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‘Come and Buy My Toys’: David Bowie Monopoly is here just in time for the holidays
12.18.2020
06:18 am
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A shot of David Bowie on the set of ‘Bing Crosby’s Merrie Old Christmas,’ 1977.
 
Well, it’s about time 2020 actually gave us some good news. Though it’s not actually from Mars (BOO!), a David Bowie Monopoly-themed game does exist, and yes, you can have one.

The Thin White Duke’s version of Monopoly came out earlier this year, first via an exclusive distribution with UK site Booghe. Sometime around the end of the summer, it found its way across the pond and can be easily found on all kinds of U.S. e-commerce sites. Now that you know you can actually have one, here’s the scoop on the gameplay for this Ziggy-centric edition of Monopoly.

First, speaking as a collector of Monopoly board games, one of the things geeks like me look forward to are the game pieces, and wham-bam, thank you ma’am, the ones created for Bowie Monopoly do not disappoint. There is Major Tom, an astronaut helmet, a rolled-up tie for Bowie’s 1993 album Black Tie White Noise, and a replica of the hat Bowie wore as Pierrot in the video for “Ashes to Ashes” and on the cover of Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), designed by Natasha Korniloff. Of course, there is a lightning bolt in honor of Aladdin Sane, a star to signify Bowie’s musical swan song, Black Star, and a skull, which of course, was often a Hamlet-esque Bowie stage prop. SOLD? Right? Not yet because as the saying goes “But wait! There’s MORE!” is in full effect here as Bowie Monopoly bends Monopoly’s classic gameplay just like many other versions of Monopoly have done over time.

In the case of Bowie-Opoly, instead of buying property, the squares on the board represent albums from Bowie’s vast musical catalog. Once you own one of his albums, you can then build stages (instead of houses) and then stadiums (instead of hotels) to increase the “rent” paid when other players land on your square. Other play includes hitting up Bowie on tour and hiring your crew and other musicians to increase your star power and bank account. There are also Sound and Vision cards (like the Chance and Community Chest cards), which bring both good and bad fortune to players drawing from the deck.

It’s hard to conceive there might be a Bowie fan out there who also digs board games that would not want a Bowie-themed Monopoly game. I should know; I am one of those people currently waiting for their very own Bowie-Opoly to arrive. Images of the Queen Bitch of Monopoly games follow.
 

 

 

 

Oh You Pretty Things!’
 

 

David Bowie’s performance of ‘Heroes’ as shown on ‘Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas’ in 1977.

Posted by Cherrybomb
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12.18.2020
06:18 am
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Your favorite rock ‘n’ roll, country and R&B legends as marionettes

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What have you been doing during the COVID-19 Lockdown?

Binging on boxsets? Drinking too much? Self-medicating? Finding all your good clothes have shrunk from lack of wear?

All of the above?

George Miller spent his time lockdown making a set of beautiful marionettes featuring some of the biggest stars of rock ‘n’ roll, country, and R&B.

Miller is a Glasgow-based artist, singer, musician and iconic pop figure who’s better known as the front man to the legendary Kaisers and more recently the New Piccadillys. I’ve known Miller a long, long time. Well, since he dressed like a rocker in a black leather jacket and sported a quiff like a zeppelin, combed back like a barrel most surfers would die for. Something like that, though memory is fickle.

Since then, Miller sang and played guitar with the Styng-Rites (“We got on telly once, made the independent top 20 once, got in the music papers a bit, built a cult following and gigged ourselves to exhaustion.”); played guitar with Eugene Reynolds’ band Planet Pop; then gigged with the Revillos and Jayne County and the Electric Chairs.

In 1993, Miller formed the Kaisers:

“We ended up making six albums and a bunch of 45s, toured the USA twice, Japan once and gigged all over Europe. We did John Peel and Mark Radcliffe sessions amongst others and got on the telly a few times. I think we lasted about seven years and everything we earned just about covered the bar bill.”

