Everyone has seen the famous photos of Nico and Andy Warhol dressed as Batman and Robin, and Warhol’s silkscreen of the Batman logo, but evidently the writers for the most “pop art” TV show in history were also very well aware of the Pope of Pop’s movements.

In an episode called “Pop Goes the Joker,” a rich society girl by the name of “Baby Jane Towser” is preyed upon by the Joker who has inadvertently become an acclaimed Warhol-esque pop artist after defacing some art ala Marcel Duchamp. Baby Jane is duped to lure in millionaire patrons to buy the Joker’s art.

Obvious to anyone at the time, the rich girl character was based on one-time fashion model, “It Girl,” Warhol superstar and wealthy young Park Avenue socialite, “Baby” Jane Holzer. Holzer was famously photographed by David Bailey, she made the cover of Vogue and appeared in a handful of Warhol’s early films, such as Couch, Soap Opera and a silent “screen test” where she coyly brushed her teeth for his camera.
 

 
Holzer was known for many things, among them, and in no particular order, her big beautiful mane of hair, her enthusiasm for everything new and exciting, and for being almost a prophet of Andy Warhol’s art, being one of the earliest and most vocal champions of his work. She dated David Bailey and was pursued by the likes of JFK and Warren Beatty. Vogue editor Diana Vreeland called her “the most contemporary girl I know” and Holzer described her look as “Jewish 1964.” She was quite good at causing a stir. It’s not being unfair to say that she was the forerunner of Kim Kardashian.
 

 
Holzer was largely absent from The Factory scene after Edie Sedgewick’s arrival, when Warhol’s entourage became too druggy for her tastes, although she and the artist stayed close friends. The essay “Girl of the Year” from Tom Wolfe’s anthology The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby is about Jane Holzer:

“The show hasn’t even started yet, the Rolling Stones aren’t even on stage… Girls are reeling this way and that way in the aisle and through their huge black decal eyes… they keep staring at - her - Baby Jane - on the aisle… Baby Jane, is a fabulous girl. She comprehends what the Rolling Stones mean. Any columnist in New York could tell them who she is… a celebrity of New York’s new era of Wog Hip… Baby Jane Holzer, Jane Holzer in Vogue, Jane Holzer in Life, Jane Holzer in Andy Warhol’s underground movies, Jane Holzer at the rock and roll, Jane Holzer is - well, how can you put it into words? Jane Holzer is This Years Girl, at least, the New Celebrity, none of your old idea of sexpots, prima donnas, romantic tragediennes, she is the girl who knows… the Stones, East End vitality… ‘Andy calls everything super,’ says Jane. ‘I’m a super star, he’s a super-director, we make super epics - and I mean, it’s a completely new and natural way of acting.You can’t image what really beautiful things can happen!’”

Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry later referenced Holzer in the the lyrics to “Virginia Plain” (“Baby Jane’s in Acapulco / We are flying down to Rio” and “Can’t you see that Holzer mane?”).

Much more after the jump…

 
Normally the editorial policy here at Dangerous Minds—such that there is one—is that we tend to post about things we actually like, can get behind and want to enthusiastically share with our readers. It’s difficult to write about stuff you hate and who wants to participate in a “Hey, smell this, it smells like shit” sort of arrangement? Neither reader nor writer? Well, this post will be a departure from all that…

A few days ago, by accident of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, the video for a song called “Fancy Pants” by a band called Kenny was inflicted upon me. I was dumbfounded by how incredibly shitty it was and decided to lob it out to all the groovesters on Twitter:
 

Everything about this sucks. The band's name. Their gear. The song title. Everything. It sucks so bad that it sort of transcends merely mundane suckage & transmutes into some higher level of terrible & truly awe-inspiring awful. Then it sucks some more https://t.co/VgA7q29w6b

— Richard Metzger (@RichardMetzger) May 2, 2018

 
I then proceeded to become oddly fascinated by this awful band, this Kenny. Soon I’d fallen into a K-hole, but thankfully it wasn’t much deeper than a mud puddle (and I happen to really like Mud.)

Songwriters Bill Martin and Phil Coulter, who’d written #1 songs for the Bay City Rollers (“Shang A Lang,” “Saturday Night”), trippy library music, several Eurovision hits (including Sandie Shaw’s “Puppet on a String”) and a World Cup song for Scotland, were responsible for the blight on 70s pop that was Kenny. With the Bay City Rollers themselves as their backing band, Coulter sang the lead vocal on a song called “The Bump” which started selling briskly. The name Kenny apparently came from an Irish singer the songwriting duo had worked with named Tony Kenny as if to imply that the song might be by him. After Mickie Most’s RAK Records had moved around 250,000 records, they started to look around for a band who could “front” for Kenny ala Milli Vanilli on TV’s Top of the Pops.
 

