Grace Jones Iconic LooksSTRAY CAT BEAT GIRL: MEET THE ELECTRIFYING ‘ARETHA FRANKLIN’ OF JAPAN, AKIKO WADAThe arrival of the “beat girl” archetype in Japanese culture back in the 60s came with numerous girl rockers taking the helm of bands, cranking out garage rock sounds and pop-inspired hits some of which would go on to sell more than a million copies (such as the 1965 smash sung in English by Emy Jackson “Crying in a Storm”). Of the many that were a part of this movement, one of the most notable was a woman often referred to as the “Japanese Aretha Franklin,” Akiko Wada. Born Akiko Iizuka (according to her website) to Korean parents, she soon adopted her maternal uncle’s name (Wada) and started skipping school (before dropping out of high school entierly) to enjoy the nightlife of Osaka. At the age of seventeen she had added “runaway” to her growing rebellious teenage resume after a trip to Tokyo. Wada’s “look” was perceived as “unconventional” even during her childhood. In elementary school Wada was already over five-feet tall and by the time she stopped growing she stood approximately 5’9. Not only did Wada sound more like a man she was also taller than most of her male counterparts on the hit parade. Due to her unique looks and vocal style she was often referred to as being “butch.” It’s important to note here that being labeled as “butch” is a distinct inference of homosexuality. And being gay in Japan isn’t merely frowned upon, it is also considered an “unacceptable” lifestyle (though there has been some progress over the last two decades). Despite assumptions regarding her sexuality Wada has been married to a man (photographer Koji Iizuka) for the past 35 years. Wada would embark on her recording career in 1968, singing on an astronomical number of records (somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 singles) since the release of her first single “Hoshizora no Kodoku” (“The Solitude of the Starry Sky”). Fast-forward to 2016 and the unstoppable Wada shows no signs of slowing down. Her latest release “All Right!!!” came out in July of this year—three months after her 66th birthday. Wada also appeared in a few memorable films, a few which audiences outside of Japan may be familiar with such as the 1970 Japanese chick biker-flick (the first of the long-running franchise) Alleycat Rock: Female Boss where Akiko gets to play the cycle-riding biker girl “Ako.” Wada would reprise the role of “Ako” in the follow-up film, Stray Cat Rock: Wild Jumbo. Wada has also hosted her own TV show, Akko ni Omakase (“Leave It To Akko”), as well as a radio show DJ Akko No Panic Studio. I’ve included a number of cool tracks from Wada’s vast catalog for you to listen to below and the groovy trailer for Stray Cat Rock: Wild Jumbo (which was lovingly remastered back in 2014 by Arrow Films) that features Wada looking larger than life, rocking out in a sweet brown pantsuit. https://dangerousminds.net/comments/stray_cat_beat_girl_meet_the_electrifying_aretha_franklin_of_japan_akiko_wa?utm_source=Dangerous+Minds+newsletter&utm_campaign=225ff51a5c-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ecada8d328-225ff51a5c-65849849 A front-row seat to the rise of punk rock Photographs by Ruby RayStory by Ryan Prior, CNN In January 1978, photographer Ruby Ray was at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom sweating with the crowd and swaying to the driving rhythm of the Sex Pistols. The band epitomized the new punk spirit in rock, injecting a new destructive energy at a time when the wider world of corporate rock was glossing over the genre’s rebellious roots. Chaos was their governing impulse. “At the time there were only about 200 true punks in San Francisco,” Ray told CNN, but this concert drew 2,000. “It was an incredible show, a huge show,” Ray said. It was also their last show. The night after the Sex Pistols broke up, Ray was photographing a show at the Mabuhay Gardens club where another punk scene stalwart, the Bags, were playing a set. Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious was there. He found a piece of shattered glass and jumped up on the stage, which was only about 2 feet off the ground. He ran the glass across his shirtless chest, drawing blood, in an attempt to seek attention and upstage the band. Ray later raced backstage where she saw Vicious laying down with a woman and smoking a cigarette. She asked if she could photograph him, and he said, “Sure, hurry up,” Ray recalls. Ray’s new photo book, “Kalifornia Kool,” depicts the San Francisco punk scene between 1976 and 1982. That period, when she was in her 20s, “was bold and daring and wild.” Her book is a living record of the ‘70s punk scene, which almost by its very definition, was ephemeral. “A lot of (the bands) didn't get recorded,” she said. “Industry didn't like punk rock.” Punk thrived in the underground, and without the aid of corporate overlords it required a democratic do-it-yourself spirit — fiery passion overruling the need for any kind of expertise. The vibe on the scene, Ray said, was always, “Sure, you could start your punk band.” But Ray and her friend V. Vale didn’t start their own punk band. They started their own punk magazine. Vale hatched the idea for the publication Search and Destroy while working at City Lights, a famed San Francisco bookstore known for first publishing Beat poet Alan Ginsberg's “Howl and Other Poems” — a book that was nearly a holy text among counterculture kids of the mid-20th century. It was Ginsberg, in fact, who walked into the store and handed Vale a check that helped bankroll the magazine's first issue. Vale found Ray, where she was working at Tower Records, and she agreed to become a photographer for the fledgling ’zine. At its peak, the all-volunteer magazine hit a circulation of 10,000 and had readers as far as London, Paris and Berlin. The young punk journalists put it together in their living room. Once they had all the stories and the photos, the group had a layout party, putting the template for each page together with scissors and paste. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/entertainment/1970s-punk-california-cnnphotos/ Amazing Cat Cartoons from SongsAmazing Magazine T-Shirts from the 1970s-80s We’ve covered the amazing 1970s T-Shirt fad in a previous article – but it’s high time for another round. Nothing brings back the pop-culture memories better than the humble tee. That’s because it proclaimed the wearer’s identity – what he or she was “into”, no matter how obscure a niche. Capitalizing on the fad, magazines of all varieties offered their readers an opportunity to wear their brand. From Billboard to Screw magazine, an endless spectrum of titles were emblazoned on our chests for the world to see. Let’s have a look… https://flashbak.com/amazing-magazine-t-shirts-from-the-1970s-80s-377371/ Sixto Rodríguez: the Improbable Fame of an ArtistHis uncertain fame and public recognition made Sixto Rodríguez confront the delicate balance between personal fortune and the authenticity of talent. The music world is famously cruel. Throughout history, once and again we have seen cases of composers, interpreters and singers whose talent has only been recognized after their death, in that posterity which, so we are told, does justice to everything and leaves stanting only that which transcends the beating of critics and time. Such is the case of Sixto Rodríguez, an American singer born to Mexican parents who had a short music career (recording a couple albums in the 1970’s and going on a brief Australian tour), and flirted briefly with fame but soon was pushed aside by a wave of new faces and voices. The son of migrants who left their country in the 20’s, Sixto was born in 1942 in Detroit, Michigan, to a lower middle class family who raised him in poverty and yet cultivated in him an interest in the underground culture, both of which would later be reflected in his music. Somehow, Rodríguez resolved to be a successful musician from very early in life, and in 1967 recorded his first single, “I’ll Slip Away,” with a small record company with a big name: Impact. Three years later he signed with Sussex Records, which was part of the better-known Buddha Records, with which he later recorded Cold Fact (1970) and Coming from Reality (1971); both influenced by Blues and Rock. Before this, which he considered a failure, Sixto decided that his music career was over. His decision, however, was perhaps too hasty, as he soon gained unexpected popularity in South Africa, Zimbabwe, New Zealand and Australia, which goes to show the capricious nature of success: met with disdain on one continent and revered on a remote other. With his unexpected following, Rodríguez went on an Australian tour with the Mark Gillespie Band, and even started to work on his next album, Alive, whose title was a sort of wink at the strange rumor –perhaps inspired by his few years of silence– that he had died. But after his Australian tour he again went into obscurity, dedicating his time to studying for his BA in Philosophy at Wayne State University in Ohio and his new and unexpected profession in demolition. What perhaps is most surprising is the revelation his daughter made in the 1990’s: that Sixto Rodríguez was a musical icon in South Africa, a figure with a cult Internet following and loads of fans despite the fact that he had only, decades ago, distributed a couple albums to the country. Capitalizing on the discovery, Rodríguez, almost 60 years old, went on a six-concert tour in South Africa, even producing a documentary about the experience: the Dead Men Don’t Tour: Rodríguez in South Africa 1998. It was a sort of final resurrection of the musical success Rodríguez had been looking for his whole life. With the re-release of his albums, new international tours scheduled as well as television appearances, this brilliant man is now battling between keeping the authenticity of his music and living out a long-lived dream. We recommend the now very popular documentary Searching for Sugar Man, by Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul, in which all of the above is profusely and endearingly put. https://www.faena.com/aleph/sixto-rodriguez-the-improbable-fame-of-an-artist Vintage T-ShirtsTwo Teens Hitchhiked to a Concert. 50 Years Later, They Haven’t Come Home Mitchel Weiser and Bonnie Bickwit were never heard from again after leaving for 1973’s historic Summer Jam at Watkins Glen. Five decades on, their family and friends still want answers ERIC J. GREENBERG
They were never seen again. Or were they? Fifty years ago last week marked the disappearance of 16-year-old Mitchel Weiser and 15-year-old Bonnie Bickwit, two gifted students who are the oldest missing-teen cases in the country. Initially dismissed as romantic runaways who would return home soon, the pair’s fate remains a mystery. After decades of police bungling and false leads, investigators have tracked several theories over what might have happened to them. Amid recent information about a possible suspect connected to their disappearance, Mitchel’s and Bonnie’s friends and families are now calling on federal and state officials to provide the necessary resources to solve the coldest of cold cases. “A task force is exactly what we need to solve what happened to my brother Mitchel and his girlfriend Bonnie,” Susan Weiser Liebegott, Mitchel’s sister who has been searching for him for the past half century, tells Rolling Stone. “Quite frankly, it is the only way to solve their case.” “This could be our last chance to bring justice and some measure of peace to the family and friends,” adds Mitchel’s childhood best friend Stuart Karten. The couple were apparently last seen leaving Camp Wel-Met, a popular summer camp in the Catskills region. Bonnie, a longtime camper, had taken a job at the camp as a parents’ helper. Mitchel stayed in Brooklyn, having snagged a prized job at a local photography studio. On the evening of Thursday, July 26, he boarded a bus at Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan heading for Bonnie’s camp in Narrowsburg, a town in Sullivan County about two hours away. Their plan was to hitchhike 150 miles northwest to attend an outdoor concert dubbed “Summer Jam” at the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway. The show featured rock counterculture legends the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and the Band, and is still considered one of the most-attended U.S. concerts to date. Their plan was to hitchhike 150 miles northwest to attend an outdoor concert dubbed “Summer Jam” at the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway. The show featured rock counterculture legends the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and the Band, and is still considered one of the most- attended U.S. concerts to date. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/mitchel-weiser-bonnie-bickwit-missing-teens-summer-jam-1234798437/amp/ When Mississippi Tried to Ban Sesame Street for Showing a “Highly Integrated Cast” (1970)On November 10, 1969, Sesame Street made its broadcast debut. The very first lines were spoken by Gordon (Matt Robinson), a Black schoolteacher who’s showing a new kid around the neighborhood, introducing her to a couple of other kids, along with Sesame Street adult mainstays Bob, Susan, and Mr. Hooper, and Big Bird, whose appearance had yet to find its final form: Sally, you’ve never seen a street like Sesame Street. Everything happens here. You’re gonna love it. The milieu would have felt familiar to children growing up on New York City’s Upper West Side, or Harlem or the Bronx. While not every block was as well integrated as Sesame Street’s cheerful, deliberately multicultural, brownstone setting, any subway ride was an opportunity to rub shoulders with New Yorkers of all races, classes and creeds. Not six months later, the all-White Mississippi State Commission for Educational Television voted 3 to 2 to remove Sesame Street from their state’s airwaves. A disgruntled pro-Sesame commission member leaked the reason to The New York Times: Some of the members of the commission were very much opposed to showing the series because it uses a highly integrated cast of children. The whistleblower also intimated that those same members objected to the fact that Robinson and Loretta Long, the actor portraying Susan, were Black. They claimed Mississippi was “not yet ready” for such a show, even though Sesame Street was an immediate hit. Professionals in the fields of psychology, education, and medicine had consulted on its content, helping it secure a significant amount of federal and private grants prior to filming. The show had been lauded for its main mission – preparing American children from low-income backgrounds for kindergarten through lively educational programming with ample representation. Kids growing up in sheltered, all-white enclaves stood to gain, too, by being welcomed into a television neighborhood where Black and white families were shown happily coexisting, treating each other with kindness, patience and respect. (Sonia Manzano and Emilio Delgado, who played Maria and Luis, joined the cast soon after.) Even though Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee also moved to pre-empt the innovative hit show, the government appointees on the Mississippi State Commission for Educational Television who’d ousted Sesame Street found themselves outnumbered when Jackson residents of all ages staged a protest in front of Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s HQ.] The Delta Democrat-Times published an editorial piece arguing that “there is no state which more desperately needs every educational tool it can find than Mississippi:” There is no educational show on the market today better prepared than Sesame Street to teach preschool children what many cannot or do not learn in their homes….The needs are immense. After 22 days, the ban was rolled back and Sesame Street was reinstated. That fall, the cast made a pitstop in Jackson during a 14-city national tour. Susan, Gordon, Bob, Mr. Hooper and Big Bird sang and joked with audience members as part of an event co-sponsored by the very same commission that had tried to blackball them, and left without having received a formal apology. Sesame Street has stayed true to its progressive agenda throughout its fifty+ year history, a commitment that seems more essential than ever in 2023. Below, Elmo, a Muppet who rose through the ranks to become a Sesame Street star engages in an entry-level conversation about race with some newer characters in an episode from two years ago. https://www.openculture.com/2023/08/when-the-mississippi-tried-to-ban-sesame-street-for-showing-a-highly-integrated-cast-1970.html The Groovy Imitation Bands of 1960s Japanese RockBY MESSYNESSY MAY 28, 2014 When the Beatles arrived in Japan in June of 1966, they caused as much pandemonium when they did when they triggered Beatlemania in the United States in 1964. A total of 8,400 policemen were mobilized for security at a cost of 90 million yen and more than 6,500 Japanese teenagers were taken into custody. They had been in Japan for 102 hours (and were paid 60 million yen). Japan had its very own ‘beat era’ during the 1960s that was heavily influenced by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, American hit music and psychedelic rock. It spawned an entirely new music genre known as ‘Group Sounds’ (GS), which saw over a hundred bands release vinyl records on major labels that imitated Western rock musicians. More than often, Group Sounds records did covers of the supergroups such as The Beatles, The Beegees and The Rolling Stones, translating the lyrics into Japanese. But the colourful, outfit co-ordinated bands also recorded their own Western-inspired moody ballads and syrupy pop songs. Some of it was not so good, but some of it was pretty groovy stuff with an added exotic edge of being sung in Japanese. The best part about this is trying to imagine what exactly a shoe belt would look like. Most Japanese musicians felt that they could not sing rock in Japanese. There were debates between bands over whether they should be singing in English or Japanese and the confrontation became known as the “Japanese-language rock controversy”. It was decided that Japanese rock music should be sung in Japanese which likely spawned the origins of modern J-Pop. https://www.messynessychic.com/2014/05/28/the-groovy-imitation-bands-of-1960s-japanese-rock/ The Obscure World of Kitschy Christian VinylBob Dylan nearly crossed over to the Christian music industry in the late seventies. He had just announced his conversion to Christianity in ’79 and proceeded to release a total of three albums based on his newfound faith. He spent several years touring and preaching from stage, but was never fully accepted by Christian music fans who were suspicious of Dylan’s failure to leave behind the secular music world and become the face of the Christian sub-genre. Nor did his mainstream fans want to listen to him singing about Jesus. By the early 80s, Dylan dropped the religious references from his music and went back to being Bob Dylan. But oh, what could have been… The contemporary Christian music industry is a funny one. Since its rise in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the Jesus Movement, it has never been short of critics claiming it “violates all that God has commanded in the Bible” and pointing out the obvious conflict between commercialisation and ministry. Nevertheless, the Jesus movement churned out a large number of bands in a very short period of time, most of which remained in music obscurity.. “Jesus music” most notably saw its emergence in hippie centres of the sixties like southern California, Seattle and Chicago. Thanks to long-haired hippie preachers who could speak in tongues while tripping on LSD, large numbers of hippies and street musicians began converting to born-again Christianity. Where many young people had been left disillusioned by a decade of free love and drugs, the Jesus Movement offered the kind of salvation the traditional church couldn’t. Once converted, the musicians continued playing the folk and rock music they had always been playing, but began infusing lyrics with a Christian message. They played for whoever would listen, collecting money at the passing of a basket known as a “love offering”. Initially, it was a means of sharing their faith and encouraging others to convert and the music was relatively simple. Without using bible clichés, there was the basic message of salvation and the value of a Christ-centered spiritual experience. Some bands talked about the imminent Second Coming of Christ, a prominent theory amongst hippie evangelicals. Few, if any made a living from playing, but there were a few to become rock stars in their own right. The seventies saw major music industry giants including Time Warner, ABC, CBS and MCA invest and start labels in the Christian music market. Jesus music festivals mimicking more moral interpretations of Woodstock began to emerge in the summer of the seventies, attracting large crowds. The industry began maturing and slowly transforming into a multi-million dollar enterprise committed to very un-Godly things such as increased market share, profit increases and commercial marketplace strategies. By the end of the 1970s the term “Jesus music” fell out of use as the movement was replaced by the industry. https://www.messynessychic.com/2017/02/16/the-obscure-world-of-kitschy-christian-vinyls/ Did Glam Rock Wrestling Give Bowie and Elton Their Style?BY FRANCKY KNAPP OCTOBER 30, 2019 Before Ziggy played guitar, Adrian Street pounded the ring (and the makeup counter) in silver tights. The pro-wrestler changed the game forever in the 1960s when he decided the game needed more panache. More glitter. More glam. He emerged from his chrysalis, that of the former coal miner and man’s man that he was, like a human disco ball. Not that he was shedding his working class roots, mind you. This wasn’t about forgetting who you were, but showing the world who you could become. Today, we’re revisiting the world of glam rock wrestling, from the 1960s into the 1990s. There will be baby oil. There will be glitter. And boy oh boy, will there be some glamourous headshots – starting off with the evolution of Adrian, AKA, “The Merchant of Menace”… It’s said that Elton John, David Bowie, and Marc Bolan all found major inspiration in this androgynous trailblazer’s wardrobe… If it weren’t for Adrian, we would’ve never had the incoming stream of wrestling glitterati in the 1980s, which thrived in the era of hair metal (and spray). “The Rock ‘N Roll Express” was formed in Memphis, Tennessee in 1983, starring Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson. Get ready to take some style notes, my friend… Of course, every great duo needs an opponent. Or two. But who would dare challenge the Rock ‘N Roll Express? Ladies and gents, we now welcome “the Fabulous Ones” to the ring… They were glam rock, but definitely opted for the less-is-more look and quite frankly, we think they would’ve made excellent subjects for a kitsch painting by the artist George Quaintance.
“Gay Semiotics” Revisited Hal Fischer speaks about his seminal 1970s-era examination of the “hanky code” used to signal sexual preferences of gay men. In 1977, San Francisco photographer Hal Fischer produced his photo-text project Gay Semiotics, a seminal examination of the “hanky code” used to signal sexual preferences of cruising gay men in the Castro district of San Francisco. Fischer’s pictures dissected the significance of colored bandanas worn in jeans pockets, as well as how the placement of keys and earrings might telegraph passive or active roles. He also photographed a series of “gay looks”—from hippie to leather to cowboy to jock—with text that pointed out key elements of queer street-style. https://aperture.org/editorial/gay-semiotics-revisited/ LIFE With Rock Stars . . . and Their Parents A gallery of rock legends -- Clapton, Zappa, Elton John, Grace Slick and more -- and their totally square, totally sweet parents. They had fame, reams of money and fans willing to do wild, unmentionable things just to breathe the same air — but in its September 24, 1971 issue, LIFE magazine illustrated a different side of the lives of rock stars. Like other mere mortals, they often came from humble backgrounds, with moms and dads who bragged about them, fussed over them, called them on their nonsense and worried about them every single day. Assigned to take portraits of the artists at home with their sweetly square folks, photographer John Olson traveled from the suburbs of London to Brooklyn to the Bay Area, capturing in his work the love that bridged any cultural and generational divides that existed between his subjects. Here, LIFE.com brings back Olson’s nostalgia-sparking photos — Marvel at the decor! Gaze in wonder at the shag carpets and bell-bottoms! — and shares his memories of hanging out with pop culture icons of the Sixties and Seventies, as well as their mums and their dads. John Olson on Frank Zappa: “Everyone had told me that Frank Zappa was going to be really difficult, and he couldn’t have been more professional,” Olson told LIFE.com. Zappa on His Parents: “My father has ambitions to be an actor,” Frank told LIFE. “He secretly wants to be on TV.” Zappa’s Mom on Zappa: “The thing that makes me mad about Frank is that his hair is curlier than mine — and blacker.” Grace Slick: Grace Slick’s mom Virginia Wing, wrote LIFE, was a “soft-spoken suburban matron” — pretty much the opposite of her wild child. “Grace and I have different sets of moral values,” Mrs. Wing told LIFE, “but she’s her own person, and we understand each other.” Elton John: In 1970, Elton John was just three albums into his prolific career, and still had countless hits — “Rocket Man,” “Daniel,” “Bennie and the Jets” and “Candle in the Wind” among them — in his future. “When he was four years old,” his mother said of her prodigiously talented son, “we used to put him to bed in the day and get him up to play at night for parties.” Ginger Baker: The world knew him as Ginger, on account of his red hair, but his mother christened him Peter, and to her he was always “my Pete.” As she told LIFE magazine: “He would bring people over and they would say, ‘You realize your son is brilliant,’ and I’d say, ‘Is he? I wish he was a bit more brilliant at keeping his room tidy.'” https://time.com/3517247/life-with-rock-stars-and-their-parents/ Brad Elterman’s Rock & Roll PhotographyBY ROLLING STONE DECEMBER 4, 2020 When Brad Elterman met Miley Cyrus, the photographer felt as if he’d gone back to his early days on the Sunset Strip, where he’d cut class as a teenager to take a candid shot of David Bowie walking down Fairfax Avenue and followed his runaway muse and friend – Joan Jett – from the Tropicana Motel to the Santa Monica Pier. “When I was taking her picture – It’s interesting. She turns her head a certain way in a certain pose, and she really reminded me of Joan back in the seventies,” he tells Rolling Stone. It’s a fitting comparison, as Miley’s newest album Plastic Hearts features Joan Jett and the Blackhearts on the track “Bad Karma.” Jett isn’t the only seventies rocker to appear, either, as Billy Idol and Stevie Nicks both feature on the anticipated album. “There are moments just like a throwback to 1976, 1977, when I was there with Miley,” says Elterman. “I mean, It’s forty-plus years ago. It’s so surreal.” https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-pictures/brad-elterman-photography-joan-jett-ramones-debbie-harry-1098867/brad-elterman-20/ Shedding a light on the psyche of war: Zippo lighters from U.S. troops fighting in Vietnam give a unique insight into life under fireSome show the fear of death and regret of leaving loved ones behind to fight on foreign soil, others hint at the hatred for both the enemy and the government that put them in harm's way... others still show a remarkable sense of humour. A unique collection of 282 Zippo lighters from the Vietnam War era were recently put up as a single lot at Cowan's Auctions in Cincinnati, Ohio. The lot was the culmination of years of painstaking research by American artist Bradford Edwards, who picked up many of the distinctive lighters on site in the former war zone during the Nineties. See image for book of these. “Love and Rockets” Is Still IndependentJaime and Gilbert Hernandez’s collaboration began with a simple proposition: each brother would be able to do whatever he wanted. By Sam Thielman December 14, 2022 Jaime, Gilbert, and Mario Hernandez self-published the first issue of “Love and Rockets” in 1981. The brothers financed the initial eight-hundred-copy run with a seven-hundred-dollar loan from their youngest brother, Ismael, and stapled its pages together at Mario’s house in Oxnard, California. They sent a copy to Gary Groth, the publisher of the artsy, angry trade magazine The Comics Journal, hoping for a review. A month later, Groth called the brothers and asked to publish the book himself. He reissued the first “Love and Rockets” in July of 1982. After the second issue came out the following April, Marvel Comics began calling Jaime with offers of work. But the Hernandezes were California punks. Marvel was the mainstream, and they prized their autonomy. Jaime declined. For four decades, the brothers have produced the series and its many spinoffs—as of this writing, a hundred and thirty-six issues in all—by themselves. “Love and Rockets” is rightly recognized as the blueprint for a mini-boom of alternative comics for adults in the eighties and nineties. Daniel Clowes’s “Eightball,” Peter Bagge’s “Hate,” and Chris Ware’s “Acme Novelty Library” would likely not exist without its example or its patronage. (Clowes’s early work was excerpted in its pages.) The Hernandezes—sometimes credited as Los Bros Hernandez—have worked in familiar forms, drawing sweeping serialized melodramas, one-page gags, and enthusiastically obscene sexual confession. But from the beginning, the brothers have used the latitude of indie comics to tell stories underrepresented in those forms. They draw queer and trans and bisexual characters—some of whom are also white Latino or Afro-Latino—whose personalities do not seem to have been focus-grouped. Small children are as complex and interesting as adults. (Owen Fitzgerald’s “Dennis the Menace” stories are a notable influence.) Characters fret about their sexual preferences. They argue about the ethics of passing for white, and the ethics of berating each other for passing for white. They make split-second decisions about how to deal with bigotry, sometimes badly, sometimes well. Some worry about proxy wars in the Global South, which directly affect them or their families. Others find themselves harassed by cops, sometimes cops in riot gear. Many of their Reagan-era fears, like the immigration police, are depressingly constant. “Love and Rockets: The First Fifty” gathers every issue of the series the Hernandezes published between 1982 and 1996. The brothers were in their twenties when the earliest issues came out, and the collection doubles as an autobiography, tracking the maturation of two great artists over their first years-long surge of creativity. From their first stories, the Hernandezes’ ambitions are clear: they are trying to establish the styles of their lifework. Their parallel stories rarely intersect but they seem to emerge from shared experience and mutual inspiration. The initial proposition of “Love and Rockets” was simple: each brother would be able to do whatever he wanted. Every issue has at least one story by Jaime and one by Gilbert. (Mario’s contributions to the comics tapered off, but he has made sporadic appearances in the meantime.) Each brother uses roughly half the magazine’s sixtysomething pages, but they also make room for one another. One month Jaime will take up a larger share, and the next month Gilbert will be in the spotlight. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/love-and-rockets-is-still-independent The forgotten story of Pure Hell, America’s first black punk band The four-piece lived with the New York Dolls and played with Sid Vicious, but they’ve been largely written out of cultural history 8August 2018 Cassidy George An essential part of learning history is questioning it, asking what has become part of our cultural memory and what might have been left out. When it comes to the history of punk music, there are few bands who have been as overlooked as Pure Hell. The band’s story began in West Philadelphia in 1974, when four teenagers – lead vocalist Kenny ‘Stinker’ Gordon, bassist Lenny ‘Steel’ Boles, guitarist Preston ‘Chip Wreck’ Morris and drummer Michael ‘Spider’ Sanders, set out to follow in the footsteps of their musical idols. A shared obsession with the sounds of Iggy, Bowie, Cooper, and Hendrix inspired them to create music that was louder, faster and more provocative than even those artists’ most experimental records. Pure Hell’s unique sound led them to New York, where they became characters in a seminal subculture recognised today as punk. As musicians of colour, their contribution to a predominately white underground scene is all the more significant. “We were the first black punk band in the world,” says Boles. “We were the ones who paid the dues for it, we broke the doors down. We were genuinely the first. And we still get no credit for it.” The title of the ‘first black punk band’ has, in recent years, been informally given to Detroit-based Death, whose music was mostly unheralded at the time but has since been rediscovered and praised for its progressive ideas. But while Death were creating proto-punk music in isolation in the early 1970s, Pure Hell was completely entrenched in the New York City underground scene, living and performing alongside the legends of American punk. Arriving the same month that Patti Smith and Television began their two-month residencies at CBGB and leaving just after Nancy Spungen’s murder, Pure Hell’s active years in the city aligned perfectly with the birth and death of a dynamic chapter of music history. “I don’t want to be remembered just because we were black,” says Kenny Gordon. “I want to be remembered for being a part of the first tier of punk in the 70s.” Being just 155km from Greenwich Village, Philadelphia was somewhat of a pipeline of New York subculture – Gordon remembers his teenage years at the movie theatre watching John Waters films like Polyester and Pink Flamingos, and hanging out at Artemis, a spot frequented by Philly scenesters like Nancy Spungen and Neon Leon. “I heard (The Rolling Stones’) ‘Satisfaction’ and knew it was the kind of music I wanted to play,” recalls bassist Lenny Boles. “I was too poor to afford instruments, so if someone had one, I would befriend them.” https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/40942/1/pure-hell-first-black-american-punk-band-history?amp=1 VHS ScreenshotsSome of these are actual vhs screenshots and some are art made into that. OXZ were the first Japanese punk band to take on the patriarchy OXZ were the first Japanese punk band to take on the patriarchyMika, Hikko and Emiko on confronting their country's conservative values and paving the way for women punk rockers in the 80s.BY NICK FULTON 11.3.20 Gauze, The Stalin, Guitar Wolf; these are some of the bands responsible for exposing Japanese youth to punk music in the 80s. All of them had a familiar taste for chaos that closely aligned with hardcore punk in America — hard, fast and heavy riffs formed the basis of their music. Nudity, nihilism and violence were often part of their live performance. You can see it for yourself in some of the grainy archival footage that’s been uploaded to YouTube. But among those early pioneers of Japanese punk was another group, OXZ (pronounced Ox-Zed), whose legacy you might be less familiar with. That’s because they were a band of three women, who weren’t offered the same social capital as their male counterparts at the time. Formed in Osaka in 1981 by Mika (vocals/guitar), Hikko (bass) and Emiko (drums), OXZ was one of the first bands to challenge the mechanics of Japanese punk and ensure it wasn’t simply defined by machismo and the male gaze. Mika and Hikko went to the same high school, they met Emiko at a venue in Osaka, and soon realized they all had the same desire to play in a punk band. However, at the time it was almost unheard of for women and young girls to embrace the more aggressive style ascribed to punk. While they often played in high school cover bands, there were few allowances for women who wanted to write and perform their own original music, especially during the boomer-era. It simply wasn't acceptable to trade having a family and keeping a tidy home for the looks, lifestyle and ideals of punk rock. In a booklet that accompanies Along Ago: 1981-1989, a new retrospective of the band’s material that’s being released this month by Captured Tracks, music historian Kato David Hopkins writes of the band’s beginnings: “there were very few women in the underground music scene at that point, and none of them dressed like punks or dyed their hair, or showed much interest in declaring complete independence from the usual rules. So in 1981 when Hikko, Mika, and Emiko first appeared together as OXZ, they were an intentional shock.” https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/bvgpwz/oxz-were-the-first-japanese-punk-band-to-take-on-the-patriarchy Discharge, GBH and other scrappy bands rose up out of a scene where gigs were like wars.In the late 1970s, Mike Stone changed punk for ever from the boot of a BMW. He had started Clay Records from a tiny record shop in Stoke-on-Trent, and after initially distributing the releases from the back of his car, Clay’s hardcore punk bands Discharge and GBH made the UK charts and are now considered pivotal influences on numerous metal styles from thrash metal to black metal, grindcore to an entire genre named after Discharge, D-beat. Both bands have been covered by some of thrash metal’s biggest artists – Anthrax, Slayer, Sepultura and Metallica, whose frontman James Hetfield credits the British bands as “the beginning for me … I loved Discharge and GBH and still do.” Discharge founder Terry “Tezz” Roberts was a schoolboy in Stoke when the band started in 1977 with his brother Tony (“Bones”, guitar) and bassist Roy “Rainy” Wainwright, following instructions in Sniffin’ Glue fanzine: “Here are three chords. Now start a band.” Forty-five miles away in Birmingham, GBH singer Colin Abrahall – still spiky-haired at 58 – saw the Ramones play at Birmingham’s Top Rank and decided: “The day I leave school I’m going to become a punk.” The Birmingham scene was centred around the currently disused Crown pub near New Street station, which had once hosted the first Black Sabbath gig but by the late 70s was a punk-rock hotbed where GBH played (initially as Charged GBH), rehearsed, and even built the stage. “Everyone in there seemed to be in a band,” says Abrahall, when we meet pre-coronavirus crisis in their Digbeth rehearsal room, surrounded by posters from 40 years of his band. Birmingham was erupting with chart-bound pop – Duran Duran, UB40 and Dexys Midnight Runners – but the punk scene was DIY. “I bought a bass guitar off a kid at school for £18,” says the singer. “Our first drum kit was an electric fire.” Hair was spiked up with everything from “Vaseline to egg whites, which made your head stink, so I discovered soap. That was great unless it rained, in which case we’d run around with Tesco bags on our heads.” Unbeknown to either band, the man who would bring their music to the world was undergoing his own awakening in London. Mike Stone, pushing 30, wasn’t exactly a punk rocker. The former mobile DJ was working for the fledgling Beggars Banquet label when chancing on the Lurkers (who he’d subsequently manage, then sign to Clay) playing in a basement made him want to get involved. “They had the same energy and excitement as the Who,” he says over a coffee in Stoke. “I’d watched the Who open-mouthed live in Leeds when I was 15. But music had become stagnant – punk was what was missing.” Stone relocated to Stoke after meeting and marrying a woman who lived there. He started a shop, Mike Stone’s Records, and a label called Clay Records at 26 Hope Street, funding the latter with £1,000 from a relative and naming it after the city’s potteries. Today, the site – now a disused fast-food joint awaiting demolition – looks lonely and unloved. Back then it was a dynamo of musical revolution, the wheels of which were initially set in motion by a 17-year-old girl. https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2020/apr/21/midlands-punk-discharge-gbh-clay What's up Tiger Lily the Wild Story of the Tax Scam Label run by Morris LevyMorris Levy was born in New York City on August 27th, 1927. As a teenager, Levy started working in nightclubs which were controlled by the mob. In 1949, he opened Birdland, a venue that would go on to become one of the most beloved jazz clubs in the world. In 1957, he founded Roulette Records, a label that subsequently issued a number of hit records, including “Peppermint Twist” by Joey Dee and the Starliters, and “Hanky Panky” by Tommy James and the Shondells. Levy learned early on the value of music publishing, and would often add his name to songwriting credits, even though he didn’t have a hand in their creation and had no musical talent. In his book, Me, the Mob, and the Music, Tommy James says Levy never paid him royalties, despite the fact he had recorded quite a few hits for Roulette. James does concede that he was given artistic freedom, which he wouldn’t have had if he’d signed with another label. A number of mafia figures were regular visitors to the Roulette building, including Gaetano “Corky” Vastola, a New Jersey gangster and one of the owners of the label. Tommy James also frequented the company’s office, observing enough to learn why Levy had a reputation for using strong-arm tactics. It is always reported that there are five major crime families in New York—Gambino, Genovese, Colombo, Lucchese, Bonanno—and that’s mostly true. But back in the sixties, there were six families. All of the above and the Roulette family. It was not for nothing that Morris Levy was called the Godfather of the music business. People from all over the industry called him or came to him to sort out problems. If somebody from Atlantic Records or Kama Sutra found out that their records were being bootlegged, they called Morris. It seemed like once a month Morris would grab [his associate and bodyguard] Nate McCalla and a few baseball bats, which were in his office, and take off for somewhere in New Jersey or upstate New York. It was a ritual. “KAREN,” he would yell out to his secretary, baseball bat in hand. “Call my lawyer.” And off they would go. (from Me, the Mob, and the Music) There were a number of subsidiary labels connected to Roulette, including Tiger Lily Records. The company was incorporated in 1976, and released over 60 albums that year. Levy gathered content from seemingly anywhere he could find it, using such cast-offs as demos, outtakes and live recordings for the Tiger Lily LPs. He even reissued a handful of albums that originally came out on the Family Productions record label, which wasn’t affiliated with Roulette. The majority of the artists on Tiger Lily would be unknown to the general public. In my view, this was done, in part, to ensure a plausible deniability if the I.R.S. was to come calling. “Tax scam records” were meant to bomb, giving investors the maximum amount they could deduct on their taxes, while spending as little cash as possible. By putting your money into an artist that showed promise, a case could be made that, ‘Hey, we took a chance, but nobody bought it.’ This also meant that the label looked for artists that exhibited a certain level of talent, resulting in a number of Tiger Lily albums by obscure acts who had exceptional material. One of the easiest (and cheapest) Tiger Lily albums to acquire is L.A. Jail, a collection of Richard Pryor stand-up recordings. There has been much speculation about whether Pryor authorized this release, and there are a couple of clues that he was, at the very least, aware of the LP’s existence. https://dangerousminds.net/comments/whats_up_tiger_lily_the_wild_story_of_the_tax_scam_record_label_run_by_the_ Vintage Back to School Ads and suchFabulous Images Documenting the Phenomenon of Voguing in New York’s House Ballrooms in the Late 1980s and Early 90sVoguing came out of the extraordinary house ballroom scene that emerged in Harlem, New York in the 1980s where men competed against one another for their dancing skills, the realness of their drag and their ability to walk on a catwalk runway like a model. These wild years of voguing and the house ballroom scene are vividly captured at its height in hundreds of amazing, previously unpublished photographs. In 1989, Malcolm McLaren had his only number one hit with a single called “Deep in Vogue.” Early the next year, Madonna had one of the biggest hits of her career, with the single “Vogue,” and when Jennie Livingston’s film Paris Is Burning arrived in cinemas the same year, winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, the mainstream got hip to New York City’s extraordinary ball culture, from which the film and McLaren and Madonna’s songs had arisen. Paris Is Burning documented a gay ballroom scene that emerged in Harlem in the mid-1980s, which drew African American and Latino gay and transgender communities to compete against one another for their dancing skills, the verisimilitude of their drag and their ability to walk on the runway. French-born photographer and documentarist Chantal Regnault began documenting the house ballroom and voguing scene in the late 1980s, capturing it at its height between 1989-1992. “1989-1992 was the peak of creativity and popularity for the ballroom scene, and when the mainstream attention faded away, the original black and Latino gay ballroom culture didn’t die. On the contrary, it became a national phenomena as Houses started to have “chapters” all over the big cities of the United States. But I was not a direct witness to most of it as I moved to Haiti in 1993.” Chantal Regnault was born in France. She left Paris after the 1968 uprisings and lived in New York for the next 15 years. At the end of the 1980s she became immersed in Harlem’s voguing scene. Also around this time, Regnault developed an interest in Haitian voodoo culture and began to divide her time between Haiti and New York. Her widely published photographs have appeared in major magazines and newspapers, including Vanity Fair and the New York Times. https://www.vintag.es/2021/09/chantal-regnault-voguing.html?m=1 Bizarre 1959 ‘Cigarette Psychology’ Article Explains 9 Ways People Hold Cigarettes And What It Says AboutWe all know the dangers of smoking cigarettes these days, and we don’t condone it. However, the 1950s were a different time, where the advertising and cultural pressure to smoke was intense. Smoking was seen as the epitome of cool and sophistication, and people were largely unaware of any negative consequences. This article, from a 1959 issue of Caper Magazine, shows a few examples of what psychoanalyst Dr. William Neutra hypothesized after observing the ways people chose to smoke. According to his psychoanalysis, the body language of the method an individual uses to hold the cigarette shines a light onto their character traits, exposing their personality type, moods, and insecurities. If you are a smoker, perhaps you recognize some of these yourself? Scroll down below to check the character analysis as vintage magazines saw it for yourself and let us know what you think in the comments! https://www.boredpanda.com/cigarette-psychology-1959-caper-magazine-dr-william-neutra/?utm_source=pinterest&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=raja c. 1960 - Working at Krystalervice with a smile. Hopefully. by Alex Q. Arbuckle These images from the Chattanooga History Center were produced as training materials for new hires at Krystal restaurants, a fast-food franchise founded in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1932. With a menu centering around the bite-sized Krystal burger, the restaurant aimed to provide fast and courteous service to customers in a hurry. Along with an orientational training film, these photos were shot as examples for employees of how and how not to present themselves behind the counter. In 1954, Krystal Company presented a breezy educational film detailing how staff at its Krystal restaurants should behave and dress. Founded in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on October 24 1932, Krystal was keen to embrace the staff, aka ‘The Krystal Family’, and have them do things ‘the Krystal way’. This was ‘The Counter Code’. Zelda, who we see in the lead photo, was breaking rules. Tutored in the Krystal way to ‘act natural’, she soon stowed her cigarette, set her disagreeable eyebrows free and her unblinking gaze on producing the great American burger; fighting the good fight against salmonella and starvation. Zelda’s not smiling in the portrait because she’s not sure about cameras and the kind of men who operate them and process amateur film in their home basement darkrooms. But she’s a happy girl and ready to serve. https://mashable.com/feature/working-at-krystal#I4HXFe8DvEqi Inside Nadia Lee Cohen’s New Book of Chameleonic Self-PortraitsThe British photographer’s latest publication Hello My Name Is … sees her transform herself into 33 different characters, inspired by name badges belonging to unknown individuals DECEMBER 14, 2021 Hello My Name Is … , Mrs Fisher, 2021Photography by Nadia Lee Cohen. Courtesy of Idea Nadia Lee Cohen is surely one of the most exciting image-makers working today. Born in London but based now in Los Angeles, she released her first book Women last year – a staggering study of contemporary womanhood created over a period of six years. Published by Idea, bound in gold cloth and featuring 100 cinematic portraits, it was a groundbreaking debut. And now she’s back. Today Cohen releases her second book, Hello My Name Is … , which, also published by Idea, sees the photographer transform into 33 different characters. Each one is inspired by name badges belonging to unknown individuals that she’s collected over the years. It’s a masterpiece not only of photography but of the process of transformation; of styling, hair, make-up and prosthetics. She even collected objects for each persona, making them into fully realised characters. There’s Jackie, the shaggy-haired Barbara Streisand fan; Mrs Fisher, the floral-festooned British royalist; and Jeff, the plush, portly and Nixon-supporting cowboy. Martin Parr and Paul Reubens AKA Pee-wee Herman have provided texts for the book, which is published in a limited edition of 1,000, just in time for Christmas. Here, Cohen delves into the process of creating this publication and explains why she dedicated it to “the 99¢ store manager”. Ted Stansfield: I’d love to start by talking about Los Angeles, where you live. What is your relationship to the city? And how did your fantasy of it compare to the reality when you first arrived? Nadia Lee Cohen: I still feel like a spectator even though I’ve been in Los Angeles for over five years. I hope I always view it like that. Before I came here I had that British naivety towards Hollywood and assumed it was a very glamorous place filled with palm trees, movie execs and Lindsey Lohans. I drove to Hollywood Boulevard on one of my first nights, in a car I had bought for $800 (which turned out to be the body of a BMW with the engine of a Nissan – very apt for what I am about to describe) and was so excited to see the Walk of Fame in the flesh. I remember asking someone if I was actually in Hollywood and they told me to fuck off. I had arrived to discover bad lookalikes, filthy streets and gawping tourists. On the sad side there was also homelessness, chronic mental illness and prostitution, all lit up and sparkling with the neon lights of Hollywood; the fairground of American decay on parade and no sign of Lindsey Lohan. The discovery of this underbelly might not sound all that appealing; and even though it wasn’t what I expected, it turned out to be the reason I love Los Angeles and why it became a sort of dysfunctional muse. https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/13776/nadia-lee-cohen-photographer-hello-my-name-is-book-idea-interview-2021 TBT: Epic Photos of Black Excellence From Harlem in the '70s GET INTO THE GROOVE WITH THESE EPIC PICS OF HARLEM IN THE 1970S.Vintage T-ShirtsThe Day the Black Supermodels Stormed VersaillesBY FRANCKY KNAPP JULY 17, 2020 There’s a “Battle of Versailles” they don’t teach you about in history class; the event that transformed the world’s most iconic château into a star-studded battle royale between French and American fashion designers in the fall of 1973. The guest list was legendary, with Josephine Baker, Princess Grace, Andy Warhol in the audience to name a few – but it was America’s own runway line-up that was revolutionary. Never before had so many Black models collectively worked the catwalk, from Pat Cleveland to Billie Blair; Alva Chinn, Charlene Dash, Barbara Jackson and so many other names that were a tour de force, ringing in new era for models of colour and what promised to be an inclusive new fashion industry in the making… Prior to the 1970s, American couture in general had not yet reached the same level of international clout as that of the French. “The Battle of Versailles” as it was officially named, was cooked up as a friendly fundraising tête-à-tête between the two countries – a clever social event to raise money and restore the deteriorating castle grounds – but it would ultimately earn American designers the global respect they sought and redefine the fashion industry forever. On one end of the ring, you had the “Five Kings” of French fashion – Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior, Emanuel Ungaro, and Hubert de Givenchy; in the American corner were its rising designers Oscar de la Renta, Halston, Bill Blass, Anne Klein, and Stephen Burrows – the latter of which was a particularly important presence… At the time, Burrows was a young Jersey kid who made it big, and one of the first African American designers to sell internationally. His colourful designs were at the heart of the New York City disco scene for both men and women. But suddenly he was about to take on the likes of Yves Saint Laurent with the world watching…. Burrows, who is still out there doing designing and being generally fabulous on Instagram, was especially beloved for his space age colour blocking designs and “lettuce edge” cuts. https://www.messynessychic.com/2020/07/17/the-day-the-black-supermodels-stormed-versailles/ The Best And Worst Rock Album Covers From Communist RussiaBefore the Iron Curtain rusted away, the Russian pop music scene was as vibrant as a Moscow hooker’s eyeliner. In the gallery of cover art and subjects featured below, look out for moustache power ballads, a human strobe, a Susan Boyle look-alike, the white Michael Jackson (with glove) and a Russian Cliff Richard: https://flashbak.com/the-best-communist-russia-album-covers-16574/ The Song Change That Got Elvis Costello Banned From Saturday Night Live – 1977 In 1977 Elvis Costello changed the SNL schedule and became a legend An appearance on TV show Saturday Night Live has been a career defining moment for a number of musicians. Sinead O’Connor famously ripped up a photograph of the Pope to draw attention to abuse by the Catholic Church, and found herself on the receiving end of threats of violence and protests. On December 17 1977, it was the turn of Elvis Costello and The Attractions to offend all the right people. When the Sex Pistols were unable to appear on the show as planned, Costello got the call. Elvis and the band would play Less Than Zero from their recent album My Aim Is True. The song is about the despicable former British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley. In the liner notes to the Rhino edition of the album, Costello writes: “Less Than Zero was a song I had written after seeing the despicable Oswald Mosley being interviewed on BBC television. The former leader of the British Union of Fascists seemed unrepentant about his poisonous actions of the 1930s. The song was more of a slandering fantasy than a reasoned argument.” On his first visit to the United States, Costello found that American audiences didn’t understand the song, writing in his 2015 autobiography, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink: “I’m not sure if anyone in Cleveland had ever heard of Oswald Mosley or gave a damn about him when we played Less Than Zero that night. It was just some rock and roll music with a fashionable-sounding title.” So here was Costello and his band playing that song on SNL. And not long after it had begun. Costello stopped it. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “but there’s no reason to do this song here.” Instead, Costello and the band gave full throat to Radio Radio, a song that takes aim at the commercialization of radio and corporate broadcasting. I wanna bite the hand that feeds me I wanna bite that hand so badlyI want to make them wish they’d never seen me – Radio Radio, Elvis Costello It wasn’t until 1989 that Costello was invited to appear again on Saturday Night Live. in 1999, as part of the show’s 25th anniversary celebrations, Costello recalled hat 1977 show by bursting onstage while the Beastie Boys were playing Sabotage and telling them to stop. He and the Beasties then launched into Radio Radio: “They’ve run that clip forever,” Costello told Details magazine, “and every time anybody does anything outrageous on that show, I get name-checked. But I was copying Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix had done the same thing on the Lulu Show, when he went into an unscheduled number. I remember seeing it and going, ‘What the hell’s going on?’” https://flashbak.com/the-song-change-that-got-elvis-costello-banned-from-saturday-night-live-1977-462471/ Video https://youtu.be/exutyvRyGdM?si=N18Z6qAHMyY30q8g INDIE ROCK AND NEW WAVE HITS REIMAGINED AS PULPY 1950S EPHEMERAThere’s a fellow out there named Todd Alcott who has put together an enchanting series of prints reimagining popular songs by some of the most vital musical artists of the 1970s through the 1990s as various graphical items mostly dating from before the rock era—e.g., pulpy paperbacks, “men’s life” mags, lurid sci-fi posters, and so on. They’re quite wonderful and you can procure them for yourself in his Etsy store. Each print will run you £19.78 (about $26) for the smallest size and prices escalate from there. One endearing thing about Alcott’s images is that they are so clearly driven by the most beloved albums in his own collection—and his taste is excellent! So he transforms multiple songs by King Crimson, PJ Harvey, Radiohead, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, the Stones, David Bowie while also hitting a bunch of other faves (NIN, Nirvana, Fiona Apple) just the one time. Alcott told Ayun Halliday of Open Culture that “these are the artists I love, I connect to their work on a deep level, and I try to make things that they would see and think ‘Yeah, this guy gets me.’” My favorite thing about these pop culture mashups is Alcott’s insistence (usually) on working in as many of the song’s lyrics into the art as possible. That does admittedly make for busy compositions but usually in a way that is very true to the pulp novel conventions or whatnot. According to his Etsy site, Alcott is also available for custom jobs should inspiration strike you! https://dangerousminds.net/comments/indie_rock_and_new_wave_hits_reimagined_as_pulpy_1950s_ephemera Sexual Innuendo in Vintage Comic PanelsPHOTOGRAPHS OF THE ‘SUPREME BEATNIK CHICK’ WHO INSPIRED PATTI SMITH In the early 1950s, a young Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken arrived in Paris to begin his career as a photographer. By day he worked for Magnum, by night—inspired by Weegee’s photographs in Picture Post—Van der Elsken documented the emerging underground youth culture of the city’s Left Bank. In 1954, Van der Elsken compiled a volume of photographs Love on the Left Bank that followed a young Beatnik girl “Ann” through the gangs of bohemians, musicians and vagabonds who hung around the bars, clubs and flophouses of St Germain-des-Prés. Ann was in fact “played” by Vali Myers—an Australian artist, model, muse and associate of Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet, who Patti Smith later recalled as: ...the supreme beatnik chick—thick red hair and big black eyes, black boatneck sweaters and trench coats. As described on its first publication in 1956, Love on the Left Bank was “a story in photographs about Paris”—a freeform impressionistic tale of Ann and her life among the “young men and girls who haunt the Left bank”: They dine on half a loaf, smoke hashish, sleep in parked cars or on benches under the plane trees, sometimes borrowing a hotel room from a luckier friend to shelter their love. Some of them write,or paint, or dance. Ed van der Elsken, a young Dutch photographer, stalked his prey for many months along the boulevards, in the cafés and under the shadow of prison walls. Whatever may happen in real life to Ann and her Mexican lover, their strange youth will be preserved ‘alive’ in this book for many years. Ed Van der Elsken‘s photographs changed perceptions about youth culture and anticipated the changes a younger generation brought to culture during the 1960s. Love on the Left Bank is available again, having been republished by Dewi Lewis publishers. https://dangerousminds.net/comments/photographs_of_the_supreme_beatnik_chick_who_inspired CLASSIC HORROR FILMS GET THE VINTAGE COMIC BOOK TREATMENT BY SPANISH ARTIST NACHE RAMOS ‘Long live the new flesh!’ A digital design based on David Cronenberg’s 1983 film ‘Videodrome.’ Outside of the fact that he is a talented artist with a deep love of classic 60s, 70s, and 80s horror, unfortunately, I do not know, nor was I able to dig much up on self-professed “comic enthusiast, music freak, horror lover, and videogame collector” Nache Ramos. But here’s what I do know. Ramos is based in Alcoli (or Alcoy), Spain where he has been a graphic designer and illustrator for over a decade. His art has been used to decorate snowboards made by Wi-Me Snowboards, and for Australian snowboard company Catalyst. In 2018, he won a Guns ‘N’ Roses contest which asked fans of the band (via Twitter), to create artwork based on their 1987 album Appetite for Destruction. Other than well-deserved accolades for his submission, I’m not sure what Ramos got as a prize, but I suppose gaining exposure to G’N'R’s 6+million Twitter followers is very much a good thing. This was also the same year Ramos moved from using traditional artistic mediums to creating his work digitally. This brings me to Nache’s nostalgic interpretations which infuse the look of old-school comic books with Ramos’ love of science fiction and horror films he grew up with. Like any horror fan worth their VHS collection, Ramos digs the films of director John Carpenter and has created several digitally designed homages to Carpenter’s films in vintage comic book style. Others include David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (pictured at the top of this post), Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Richard Donner’s bone-chilling 1976 film, The Omen. If this all sounds good to you (and it should), Ramos also accepts commissions via his Instagram. You can also pick up very reasonably-priced prints of Ramos’ super-cool fictional movie posters on his Red Bubble page. I myself picked up Nache’s take on Videodrome. Scroll on to see more of Ramos’ fantastic faux-vintage comics. https://dangerousminds.net/comments/classic_horror_films_get_the_vintage_comic_book_treatment_by_spanish_artist EXP TVThere are certain things you don’t know you’re missing in life until you’re exposed to them, right? EXP TV just might be one of those things. It’s got an aesthetic that hovers around the same territory as Everything is Terrible! and Vic Berger, it even reminds me of Mike Kelley’s stuff, but that’s only going to get you in the ballpark. Which is good enough, but you just have to click on the link and see for yourself. It’s a barrage of strange imagery and is really quite an inspired—not to say elaborate and work intensive—art project. And just in time for a pandemic. Bored with Netflix? Have enough Amazon Prime? Maxed out on HBO Max? You need to tune in, turn on and drop your jaw to the floor at what’s screening on EXP TV. EXP TV the brainchild of Tom Fitzgerald, Marcus Herring, Taylor C. Rowley. I asked them a few questions via email. What is EXP TV? What should someone expect to see when they get there? EXP TV is a live TV channel broadcasting an endless stream of obscure media and video ephemera from our site at exptv.org. We stream 24/7. The daytime programming is called “Video Breaks”—a video collage series featuring wild, rare, unpredictable, and ever-changing archival clips touching on every subject imaginable. Similar to how golden era MTV played music videos all day, daytime EXP TV streams non-stop, deep cut video clips filtered through our own distinct POV. What treasures would reward the loyal Video Breaks viewer? Ventriloquist dummy sales demos, Filipino Pinocchios, LSD trip-induced talking hot dogs, Liberace’s recipe tips, French synth punk, primal scream therapy seminars, Deadhead parking lots, empty parking lots, Israeli sci-fi, scary animatronics, teenage girls’ homemade art films, Belgian hard techno dance instructions, Czech children’s films about UFOs, even Danzig reading from his book collection. And that’s all in just one hour! We’ve been collecting obscure media for decades, but we’ve sorted through it all and cherry-picked the funny, the bizarre, the relevant, the irrelevant, the visually stunning, the interesting, the infamous, the good, the bad and the fugly. We’ve done all that so the viewers don’t have to. They get to kick back and experience the sweet spot without having to dig for rare stuff themselves or sit through an entire movie waiting for the cool part. Our Nite Owl programming block features specialty themed video mixes and deep dives on everything under the sun: Bigfoot, underground 80s culture, Italo disco, cults, Halloween hijinks, pre-revolutionary Iranian pop culture, midnight movies, ‘ye ye’ promo films, Soviet sci-fi, reggae rarities, psychedelic animation and local news calamities. On any given night you could watch something like our Incredibly Strange Metal show followed by a conceptual video essay like Pixel Power—our exploration of early CGI art. https://dangerousminds.net/comments/exp-tv_freaktastic_new_video_channel_will_rip_your_face_off_and_eat_your_br Tonetta"I’ll be your drain tonight.” How’s that for an opening line? Unforgettable? Perverse? And yet somehow... tempting? Keep in mind that it’s being delivered by a man in his early 60s. BN By Bob Nickas Stills from Tonetta’s music videos for “Sweet & Sexy” and “Grandma Knows Best.” I’ll be your drain tonight.” How’s that for an opening line? Unforgettable? Perverse? And yet somehow… tempting? Keep in mind that it’s being delivered by a man in his early 60s, with a platinum-blond wig screwed to his head as he shakes his moneymaker for the camera in his Toronto apartment. Although the “Dancing With Myself” factor may be precipitous, Billy Idol has nothing on this guy. In his “Grandma Knows Best” video he’s totally buff, squeezed into a little black bikini bottom, with his hair cut short and spiky. His styling decisions are nothing if not deliriously twisted. For “Sweet & Sexy,” his face is obscured by what looks like a white porcelain doll mask. Visual and sonic collisions can be eerily inspired. Dressed in a belted lady’s swimsuit and singing about Jesus, he’s a gnarly Serge Gainsbourg meets a silvery Jeanne Moreau by way of 1960s French yé-yé. Equally cool and disturbing, this is Tonetta, one Tony Jeffrey, an artist, songwriter, performer, and contagious force of nature. In a world of parrots, Tonetta actually lip-synchs to his own lyrics. “What’s a caveman to do?” he wonders. “Eat, drink, and screw/ That’s all I want and all I know/ I was blessed with a ten-inch pole.” While Tonetta has been recording his irresistibly catchy songs since ’83, the videos made at home have only been spilling out over the past two years, quickly finding a devoted if not bewildered cult audience via YouTube. Any artist would give his eyeteeth for the kinds of comments that are regularly showered on Tonetta: “I’ve never had this feeling before… I’m horrified but can’t seem to look away… like a car wreck.” “I’m blasting this and dancing in my underwear! Tonetta connection!!!” The most succinct is also the most undeniable, simply stated: “This cannot be unseen.” While terms like “creepy” and “scary” come up with some frequency, Tonetta clearly offers something people are missing in their increasingly predictable lives, whether they know it or not, or care to admit. Tonetta’s redefinition of “guilty pleasure” isn’t simply a matter of permission, of allowing an audience to have a good time without any of the attendant and boring remorse: He gives himself permission. In a repressive society, doing exactly what you want is tantamount to the greatest crime of all; the ever-prolific Tonetta, particularly at his age, is a genuine role model, not a goody-goody type like Naomi Campbell or Tiger Woods or even Sir Elton John. When most people are busy rolling over and playing dead, Tonetta jacks up addictive hits like “Drugs Drugs Drugs” and “Yoassismine.” Pull the ninja mask over your head, break out the leather vest, oil up your six-pack, and get ready to wail on that toy guitar. Forget zoning out to a coma in the corporate atrium of MoMA, this is performance art, as messy, invasive, and unrelenting as the day is long. But just when you thought he couldn’t take you higher, there’s more. Tonetta, it turns out, is also an unexpectedly fine draftsman whose frisky imagination is at the service of curious drawings that skim the surface of the unconscious and plumb the depths of the everyday. https://www.vice.com/en/article/qbzkdq/tonetta-594-v17n11 The Incredible Story Of Marion Stokes, Who Single-Handedly Taped 35 Years Of TV NewsIt’s also the life work of Marion Stokes, who built an archive of network, local, and cable news, in her home, one tape at a time, recording every major (and trivial) news event until the day she died in 2012 at the age of 83 of lung disease. Stokes was a former librarian who for two years co-produced a local television show with her then-future husband, John Stokes Jr. She also was engaged in civil rights issues, helping organize buses to the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, among other efforts. She began casually recording television in 1977. She taped lots of things, but she thought news was especially important, and when cable transformed it into a 24-hour affair, she began recording MSNBC, Fox, CNN, CNBC, and CSPAN around the clock by running as many as eight television recorders at a time. She’d feed a six-hour tape into the recorders late at night. She’d wake up early the next day to change them (or conscript family members to do the same if she wasn’t home). She’d cut short meals at restaurants to rush home before tapes ended. And when she got too old to keep up, she trained a younger helper named Frank to run the various recording equipment. But the majority of her days were structured around paying attention to and saving whatever was on the news. “Pretty much everything else took a back seat,” says her son, Michael Metelits. “It provided a certain rhythm to her life, and a certain amount of deep, deep conviction that this stuff was going to be useful. That somehow, someone would find a way to index it, archive it, store it–that it would be useful.” How many tapes are we talking about? How did that work? How did the family live like that? It’s just an amazing, amazing story.Stokes bought VHS tapes by the dozen. As she recorded, she made stacks so high they would fall over. The project took over several of the apartments she owned. “It was just a logistical nightmare–that’s really the only way to put it,” Metelits says. When people asked her why her home was filled packed with televisions, recorders, and tapes, she’d tell them, “I’m archiving, that’s all.” https://www.fastcompany.com/3022022/the-incredible-story-of-marion-stokes-who-single-handedly-taped-35-years-of-tv-news Phil Black (1902-1975)Phil Black (1902-1975) was the promoter of the 'Fancy Dress' Balls at the end of the Harlem Renaissance era; and pioneer Promoter of the 'Funmaker' Ball (from 1944-1975), which continued for several years after his death (in his honor). Phil Black was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania circa 1902. Details of his early life before he emerged on the nightlife scene remain a mystery. In 1924, dressed as female (adopting the stage name 'Cora'), Phil Black went to 'Cakewalks' Club with a buddy; and they won first prize as the best couple. Friends told him that he was as good as the professional female impersonators; and the star that would become the infamous Phil "Cora" Black was born. Black started with bookings in the Pittsburgh area; and then joined a touring group, 'Shufflin Sam.' For six years (1927-1933) he played in and around Atlantic City, often as the only African-American member of the troupe. In 1934, Phil Black was based in New York City; appearing in Greenwich Village and Harlem. The following year, it is believed that Black took the reins as the primary promoter for the infamous 'Hamilton Lodge' Fancy Dress Ball, held in Harlem's 'Rockland Palace Ballroom', the same 'Rockland Palace' that would house Phil Black's famous 'Funmaker's' Ball. In 1944, Black played Montréal for four months; and, later, in 1948 he is credited with promoting boat rides on the Hudson River. He created the 'Funmaker' Drag Balls (circa 1944). The 'Funmaker' Balls were produced by Black until his death in 1975; popular affairs that were profiled by 'Jet Magazine' in the mid 1950s. His events became the standard for the Voguing Balls; that emerged - in Harlem - around 1972. https://www.queermusicheritage.com/f-black-phil.html This 1960s Documentary Sheds Light on the Dawning of New York’s Drag SceneIt was two years before the Stonewall Riots. The American Medical Association still classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. Coming out as gay could mean job loss, social ostracism, or far worse. The whole notion of Ru Paul’s Drag Race or Pose, of millions of people clogging the streets to celebrate Pride, would have seemed like a ridiculous dream, even a cruel joke, a half-century ago. But passionate desire has a way of surviving—even thriving!—regardless of the odds. So it was that, undaunted, drag performers from all over the country converged in New York City in 1967 to participate in the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant held at Town Hall. Luckily for us, and for history, the pageant—and the events leading up to it—were filmed, and the result, The Queen, now benefiting from Kino Lorber Repertory’s 4K digital restoration, opens in New York on June 28 at IFC Center and expands nationally afterwards. The movie was directed by Frank Simon and narrated by Jack Doroshow, aka Flawless Sabrina, who was also the organizer of the pageant. (Sabrina was arrested three times in 1968 while promoting the movie in Times Square.) There’s a rough cinema vérité quality to the film, which went on to be screened at the International Critics’ Week of the 1968 Cannes Film Festival. The contestants, perfectly ordinary-looking men, are transformed with stuffed bras, wigs, chiffon cloaks, evening dresses, and stilettos into living homages to the biggest female stars of the time: Ursula Andress tresses piled high; Barbra Streisand page boys; Diana Ross–manques in a mod mood. We peek backstage as the contestants are getting dressed; we scan the audience for glimpses of the judges, a collection of louche Manhattanites that included Larry Rivers, Andy Warhol, George Plimpton, and Terry Southern, ready to award points for walk, talk, gowns, and even bathing suits. https://www.vogue.com/article/the-queen-frank-simon-miss-all-america-camp-beauty-contest 30 Laughable His-And-Hers Fashions From The 1970s You Wouldn’t Wear In Public TodayThe 1970s saw the founding of Apple Computer, Inc., the resignation of President Nixon, and... a lot of his-and-hers matching outfits that would get ridiculed to shreds in the street today. There are only so many belted tank tops and leopard onesies a person can tolerate, and the 70s fashion pushed the boundaries of this limit, for sure. https://www.boredpanda.com/matching-his-and-her-fashion-1970/?media_id=1632160&utm_source=pinterest&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic Syd Brak“Kings Of The Road” by Syd Brak, 1985. 34 years ago, art director Paul Rodriguez of the Athena art retailer company (established in 1964) had an epiphany—and his vision would go on to become the best-selling poster in British history. Shot by photographer Spencer Rowell in London in May of 1986, Rodriguez’s conception of a shirtless male model holding a newborn baby boy, “Man and Baby” (better known as “L’Enfant”) sold five million copies. Rodriguez got rich, Rowell bought himself an airplane and the model, Adam Perry, claimed that the touching yet titular photo got him laid three thousand times. One of Athena’s other superstars was illustrator Syd Brak. Before relocating to London in 1978, Brak was working as the assistant art director for advertising firm J. Walter Thompson in his birthplace of South Africa. After making the leap to London, Brak’s work caught the attention of Athena in the early 80s. Long before “L’Enfant” became the it image of the 80s, Brak’s 1982 airbrushed “Long Distance Kiss,” would become the number one selling poster in the world. Here’s Brak on his early work with Athena: The popularity of “Long Distance Kiss” was the first in a kiss-themed series Athena had Brak create to break through to the teenage girl market, who, in Brak’s words, “aspire to maturity and sophistication.” Brak’s glossy, airbrushed images featuring spikey glam rock-colored hair and equally eye-popping David Bowie-esque makeup helped fuel the boundary-pushing looks of the New Romantic movement. They are also reminiscent of looks created by two popular makeup artists from the early 1970s, Pierre La Roche, and legendary Australian makeup artist Richard Sharah—both of whom worked extensively with Bowie, Steve Strange of Visage, Gary Numan, and Toyah. The decade of the 80s belonged to Brak and other airbrush artists, as the medium took over art in that decade, appearing on everything from book covers, to albums, VHS tapes, and of course, posters. Brak was one of the most popular/in-demand artists of the decade. If you are a child of the 80s, Brak’s artwork will be instantly recognizable to you, much like the artwork of Patrick Nagel, intrinsically linked to the neon decade as well. https://dangerousminds.net/comments/long_distance_kiss_how_syd_braks_visionary_work_helped_define_the_80s TRICIA NIXON’S WEDDING TRAVESTIED BY THE COCKETTES, 1971 |
Real People With Real Problems – A Different Kind of LP Album Covers
These LPs are all from people who are handicapped, in one way or another. All are from between the 1960s and ’70s, and all are on private labels.