Most recently, Miller was involved with the New Piccadillys, worked with Sharleen Spiteri, then toured and recorded with Los Straitjackets across America. About five years ago, the Kaisers reformed due to public demand and will be releasing a new album in the fall—more on that another time.
 
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George Miller: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Band.
 
I reconnected with Miller through social media. Over the past few months, he would post a photograph of his latest marionette in progress. Sculpting heads of rock stars like Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly or country greats like Johnny Cash. They were beautiful, fabulous models, which were then dressed by Ursula Cleary and placed in boxes designed by Chris Taylor.

How did these marionettes come about?

George Miller: I’d been working on a BBC children’s drama for a few weeks (I’m a freelance Production Designer, gawd help me) and as lockdown was approaching, production stopped so I went from super busy to completely idle pretty much overnight.

I’d made some marionettes for a video a few years earlier and since then had been toying with the idea of making one of Link Wray but never seemed to have the time, so lockdown seemed the ideal opportunity. I liked the notion of spending time making something that had no ultimate purpose other than self amusement and no deadline for completion. With his outfit made by my partner Ursula, Link turned out pretty satisfactorily but after a few days I got the itch again, so I got to work on Bo Diddley, another guitar favorite of mine. Bo gave me a bit of trouble and the first attempt went in the bin. Realizing I’d tried to rush it, I reverted to lockdown pace, which I’ve employed ever since.
 
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Why did you choose the classic rock ‘n’ roll, R’n'B icons?

GM: I wouldn’t call myself a musical luddite, but nothing has ever thrilled me more than a good rock ‘n’ roll record, so I decided to keep making favorites from the 1950s until my day job resumed. Although a couple of the subjects are still with us, the notion of “resurrecting” the others in some way appealed to me. I like seeing them bursting out of their “coffins.” It’s also a way of expressing my fascination with these people and the music they made. If I start to run out of subjects, I’ll move forward in time, but I doubt I’ll go past 1965 as the joy goes out of it a bit for me around then.

Maybe I’ll fast forward—Joey Ramone would be a good subject.
 
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Where did the boxes for the marionettes come from?

GM: When I posted a photo of the Buddy Holly puppet, a Facebook friend by the name of Chris Taylor sent me a mock-up of a box label with a great illustration and excellent graphics. Chris got me thinking that this could be a “proper” project and we’ve been working together on ideas for an exhibition and a range of merchandise, as the marionettes have been developing a bit of a virtual fan base online. Chris’s illustrations have a great deal of style and though instantly recognizable, they have their own identity, which complements the puppets which are more rigidly representational. It reminds me of opening a box to find that the toy inside looks different to the illustration, something that always registered with me as a child. Chris’s work has definitely steered things in the direction of an art project, albeit with the (for now) all-important absence of deadline.

Where can we buy these Kaiser George Marionettes?

GM: The marionettes are one-offs and aren’t for sale as they take so long to make. I wouldn’t want to sculpt any of them twice, though mould making could be an option. As someone commented on Facebook, it would be a bit like selling your children. Chris and I are working on a set of bubblegum cards which will be for sale and we’re unashamedly excited about it. Second childhood? Definitely.
 
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KGM Trading Cards.
 
What other plans do you have for your rock ‘n’ roll children?

GM: When the “cast” of puppets grows to 20 or so, I’m planning on making a video showcasing their individual musical styles plus a series of short clips based on the photographs of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran passing time in the dressing room of the Glasgow Empire theater. I quite like the idea of two marionettes in a small room not doing very much, just idle movements.

Now, if I was an enterprising businessman, I would certainly be thinking of investing in mass marketing these to-die-for Kaiser George Marionettes. You know you sure as hell want one. And damned if I wouldn’t be collecting all those trading cards too.
 
