A major element of the current rock n’ roll crisis we’re in is that contemporary bands have almost no willingness to provoke. It’s just not a Millennial impulse to shit themselves on stage or strut around arenas wearing Charles Manson t-shirts or brawl with the audience or carve their arms up with razor blades during press interviews. They just don’t wanna do it, man. And that’s a drag because every generation deserves their own Iggy, their own Lux, their own GG. How do you know where too far is unless somebody you know goes there?
 

They don’t make ‘em like they used to: Lux Interior letting it all hang out
 
We had a great run of truly berserk performers in the 80s and 90s, from the Dwarves to Suckdog, from the Genitorturers to Psychodrama, and I figured we’d reached our apex of onstage WTF when Karen Finley started shoving yams up her ass, but then Rockbitch hit the scene and blew up that notion completely.
 

Sex cult or rock band? Rockbitch were a little bot of both.
 
A (mostly) female commune/collective of like-minded British sexual warriors, Rockbitch formed in 1989. They played hardcore rock n’ roll, and they lived it, too. Their shows were a literal orgy of golden showers, scissor fights, fist-fucking, and every other extravagant live sex act you can imagine. And this was just during the guitar solos, dude. They turned the whole notion of the conquering male rock star on its head, proving female musicians were just as capable of initiating debauchery and free-flowing sexual mayhem both on and off-stage. At every show, they’d throw out a “golden condom” to the audience. The lucky recipient got to have group sex with the band backstage. You may not have started out as a libertine, but by the end of your first Rockbitch gig, you were basically Caligula. Rockbitch took it all the way.
 

Rockbitch in action
 
Naturally, they were banned just about everywhere, and mostly regulated their activities to the Netherlands, where the locals really “got” Rockbitch. The band broke up in 2002, leaving behind one album, 1999’s Motor Driven Bimbo, an eye-popping documentary, This is Rockbitch, an archival website featuring plenty of alarming photos, and a handful of pretty incredible videos. They might’ve been the last vestige of truly out-there rock n’ roll we’ll ever get unless Katy Perry or whoever starts peeing on her dancers.

See Rockbitch in action, after the jump…

One of the tamer covers of the vintage Italian fumetti series, ‘Wallestein il Mostro.’
 
Wallestein il Mostro was one of many horror-themed erotic comics put out by Renzo Barbieri and his publishing company Edifumetto. Known for their strikingly graphic covers, Edifumetto put out more than 140 issues of Wallestein il Mostro in five different runs over the course of nearly ten years.

If you’re a fan of Troma Films, you might notice that the monstrous vigilante Wallestein bears a distinct resemblance to Melvin, aka the Toxic Avenger—the deformed mop-wielding superhero who made his debut in the 1984 film The Toxic Avenger. Much like Toxie, Wallestein is always getting mixed up in some sort of caper gone wrong involving naked women with huge boobs. The “origin story” of how Wallestein came to be goes like this: after handsome Count Wallestein is killed, his identity is taken over by a vengeful swamp monster who dons a mask with human attributes covered in bulbous boils. In accordance with the style of Italian “fumetti,” the covers are stunningly lurid and over-the-top in every possible way, commonly featuring fun themes such as dismemberment, full-frontal nudity, and scenes involving sexual torture. As with other fumetti comics, the illustrations were designed by immensely talented artists such as Mario Cubbino and Giovanni Romanini who was a regular collaborator of Roberto Raviola—one of Italy’s most respected comic book artists who is better known under his singular moniker of Magnus. If you’re curious about what the comic looks like inside, you can flip through a few NSFW pages, here.

You’ve probably already surmised that the images I’ve posted below of the gloriously gory, sexually charged covers of Wallestein il Mostro are totally NSFW. Unless of course, you happen to work in an environment that endorses violence and explicit nudity like mine. If you are a fan of fumetti, it’s fairly easy to track down various copies of Wallestein il Mostro online.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

Boobroom, 2017
 
Much of Weijue Wang’s art is fluffy and pink and displays a strong emphasis on the mammaries of the female human, but underneath her seemingly fun and bouncy subject matter is a very dark subtext. Very dark.