 
A progrock group called Chuff, led by a singer named Ross Pringle, rehearsed in a cold storage unit of a banana warehouse where Pringle worked. The group played at the Windsor Pop Festival and shared the stage in London with heavy groups like Hawkwind, The Edgar Broughton Band and the Troggs. Chuff were approached about becoming Kenny and signed up for the gig after firing poor Ross. A guy called Rick Driscoll replaced him and Kenny, this Kenny, was born.

More after the jump…

 
After the first three KISS studio LPs failed to sell, album #4 was a do or die situation for the band and their label, Casablanca Records. The company had sunk a ton of money into the group, but had little to show for it. They were so broke, they couldn’t afford to make royalty payments, forcing KISS to borrow money to stay afloat. By mid-1975, attendance for KISS concerts was on the upswing, but that wasn’t reflected in album sales. During Halloween night 1975, Casablanca president, Neil Bogart, and his vice president, Larry Harris, took Bogart’s children trick-or-treating, and saw one kid after another made up to look like their favorite member of KISS. Despite KISS’s lack of commercial success, there was certainly something brewing in the zeitgeist.
 

 
Though the members of KISS each have their own unique makeup and costumes, highlighting their personas hadn’t initially occurred to the band or anyone else in their orbit. In a TV commercial for the band’s second record, Hotter Than Hell (1974), they’re referred to as “the demons of rock,” depicted more as a marauding gang than as an group of intriguing individuals.
 

 
After KISS’s third LP, Dressed to Kill (1975), didn’t make much of an impact, it was decided that rather than go back into the studio, the group would record a live record. For a number of reasons, this was a risky proposition. Live albums generally weren’t big sellers at the time, and they acted as a kind of live greatest hits, but KISS didn’t have any hits. The release would be a double album housed in a gatefold sleeve with a booklet, adding to the manufacturing costs, which the label could scarcely afford. With band and record company hemorrhaging money, if Alive! tanked it had the very real potential of sinking both Casablanca and KISS.
 

Their earliest promo photo.

For the first time, an advertising agency was hired to design the packaging for a KISS album, and Dennis Woloch at Howard Marks Advertising was given the task. In the book, Shout It out Loud: The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon, Woloch talks about the inclusion of handwritten messages from KISS pictured on the inside of the Alive! gatefold:

I don’t remember if it was me or Bill [Aucoin, KISS’s manager] who came up with the idea, but the image of KISS was just starting to form. We told those guys, ‘You’re different characters. You each have your own persona. How about writing a little personal note to the fans from each of you?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, sure, fine.’ They just went along with everything in those days, because they weren’t hot shit yet.

More after the jump…

via Zero Equals Two

A couple weeks ago, Vince Clarke from Depeche Mode, Yazoo, and Erasure stopped by the set of Extra Crispy, Time, Inc.‘s “digital editorial brand dedicated to obsessively documenting breakfast, brunch and the culture surrounding it all.” He charmed them silly while fixing beans on toast, a dish he touts as nutritious (?), inexpensive, and good for a hangover. (On the road, Vince apparently makes a hell of a grilled cheese sandwich with the hotel room iron, too.)

The Guardian reports this is nine out of ten Britons’ “preferred way to enjoy beans.” In the U.S. of A., we use a hose and a funnel, so I’m curious about these here beans prepared in le style anglais I heard tell of oncet or twicet; it is said that one eats them with one’s mouth.

The ingredients: sharp cheddar, Irish butter, well-done toast, and Heinz baked beans. The equipment: butter knife, can opener, cheese grater, saucepan, toaster, stove, broiler. Where’s my bottle of HP Sauce? Where’s my button that calls the paramedics?
 

 
H/T Zero Equals Two

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
When Vince Clarke met Wire

Another Shot comp (1988)
 
Wilfred Limonious was a prodigiously talented Jamaican artist and cartoonist whose work represents a key document for the the dancehall reggae scene of the mid-1980s. Limonious had a background as a newspaper cartoonist, but in the mid-1980s his work became incredibly in demand for album cover art for the dancehall artists like Yellowman, Little John, and Horace Martin. Between 1983 and 1992, Discogs credits Limonious with a staggering 132 covers—much of his finest album art came in the years 1985 and 1986, when he must have been churning out 3 a month, at a minimum, besides doing who knows what else.
 

