Viva Art Clokey
My favorite Gumby episode. It’s so good I can scarcely believe it exists. Bon Voyage, Art !
My favorite Gumby episode. It’s so good I can scarcely believe it exists. Bon Voyage, Art !
Macho Man gets so high on coke that he thinks he has Teh Magick! I’M A CHAMELEON, MAN!
I bought my copy of Darker Skratcher at the Wherehouse records franchise in the Panorama City mall in 1980. It was in the “punk” section and sure enough it had a cut on it by 45 Grave that I had heard on Rodney on the Roq a few times and which I’m sure was the reason I bought it. The remainder of the tracks were a glimpse into a mysterious suburban/subterranean music scene that became a huge influence on myself and all of my friends. It was a musical approach that could incorporate free improvisation, musique concrete, obscure pop culture references and pure noise into its “punk”. Sounded like home to me. Each of the groups on Darker Skratcher warrant their own posts, so I’ll refrain from the details for now and defer to the sage Mr. Lumbleau over at Mutant Sounds :
A seminal artifact of the L.A. Free Music Society’s salad days and one that, unlike most extant L.A.F.M.S. compilations, spends most of it’s time highlighting the less well recognized quirk pop perfection dimension of the L.A.F.M.S.’ collective praxis; to wit, it’s a compendium essential enough for me to be willing to bear the karmic burden of sharing a recording containing work by a certain Boyd Rice*. All that aside though, what self respecting freaky fringe music acolyte could be without this watershed document? From The Rick Potts Band’s suavely ludicrous bontempi pop to BPeople’s angular art fracture and from 45 Grave’s delightfully dejected sounding novelty song kitsch to Human Hands’ ferocious post punk juggernaut (one of their finest moments ever), it’s a testament to the sundry modes of ass-backward brilliance collectively deployed by this genre disrupting (and genre defining) art geek mafia.
*fwiw I share his misgivings about Mr Rice, but this track (the opening cut from DS) is just too great not to post.
Did you hear about the idiot couple in Chattooga County, Ga., who gave tattoos to six of their seven children? Yup, Patty “Jo Jo” Marsh and Jacob Bartels, decided to give their kids—one just 10 years old—crude, prison-style cross-shaped tats using an old tattoo gun and a guitar string. When the biological mother of two of the children got wind of this, she reported the duo to Family and Children Services. Marsh and Bartels were arrested three days after Christmas and charged with three counts each of illegal tattooing, second-degree child cruelty and reckless conduct.
Sez Jo Jo: ?
As anybody who has ever worked as a graphic designer (or with graphic designers) knows, there are certain fonts that are not so much as forbidden to use but, rather, punishable by immediate death and professional blackballing upon use. They also tend to be the ones that first-time or amateur designers go for first, and so you see them pretty much everywhere. The penultimate font horror is, of course, Comic Sans.*
The font is so ubiquitous and corrosive to all good sense that ByDesign has dedicated a podcast to it:
In just 15 years, the casual typeface Comic Sans has become one of the world’s most ubiquitous fonts, popping up everywhere from street signs to porn sites. Now there’s an international campaign to ban it. We meet the type designer who started it all.
(ByDesign: Comic Sans, Font of Controversy)
(Check out this Anti-Comic Sans Font Hoodie)
Before records labels like Slash and Dangerhouse came along to consume my youth, there was, of course, Casablanca Records. With KISS, Meatloaf, Parliament and Donna Summer under its roof, the label straddled a number of seemingly incongruous musical worlds.
But as the LA Weekly’s Gustavo Turner points out in his review of Larry Harris’ new book And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records, these worlds were all linked, albeit tenuously at times, by Casablanca’s visionary-in-chief (and Harris’ cousin), Neil Bogart. A genius at both label promotion and self-indulgence, Bogart passed away from cancer in ‘82, but not before becoming one of the defining figures of the ‘70s. Here’s a snip from Turner’s review:
They struck gold, big-time ?
Well shit my leg off… it’s an excellent retrospective mix of the groundbreaking Sheffield record label Warp’s 20-year history. Listening now, not bad! Tracklist below:
Clark - Herzog
Jamie Lidell - A Little Bit More (Luke Vibert Mix)
Aphex Twin - Ventolin (Deep Gong Mix)
Prefuse 73 - Robot Snares Got No Cadences Or Balances
Harmonic 313 - Dirtbox
Aphex Twin - Window Sill
Nightmares On Wax - Night Interlude
Nightmares On Wax - What I’m Feeling (Rae & Christian Remix)
LFO - Shove Piggy Shove
Mira Calix - Ilanga
Boards Of Canada - Happy Cycling
Jamie Lidell- Multiply (a Cappella)
Autechre - Teartear
Aphex Twin - Ventolin (Plain-An-Gwarry Mix)
Plaid - Alba Eedio
Boards Of Canada - Sixtyten
LFO - Tied Up
LFO - Them
Autechre - Cipater
Mike Ink - Paroles
LFO - Pathfinder
Link - Amazon Amenity (Chameleon Remix)
AFX - Children Talking
Aphex Twin & Squarepusher - Freeman Hardy & Willis Acid
Aphex Twin - Bucephalus Bouncing Ball
Aphex Twin - Cock 10
Boards Of Canada - Zoetrope
Broadcast & The Focus Group - Various cuts
Jimi Tenor - Backbone Of Night
John Callaghan - I’m Not Comfortable In My Own Mind
Ralph Bakshi apparently loaded some sneaky images of Mighty Mouse snorting coke in the 1980s Saturday morning cartoon. Hey, look, how do you think those poor animators work all night? Oh, I’m sorry, unless they’re chained to a desk in Southeast Asia… and hey, even then. Probably especially then. How else are they going to think like 8-year-olds constantly?
Fans of edgy animation and cartoon vice rejoiced this week, as the infamous 1987-1988 Saturday morning series “Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures” finally hit DVD. From the warped minds of Ralph Bakshi (“Fritz the Cat”) and John Kricfalusi (“Ren & Stimpy”), the show is often cited as a precursor to the era of wacky, subversive TV animation. So why the hold up on the DVD release? Well, it might have something to do with a controversial episode where the superhero mouse sniffed a very suspicious-looking white powder.
Premiering on CBS in November of 1987, “Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures” stood out in a field crowded with the mediocre likes of “Foofur” and “The Pound Puppies.” (This was a time when “The Smurfs” dominated two hours of prime Saturday morning real estate on NBC.) Bakshi—who began his animation career at Terrytoons, home of the original Mighty Mouse—assembled a team of future animation stars like Bruce Timm (“Batman: The Animated Series”) and “Wall-E” director Andrew Stanton, and granted them the creative freedom to poke fun at classic animation and superheroes (with characters like the Dark Knight stand-in Bat-Bat) in the guise of an innocuous Saturday morning ‘toon. As Kricfaulsi recently told Wired, the era of edgy, “creator-driven” animation that many credit “Ren & Stimpy” with starting actually kicked off two years earlier with “Mighty Mouse.”
But the show often veered into territory too risque for the Tiffany Network, including having characters shower together and hinting in a dream sequence that Mighty’s gal Pearl Pureheart had an illegitimate child with nemesis The Cow. The biggest controversy (and perhaps part of the reason why the show is remembered today) arose from the episode “The Littlest Tramp,” where Mighty Mouse is shown sniffing what appeared to be cocaine.