The prevailing maladies seem to be either blindness, dwarfism or lack of limbs. And almost all are about their relationship with Jesus. Most appear relatively happy and excited to be singing for the lord. This isn’t meant to make fun of the handicapped but to show how amazing it was a few years back when anyone could make their own album, individuals, churches, etc.
https://vintagenewsdaily.com/real-people-with-real-problems-a-different-kind-of-lp-album-covers/
The prevailing maladies seem to be either blindness, dwarfism or lack of limbs. And almost all are about their relationship with Jesus. Most appear relatively happy and excited to be singing for the lord. This isn’t meant to make fun of the handicapped but to show how amazing it was a few years back when anyone could make their own album, individuals, churches, etc.
https://vintagenewsdaily.com/real-people-with-real-problems-a-different-kind-of-lp-album-covers/
20 Mid-Century Christian Ventriloquism Albums 576
Shares
In the 1950s and 1960s Christian teachers turned to ventriloquism to teach kids about Jesus. They made albums
https://flashbak.com/20-mid-century-christian-ventriloquism-albums-52632/
https://flashbak.com/20-mid-century-christian-ventriloquism-albums-52632/
20 Famous Rock Stars When They Were Children
Spanish Harlem in the 1980s – in pictures
Growing up in New York, photographer Joseph Rodriguez would take the subway from Brooklyn to east Harlem, where his uncle had a sweet shop, to spend time with the local Latino community (Rodriguez is of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent). He spent five years “sitting down at kitchen tables and listening to people’s stories”; the photographs he took are collected in Spanish Harlem: El Barrio in the 80s, published on 21 November by PowerHouse Books. “The only time local newspapers mentioned El Barrio was when crimes were committed,” says Rodriguez. “I knew I had to spend time to try and break these stereotypes. It’s important to show how that era was for people, to show their grit and resilience against social injustice.”
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/sep/09/spanish-harlem-in-the-1980s-in-pictures
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/sep/09/spanish-harlem-in-the-1980s-in-pictures
HE WILD WILD WORLD OF JAPANESE REBEL BIKER CULTURE
Back in the 1970s the term bōsōzoku (or “speed tribes”) was first used to describe Japanese biker gangs that routinely fought in the streets with rival gangs and the police. Often dressed like Kamikaze pilots, the bōsōzoku wreaked havoc speeding through the streets on their illegally modified bikes, blowing through red lights, and smashing the car windows of any motorist that dared defy them with baseball bats. Foreigners were an especially favorite target of the bōsōzoku’s aggression.
The earliest incarnation of the bōsōzoku, the kaminari zoku, appeared in the 1950’s. Not unlike their idols from the films, The Wild Ones or Rebel Without a Cause, the group was formed by the youthful and disenchanted members of Japan’s proletariat, and the gang provided a place for the emerging delinquents to call their own. A fiercely disciplined and rebellious group, the bōsōzoku once boasted more than 40,000 members. By 2003 the bōsōzoku’s numbers had dwindled to just over 7000. According to first-hand accounts from former senior members, the modern version of the bōsōzoku (known as Kyushakai) no longer embody the rebel spirit of their predecessors. In fact, some have returned to homaging their rockabilly idols by donning elaborate Riizentos, a style of pompadour synonymous with disobedience. These days many ex-bōsōzoku parade around on their bikes in non-disruptive groups and enjoy dancing, performing music and socializing in groups in Harajuku, an area well known for its outrageous fashion.
Many factors are to blame for the demise of the traditional bosozuku. A former leader of from the Narushino Specter gang in the 90s (and one time Yakuza loan shark), Kazuhiro Hazuki recalls that the police were once content to allow the bōsōzoku to run riot and no matter how many times they were arrested, a gang member never had their license revoked. Over the years, revised traffic laws have led to a rise in the arrest and prosecution of the bōsōzoku. Some also point to the inclusion of women as bōsōzoku riders, now a common sight in Japan, and a less than robust economy (many bōsōzoku bikes can cost as much as ten grand) for the drastic reduction in the gang’s
If this post has piqued your interest of vintage Japanese biker culture, there are several documentaries and films based on the bōsōzoku and other speed tribes in Japan, such as 1976’s God Speed You! Black Emperor, 2012’s Sayonara Speed Tribes, a short documentary that features historical perspective from the aforementioned Kazuhiro Hazuki, or the series of films from director Teruo Ishii based on the bōsōzoku that began in 1975 with, Detonation! Violent Riders. If you are a fan of Japanese anime, the story told in the cult film Akira deeply parallels the real world of the bōsōzoku in their heyday. Many images of the bōsōzoku of the past and their mind-boggling motorcycles follow.
The earliest incarnation of the bōsōzoku, the kaminari zoku, appeared in the 1950’s. Not unlike their idols from the films, The Wild Ones or Rebel Without a Cause, the group was formed by the youthful and disenchanted members of Japan’s proletariat, and the gang provided a place for the emerging delinquents to call their own. A fiercely disciplined and rebellious group, the bōsōzoku once boasted more than 40,000 members. By 2003 the bōsōzoku’s numbers had dwindled to just over 7000. According to first-hand accounts from former senior members, the modern version of the bōsōzoku (known as Kyushakai) no longer embody the rebel spirit of their predecessors. In fact, some have returned to homaging their rockabilly idols by donning elaborate Riizentos, a style of pompadour synonymous with disobedience. These days many ex-bōsōzoku parade around on their bikes in non-disruptive groups and enjoy dancing, performing music and socializing in groups in Harajuku, an area well known for its outrageous fashion.
Many factors are to blame for the demise of the traditional bosozuku. A former leader of from the Narushino Specter gang in the 90s (and one time Yakuza loan shark), Kazuhiro Hazuki recalls that the police were once content to allow the bōsōzoku to run riot and no matter how many times they were arrested, a gang member never had their license revoked. Over the years, revised traffic laws have led to a rise in the arrest and prosecution of the bōsōzoku. Some also point to the inclusion of women as bōsōzoku riders, now a common sight in Japan, and a less than robust economy (many bōsōzoku bikes can cost as much as ten grand) for the drastic reduction in the gang’s
If this post has piqued your interest of vintage Japanese biker culture, there are several documentaries and films based on the bōsōzoku and other speed tribes in Japan, such as 1976’s God Speed You! Black Emperor, 2012’s Sayonara Speed Tribes, a short documentary that features historical perspective from the aforementioned Kazuhiro Hazuki, or the series of films from director Teruo Ishii based on the bōsōzoku that began in 1975 with, Detonation! Violent Riders. If you are a fan of Japanese anime, the story told in the cult film Akira deeply parallels the real world of the bōsōzoku in their heyday. Many images of the bōsōzoku of the past and their mind-boggling motorcycles follow.
Vintage Photos Give A Glimpse Into Hispanic New Mexican Life In The '80s
Kevin Bubriski's photographs will take you back in time.
By
Carolina Moreno
May 11, 2016, 03:32 PM EDT
Kevin Bubriski was 26 years old when he arrived in New Mexico in 1981. The Massachusetts native had spent three years in Nepal with the Peace Corps and another year working in a mountain village before moving to Santa Fe to study film.
But once in the American southwest, he found a burgeoning and vivacious culture and people so far from anything he'd ever known, and he spent the next two and a half years of his life documenting their daily lives through his photography.
"The vitality and beauty of the Hispanic New Mexicans caught my eye, as well as [their] vibrant cultural life," the documentary photographer told The Huffington Post.
Bubriski recently compiled these images of intimate celebrations, casual car rides, romance and friendships into his new book, "Look into My Eyes: Nuevomexicanos por Vida."
"The photographs allow the viewer to encounter this community of three decades ago, quietly 'look into their eyes,' and ideally find a sense of our shared humanity," Bubriski told HuffPost. "The specific take away for me from the experience was a deep appreciation for the Hispanic culture and history of New Mexico."
Bubriski's subjects often gaze intently into his camera lens, indeed offering a look into their eyes and a brief glimpse into their world, which is accentuated by big hair, bold make-up and all the glamour of the early '80s. He says his photographs are a result of the "mutual respect" between the person behind the camera and those in front of it.
"As a new person to New Mexico, I felt that Hispanic New Mexicans were in some ways neglected by the other communities of Santa Fe and Albuquerque," Burbriski said. "I was there for a brief two and a half years, so I did not have a personal history with the place and the people. Maybe that is what gave me a freedom to experience the place with a fresh outlook. I had no preconceived notions of who anyone or any community was. I was young and interested in exploring the variety of landscape and people."
The photographer left New Mexico in 1983, and 33 years later he still remembers how "Santa Fe felt very much like a small town with a sense of casual friendliness." The state, he says, has grown immensely since.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vintage-photos-give-a-glimpse-into-hispanic-new-mexican-life-in-the-80s_n_573237bce4b096e9f092f3d7
By
Carolina Moreno
May 11, 2016, 03:32 PM EDT
Kevin Bubriski was 26 years old when he arrived in New Mexico in 1981. The Massachusetts native had spent three years in Nepal with the Peace Corps and another year working in a mountain village before moving to Santa Fe to study film.
But once in the American southwest, he found a burgeoning and vivacious culture and people so far from anything he'd ever known, and he spent the next two and a half years of his life documenting their daily lives through his photography.
"The vitality and beauty of the Hispanic New Mexicans caught my eye, as well as [their] vibrant cultural life," the documentary photographer told The Huffington Post.
Bubriski recently compiled these images of intimate celebrations, casual car rides, romance and friendships into his new book, "Look into My Eyes: Nuevomexicanos por Vida."
"The photographs allow the viewer to encounter this community of three decades ago, quietly 'look into their eyes,' and ideally find a sense of our shared humanity," Bubriski told HuffPost. "The specific take away for me from the experience was a deep appreciation for the Hispanic culture and history of New Mexico."
Bubriski's subjects often gaze intently into his camera lens, indeed offering a look into their eyes and a brief glimpse into their world, which is accentuated by big hair, bold make-up and all the glamour of the early '80s. He says his photographs are a result of the "mutual respect" between the person behind the camera and those in front of it.
"As a new person to New Mexico, I felt that Hispanic New Mexicans were in some ways neglected by the other communities of Santa Fe and Albuquerque," Burbriski said. "I was there for a brief two and a half years, so I did not have a personal history with the place and the people. Maybe that is what gave me a freedom to experience the place with a fresh outlook. I had no preconceived notions of who anyone or any community was. I was young and interested in exploring the variety of landscape and people."
The photographer left New Mexico in 1983, and 33 years later he still remembers how "Santa Fe felt very much like a small town with a sense of casual friendliness." The state, he says, has grown immensely since.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vintage-photos-give-a-glimpse-into-hispanic-new-mexican-life-in-the-80s_n_573237bce4b096e9f092f3d7
Rare Photos of '70s Black Beauty Pageants Celebrate Women Defying Beauty Standards
BY KRISTINA RODULFO PUBLISHED: JUL 8, 2016
When Raphael Albert was photographing West London in the '60s and '70s, racist, anti-immigrant tensions ran high. Albert, from the Caribbean island of Granada himself, gravitated toward the West Indian community thriving at the time amidst discrimination, and used his lens to capture celebrations of black communities.
One assignment he had as a freelance photographer was to cover a local Miss Jamaica pageant for the West Indian World. That sparked three decades of photographing London's black beauty pageants and eventually led to him organizing them himself. Now, his work is being displayed in an Autograph ABP exhibit called "Miss Black and Beautiful," launching today.
Every photograph embodies the contemporary "Black Is Beautiful" movement of the time. Women are documented wearing typical beauty pageant smiles, bikinis, and adornments, but also proudly wear afros at a time when Eurocentric beauty ideals reigned.
According to Renée Mussai, curator of the exhibit and head of archive at Autograph ABP, pageants were organized in the Caribbean since the 1930s but in the U.K., there were no contests for black women. Meanwhile in the U.S., there was a "rule number seven" that prevented black women from entering pageants–the first time a black woman competed in Miss America was 1970. Today, even, there have been less than five black Miss Universe winners in over 50 years.
https://www.elle.com/culture/news/a37666/rare-black-beauty-pageants-london-photos/
When Raphael Albert was photographing West London in the '60s and '70s, racist, anti-immigrant tensions ran high. Albert, from the Caribbean island of Granada himself, gravitated toward the West Indian community thriving at the time amidst discrimination, and used his lens to capture celebrations of black communities.
One assignment he had as a freelance photographer was to cover a local Miss Jamaica pageant for the West Indian World. That sparked three decades of photographing London's black beauty pageants and eventually led to him organizing them himself. Now, his work is being displayed in an Autograph ABP exhibit called "Miss Black and Beautiful," launching today.
Every photograph embodies the contemporary "Black Is Beautiful" movement of the time. Women are documented wearing typical beauty pageant smiles, bikinis, and adornments, but also proudly wear afros at a time when Eurocentric beauty ideals reigned.
According to Renée Mussai, curator of the exhibit and head of archive at Autograph ABP, pageants were organized in the Caribbean since the 1930s but in the U.K., there were no contests for black women. Meanwhile in the U.S., there was a "rule number seven" that prevented black women from entering pageants–the first time a black woman competed in Miss America was 1970. Today, even, there have been less than five black Miss Universe winners in over 50 years.
https://www.elle.com/culture/news/a37666/rare-black-beauty-pageants-london-photos/
The Girl Suspended For Wearing Pants – New York City, 1942
By Paul Sorene on April 17, 2019
In March 1942 Beverley Bernstein, 16, was sent home for her Brooklyn NYC school for wearing trousers. A protest ensued...
This great photograph shows students protesting the high school dress code that banned slacks for girls in Brooklyn NYC back in 1942. It illustrated a question in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper on March 26 1942. As war raged around the globe, readers were invited to consider the burning question: “Should high school girls, particularly students of Abraham Lincoln High School on Ocean Parkway… be permitted to wear slacks to class?”
The article featured Lincoln pupil Beverly Bernstein, a 16-year-old suspended by the school’s dean of girls, Bertha Cohen, for wearing blue gabardine slacks and a “lipstick-red sweater”. “She wore them to school, along with a lipstick-red sweater,” the Eagle reported.
Her rustication sparked a protest movement. The above photo was captioned: “Girls show up in slacks at Abraham Lincoln High School, in Brooklyn, in protest because a classmate, Beverly Bernstein, was suspended the day before for wearing slacks.”
Bernstein’s champions argued that slacks “are better than skirts in the event of an air raid”. Moreover they were vital to “conserve silk stockings”. They circulated a petition.
“The undersigned want to have official permission for girls to wear slacks to school for the following reasons:
a) The United Stated Government advocates slacks for school because they are better than skirts in the event of an air raid
b) They conserve silk stockings
c) They curb sexy clothes such as short skirts. Note: Boys also wish the girls to wear slacks and signing the petition in hope that it will be allowed.”
Presented with such reasoning, Lincoln’s principal shrugged, stating that “if the girls wear them, we won’t get excited about it”.
Slacks for girls was a national concern. Writing for the San Antonio Light newspaper (San Antonio, Texas) on May 22, 1942, Russ Westover, “Famous Cartoonist – Creator of ‘Tillie the Toiler'”, opined:
The girls appear to be winning their battle for the right to wear slacks to school. In Pittsburgh, for example, the superintendent of schools approved, provided, however, the girls do not take to any outlandish fashions that will create a distraction and a disturbance. In New York, when Beverly Bernstein was forbidden to wear slacks to Abraham Lincoln High School, she and fellow students staged a strike for the emancipation of women from skirts. They got up a petition which school authorities couldn’t talk down:
“The undersigned want official permission for girls to wear slacks to school for the following reasons:
(a) the United States government advocates slacks for school, because they are better than skirts in the event of an air raid; (b) they conserve silk stockings; (c) they curb sexy clothes such as short skirts.
Note: Boys also wish the girls to wear slacks and are signing this petition.”
It isn’t exactly true the government is advocating slacks for school. In fact, it’s fearful that unnecessary adoption of the style will aggravate the shortage of wool. However, in scores of other cities, girls have donned pants for school hours, and they’re on their honor not to let the fashion get beyond conservative bounds.
The least captious girls hate their beaux to present a rumpled, unpressed appearance. Let them take this tip unto themselves and keep slacks in press. Washable slacks should be kept at least as fresh as a girl keeps her blouse, her handkerchief. If the tailor stitches down the crease of wool pants, pressing them neatly is then an easy home job, and the crease doesn’t get out of line between pressing.
There has been a great spurt of publicity to get hats onto heads above slacks. And the long-visored cap, the cocoanut straw hat and the felt fedora type have been advocated for the slacks ensemble. The scarf or handkerchief turban is very popular. Another suggestion is the worsted snood.
As for the intrepid Beverly Bernstein, well, we know she was born in 1926, lived at 65 Exeter Street, Kings, New York, sharing her home with two younger brothers, Arthur and Leonard (not the musician), and parents, Russian-born Jacob and native New Yorker Ruth. We’d love to know more. Who were those campaigners in the photo? And what did Beverly Bernstein do next?
https://flashbak.com/the-girl-suspended-for-wearing-pants-new-york-city-1942-414698/
In March 1942 Beverley Bernstein, 16, was sent home for her Brooklyn NYC school for wearing trousers. A protest ensued...
This great photograph shows students protesting the high school dress code that banned slacks for girls in Brooklyn NYC back in 1942. It illustrated a question in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper on March 26 1942. As war raged around the globe, readers were invited to consider the burning question: “Should high school girls, particularly students of Abraham Lincoln High School on Ocean Parkway… be permitted to wear slacks to class?”
The article featured Lincoln pupil Beverly Bernstein, a 16-year-old suspended by the school’s dean of girls, Bertha Cohen, for wearing blue gabardine slacks and a “lipstick-red sweater”. “She wore them to school, along with a lipstick-red sweater,” the Eagle reported.
Her rustication sparked a protest movement. The above photo was captioned: “Girls show up in slacks at Abraham Lincoln High School, in Brooklyn, in protest because a classmate, Beverly Bernstein, was suspended the day before for wearing slacks.”
Bernstein’s champions argued that slacks “are better than skirts in the event of an air raid”. Moreover they were vital to “conserve silk stockings”. They circulated a petition.
“The undersigned want to have official permission for girls to wear slacks to school for the following reasons:
a) The United Stated Government advocates slacks for school because they are better than skirts in the event of an air raid
b) They conserve silk stockings
c) They curb sexy clothes such as short skirts. Note: Boys also wish the girls to wear slacks and signing the petition in hope that it will be allowed.”
Presented with such reasoning, Lincoln’s principal shrugged, stating that “if the girls wear them, we won’t get excited about it”.
Slacks for girls was a national concern. Writing for the San Antonio Light newspaper (San Antonio, Texas) on May 22, 1942, Russ Westover, “Famous Cartoonist – Creator of ‘Tillie the Toiler'”, opined:
The girls appear to be winning their battle for the right to wear slacks to school. In Pittsburgh, for example, the superintendent of schools approved, provided, however, the girls do not take to any outlandish fashions that will create a distraction and a disturbance. In New York, when Beverly Bernstein was forbidden to wear slacks to Abraham Lincoln High School, she and fellow students staged a strike for the emancipation of women from skirts. They got up a petition which school authorities couldn’t talk down:
“The undersigned want official permission for girls to wear slacks to school for the following reasons:
(a) the United States government advocates slacks for school, because they are better than skirts in the event of an air raid; (b) they conserve silk stockings; (c) they curb sexy clothes such as short skirts.
Note: Boys also wish the girls to wear slacks and are signing this petition.”
It isn’t exactly true the government is advocating slacks for school. In fact, it’s fearful that unnecessary adoption of the style will aggravate the shortage of wool. However, in scores of other cities, girls have donned pants for school hours, and they’re on their honor not to let the fashion get beyond conservative bounds.
The least captious girls hate their beaux to present a rumpled, unpressed appearance. Let them take this tip unto themselves and keep slacks in press. Washable slacks should be kept at least as fresh as a girl keeps her blouse, her handkerchief. If the tailor stitches down the crease of wool pants, pressing them neatly is then an easy home job, and the crease doesn’t get out of line between pressing.
There has been a great spurt of publicity to get hats onto heads above slacks. And the long-visored cap, the cocoanut straw hat and the felt fedora type have been advocated for the slacks ensemble. The scarf or handkerchief turban is very popular. Another suggestion is the worsted snood.
As for the intrepid Beverly Bernstein, well, we know she was born in 1926, lived at 65 Exeter Street, Kings, New York, sharing her home with two younger brothers, Arthur and Leonard (not the musician), and parents, Russian-born Jacob and native New Yorker Ruth. We’d love to know more. Who were those campaigners in the photo? And what did Beverly Bernstein do next?
https://flashbak.com/the-girl-suspended-for-wearing-pants-new-york-city-1942-414698/
Vintage 70s Selfies Show an Artist Discovering Her Sexuality
Playing dress up and shooting self-portraits at her parents' house in the suburbs coaxed Meryl Meisler out of the closet and into herself.
By Miss Rosen
Growing up in Long Island during the 1950s and 60s, Meryl Meisler had the typical suburban life: girl Scouts, ballet and tap dance lessons, and prom. But while she loved her family and friends, she didn’t quite fit in. She quickly realized she didn’t want to be a housewife, teacher, nurse, or a secretary—pretty much the only options available to young women at that time.
As Meisler came of age, she began to discover her sexuality as a lesbian as well as her identity as an artist. “Photography is in my genes,” Meisler said. Her paternal grandfather Murray Meisler, her uncle Al, and her father Jack had all been lifelong practitioners of the art.
Meisler got her first camera in second grade, but it wasn’t until she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison during the mid-1970s that she became serious about the form while pursuing an MA in Art. During school breaks, she returned to her childhood home, where she staged a series of self-portraits that examined her past, present, and future. At this point, Meisler hadn’t heard of Cindy Sherman, but she had the same instinct. She sought to examine the construction of the female gender, from its rituals to its poses to its personas.
A selection of these photographs appears in Purgatory & Paradise: SASSY 70s Suburbia & The City (Bizarre), while others have recently come to light as Meisler prepares for her next book. Here, she speaks with us about this seminal period of her life, sharing a self-portrait of the artist as a young woman ready to take flight.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne48j8/vintage-70s-selfies-show-an-artist-discovering-her-sexuality?utm_source=vicefbus
By Miss Rosen
Growing up in Long Island during the 1950s and 60s, Meryl Meisler had the typical suburban life: girl Scouts, ballet and tap dance lessons, and prom. But while she loved her family and friends, she didn’t quite fit in. She quickly realized she didn’t want to be a housewife, teacher, nurse, or a secretary—pretty much the only options available to young women at that time.
As Meisler came of age, she began to discover her sexuality as a lesbian as well as her identity as an artist. “Photography is in my genes,” Meisler said. Her paternal grandfather Murray Meisler, her uncle Al, and her father Jack had all been lifelong practitioners of the art.
Meisler got her first camera in second grade, but it wasn’t until she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison during the mid-1970s that she became serious about the form while pursuing an MA in Art. During school breaks, she returned to her childhood home, where she staged a series of self-portraits that examined her past, present, and future. At this point, Meisler hadn’t heard of Cindy Sherman, but she had the same instinct. She sought to examine the construction of the female gender, from its rituals to its poses to its personas.
A selection of these photographs appears in Purgatory & Paradise: SASSY 70s Suburbia & The City (Bizarre), while others have recently come to light as Meisler prepares for her next book. Here, she speaks with us about this seminal period of her life, sharing a self-portrait of the artist as a young woman ready to take flight.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne48j8/vintage-70s-selfies-show-an-artist-discovering-her-sexuality?utm_source=vicefbus
Chola Style and Culture: 40 Fascinating Vintage Photos of Latina Gangs in Southern California From the 1970s and '80s
Vatos get the glory, but we all know it’s the Cholas that hold everything down. These fascinating vintage photos from from between the 1970s and '80s that show how influential Latina gangsters were on style and culture in Southern California. The look, the poses, the Germanic blackletter font still used widely, and the camaraderie are consistent in every shot.
https://www.vintag.es/2016/12/chola-style-and-culture-40-fascinating.html?m=1
https://www.vintag.es/2016/12/chola-style-and-culture-40-fascinating.html?m=1
Selling Polaroid Portraits In The Bars Of Amsterdam, 1979-80 The Red Light District
Even artists on an idyll in Europe have to make money. Bettie and I found a lucrative gig selling instant photo portraits in the bars and clubs of Amsterdam. Every night we headed out for 4 or 5 hours seeking customers in Amsterdam's entertainment districts. Although at first we were not sure we would succeed, in retrospect I can see our success was virtually assured. Dutch art history is full of portraits done in bars and taverns, but apparently we were the first to update this tradition with instant photographs. Our Polaroid camera was a money machine fueled by alcohol; each photo sold for 6 guilders (approx. $3) and we usually took more than 50 pictures a night. We were soon a fixture of the city's nightlife with many regular customers eager to get new pictures whenever we happened to cross their path.
https://98bowery.com/idyll-in-holland/amsterdam-prive-part-one
https://98bowery.com/idyll-in-holland/amsterdam-prive-part-one
Artist Defies the Black Family Stereotype Using Abandoned Family Polaroids
“What intrigues me when I look at these images is that they show African Americans with a distinct and powerful sense of pride and joy. Despite the fact that these pictures are ‘found’ Polaroids, that power often lingers and transcends their personal subject matter… Many of these frames echo the key purpose of the Father Figure project, a counter-balance to the prevalent visual tropes of absent fathers and dysfunctional black families”.
Photographer Zun Lee continues his work on black male identity with his latest project, “Fade Resistance“, utilizing family Polaroids either found on the street curb or picked up in flea markets and on eBay. A collection he started a year ago of African American vernacular photography that spans from the 1970s until 2000, the Polaroids offer glimpses into everyday family life and, as Lee reflects, “descriptive of universal experiences”.
Zun Lee’s work is heavily influenced by his own personal family history. Born and raised in Germany, Lee didn’t discover until he was in his 30’s that his biological father was black, rather than the Korean father he had been raised with. He turned to photography to come to terms as well as to explore the concepts of fatherhood in black families – and to counteract the stereotype of the “deadbeat” black father figure, as he did with his earlier project series called Father Figure. “I hope this work can help question preconceived notions and present a broader context of black fatherhood. Perhaps it can serve as a counter-narrative to humanize black men as present and competent fathers in a media climate that largely continues to deny this possibility.”
Zun Lee will be presenting “Fade Resistance” at the upcoming Magnum Foundation’s Photography, Expanded Symosium. With over 3,000 collected Polaroids, Lee hopes that they will be reunited with their families over the course of this project and expects to lead the collection into an interactive online space to assist with not only identifying them but also to allow for the public to interact with the photographs and contribute their own family photos. “My hope is, at the very minimum, to give the vintage Polaroids a new ‘virtual home’ in a present-day context but with a revitalized meaning and contemporary significance.”
http://1world1family.me/artist-defies-the-black-family-stereotype-using-abandoned-family-polaroids/
Found Photos: One Woman’s Love Affair With Her Married Boss
Between May 1969 and December 1970 unmarried secretary Margret S., 24, and her German businessman boss, Günter K., 39, were engaged in a clandestine love affair.
Günter kept records of the romance, hundreds of color and black-and-white photographs showing Margret S., samples of her hair (head and pubic), her fingernails, empty contraception packages, a blood-stained napkin, hotel receipts, movie and theater tickets and sexually explicit diary entries. More than thirty years later, the records were found, locked inside a briefcase.
Veit Loers notes:
“In September 1970, the diary entries set in, with precise descriptions of what happens during foreplay and then of the sexual act itself, but also mentioning all kinds of things happening besides. All this is meticulously typed, in red and black ink, as by a bookkeeper of his own obsession. The couple go on ‘business trips’ in Günter’s Opel Kapitän, stay at spa hotels and visit the casino in Wiesbaden. Then the trysts begin to take place in an attic flat in Günter’s store building. Nobody is supposed to know, but people must notice something. Margret prepares roulades and redfish filets with cucumber salad. They drink Cappy (orange juice) with a green shot (Escorial, strong liquor) and watch ‘colourful television’.
Margret dresses for him in the clothes he has bought her. He, the perfect lover, in truth is a macho man who wants to have everything under control. She enjoys his attention, his generosity, is happy to let herself be manipulated, is jealous, becomes pregnant despite the pills, and has an illegal abortion − for the third time in her young life. Just before Christmas 1970 the reports and photographs break off. The relationship appears to be at an end. Margret is scared. She tells him that ‘after Christmas the fucking will be over and you will not dance at two weddings anymore’. He gets involved with other women. These are no love stories, though, just obsessive sexual romps, chronicled nonetheless in hundreds of grotesque documents testifying to the stuffy German milieu in the early years of the Kohl era.”
Does Mrs K suspect? Yes:
Monday 7.9.1970: At lunch Leni [Günther’s wife] says to Margret: Madame, you are a lesser character, you are disrupting a good marriage.
Tuesday 8.9.1970: Around 10 a clock Margret says to me: You let this insult from your wife against me pass? No more sex, you can jump on your own wife. Whatever you do, you are not allowed to jump on me anymore.
Later, my wife has to apologize to her at lunch on 8.9.1970.
The loves retire for sex. He later adds:
Devil salad is eaten. Everything is okay again.
The photographs are extraordinary. They are also racy and NSFW. We do get to see Günther in one picture. It the part of him that did his thinking.
https://flashbak.com/found-photos-one-womans-love-affair-with-her-married-boss-53673/
Günter kept records of the romance, hundreds of color and black-and-white photographs showing Margret S., samples of her hair (head and pubic), her fingernails, empty contraception packages, a blood-stained napkin, hotel receipts, movie and theater tickets and sexually explicit diary entries. More than thirty years later, the records were found, locked inside a briefcase.
Veit Loers notes:
“In September 1970, the diary entries set in, with precise descriptions of what happens during foreplay and then of the sexual act itself, but also mentioning all kinds of things happening besides. All this is meticulously typed, in red and black ink, as by a bookkeeper of his own obsession. The couple go on ‘business trips’ in Günter’s Opel Kapitän, stay at spa hotels and visit the casino in Wiesbaden. Then the trysts begin to take place in an attic flat in Günter’s store building. Nobody is supposed to know, but people must notice something. Margret prepares roulades and redfish filets with cucumber salad. They drink Cappy (orange juice) with a green shot (Escorial, strong liquor) and watch ‘colourful television’.
Margret dresses for him in the clothes he has bought her. He, the perfect lover, in truth is a macho man who wants to have everything under control. She enjoys his attention, his generosity, is happy to let herself be manipulated, is jealous, becomes pregnant despite the pills, and has an illegal abortion − for the third time in her young life. Just before Christmas 1970 the reports and photographs break off. The relationship appears to be at an end. Margret is scared. She tells him that ‘after Christmas the fucking will be over and you will not dance at two weddings anymore’. He gets involved with other women. These are no love stories, though, just obsessive sexual romps, chronicled nonetheless in hundreds of grotesque documents testifying to the stuffy German milieu in the early years of the Kohl era.”
Does Mrs K suspect? Yes:
Monday 7.9.1970: At lunch Leni [Günther’s wife] says to Margret: Madame, you are a lesser character, you are disrupting a good marriage.
Tuesday 8.9.1970: Around 10 a clock Margret says to me: You let this insult from your wife against me pass? No more sex, you can jump on your own wife. Whatever you do, you are not allowed to jump on me anymore.
Later, my wife has to apologize to her at lunch on 8.9.1970.
The loves retire for sex. He later adds:
Devil salad is eaten. Everything is okay again.