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See more of George’s Marvellous Marionettes, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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07.21.2020
04:06 pm
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It’s Murder on the Dancefloor: Incredible Expressionist dance costumes from the 1920s

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Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt were a wife and husband partnership briefly famous in Germany during the early 1920s for their wild, expressionist dance performances consisting of “creeping, stamping, squatting, crouching, kneeling, arching, striding, lunging, leaping in mostly diagonal-spiraling patterns” across the stage. Shulz believed “art should be…an expression of struggle” and used dance to express “the violent struggle of a female body to achieve central, dominant control of the performance space and its emptiness.”

In his book, Empire of Ecstasy—Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935, author Karl Toepfer notes that “Husband-wife dance pairs are quite rare on the stage; in the case of Schulz and Holdt the concept of marriage entailed a peculiarly deep implication in that it also referred to a haunting marriage of dance and costume.”

The couple created dances and costumes together and at the same time, so that bodily movement and the masking of the body arose from the same impulse. Schulz was a highly gifted artist whose drawings and sketches invariably startle the viewer with their hard primitivism and demonic abstraction, but Holdt assumed much responsibility for the design of the costumes and masks; for most of the costumes deposited in Hamburg, it is not possible to assign definite authorship to Schulz. The mask portions consisted mostly of fantastically reptilian, insectoid, or robotic heads, whereas the rest of the costumes comprised eccentric patchworks of design, color, and material to convey the impression of bodies assembled out of contradictory structures.

According to Toepfer, these costumes “disclose a quality of cartoonish, demonic grotesquerie rather than frightening ferocity.” The couple gave these designs descriptive names like Toboggan, Springvieh, and Technik, which they also used as titles for their performances. Their designs sought something pagan, pre-Christian, that tapped into the “redemptive organic forms of nature and the animal world.”

Little is known about Holdt. What is known about Schulz could be written on a postcard. Born in Lübben in 1896, Schulz studied dance and performance in Berlin in 1913. She became associated with the Expressionists who rebeled against the rigid, traditional forms of art in favor of a more subjective perspective. In dance, this meant abandoning the austere, mechanical, and precise choreography of ballet for more expressive, fluid, and personal interpretations. Schulz moved to Hamburg, where she married Holdt in April 1920. The couple had a tempestuous relationship. Schulz has been described as possessive and jealous, while Holdt was considered “untrustworthy” which I take to mean he played around a lot. The difficulties and emotional insecurities in their relationship fed into their work. According to Toepfer:

The Schulz-Holdt dance aesthetic does seem to embed a powerful masochism, not only in the marriage between dancers but in the equally passionate marriage of mask and movement. But the dances of this strange couple were also a kind of bizarre, expressionist demonization of marriage itself, the most grotesquely touching critique of pairing to appear in the whole empire of German dance culture.

The couple moved away from Expressionism and sought inspiration from the supposed purity of pre-Judeo-Christian, Aryan-Nordic culture—which kinda almost sounds vaguely National Socialist. They lived an austere existence in direst poverty. Their home was basically one room with little in the way of amenities or even a bed—they slept on straw. They wanted to live without money and desired a society where everyone was given an equal share on the basis of their needs. Between 1920-24, the couple performed their dance routines to the bewildered and often antagonistic audiences of Hamburg. Though some critics appreciated the pair’s talent and startling originality, this praise was never enough to pay the rent.

In 1923, Schulz gave birth to a son. In 1924, the couple were photographed in their costumes by Minya Diez-Dührkoop. That same year, on June 19th, four days before her birthday, Schulz, no longer able to withstand Holdt’s (suspected) adultery, shot her husband in a jealous rage several times at point blank range before turning the gun on herself. The couple were discovered dead lying on their bed of straw with their infant son between them.

Schulz and Holdt would have been long forgotten had not their designs and costumes been gifted to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) in 1925. These precious artefacts were rediscovered in 1989 and are available to view online in the full glory of color.

Below are some of Diez-Dührkoop’s original photographs from 1924 of Shulz and Holdt’s costumes.
 
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‘Toboggan.’
 
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‘Technik.’
 
