Way, way back in 1989, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote an obituary of the then-recently deceased activist/organizer/author/provocateur Abbot Howard “Abbie” Hoffman, calling him an “activist with Jewish soul.” That, he was, 100%. There was plenty to criticize about the man—he could be arrogant, and he contributed significantly to the Baby Boom’s decoupling of the left from the labor movement, a move that significantly damaged both institutions—but he brought theatricality and exuberance to the often humorless politics of the left, and he was motivated by a genuine and irrepressible desire to see the spoils of America’s prosperity and justice offered to ALL of its citizens.

Hoffman addressed the Jewish foundations of his political ethos in his autobiography Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, and those connections were discussed in his JTA obit:

“Judaism has never been so much a religion to me as a noble history and a cluster of stereotypes. Jews, especially first-born male Jews, have to make a big choice very quickly in life whether to go for the money or to go for broke.”

Hoffman never made a lot of money, preferring to eschew the life of the yuppie in order to remain loyal to his roots as a Yippie. It conformed with his self-identity as the perennial outsider, a role he viewed as an extension of his Jewishness.

“As a kid, I went to the rabbis and said, ‘What do you think of Philip Roth or Norman Mailer or Joseph Heller, you know, those kinds of writers,’ ” Hoffman told the New Jewish Times newspaper in 1980.

“They would say, ‘Not good for the Jews. Too much self-ridicule, too much mockery.’ But I think this is the destiny for the Jews: to be rebels, to question society. And to be funny. We’re philosophers and comedians.”

More after the jump…

 
The appallingly unappetizing dishes and photography of 50s-70s cookbooks have been choice fodder for mockery for a long time, and it’s easy to see why. The unreal colors produced by the era’s photographic and printing technologies do nothing to help the repellent appearance of mystery meats and bizarre assemblages in aspic. I even keep a few old school cookbooks around solely for the photos—I doubt I’ll ever actually cook too many of these things, as almost everything pictured resembles the symptoms of loathsome diseases, and no recipe with “delight” or “surprise” in its name has ever lived up to its billing. Here are a few exemplary images from my copy of the 1961 edition of Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cookbook (and looking at the asking prices for that book: thank you, mom, for never throwing that away). Unappetizing though these are—I don’t love ham salad, but I also don’t think it’s supposed to put one in mind of an Eldritch Abomination—they’re tame compared to what’s to come below.
 

 

 

 
More—oh you know there’s more—after the jump…

Chocolate Vincent Price life-mask
 
Ever wanted to taste Vincent Price’s face? Well now’s your chance with these macabre chocolate treats by Conjurer’s Kitchen. Not only is there an edible Vincent Price life-mask, but there’s chocolate conjoined fetal skulls, baby head lollipops, a diseased dental jaw bone made of white chocolate and an edible flamingo skull!

To top off this chocolatey weirdness, there are edible Christmas cards that look like ouija boards. I love it!

So for that special person in your life who’s into odd shit, might I’d suggest one of these treats as a holiday gift? I’m sure you’d blow their socks off!

Chocolate conjoined twins skulls
 

Doll head lollipops
 
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Ever wanted your home to smell like greasy fried chicken made with eleven herbs and spices? Well now is your chance with this KFC chicken-scented candle. I’ve heard of bacon-scented candles before, but not fried chicken. I can’t imagine that it smells too good, but your mileage may vary.

Sadly, these candles aren’t available to purchase just yet as they’re part of a social media KFC giveaway contest. If you’d like to take part and try to win one of these puppies, click here.

And no, this isn’t stealthy paid advertorial. I just thought this candle was totally gross. That doesn’t mean I didn’t fall for the bait of reblogging their contest hook, line and sinker, of course…

 
Certainly one thing that can be said of Klaus Nomi—as a little gay German dude born during World War II who had a passion for opera and a voice to match—is that he marched to the beat of his own drum. On paper, he doesn’t particularly sound like anyone who would become the object of admiration by a huge cult following—long after his death—but it happened. He landed in New York City in the 1970s, and that was the perfect place for his experimental new wave opera and eccentric form of exhibitionism to flourish.

In addition to palling around with David Bowie and wowing downtown audiences with his epicene good nature, his incredible singing performances, and his peculiar, almost plastic persona, Nomi was a first-rate pastry chef—that was his day job. In an appearance on Glenn O’Brien and Chris Stein’s legendary TV Party cable access show, he once demonstrated how to make his “sour-sweet lemon tarts.”

The Fashion Beyond Fashion blog reproduced Nomi’s recipe for a lime tart, which you can surely put to use as a way of delighting your holiday guests:
 

Step 1. The crust. It needs a 9-inch pie pan to make the tart in. It needs 1 1/4 cups fine graham cracker crumbs, 1/3rd cup brown sugar, and 1/4 melted butter to make crust. Mix the ingredients together and shape the crust into the pie pan. (Klaus Nomi mentions that it may not seem like the crust will hold together, but if it packs it tightly enough and when it sits overnight, it should hold).The artist also cautions about making the crust too sweet, you may not need to use as much brown sugar.