The photographs are extraordinary. They are also racy and NSFW. We do get to see Günther in one picture. It the part of him that did his thinking.
https://flashbak.com/found-photos-one-womans-love-affair-with-her-married-boss-53673/
Meet Hilda, The Forgotten Plus Size Pinup Girl From The 1950s (10 Pics)
You’d be pretty accurate when saying that the media in the 1950s was promoting the image of a woman’s beauty that was skewed towards the curvy slender models like typical pinup girls. But it wasn’t all like that as the illustrator Duane Bryers (1911-2012) proved with Hilda, a plus-sized pinup model.
Ahead of his talk with Toby Mott at the ICA, the founder of the legendary Sniffin’ Glue fanzine shares his thoughts on punk in the 21st century
Jessie Pink
“You start off by kicking down the doors, then you end up at Butlins!’ quips writer and musician Mark Perry. He’s recalling his experience of the punk scene, where he situated himself front and centre after founding fanzine Sniffin’ Glue in 1976. “I just felt there was a need to have a magazine that was devoted to punk rock so I had the idea to start my own fanzine,” he explains over the phone. “That’s why it was important at the time, because it was the first UK fanzine to write about punk rock.” Inspired by The Ramones, Sniffin’ Glue quickly became an authentic outlet for punk in the 70s. Writers included future NME scribe Danny Baker, and were supported by photographs from Dennis Morris – otherwise known as ‘Mad Dennis’.
As punk celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, Perry and punk historian/cultural archivist Toby Mott will go head to head on May 11 at the ICA in London, where Perry will also perform with his band, Alternative TV. Ahead of the event, we caught up with the writer, musician and publisher to talk about the historic Sniffin’ Glue, as well as punk’s place in the digital age.
https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/30999/1/mark-perry-tracing-the-beginnings-of-the-punk-fanzine
“You start off by kicking down the doors, then you end up at Butlins!’ quips writer and musician Mark Perry. He’s recalling his experience of the punk scene, where he situated himself front and centre after founding fanzine Sniffin’ Glue in 1976. “I just felt there was a need to have a magazine that was devoted to punk rock so I had the idea to start my own fanzine,” he explains over the phone. “That’s why it was important at the time, because it was the first UK fanzine to write about punk rock.” Inspired by The Ramones, Sniffin’ Glue quickly became an authentic outlet for punk in the 70s. Writers included future NME scribe Danny Baker, and were supported by photographs from Dennis Morris – otherwise known as ‘Mad Dennis’.
As punk celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, Perry and punk historian/cultural archivist Toby Mott will go head to head on May 11 at the ICA in London, where Perry will also perform with his band, Alternative TV. Ahead of the event, we caught up with the writer, musician and publisher to talk about the historic Sniffin’ Glue, as well as punk’s place in the digital age.
https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/30999/1/mark-perry-tracing-the-beginnings-of-the-punk-fanzine
What About Gay Bob?
What About Gay Bob?
The First Openly Gay Doll (for everyone) Was a Trailblazer Toy
In 1977, Gay Bob came out of the closet.
Thirteen inches tall and plastic, Gay Bob was marketed as the first openly gay doll and made his retail debut in mail-order catalogs. He was sold in a cardboard box designed to look like a closet. Gay Bob's packaging proudly (and wordily) explained what “coming out of the closet” meant:
"Hi boys, girls and grownups, I’m Gay Bob, the world’s first gay doll. I bet you are wondering why I come packed in a closet. ‘Coming out of the closet’ is an expression which means that you admit the truth about yourself and are no longer ashamed of what you are... A lot of straight people should come out of their 'straight closets' and take the risk of being honest about what they are. People who are not ashamed of what they are, are more lovable, kind, and understanding. That is why everyone should come out of “their closet" so the world will be a more loving, understanding, and fulfilling place to live. Gay people are no different than straight people. If everyone came out of their closets, there wouldn’t be so many angry, frustrated, frightened people... It’s not easy to be honest about what you are; in fact it takes a great deal of courage. But remember, if Gay Bob has the courage to come out of his closet, so can you!"
At face value, Gay Bob’s message about the merits of coming out seems earnest, espousing the values of courage, honesty, and living authentically; however, the branding and design of the Gay Bob doll are brash. Gay Bob’s story is deceptively complicated and intertwined in toy and LGBTQ+ history.
THE CREATOR - WHO MADE GAY BOB?
Gay Bob was created by an advertising executive named Harvey Rosenberg. Rosenberg put $10,000 of his own money into getting Gay Bob manufactured through his company, Gizmo Development.
While Rosenberg did not identify as gay, he stated that he had created the doll to liberate men from traditional sexual roles. According to Rosenberg, regardless of a person’s sexuality, Gay Bob could serve as an example for having the courage to “come out of the closet” and be your true, authentic self. During a press blitz for the doll’s release, Rosenberg also indicated that Gay Bob was a spoof of other “amorphous, sexless dolls,” which was undoubtedly a reference to Mattel’s KenTM and BarbieTM. He had plans to release additional dolls that would have made up the rest of Gay Bob’s family (a mother, father, and two brothers); however, the other dolls were never produced.
Gay Bob dolls were sold via mail-order advertisements in gay magazines and a few boutique shops in New York City and San Francisco.
"Does God Ever Speak through Cats?" is a book about Christian spirituality and cats. When David Evans moved into a new house in Los Angeles, he unwittingly embarked on two strange new journeys. One involved a totally new relationship with God. The other was focused on a stray cat that was living in the backyard. To David's great surprise, he discovered that these two very different journeys were related to each other and had a lot in common. This is the book he wrote to tell that story.
https://nhm.org/stories/what-about-gay-bob
The First Openly Gay Doll (for everyone) Was a Trailblazer Toy
In 1977, Gay Bob came out of the closet.
Thirteen inches tall and plastic, Gay Bob was marketed as the first openly gay doll and made his retail debut in mail-order catalogs. He was sold in a cardboard box designed to look like a closet. Gay Bob's packaging proudly (and wordily) explained what “coming out of the closet” meant:
"Hi boys, girls and grownups, I’m Gay Bob, the world’s first gay doll. I bet you are wondering why I come packed in a closet. ‘Coming out of the closet’ is an expression which means that you admit the truth about yourself and are no longer ashamed of what you are... A lot of straight people should come out of their 'straight closets' and take the risk of being honest about what they are. People who are not ashamed of what they are, are more lovable, kind, and understanding. That is why everyone should come out of “their closet" so the world will be a more loving, understanding, and fulfilling place to live. Gay people are no different than straight people. If everyone came out of their closets, there wouldn’t be so many angry, frustrated, frightened people... It’s not easy to be honest about what you are; in fact it takes a great deal of courage. But remember, if Gay Bob has the courage to come out of his closet, so can you!"
At face value, Gay Bob’s message about the merits of coming out seems earnest, espousing the values of courage, honesty, and living authentically; however, the branding and design of the Gay Bob doll are brash. Gay Bob’s story is deceptively complicated and intertwined in toy and LGBTQ+ history.
THE CREATOR - WHO MADE GAY BOB?
Gay Bob was created by an advertising executive named Harvey Rosenberg. Rosenberg put $10,000 of his own money into getting Gay Bob manufactured through his company, Gizmo Development.
While Rosenberg did not identify as gay, he stated that he had created the doll to liberate men from traditional sexual roles. According to Rosenberg, regardless of a person’s sexuality, Gay Bob could serve as an example for having the courage to “come out of the closet” and be your true, authentic self. During a press blitz for the doll’s release, Rosenberg also indicated that Gay Bob was a spoof of other “amorphous, sexless dolls,” which was undoubtedly a reference to Mattel’s KenTM and BarbieTM. He had plans to release additional dolls that would have made up the rest of Gay Bob’s family (a mother, father, and two brothers); however, the other dolls were never produced.
Gay Bob dolls were sold via mail-order advertisements in gay magazines and a few boutique shops in New York City and San Francisco.
"Does God Ever Speak through Cats?" is a book about Christian spirituality and cats. When David Evans moved into a new house in Los Angeles, he unwittingly embarked on two strange new journeys. One involved a totally new relationship with God. The other was focused on a stray cat that was living in the backyard. To David's great surprise, he discovered that these two very different journeys were related to each other and had a lot in common. This is the book he wrote to tell that story.
https://nhm.org/stories/what-about-gay-bob
Vintage Stock Photos
Bad Postcards
Old School Hip-Hop Flyers
Muppet Calendar
Bad (good) Record Covers
Vintage Buttons
How To Look Punk
Liartown
Forgotten Glamour at Mermaid City
Girls would come from as far as Tokyo to audition for the chance to be a Weeki Wachee mermaid in the 1960s. They performed to sold-out crowds; half a million people a year came to watch their dazzling underwater shows, including the King himself, Elvis Presley. They took etiquette and ballet lessons and they were treated like royalty wherever they went in Florida. Impossibly glamorous, even when squeezed into a sequin fish tail or eating a banana underwater, for today’s vintage muse, I’m turning our attention to the legendary mermaids of Weeki Wachee…
The underwater mermaid “stage” was (and still is) a natural ancient spring, discovered by the Seminole Indians who named it Weeki Wachee, meaning “little spring” or winding “river”. A theatre was built into the limestone around the basin in 1947, submerged six feet below the water’s surface. The spring itself however, is so deep that the bottom has never been found, and the surge of currents from the subterranean caverns are so strong they can easily knock a diver’s mask off.
https://www.messynessychic.com/2017/03/24/forgotten-glamour-at-mermaid-city/
The underwater mermaid “stage” was (and still is) a natural ancient spring, discovered by the Seminole Indians who named it Weeki Wachee, meaning “little spring” or winding “river”. A theatre was built into the limestone around the basin in 1947, submerged six feet below the water’s surface. The spring itself however, is so deep that the bottom has never been found, and the surge of currents from the subterranean caverns are so strong they can easily knock a diver’s mask off.
https://www.messynessychic.com/2017/03/24/forgotten-glamour-at-mermaid-city/
Jet Magazine
Vintage Ads
Japanese Vintage Wrestling Posters
Sometimes Mugshots Look Like Portraits: Here Are 44 Stunning Mid-Century Mugshots in Philadelphia
In 1855, Allan Pinkerton founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago and devised the first Rogues’ Gallery—a compilation of descriptions, methods of operation, hiding places, and names of criminals and their associates. The San Francisco Police Department may have started the practice about the same time. By 1858, New York City had a collection of some 450 ambrotypes (images on glass plates). From these early instances, the practice of collecting criminal mug shots spread across the nation and around the world.
The use of photographs for this a purpose in Philadelphia first occurred in 1860 when the Police Department officially established its own Rogues’ Gallery. By then, camera exposure time had been cut from minutes to seconds, thus making mug shot portraiture practical. Note also that the use of photography in crime fighting was new technology before the Civil War, and Philadelphia was the nation’s leading city for photography in that era.
Punks, sneaks, mooks and miscreants. Hookers, stooges, grifters and goons. Men and women, elderly and adolescent, rich and poor, but mostly poor. These portraits make up a small part of Mark Michaelson’s collection of over 10,000 American mugshots from the 1870s to the 1960s.
https://www.vintag.es/2018/10/vintage-philadelphia-mugshots.html?m=1
The use of photographs for this a purpose in Philadelphia first occurred in 1860 when the Police Department officially established its own Rogues’ Gallery. By then, camera exposure time had been cut from minutes to seconds, thus making mug shot portraiture practical. Note also that the use of photography in crime fighting was new technology before the Civil War, and Philadelphia was the nation’s leading city for photography in that era.
Punks, sneaks, mooks and miscreants. Hookers, stooges, grifters and goons. Men and women, elderly and adolescent, rich and poor, but mostly poor. These portraits make up a small part of Mark Michaelson’s collection of over 10,000 American mugshots from the 1870s to the 1960s.
https://www.vintag.es/2018/10/vintage-philadelphia-mugshots.html?m=1
These Striking Photos of 70s queer life inspired the film 'Milk'
Harvey Milk stands outside his Castro Camera store in San Francisco. There's a smile on his face. The wind flutters his striped tie, which is swept to the side over his herringbone jacket.
This now-famous image of the late gay politician — whose LGBT activism and assassination were captured in the award-winning film Milk starring Sean Penn and James Franco — was almost lost to history. Photographer Daniel Nicoletta, Milk's friend and mentee, shot the image as part of Milk's 1977 campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Milk had scrapped the photo because of the wind-bent tie, opting for a more traditional shot, in which it was straight, as his official campaign portrait.
Milk won the election. But in 1978, he was infamously killed alongside S.F. Mayor Moscone by Dan White, a former city supervisor. After his assassination, Nicoletta, sorting through Milk's possessions with Milk's partner Scott Smith, found the negative of the photograph sitting on top of a box filled with thousands of loose slides. It was like it had been waiting for them. Nicoletta examined the negative, and was immediately drawn in by the big smile of his late friend — and the tie.
"Something about the wind lifting the tie in the air evoked a sense of the passing of time," Nicoletta said. "And that's why that photo became the one that was meant to go out into the world."
Today, the public can see a version of this portrait on a stamp; Milk posthumously made history by becoming the first out politician to be honored with one by the U.S. Postal Service in 2014. It's also featured in its full glory in Nicoletta's book, LGBT San Francisco. The sweeping tome chronicles over 40 years of the LGBT rights movement — largely in one of its epicenters.
In the book's forward, Milk director Gus Van Sant called Nicoletta's photography "a vital resource to the formation of Milk" - he used it as a visual reference in crafting the award-winning film's story and set. Van Sant defined it as a "treasured artistic record of the people who initiated a movement from within their own neighborhood, and the work links that exuberant time to the larger history of LGBT people. This book is a very welcome addition to our enduring collective memory."
And what a memory. In LGBT San Francisco, Nicoletta captures the historic events that swirled around Milk's election, activism, and assassination, including the White Night riots, a violent LGBT uprising that occurred after Milk's killer received a lenient sentence. Afterward, LGBT history unfolds in this book like a glorious Pride march through time. There are activists like Cleve Jones, icons like Lily Tomlin and Divine, drag queens, hustlers, gay bars, club kids, the leather lovers of the Folsom Street Fair, radical fairies, and portraits of hundreds of queer individuals who embodied the spirit of a burgeoning movement.
https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/mbvgav/these-striking-photos-of-70s-queer-life-inspired-the-film-milk
This now-famous image of the late gay politician — whose LGBT activism and assassination were captured in the award-winning film Milk starring Sean Penn and James Franco — was almost lost to history. Photographer Daniel Nicoletta, Milk's friend and mentee, shot the image as part of Milk's 1977 campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Milk had scrapped the photo because of the wind-bent tie, opting for a more traditional shot, in which it was straight, as his official campaign portrait.
Milk won the election. But in 1978, he was infamously killed alongside S.F. Mayor Moscone by Dan White, a former city supervisor. After his assassination, Nicoletta, sorting through Milk's possessions with Milk's partner Scott Smith, found the negative of the photograph sitting on top of a box filled with thousands of loose slides. It was like it had been waiting for them. Nicoletta examined the negative, and was immediately drawn in by the big smile of his late friend — and the tie.
"Something about the wind lifting the tie in the air evoked a sense of the passing of time," Nicoletta said. "And that's why that photo became the one that was meant to go out into the world."
Today, the public can see a version of this portrait on a stamp; Milk posthumously made history by becoming the first out politician to be honored with one by the U.S. Postal Service in 2014. It's also featured in its full glory in Nicoletta's book, LGBT San Francisco. The sweeping tome chronicles over 40 years of the LGBT rights movement — largely in one of its epicenters.
In the book's forward, Milk director Gus Van Sant called Nicoletta's photography "a vital resource to the formation of Milk" - he used it as a visual reference in crafting the award-winning film's story and set. Van Sant defined it as a "treasured artistic record of the people who initiated a movement from within their own neighborhood, and the work links that exuberant time to the larger history of LGBT people. This book is a very welcome addition to our enduring collective memory."
And what a memory. In LGBT San Francisco, Nicoletta captures the historic events that swirled around Milk's election, activism, and assassination, including the White Night riots, a violent LGBT uprising that occurred after Milk's killer received a lenient sentence. Afterward, LGBT history unfolds in this book like a glorious Pride march through time. There are activists like Cleve Jones, icons like Lily Tomlin and Divine, drag queens, hustlers, gay bars, club kids, the leather lovers of the Folsom Street Fair, radical fairies, and portraits of hundreds of queer individuals who embodied the spirit of a burgeoning movement.
https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/mbvgav/these-striking-photos-of-70s-queer-life-inspired-the-film-milk
THE SCREAMING PHANTOMS, THE DIRTY ONES & THE SATAN SOULS: CHECK OUT THIS 1974 MAP OF BROOKLYN GANGS
1979’s The Warriors became a cult classic by creating a fantastically dystopian world of lawlessness roamed by stylized gangs of the Romantic variety, but the reality of 1970’s NYC gangs was… well, actually… not that much different from their epic, fictionalized versions onscreen. In fact, the fear of gang violence at the time was so fevered, the film was actually blamed for crimes committed against people who were coincidentally coming from or going to the movie. This map from The New York Times is dated August 1, 1974, and the names of the gangs are so dramatic, it’s easy to see how fact and fiction could blur in the eyes of a terrified populace.
The folks over at The Bowery Boys blog even dug up a few details on the “activities” of some of the gangs listed, including The Young Barons (an altercation that ended in one death and the slicing off of someone’s nose, 1972), a battle between the Devils Rebels and the Screaming Phantoms (two rebels were killed, 1973), and the 1974 extortion dealings of the Outlaws, the Tomahawks, the Jolly Stompers and B’Nai Zaken. If that last one threw you for a loop, B’Nai Zaken is a phrase largely associated with Ethiopian Jews, and not (as I had hoped), a bunch of Hassidim with nunchucks.
There was a even a 1973 report that a few local gangs had been cast in an autobiographical gang film,The Education of Sonny Carson, perhaps paving the way for Walter Hill to later do the same thing with The Warriors
://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_screaming_phantoms_the_dirty_ones_the_satan_souls_check_out_this_1974_m
The folks over at The Bowery Boys blog even dug up a few details on the “activities” of some of the gangs listed, including The Young Barons (an altercation that ended in one death and the slicing off of someone’s nose, 1972), a battle between the Devils Rebels and the Screaming Phantoms (two rebels were killed, 1973), and the 1974 extortion dealings of the Outlaws, the Tomahawks, the Jolly Stompers and B’Nai Zaken. If that last one threw you for a loop, B’Nai Zaken is a phrase largely associated with Ethiopian Jews, and not (as I had hoped), a bunch of Hassidim with nunchucks.
There was a even a 1973 report that a few local gangs had been cast in an autobiographical gang film,The Education of Sonny Carson, perhaps paving the way for Walter Hill to later do the same thing with The Warriors
://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_screaming_phantoms_the_dirty_ones_the_satan_souls_check_out_this_1974_m
Vibrant photos capture spirit of 1980s NYC by Jamel Shabazz
By Alex Arbuckle on May 18, 2016
Jamel Shabazz's New York
One man's vivid record of a city's culture
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Jamel Shabazz first took up photography at the age of 15, and went on to create a peerlessly vibrant record of the city in the 1980s.Drawing inspiration from the works of socially concerned photographers such as Gordon Parks and Leonard Freed, Shabazz roamed the streets and subways of New York, making both candid and effortlessly posed images of the city’s diverse denizens, especially black and Hispanic communities.He shot his photos with one eye on the future, hoping to contribute to the recording of history and culture. While his images brim with a timeless sense of humanity, they are also full of highly specific signifiers of New York in the 1980s, from hulking boomboxes to flashy fashion and jewelry to graffiti-covered subways.In addition to a successful photographic career with dozens of international solo exhibitions, Shabazz has maintained close ties to his community, volunteering and mentoring children and advocating for youth art education.
https://mashable.com/archive/jamel-shabazz-new-york#c.SMzUsQukqD
Jamel Shabazz's New York
One man's vivid record of a city's culture
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Jamel Shabazz first took up photography at the age of 15, and went on to create a peerlessly vibrant record of the city in the 1980s.Drawing inspiration from the works of socially concerned photographers such as Gordon Parks and Leonard Freed, Shabazz roamed the streets and subways of New York, making both candid and effortlessly posed images of the city’s diverse denizens, especially black and Hispanic communities.He shot his photos with one eye on the future, hoping to contribute to the recording of history and culture. While his images brim with a timeless sense of humanity, they are also full of highly specific signifiers of New York in the 1980s, from hulking boomboxes to flashy fashion and jewelry to graffiti-covered subways.In addition to a successful photographic career with dozens of international solo exhibitions, Shabazz has maintained close ties to his community, volunteering and mentoring children and advocating for youth art education.
https://mashable.com/archive/jamel-shabazz-new-york#c.SMzUsQukqD
Vintage Japanese Boomboxes from the 1980s
By Sheldon D. on May 19,
In the 1980s, portable tape players were huge, loud and a lot of fun
Junichi Matsuzaki collects Japanese boomboxes from the 1980s. At Design Underground Shibuya-Base in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, he sells new and used cassette tapes. Matsuzaki sees cassettes as a retro fashion that produces great analog sound. Unlike downloads, you actually own the music. And you can touch the tapes. When they jam in the player, you can take them out and spend a few zen moments winding the tape back into the cassette with a pencil. You can also revisit the lost art of cassette tape design.
Although Japan copied boomboxes made in the West – starting with the first boombox invented in The Netherlands by Philips in 1969 – those produced in Japan gradually became more and more creative. as companies like Sony, Sharp, National, Sanyo, Marantz, Aiwa and Toshiba competed.
Matsuzaki values boomboxes for their high-quality parts, producing seamless sound. He explains, saying “The iPhone, for example, only lets you scroll the volume bar on its touch-screen. Vintage radio/cassette players, on the other hand, are equipped with a sound meter… and a cassette counter, which marks the passing of time.”
Boomboxes were big sounds you could take anywhere. As Don Letts of Big Audio Dynamite told The New York Times in 2010: “You could take it to the streets, and wherever you took it, you had an instant party.”
Miles Lighrwood, founder of online archive founder of Boomboxラジカセ Creators, told Collectors Weekly why boomboxes were so big:
The classic grail boomboxes of the ’70s and ’80s were designed to provide a home stereo experience on the go. That meant several large speakers (typically 2 to 3 speakers ranging from 2″ to 10″ in diameter), one or more cassette decks (side-by-side or stacked), a multi-band radio receiver (typically 2 to 5 bands, but some had more), the power supply to blast it in the street (8-10 batteries), and the transformer that allowed you to plug-in at home. In the analog era, to get the loudest sound out of big speakers required a large amplifier and other crossover electronics that occupied quite a bit of physical space within a box.
Transporting all these components safely and with style required a sturdy enclosure that satisfied both aesthetic, sonic, and functional requirements; consequently, these boomboxes were large and heavy. Practical issues aside, a bigger, louder, flashier box got you more attention on the street—boosting your reputation—and manufacturers could charge more; so win-win. Bigger is better.
https://flashbak.com/vintage-japanese-boomboxes-from-the-1980s-461010/
In the 1980s, portable tape players were huge, loud and a lot of fun
Junichi Matsuzaki collects Japanese boomboxes from the 1980s. At Design Underground Shibuya-Base in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, he sells new and used cassette tapes. Matsuzaki sees cassettes as a retro fashion that produces great analog sound. Unlike downloads, you actually own the music. And you can touch the tapes. When they jam in the player, you can take them out and spend a few zen moments winding the tape back into the cassette with a pencil. You can also revisit the lost art of cassette tape design.
Although Japan copied boomboxes made in the West – starting with the first boombox invented in The Netherlands by Philips in 1969 – those produced in Japan gradually became more and more creative. as companies like Sony, Sharp, National, Sanyo, Marantz, Aiwa and Toshiba competed.
Matsuzaki values boomboxes for their high-quality parts, producing seamless sound. He explains, saying “The iPhone, for example, only lets you scroll the volume bar on its touch-screen. Vintage radio/cassette players, on the other hand, are equipped with a sound meter… and a cassette counter, which marks the passing of time.”
Boomboxes were big sounds you could take anywhere. As Don Letts of Big Audio Dynamite told The New York Times in 2010: “You could take it to the streets, and wherever you took it, you had an instant party.”
Miles Lighrwood, founder of online archive founder of Boomboxラジカセ Creators, told Collectors Weekly why boomboxes were so big:
The classic grail boomboxes of the ’70s and ’80s were designed to provide a home stereo experience on the go. That meant several large speakers (typically 2 to 3 speakers ranging from 2″ to 10″ in diameter), one or more cassette decks (side-by-side or stacked), a multi-band radio receiver (typically 2 to 5 bands, but some had more), the power supply to blast it in the street (8-10 batteries), and the transformer that allowed you to plug-in at home. In the analog era, to get the loudest sound out of big speakers required a large amplifier and other crossover electronics that occupied quite a bit of physical space within a box.
Transporting all these components safely and with style required a sturdy enclosure that satisfied both aesthetic, sonic, and functional requirements; consequently, these boomboxes were large and heavy. Practical issues aside, a bigger, louder, flashier box got you more attention on the street—boosting your reputation—and manufacturers could charge more; so win-win. Bigger is better.
https://flashbak.com/vintage-japanese-boomboxes-from-the-1980s-461010/
The Miss American Vampire competition
The Miss American Vampire competition was conducted in 1970 as a promotional tool for House of Dark Shadows. Regional contests were held around the country, but New York City and Los Angeles generated the most interest from competitors. Almost all of the documentary evidence circulating the Internet these days comes from the New York regional contest, which took place at Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey in September, 1970. Jonathan Frid was on hand to crown the winner.
Girls 18-25 were invited to produce the most imaginative "Vampire look" with originality, charm, poise, stage presence and videogenic qualities being highly important. The last two parts being essential since the winner was to have a week-long role on the television show.
The final competition winner was actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather, who gained greater fame a few years later when she represented Marlon Brando at the 1973 Academy Awards to decline his Oscar for The Godfather in an act of protest over the treatment and portrayal of Native Americans. Similarly, Littlefeather did not reap the benefits of her award. It’s unclear whether she declined the trip to New York to appear on the show, or whether the producers decided not to hold up their end of the deal. Either way, Littlefeather remained in Los Angeles. The prize passed to Christine Domaniecki, the winner of the New Jersey regional, where she had been crowned by none other than
https://www.vintag.es/2018/01/amazing-photographs-from-miss-american.html?m=1
Girls 18-25 were invited to produce the most imaginative "Vampire look" with originality, charm, poise, stage presence and videogenic qualities being highly important. The last two parts being essential since the winner was to have a week-long role on the television show.
The final competition winner was actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather, who gained greater fame a few years later when she represented Marlon Brando at the 1973 Academy Awards to decline his Oscar for The Godfather in an act of protest over the treatment and portrayal of Native Americans. Similarly, Littlefeather did not reap the benefits of her award. It’s unclear whether she declined the trip to New York to appear on the show, or whether the producers decided not to hold up their end of the deal. Either way, Littlefeather remained in Los Angeles. The prize passed to Christine Domaniecki, the winner of the New Jersey regional, where she had been crowned by none other than
https://www.vintag.es/2018/01/amazing-photographs-from-miss-american.html?m=1
On The Streets for Philadelphia’s Bicentennial Party
Don Hudson's photographs of American's celebrating their freedom on Sunday, July 4, 1976
Don Hudson is an “experienced amateur photographer trying to understand what I photograph”. In 1976, Don was in Philadelphia for the Bicentennial. Seemingly undiluted by Vietnam, Watergate and the energy crisis, Americans went nuts for the Bicentennial. Everything from sugar packets to license plates commemorated the event, and every classroom was bedecked in red, white & blue.
“I was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950 and have lived in the area my entire life. In 1972 I decided to act on my love of photography and enrolled in art school. During my two years there I studied the language, both the history and the history-in-making, honed my technical skills, and most importantly, began an association with like-minded souls playing the game of photography. For 40 years, through peaks and valleys of activity, my playing of the game has been about my personal relationship with how the camera describes the appearance of truth in a photograph. You will have to look at the photographs for further explanation. I consider myself a thoughtful, and proudly amateur photographer.”- Don Hudson
https://flashbak.com/on-the-street-of-philadelphias-bicentennial-party-420535/
Don Hudson is an “experienced amateur photographer trying to understand what I photograph”. In 1976, Don was in Philadelphia for the Bicentennial. Seemingly undiluted by Vietnam, Watergate and the energy crisis, Americans went nuts for the Bicentennial. Everything from sugar packets to license plates commemorated the event, and every classroom was bedecked in red, white & blue.
“I was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950 and have lived in the area my entire life. In 1972 I decided to act on my love of photography and enrolled in art school. During my two years there I studied the language, both the history and the history-in-making, honed my technical skills, and most importantly, began an association with like-minded souls playing the game of photography. For 40 years, through peaks and valleys of activity, my playing of the game has been about my personal relationship with how the camera describes the appearance of truth in a photograph. You will have to look at the photographs for further explanation. I consider myself a thoughtful, and proudly amateur photographer.”- Don Hudson
https://flashbak.com/on-the-street-of-philadelphias-bicentennial-party-420535/
The Photographer Who Documented the Underbelly of Chilean Society
“I witnessed it all, and through photography I perpetuated their rebellion.” Paz Errázuriz tells Irina Baconsky about defying the Pinochet regime to capture her country’s marginalised communities
With bracing candour, vulnerability and authority, Paz Errázuriz’s imagery illuminates humanity in all its poetic, unruly beauty – yet, despite a career spanning nearly four decades, the Chile-born photographer has only recently begun to accept the label of artist. “When I started taking pictures in Chile in the 70s, photography didn’t have the status it has now,” she tells us at the opening of the Barbican Art Gallery’s Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins. “It wasn’t really a part of the art world, and I never used the word ‘artist’ to describe myself.”
As such, rather than being interested in the strictly aesthetic value of photography, the self-taught image-maker was drawn to the political, transgressive, documentary potential of her medium, which she continuously used as a portal to the obscure corners of society’s underbelly. Born into a conservative, catholic Santiago family, Errázuriz nurtured a profound desire for escapism and a fascination for the lifestyles and communities of people whose mere existence was a radical act of disobedience to the status quo.
“I was always interested in exploring identity, especially in the context of a homogenised society,” she explains. “Through looking at the identities of others, I began to discover my own.” Following the 1973 Chilean coup d’état which established the repressive military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, photography became more than a personal interest for Errázuriz, resolutely morphing into an unapologetic means of political resistance. “I started working in the street as a photojournalist, and that’s how I first got a glimpse into the underworld of alternative and marginalised communities,” she reminisces. “I did a lot of work on female prostitution, which I knew nothing about – it was an incredibly taboo area, sex was a forbidden word.”
It was the hidden realm of prostitution that led to Errázuriz’s encounter with the dangerous, intrepid and intoxicatingly genuine world of the people both closest to her heart and most influential in her work: the transgender and transvestite communities. Documenting one of the most obscure and difficult times in Chile’s recent political and sexual history under the brutal authoritarianism of the Pinochet regime, Errázuriz’s powerful series La Manzana de Adán (Adam’s Apple) is among her most memorable works to date. Shot in the 1980s over the course of four years, it centres on the lives of Pilar, Evelyn and Mercedes, members of a community of transvestite sex workers in the Santiago brothels of La Jaula and La Palmera. “Living with them for so many years was the best education I could have asked for,” asserts the photographer. “I learned so much about love, community, and I found a family that I wish had always been my own.”
https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/10759/the-photographer-who-documented-the-underbelly-of-chilean-society
With bracing candour, vulnerability and authority, Paz Errázuriz’s imagery illuminates humanity in all its poetic, unruly beauty – yet, despite a career spanning nearly four decades, the Chile-born photographer has only recently begun to accept the label of artist. “When I started taking pictures in Chile in the 70s, photography didn’t have the status it has now,” she tells us at the opening of the Barbican Art Gallery’s Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins. “It wasn’t really a part of the art world, and I never used the word ‘artist’ to describe myself.”
As such, rather than being interested in the strictly aesthetic value of photography, the self-taught image-maker was drawn to the political, transgressive, documentary potential of her medium, which she continuously used as a portal to the obscure corners of society’s underbelly. Born into a conservative, catholic Santiago family, Errázuriz nurtured a profound desire for escapism and a fascination for the lifestyles and communities of people whose mere existence was a radical act of disobedience to the status quo.
“I was always interested in exploring identity, especially in the context of a homogenised society,” she explains. “Through looking at the identities of others, I began to discover my own.” Following the 1973 Chilean coup d’état which established the repressive military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, photography became more than a personal interest for Errázuriz, resolutely morphing into an unapologetic means of political resistance. “I started working in the street as a photojournalist, and that’s how I first got a glimpse into the underworld of alternative and marginalised communities,” she reminisces. “I did a lot of work on female prostitution, which I knew nothing about – it was an incredibly taboo area, sex was a forbidden word.”
