Like sky-high stiletto shoes don’t hurt already enough, amirite ladies? I know, let’s turn ‘em into roller skates! Say what?! Saint Laurent did just that with their Anthony Vaccarello-designed stiletto roller skates that retail for £2,000 ($2,625). Who in their right mind would buy these painful puppies that promise even more pain?

According to Dazed Digital:

The heels previously appeared in campaign images for the brand that were banned by France’s watchdog over allegations that the images were demeaning to women.

I have to agree, the whole roller skate/stiletto mash-up is totally stupid. And look how pricey: $2,625? $2,625 for this? YIKES!

A post shared by Inezandvinoodh (@inezandvinoodh) on Mar 9, 2017 at 3:20pm PST

 
via Geekologie

 
Denis Diderot might sound like the name of some superstar French soccer player but it is in fact the name of a famous Enlightenment writer, philosopher, and playwright, who might do you good getting to know.

Diderot (1713-84) had the smarts. Apart from all his fancy writing, Diderot was also co-founder, editor and contributor of Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopaedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts), or the Encyclopedia. His intention was to make information and knowledge available to all—well, at least to all those who could read that is. Diderot and his buddies wanted to break the superstitious rule of religion over their fellow citizens. To this end, he was always asking difficult questions of religious believers, gently poking fun, and writing controversial philosophical tracts on the question of God, belief, design, and all that.

Take, for example, his book The Skeptic’s Walk which featured a deist, a pantheist, and an atheist out on convivial perambulation together where each offered up their thoughts on God, the universe, and so forth. Due to its content, the book was not published in Diderot’s lifetime. It was long believed the only copy of Diderot’s original handwritten text had been confiscated by the police not long after its completion in 1752. Thankfully, it turned out that Diderot had another copy (told you he was smart) which was eventually published in 1830.

Anyway, you’re not here to read about Enlightenment philosophy, you’re here to see naughty nuns, and we’ll get to that shortly, well, unless of course you’ve already scrolled past all of this and are getting an eyeful below. Good luck with that. That’s kinda like people who “Like” things on Facebook but never click the fucking link. But let’s get back to Diderot.

You see, Diderot was also a bit of a scallywag and a wit. He had a propensity for pranking his buddies which on one occasion led to his infamous work of literature, La Religieuse or The Nun.

The Nun all started when Diderot was miffed over the loss of one of his drinking buddies who had moved out of Paris and back to some big fancy country estate in Normandy. To draw him back to Paris, Diderot started writing his pal (Marquis de Croismare) a series of letters purportedly from a nun called Suzanne Simonin. This young lady had been forcibly sent to a nunnery by her greedy and ungrateful family—a common occurrence at the time—where she found herself preyed upon by sadistic lesbian Abbess of Ste-Eutrope.

The Marquis on receiving these missives from such an unfortunate young woman, wrote back offering his help. Diderot continued the ruse until the Marquis demanded to meet with the young lady to get her free from her imprisonment in the convent, at which point Diderot wrote a final letter from another fictional character claiming the young girl was dead. Later, when all was revealed, the Marquis found the whole prank “hilarious,” as he had acted honorably throughout. (I’m guessing that this was expressed with more of a nervous titter than an outright LOL-style guffaw.)

The correspondence started an idea in Diderot’s head to write a book based on his letters and this became La Religieuse. Published twelve years after his death in 1796, The Nun became a scandalous hit. Obviously tame by today’s standards, the book’s notoriety continued right up to the 1960s when filmmaker Jacques Rivette made a movie of The Nun which was banned by French authorities after the Catholic Church ran a letter-writing campaign to have the film stopped. Rivette’s rather dull movie went on to be nominated for a Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.

I’ve never quite got the whole nuns as sex objects thing—maybe the attraction for some is the frisson of deflowering someone who is supposedly betrothed to the Son of God. Or simply a manifestation of “hot for teacher” for lapsed Catholics? Many nuns were forced into convents against their will (like the character in Diderot’s book), and many (even today ) had the sexual attentions of priests and bishops forced upon them against their will. When Aldous Huxley pointed out that the grounds of some convents were littered with the skeletons of dead babies it is as if he is landing the blame solely with the women. This kind of selective blindness never equates male desire and sex with the consequences of pregnancy or disease.

In 1947, Paul-Émile Bécat produced a series of illustrations for Diderot’s The Nun. DM’s featured Bécat’s work before, and he had a highly respected reputation as an artist and for illustrating some of the most infamous and famous books of French literarture—see more here. This small selection mainly features on the nuns Bécat drew for Diderot’s book and some other works.
 