More expressionist delights from Shulz and Holdt, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.30.2019
06:34 am
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Probably the most beautiful Hobo nickels in the world
04.23.2019
04:46 pm
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Roman Booteen is a master of crafting hobo nickels. He carves intricate designs featuring icons from pop culture, literature, history and film onto American nickels and silver dollars. Based in Yekaterinburg, the fourth largest city in Russia, Booteen’s incredible one-off coins sell for hundreds to thousands of dollars each. In 2017, his “1921 Morgan Dollar Hobo Nickel” was sold for a staggering $10,101. Nice.

Modifying coins by carving a bas-relief onto their surfaces has been around since the middle of the eighteenth-century. Such decorated coins were given as gifts and love tokens or worn as jewelry on bracelets or necklaces. In America, this kind of coin carving grew in popularity with the introduction of the Buffalo nickel in 1913, as the nickel had a larger, more malleable surface which was especially suitable for carving minute detail. These modified coins were called “Hobo nickels” as they were mainly crafted by itinerants as a way to make money or exchange their handicraft for food.

Booteen’s work has evolved from simple bas relief to one coin featuring a “gold bug” which can open its wings (inspired by the story by Poe) and another that has a finger trap with teeth which can literally chomp thru wood. Little is known about Booteen. He keeps a low-profile which has led to him being described as a “man of mystery.” However, he shares his work via Instagram and Facebook and his hobo nickels sell on eBay. He also does a wild selection of engravings for Zippo lighters (see below) and Hotco.co will be releasing a limited replica edition of his “The Trap With the Golden Bait” this year.
 
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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.23.2019
04:46 pm
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You Don’t Say!: Nicolas Cage’s face on pillows, bedding, & wallpaper
10.01.2018
10:09 am
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A shirtless Nicolas Cage lying inside of a banana peel. Get it here
 
I’ve seen Cage’s latest cinematic masterpiece of WTF, Mandy at least three times since its release last month. If we have learned anything from Nicolas Cage during his long acting career it is this—never count the man out. Cage has been everything from hero to anti-hero, and even had a short run as a tasty Japanese snack. He’s been a loser, a winner, a punk, a prisoner, a terrifyingly authentic drunk, and most recently a relentless backwoods lumberjack out for revenge.

Of course, a large part of society’s younger members became acquainted with Cage’s incredibly emotive face thanks to a legendary meme of the actor giving us his best crazy face in a scene from the 1988 film Vampire’s Kiss. The Nic Cage “You Don’t Say!” meme is almost as famous as the actor himself and to prove this point, many of the items featured in this Cage-centric post use this image of Nic as well as a variety of others for pillows, bedding and yes, even wallpaper. If you’ve ever wanted to hug a pillow with a photo of a shirtless Nic Cage sitting inside a banana peel (gloriously pictured at the top of this post), then goddammit this is your lucky day.

All of the items in this post can be yours for about twenty bucks or so depending on how deep your love for Nicolas Cage is. I’ve included links below each image in case you just realized how incomplete your life is because you don’t own a fleece blanket with Cage’s mug eerily photoshopped with the Declaration of Independence. Some images might be slightly NSFW.
 

Nicolas Cage mashed up with the Declaration of Independence fleece blanket. Get it here.
 

Nicolas Cage hugging a rainbow. Squeee! Get it here.
 
More Nic Cage merch, after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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10.01.2018
10:09 am
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Undead, Undead: John Coulthart’s beautiful illustrations for Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’
09.04.2018
08:50 am
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We all know what Dracula looks like. Bela Lugosi and innumerable Hammer horror movies starring Christopher Lee have fixed the Count in our imagination. He’s tall, gaunt, interestingly pale, with slicked back hair, and a set of unfeasibly large canine teeth. He sports a cloak, and what appears to be an evening suit which can often make him look like a nightclub doorman or a shifty croupier at a Mayfair casino dealing from the bottom of the pack. When commissioned to provide the illustrations for a new edition of Bram Stoker’s enduring tale, artist John Coulthart decided to keep his work faithful to the source material.