 
Limonious’ work could take the form of a respectful portrait, a galvanizing call to arms (complete with machine guns, natch), or a hilarious comment on sexual politics. It’s easy to draw a correlation between his work (and perhaps that of dancehall in general) and the hip-hop movement in the United States—both feature a fair amount of braggadocio about sexual and criminal activities.

Limonious was way funnier than most of the art associated with rap, however. His most memorable images are street scenes, usually with a variety of people in them, and often there are scurrilous little goings-on and comments off to the side or tucked in between. In many ways Limonious’ comedic strategies call to mind the busy imagery of MAD Magazine.

As British reggae historian Steve Barrow has said,

Looking back at Limonious’s work now, it’s clear that he is an important part of a global cartooning continuum. The exaggerated caricatures of artists such as the 18th-century cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson, the late 19th-century German artist Lothar Meggendorfer, the early 20th-century US comic artist George Herriman, Chic Young, the creator of Blondie, and the renowned UK artists Dudley Watkins and Leo Baxendale, who worked on DC Thompson company titles The Beano and The Dandy, can all be cited as antecedents. So, while his jacket artwork––at first glance––is obviously focussed on Jamaican popular culture, at the same time his work forms part of a larger world––that of international graphic culture.

 
Limonious’ images are so fun, arresting, and vibrant that it’s well-nigh irresistible to come up with comps. The first thing that entered my mind was the four covers Corky McCoy did for Miles Davis in the early 1970s—most notably On the Corner but also In Concert, Big Fun, and Water Babies. It’s also hard not to think of Los Bros Hernandez, and some of his more casual work (the cartoons and some of the back images palaver) reminds me (if no one else) of Garry Trudeau’s early Doonesbury cartoons, while he was still at Yale.
 

Remarkable sample of Limonious’ hand-drawn type, endpaper for In Fine Style by Christopher Bateman
 
Limonious sadly passed away at the age of 50 on December 27, 1999. It took a while for the rest of the world to pay attention to the jaw-dropping vibrancy of Limonious’ work, but it’s finally happening. Three years ago Christopher Bateman published In Fine Style: The Dancehall Art of Wilfred Limonious, which is quite simply one of the finest coffee table books you could ever hope to own, and the stylemaker Supreme has been releasing T-shirts with Limonious’ imagery on them.
 

Dance Hall Time comp (1986)
 

Original Stalag 17, 18 and 19 comp (1984)
 
Many more examples of Limonious’ marvelous album art after the jump….....
 

A sketch of The Jackson 5 in clothes envisioned and made for the band by designer Boyd Clopton.
 
In addition to creating unique stagewear and costumes for acts like The Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes and Aretha Franklin (among many, many others), Boyd Clopton was also a talented painter whose personal works have been known to fetch as much as twenty grand when they become available.

A resident of Venice Beach during the glorious time it was still very much a mecca for bohemian beat poets, musicians, and creatives, Clopton lived there for three decades starting sometime in 1960 when he was in his late 20s. In the early 70s, Clopton’s wildly groovy designs were being worn almost exclusively by The Jackson 5 during their live shows, television appearances, and photo shoots. Aretha Franklin was also a fan of Clopton’s duds and would make it a point to seek him out whenever she was in Los Angeles (as mentioned in a 1974 interview published in Ebony magazine). Like other designers, Clopton would sketch out his concept clothing on paper for his clients. Unfortunately, Clopton’s career was cut short by his untimely death in 1989 at the age of 55. Single articles of clothing designed by Clopton have sold for hundreds and even thousands of dollars in auctions as have his sketches—many which reside in an archive maintained by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Below, some examples of Clopton’s fantastic sketches featuring his famous muses, as well as a few shots of The Jackson 5 wearing his outrageous outfits in real life. Keep it funky, now.
 

A sketch of Marlon Jackson of The Jackson 5 in one of Clopton’s designs.
 

The Jackson 5.
 

Dusty Springfield 1972.
 
Much more after the jump…

‘Portrait of Andre Breton’ by Man Ray, c. 1930
 
Europe after the Rain, the Arts Council of Great Britain’s 1978 documentary on Dada and Surrealism, looks at the careers of André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dalí, Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Yves Tanguy, John Heartfield, Giorgio de Chirico, Francis Picabia and René Magritte, among others. Sure, there are better ways to see these artists’ work than on YouTube, but this film is worth watching, because it makes both movements’ commitment to revolutionary left-wing politics explicit as few other surveys do.