 

 
More sacrilegious nun action, after the jump…

 
Adorable mascots are an ingrained part of Japanese culture in a way that isn’t true in the U.S. or Britain. According to the 2011 book Fuzz and Fur: Japan’s Costumed Characters, the Japanese term for such entities is kigurumi, which means something like “dressing up as a stuffed toy.” In America, sports teams are the primary sponsor of such characters, although you do see them sometimes advertising a car dealership or a tax return office in the U.S.

Even though he was never affiliated with the San Diego Padres or any other team, the San Diego Chicken remains the defining exemplar of the genre.

In Japan, many companies and products have a signature mascot intended to draw the attention of consumers. Most Japanese mascots are forgettable enough, but every now and then one comes along that is different from the rest. Such is the case with a mascot unveiled by the Ichijiku Pharmaceutical Company earlier this week. The mascot’s named is “Kan-chan” and she (yes, she) made her debut on Twitter with two poses in front of the Tokyo Skytree Building.

What sets Kan-chan apart is Ichijiku Pharmaceutical’s stock in trade, which is the retail enema. And Kan-chan definitely was designed to resemble that product. Indeed, the resemblance is unmistakable when you look at the product and Kan-chan next to each other:
 

 

 
Somewhat ridiculously, Ichijiku Pharmaceutical apparently has insisted that Kan-chan is a penguin, even claiming that the pink nubbin on the top of her head is not an enema cap but is rather a “hair accessory,” whatever that means. But this seems unlikely, if you consider that Kan-chan’s very name is a shout-out to Ichijiku Pharmaceutical’s signature product—the Japanese word for enema is kancho.

More after the jump…

Victor Moscoso, ‘Incredible Poetry Reading’
 
The Bay Area’s CBS affiliate, KPIX, aired special reports on the hippie phenomenon in 1967: “The Maze: Haight/Ashbury,” a tour of the burgeoning neighborhood led by Beat poet Michael McClure, and “The Maze: Etched in Acid,” a skeptical look at LSD enthusiasts. The music of the New Salvation Army Banned plays under both. (The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Wildflower were profiled in “The Maze: Liverpool, U.S.A.,” an episode that has yet to turn up on the intertubes.)

What you catch glimpses of, aside from the period-costume detail everyone expects from this time and place—incense sticks, love beads, bad dancing—is the grime of actually existing hippiedom: chainsmoking guys with scabs on their noses and dirt under their fingernails who stole their friends’ records, ate chili dogs and shot A, huddled in stuffy rooms, “rapping.” So this is the vaunted innocence my elders cry over, huh? I’m not ashamed to admit I felt a tug at my heartstrings, too. The street parking on display in these reports made the tears and the snot run down my face, with the upper lip trembling, the lungs breathing all irregular, and the awful shuddering of the bowels. Once, before humankind decided to turn its back on righteousness and wade ass-deep in sin, there truly was free parking on this earth. In San Francisco, even!

More after the jump…

 
This is the best self-interview since David Byrne’s promotional interview for Stop Making Sense.

In this nineteen minute video, “Jerry” Casale plays the cynical straight interviewer of himself, “Gerald” Casale, bass player, vocalist, and spokesman for DEVO.

Gerald reveals to Jerry the secret behind the DEVO “energy domes” (erroneously referred to as “flower pots” by many spuds back in the day), the inspiration behind which was an art deco lighting fixture that hung from the ceiling in his grade school.

Gerald talks at length about the origins of DEVO at Kent State University, from the original concept creation with his friend Bob Lewis, to his meeting of Mark Mothersbaugh after seeing Mothersbaugh’s stickered artwork hanging in the halls of the school.

Gerald explains that the Kent State Massacre was the impetus for the creation of DEVO, conceptually and musically, as an experimental force and bulwark against the prevailing culture:

“After those killings at Kent State and the clampdown from the Nixon administration, you either had to go underground and stick to activism and possibly go to jail or be killed, or find a more creative and subversive way of reacting to the situation you found yourself in in the horrible culture.”

Gerald waxes nostalgic for the “democratic” early days of DEVO’s music when all of the members contributed to the minimalist “form follows function” vision of the band, but explains that the songwriting process went south when the technology they were using became “autocratic,” dictating the direction of the group. According to Casale, “Mark wanted it that way and I didn’t.”