Coulthart had previously been commissioned by the same publisher to illustrate Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with which he had similarly “opted for fidelity to the text and period details “:

Despite its epistolary form, Dracula is much more readable (in a contemporary sense) than Frankenstein, so more people will have read Stoker than Shelley; but the sheer scale of cultural mauling that Dracula has been subject to means that—as with Frankenstein—even the allegedly faithful adaptations often deviate from the novel. The lounge-lizard vampire that everyone knows was a creation of Hamilton Deane’s 1924 stage adaptation, the success of which led to Tod Browning’s film and Bela Lugosi’s performance (which I’ve never liked); film and theatre may have made Dracula universally popular but the Lugosi stereotype has overshadowed the more powerful and violent character that Stoker gives us, with his bearded face, hairy palms and glowing eyes. So that’s who you see here, although the restrictions of time and brief (one picture per chapter) meant that some of the moments I’d have liked to illustrate had to be forfeit. Poor old Renfield gets short shrift, and some of the minor male characters are out of the picture altogether.

Regardless of the constrictions of time and remit, Coulthart’s illustrations for Dracula are among the very best ever produced, as his detailed work fully captures the intense, eerie, menacing, and almost dreamlike atmosphere of Stoker’s novel where you can “believe in things that you cannot.”

See the complete set of John Coulthart’s marvellous illustration fro Dracula here.
 
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See more of John Coulthart’s superb illustrations for ‘Dracula,’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.04.2018
08:50 am
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Some favorite record covers with one letter removed
08.28.2018
08:55 am
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A misplaced letter can make a whole lot of difference, as anyone who’s seen that classic episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm knows. In that particular show, poor old Larry caused righteous outrage after his obituary notice for a “beloved aunt” had one vowel replaced with a consonant.

The Internet is good at making you aware of how frequently things are repeated with often differing results. Sometimes they’re diminished, sometimes improved. A few years back, Reddit featured a thread of band names with one letter replaced. This led onto Pigeons & Planes making a series of album covers with one letter missing.

Returning to this theme, the various creative talents at b3ta have come up with a whole new batch of record covers with one letter absent, most of which, like some of their predecessors, are pretty damned amusing—though tbh I’m not quite sure if there is any letter missing from the Coldplay cover…

See more than 230 other record covers with one letter missing here.
 
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More classic album covers minus a letter, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.28.2018
08:55 am
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The Fool: The Dutch artists who worked for the Beatles (and made their own freak folk masterpiece)
06.12.2018
06:32 am
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“It appears that some part of Slothrop ran into the AWOL Džabajev one night in the heart of downtown Niederschaumdorf. (Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there’s no telling which of the Zone’s present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering. There’s supposed to be a last photograph of him on the only record album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock group—seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style of the early Stones, near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East End, or South of the River. It is spring, and French thyme blossoms in amazing white lacework across the cape of green that now hides and softens the true shape of the old rubble. There is no way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop’s: the only printed credit that might apply to him is “Harmonica, kazoo—a friend.” But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea…)”

― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Although they are hardly household names today—and they should be—the Dutch art collective The Fool created some of the most potent, striking and exotic imagery of the psychedelic era. Their hippie-gypsy clothing was seen on the Beatles and their wives, Cream and other rock stars and their album covers and other creations have today become iconic. They also recorded an incredible, but long-forgotten album—its limited edition vinyl re-release is the occasion of this post—but more on that below.
 

Marijke Koger
 
The Fool, before it was so named, started with just with two members—Marijke Koger the visionary psychedelic artist who was the collective’s leader and Simon (or Seemon) Posthuma—and later Josje Leeger, Koger’s friend from art school. Englishmen Barry Finch and photographer Karl Ferris were also involved.
 