Wang’s work was showcased at StARTup Art Fair in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. Here is the statement of purpose Wang submitted for the event, which was rather striking:
 

As an emerging Chinese female artist who lives in an age of consumerism in China, I am bombarded with the commodification of everything in every aspect of my daily life. I am interested especially in the commodification of the female bodies. Contemporary women are freer to think and act. With enhanced freedom, however, some threat their self-esteem by seeking painful cosmetic surgeries to modify their appearances. In the name of beauty, some women commoditize their bodies to fit into the sexualized beauty norms. These soft and fluffy female private part jewelries and sculptures are born in my needle’s sharp penetration through the felt. Underneath their harmless domesticity, I want to unveil the profound violence and irony in female commodification and mass-produced beauty. By showing my works in a hotel room setting, the sexual and domestic feeling of my works will be enhanced. Basically, I will create a room of fetish of female body parts. Some pieces will be lying on the bed (like the Airport Dream II ), while the sound that will be coming out of the piece will allow the audience to expand their imagination.

 
As you can see, Wang views her work, which would include a “room of fetish of female body parts,” as directly confronting the consumer culture that has arisen in China, which brings along with it inordinate stress and concern over the appearance of females. Wang has noticed that women in China are increasingly turning to breast enhancement, which in her eyes is equivalent to self-mutilation.
 

Process, 2017
 
In Kelsey Lannin’s article at Creators, she gestured at the two enormous “breasts” propped up on her pink bed and said, “I have huge boobs now! They might look cute and fluffy but they are borne out of violence. Of a needle penetrating through the felt.”

A work of hers called “Airport Dream” consists in part of round pink balls (yes, with “nipples”) suspended on pieces of string. The title is a reference to the fact that in China, the word airport is a common insult directed at flat-chested women!

“I definitely want to expand on it,” Wang told Lannin. “There are still a lot of women being called ‘airport’ in China.”
 

Boobroom, 2017
 

Airport Dream, 2017
 
via Creators
 

Two ‘Apache’ dancers hanging out in a cafe in Paris in 1938.
 
I’m going to roll the clock back to my earliest recollection of seeing what was essentially a version of the “Apache” dance that was featured on, of all things one of the original installments of the Popeye the Sailor cartoon series that I saw on TV as a child during the 1970s. The short in question was the seventeenth ever produced, in 1934, called “The Dance Contest.” In it Popeye and his gangly girlfriend Olive Oyl enter a dance contest which of course Popeye’s nemesis Bluto attempts to disrupt. When Bluto finally gets his chance dance with Olive he recklessly and abusively hurls her around—much in the style of an Apache dance. Naturally, Popeye is having none of that and after downing a can of his famous spinach, he takes over the lead dancer role with Bluto who he then essentially beats to a pulp while his famous theme plays out in the background. The cartoon itself, as you may recall, was already notoriously violent so it made perfect sense to incorporate one of the most popular and viciously aggressive dance crazes of the time into its storyline. But all of that would have gone over the head of pretty much any kid watching the show several decades later and it wasn’t until I was conducting my very important “research” for this post that I actually realized that the old-timey cartoon was riffing on what some referred to as the “Dance of Death” or the “Dance of the Underworld,” aka, “the Apache dance.”

If you are not familiar with this style of dance then it’s important to note that female dancers played a pivotal part in creating the savage scenarios in the dance by helping to develop its complicated choreography. The word “Apache” was derived from a name given to members of Parisian street gangs who were formerly known as “no goods.” After a particularly heinous crime involving the murder of a man who was found with his face, nose, and neck pierced with several women’s hat pins, the news reported the story with the headline “Crime Committed by the Apaches of Belleville.” From that point forward, the dance, its dancers, as well as teenage hooligans (who were often one and the same) became synonymous with the name. The earliest known appearance of the Apache was in the 1900s, perhaps as early as 1902. Like many dances, it is thematic in nature with storylines involving arguments between two lovers or perhaps a prostitute and a john. There were full-fledged stage productions involving complexly choreographed dance numbers. Dancers, especially amateurs, would often break bones and sustain other injuries during the heated and violent routines. Some routines were so egregious looking it was difficult to tell if something wasn’t actually going very fucking wrong while everyone sat back swilling booze, smoking cigarettes and watched. The craze dominated Paris for nearly 30 years and would also be featured in several films including one from the wildly popular Charlie Chan series, 1935’s Charlie Chan In Paris.