It was the hidden realm of prostitution that led to Errázuriz’s encounter with the dangerous, intrepid and intoxicatingly genuine world of the people both closest to her heart and most influential in her work: the transgender and transvestite communities. Documenting one of the most obscure and difficult times in Chile’s recent political and sexual history under the brutal authoritarianism of the Pinochet regime, Errázuriz’s powerful series La Manzana de Adán (Adam’s Apple) is among her most memorable works to date. Shot in the 1980s over the course of four years, it centres on the lives of Pilar, Evelyn and Mercedes, members of a community of transvestite sex workers in the Santiago brothels of La Jaula and La Palmera. “Living with them for so many years was the best education I could have asked for,” asserts the photographer. “I learned so much about love, community, and I found a family that I wish had always been my own.”
https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/10759/the-photographer-who-documented-the-underbelly-of-chilean-society
Black Celebration | Old School Goth and Deathrock Gallery IV
Nostalgia for the 80’s has never begun to fade given that it was one of the most visually striking eras of music and subculture. So, once again we at Post-Punk.com present to you another gallery of Old-Goth of pictures culled from all over the world, representing attendees of The Batcave in London, Deathrockers in the states, and Sisters of Mercy fans in Leeds, and more.
Whether you are a fan of the music in Europe or the US. Young or old, nothing else quite compares to the DIY fashion of leather jackets, handmade buttons, bones, crosses, and skulls, eyeliner, and enough hairspray to destroy the ozone layer several times over.
Below is our fourth gallery of vintage photos curated to honor those who built an international Goth scene from the their confines of their bedrooms laden with vinyl, posters, and cassette tapes, to dancefloors drowned in a haze of clove cigarettes and fog machines.
If you are reading this article on December 15th, 2017, and are in the Philadelphia area, please consider going to Goth 101: A History of the Postpunk and Goth Subculture, 1978 – 1987, An Illustrated Lecture with Andi Harriman.
https://post-punk.com/old-school-goth-and-deathrock-gallery-four/amp/
Whether you are a fan of the music in Europe or the US. Young or old, nothing else quite compares to the DIY fashion of leather jackets, handmade buttons, bones, crosses, and skulls, eyeliner, and enough hairspray to destroy the ozone layer several times over.
Below is our fourth gallery of vintage photos curated to honor those who built an international Goth scene from the their confines of their bedrooms laden with vinyl, posters, and cassette tapes, to dancefloors drowned in a haze of clove cigarettes and fog machines.
If you are reading this article on December 15th, 2017, and are in the Philadelphia area, please consider going to Goth 101: A History of the Postpunk and Goth Subculture, 1978 – 1987, An Illustrated Lecture with Andi Harriman.
https://post-punk.com/old-school-goth-and-deathrock-gallery-four/amp/
A Moment for Barbette
Barbette — born Vander Clyde Broadway in 1898 — was a drag pioneer, circus acrobat, toast of Paris, friend of Josephine Baker, muse (and lover, briefly) of Jean Cocteau, and frequent subject of Man Ray’s lens.
It’s been nearly a century since the Texas native first stunned audiences by performing trapeze and high-wire stunts in full drag, yanking off his wig at the end and striking a masculine pose. The guise began when he replaced a female performer who had died suddenly; it went so well that he made a career out of the illusion.
Barbette started a solo act at the Harlem Opera House in 1919, soon taking the act on the road to England and France. During an engagement at the London Palladium, scandal broke out when he was caught having sex with a man, thus barred from further working in England.
In France, however, he was hailed by Jean Cocteau, who wrote Le Numéro Barbette in 1926, an influential essay on the nature of art. During a brief dalliance between the two, Cocteau gave Barbette a cameo in his film Le Sang d’un Poète (1930). Further, the trapeze-artist murderer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder (1930) is inspired by Barbette, a role not to be found in the source novel.
Barbette continued to tour Europe and North America throughout the 1920s and 30s until a high-wire accident put him into the hospital for a year. He later found work as an aerial choreographer and consultant on films, most notably Some Like It Hot (1959), for which he coached Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis on gender illusion — although a resemblance to a frothy, effervescent Marilyn Monroe is uncanny. After years of chronic pain, Barbette committed suicide at the age of 74.
https://hintmag.com/2017/06/20/barbette-van-der-clyde-broodway-june-20-2017-1019-fashion/?amp
It’s been nearly a century since the Texas native first stunned audiences by performing trapeze and high-wire stunts in full drag, yanking off his wig at the end and striking a masculine pose. The guise began when he replaced a female performer who had died suddenly; it went so well that he made a career out of the illusion.
Barbette started a solo act at the Harlem Opera House in 1919, soon taking the act on the road to England and France. During an engagement at the London Palladium, scandal broke out when he was caught having sex with a man, thus barred from further working in England.
In France, however, he was hailed by Jean Cocteau, who wrote Le Numéro Barbette in 1926, an influential essay on the nature of art. During a brief dalliance between the two, Cocteau gave Barbette a cameo in his film Le Sang d’un Poète (1930). Further, the trapeze-artist murderer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder (1930) is inspired by Barbette, a role not to be found in the source novel.
Barbette continued to tour Europe and North America throughout the 1920s and 30s until a high-wire accident put him into the hospital for a year. He later found work as an aerial choreographer and consultant on films, most notably Some Like It Hot (1959), for which he coached Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis on gender illusion — although a resemblance to a frothy, effervescent Marilyn Monroe is uncanny. After years of chronic pain, Barbette committed suicide at the age of 74.
https://hintmag.com/2017/06/20/barbette-van-der-clyde-broodway-june-20-2017-1019-fashion/?amp
20 Great Vintage Photos Of Women With Signs
34 Coy Photo Portraits of Fancy 80s Wrestlers
Tough wrestler guys from Memphis posing for pictures and looking cutesy, corny and super coy.
The fashion faux pas range from preposterous poses, too-fabulous fringe and heartbreaking headbands. Lots of spandex, disco clothes, blow-dried hair, and a very strange vibe indeed!
Teams like the Fabulous Ones, Rock & Roll Express and the legendary Handsome Jimmy Valiant are pictured in the collection, hearkening back to a time when wrestling was just beginning.
https://www.vintag.es/2012/07/fancy-1980s-wrestlers.html?m=1
Real People With Real Problems – A Different Kind of LP Album Covers
These LPs are all from people who are handicapped, in one way or another. All are from between the 1960s and ’70s, and all are on private labels.
The prevailing maladies seem to be either blindness, dwarfism or lack of limbs. And almost all are about their relationship with Jesus. Most appear relatively happy and excited to be singing for the lord. This isn’t meant to make fun of the handicapped but to show how amazing it was a few years back when anyone could make their own album, individuals, churches, etc.
https://www.vintag.es/2020/02/real-people-with-real-problems.html?m=1
20 Mid-Century Christian Ventriloquism Albums
In the 1950s and 1960s Christian teachers turned to ventriloquism to teach kids about Jesus. They made albums:https://flashbak.com/20-mid-century-christian-ventriloquism-albums-52632/
Spanish Harlem in the 1980s – in pictures
Growing up in New York, photographer Joseph Rodriguez would take the subway from Brooklyn to east Harlem, where his uncle had a sweet shop, to spend time with the local Latino community (Rodriguez is of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent). He spent five years “sitting down at kitchen tables and listening to people’s stories”; the photographs he took are collected in Spanish Harlem: El Barrio in the 80s, published on 21 November by PowerHouse Books. “The only time local newspapers mentioned El Barrio was when crimes were committed,” says Rodriguez. “I knew I had to spend time to try and break these stereotypes. It’s important to show how that era was for people, to show their grit and resilience against social injustice.”
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/sep/09/spanish-harlem-in-the-1980s-in-pictures
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/sep/09/spanish-harlem-in-the-1980s-in-pictures
ROCK STARTS: YOUR FAVORITE ROCK STARS WHEN THEY WERE CHILDREN
HILARIOUS & CRINGEWORTHY KNITTED SWEATERS OF THE 1980S
It’s November, and the temperature in my neighborhood in northern Ohio reached 77 just two days ago. It felt like the start of September really, just a lovely day to be outside. Not at all cold.
One of the benefits of the balmy winters brought on by catastrophic climate change is that there’s no risk someone will trick us into donning one of the absolutely amazing sweaters featured in a remarkable book of knitting designs from the fashionable 1980s. Wit Knits, which presented “lively and original” knitted sweater suggestions by George Hostler and Gyles Brandreth, came out in 1986, and the photographs showing off the finished designs are simply jaw-dropping in their silliness.
There’s a website devoted to these pictures, but its proprietor, rightly sensing that the visual impact of these doozies is the primary appeal, therefore “won’t post patterns, buy the book if you want to make them.” Harrumph. The book is, like everything else, available on Amazon.
The really peculiar thing about Wit Knits is that virtually all of the models are well-known figures from 1980s British television. I don’t know how Hostler and Brandreth were able to sucker such famous personages into agreeing to be involved with this, but perhaps it was simply a paid gig like any other. Maybe they got to keep the sweaters?
For instance: I can remember watching, on WNET Channel 13 in New York back around when this book came out, a delightful British show called Good Neighbors (it was known as The Good Life in the U.K.), and Richard Briers, here wearing the light blue sweater with the “wee Scottie” on it, was the lead actor on that show. Meanwhile, Joanna Lumley—then perhaps best known for her stint in The New Avengers, who later became an icon of decadence in Ab Fab—here is shown wearing a ridiculous sweater with a horsey; she also has a different one with what is most likely an owl on it. Lizzie Webb, who presented morning exercise routines on TV, is wearing a sweater with a kittykat on it. Most of the people here are like that.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/hilarious_cringeworthy_knitted_sweaters_of_the_1980s
One of the benefits of the balmy winters brought on by catastrophic climate change is that there’s no risk someone will trick us into donning one of the absolutely amazing sweaters featured in a remarkable book of knitting designs from the fashionable 1980s. Wit Knits, which presented “lively and original” knitted sweater suggestions by George Hostler and Gyles Brandreth, came out in 1986, and the photographs showing off the finished designs are simply jaw-dropping in their silliness.
There’s a website devoted to these pictures, but its proprietor, rightly sensing that the visual impact of these doozies is the primary appeal, therefore “won’t post patterns, buy the book if you want to make them.” Harrumph. The book is, like everything else, available on Amazon.
The really peculiar thing about Wit Knits is that virtually all of the models are well-known figures from 1980s British television. I don’t know how Hostler and Brandreth were able to sucker such famous personages into agreeing to be involved with this, but perhaps it was simply a paid gig like any other. Maybe they got to keep the sweaters?
For instance: I can remember watching, on WNET Channel 13 in New York back around when this book came out, a delightful British show called Good Neighbors (it was known as The Good Life in the U.K.), and Richard Briers, here wearing the light blue sweater with the “wee Scottie” on it, was the lead actor on that show. Meanwhile, Joanna Lumley—then perhaps best known for her stint in The New Avengers, who later became an icon of decadence in Ab Fab—here is shown wearing a ridiculous sweater with a horsey; she also has a different one with what is most likely an owl on it. Lizzie Webb, who presented morning exercise routines on TV, is wearing a sweater with a kittykat on it. Most of the people here are like that.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/hilarious_cringeworthy_knitted_sweaters_of_the_1980s
Before He Was Famous, Fascinating Black and White Photos of a Very Young Prince in 1977
In 1977, a local musician named Prince Rogers Nelson came to the attention of Minneapolis music agent/manager Owen Husney and his partner Gary Levinson. Upon hearing his music, Husney and Levinson immediately signed the 19 year old to a management contract and set about securing a record deal for the young musician.
To entice photographer Robert Whitman to take photographs of Prince for a press kit aimed at potential record companies, Levinson came by Whitman’s apartment and played him one song on his car stereo... an early version of “Soft and Wet.” Husney and Levinson then booked Prince into the Sound 80 Studios to work on recording a demo and Whitman came on board to make photographs of this young artist, who would one day become one of the most important musicians of the 20th century.
These photographs were created during three separate photoshoots that Whitman made of Prince during 1977. Whitman photographed Prince in his Minneapolis studio, Owen Husney’s Linden Hills Boulevard home and on the street of downtown Minneapolis, including in front of the mural of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony painted on the side of the Schmitt’s Music store.
These pictures, Prince’s first with a professional photographer, mark an instrumental moment in his career. The creation of the style and persona that has come to define the artist known as PRINCE.
https://www.vintag.es/2022/06/prince-by-robert-whitman.html?m=1
These Rarely Seen Photos of Early Pride Parades Capture a Shifting Movement
By Wilder Davies
June 28, 2019 11:43 AM EDT
Amid the flurry of rainbow-laden corporate logos, sponsored events and news items about gay penguins, it is difficult to turn on a television or set foot in public during June without the reminder that it is Pride Month for LGBT and queer people. This week, New York City is hosting WorldPride in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, with an estimated 4 million visitors expected to participate. Pride has come a long way since its more radical origins, when marchers numbered in the thousands, corporations were far from getting the memo and the stakes in general felt higher.
But there is much to be gleaned from remembering how it once was. George Dudley, a photographer and artist who also served as the first director of New York City’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, documented scenes from pride parades in New York City from the late 1970s through the early ‘90s. His images of queer and trans people parading down the streets of Manhattan illustrate an ebullient and joyous atmosphere that feels not too dissimilar from scenes at pride parades today. The circumstances his subjects faced in their daily lives, however, were profoundly different.
Dudley made the photos in this collection during pride parades between 1976 and 1981. Unlike much of the publicly available photography taken at the first pride parade in 1970 and those that followed, these images were made not by a disinterested photojournalist but by someone deeply entrenched in the community. As a result, the photographs feel warm and intimate. They present the parade not as a newsworthy spectacle but as a gathering of people making themselves visible at a time when the world at large was not interested in seeing them.
https://time.com/longform/pride-parade-photos-1970s/
June 28, 2019 11:43 AM EDT
Amid the flurry of rainbow-laden corporate logos, sponsored events and news items about gay penguins, it is difficult to turn on a television or set foot in public during June without the reminder that it is Pride Month for LGBT and queer people. This week, New York City is hosting WorldPride in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, with an estimated 4 million visitors expected to participate. Pride has come a long way since its more radical origins, when marchers numbered in the thousands, corporations were far from getting the memo and the stakes in general felt higher.
But there is much to be gleaned from remembering how it once was. George Dudley, a photographer and artist who also served as the first director of New York City’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, documented scenes from pride parades in New York City from the late 1970s through the early ‘90s. His images of queer and trans people parading down the streets of Manhattan illustrate an ebullient and joyous atmosphere that feels not too dissimilar from scenes at pride parades today. The circumstances his subjects faced in their daily lives, however, were profoundly different.
Dudley made the photos in this collection during pride parades between 1976 and 1981. Unlike much of the publicly available photography taken at the first pride parade in 1970 and those that followed, these images were made not by a disinterested photojournalist but by someone deeply entrenched in the community. As a result, the photographs feel warm and intimate. They present the parade not as a newsworthy spectacle but as a gathering of people making themselves visible at a time when the world at large was not interested in seeing them.
https://time.com/longform/pride-parade-photos-1970s/
Time For Tee – T-Shirt Adverts From The Past
If a James Brown T Shirt is good enough for James Brown, then it’s good enough for us. However we’re not sure that wearing a Jethro Tull T shirt did drive girls wild with desire in the seventies.
Here we have a draw full of T shirts from the past. From a Drac-tastic Christopher Lee-Tee that you could wear to scare your friends to a T shirt that you could wear to show the world how much you love Weetabix.
http://www.voicesofeastanglia.com/2014/09/time-tee-t-shirt-adverts.html
Here we have a draw full of T shirts from the past. From a Drac-tastic Christopher Lee-Tee that you could wear to scare your friends to a T shirt that you could wear to show the world how much you love Weetabix.
http://www.voicesofeastanglia.com/2014/09/time-tee-t-shirt-adverts.html
Portraits of Gangs of Kabukicho, Tokyo in the 1960s and 1970s
Kabukicho is an entertainment and red-light district situated in the busy Tokyo area of Shinjuku. At night the streets are buzzing with neon lights, as the host and hostess bars and clubs come to life. Meanwhile, in the criminal underworld, around a thousand gangsters (Yakuza) are said to operate in the area, giving this spot the nickname the ‘Sleepless Town’.
During the 1960s and ’70s, one curious photographer named Watanabe Katsumi prowled the streets while taking pictures of Yakuza, the pimps and the prostitutes who called Kabukicho their home.
Watanabe made his living by selling these photographs to his subjects, offering three prints for 200 yen—roughly around a dollar back then. A modest gentleman, Watanabe had a keen sensitivity to the natural posturing of his subjects, which allowed them to uninhibitedly reveal their identities. He saw Kabukicho as a stage, and his photographs document the performers. Here is a collection of images from his volume titled The Gangs of Kabukicho.
https://www.vintag.es/2015/09/gangs-of-kabukicho-tokyo-in-1960s-and.html?m=1
During the 1960s and ’70s, one curious photographer named Watanabe Katsumi prowled the streets while taking pictures of Yakuza, the pimps and the prostitutes who called Kabukicho their home.
Watanabe made his living by selling these photographs to his subjects, offering three prints for 200 yen—roughly around a dollar back then. A modest gentleman, Watanabe had a keen sensitivity to the natural posturing of his subjects, which allowed them to uninhibitedly reveal their identities. He saw Kabukicho as a stage, and his photographs document the performers. Here is a collection of images from his volume titled The Gangs of Kabukicho.
https://www.vintag.es/2015/09/gangs-of-kabukicho-tokyo-in-1960s-and.html?m=1
Sylvia Rivera, Latinx stonewall activist, is getting a monument in New York
50 years later, the city apologizes to the pioneers of the LGBTQ revolution.
This coming June 28 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the seed of what is now celebrated as the Pride Parade and Pride Month.
It was in that bar in Greenwich, Manhattan (NY), that the first major civil rights protest by the LGBT+ community took place after the New York police made one of their usual raids against LGBT+ youth.
That night, the lead faces of the resistance against the police forces were two transgender activists: the African-American Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who had Latinx roots.
The two women were committed to social causes since they had experienced extreme poverty, lived on the streets of New York, and had suffered for most of their lives from violence, police abuse, and discrimination even within the gay community itself due to their skin color, cultural identity, and even their way of dressing.
Now, 50 years after the LGBT+ fight for equal rights started, the state of New York organized WorldPride throughout the month of June, to celebrate the diversity and commemorate all of those who fought in Stonewall.
As part of the celebration, the state of New York raised the pride flag in the State Capitol for the first time in history — a challenging action since Trump administration banned the rainbow flag in all the U.S. embassies around the world.
And while Trump also bans transgender people from serving their country in the Armed Forces, New York announced they will build two statues in honor of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.
https://aldianews.com/en/culture/heritage-and-history/ny-apologizes-sylvia
This coming June 28 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the seed of what is now celebrated as the Pride Parade and Pride Month.
It was in that bar in Greenwich, Manhattan (NY), that the first major civil rights protest by the LGBT+ community took place after the New York police made one of their usual raids against LGBT+ youth.
That night, the lead faces of the resistance against the police forces were two transgender activists: the African-American Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who had Latinx roots.
The two women were committed to social causes since they had experienced extreme poverty, lived on the streets of New York, and had suffered for most of their lives from violence, police abuse, and discrimination even within the gay community itself due to their skin color, cultural identity, and even their way of dressing.
Now, 50 years after the LGBT+ fight for equal rights started, the state of New York organized WorldPride throughout the month of June, to celebrate the diversity and commemorate all of those who fought in Stonewall.
As part of the celebration, the state of New York raised the pride flag in the State Capitol for the first time in history — a challenging action since Trump administration banned the rainbow flag in all the U.S. embassies around the world.
And while Trump also bans transgender people from serving their country in the Armed Forces, New York announced they will build two statues in honor of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.
https://aldianews.com/en/culture/heritage-and-history/ny-apologizes-sylvia
Hilarious Stock Photos From The 1970s
If you think that today's stock photos look staged or funny, wait till you see what they looked like in the 1970s! The photos by stock photo pioneer H. Armstrong Roberts give us a unique glimpse into the past. He founded one of the first major stock photography agencies in 1920, and it continues today under the name RobertStock.
https://www.boredpanda.com/1970-stock-photos-robert-armstrong/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=Newsletter
https://www.boredpanda.com/1970-stock-photos-robert-armstrong/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=Newsletter
The Great Blues Singer Gladys Bentley Broke All the Rules
For the Smithsonian’s Sidedoor podcast, host Haleema Shah tells the story of an unapologetically gay African-American performer in 1920s and 30s
Haleema Shah
March 14, 2019
In 1934, a midtown Manhattan nightclub called King’s Terrace was padlocked by the police after an observer complained of the “dirty songs” performed there.
The after-theater club near Broadway was where a troupe of “liberally painted male sepians with effeminate voices and gestures” performed behind entertainer Gladys Bentley, who was no less provocative for early 20th-century America. Performing in a signature white top hat, tuxedo and tails, Bentley sang raunchy songs laced with double-entendres that thrilled and scandalized her audiences.
And while the performance of what an observer called a “masculine garbed smut-singing entertainer” led to the shutdown of King’s Terrace, Bentley’s powerful voice, fiery energy on the piano and bold lyrics still made her a star of New York City nightclubs.
Her name doesn’t have the same recognition as many of her Harlem Renaissance peers, in part, because the risqué nature of her performances would have kept her out of mainstream venues, newspapers and history books. Today though, Bentley’s story is resurfacing and she is seen as an African-American woman who was ahead of her time for proudly loving other women, wearing men’s clothing and singing bawdy songs.
Years before Gladys Bentley performed in midtown Manhattan, she arrived in Harlem around 1925. After leaving her hometown of Philadelphia as a teenager, she arrived in New York during the Harlem Renaissance and was absorbed into a vibrant artistic and intellectual community.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/great-blues-singer-gladys-bentley-broke-rules-180971708/
Haleema Shah
March 14, 2019
In 1934, a midtown Manhattan nightclub called King’s Terrace was padlocked by the police after an observer complained of the “dirty songs” performed there.
The after-theater club near Broadway was where a troupe of “liberally painted male sepians with effeminate voices and gestures” performed behind entertainer Gladys Bentley, who was no less provocative for early 20th-century America. Performing in a signature white top hat, tuxedo and tails, Bentley sang raunchy songs laced with double-entendres that thrilled and scandalized her audiences.
And while the performance of what an observer called a “masculine garbed smut-singing entertainer” led to the shutdown of King’s Terrace, Bentley’s powerful voice, fiery energy on the piano and bold lyrics still made her a star of New York City nightclubs.
Her name doesn’t have the same recognition as many of her Harlem Renaissance peers, in part, because the risqué nature of her performances would have kept her out of mainstream venues, newspapers and history books. Today though, Bentley’s story is resurfacing and she is seen as an African-American woman who was ahead of her time for proudly loving other women, wearing men’s clothing and singing bawdy songs.
Years before Gladys Bentley performed in midtown Manhattan, she arrived in Harlem around 1925. After leaving her hometown of Philadelphia as a teenager, she arrived in New York during the Harlem Renaissance and was absorbed into a vibrant artistic and intellectual community.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/great-blues-singer-gladys-bentley-broke-rules-180971708/
Who Was Flo Kennedy? Learn All About the Fiery Black Feminist and Civil Rights Activist
Bridging the worlds of Black Power and Women’s Liberation, the flamboyant and fierce Florynce “Flo” Kennedy became a catalyst for change through her tireless activism and legal finesse.
02.09.2021 by Hannah Militano
Merging the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements, the vivacious, cause-driven activist and lawyer Florynce “Flo” Kennedy brought new meaning to intersectional feminism, embodying genuine inclusion like no one before her. Known for her incendiary wit and eccentric style, she was typically seen in her signature cowboy hats, playful peace sign earrings, and statement sunglasses as she spoke out against the discrimination and mistreatment of marginalized communities with a backbone that defied convention. Ahead of the late activist’s birthday this week, L’OFFICIEL looks back on the unsung feminist hero’s significant contributions to social justice.
As one of the first Black women to graduate from Columbia Law School in 1951, she didn’t get there without a fight. When she was initially refused admission by the university, she was assured that it was not due to her race, but to her gender. After threatening to sue, she was accepted and went on to be one of a mere eight women in her graduating class, and the only Black woman. She once wrote on the subject, “I find that the higher you aim, the better you shoot.”
Three years after graduating, Kennedy opened her own law firm, eventually representing jazz artists Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker to reclaim funds withheld by record companies. Although the attorney won her cases, she became disenchanted with practicing law, pondering the extent of its means to make an impact on society. Going on to represent civil rights leader H. Rap Brown and members of the Black Panther Party, Kennedy began to shift gears towards political activism. This transformation from corporate lawyer to political revolutionary came naturally to Kennedy, who, in her youth, once organized a boycott against a Coca-Cola bottler who refused to hire Black drivers.
By 1966, the activist founded the Media Workshop as a means to combat racism in advertising and journalism. Implementing her legal finesse, Kennedy went as far as filing a lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Church for interfering with women’s reproductive rights. Shortly after, she organized a faction of feminist lawyers to challenge whether or not New York State’s abortion laws were constitutional, causing a more progressive shift in the law the following year. Also known for coordinating less conventional demonstrations, Kennedy is credited with spearheading the “Great Harvard Pee-In of 1973” where protestors poured jars of their urine on the steps of the university’s historic Lowell Hall to call attention to its lack of female restrooms.
In 1971, the renegade founded the Feminist Party, which would go on to back the pivotal Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm for president. Lecturing across the country with speaking partner Gloria Steinem, Kennedy was known for bringing white feminists to Black power conventions, integrating the movements of Black Power, Women’s Liberation, and gay rights, to work together as one, bringing new perspectives to a variety of intersectional issues.
A founding member of the National Organization for Women and the National Black Feminist Organization, People magazine once dubbed the political pioneer, “the biggest, loudest and, indisputably, the rudest mouth on the battleground” of progessive causes. During press conferences with Steinem, Kennedy would always call into question why reporters would relegate questions on women’s rights to Steinem, and questions regarding racial discrimination to herself, noting their divisive nature. Whenever the two were posed with the ignorant question of whether or not they were lesbians, simply because they were two women speaking out for gender equality, Kennedy would quip back, “Are you my alternative?”
https://www.lofficielusa.com/politics-culture/who-was-florynce-flo-kennedy-black-feminist-activist
When Glamour Shots Gone Wrong: 35 Hilarious Studio Portrait Photos From the 1980s and 1990s
Who can forget Glamour Shots- that huge (albeit scary) trend of the '90s- feathers, soft lighting, huge hair, overdone makeup, and lots of satin gloves. Glamour Shots were dominated by big hair and bare shoulders, and in an era of way too much hairspray and truly horrible prom dresses, it was hard to look good. They offer anyone a chance to look as glamorous as a movie star, however the results of these "make-over" sessions are often unintentionally hilarious
https://www.vintag.es/2017/03/when-glamour-shots-gone-wrong-10.html?m=1
Who can forget Glamour Shots- that huge (albeit scary) trend of the '90s- feathers, soft lighting, huge hair, overdone makeup, and lots of satin gloves.
Glamour Shots were dominated by big hair and bare shoulders, and in an era of way too much hairspray and truly horrible prom dresses, it was hard to look good. They offer anyone a chance to look as glamorous as a movie star, however the results of these "make-over" sessions are often unintentionally hilarious!
https://www.vintag.es/2017/03/when-glamour-shots-gone-wrong-10.html?m=1
Who can forget Glamour Shots- that huge (albeit scary) trend of the '90s- feathers, soft lighting, huge hair, overdone makeup, and lots of satin gloves.
Glamour Shots were dominated by big hair and bare shoulders, and in an era of way too much hairspray and truly horrible prom dresses, it was hard to look good. They offer anyone a chance to look as glamorous as a movie star, however the results of these "make-over" sessions are often unintentionally hilarious!
The Good, The Bad, and Mostly, The Ugly: 35 Awkward Olan Mills Photos From the 1970s and 1980s
Remember the bad photos you got from Olan Mills and other photography studios back in the 1970s and ’80s? What background would you use? The autumn leaves, the southern grove or the fake library with all the books, that was the worst
https://www.vintag.es/2017/01/the-good-bad-and-mostly-ugly-35-awkward.html?m=1
https://www.vintag.es/2017/01/the-good-bad-and-mostly-ugly-35-awkward.html?m=1
1970s Lee Jeans Lion Head Adverts
ON 1970S LEE JEANS LION HEAD ADVERTS
“Lee can change your image” they certainly can, especially if you’re wearing a huge scary lion mask. These six adverts come from an advertising campaign from the Jeans company in 1971. We’re not sure where the idea for the adverts came from, however we guess it must of been an interesting day at the office when they came up with the idea.
http://www.voicesofeastanglia.com/2012/05/1970s-lee-jeans-lion-head-adverts.html
“Lee can change your image” they certainly can, especially if you’re wearing a huge scary lion mask. These six adverts come from an advertising campaign from the Jeans company in 1971. We’re not sure where the idea for the adverts came from, however we guess it must of been an interesting day at the office when they came up with the idea.
http://www.voicesofeastanglia.com/2012/05/1970s-lee-jeans-lion-head-adverts.html
Baby Huey – Listen to Me
Modern music is littered with tales of bands who never quite realised the success they were due and arguably most of the records played on the Rare Soul scene are the sound of broken dreams; recording artists who started off with high hopes but were denied commercial success for one reason or another. Here we are going to look at an artist and band who never had massive commercial success at the time but have since been sampled over 70 times and have become a huge part of hip-hop folklore.
The Baby Huey Story: The Living Legend is an album released in 1971 on Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom label (named after label owners Curtis Mayfield and Eddie Thomas the manager of Mayfield’s band The Impressions) but which never troubled the charts and sunk without trace only to be rediscovered years later by the nascent hip-hop scene and has since been sampled across dozens of releases. The story leading up to the release of the album is one we wanted to share and is ultimately one of broken dreams.
Baby Huey started life in Richmond, Indiana in August 1944 as James Thomas Ramey. His early years are unremarkable except for suffering from a glandular disorder that seriously affected his weight to such an extent that he weighed 25 stone (350 pounds) when he was in his late teens.
In 1962, 18 year old James Ramey moved to Chicago and adopted the stage name Baby Huey (an enormous and naïve cartoon duckling popular in the US during the 1950s). He hooked up with guitarist Johnny Ross and keyboard maestro (and trumpeter) Melvyn ‘Deacon’ Jones and the trio started a band calling themselves Baby Huey and the Babysitters. The band became popular on the local Chicago live music scene with their energetic performances making them stand out. It was said Baby Huey could move on-stage like James Brown which is no mean feat for anyone let alone someone of his size. In addition, he was by all accounts, a really good band leader in terms of controlling and organising the band. They managed four single releases in the early 60s – ‘Beg Me’, ‘Monkey Man’, ‘Messin’ with the Kid’ and ‘Just Being Careful’. The band though were more noted for their live performances and with Baby Huey’s impressive (and barefoot!) stage presence they stood out as an exciting and mesmerising live band.
http://www.voicesofeastanglia.com/2020/09/baby-huey-listen-to-me.html
The Baby Huey Story: The Living Legend is an album released in 1971 on Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom label (named after label owners Curtis Mayfield and Eddie Thomas the manager of Mayfield’s band The Impressions) but which never troubled the charts and sunk without trace only to be rediscovered years later by the nascent hip-hop scene and has since been sampled across dozens of releases. The story leading up to the release of the album is one we wanted to share and is ultimately one of broken dreams.
Baby Huey started life in Richmond, Indiana in August 1944 as James Thomas Ramey. His early years are unremarkable except for suffering from a glandular disorder that seriously affected his weight to such an extent that he weighed 25 stone (350 pounds) when he was in his late teens.
In 1962, 18 year old James Ramey moved to Chicago and adopted the stage name Baby Huey (an enormous and naïve cartoon duckling popular in the US during the 1950s). He hooked up with guitarist Johnny Ross and keyboard maestro (and trumpeter) Melvyn ‘Deacon’ Jones and the trio started a band calling themselves Baby Huey and the Babysitters. The band became popular on the local Chicago live music scene with their energetic performances making them stand out. It was said Baby Huey could move on-stage like James Brown which is no mean feat for anyone let alone someone of his size. In addition, he was by all accounts, a really good band leader in terms of controlling and organising the band. They managed four single releases in the early 60s – ‘Beg Me’, ‘Monkey Man’, ‘Messin’ with the Kid’ and ‘Just Being Careful’. The band though were more noted for their live performances and with Baby Huey’s impressive (and barefoot!) stage presence they stood out as an exciting and mesmerising live band.
http://www.voicesofeastanglia.com/2020/09/baby-huey-listen-to-me.html
FRANK ZAPPA, SERIAL KI$#ERS AND THE ALL-GIRL DANCE TROUPE L.A. KNOCKERS
I’ve learned many things here writing for Dangerous Minds—one that there is always more to a picture than meets the eye. Which is why I took it upon myself to find out more about mid-70s all-girl dance troupe/cabaret act, L.A. Knockers. Their act was a fan favorite in the Los Angeles club scene where you could find the girls performing at The Starwood, The Troubadour, The Comedy Store, The Matrix Theater, and the Playboy Club. The shows curated exclusively for the Playboy Club included a strange sounding sixed-up comedic version of a 1978 medley by The Village People, “The Women” featuring members of the Knockers dressed as John Travolta (in Saturday Night Fever mode), Dracula, Superman, King Kong and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. And that was just for starters.