 
Posthuma and Koger met in 1961 and participated in a nascent counterculture boutique in Amsterdam called Trend. Posthuma staged a “happening” in 1965 called Stoned in the Streets featuring an “electronic striptease” from a bodypainted Marijke, future Firesign Theatre member Peter Bergman reading poetry and weirdo medical student Bart Hughes revealing the trepanation hole he’d drilled into his own skull to grossed out hippies. The two were living on Ibiza selling posters and making clothing when they were “discovered” by Ferris. His photos of them and their work caused quite a stir when they were published in England, which was then starting to turn from drab postwar black & white to swinging psychedelic day-glo. The pair relocated to London and began to design clothing and more for bands like Cream and Procol Harum. Cream manager Robert Stigwood had Koger and Posthuma paint Eric Clapton’s Gibson SG—one of the most iconic guitars in history—as well as Jack Bruce’s bass and Ginger Baker’s bass drum head, the stage clothes and posters for Cream’s first US tour. They did album covers for the Move, the Hollies and the Incredible String Band and an illustration for the concert program at Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s Saville Theatre in Covent Garden. Of course it’s not surprising that the Beatles themselves wanted to work with such forward-thinking and creative young people. One day, as Simon told it, John Lennon and Paul McCartney simply turned up at their home:

During John and Paul’s first visit to our house in Bayswater, they saw the ‘Wonderwall,’ a composition consisting of a decorated armoire and a bust, against an arched wall, painted in the style that was up until then new to the world. “I love it, I want to live in it,” John said when he saw the ‘Wonderwall’, and Paul agreed. Afterwards, Marijke laid the tarot cards for Paul. It turned out to be his inspiration for writing “The Fool on the Hill.”

Although you can see Marijke and Simon’s fashions on the Beatles during the “I am the Walrus” sequence in Magical Mystery Tour, it was not until a bit later, when the Beatles asked them to work on the Apple Boutique on Baker Street that they formed, and so named, the Fool artistic collective with the others. It was a big job, with the Fab Four basically charging the Fool to design the exterior of the store (including a controversial mural on the outside of the building that was painted by the duo over the course of a weekend with some art students including Mickey Finn, later the bongo player of T.Rex, assisting them), the interior, and all of the clothing sold there.

Film director Joe Massot was also inspired by the “Wonderwall” cabinet and it became the title of a psychedelic film he created of that name to showcase their striking vision starring Jane Birkin.The Fool, who also appeared in the quirky cult favorite, served as the art directors for the film and it’s clearly as much their vision as it is Massot’s. Indeed it was they who got George Harrison to do the Wonderwall soundtrack.

And speaking of soundtracks, the Fool made their own. Having met Hollie Graham Nash when they did that band’s Evolution album cover, they tapped him to produce their eponymously-titled psychedelic freak folk album that was released by Mercury Records in 1969. Whereas it’s a fascinating document of the era no matter the angle of regard, it also happens to be REALLY AMAZING MUSIC. The first time I heard it, my initial thought was “Oh, it sounds like an Incredible String Band kinda thing” and indeed it does, from the (fairly cack) singing to the use of exotic instrumentation, including tabla, Moroccan stringed instruments and Scottish bagpipes. One song even sounds like an ISB pastiche done by the Residents. But here’s the thing, also like Incredible String Band, you have to give this one quite a few spins before you really “get” it. Had I written this review a few days ago, it wouldn’t be such a “rave” review—because that’s what this is, in case you were wondering, I’m unexpectedly NUTS about this album—but after listening to it a couple more times over the weekend, well, I’ve totally fallen in love with it. I went from a generally positive, but lukewarm appraisal to thinking The Fool sounded like an album I’d known and loved since childhood. Every song on it forced its way into my head where they will now reside forever. Had I written this post last week, let’s just say it still would have gone over my head. At that point the magic of this album had not reached me. But then it did. This is one of those play-it-until-you-get-it things—like ISB, like Frank Zappa, like Pink Floyd even—that is absolutely worth putting the effort into. Even if you are initially turned off at the idea of flower children visual artists dabbling in pop music, get over it. This record is the real deal. I mean look at these people. Look at their artwork. They are authentically psychedelic!!! You can’t fake this!