LIFE magazine wrote a rather extensive piece on the Apache dance craze/culture in 1946, and interviewed female dancers regarding their feelings about the dance. They said they “liked being thrown around,” which at face value appears to describe an act of domestic violence, only set to a jazz soundtrack. Which brings me to another important distinction about the Apache—it’s not just the ladies who get roughed up. No. In the Apache, the female dancers also get to gracefully kick the shit out of their male counterparts. So you see, everyone wins when they do the Apache dance at one point or another.

I’ve posted some gorgeous images of Apache dancers hanging out around Paris as well as some incredible footage from Charlie Chan in Paris featuring an Apache dance scene with actress Dorothy Appleby that you just have to see. I’ve also posted that Popeye the Sailor short I referenced at the beginning of this post because, well, why not?
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
David Huggins is 72 years old. He lives in Hoboken with his wife and son and works in a delicatessen. In his early years he was trained as a painter at the Art Students League of New York. At some point, during his “perfectly normal life” he “started remembering things.”

Huggins’ suppressed memories have gotten very detailed indeed. He recalls being abducted by extraterrestrials on numerous occasions, although “abducted” might not be the right word—Huggins’ experiences have mostly been pleasurable and he is quite content to assist the aliens in whatever way they desire. He says that he lost his virginity to a female “alien hybrid” named Crescent when he was seventeen years old. Huggins claims they’ve have had “over fifty hybrid-alien children” together—the details of their mating and the births are rather remarkable.
 

The artist and his work
 
Huggins tried attending abductee meetings but disliked them, they were too depressing—his experiences were nothing like that. So he turned to his art as an expression of his vivid memories.

Crescent is by far the most important alien in Huggins’ narratives. As he tells it, he was walking through a forest in Georgia towards a lake. He saw her sitting next to a tree. Crescent had a perfectly normal human appearance except for her head—her pale, pointed face had large black eyes and she was wearing a wig. They both disrobed and he soon lost his virginity.

Of his children, Huggins has given the following account:
 

I was taken into a room and it was filled with babies and I had to touch every one. The human touch was really important. The first time I touched one of the babies static electricity jumped from my hand to the baby. This was right before I touched it and I pulled back and said to the Insect-being “Wow, did you see that?” So I reached over and touched the baby. I woke up the next morning spent, totally exhausted and slept all day. But that night the Insect-like Being takes me to this door; we are in front of this doorway and there is this brilliant light. It was like it was pushing its way out of the doorway — it had form. The Insect-Like Being said I had to go inside the room with the light, so I go inside and it was just incredible. The light was passing right through me. I was in there for a few minutes. The next morning when I woke up I had incredible energy and felt really energized for weeks afterwards.

 
Fortunately for us, Huggins has harnessed his artistic talent to capture his memories, whether of real or imagined events. They display very good draftsmanship and use of color, and they are pleasurable to look at. It almost amounts to a perfect painterly representation of the entire “Area 51” mythos that has been such a familiar trope since the middle of the last century.

In 2009 Farah Yurdozu published a coffee-table book about Huggins under the title Love in an Alien Purgatory that reproduced many of his paintings—it’s available at Amazon for a reasonable sum.

Huggins is the subject of a forthcoming documentary by Brad Abrahams called Love and Saucers, which looks very interesting.
 

First Meeting
 

Our Son
 
More after the jump…

An illustration by artist Bill Ward featuring one of his impossibly busty blonde pinups.

When artist Bill Ward passed away in 1998 he left behind his large legacy of pinup illustrations that some comic connoisseurs have approximated to be at least 10,000 in number. Ward was a hugely influential force in adult-oriented comics and his work was featured widely in men’s interest magazines and the various Humorama digests, who coincidently were the number one buyers of comic art in the world during Ward’s heyday. One of Ward’s signature comic creations which he debuted in 1946 was a character called “Torchy,” a bubble-headed blonde who had trouble keeping her clothing on. Ward’s dangerously curvy girls and pin-ups were incredibly popular with Humorama fans, and there’s really no surprise as to why. His illustrations are infectiously sexy, and defy all logical body images, despite the fact that your mind would perhaps like to convince you otherwise.