The members of L.A. Knockers would grow through the dozen or so years they were together and they performed all over the country to packed houses, but most often in Las Vegas and Reno. Knockers’ principal choreographer Jennifer Stace would bring the dance-magic to the group as did choreographer, Marilyn Corwin. Corwin worked her disco moves with The Village People, for the movie, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984) and with Frank Zappa during some of his live performances. The Knockers caught the eye of Zappa, who, according to an article published in 1981 in Italian magazine L’Espresso, wanted to take the Knockers on tour with him, a claim that perhaps at first sounded like it had no legs, but it much like the Knockers, actually did. On New Year’s Eve in 1976, Zappa played a show at the Forum in Los Angeles which included members of the L.A. Knockers dressed like babies in diapers and white afro wigs. Hey, even Frank Zappa thought they were cool as f, which, without question, they were.
Any story worth reading must include a twist, and this is where the part about the Hillside Stranglers, the horrific serial killers and cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, comes in. Twenty-one-year-old Lissa Kastin, an original member of L.A. Knockers would become Bianchi and Buono’s third victim. In 1985’s The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O’Brien, the author notes that Kastin was not “an attractive enough victim” for the degenerate cousins who were put off by her “health nut looks” and “unshaved legs.” In some true crime circles, Kastin would be referred to as “the ugly girl” among the Hillside Stranglers’ female body count thanks to a photo used by the newspapers—an image that looked almost nothing like the young, rising star.
Below are some incredible photos taken by Elisa Leonelli which lovingly chronicle the L.A. Knockers’ decade-plus career in showbiz as well as a compilation video of the troupe performing live which you simply must see. Some of the images which follow are slightly NSFW.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/frank_zappa_serial_killers_and_the_all-girl_dance_troupe_l.a._knockers?utm_source=Dangerous+Minds+newsletter&utm_campaign=98ef0d49e8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ecada8d328-98ef0d49e8-65873885
The members of L.A. Knockers would grow through the dozen or so years they were together and they performed all over the country to packed houses, but most often in Las Vegas and Reno. Knockers’ principal choreographer Jennifer Stace would bring the dance-magic to the group as did choreographer, Marilyn Corwin. Corwin worked her disco moves with The Village People, for the movie, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984) and with Frank Zappa during some of his live performances. The Knockers caught the eye of Zappa, who, according to an article published in 1981 in Italian magazine L’Espresso, wanted to take the Knockers on tour with him, a claim that perhaps at first sounded like it had no legs, but it much like the Knockers, actually did. On New Year’s Eve in 1976, Zappa played a show at the Forum in Los Angeles which included members of the L.A. Knockers dressed like babies in diapers and white afro wigs. Hey, even Frank Zappa thought they were cool as f, which, without question, they were.
Any story worth reading must include a twist, and this is where the part about the Hillside Stranglers, the horrific serial killers and cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, comes in. Twenty-one-year-old Lissa Kastin, an original member of L.A. Knockers would become Bianchi and Buono’s third victim. In 1985’s The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O’Brien, the author notes that Kastin was not “an attractive enough victim” for the degenerate cousins who were put off by her “health nut looks” and “unshaved legs.” In some true crime circles, Kastin would be referred to as “the ugly girl” among the Hillside Stranglers’ female body count thanks to a photo used by the newspapers—an image that looked almost nothing like the young, rising star.
Below are some incredible photos taken by Elisa Leonelli which lovingly chronicle the L.A. Knockers’ decade-plus career in showbiz as well as a compilation video of the troupe performing live which you simply must see. Some of the images which follow are slightly NSFW.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/frank_zappa_serial_killers_and_the_all-girl_dance_troupe_l.a._knockers?utm_source=Dangerous+Minds+newsletter&utm_campaign=98ef0d49e8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ecada8d328-98ef0d49e8-65873885
How punk and reggae fought back against racism in the 70s
Syd Shelton’s photographs capture the Rock Against Racism movement that confronted racism in 70s and 80s Britain.
BY
STUART BRUMFITT
When Syd Shelton returned to London in 1977 after fours years living in Australia, he was shocked at how much things had changed. "The recession had really hit and the Callaghan government had attacked living standards for working people - very similar to what's happening right now," he explains. "Whenever that happens, there's always a rise of something like the National Front." Syd was desperate to fight against the hatred and was lucky to meet one of campaign group Rock Against Racism's founders, Red Saunders. Before long he was their unofficial photographer and designer for their newspaper/zine Temporary Hoarding. With an exhibition of his work from that period opening up at Rivington Place next month, we caught up with Syd to hear about some of Britain's most tribal and transformative times.
https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/ywv3mb/how-punk-and-reggae-fought-back-against-racism-in-the-70s
BY
STUART BRUMFITT
When Syd Shelton returned to London in 1977 after fours years living in Australia, he was shocked at how much things had changed. "The recession had really hit and the Callaghan government had attacked living standards for working people - very similar to what's happening right now," he explains. "Whenever that happens, there's always a rise of something like the National Front." Syd was desperate to fight against the hatred and was lucky to meet one of campaign group Rock Against Racism's founders, Red Saunders. Before long he was their unofficial photographer and designer for their newspaper/zine Temporary Hoarding. With an exhibition of his work from that period opening up at Rivington Place next month, we caught up with Syd to hear about some of Britain's most tribal and transformative times.
https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/ywv3mb/how-punk-and-reggae-fought-back-against-racism-in-the-70s
Vintage High School Photos of Celebrities
William Dorsey Swann - First Drag Queen
It’s a little before 11 PM on April 12th, 1888 in downtown Washington DC. President Grover Cleveland has just finished up a speech on what will become American Somoa, his wife Frances is already asleep, and, four blocks east, at the intersection of F and 12th Street, thirty Black, gay men are having a party. It’s William Dorsey Swann’s thirtieth birthday, or “The Queen,” as her friends call her drag persona, and everyone has come in their finest silks. Swann leads the dancing. His friends, near nude, sing along, but all reverie comes to a halt when the DC police show up. Before cops can get in, The Queen throws herself in front of the door, barricading the entrance and resisting arrest. Her terrified friends flee through the back or throw themselves out second-story windows. When all is over, twelve have been taken in, including Swann, and up to four hundred people have risen out of bed to gawk at these men in long wigs as they’re marched down to the police station. Their names will be pu
blished in the paper tomorrow, but journalists will bear no mention of how Swann has just become the first person to take physical action in the name of queer liberation. She has begun a hundred-years long legacy of queer activists, all building off the back of The Queen as she stands in the doorway, protecting her loved ones, yelling “you is no gentleman.”
F and 12th is a Walgreens now, but before the superstore, before Stonewall, before Rupaul publicly decimated Jimmy Fallon for calling him a drag queen, there was William Dorsey Swann, the very first “Queen of Drag.” Born around 1858, the fifth of thirteen children, Swann began his life enslaved on a plantation in Hancock, Maryland. After the Emancipation Act of 1862, Swann’s family purchased a farm in Washington County. Migrating toward DC in the 1880s, Swann carved out a community for himself, all Black, gay men, many drag artists, but Swann was the architect, the first to give “drag queens” their name.
During this time, female impersonation was seen as an offshoot of blackface minstrel shows. Audience members could easily make the jump from mocking Black men to mocking Black women, and White men were known to dress up as African American women and perform “wench” songs. So it’s particularly noteworthy that Swann, a Black man, would have such power over the styles of a genre largely dedicated to perpetrating racist stereotypes against him. He designed costumes for iconic DC drag queens like Alden Garrison and Louise “Mother” Diggs.
Swann’s drag balls took place at members’ houses, many of whom worked for wealthy White families during the day. Because he suspected informants within the scene, the venue would often change at the last minute, and invites were given out in secret at the local YMCA. Raids were a constant in the DC drag scene.
https://www.messynessychic.com/2022/07/24/born-into-slavery-she-became-the-first-queen-of-drag/
blished in the paper tomorrow, but journalists will bear no mention of how Swann has just become the first person to take physical action in the name of queer liberation. She has begun a hundred-years long legacy of queer activists, all building off the back of The Queen as she stands in the doorway, protecting her loved ones, yelling “you is no gentleman.”
F and 12th is a Walgreens now, but before the superstore, before Stonewall, before Rupaul publicly decimated Jimmy Fallon for calling him a drag queen, there was William Dorsey Swann, the very first “Queen of Drag.” Born around 1858, the fifth of thirteen children, Swann began his life enslaved on a plantation in Hancock, Maryland. After the Emancipation Act of 1862, Swann’s family purchased a farm in Washington County. Migrating toward DC in the 1880s, Swann carved out a community for himself, all Black, gay men, many drag artists, but Swann was the architect, the first to give “drag queens” their name.
During this time, female impersonation was seen as an offshoot of blackface minstrel shows. Audience members could easily make the jump from mocking Black men to mocking Black women, and White men were known to dress up as African American women and perform “wench” songs. So it’s particularly noteworthy that Swann, a Black man, would have such power over the styles of a genre largely dedicated to perpetrating racist stereotypes against him. He designed costumes for iconic DC drag queens like Alden Garrison and Louise “Mother” Diggs.
Swann’s drag balls took place at members’ houses, many of whom worked for wealthy White families during the day. Because he suspected informants within the scene, the venue would often change at the last minute, and invites were given out in secret at the local YMCA. Raids were a constant in the DC drag scene.
https://www.messynessychic.com/2022/07/24/born-into-slavery-she-became-the-first-queen-of-drag/
45 Crazy Covers From “Hara Kiri”, the Magazine So ‘Stupid and Nasty’ That Was Banned by the French Government
In 1960, Georges Bernier and François Cavanna created the monthly satirical magazine Hara Kiri. The magazine, specifically the covers, are insane. Art directed by Fred Aristidès, it’s perverse, bizarre and still shocking fifty years on.
The magazine was one of a few magazines published back in the early 1960s that helped further along the proliferation of adult-oriented satire magazines like its American counterparts MAD and National Lampoon. Since the European outlook on humor was, let’s say, much more “open-minded” than in the U.S., Hara Kiri was able to blaze a trail bound straight for the gutter when it came to its unique brand of depraved comedic imagery.
Hara-Kiri editions, subtitled “Journal bête et méchant” (“Stupid and nasty newspaper”), were constantly aiming at established powers, be they political parties or institutions like the Church or the State. In 1961 and 1966 the monthly magazine was temporarily banned by the French government.
https://www.vintag.es/2018/08/hara-kiri-covers.html?m=1
Take a look back at Chicago's Tri-Taylor neighbourhood in 1971
Take a look back at Chicago's Tri-Taylor neighbourhood in 1971
Jack Whatley
TUE 11TH DEC 2018
Chicago has long been infamous for gang culture and crime, from Al Capone to the present day the second city has often been riddled with violence and fear. But what can sometimes be missed is the humanity between those flashing moments of infamy.
One such place which battled this juxtaposing seem which tied up the city was the Tri-Taylor neighbourhood. Located on Chicago’s Near West Side the area was famed for its gang culture which existed not only in the wealth of poverty but in the throes of gang turbulence.
In 1971, just a short time before the area was due to be demolished one man took his camera around the dangerous streets and captured is joy, its despair, and its life.
Lou Fourcher was a graduate student in 1971 as he took to the streets armed with his camera while participating in the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Valley Project. His son, Mike, reported to Lee Bey: “He was a fish out of water in this neighbourhood,” Flashbak points out. “He told me many times that he got most of the pictures because he managed to talk a local gang leader into walking him around. I think the work he did at the clinic, the Valley Project, was an inspiration for him, since he later went on to run non-profit health , like Erie Family Health Center in Humboldt Park and New City Health Center in Englewood.”
Take a look at some revealing images of an area that most people would know as simply ‘The Valley’.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/take-a-look-back-at-chicagos-tri-taylor-neighbourhood-in-1971/?amp
Jack Whatley
TUE 11TH DEC 2018
Chicago has long been infamous for gang culture and crime, from Al Capone to the present day the second city has often been riddled with violence and fear. But what can sometimes be missed is the humanity between those flashing moments of infamy.
One such place which battled this juxtaposing seem which tied up the city was the Tri-Taylor neighbourhood. Located on Chicago’s Near West Side the area was famed for its gang culture which existed not only in the wealth of poverty but in the throes of gang turbulence.
In 1971, just a short time before the area was due to be demolished one man took his camera around the dangerous streets and captured is joy, its despair, and its life.
Lou Fourcher was a graduate student in 1971 as he took to the streets armed with his camera while participating in the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Valley Project. His son, Mike, reported to Lee Bey: “He was a fish out of water in this neighbourhood,” Flashbak points out. “He told me many times that he got most of the pictures because he managed to talk a local gang leader into walking him around. I think the work he did at the clinic, the Valley Project, was an inspiration for him, since he later went on to run non-profit health , like Erie Family Health Center in Humboldt Park and New City Health Center in Englewood.”
Take a look at some revealing images of an area that most people would know as simply ‘The Valley’.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/take-a-look-back-at-chicagos-tri-taylor-neighbourhood-in-1971/?amp
100+ Vintage Japanese Movie Monsters That Will BLOW YOU AWAY With Their Fabulousness
BY JAMES ST. JAMES ON AUGUST 20, 2018 12:18 PM
I don’t know, I don;t know… You could pair ANY of these outfits with a stunty little wig and some 301s and you’ve got a FABULOUS look for DragConNYC… Just sayin’.
https://www.sadanduseless.com/oldschool-monster-parade/
I don’t know, I don;t know… You could pair ANY of these outfits with a stunty little wig and some 301s and you’ve got a FABULOUS look for DragConNYC… Just sayin’.
https://www.sadanduseless.com/oldschool-monster-parade/
From 'Dreamgirls' to 'Abbot Elementary,' Sheryl Lee Ralph isn't leaving the spotlight
From 'Dreamgirls' to 'Abbot Elementary,' Sheryl Lee Ralph isn't leaving the spotlight
March 23, 20234:37 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
By
Megan Lim
Ashley Brown
Juana Summers
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
She was the first to play the role of Deena Jones in the original production of "Dreamgirls" on Broadway...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DREAMGIRLS")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As The Dreams, singing) We're your dreamgirls. Boys, we'll make you happy.
SUMMERS: ...The second Black woman to win an Emmy for supporting actress in a comedy...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SHERYL LEE RALPH: I am here to tell you that this is what believing looks like. This is what striving looks like. And don't you ever, ever give up on you.
SUMMERS: ...And earlier this year, the third to perform "Lift Every Voice And Sing" at the Super Bowl.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RALPH: (Singing) Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
SUMMERS: It's kind of hard to imagine that about 15 years ago, actor and singer Sheryl Lee Ralph had considered walking away from show business. Opportunities had seemed to dry up. She was focusing on her family life. But then she tells the story about a chance run-in with a casting director who told her to get back in the game and remember who she is.
RALPH: You know, the reason I tell people you've got to believe in yourself is for that time, I stopped believing in me. I stopped believing in my ability.
SUMMERS: I spoke to Sheryl Lee Ralph about how she rediscovered her ability and where it's led her, starting with how it felt to perform at the Super Bowl live.
RALPH: Oh, my God. First of all, it's like being in the Colosseum. This is like being in the middle of this massive gathering of human beings and just them, the 70,000 of them in that one space. There's almost a deafening din, you know, that sound. And I got up there and sang my song. And I loved the moment. I loved the moment.
SUMMERS: You know, I was a bit surprised to hear you talk about almost stepping away from the business in the early 2000s. I mean, I'm in my 30s. And I have to say, you were a primetime TV staple for people like me and my friends as Dee Mitchell, the mother to Brandy's character on "Moesha" for six seasons. So I'd love to know a bit more about what made you consider stepping out of the spotlight then.
RALPH: You know what? It's so - it was so strange. I had gone through a divorce, and I was definitely going through that, and my children - you know, you want to keep your children stable. And for some reason, after "Moesha," things just kind of slowed down. And I thought, well, you know, maybe this is where I quit. And, you know, I'll be that person, you know, the one that used to be. And I had that fateful run-in with the casting director who said, you know, you've obviously forgotten who you are. And I was really - I was like, wow. Wow. But the moment I doubled down and started to believe in myself and dreamed bigger dreams for myself and put in the work towards making those things happen, wow, everything is very different, very different.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/12/1121995938/sheryl-lee-ralph-abbot-elementary-emmy-dreamgirls
March 23, 20234:37 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
By
Megan Lim
Ashley Brown
Juana Summers
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
She was the first to play the role of Deena Jones in the original production of "Dreamgirls" on Broadway...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DREAMGIRLS")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As The Dreams, singing) We're your dreamgirls. Boys, we'll make you happy.
SUMMERS: ...The second Black woman to win an Emmy for supporting actress in a comedy...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SHERYL LEE RALPH: I am here to tell you that this is what believing looks like. This is what striving looks like. And don't you ever, ever give up on you.
SUMMERS: ...And earlier this year, the third to perform "Lift Every Voice And Sing" at the Super Bowl.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RALPH: (Singing) Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
SUMMERS: It's kind of hard to imagine that about 15 years ago, actor and singer Sheryl Lee Ralph had considered walking away from show business. Opportunities had seemed to dry up. She was focusing on her family life. But then she tells the story about a chance run-in with a casting director who told her to get back in the game and remember who she is.
RALPH: You know, the reason I tell people you've got to believe in yourself is for that time, I stopped believing in me. I stopped believing in my ability.
SUMMERS: I spoke to Sheryl Lee Ralph about how she rediscovered her ability and where it's led her, starting with how it felt to perform at the Super Bowl live.
RALPH: Oh, my God. First of all, it's like being in the Colosseum. This is like being in the middle of this massive gathering of human beings and just them, the 70,000 of them in that one space. There's almost a deafening din, you know, that sound. And I got up there and sang my song. And I loved the moment. I loved the moment.
SUMMERS: You know, I was a bit surprised to hear you talk about almost stepping away from the business in the early 2000s. I mean, I'm in my 30s. And I have to say, you were a primetime TV staple for people like me and my friends as Dee Mitchell, the mother to Brandy's character on "Moesha" for six seasons. So I'd love to know a bit more about what made you consider stepping out of the spotlight then.
RALPH: You know what? It's so - it was so strange. I had gone through a divorce, and I was definitely going through that, and my children - you know, you want to keep your children stable. And for some reason, after "Moesha," things just kind of slowed down. And I thought, well, you know, maybe this is where I quit. And, you know, I'll be that person, you know, the one that used to be. And I had that fateful run-in with the casting director who said, you know, you've obviously forgotten who you are. And I was really - I was like, wow. Wow. But the moment I doubled down and started to believe in myself and dreamed bigger dreams for myself and put in the work towards making those things happen, wow, everything is very different, very different.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/12/1121995938/sheryl-lee-ralph-abbot-elementary-emmy-dreamgirls
Stars With Cars
Was Diane Arbus the Most Radical Photographer of the 20th Century?
A new biography and Met exhibit show how she sacrificed her marriage, her friendships, and eventually her life for her career as an artist living on the edge.
By Alex Mar
In 1956, Diane Arbus was 33 but still child-faced and quiet, girlish in a pageboy cut and Peter Pan collars. She was married to the man she’d met at 13 in Russeks, the massive fur store: Diane, the daughter of the wealthy Jewish owners, growing up on Central Park West; Allan, the city-college dropout five years her senior, working a menial job in the shop’s ad department. The pair had since transformed themselves into a duo of fashion photographers, shooting for magazines from Vogue to Harper’s Bazaar for nearly a decade. In a series for Glamour dubbed “Mr. and Mrs. Inc.,” they were profiled as an adorable working couple: The accompanying image shows Allan staring straight at the viewer, while Diane, her hair curled into a flip, eyes downcast, leans her head against his cheek. After long hours in the studio, she’d hurry home to cook dinner for her husband and their two young daughters.
But Diane was growing dissatisfied. She dreamt up the concepts for their shoots — then spent her days handling the models, pinning their clothes in place, a role even Allan admitted was “demeaning.” Besides, she’d begun asking herself, what could she possibly learn by posing a person in borrowed clothes, inserting them as a human fill-in-the-blank into some art director’s fantasy?
Allan had given his wife her first camera after their honeymoon, and slowly, steadily, Diane was developing an independent relationship to photography. She wanted to work in a more intimate way, far less tame and composed. On one assignment that spring, after a day spent posing little girls on a swing set for Vogue, Diane stepped back. Raising her voice only slightly, she made an announcement: “I can’t do it anymore. I’m not going to do it anymore.” She was done with the contained environment of the studio; she needed to move out into the world.
Diane committed herself to wandering New York City with her 35mm Nikon, following strangers down the street or lying in wait in doorways until she saw someone she felt compelled to photograph. This was the onset of a lifelong addiction to experience, which would feed her and consume her in equal measure. Around this time, she asked her husband to develop a roll of film, and she labeled the negatives’ glassine sleeve with a fine black marker: “#1.”
We label things in private as a promise to ourselves. We number things as an act of imagination — not unlike the way the Dutch mapped a grid of 12 avenues and 155 streets onto the mostly empty island of Manhattan. #1 — the beginning of something.
https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/diane-arbus-c-v-r.html
By Alex Mar
In 1956, Diane Arbus was 33 but still child-faced and quiet, girlish in a pageboy cut and Peter Pan collars. She was married to the man she’d met at 13 in Russeks, the massive fur store: Diane, the daughter of the wealthy Jewish owners, growing up on Central Park West; Allan, the city-college dropout five years her senior, working a menial job in the shop’s ad department. The pair had since transformed themselves into a duo of fashion photographers, shooting for magazines from Vogue to Harper’s Bazaar for nearly a decade. In a series for Glamour dubbed “Mr. and Mrs. Inc.,” they were profiled as an adorable working couple: The accompanying image shows Allan staring straight at the viewer, while Diane, her hair curled into a flip, eyes downcast, leans her head against his cheek. After long hours in the studio, she’d hurry home to cook dinner for her husband and their two young daughters.
But Diane was growing dissatisfied. She dreamt up the concepts for their shoots — then spent her days handling the models, pinning their clothes in place, a role even Allan admitted was “demeaning.” Besides, she’d begun asking herself, what could she possibly learn by posing a person in borrowed clothes, inserting them as a human fill-in-the-blank into some art director’s fantasy?
Allan had given his wife her first camera after their honeymoon, and slowly, steadily, Diane was developing an independent relationship to photography. She wanted to work in a more intimate way, far less tame and composed. On one assignment that spring, after a day spent posing little girls on a swing set for Vogue, Diane stepped back. Raising her voice only slightly, she made an announcement: “I can’t do it anymore. I’m not going to do it anymore.” She was done with the contained environment of the studio; she needed to move out into the world.
Diane committed herself to wandering New York City with her 35mm Nikon, following strangers down the street or lying in wait in doorways until she saw someone she felt compelled to photograph. This was the onset of a lifelong addiction to experience, which would feed her and consume her in equal measure. Around this time, she asked her husband to develop a roll of film, and she labeled the negatives’ glassine sleeve with a fine black marker: “#1.”
We label things in private as a promise to ourselves. We number things as an act of imagination — not unlike the way the Dutch mapped a grid of 12 avenues and 155 streets onto the mostly empty island of Manhattan. #1 — the beginning of something.
https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/diane-arbus-c-v-r.html
Kira Roessler – Bass Player, Roadie, Fan, Academy Award Winner
Kira Roessler might not view herself as a groundbreaker and even downplays the fact that she has been paving the way for women in male-dominated fields for most of her adult life. She is a bass player, singer, and songwriter and is best known for her work with Black Flag and Dos. During the period that she was the bass player for Black Flag, she was also attending UCLA and majoring in Economics and Engineering. She has since gone on to become an Emmy Award-winning dialogue editor and part of an Oscar-winning team.
Kira was born in Connecticut and started taking classical piano lessons at six years old. Her older brother Paul also took lessons, and being three years older than Kira was better. Kira, who is competitive, became frustrated and quit.
When Kira was 14, her brother’s progressive rock band lost their bass player, and Kira was determined to replace him. She was able to borrow a bass and practiced 6-10 hours a day (six on school days and ten on weekends). She even kept a log. She was never good enough, but when she was 15, Paul discovered punk rock through friends of his who were in a band called The Germs. So she followed Paul into the vortex.
Kira and her brother moved into a house with a garage converted into a rehearsal space. They jammed with people and started their own punk rock band. They went to gigs and met other people who played. Kira’s first gig was at age 16 at the Whisky A Go-Go. By the time Kira joined Black Flag in 1983 (replacing founding member Chuck Dukowski), she had played in several bands in Los Angeles.
When Kira joined Black Flag, she had already completed three years of her BS degree at UCLA. She informed the band that she needed to finish, but that she would take quarters off school to tour. It took her two years to complete her last year at UCLA because Black Flag did four US tours and one European tour in ’84 and ’85. It was madness. Kira would literally get dropped off from the tour at UCLA for classes. It seemed like every time the band was recording; she was studying for midterms or finals. So when she would drop to the floor exhausted from playing, she would get the books out.
As with many musicians on the road, Kira faced some difficulties. The hardest part about the touring for her was her right hand. She suffered an injury a week into joining Black Flag that never really healed. When the gigs were over, you could find her backstage with her hand in an ice bucket. She never let the injury stop her, but it certainly made her grumpy at times. The second hardest part of touring for Kira was the feeling that life is going on without you back home and the lack of stability. Relationships of any sort were affected, and there was no ‘home’ when she got back. She concludes this is why she’s a relative “homebody” now.
Kira’s tenure and life on the road with Black Flag ended with the 1985 tour. With only two gigs left on the tour, she called home and found out that a tour had been scheduled in the fall concurrently when she was to be attending UCLA to complete her degree. She knew at that point that she was going to be asked to leave. When the band returned home, she was indeed asked to leave.
Kira was featured on five of Black Flag’s studio albums. She left the band at the conclusion of In My Head Tour and graduated from UCLA in 1986. After Black Flag, she went on to form the two-bass duo Dos with Mike Watt, whom she was married to from ‘87 – ‘92. She contributed songs to the Minutemen’s final album and now works as a dialog editor, recently being part of an Oscar-winning sound editing team for work on Mad Max: Fury Road.
https://soundgirls.org/kira-roessler/
You May Be Cool but You’ll never be Cordell Jackson “the Rockin’ Granny” Cool
BY MESSYNESSY
NOVEMBER 21, 2018
Somewhere in between Willie Nelson and Jimi Hendrix was Cordell Jackson, an American musician thought to be the first woman to produce, engineer, arrange and promote music on her own rock and roll music label. She was making music reminiscent of the Velvet Underground before the world was even introduced to rock & roll. The Mississippi-born, ballgown-wearing guitarist played with more energy than any Indie band worth their salt today, and during live performances, Cordell would strum on her guitar so fast that she would often break her guitar picks by the end of the song. At the height of her career, she appeared on David Letterman and MTV news and became known as “rock-and-roll granny”.
Jackson started playing the guitar at the age of 12 in a bible belt town where “girls didn’t play guitar”. She began writing her own songs in her 20s after moving to Memphis, the capital of rock & roll. “They didn’t have a name for “rock & roll then”, Cordell later told MTV news in 1989. “I just always played it fast”.
In the 1960s and ’70s, she worked with local artists, dipping into gospel and releasing a compilation album of her ’50s rock recordings. In 1983 she came out with an instrumental LP on her label, Moon Records, called “Knockin’ Sixty.” Jackson became something of an icon on the Memphis music scene. She lived in a yellow house and drove a yellow car and opened up her house for tours every summer. Her first music video, which helped her gain nationwide fame, was filmed at that very house.
Jackson’s Moon Records label was the oldest continuously operating label in Memphis at the time of her death in 2004. It’s never too late to rock out with this forgotten music legend, so give Cordell Jackson a search– you can find her on Spotify, Apple Music and all the other major platforms. She plays from her soul and is … how shall we say– the bomb-diggity.
https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/11/21/you-may-be-cool-but-youll-never-be-cordell-jackson-the-rockin-granny-cool/
NOVEMBER 21, 2018
Somewhere in between Willie Nelson and Jimi Hendrix was Cordell Jackson, an American musician thought to be the first woman to produce, engineer, arrange and promote music on her own rock and roll music label. She was making music reminiscent of the Velvet Underground before the world was even introduced to rock & roll. The Mississippi-born, ballgown-wearing guitarist played with more energy than any Indie band worth their salt today, and during live performances, Cordell would strum on her guitar so fast that she would often break her guitar picks by the end of the song. At the height of her career, she appeared on David Letterman and MTV news and became known as “rock-and-roll granny”.
Jackson started playing the guitar at the age of 12 in a bible belt town where “girls didn’t play guitar”. She began writing her own songs in her 20s after moving to Memphis, the capital of rock & roll. “They didn’t have a name for “rock & roll then”, Cordell later told MTV news in 1989. “I just always played it fast”.
In the 1960s and ’70s, she worked with local artists, dipping into gospel and releasing a compilation album of her ’50s rock recordings. In 1983 she came out with an instrumental LP on her label, Moon Records, called “Knockin’ Sixty.” Jackson became something of an icon on the Memphis music scene. She lived in a yellow house and drove a yellow car and opened up her house for tours every summer. Her first music video, which helped her gain nationwide fame, was filmed at that very house.
Jackson’s Moon Records label was the oldest continuously operating label in Memphis at the time of her death in 2004. It’s never too late to rock out with this forgotten music legend, so give Cordell Jackson a search– you can find her on Spotify, Apple Music and all the other major platforms. She plays from her soul and is … how shall we say– the bomb-diggity.
https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/11/21/you-may-be-cool-but-youll-never-be-cordell-jackson-the-rockin-granny-cool/
1990s Teenagers and Their Bedrooms Walls
Your memories and photographs of being a teenager
In the 1980s a cousin’s bedroom was covered in pictures of Duran Duran. No. Not exactly. Rewind. Simon Le Bon was there by committee. It was more covered in just one member of the four-strong band, bassist John Taylor, who before he circled the plughole of popular youth culture sometime between marrying posho TV presenter Amanda De Cadenet and embarking on a solo music career was a popular aide to ruby teenage dreams.
I’ve no photos of the cousin’s bedroom because back then I didn’t carry a camera round with me all day and I only looked inside the room once – shooed down the stairs before I could further pollute the shine.
Taylor went on to marry an American woman big in tracksuits and take on US citizenship, and the look of someone who might have once been someone, but with TinTin dad’s hair and LA teefs could also be lots of other men of an age who live in LA.
I’m more interested in what happened to the Duran Duran posters, of which there must have been millions? How many trees owe their demise to John Taylor? And all that Blu Tak? Tons of it to keep John smiling down from the walls. Where does it go? Does it get re-used at an LA clinic, useful in keeping things taught and wadded, a perfect recycling scheme whereby what once held up a cultivated likeness of a popstar now holds one together, literally?
My cousin never did pull John. But the good news is that some of us did take photos. Like Flashbak, the Museum of Youth Culture has been attracting readers to submit snapshots of their teenage bedrooms as part of their ‘Grown up in Britain’ campaign. through sending in their photographs and sharing their memories. You can send them your pictures and memories here.
https://flashbak.com/1990s-teenagers-and-their-bedrooms-walls-433800/
I’ve no photos of the cousin’s bedroom because back then I didn’t carry a camera round with me all day and I only looked inside the room once – shooed down the stairs before I could further pollute the shine.
Taylor went on to marry an American woman big in tracksuits and take on US citizenship, and the look of someone who might have once been someone, but with TinTin dad’s hair and LA teefs could also be lots of other men of an age who live in LA.
I’m more interested in what happened to the Duran Duran posters, of which there must have been millions? How many trees owe their demise to John Taylor? And all that Blu Tak? Tons of it to keep John smiling down from the walls. Where does it go? Does it get re-used at an LA clinic, useful in keeping things taught and wadded, a perfect recycling scheme whereby what once held up a cultivated likeness of a popstar now holds one together, literally?