Take this list from 1919, drawn up by Richard Huelsenbeck and Raoul Hausmann on behalf of the Dadaist Revolutionary Central Council:

Dadaism demands:

1) The international revolutionary union of all creative and intellectual men and women on the basis of radical Communism;
2) The introduction of progressive unemployment through comprehensive mechanization of every field of activity. Only by unemployment does it become possible for the individual to achieve certainty as to the truth of life and finally become accustomed to experience;
3) The immediate expropriation of property (socialization) and the communal feeding of all; further, the erection of cities of light, and gardens which will belong to society as a whole and prepare man for a state of freedom.

(The full manifesto goes on to demand free meals on Potsdamer Platz for “all creative and intellectual men and women,” the requisition of churches, “immediate organization of a Dadaist propaganda campaign with 150 circuses for the enlightenment of the proletariat,” and “immediate regulation of all sexual relations according to the views of international Dadaism through establishment of a Dadaist sexual center.”)
 

‘Europe after the Rain II’ by Max Ernst, 1940-1942
 
The movie is full of treasures: BBC interviews with Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp from the Sixties, a reading of Artaud’s “Address to the Dalai Lama,” an account of Freud’s meeting with Dalí. As usual in a film of this type, the attempts to dramatically recreate speeches by historical figures are embarrassing. I am not extra fond of the portrayal of Tzara as a supercilious toff. But the re-enactment of Breton’s dialogue with an official of the Parti communiste français is illuminating, and complements the other valuable material on the “Pope of Surrealism”: his work with shell-shocked soldiers in World War I, trials and expulsions of other Surrealists, collaboration with Leon Trotsky in Mexico, less-than-heroic contributions to the French Resistance, and study of the occult.

A VHS rip of the movie has been up on YouTube for some time, but this sharpened upload only recently appeared through the good offices of Manufacturing Intellect. It’s worth noting that the original VHS rip is nearly six minutes longer.
 

 
The writer Max Frisch once wrote that an author does nothing worse than betray himself. In that, a work of fiction reveals more of a writer’s thoughts, tastes, and secrets than any work of biography.

This, of course, may not always be the case, but for many it is true. Like Oscar Wilde, whose novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) revealed more about his tastes and thoughts and secret lifestyle than he ever ‘fessed-up to in public—as he once admitted in a letter to the artist Albert Sterner in 1891:

You’ll find much of me in it, and, as it is cast in objective form, much that is not me.

The parts that were thought to be Wilde—the story’s homoerotic subtext—led the press to damn the book as morally corrupt, perverse, and unfit for publication.

As for the parts that were not Wilde, they revealed some of the people who in part inspired his story, in particular, a poet called John Gray (1866-1934), who was one of the Wilde’s lovers. Gray later loathed his association with the book and eventually denounced his relationship with Wilde and was ordained as a priest.
 

Wilde thing: A portrait of Oscar in his favorite fur coat.
 
The Picture of Dorian Gray tells the story of a distinguished young man, Gray, whose portrait is painted by the artist Basil Hallward. On seeing the finished picture, Gray is overwhelmed by its (or rather his own) beauty and makes a pact with the Devil that he shall stay forever young with the painting grow old in his place. In modern parlance, consider it Faust for the selfie generation. Gray then abandons himself to every sin and imaginable depravity—the usual debauches of sex, drugs, and murder, etc.—in order to “cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.” As to be expected, this has catastrophic results for Gray and those unfortunate enough to be around him.

Wilde disingenuously claimed he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray “in a few days” as the result of “a wager.” In fact, he had long considered writing such a Faustian tale and began work on it in the summer of 1889. The story went through various drafts before it was submitted for publication in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Even then, Wilde contacted his publisher offering to lengthen the story (from thirteen to eventually twenty chapters) so it could be published as a novel which he believed would cause “a sensation.”

It certainly did that as the press turned on Wilde and his latest work with unparalleled vehemence. The critics were outraged by the lightly disguised homosexual subtext, in particular, Wilde’s reference to his secret gay lifestyle:

...there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex…They are forced to have more than one life.

The St. James’s Gazette described the tale as “ordure,” “dull and nasty,” “prosy rigmaroles about the beauty of the Body and the corruption of the Soul.” And went on to denounce it as a dangerous and corrupt story, the result of “malodorous putrefaction” which was only suitable for being “chucked on the fire.”