DEVO’s biggest hit, “Whip It,” is also discussed, with Gerald revealing to Jerry that the basis for the song was Mark Mothersbaugh’s deconstruction of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” adding a two beat space to the song’s main riff, with Casale’s lyrics being inspired by Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

Watch after the jump…

 
Photographer Cindy Sherman has undertaken a sustained and acclaimed critique/exploration of the nature and construction of identity, Western self-representation, the male gaze, and the presumed documentary nature of photography that’s still ongoing after forty years, by using as her subject only herself, in various disguises. In 1977 she became prominent with a series called “Untitled Film Stills,” in which she cast herself in scenes that strongly resembled classic Hollywood tropes, but which were derived from no specific films in particular. The strength of that series and her early ‘80s work made her one of that decade’s art stars, making her a key figure not just in the so-called “Pictures Generation,” but in postmodern photography overall, and she became a MacArthur Fellow in the mid ‘90s.

Sherman’s generation of artists took a lot of heat for their appropriation-happy ethos. The artists themselves saw the tactic as a means to critique the increasingly image-saturated culture of the ‘80s, but some drew accusations of merely copying work and using conceptual art as a smoke screen. In some cases that seemed justified, as in the yeah-we-get-it-already oeuvre of accomplished forger Mike Bidlo, and Richard Prince has recently been savaged for selling other people’s online photos for six figures, without seeking permission or compensating the original photographers.

But since Sherman’s appropriations were of tropes rather than of specific works, she was never really a part of that fray, and because American culture has only become MORE image-saturated, the work of her generation of artists has only become more relevant, and seems more like prophecy than theft (hell, “PROPHECY IS THEFT” sounds a lot like a slogan Barbara Kruger would proffer), and fittingly, Sherman’s new work is a series of garishly saturated and disturbingly manipulated self portraits, published to that great asylum for performative selfies, Instagram.

Via Artnet News:

Before the age of social media and its painstakingly sculpted personae, Pictures Generation artist Cindy Sherman had already established herself as the art world’s reigning queen of self-reinvention, using the camera to morph into one character after another. Though her works are technically not self-portraits, Sherman’s method of turning the lens onto herself is uncannily appropriate to our times, in which the stage-managed selfie has become so ubiquitous that it’s now fodder for exhibitions and often cited as an art form in itself.

What we see here is somewhat of a departure from the artist’s traditional model: the frame is tighter and closer to her face, in what is clear use of a phone’s front-facing camera. Plus, the subject matter is decidedly intimate in comparison to her usual work—the latest posts document a stay in the hospital. She may even be having fun with filters.

The last hospital image was posted only three days ago, so DM wishes Ms. Sherman a speedy and comfortable recovery.
 

Back from the gym!

A post shared by cindy sherman (@_cindysherman_) on May 13, 2017 at 10:48am PDT

Oops!

A post shared by cindy sherman (@_cindysherman_) on May 15, 2017 at 5:05pm PDT

 
More after the jump…

 
Glenn Danzig’s Los Feliz home is for sale. The listing price is $1,199,000. Sadly, there’s only one photo of the home’s the exterior. I’d love to take a peek inside. Perhaps the relator will add more photos to the listing?

The home boasts 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and it’s 1,544 sqft.

From the MLS:

Located in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles. This 1907 Craftsman home is awaiting your imagination and creative talents. In the rear of the property is a 2 bd.+1ba. additional unit. Many original accents are still intact. Two story home with hardwood floors, leaded glass, and storage units. This is a property that should be returned to its glorious past. Property is to be sold “as is”.

I noticed in the listing there’s no cooling but you do get four parking spaces.

Click on image to enlarge.
 
h/t to everyone who’s sharing this on Facebook.

 
I’ve never owned a Chia Pet before, but if I was going to, you better bet it would be a Bob Ross one. If you’re going to have a Chia Pet, what better subject than a soft-spoken white man with a permed afro and a long-running show on PBS? Imagine my delight when I discovered this wonderful creation existed! It’s just perfect. I must own one. Now.

Wanna hear a great factoid about Bob Ross? Of course you do. The reason he always spoke so quietly is this: Before becoming a TV painting instructor, Ross held various jobs in the military that required him to be, as he put it himself, “tough” and “mean.” Ross was “the guy who makes you scrub the latrine, the guy who makes you make your bed, the guy who screams at you for being late to work.” Tired of all of that agro, Ross vowed that after he left the military, he would never scream again.

The Bob Ross Chia Pet is available here for $19.99.

 

 
via Geekologie

 
Do the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan occupy opposite poles of some optimist/skeptic spectrum? I’ll allow that they just might. The two bands definitely have little in common aesthetically, what with the Dead’s trademark move being the lengthy improvised guitar jam and the Dan opting for a much tighter method that might just involve importing several seasoned sessionists in order to nail down a difficult solo, as famously happened with “Peg.”