My cousin never did pull John. But the good news is that some of us did take photos. Like Flashbak, the Museum of Youth Culture has been attracting readers to submit snapshots of their teenage bedrooms as part of their ‘Grown up in Britain’ campaign. through sending in their photographs and sharing their memories. You can send them your pictures and memories here.
https://flashbak.com/1990s-teenagers-and-their-bedrooms-walls-433800/
In the 1980s, Star Hits magazine helped kids rock out to the best bands
Star Hits was a riff on the hugely popular British music magazine, Smash Hits… and in the ’80s, America’s teens loved it. Here’s a look at what bands were hot and featured in Star Hits magazine back in the day!
https://clickamericana.com/media/music/star-hits-magazine-covers-1984-1985-1988?utm_source=pinterest&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=grow-social-pro
https://clickamericana.com/media/music/star-hits-magazine-covers-1984-1985-1988?utm_source=pinterest&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=grow-social-pro
Vintage Buttons
Stanley Kubrick Photo Album: 20 Early Photographs Shot by the Legendary Director (Exclusive)
BY ZACK SHARF
Plus icon
APRIL 25, 2018 12:43 PM
Before Kubrick become an iconic film director, he was a staff photographer at “Look” magazine. Here are 20 images from his days as a photojournalist.
https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/stanley-kubrick-photo-album-early-photographs/
Plus icon
APRIL 25, 2018 12:43 PM
Before Kubrick become an iconic film director, he was a staff photographer at “Look” magazine. Here are 20 images from his days as a photojournalist.
https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/stanley-kubrick-photo-album-early-photographs/
Elton and Betty White
Elton and Betty White were an urban folk duo from Little Rock, Arkansas, who sang short, charming songs about love, sex, politics, neighbors, friends and their home town, Little Rock, Arkansas. Between 1985 and 1991, Elton and Betty recorded over 200 startlingly honest and sometimes hilarious songs. This is not to say that the Whites were an improvised act. They often asked for requests and loved doing interpretations of other artists works. They sold cassette copies of their songs for $5. Titles of their cassettes include, The Best of Elton and Betty, The Best of Elton and Betty Part II, Sex Beyond The Door, The Best Love Maker In The World, Hard Deep Sex Explosion and others Most recordings were made by Jerry Colburn, who asked them the name of each song in the session, prompting them to say the title at the top of each one. There were never compact discs of this material - explaining why the music wasn’t passed around even more than it is today. Donavan Suitt has made a few CD-Rs of the album for a participants in the documentary: Matt Besser, Skip Heller, folks like that….
In 1991, Elton and Betty moved to California after a videotape of them was aired on the Arsenio Hall Show in hopes of making it big in the entertainment industry. Producers never returned calls from the couple. Soon they ran out of money and were sleeping in their car. They heard about Venice Beach from fellow Little Rock resident & former Subgenius associate and X Factor contestant Janor Hyper Cleats. Elton and Betty took his advice and started performing for money. They performed hits by Elvis, The Beatles, Beach Boys and others, intending to save their hits from Little Rock for when they made it big. They began calling themselves as “The Married Couple” and started writing songs about being healthy, happy and in love. The only known studio recordings by Elton and Betty were recorded in Little Rock. None exist outside of The Married Couple’s LA Public access TV show, “Elton And Betty White Time” in the mid-1990s. These broadcasts are thought to be lost in the shuffle of the studio changing hands. Therefore, the world of Elton and Betty White is somewhat of a time capsule in Little Rock – the city they called home. In song after song, Elton calls out to Little Rock, North Little Rock, Conway and Fort Smith, hometown of Rudy Ray Moore aka Dolemite. Elton and Betty were the faces of Little Rock at the time, under then-governor Bill Clinton. For those who grew up in Little Rock in the 1980s, the Whites were like the gods of some kind of futuristic sexual revolution – or at least the weirdest, really-in-love couple in town. After performing on the boardwalk of Venice Beach for ten years, time caught up with Betty on August 20, 2003. She is greatly missed.
2008: Original producer of all Elton and Betty recordings, Jerry Colburn, and Rural War Room founder, producer Donavan Suitt begin to digitize original cassette tape masters from Elton and Betty’s huge collection of recorded works circa 1985-1991. Due to interest from Oxford American magazine, Suitt scrambles to remaster “Heat” from the 1988 album, Sex Beyond The Door; and “A Jelly Behind Woman Blows My Mind” from the 1987 album, “The Best of Elton and Betty” for inclusion on the
https://www.eltonandbetty.com/story
In 1991, Elton and Betty moved to California after a videotape of them was aired on the Arsenio Hall Show in hopes of making it big in the entertainment industry. Producers never returned calls from the couple. Soon they ran out of money and were sleeping in their car. They heard about Venice Beach from fellow Little Rock resident & former Subgenius associate and X Factor contestant Janor Hyper Cleats. Elton and Betty took his advice and started performing for money. They performed hits by Elvis, The Beatles, Beach Boys and others, intending to save their hits from Little Rock for when they made it big. They began calling themselves as “The Married Couple” and started writing songs about being healthy, happy and in love. The only known studio recordings by Elton and Betty were recorded in Little Rock. None exist outside of The Married Couple’s LA Public access TV show, “Elton And Betty White Time” in the mid-1990s. These broadcasts are thought to be lost in the shuffle of the studio changing hands. Therefore, the world of Elton and Betty White is somewhat of a time capsule in Little Rock – the city they called home. In song after song, Elton calls out to Little Rock, North Little Rock, Conway and Fort Smith, hometown of Rudy Ray Moore aka Dolemite. Elton and Betty were the faces of Little Rock at the time, under then-governor Bill Clinton. For those who grew up in Little Rock in the 1980s, the Whites were like the gods of some kind of futuristic sexual revolution – or at least the weirdest, really-in-love couple in town. After performing on the boardwalk of Venice Beach for ten years, time caught up with Betty on August 20, 2003. She is greatly missed.
2008: Original producer of all Elton and Betty recordings, Jerry Colburn, and Rural War Room founder, producer Donavan Suitt begin to digitize original cassette tape masters from Elton and Betty’s huge collection of recorded works circa 1985-1991. Due to interest from Oxford American magazine, Suitt scrambles to remaster “Heat” from the 1988 album, Sex Beyond The Door; and “A Jelly Behind Woman Blows My Mind” from the 1987 album, “The Best of Elton and Betty” for inclusion on the
https://www.eltonandbetty.com/story
‘FEED THE WORLD’ WITH BAD MUSIC: THE WACKY WORLD OF CHARITY SINGLES
In the mid-1980s, the pop music scene had this idea that recording songs with superstar ensemble bands would change the world. Nobody (especially not Sir Bob Geldof) stopped to consider that maybe it was a little condescending, a little patronizing, and a little bit OH I DUNNO colonialist to want to “fix” all the poor starving dark people. Do they know it’s Christmas? Probably not, dude. And they probably don’t care, either. Ever considered that “they” may not be into the whole Jesus thing?Right. So these songs have existed for years (although obviously George Harrison got in on that action first with The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971.) The most famous ones (of course) were the gazillion-selling hit singles where proceeds went to Ethiopia—“We Are The World” and “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (in 1984 and 1989 respectively). Hell, even the money from George Michael’s “Last Christmas/Everything She Wants” single went to helping the famine in Ethiopia. Not that this was bad. I mean, I’m certainly not gonna attack George because that dude was amazing.
The general feeling of these charity songs ended up being a little “OMGZ we need to helpz the poors who can’t help themselves, c’mon other rich musik frenz! Let us change the world with our synthesizer-ness, big shoulder clothing and rockstar monies!” On the other hand, it catalyzed some pretty HFS songs and mind-blowing music videos. The following works are not all that…good. But they are also not all terrible! Some of them you should love authentically. They are great! Others…well, I love them. But I also recognize that the cheese factor is basically at Wisconsin-level.
When the pop stars got all philanthropist-y, the metalheads just had to get in on the action. Thus we got the complete insanity of Swedish Metal Aid and Hear ‘n Aid. Both bands were (like their new wave/pop siblings) ensemble acts with proceeds headed towards Africa. Unlike Band Aid and USA for Africa, these two acts had hair, voices and attitudes that went sky-high. And spandex. Lots and lots and lots of spandex. Swedish Metal Aid was fronted by Joey Tempest of Europe (yes, “The Final Countdown,” that Europe) and involved members from bands with names like Neon Leon & the Bondage Babies, Heavy Load, Trash, Treat, Orion’s Swords and Glorious Bankrobbers. Hear ‘n Aid was organized by the one and only Ronnie James Dio and he got everybody in there—Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Yngwie Malmsteen, Queensrÿche, Dokken, Mötley Crüe and even Spinal Tap!
Swedish Metal Aid’s song was called “Give a Helpin’ Hand,” while Hear ‘n Aid released “Stars.” Behold the damage….
But the 1980s was not where charity tunes began. In 1974, there was a horrible cyclone in Australia in the city of Darwin. Joke all you want about the name of the city where it happened but it was really awful and to make things worse? It happened on Christmas! The Kiwi pop duo Bill and Boyd recorded a song called “Santa Never Made it into Darwin” to raise money for Cyclone Tracy relief. I’m a fan of the song. I’ve included that here for your listening pleasure as well.
You may have some familiarity with the charity Comic Relief. It’s a bit of a big deal in the UK, where it’s quite a large event, highly star-studded and…called Red Nose Day. Because everyone, you guessed it, wears red noses. It targets the same charitable areas—worldwide poverty and local hunger organizations. That said, it has produced a few of the absolute best songs for its cause. My personal favorite is, hands’ down, the Cliff Richards/Young Ones collaboration on a song that I love, “Living Doll.” But I will say that I swoonswoonswoon over Bruce Dickinson singing Alice Cooper…
’m nerdily crazy about one of the last ones I’ve included. Another ensemble band collected in the UK for the BBC Children In Need telethon called The County Line. They cover David Bowie’s “Heroes” and the video is so 80s I could puke Aqua Net. I love it! How can you beat a band that boasts Suzi Quatro and Bronski Beat??? But this one is really special.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/feed_the_world_with_bad_music_the_wacky_world_of_charity_singles
The general feeling of these charity songs ended up being a little “OMGZ we need to helpz the poors who can’t help themselves, c’mon other rich musik frenz! Let us change the world with our synthesizer-ness, big shoulder clothing and rockstar monies!” On the other hand, it catalyzed some pretty HFS songs and mind-blowing music videos. The following works are not all that…good. But they are also not all terrible! Some of them you should love authentically. They are great! Others…well, I love them. But I also recognize that the cheese factor is basically at Wisconsin-level.
When the pop stars got all philanthropist-y, the metalheads just had to get in on the action. Thus we got the complete insanity of Swedish Metal Aid and Hear ‘n Aid. Both bands were (like their new wave/pop siblings) ensemble acts with proceeds headed towards Africa. Unlike Band Aid and USA for Africa, these two acts had hair, voices and attitudes that went sky-high. And spandex. Lots and lots and lots of spandex. Swedish Metal Aid was fronted by Joey Tempest of Europe (yes, “The Final Countdown,” that Europe) and involved members from bands with names like Neon Leon & the Bondage Babies, Heavy Load, Trash, Treat, Orion’s Swords and Glorious Bankrobbers. Hear ‘n Aid was organized by the one and only Ronnie James Dio and he got everybody in there—Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Yngwie Malmsteen, Queensrÿche, Dokken, Mötley Crüe and even Spinal Tap!
Swedish Metal Aid’s song was called “Give a Helpin’ Hand,” while Hear ‘n Aid released “Stars.” Behold the damage….
But the 1980s was not where charity tunes began. In 1974, there was a horrible cyclone in Australia in the city of Darwin. Joke all you want about the name of the city where it happened but it was really awful and to make things worse? It happened on Christmas! The Kiwi pop duo Bill and Boyd recorded a song called “Santa Never Made it into Darwin” to raise money for Cyclone Tracy relief. I’m a fan of the song. I’ve included that here for your listening pleasure as well.
You may have some familiarity with the charity Comic Relief. It’s a bit of a big deal in the UK, where it’s quite a large event, highly star-studded and…called Red Nose Day. Because everyone, you guessed it, wears red noses. It targets the same charitable areas—worldwide poverty and local hunger organizations. That said, it has produced a few of the absolute best songs for its cause. My personal favorite is, hands’ down, the Cliff Richards/Young Ones collaboration on a song that I love, “Living Doll.” But I will say that I swoonswoonswoon over Bruce Dickinson singing Alice Cooper…
’m nerdily crazy about one of the last ones I’ve included. Another ensemble band collected in the UK for the BBC Children In Need telethon called The County Line. They cover David Bowie’s “Heroes” and the video is so 80s I could puke Aqua Net. I love it! How can you beat a band that boasts Suzi Quatro and Bronski Beat??? But this one is really special.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/feed_the_world_with_bad_music_the_wacky_world_of_charity_singles
Lighting up Lagos: the stars of 1970s Nigerian rock music - in pictures
After years being ravaged by the Biafran civil war, Nigeria was ready to kick out the jams in the 1970s. Bands like Semi-Colon, Grotto and the Funkees filled the decade with psych-laced funk. Musicologist Uchenna Ikonne tells the stories behind the sunglasses
A new compilation brings together obscure rock bands from Nigeria in the 1970s, as the country emerged out of civil war. Compiler and musicologist Uchenna Ikonne gives us their backstories, beginning with the Hykkers: ‘They were the first professional rock’n’roll band in the 60s but disappeared from the Nigerian mainstream, as they were trapped behind rebel lines for the duration of the war. When peace returned, so did the Hykkers, with a ruggedly psychedelic new sound’• The book and CD Wake Up You! is out now on Now Again Records
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/jun/06/1970s-nigerian-rock-music-stars-wake-up-you?page=with%3Aimg-3
A new compilation brings together obscure rock bands from Nigeria in the 1970s, as the country emerged out of civil war. Compiler and musicologist Uchenna Ikonne gives us their backstories, beginning with the Hykkers: ‘They were the first professional rock’n’roll band in the 60s but disappeared from the Nigerian mainstream, as they were trapped behind rebel lines for the duration of the war. When peace returned, so did the Hykkers, with a ruggedly psychedelic new sound’• The book and CD Wake Up You! is out now on Now Again Records
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/jun/06/1970s-nigerian-rock-music-stars-wake-up-you?page=with%3Aimg-3
The first transgender celebrity in America and her remarkable life
By Chris Wild on April 27, 2015
When Christine Jorgensen was born on May 30, 1926 in the Bronx, New York, she was George William Jorgensen, Jr. Assigned male at birth, she was aware from a very early age that she did not feel male.While not the first transgender person to undergo sex reassignment surgery, nor the first American transgender, Christine was undoubtedly the first person to become widely known for having sex reassignment surgery.
After graduation she (then George) was drafted into the U.S. army, and following her service, began to research gender reassignment. She took female hormones and in 1951 traveled to Denmark to undergo gender reassignment surgery, a procedure not then available legally in the U.S. Later she had reconstructive surgery in the U.S.Naming herself after her surgeon, Dr. Christian Hamburger, her story broke after her second operation in Denmark. She returned to the U.S. a celebrity in 1955, aged 29. She was greeted at Idlewild (now JFK) Airport by several admirers and curious people and the press. From that moment on she was subject to intrusive press attention.
Christine agreed to an offer from Hearst's American Weekly magazine for exclusive rights to her story. American Weekly oversaw her return to New York from Denmark. (Denmark's royal family, on the same flight, were ignored by the waiting press.) Christine was paid $20,000 for her story's rights. Other press agencies followed her story as well, though some of the reporting was overtly salacious. Christine regularly received offers to appear naked.She eventually wrote "The Story of My Life" for the February 1953 edition of American Weekly; the story "Her first Easter bonnet" appeared on the front page of Newsday on Easter weekend, 1953.
Christine made her living as an entertainer, actress and nightclub singer. She performed "I Enjoy Being a Girl" and wore a Wonder Woman costume, at Freddy's Supper Club on Manhattan's Upper East Side. She even recorded a number of songs, and also toured university campuses talking about her experiences.Christine published her biography Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography in 1967. Three years later it was filmed as The Christine Jorgensen Story.She retired to California in the early 1980s, and was diagnosed with cancer in 1987. Christine died in 1989, aged 62. The year she died, Christine Jorgensen said she gave the sexual revolution "a good swift kick in the pants."
https://mashable.com/archive/christine-jorgensen
When Christine Jorgensen was born on May 30, 1926 in the Bronx, New York, she was George William Jorgensen, Jr. Assigned male at birth, she was aware from a very early age that she did not feel male.While not the first transgender person to undergo sex reassignment surgery, nor the first American transgender, Christine was undoubtedly the first person to become widely known for having sex reassignment surgery.
After graduation she (then George) was drafted into the U.S. army, and following her service, began to research gender reassignment. She took female hormones and in 1951 traveled to Denmark to undergo gender reassignment surgery, a procedure not then available legally in the U.S. Later she had reconstructive surgery in the U.S.Naming herself after her surgeon, Dr. Christian Hamburger, her story broke after her second operation in Denmark. She returned to the U.S. a celebrity in 1955, aged 29. She was greeted at Idlewild (now JFK) Airport by several admirers and curious people and the press. From that moment on she was subject to intrusive press attention.
Christine agreed to an offer from Hearst's American Weekly magazine for exclusive rights to her story. American Weekly oversaw her return to New York from Denmark. (Denmark's royal family, on the same flight, were ignored by the waiting press.) Christine was paid $20,000 for her story's rights. Other press agencies followed her story as well, though some of the reporting was overtly salacious. Christine regularly received offers to appear naked.She eventually wrote "The Story of My Life" for the February 1953 edition of American Weekly; the story "Her first Easter bonnet" appeared on the front page of Newsday on Easter weekend, 1953.
Christine made her living as an entertainer, actress and nightclub singer. She performed "I Enjoy Being a Girl" and wore a Wonder Woman costume, at Freddy's Supper Club on Manhattan's Upper East Side. She even recorded a number of songs, and also toured university campuses talking about her experiences.Christine published her biography Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography in 1967. Three years later it was filmed as The Christine Jorgensen Story.She retired to California in the early 1980s, and was diagnosed with cancer in 1987. Christine died in 1989, aged 62. The year she died, Christine Jorgensen said she gave the sexual revolution "a good swift kick in the pants."
https://mashable.com/archive/christine-jorgensen
Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink
I had just purchased a Yashica Mat at a pawnshop and as usual I was out riding around looking for something to shoot. I happened upon an old wooden structure built in the 30’s in rural southern Hillsborough County (Tampa, FL) – the sign read Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink. That weekend in September 1972, I ran 8 rolls through the camera. After that I photographed nearly every weekend until late spring of 1973. I was 26 years old. That first weekend I was met with curiosity and suspicion by the skaters. The next weekend I returned with proof sheets which I stapled to the wooden siding of the rink’s interior. For some, complete disinterest in the images. For others, it was as if they were staring at themselves in the mirror – they couldn’t get enough. The skaters became like actors parading their bodies, confronting one another for an audience – the camera. Though the roller skaters may not have thought of themselves on a stage, they were no less explicit and physical in their stagecraft. Some of the scenes were unapologetically theatrical. Young men aggressively wrapping arms around their girlfriends’ necks, gesturing uncomfortably for the camera – a come-on, an uncensored performance. Yet others were deadpan. I soon became wallpaper – I was there, but I wasn’t – just snapping the shutter. Then in the latter months I became more of an insider. A few of the rink regulars invited me to several parties in an old trailer deep in the orange groves.
After that, I saw them in a different way. My objectivity had crashed. My last photographs at the rink were shot in May. I boxed up my negs and proofs and then moved to Providence, Rhode Island. These images have never been shown. Now and again you happen upon something that just leaves you stunned in utter amazement and has a major impact on your work. Such was the case 40 years ago, and such is the case today, as I have recently unboxed these images and scanned all 800 negatives, reliving those 7 incredible months of shooting.
http://lenscratch.com/2014/01/bill-yates/
After that, I saw them in a different way. My objectivity had crashed. My last photographs at the rink were shot in May. I boxed up my negs and proofs and then moved to Providence, Rhode Island. These images have never been shown. Now and again you happen upon something that just leaves you stunned in utter amazement and has a major impact on your work. Such was the case 40 years ago, and such is the case today, as I have recently unboxed these images and scanned all 800 negatives, reliving those 7 incredible months of shooting.
http://lenscratch.com/2014/01/bill-yates/
Living: Here Come the Yuppies!
A new impulse book goes beyond preppiness
Who are all those upwardly mobile folk with designer water, running shoes, pickled parquet floors and $450,000 condos in semislum buildings? Yuppies, of course, for Young Urban Professionals, and the one true guide to their carefully hectic life-style is The Yuppie Handbook (Long Shadow Books; $4.95). Tongue firmly in chic, Authors Marissa Piesman and Marilee Hartley tirelessly chronicle the ways of the Yuppie, along with its lesser-known subspecies the Guppie (Gay Urban Professional) and Puppie (Pregnant Urban Professional). Both writers are accredited Yups: Piesman, 32, is a lawyer, and Hartley, 38, is an editor.
The slim volume is yet another clone of a reigning champion in the impulse book market, The Official Preppy Handbook, which appeared three years ago and has more than 1.3 million copies in print. The new manual is aimed at an affluent, surefire market: the upscale young singles and dual-career couples gathered in or near big cities. Long the darlings of the advertising world and the media, these fast-trackers are now united under a sassy name and invited to smile along at their own trendiness.
Yuppies are dedicated to the twin goals of making piles of money and achieving perfection through physical fitness and therapy. The Yuppie wakes to a digital alarm, sets down the dog food for the akita and jogs for the beta-endorphins before putting in a typically grueling day at the office, followed by an hour of therapy and meeting of the condo board. There is no time for sex, so for many Yuppies celibacy is a way of life. Yuppies eat tortellini, tuna sashimi and chefs salad, and favor restaurants with ceiling fans and dark green walls. No instant food ever passes Yuppie lips. The kitchen features scores of exotic appliances that cannot be washed in the dishwasher, window herb gardens and a double sink for draining pasta.
Yuppie meals are served on plain white plates, set down on straw place mats. The dining table, preferably butcher block, glass or marble, must never match the dining chairs. Yuppies angle for Queen Anne service as a wedding gift, then use their half of the service for everyday flatware after the divorce. As wedding presents, Yuppies give ski wax, an ounce of saffron or a specially written home-computer program, the Yuppie equivalent of a handmade quilt.
https://archive.org/details/yuppiehandbookst00pies
Who are all those upwardly mobile folk with designer water, running shoes, pickled parquet floors and $450,000 condos in semislum buildings? Yuppies, of course, for Young Urban Professionals, and the one true guide to their carefully hectic life-style is The Yuppie Handbook (Long Shadow Books; $4.95). Tongue firmly in chic, Authors Marissa Piesman and Marilee Hartley tirelessly chronicle the ways of the Yuppie, along with its lesser-known subspecies the Guppie (Gay Urban Professional) and Puppie (Pregnant Urban Professional). Both writers are accredited Yups: Piesman, 32, is a lawyer, and Hartley, 38, is an editor.
The slim volume is yet another clone of a reigning champion in the impulse book market, The Official Preppy Handbook, which appeared three years ago and has more than 1.3 million copies in print. The new manual is aimed at an affluent, surefire market: the upscale young singles and dual-career couples gathered in or near big cities. Long the darlings of the advertising world and the media, these fast-trackers are now united under a sassy name and invited to smile along at their own trendiness.
Yuppies are dedicated to the twin goals of making piles of money and achieving perfection through physical fitness and therapy. The Yuppie wakes to a digital alarm, sets down the dog food for the akita and jogs for the beta-endorphins before putting in a typically grueling day at the office, followed by an hour of therapy and meeting of the condo board. There is no time for sex, so for many Yuppies celibacy is a way of life. Yuppies eat tortellini, tuna sashimi and chefs salad, and favor restaurants with ceiling fans and dark green walls. No instant food ever passes Yuppie lips. The kitchen features scores of exotic appliances that cannot be washed in the dishwasher, window herb gardens and a double sink for draining pasta.
Yuppie meals are served on plain white plates, set down on straw place mats. The dining table, preferably butcher block, glass or marble, must never match the dining chairs. Yuppies angle for Queen Anne service as a wedding gift, then use their half of the service for everyday flatware after the divorce. As wedding presents, Yuppies give ski wax, an ounce of saffron or a specially written home-computer program, the Yuppie equivalent of a handmade quilt.
https://archive.org/details/yuppiehandbookst00pies
Vintage Photos of Celebrities and Their Pets
HILARIOUS & CRINGEWORTHY KNITTED SWEATERS OF THE 1980S
’s November, and the temperature in my neighborhood in northern Ohio reached 77 just two days ago. It felt like the start of September really, just a lovely day to be outside. Not at all cold.
One of the benefits of the balmy winters brought on by catastrophic climate change is that there’s no risk someone will trick us into donning one of the absolutely amazing sweaters featured in a remarkable book of knitting designs from the fashionable 1980s. Wit Knits, which presented “lively and original” knitted sweater suggestions by George Hostler and Gyles Brandreth, came out in 1986, and the photographs showing off the finished designs are simply jaw-dropping in their silliness.
There’s a website devoted to these pictures, but its proprietor, rightly sensing that the visual impact of these doozies is the primary appeal, therefore “won’t post patterns, buy the book if you want to make them.” Harrumph. The book is, like everything else, available on Amazon.
The really peculiar thing about Wit Knits is that virtually all of the models are well-known figures from 1980s British television. I don’t know how Hostler and Brandreth were able to sucker such famous personages into agreeing to be involved with this, but perhaps it was simply a paid gig like any other. Maybe they got to keep the sweaters?
For instance: I can remember watching, on WNET Channel 13 in New York back around when this book came out, a delightful British show called Good Neighbors (it was known as The Good Life in the U.K.), and Richard Briers, here wearing the light blue sweater with the “wee Scottie” on it, was the lead actor on that show. Meanwhile, Joanna Lumley—then perhaps best known for her stint in The New Avengers, who later became an icon of decadence in Ab Fab—here is shown wearing a ridiculous sweater with a horsey; she also has a different one with what is most likely an owl on it. Lizzie Webb, who presented morning exercise routines on TV, is wearing a sweater with a kittykat on it. Most of the people here are like that.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/hilarious_cringeworthy_knitted_sweaters_of_the_1980s
One of the benefits of the balmy winters brought on by catastrophic climate change is that there’s no risk someone will trick us into donning one of the absolutely amazing sweaters featured in a remarkable book of knitting designs from the fashionable 1980s. Wit Knits, which presented “lively and original” knitted sweater suggestions by George Hostler and Gyles Brandreth, came out in 1986, and the photographs showing off the finished designs are simply jaw-dropping in their silliness.
There’s a website devoted to these pictures, but its proprietor, rightly sensing that the visual impact of these doozies is the primary appeal, therefore “won’t post patterns, buy the book if you want to make them.” Harrumph. The book is, like everything else, available on Amazon.
The really peculiar thing about Wit Knits is that virtually all of the models are well-known figures from 1980s British television. I don’t know how Hostler and Brandreth were able to sucker such famous personages into agreeing to be involved with this, but perhaps it was simply a paid gig like any other. Maybe they got to keep the sweaters?
For instance: I can remember watching, on WNET Channel 13 in New York back around when this book came out, a delightful British show called Good Neighbors (it was known as The Good Life in the U.K.), and Richard Briers, here wearing the light blue sweater with the “wee Scottie” on it, was the lead actor on that show. Meanwhile, Joanna Lumley—then perhaps best known for her stint in The New Avengers, who later became an icon of decadence in Ab Fab—here is shown wearing a ridiculous sweater with a horsey; she also has a different one with what is most likely an owl on it. Lizzie Webb, who presented morning exercise routines on TV, is wearing a sweater with a kittykat on it. Most of the people here are like that.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/hilarious_cringeworthy_knitted_sweaters_of_the_1980s
The most important black woman sculptor of the 20th century deserves more recognition
Augusta Savage started sculpting as a child in the 1900s using what she could get her hands on: the clay that was part of the natural landscape in her hometown of Green Cove Springs, Florida. Eventually her talents took her far from the clay pits of the South. She joined the burgeoning arts scene of the Harlem Renaissance when her talents led her to New York.
Her work was lauded, and she was consistently admired by contemporary black artists, but her renown was transient. And much of her work has been lost, since she could mostly afford to cast only in plaster.
Like other key figures of the 1920s such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Savage skillfully challenged negative images and stereotypical depictions of black people. One of her largest commissions, for instance, were sculptures for the World’s Fair of 1939, inspired by “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a song often described as the black national anthem. “The Harp,” another work in the commission, depicted black singers as the ascending strings of that instrument. Regrettably, both pieces were destroyed when the fairgrounds were torn down.
Born in 1892, Savage would often sculpt clay into small figures, much to the chagrin of her father, a minister who believed that artistic expression was sinful. In 1921, she moved to Harlem, where she enrolled at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. A gifted student, Savage completed the four-year program in only three and quickly embarked on a career in sculpting. During the early to mid-1920s, she was commissioned to create several sculptures, including a bust of NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois and charismatic black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey — two key black leaders of the period who were often at odds with each other.
Both pieces were well received, especially in black circles, but the racial climate at the time hampered wider recognition of her work. Savage won a prestigious scholarship at a summer arts program at the Fontainebleau School of the Fine Arts outside of Paris in 1923, for instance, but the offer was withdrawn when the school discovered that she was black. Despite her efforts — she filed a complaint with the Ethical Culture Committee — and public outcry from several well-known black leaders at the time, the organizers upheld the decision.
https://timeline.com/the-most-important-black-woman-sculptor-of-the-20th-century-deserves-more-recognition-af0ed7084bb1?gi=342937a757f8
Her work was lauded, and she was consistently admired by contemporary black artists, but her renown was transient. And much of her work has been lost, since she could mostly afford to cast only in plaster.
Like other key figures of the 1920s such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Savage skillfully challenged negative images and stereotypical depictions of black people. One of her largest commissions, for instance, were sculptures for the World’s Fair of 1939, inspired by “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a song often described as the black national anthem. “The Harp,” another work in the commission, depicted black singers as the ascending strings of that instrument. Regrettably, both pieces were destroyed when the fairgrounds were torn down.
Born in 1892, Savage would often sculpt clay into small figures, much to the chagrin of her father, a minister who believed that artistic expression was sinful. In 1921, she moved to Harlem, where she enrolled at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. A gifted student, Savage completed the four-year program in only three and quickly embarked on a career in sculpting. During the early to mid-1920s, she was commissioned to create several sculptures, including a bust of NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois and charismatic black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey — two key black leaders of the period who were often at odds with each other.
Both pieces were well received, especially in black circles, but the racial climate at the time hampered wider recognition of her work. Savage won a prestigious scholarship at a summer arts program at the Fontainebleau School of the Fine Arts outside of Paris in 1923, for instance, but the offer was withdrawn when the school discovered that she was black. Despite her efforts — she filed a complaint with the Ethical Culture Committee — and public outcry from several well-known black leaders at the time, the organizers upheld the decision.
https://timeline.com/the-most-important-black-woman-sculptor-of-the-20th-century-deserves-more-recognition-af0ed7084bb1?gi=342937a757f8
The Beautiful Men of Goth and Post-Punk
The men of goth and post-punk are undeniably some of the most beautiful male specimens to have graced a stage or have played an instrument. In fact, some of them wear more makeup than the many talented women in which they share a scene that overall embraces androgyny, while defying gender norms and sexuality.
We’ve compiled a list and gallery dedicated to some of the most iconic musicians and singers making the best music to come out during the late 70s and 80s, some of which who inspired boys and girls to spend a fortune on cosmetics and hairspray in attempts to achieve the varying looks made by their heroes listed below.
https://post-punk.com/beautiful-men-goth-and-postpunk/amp/
We’ve compiled a list and gallery dedicated to some of the most iconic musicians and singers making the best music to come out during the late 70s and 80s, some of which who inspired boys and girls to spend a fortune on cosmetics and hairspray in attempts to achieve the varying looks made by their heroes listed below.
https://post-punk.com/beautiful-men-goth-and-postpunk/amp/
GORGEOUS CAST PORTRAITS FROM TOD BROWNING’S ‘FREAKS’ (1932)
Freaks has earned its place in history as one of the all-time great cult films, though it wasn’t always beloved. The film was reviled by both critics and audiences upon release in 1932. It was a career-killer for Tod Browning, who had previously been a Hollywood golden child with a string of Lon Chaney hits under his belt and who had just come off the enormous success of Dracula.
The film shocked audiences with its use of actual sideshow “freaks” as actors:
Among the characters featured as “freaks” were Peter Robinson (“the human skeleton”); Olga Roderick (“the bearded lady”); Frances O’Connor and Martha Morris (“armless wonders”); and the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Among the microcephalics who appear in the film (and are referred to as “pinheads”) were Zip and Pip (Elvira and Jenny Lee Snow) and Schlitzie, a male named Simon Metz who wore a dress mainly due to incontinence, a disputed claim. Also featured were the intersexual Josephine Joseph, with her left/right divided gender; Johnny Eck, the legless man; the completely limbless Prince Randian (also known as The Human Torso, and mis-credited as “Rardion”); Elizabeth Green the Stork Woman; and Koo-Koo the Bird Girl, who suffered from Virchow-Seckel syndrome or bird-headed dwarfism, and is most remembered for the scene wherein she dances on the table.
The film had only a short cinema run in the United States before it was pulled by MGM due to audiences’ revulsion. It was not even allowed to be shown at all in the UK for thirty years.
Some argue that the film was a crass exploitation of the mentally and physically challenged, while others believe the film is sympathetic to the disabled stars and was therefore an empowering vehicle, showcasing their struggle. It has remained controversial to this day.