Ward’s masterful use of the Conte crayon (an implement consisting of compressed powdered graphite or charcoal mixed with a wax or clay) provides another layer of intrigue to his pinups. He was an expert at being able to manipulate the medium in order to create a sense of tangibility to his sexed-up subjects, and his use of the material is nearly unrivaled. As you’ll see in Ward’s images in this post the use of the Conte allowed for a glossy luster to be applied to aspects of his pinups, whether it’s the tone of their platinum-blonde hair or a sense of shimmer to their ever-present thigh-high stockings. Ward’s women all possessed a slight air of irreproachability while standing around in stilettos and skin-tight clothing. According to Ward’s former editor Dian Hanson who worked with the artist at Juggs and Leg Show, it was Ward’s adeptness with Conte that helped set him apart as a fetish artist, as it gave him the ability to make the fetish-style clothing worn by his illustrated goddesses as alluring as the giant-breasted women it was clinging to.

Given Ward’s rather prolific catalog of work, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to showcase his blonde bombshell pinups exclusively as they perfectly represent his use of Conte and how the medium helps accenutate his bodacious illustrations. I also happen to be a big fan of blondes in general having been one all my life, so perhaps it’s a bit of the narcissist in me that wants to help perpetuate the notion that blondes really do in fact have more fun. If you’re interested, Ward’s work has been compiled into a few books including 2006’s The Wonderful World of Bill Ward: King of the Glamour Girls by fetish photographer Eric Kroll, and 2007’s The Pin-Up Art of Bill Ward that prominently features the artist’s exquisitely erotic illustrations. All of the illustrations of Ward’s gorgeous blonde pinups below are NSFW. YAY!
 

 

 
More buxon blondes and bodacious ta-tas after the jump…

A rather tame example of the work of Japanese artist Suehiro Maruo.
 
Japanese artist Suehiro Maruo has been an active member of the art community in Japan since he was a high school student. At the young age of fifteen, he left school and moved from Nagasaki to Tokyo where he found work as a bookbinder. He would later attempt to get his artwork published in the hugely popular weekly manga magazine Shōnen Jump but was rejected because his work was considered too graphic. Unfettered, Maruo would follow his instincts and in 1980 would finally get a break with another popular manga magazine, Ribon no Kishi which embraced the artist’s violent and often sexually charged vision. This relationship would open many doors for Maruo including a long-term partnership with celebrated alternative monthly manga, Garo. Maruo’s illustrations and paintings have had a deep impact on the world and his work has been translated into many languages from English to Russian. Though I’m a huge fan myself, it’s safe to say that Maruo’s work appeals to a fairly specific audience as the title of this post quite plainly suggests.

Maruo’s style falls under a couple of classifications in the world of Japanese art;  “Muzan-e” that when translated means “Bloody Prints” which is the traditional Japanese art of carving gruesome images onto wood blocks as originally conceived during the Edo period. Another category that applies to Maruo’s work is the term “ero guro” or “erotic grotesque” which should be self-explanatory. I dug through Maruo’s Tumblr (which is quite addicting) and came across some screen shots of an interview he did where he was discussing what drives him to create, noting that he was actually quite “sensitive” but that his sensitivity wasn’t “unshakable.”

“I tend to create expressions that get stronger and stronger and more grotesque. It’s actually just one of my fantasies. Pleasure and pain are subjects I’m particularly interested in.”

Maruo has a rather strong worldwide cult following—connoisseurs of his special brand of diabolical, blood-soaked Japanese erotica are everywhere and his work has been compiled in books, as well as other various publications such as graphic novels and comics. Maruo also makes an appearance in the documentary film Sex in the Comix along with two other influential illustrators you may have heard of, Robert Crumb and German artist Ralf König. If you’re a fan of the band Naked City—the spasmodically awesome ensemble featuring John Zorn and the talented Bill Frisell—then you may already have some of Maruo’s artwork in your record collection as his work is featured on a few of the band’s releases from the 1990s. Included below are images from Maruo’s collaboration with Naked City as well as selections from his catalog which are completely NSFW.
 

 

 
Much more Maruo after the jump…

 
OK, it’s April and not exactly calendar-buying season. But this is a little too good not to share. There’s a calendar that showcases pictures of sexy women holding carps. The name of the calendar is the Carponizer Calendar. Carponizer? Yes, Carponizer.

The calendar is the brainchild of a certain Hendrik Pöhler, a native of Germany who sells equipment for carp fishing for a living.