One critic from the Daily Chronicle described the novel as:

...a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents—a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction…

While the Scots Observer asked: “Why go grubbing in the muckheaps?” and damned the book as only suitable “for the Criminal Investigation Department…outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys.”

The last remark related to the “Cleveland Street Affair” of early-1890, in which young telegraph boys were alleged to be working as prostitutes at a brothel on Cleveland Street. It was claimed the government had covered-up this notorious scandal as the brothel was known to be frequented by those from the highest ranks of politicians and royalty.

Little wonder that when Gray was publicly identified by the Star newspaper as “the original Dorian of the same name” he threatened to sue for libel. Gray asked Wilde to write a letter to the press denying any such association. Wilde did so, claiming in the Daily Telegraph that he hardly knew Gray, which was contrary to what was known in private. The Star agreed to pay Gray an out of court settlement—but the association was now publicly known.
 

John Gray: ‘The curves of your lips rewrite history.’
 
More on the life of John Gray, after the jump…
 

 
During Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour, Peter Gabriel told his bandmates that he’d be leaving the group at the conclusion of the tour. Two years later Gabriel began an adventurous and wildly successful solo career with the release of “Solsbury Hill.” Between 1977 and 1982, Gabriel released four probing, dark solo albums each bearing his own name and forcing fans to come up with nicknames for them, like “Scratch.” Robert Fripp played on the first three of these albums and actually produced the second one. 1980’s “Melt” is perhaps the best one of the four, featuring “Biko,” “Intruder” (which featured pioneering use of the gated drum effect), and “Games Without Frontiers.”

For the 1980 tour to support the third solo album, Gabriel decided to concoct a clever, subversive version of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, also known as “Mao’s Little Red Book,” which had done so much to solidify Mao’s grip on power in the People’s Republic of China in the 1960s. This is what it looked like:
 

 
True to its name, it really was little; it was about the size of the palm of a person’s hand. The 1980 tour program suggested a dystopic work of fiction, echoing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the name of the tour, which was Tour of China 1984, thereby confusing historians for all time: The entire fun of the program, one might say, was that Gabriel was not touring China and it was not 1984. Basically it was all a mindfuck. The tour was limited to the United Kingdom and North America.

Durrell Bowman supplies a solid description of the 1980 tour in his book Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener’s Companion:
 

The tour for Peter Gabriel III began in February 1980, was strangely billed the Tour of China 1984, and its shows began with the performers carrying torches through the audience and Gabriel arriving from the back of the hall like a weird creature, as the unusual drums and sound effects from the beginning of “Intruder” were being played. Presumably to match the tour’s bizarre totalitarian China parody, the band wore black, over-all-like jumpsuits and each audience member was given a program booklet made to look like the 1966 book Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. ... The booklet included Gabriel’s head superimposed over those of other individuals, as well as Chinese newspaper ads, political posters, and comic books.

 
On his SYNERGY website, synth player Larry Fast has a few pics from and comments about that tour, including the “boiler suits” while “they were still new and black” and his backstage pass—note the Chinese ideograms on the front:
 

 
Of the Mao parody, Gabriel posted the following comment on his website:
 

One of the things at that time was that a lot of bands were keen to get be the first to play in China. There was a lot of press about it. So I thought that I would do the tour merchandise for a fictitious Chinese tour and it was the Tour of China 1984. We used Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book which had had more copies of it sold, or at least distributed, than any other book, as the model for the tour programme. That was fun to do.

 
Gabriel has never played a concert in China, but in 1994 he did play Hong Kong Stadium on the Secret World Tour—but that was three years before the British gave up control over the colony, after which it became the “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.”
 

 

 
Much more after the jump…....
 

 
Philipp Igumnov is a Russian artist based in Moscow who over the past decade has created a hybrid art of collage, illustration, and photography under the name “woodcum.” This monicker ain’t no sexual tree-fucker slang or the past tense actions of an amour but (apparently) a play on the words “would come” as inspired by his English teacher at high school who kept repeating the phrase “would come” like some kinda idiosyncratic tic.

Igummov took his cue was from various digital artists who were similarly experimenting with collage and image manipulation. Igummov had produced work as an illustrator but found drawing on top of an assembled picture gave it a clarity, substance, and reality that illustration alone failed to do. Well, at least for him this was the case.

He exhibited his work through his blog and Flickr and soon the browsing public came to like and share his images across the net. Now, you can buy prints of his work from a starting price of around $35 or 30€, details here.
 

 

 
More startlingly good collages, after the jump…