Step 2. The filling. it needs 4 eggs, 1 can sweetened condensed milk (Klaus used Borden’s condensed milk), and 1/2 cup lime juice. First it has to be separated the eggs; placing yolks in one bowl and whites in the other one. Klaus uses the egg shell to actually separate the whites from the yolk by putting the yolk on one side of the cracked shell and letting the whites drip into a separate bowl. Take the bowl with the egg yolks and add the sweetened condensed milk and lime juice. Mix together. Then, in the bowl with the egg whites, it has to whip them until the whites are very, very stiff. Once the whites are stiff it dramatically increases in volume, it slowly folds the whites into the other bowl. Once mixed together, place the filling into the crust.

Step 3. It takes lime peel and cut it into thin strips. It place the lime peel on top of the pie. This has two purposes; a beautiful presentation but also the flavor. The zest really adds a punch to the taste and is meant to be eaten. Then it places the tart into the refrigerator for at least several hours, but overnight is recommended in order to firm the tart, make easier the cut and better consistency.

 
More after the jump…

 
Why not soak your old tired bones in a nice steaming hot bath that smells just like a Ramen noodle beef bowl? Sounds enticing, does it not? Well you can do just that with these Ramen bath salts from Japan.

Google translate isn’t working too well on the Japanese site that’s selling them (or maybe it is, tough call). It’s impossible for me to translate all the different scents the Ramen bath salts come in. You can probably guess what they are, though. They’re selling for around $3 a pack here.

Here’s how Google translated the description of the product:

Finally finished!? Rice smell of bath salts!? Only in about likely go three times rice fragrance to a too delicious smell, and inspiring, but fasting use caution! Too much like the stomach, it will be in trouble!!

Okay! Sign me up! My man LOVES IT when he gets home and I smell of beef soup and MSG.

 

 
via Nerdcore

 
Never mind prog, hair metal is the most reviled rock genre, period. And it probably should be, because most of it fucking blows like nothing else on Earth. (Show up at my door with a copy of Open Up and Say… Ahh! and a gun, and that gun had better be loaded.) But it shouldn’t have sucked—at its most basic, the genre combined the grit of ‘70s hard rock (awesome), the decadent swagger of glam (awesome), and the gleeful sneer of punk (awesome), but by some unholy and counterintuitive rock math, “awesome plus awesome plus awesome” equalled stomach-churningly shitty.

Before grunge tanked the genre in the early ‘90s, hair metal was already in decline anyway, due to the samey cartoonishness of its sartorial norms, the tediousness of its de rigueur power-ballads, and the body-blow of Penelope Spheeris’ documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, which aimed an array of klieg lights on the jaw-droppingly pathetic delusions of also-ran hair metal musicians. (If you have a Roku or similar device, The Shout Factory streaming channel has that doc, FYI. It’s a must-see.) But before the curtain fell, a band from Philly called Cinderella scored a huge hit with a power ballad (of course) called “Nobody’s Fool” and a triple-platinum album called Night Songs. The band was less party-oriented than much hair metal, ultimately moving away from the style towards a more straightforward bluesy hard rock approach, and they were gifted with a singer, Tom Keifer, who at his best approached the expressiveness of Ronnie James Dio. In his lesser moments, well, see how much of this you can make it through.

While “Nobody’s Fool” is arguably the song most closely associated with the band, I feel like the video below captures a way more appealing vibe. It’s a 30-second commercial the pre-fame band shot for a hot dog stand called Pat’s. (Located on ROUTE 420! COME ON!) To be clear, I am in no way knocking them for writing a hot dog commercial. There have existed a couple of hot dog places I would gladly honor in song, myself, should the occasion arise. I genuinely like this ad—for one thing, the footage of the rough-around-the-edges early band contrasts edifyingly against the blow dried, pampered-poodle corporate glam of their official videos, and watching them stuff their faces with dirty water hot dogs is about the least pretentious thing ever in a genre where affectation was job one.

In a great video made a few years ago for Loudwire, Keifer related the tale of how Cinderella came to make the ad.

In recent years, the commercial “Pat’s Chili Dogs” I did with my band Cinderella years ago has been surfacing on the internet quite a bit lately. And the way that came about was, that was right when early ‘80s MTV was just starting to take off, and we were a young baby band kicking around in the clubs in the Philadelphia/Jersey area, and we wanted to be on MTV, and we sent our video, which was horrible, to like Basement Tapes or something like that. They wouldn’t play it, they wouldn’t touch us. So a local proprietor who owned a chili dog stand asked us to sing. He saw us in a club and he liked us. He said “would you do a rock ’n’ roll commercial for my place?” And he said “We’re gonna buy local TV advertising on MTV,” and the light went off, we were like “Well, we’ll be on MTV, then!” [laughs] Only locally, but that’s what it felt like to us, so we said “Sure, we’ll do it.” Plus we got free chili dogs any time we wanted.

 
More after the jump…

The Pretenders giving zero fucks.
 