If you picked lyrics from the two bands at random and presented them in the form of a quiz, most knowledgeable music fans would have little trouble telling the two apart.

Which brings us to the official Steely Dan website, which has an unusual status among such entities for two reasons: its existence runs back very nearly to the very dawn of the World Wide Web, and Becker and Fagen clearly perceived it as a potential venue for their own personal expression.

According to the Internet Archive, Steely Dan’s website first surfaced no later than April 11, 1997, which is two years after the accepted inception of the WWW but remarkably early for an act as established as Steely Dan. The site is so old that it was was and running several years in advance of Steely Dan’s return to presenting new studio material to its audience, namely Two Against Nature, released in 2000, and Everything Must Go, released in 2003, both of which events it duly documented and promoted, as well as the many tours the Dan has undertaken over the years (remember when Steely Dan didn’t tour?).

The website has an unmistakably personal touch. As stated, whoever is running the website is expansive and expressive, with all sorts of pages dedicated not only to their albums and tours but also to such matters as the Dan’s tongue-in-cheek letter campaign to get set the terms of the band’s inevitable induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which didn’t last long because it happened in 2001 (the Dead beat them by seven years).

Amusingly, much of the website is in straight HTML, enough so to make one positively nostalgic for an Internet without any way to spread the word to LinkedIn or whatever. One such page is an amazing guide for music lovers who aren’t yet sure if they can handle Steely Dan, with detailed instructions on how to make the leap from Grateful Dead fandom to Dan fan status.

The “Deadhead/Danfan Conversion Chart” offers detailed illustrations of how to shed the “rectangular granny glasses” favored by Deadheads in favor of the “LA Eyeworks clipons” that are more typical of the pussyhound/drugrunner characters one might encounter in Steely Dan songs. In each case there is a transitional item named, occupying the creepy and simultaneous “Deadfan/Danhead” category—in the aforementioned example of eyewear, “rayban knockoffs” occupies that slot.

There are 20 such triads (Deadhead—Deadfan/Danhead—Danfan) and nary a weak one on the list. As a kicker, the final entry offers the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan themselves as start and end points, but I won’t name which artist they picked to be the transitional figure. But it’s kind of genius.

Here it is, but you can see the original version here:
 

 
Thanks to Sydney Aja Peterson for the find.
 

Salvador Dali, ‘Impressions of Africa’ (1938)

The rambling plot of the movie Salvador Dalí made for West German public TV in 1976, Impressions of Upper Mongolia (Homage to Raymond Roussel)—whose title has also been translated as Voyage in Outer Mongolia, and which more precisely concerns the region of Occidental Upper Mongolia—takes in golden circuit boards that replicate the painter’s brain, the giant, hallucinogenic, fictitious mushroom champlinclis histratatus domus biancus, and “the cruel mouth of Hitler.” Inspired by the writer Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, the film does not lend itself to a one-line summary; I would love to see the TV Guide entry.

José Montes Baquer, who directed the movie (though it’s “a film by Salvador Dalí,” of course), provided this useful synopsis in a 2007 interview with Tate Etc.:

The story was: in ancestral times, in order to deal with a wave of starvation, the princess was forced to administer hallucinogenic powders from a gigantic soft mushroom to her subjects. This substance produced a collective madness among the inhabitants of her principality, who created rock paintings that were discovered on boulders by a Dalínian expedition to this dreamland.

In the same interview, Baquer recalled that the collaboration began with a gift from Dalí, who spoke these words as he handed the filmmaker a plastic pen from the Hotel St. Regis with a specially treated metallic band:

In this clean and aseptic country [i.e., the USA], I have been observing how the urinals in the luxury restrooms of this hotel have acquired an entire range of rust colours through the interaction of the uric acid on the precious metals that are astounding. For this reason, I have been regularly urinating on the brass band of this pen over the past weeks to obtain the magnificent structures that you will find with your cameras and lenses. By simply looking at the band with my own eyes, I can see Dalí on the moon, or Dalí sipping coffee on the Champs Élysées. Take this magical object, work with it, and when you have an interesting result, come see me. If the result is good, we will make a film together.

I love a happy ending. Baquer got a half hour of footage out of magnifying the band on Dalí‘s magic piss pen, and the two men turned it into this cinematic act of blunt force head trauma. If you persevere, you will see the pen from the Hotel St. Regis, and you will see Dalí lament that, “in this dreadful time of pornography,” Standards and Practices won’t let him whiz on it on camera.

Continues after the jump…