The Fool has been lovingly packaged and released as a numbered limited edition turquoise vinyl longplayer (with an extra track) by Holland’s mighty Music on Vinyl label. They’ve pressed up just 1000 of them so if this is something that sounds intriguing to you—and I hope that it does—you might want to get on buying one stat before it’s sold out and selling used for $80 on Discogs. A final thought about the album is that Graham Nash did a remarkable job producing it. I realize that he got pretty busy right after this (it came post Hollies, but before CSN had ramped up) but this album is a lost masterpiece in so very many ways. It’s a pity that he didn’t have a parallel career as a producer like Todd Rundgren.

The Fool even made an American tour, but disbanded as a working entity in 1970, leaving Posthuma and Koger, who were married for a time, to continue as a duo, Marijke & Seemon. They relocated to Hollywood where they painted a psychedelic mural on the exterior of the Aquarius Theater on Sunset Boulevard for the 1969 production of Hair. Today, Posthuma is based in Amsterdam—he’s also written his autobiography A Fool such as I - The Adventures of Simon Posthuma, but so far it’s only in a Dutch edition—and Marijke is based near Los Angeles. She still paints guitars and in recent years has been commissioned to do some outdoor murals in Europe. She is open for designing album covers and can be reached at her website. Finch and Leeger married on the day man landed on the moon, had six children (each named for a color) and remained together until her death by stroke in 1991. A store in Amsterdam inspired by their mother’s work was opened by two of their daughters.

Although the Victoria & Albert Museum has some of the Fool’s creations in their permanent collection, there needs to be a full-on Fool museum-level survey. And a coffee table book! SURELY a museum in the Netherlands should be looking into this!?!?! Look at the work below. This art (and history) deserves to be cataloged and respected; and preserved for future generations to enjoy.  (I’m assuming that Karl Ferris took many of the photos below, but I’m not sure which ones.)


Painting John Lennon’s piano
 

Inside the Apple Boutique
 
Much much more after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.12.2018
06:32 am
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‘The Shining,’ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ and ‘Frankenstein’: Bags for Book Lovers
06.06.2018
11:00 am
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“If you go home with somebody,” John Waters once said, “and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em!”

To save the bother of waiting until you get back to someone’s home before realizing they have no booklined shelves here are some neat bags that let any suitable mate, friend, or potential one-night-stand know you’ve got the literary smarts.

Since 2011, Moscow-based designers Max and Lyuba have produced a series of 129 book bags featuring covers from some well-thumbed classics like Alice in Wonderland, The Catcher in the Rye, and even J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. Each bag is handmade and sold via Max and Lyuba’s KrukuStudio boutique on Etsy.
 
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More bags for book lovers, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.06.2018
11:00 am
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In their own write: Fonts made from the handwriting of David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon & more
04.09.2018
10:15 am
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For some, the first step towards a chosen career is imitation.

Peter Capaldi is a fan of the great horror actor (and big screen Doctor Who) Peter Cushing. Once, when Capaldi was a child, he was fortunate enough to have met Cushing who gave him a signed autographed photo. Capaldi was so enamored by the actor that he spent many hours practicing his signature to look just like his idol’s as it was his ambition to follow in the great man’s footsteps as a thespian. He managed to make Cushing’s signature his own and forty years later Capaldi became the twelfth Doctor Who.

Nicolas Damiens is a French graphic designer with an impressive back catalog of award-winning work for a range of companies. He has won a trophy cabinet full of awards including a gold medal for his project Tokyo No Ads. Most recently, Damiens designed a series of Songwriters Fonts based on original handwritten letters and notes from the likes of Serge Gainsbourg, John Lennon, David Bowie, Kurt Cobain and Leonard Cohen. These fonts are available to download for free for personal use so you won’t have to practice your cursive writing skills for penmanship like one of your favorite pop stars.
 
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More Songwriters Fonts, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.09.2018
10:15 am
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