If you grew up as a kid in the UK during the mid-70s through to the early 80s it’s a safe bet that you a spent few Saturday mornings glued to the tube watching kids show Tiswas (or “This Is Saturday, What A Show!”, “Today Is Saturday, Wear A (or Wake-up And) Smile!”, or (unofficially) “This Is Saturday, Watch And Suffer!”).

Tiswas had a live studio audience filled with young fans and tried to bring on various musical acts who were popular during the years it was broadcast such as Elvis Costello, Motörhead and in this case, The Pretenders. In 1981 Chrissie Hynde, Martin Chambers and Pete Farndon had the pleasure of participating in a skit called “The Phantom Flan Flinger Challenge.” The title of the segment sounds both delicious and gross but if you’ve ever seen the show you know things are not going to end well for Chrissie and her bandmates.

As it was a common practice to “repurpose” Tiswas’ videotape masters (“tape over” them) only a small number of episodes (according to some sources only 22) actually still exist.

Given the rarity of surviving Tiswas shows, I am happy to report that not only is the quality of this footage pretty great, it also contains a rather startling moment involving one of Tiswas’ hosts, Chris Tarrant, and Chrissie Hynde that will make you wonder if Tarrant ever made it out of the studio alive. I’ll leave you to ponder what that all means while you watch this amusing four minutes of footage.
 

 
No word yet on this year’s Descendents annual Christmas sweater, but that doesn’t mean no news at all. On the heels of the band’s new album Hypercaffium Spazzinate, the band introduced a coffee of the same name for the boutique roasters Dark Matter. Now, as if to produce the ideal buzz under which to listen to their records, they’ve made a beer with that coffee. San Diego’s Mikkeller Brewing has introduced “Feel This,” which is named for a song from the new LP, and is being introduced during San Diego Beer Week festivities this Friday.

The brew is a 7.3 % coffee IPA—evidently the Descendents didn’t get the memo about deep-pocket douchebags migrating their allegiance to sour beers this year—but the news release was unclear as to whether 7.3% was the coffee content or the final brew’s ABV. Mikkeller’s brewmaster Bill Batten, an old punk himself, offered the following comment:

Having grown up in the punk rock and skate punk scene, it was an honor to be given the opportunity to create a beer for the Descendents to celebrate their recently released album. While doing this collaboration we got an opportunity to meet the Dark Matter boys and learn about their coffee process.

More after the jump…

 
Human beings are great at doing two things when we’re sad: wallowing in music and overindulging in food. We all have our go-tos—ABBA and chocolate covered pretzels? Excellent choice. Early Cure and ice cream? Gets the job DONE, son. Belle and Sebastian and Doritos? Awesome and awesome and awesome.

When getting over a breakup herself, artist Automne Zinng spent a lot of time making art while listening to music. Zinng is a primitivist illustrator and surrealist photographer who attracted some attention a few years back with a series of drawings called “Goths Eating Things.” I’ll leave the guesswork as to what that series depicted up to you. She’s parlayed that series into two cookbooks, Defensive Eating with Morrissey and Comfort Eating with Nick Cave, both of which pair drawings of those singers eating with recipes, many of which pun on those artists’ lyrics.

From her introduction to Defensive Eating with Morrissey:

In 2013, I was broke, living in Los Angeles, and going through a terrible breakup. It was probably one of the darkest times in my life and I felt inconsolable. I wasn’t working. I wasn’t eating. I wasn’t drinking. I wasn’t doing much of anything except writing depressing songs and listening to even more depressing ones from my youth. I found it curious that the bands that got me through the general malaise of being a sad teenage goth served as a type of sonic comfort food for me as an even sadder adult. Was I having a mid-life crisis?

The only thing that brought me comfort during that nightmare was drawing. I started to doodle images of Nick Cave crying over pints of ice cream, Siouxsie Sioux devouring tacos, and The Sisters Of Mercy stuffing their faces with Cinnabons. The more time passed, the more surreal these drawings became. Eventually, I started sharing them with others and everyone wanted to see Morrissey putting things in his mouth. Who wouldn’t? I obliged and started doing a series of drawings of Morrissey hoarding food. Those drawings became a zine, and that zine is now a cookbook.

Unfortunately, Messers Morrissey and Cave were not involved in the making of the books. According to the publisher, Microcosm Publishing’s Joe Biel—who’s broached this territory before in publishing Tom Neely’s fictional punk rock bromance Henry & Glenn Forever—“Morrissey was nearly involved. His manager really liked the book and pushed and pushed him but he’s kind of…humorless. We even offered to give money to his favorite charity. He eventually just stopped engaging. Unbeknown to us, Nick Cave’s son had just died when we got in touch so his manager said that he could not be involved.”

The recipes were crafted by Joshua “The Touring Vegan Chef” Ploeg, and accordingly they’re all vegan, so barring allergies, everyone can enjoy them (working out variations to accommodate other special diets like gluten free, nut free, kosher, etc. would be all up to the end user). Microcosm have been kind enough to permit us to share some of the art and recipes with you. We’re planning to try the Nick Cave cookies ourselves this weekend.
 

 

 
More after the jump…