To get these priceless pics, photographer Raphael Faraggi runs the shoots in France over four weeks. He is assisted by “two competent caretakers,” who are charged with cleaning and polishing the carps’ scales before they are given to the models for the big pose. The Carponizer Calendar is, shall we say, R-rated, but if you go to Faraggi’s website some of the carp pictures are topless.

According to Pöhler, “The idea for the calendar was to bring two of the greatest hobbies of men, fishing and women together.” Right.

The Carponizer Calendar has actually been around since 2014, if not earlier. The 2016 edition and the 2017 edition are available on Amazon. In case you are wondering, the next time that the 2016 calendar configuration comes around again is 2044—leap years are tough—but you can reuse the 2017 edition as soon as 2023.

Pöhler claims that the 2017 calendar has “once more managed to courageously make every month of the year that little bit more special,” and really, who could argue?
 

 

 
More scantily clad women holding fish, after the jump…...

 
Back in 2000, Lemmy was the guest on Channel 4’s series All Back to Mine, an interview show based on Desert Island Discs. Usually, Sean Rowley, the host of the show, would visit musicians at home and listen to a few of their favorite records, but this episode was filmed at a bar table with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

Lemmy lists a few favorite records—“Good Golly, Miss Molly,” something by the Shadows he doesn’t name, “Hotel California”—in the course of this freewheeling conversation, which is not really about his favorite records and offers something for everyone. There’s material on being a Ted and hating Mods (“How can you be mean on a Vespa?”), the Hawkwind way of life (“We weren’t in a regular job, we weren’t paying our taxes regular, we weren’t like joining the Young Conservatives or whatever it is, y’know—we were just, like, gettin’ wrecked and playing music that we liked”), and megadosing with Jimi:

Lemmy: I was Jimi Hendrix’s roadie, what’d you expect? I mean, he’d come back from America with a hundred thousand tabs of acid, right?
Rowley: Who, Jimi had?
Lemmy: Yeah, and it wasn’t even illegal then. He brought it back in his suitcase. And he gave half of it ‘round the crew. I mean, that’s a lot of acid, you know.
Rowley: And you were part of the crew, at the time, then.
Lemmy: There was only two of us.

And then there’s the astonishing answer to Rowley’s question about having sex with a trans person, in which Lemmy frames gender reassignment surgery in terms of manly virtue…

More after the jump…

“Rodrique says the tokoloshe comes to his bed in the middle of the night to torment him.”

This curious tale appeared on the February 4, 2015 cover of the Daily Sun, South Africa’s largest daily newspaper with a readership of 5.7 million, but it just made its way to me. You’d think a story like this would have been, well… bigger news. Get a load of this:

Sometimes it’s a lizard who scratches him, but mostly she’s a short, beautiful woman who sucks his 4-5 . . . but there is no happy ending.

Rodrique Classen (31) said the last two years have been hell. The tokoloshe leaves him so horny that he has to leave his bed in the middle of the night and go in search of magoshas [prostitutes].

“It is only after the third big magosha that I find enough peace to go home to rest,” he said.

That’s the worst! How many times has a short beautiful demon sucked YOUR 4-5 without the expected happy ending, sending you out into the night to have sex with as many as three streetwalkers before you can finally chill out and get some sleep? We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

Rodrique, who lives with his parents—no surprise there—has no money, no job and whattaya know no girlfriend, either!
 

 

“I really want a girlfriend but the tokoloshe won’t allow it. The tokoloshe does something that makes the women think I am evil and they leave me,” he said.

Gee-whiz, I wonder what that “something” might be, don’t you? I’m pretty sure his lack of success with the ladies would have nothing whatsoever to do with a cover story like this one about his demonic sex addiction appearing on the front page of the country’s largest daily. Seems just a wee bit self-inflicted to me, Rodrique… just sayin’.

A traditional Zulu sangoma healer by the name of Dumezweni Mahabuke told the paper that the tokoloshe problem originates with Rodrique’s parents’ house.

“The tokoloshe was created in the yard to destroy him and make sure he never gets into a stable relationship with a woman,” said Dumezweni. “He needs to be cleansed by being washed and the house must be cleansed through special ceremonies. That’s the only way the tokoloshe will leave him alone,” said the sangoma.

More after the jump…