Thanks to the excellent blog Decaying Hollywood Mansions, we have this stunning gallery of promotional cast photos from the film, featuring the unusually beautiful stars of Tod Browning’s 1932 masterpiece.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/gorgeous_cast_portraits_from_tod_brownings_freaks_1932
The film shocked audiences with its use of actual sideshow “freaks” as actors:
Among the characters featured as “freaks” were Peter Robinson (“the human skeleton”); Olga Roderick (“the bearded lady”); Frances O’Connor and Martha Morris (“armless wonders”); and the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Among the microcephalics who appear in the film (and are referred to as “pinheads”) were Zip and Pip (Elvira and Jenny Lee Snow) and Schlitzie, a male named Simon Metz who wore a dress mainly due to incontinence, a disputed claim. Also featured were the intersexual Josephine Joseph, with her left/right divided gender; Johnny Eck, the legless man; the completely limbless Prince Randian (also known as The Human Torso, and mis-credited as “Rardion”); Elizabeth Green the Stork Woman; and Koo-Koo the Bird Girl, who suffered from Virchow-Seckel syndrome or bird-headed dwarfism, and is most remembered for the scene wherein she dances on the table.
The film had only a short cinema run in the United States before it was pulled by MGM due to audiences’ revulsion. It was not even allowed to be shown at all in the UK for thirty years.
Some argue that the film was a crass exploitation of the mentally and physically challenged, while others believe the film is sympathetic to the disabled stars and was therefore an empowering vehicle, showcasing their struggle. It has remained controversial to this day.
Thanks to the excellent blog Decaying Hollywood Mansions, we have this stunning gallery of promotional cast photos from the film, featuring the unusually beautiful stars of Tod Browning’s 1932 masterpiece.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/gorgeous_cast_portraits_from_tod_brownings_freaks_1932
Licenses and Passports of Celebrities
The Krystal Counter Code: A 1954 Fast Food Server Guide
In 1954, Krystal Company presented a breezy educational film detailing how staff at its Krystal restaurants should behave and dress. Founded in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on October 24 1932, Krystal was keen to embrace the staff, aka ‘The Krystal Family’, and have them do things ‘the Krystal way’. This was ‘The Counter Code’.
Zelda, who we see in the lead photo, was breaking rules. Tutored in the Krystal way to ‘act natural’, she soon stowed her cigarette, set her disagreeable eyebrows free and her unblinking gaze on producing the great American burger; fighting the good fight against salmonella and starvation. Zelda’s not smiling in the portrait because she’s not sure about cameras and the kind of men who operate them and process amateur film in their home basement darkrooms. But she’s a happy girl and ready to serve.
All shots are delivered in a before and after fashion. We’d like to see the after that followed the ‘before and after’, say, a year later. But there’s an element of mystery with all fast food, so let this be no exception.
https://flashbak.com/the-krystal-counter-code-a-1954-fast-food-server-guide-376346/
Zelda, who we see in the lead photo, was breaking rules. Tutored in the Krystal way to ‘act natural’, she soon stowed her cigarette, set her disagreeable eyebrows free and her unblinking gaze on producing the great American burger; fighting the good fight against salmonella and starvation. Zelda’s not smiling in the portrait because she’s not sure about cameras and the kind of men who operate them and process amateur film in their home basement darkrooms. But she’s a happy girl and ready to serve.
All shots are delivered in a before and after fashion. We’d like to see the after that followed the ‘before and after’, say, a year later. But there’s an element of mystery with all fast food, so let this be no exception.
https://flashbak.com/the-krystal-counter-code-a-1954-fast-food-server-guide-376346/
Vintage Puffy Stickers
HAPPY HARVEY MILK DAY - Harvey Milk, Activist and Politician, Led a Revolution for LGBTQ Rights
Overlooked History is a Teen Vogue series about the undersung figures and events that shaped the world.
BY LEXI MCMENAMIN
JUNE 7, 2021
Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to hold public office in California. Elected in 1977 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, he was assassinated at age 48, in 1978, by an ex-coworker, barely a year into his first term as an elected official. Ten days before his assassination, Milk recorded himself saying goodbye in case this grim scenario ever played out. “I fully realize that a person who stands for what I stand for, an activist, a gay activist, becomes the target or potential target for a person who is insecure, terrified, afraid, or very disturbing,” Milk said in the tape. “Knowing that I could be assassinated at any moment, at any time, I feel it’s important that some people know my thoughts, and why I did what I did. Almost everything that was done was done with an eye on the gay movement.” Politics
Milk had real clarity about what it might mean for him to become a martyr to this cause: “All I ask is for the movement to continue, and if a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” His barrier-breaking has undoubtedly played a role in the strides the LGBTQ+ movement has made since the 1970s, and served as inspiration for how marginalized communities can build solidarity.
“I have no doubt that, had he lived, and had he survived the AIDS epidemic, I have no doubt that he would have been in [Pete Buttigieg’s] position, for instance,” Lillian Faderman, author of Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death, told Teen Vogue. “I know he would have run for statewide office... I’m sure he would have run for federal office. He was hugely ambitious, and he should have been, since he was so charismatic. I think he would have been an icon not for his martyrdom, but because he was so eloquent and so charismatic, and he would have been in the public eye, and not just in San Francisco.”
Born on Long Island in 1930 and raised in a tight-knit Jewish community, Milk knew from a young age that he was gay, but spent much of his adult life figuring out how out of the closet to be. Milk lived several lives before moving to San Francisco full-time in 1972: He was in the Navy, worked in finance, was a teacher, and was even a Republican, volunteering on Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign.
“Harvey Milk offers us a story of political transformation over the life course,” said Marc Stein, a historian of LGBTQ urban history and a professor at San Francisco State University. “[He] had contact with the early gay movement of the 1960s [...] but he distanced himself from it and rejected the idea of being out and proud in the pre-Stonewall era, and was pursuing a business career. But then, like so many, he was really transformed by everything going on in the country in the late ’60s and early ’70s.”
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/harvey-milk-lgbtq-activist-legacy
BY LEXI MCMENAMIN
JUNE 7, 2021
Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to hold public office in California. Elected in 1977 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, he was assassinated at age 48, in 1978, by an ex-coworker, barely a year into his first term as an elected official. Ten days before his assassination, Milk recorded himself saying goodbye in case this grim scenario ever played out. “I fully realize that a person who stands for what I stand for, an activist, a gay activist, becomes the target or potential target for a person who is insecure, terrified, afraid, or very disturbing,” Milk said in the tape. “Knowing that I could be assassinated at any moment, at any time, I feel it’s important that some people know my thoughts, and why I did what I did. Almost everything that was done was done with an eye on the gay movement.” Politics
Milk had real clarity about what it might mean for him to become a martyr to this cause: “All I ask is for the movement to continue, and if a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” His barrier-breaking has undoubtedly played a role in the strides the LGBTQ+ movement has made since the 1970s, and served as inspiration for how marginalized communities can build solidarity.
“I have no doubt that, had he lived, and had he survived the AIDS epidemic, I have no doubt that he would have been in [Pete Buttigieg’s] position, for instance,” Lillian Faderman, author of Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death, told Teen Vogue. “I know he would have run for statewide office... I’m sure he would have run for federal office. He was hugely ambitious, and he should have been, since he was so charismatic. I think he would have been an icon not for his martyrdom, but because he was so eloquent and so charismatic, and he would have been in the public eye, and not just in San Francisco.”
Born on Long Island in 1930 and raised in a tight-knit Jewish community, Milk knew from a young age that he was gay, but spent much of his adult life figuring out how out of the closet to be. Milk lived several lives before moving to San Francisco full-time in 1972: He was in the Navy, worked in finance, was a teacher, and was even a Republican, volunteering on Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign.
“Harvey Milk offers us a story of political transformation over the life course,” said Marc Stein, a historian of LGBTQ urban history and a professor at San Francisco State University. “[He] had contact with the early gay movement of the 1960s [...] but he distanced himself from it and rejected the idea of being out and proud in the pre-Stonewall era, and was pursuing a business career. But then, like so many, he was really transformed by everything going on in the country in the late ’60s and early ’70s.”
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/harvey-milk-lgbtq-activist-legacy
FULL DECK OF AWESOME JAPANESE MONSTER PLAYING CARDS
This pack of Japanese playing cards features a selection of pachimon kaiju or “imitation monsters” lifted from various hit TV shows and movies. These monsters range from fire-breathing gorillas to flying creatures from outer space and giant electrocuting humanoids. The set was apparently manufactured as a promotional pack for kids by a Japanese brand of mayonnaise called Kewpie.
I’d have surely eaten my egg-mayo sandwiches without complaint if I’d been dealt a hand of these fun little beauties.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/full_deck_of_japanese_monster_playing_cards
I’d have surely eaten my egg-mayo sandwiches without complaint if I’d been dealt a hand of these fun little beauties.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/full_deck_of_japanese_monster_playing_cards
Richard Simmons VHS Covers
More Vintage Buttons
Vintage Record Covers
Inside the Improvised World of Christopher Guest
Four of the faux-documentary master’s leading players dish out their favorite memories of working on Guest’s movies as his latest, Mascots, hits Netflix
It’s been 20 years since Waiting for Guffman—a story set in a small, Midwestern town about small-time community theater—became an instant cult classic. The film, Christopher Guest’s directorial debut, was also his first to feature a stable of actors who would become regulars in Guest projects for decades to come—including Parker Posey, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, and Fred Willard. Four years later, Guest added John Michael Higgins, Jane Lynch, Ed Begley Jr., Jennifer Coolidge, and Michael McKean to his caravan of characters via Best in Show. Though two more faux documentaries followed—they’re not “mockumentaries,” a term Guest is known to loathe—it’s now been a decade since Guest last re-united his reparatory company. But that will change with this month’s release of Mascots, a fictional inside look at the very real world of professional mascots—directed by Guest, and starring his signature corps of actors. The film began streaming on Netflix Thursday.
Watching a Christopher Guest movie is like “being a fly on the wall,” as Lynch described it to Vanity Fair. Or maybe, as fellow regular Bob Balaban says, it’s more like “spending time with a bunch of really funny and totally harmless mental patients.” We sat down with four members of this merry band of players to talk about their favorite memories over the last two decades of working with Guest.
“My weirdest moment with the Guestian players was actually a compendium of many moments that happened over and over when we went on our five-city A Mighty Wind tour,” says Balaban, who often finds himself playing figures of authority who don’t really have any actual authority. (Think dog-show head honcho Dr. Theodore Millbank in Best in Show, or Wind concert organizer Jonathan Steinbloom.) “Shortly after the movie opened, our characters put on a folk concert in some medium-sized and some really big halls. We’d pull up in our tour bus and schlep into our dressing rooms wearing our street clothes. And mostly nobody had any idea who we were. Half an hour later, we’d walk out onstage in costume and the crowd would act like we were Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, and the Beatles all rolled into one, screaming, jumping around, throwing stuff, insanely happy.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/10/christopher-guest-mascots-netflix
It’s been 20 years since Waiting for Guffman—a story set in a small, Midwestern town about small-time community theater—became an instant cult classic. The film, Christopher Guest’s directorial debut, was also his first to feature a stable of actors who would become regulars in Guest projects for decades to come—including Parker Posey, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, and Fred Willard. Four years later, Guest added John Michael Higgins, Jane Lynch, Ed Begley Jr., Jennifer Coolidge, and Michael McKean to his caravan of characters via Best in Show. Though two more faux documentaries followed—they’re not “mockumentaries,” a term Guest is known to loathe—it’s now been a decade since Guest last re-united his reparatory company. But that will change with this month’s release of Mascots, a fictional inside look at the very real world of professional mascots—directed by Guest, and starring his signature corps of actors. The film began streaming on Netflix Thursday.
Watching a Christopher Guest movie is like “being a fly on the wall,” as Lynch described it to Vanity Fair. Or maybe, as fellow regular Bob Balaban says, it’s more like “spending time with a bunch of really funny and totally harmless mental patients.” We sat down with four members of this merry band of players to talk about their favorite memories over the last two decades of working with Guest.
“My weirdest moment with the Guestian players was actually a compendium of many moments that happened over and over when we went on our five-city A Mighty Wind tour,” says Balaban, who often finds himself playing figures of authority who don’t really have any actual authority. (Think dog-show head honcho Dr. Theodore Millbank in Best in Show, or Wind concert organizer Jonathan Steinbloom.) “Shortly after the movie opened, our characters put on a folk concert in some medium-sized and some really big halls. We’d pull up in our tour bus and schlep into our dressing rooms wearing our street clothes. And mostly nobody had any idea who we were. Half an hour later, we’d walk out onstage in costume and the crowd would act like we were Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, and the Beatles all rolled into one, screaming, jumping around, throwing stuff, insanely happy.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/10/christopher-guest-mascots-netflix
(1895 - 1967) Josep Baqué
"Josep Baqué was born in Barcelona in the late19th century. He was a municipal police officer and during his lifetime never declared himself as an artist. Since early 1930s and for the following decades he produced more than 1500 drawings of "monsters, wonders and rare events" made in ink and gouache on paper, some embellished with gold and silver. He created army of imaginary creatures, strange and unusual, mixing human and animal traits or characteristics of different types (cats, primitive men, bats and insects, giant spiders, snakes, snails, octopus, cuttlefish, seafood, fowl, fish...) Baqué died in 1967 and left his niece, his sole heir, his fantastic bestiary isolated away from light for nearly 40 years. In 2007, the famous College of Pataphysics organized an exhibition of 160 monsters and published a lengthy article in the journal of pataphysicians Viridis Candela." - quote source unknown
http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2014/08/josep-baque.html?m=1
http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2014/08/josep-baque.html?m=1
Inside Nadia Lee Cohen’s New Book of Chameleonic Self-Portraits
The British photographer’s latest publication Hello My Name Is … sees her transform herself into 33 different characters, inspired by name badges belonging to unknown individuals
DECEMBER 14, 2021
Ted Stansfield
Photography by Nadia Lee Cohen. Courtesy of Idea
Nadia Lee Cohen is surely one of the most exciting image-makers working today. Born in London but based now in Los Angeles, she released her first book Women last year – a staggering study of contemporary womanhood created over a period of six years. Published by Idea, bound in gold cloth and featuring 100 cinematic portraits, it was a groundbreaking debut. And now she’s back.
Today Cohen releases her second book, Hello My Name Is … , which, also published by Idea, sees the photographer transform into 33 different characters. Each one is inspired by name badges belonging to unknown individuals that she’s collected over the years. It’s a masterpiece not only of photography but of the process of transformation; of styling, hair, make-up and prosthetics. She even collected objects for each persona, making them into fully realised characters. There’s Jackie, the shaggy-haired Barbara Streisand fan; Mrs Fisher, the floral-festooned British royalist; and Jeff, the plush, portly and Nixon-supporting cowboy. Martin Parr and Paul Reubens AKA Pee-wee Herman have provided texts for the book, which is published in a limited edition of 1,000, just in time for Christmas.
Here, Cohen delves into the process of creating this publication and explains why she dedicated it to “the 99¢ store manager”.
Ted Stansfield: I’d love to start by talking about Los Angeles, where you live. What is your relationship to the city? And how did your fantasy of it compare to the reality when you first arrived?
Nadia Lee Cohen: I still feel like a spectator even though I’ve been in Los Angeles for over five years. I hope I always view it like that. Before I came here I had that British naivety towards Hollywood and assumed it was a very glamorous place filled with palm trees, movie execs and Lindsey Lohans. I drove to Hollywood Boulevard on one of my first nights, in a car I had bought for $800 (which turned out to be the body of a BMW with the engine of a Nissan – very apt for what I am about to describe) and was so excited to see the Walk of Fame in the flesh. I remember asking someone if I was actually in Hollywood and they told me to fuck off. I had arrived to discover bad lookalikes, filthy streets and gawping tourists. On the sad side there was also homelessness, chronic mental illness and prostitution, all lit up and sparkling with the neon lights of Hollywood; the fairground of American decay on parade and no sign of Lindsey Lohan. The discovery of this underbelly might not sound all that appealing; and even though it wasn’t what I expected, it turned out to be the reason I love Los Angeles and why it became a sort of dysfunctional muse.
https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/13776/nadia-lee-cohen-photographer-hello-my-name-is-book-idea-interview-2021
DECEMBER 14, 2021
Ted Stansfield
Photography by Nadia Lee Cohen. Courtesy of Idea
Nadia Lee Cohen is surely one of the most exciting image-makers working today. Born in London but based now in Los Angeles, she released her first book Women last year – a staggering study of contemporary womanhood created over a period of six years. Published by Idea, bound in gold cloth and featuring 100 cinematic portraits, it was a groundbreaking debut. And now she’s back.
Today Cohen releases her second book, Hello My Name Is … , which, also published by Idea, sees the photographer transform into 33 different characters. Each one is inspired by name badges belonging to unknown individuals that she’s collected over the years. It’s a masterpiece not only of photography but of the process of transformation; of styling, hair, make-up and prosthetics. She even collected objects for each persona, making them into fully realised characters. There’s Jackie, the shaggy-haired Barbara Streisand fan; Mrs Fisher, the floral-festooned British royalist; and Jeff, the plush, portly and Nixon-supporting cowboy. Martin Parr and Paul Reubens AKA Pee-wee Herman have provided texts for the book, which is published in a limited edition of 1,000, just in time for Christmas.
Here, Cohen delves into the process of creating this publication and explains why she dedicated it to “the 99¢ store manager”.
Ted Stansfield: I’d love to start by talking about Los Angeles, where you live. What is your relationship to the city? And how did your fantasy of it compare to the reality when you first arrived?
Nadia Lee Cohen: I still feel like a spectator even though I’ve been in Los Angeles for over five years. I hope I always view it like that. Before I came here I had that British naivety towards Hollywood and assumed it was a very glamorous place filled with palm trees, movie execs and Lindsey Lohans. I drove to Hollywood Boulevard on one of my first nights, in a car I had bought for $800 (which turned out to be the body of a BMW with the engine of a Nissan – very apt for what I am about to describe) and was so excited to see the Walk of Fame in the flesh. I remember asking someone if I was actually in Hollywood and they told me to fuck off. I had arrived to discover bad lookalikes, filthy streets and gawping tourists. On the sad side there was also homelessness, chronic mental illness and prostitution, all lit up and sparkling with the neon lights of Hollywood; the fairground of American decay on parade and no sign of Lindsey Lohan. The discovery of this underbelly might not sound all that appealing; and even though it wasn’t what I expected, it turned out to be the reason I love Los Angeles and why it became a sort of dysfunctional muse.
https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/13776/nadia-lee-cohen-photographer-hello-my-name-is-book-idea-interview-2021
Misc. Posts
Assorted Images Posted as Stories and Single Posts and a few extras
East Los Angeles Gang El Hoyo Maravilla (1983)
In 1983, British photographer Janette Beckman was in Los Angeles documenting the burgeoning West Coast punk scene. Browsing through the LA Weekly, she became fascinated with an article about El Hoyo Maravilla (HM), a Mexican American street gang based in East LA. “There were no photos to illustrate the story,” Beckman recalls. “After reading the article in the LA Weekly I tracked the writer down and persuaded him to take me to the ‘Hoyo Maravilla Park’ and introduce me… I just wanted to document the East LA culture and style. It was a part of Los Angeles that no one seemed to acknowledge. Back in the day, before the internet, if you thought of LA it was Hollywood, the movies, Beverly Hills, and the music scene.”
Bad To The Bone! Portraits Of Vintage Female Pro Wrestling
When I moved to Georgia as a youngster, I got turned on to wrestling and all of the characters that made up the sport. What I did not see a lot of at the time were women wrestlers. Don’t get it twisted – women have been brawling for decades. If you don’t believe me, check out all of these rad vintage photos of women wrestlers kicking ass. If you are living in the UK, there is a show up called WOMEN OF WRESTLING at the Doomed Gallery in Dalston.
https://cvltnation.com/bad-to-the-bone-portraits-of-vintage-female-pro-wrestling/
https://cvltnation.com/bad-to-the-bone-portraits-of-vintage-female-pro-wrestling/
Rennie Ellis and the decadent '80s
A new collection of photographs by Rennie Ellis captures the excess of the '80s and '90s. 'Decadent' documents the seedier side of life in an Australia that had not yet seen anti-binge drinking or skin cancer awareness campaigns.
Was Australian social culture more freewheeling and outrageous in the ‘80s and ‘90s? It’s often said that life now is a lot more conservative than it was just a couple of decades ago.
Perhaps some hard evidence can be found in a new book of photographs by late Melbourne photographer Rennie Ellis. Called Decadent, the selection of images taken between 1980 and 2000 captures the the wilder side of life at the end of the twentieth century.
When Ellis died from a brain haemorrhage in 2003 at the age of 62 he left behind a priceless legacy: hundreds of thousands of photographs documenting the lives and lifestyles of ordinary and extraordinary Australians.
‘Between 1980 and the end of the twentieth century, Rennie Ellis documented what were, in retrospect, seismic changes in Australia,’ writes fellow photographer Robert McFarlane in his foreword.
Ellis captured a brief period of ‘behavioural candour’ in Australian society.
‘It could easily be argued that we have retreated into a more modest, conservative Australia since these pictures were made.’
The images were taken in public locations: beaches, pubs, sporting events and in the demimonde of Melbourne’s nightclubs and strip clubs.
William Yang describes Ellis as a ‘good perv’ who was charming and non-judgmental. While Yang, also a noted and prolific photographer, was documenting Sydney’s social scene—from celebrities to sub-cultures of the gay community—he met Ellis and the two became friends. They shared a passion for capturing the era’s exuberance in their respective cities.
‘[There was] a feeling of liberation and freedom; a collective social euphoria where people threw off the shackles of polite society,’ says Yang.
‘That window of social history where "anything goes"—all those parties and of excess, the fun, the defiance and the sex, both flaunted and actual—had closed.’
Manuela Furci, director of the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive and Ellis’ former assistant, says that he was obsessive about taking photos.
‘What I loved about Rennie, apart from his child-like curiosity, was that he treated everyone with respect ... he just loved stories.’
What Decadent captures, Furci believes, is a mood that existed before skin cancer awareness campaigns, when smoking and drinking alcohol were seen as a guilty pleasures. In the earlier years, the dreadful gravity of the HIV/AIDs epidemic was not fully comprehended.
It was also before social media, when risqué behaviour and dress did not come with the fear of becoming an unwitting Facebook sensation.
‘People felt a lot freer in expressing themselves ... they felt less inhibited,’ Furci says.
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/archived/thelist/rennie-ellis/5352326
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You know how you were just scrolling and said, "Hang on, did I just see a post of Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Frederik Pohl, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, and Neil Gaiman all with cats?"
Vintage Photos of Ladies with Bird Hats - credit - Vintage Everyday
Contort yourself! The mutant disco mayhem of New York’s Ze Records
Disgusted with Britain’s ‘cruel’ aristocracy, Michael Zilkha left to champion a generation of party-starting punk-funk bands. As he returns as a book publisher, he remembers that wild scene
John Peel once said that Ze Records was “the best independent label in the world”. The Face magazine called it the “world’s most fashionable”. Between 1978 and 1984, the New York record company’s incredible roster included Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Lydia Lunch, Was (Not Was), Lizzy Mercier Descloux, James Chance and Suicide, who were mostly rather extreme characters.
“It felt more like a repertory company than a record label,” says the co-founder Michael Zilkha. “We’d have these crazy showcases, with everyone except Lydia, who was outside picketing because she felt I hadn’t given her enough tour support.”
‘I wanted to start again in an immigrant city’ … Michael Zilkha in 1981. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images
Four decades on, Ze is back, but as a book publisher. The idea was triggered in January 2017, when Zilkha was visited by an old friend, Glenn O’Brien, who had cancer. O’Brien was a staunch Ze champion when he edited Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in the late 70s, and in 2000 worked with Zilkha on Downtown 81, a film featuring the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and several Ze acts.
“Glenn was down here having treatment,” says Zilkha, 68, on a video call from Houston, Texas. “We were sitting in my garden and he said: ‘Michael. Do you think I’m a good writer?’ I told him he was a great writer – I loved his writings on Basquiat, Patti Smith and Trump. But he’d never been a part of the literary establishment, so I knew what he was asking.”
O’Brien died a few weeks later, by which time Zilkha had promised his friend that he would publish a volume of his writing. In 2019, Intelligence for Dummies: Essays and Other Collected Writings became the first Ze book. “I told him that he would be properly recognised and I’d get it reviewed in the New York Review of Books, which it was.” Now, Zilkha is launching Ze’s backlist in the UK alongside two books: the former Life magazine photographer Bud Lee’s powerful 1967 Newark riots monograph The War is Here; and Adele Bertei’s Twist: An American Girl. This extraordinary memoir details her troubled path to forming the first gay all-girl band, the Bloods, and playing in early Ze signing James Chance and the Contortions.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/mar/16/contort-yourself-the-mutant-disco-mayhem-of-new-yorks-ze-records?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3TBN7U2sl2t1MJhlwa8pBrzImbtVJHC3-EeTCYRt1TNqhyodhGBnubAXU
John Peel once said that Ze Records was “the best independent label in the world”. The Face magazine called it the “world’s most fashionable”. Between 1978 and 1984, the New York record company’s incredible roster included Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Lydia Lunch, Was (Not Was), Lizzy Mercier Descloux, James Chance and Suicide, who were mostly rather extreme characters.
“It felt more like a repertory company than a record label,” says the co-founder Michael Zilkha. “We’d have these crazy showcases, with everyone except Lydia, who was outside picketing because she felt I hadn’t given her enough tour support.”
‘I wanted to start again in an immigrant city’ … Michael Zilkha in 1981. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images
Four decades on, Ze is back, but as a book publisher. The idea was triggered in January 2017, when Zilkha was visited by an old friend, Glenn O’Brien, who had cancer. O’Brien was a staunch Ze champion when he edited Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in the late 70s, and in 2000 worked with Zilkha on Downtown 81, a film featuring the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and several Ze acts.
“Glenn was down here having treatment,” says Zilkha, 68, on a video call from Houston, Texas. “We were sitting in my garden and he said: ‘Michael. Do you think I’m a good writer?’ I told him he was a great writer – I loved his writings on Basquiat, Patti Smith and Trump. But he’d never been a part of the literary establishment, so I knew what he was asking.”
O’Brien died a few weeks later, by which time Zilkha had promised his friend that he would publish a volume of his writing. In 2019, Intelligence for Dummies: Essays and Other Collected Writings became the first Ze book. “I told him that he would be properly recognised and I’d get it reviewed in the New York Review of Books, which it was.” Now, Zilkha is launching Ze’s backlist in the UK alongside two books: the former Life magazine photographer Bud Lee’s powerful 1967 Newark riots monograph The War is Here; and Adele Bertei’s Twist: An American Girl. This extraordinary memoir details her troubled path to forming the first gay all-girl band, the Bloods, and playing in early Ze signing James Chance and the Contortions.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/mar/16/contort-yourself-the-mutant-disco-mayhem-of-new-yorks-ze-records?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3TBN7U2sl2t1MJhlwa8pBrzImbtVJHC3-EeTCYRt1TNqhyodhGBnubAXU
40 years of Japanese rockers Shonen Knife: ‘Nirvana looked wild – I was so scared!’
With songs about jellybeans and feline transformations, the Osaka band brought joy and fun to a serious punk-rock scene. After decades of cult hits, frontwoman Naoko Yamano explains why she wants to end up the world’s oldest rock star
Daniel Robson
Fri 3 Dec 2021
Very few rock bands make it to 40 years. And for Shonen Knife, this landmark seems all the more unlikely – there haven’t been many all-women rock bands from Japan who turned their obsession with junk food, cute animals and Ramones into an international career.
Their breakthrough came with 1992’s Let’s Knife, released in Britain by Creation Records shortly after a career-changing tour with Nirvana. It was a punk album like no other, featuring lyrical observations on the envy frontwoman Naoko Yamano felt for exotic American girls with blond hair and blue eyes, alongside pontification on life’s more frivolous joys: eating jellybeans, riding a bicycle, fishing for black bass, and – rather less relatably – becoming a cat and growing whiskers.
“I was too embarrassed to write songs about love,” says Naoko, 60, as we sit in the Tokyo office of Shonen Knife’s Japanese record label to reflect on the past 40 years. “Instead, I wanted to write about the topics that were important to me, like sweets and delicious food, or cute animals. I’m not really a very deep thinker, so I just want to write music that will make people feel happy.”
Shonen Knife formed in 1981 when Naoko and her schoolfriend Michie Nakatani cemented their love for the Beatles, the Jam and Ramones into something of their own. With Naoko on guitar and Nakatani on bass, they enlisted Naoko’s younger sister, Atsuko, on drums.
The trio entered a tiny room at the Rock Inn rehearsal studio in Osaka for the first time on 29 December 1981. “It felt good to hear the guitar and bass coming through the amplifiers, and the loud drum sound,” recalls Naoko of that first rehearsal, where they played covers of songs by British punk and pop bands such as Delta 5, Buzzcocks and Mo-dettes. Then, in March 1982, they played their first gig at a small Osaka venue, where young Atsuko became so overpowered by nerves that she broke out in a rash.
Among the seven or eight songs they played that night was Parallel Woman, the first song Naoko ever wrote. Later released on their 1983 album Burning Farm, Parallel Woman set the template for Shonen Knife’s approach to songwriting, with detailed observational lyrics about Naoko’s experience of working in a factory while dreaming of revealing her true identity as a rock’n’roll superheroine – the mundane writ fantastic. In a punk scene where bands snarled lyrics about class war, drugs, sex and violence, Naoko and Nakatani wrote songs that were overwhelmingly positive, innocent and fun, making their music all the more disarming.
https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2021/dec/03/40-years-of-japanese-rockers-shonen-knife-nirvana-looked-wild-i-was-so-scared
Daniel Robson
Fri 3 Dec 2021
Very few rock bands make it to 40 years. And for Shonen Knife, this landmark seems all the more unlikely – there haven’t been many all-women rock bands from Japan who turned their obsession with junk food, cute animals and Ramones into an international career.
Their breakthrough came with 1992’s Let’s Knife, released in Britain by Creation Records shortly after a career-changing tour with Nirvana. It was a punk album like no other, featuring lyrical observations on the envy frontwoman Naoko Yamano felt for exotic American girls with blond hair and blue eyes, alongside pontification on life’s more frivolous joys: eating jellybeans, riding a bicycle, fishing for black bass, and – rather less relatably – becoming a cat and growing whiskers.
“I was too embarrassed to write songs about love,” says Naoko, 60, as we sit in the Tokyo office of Shonen Knife’s Japanese record label to reflect on the past 40 years. “Instead, I wanted to write about the topics that were important to me, like sweets and delicious food, or cute animals. I’m not really a very deep thinker, so I just want to write music that will make people feel happy.”
Shonen Knife formed in 1981 when Naoko and her schoolfriend Michie Nakatani cemented their love for the Beatles, the Jam and Ramones into something of their own. With Naoko on guitar and Nakatani on bass, they enlisted Naoko’s younger sister, Atsuko, on drums.
The trio entered a tiny room at the Rock Inn rehearsal studio in Osaka for the first time on 29 December 1981. “It felt good to hear the guitar and bass coming through the amplifiers, and the loud drum sound,” recalls Naoko of that first rehearsal, where they played covers of songs by British punk and pop bands such as Delta 5, Buzzcocks and Mo-dettes. Then, in March 1982, they played their first gig at a small Osaka venue, where young Atsuko became so overpowered by nerves that she broke out in a rash.
Among the seven or eight songs they played that night was Parallel Woman, the first song Naoko ever wrote. Later released on their 1983 album Burning Farm, Parallel Woman set the template for Shonen Knife’s approach to songwriting, with detailed observational lyrics about Naoko’s experience of working in a factory while dreaming of revealing her true identity as a rock’n’roll superheroine – the mundane writ fantastic. In a punk scene where bands snarled lyrics about class war, drugs, sex and violence, Naoko and Nakatani wrote songs that were overwhelmingly positive, innocent and fun, making their music all the more disarming.
https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2021/dec/03/40-years-of-japanese-rockers-shonen-knife-nirvana-looked-wild-i-was-so-scared
When Richard Pryor Sang The Blues
Best known for his comedy, Richard Pryor performed a moving blues standard on TV in the 1960s.
James Gaunt
While these days Richard Pryor is known for his many outrageous comedy antics, he was a lot less controversial in the early 1960s and often appeared on TV variety shows.
During 1966 Richard worked as a writer and regular performer on The Kraft Summer Music Hall, a music and comedy variety show which ran as a spinoff from the long running Kraft Music Hall. Of the eleven summer episodes, Richard appeared in five.
On August 8 1966, the show featured standup comedy routines by Richard and ends with him joining the cast to sing a medley about rivers. The episode isn’t available online, but Vulture previously wrote about it in detail, noting, “Based on his enthusiasm I can’t tell if he was forced to do it or if he requested it. Either way, hearing Richard Pryor sing was the last thing I expected from the Kraft Music Hour.”
Although it was unexpected, he did perform at least one other song, and that has thankfully been shared on YouTube.
In the episode from August 1, host John Davidson introduces him as follows:
There’s a funny thing about show business. Many times singers want to be actors or serious actors just dying to be comics, you know to say a funny line. And sometimes comedians want to sing. Now take Richard Pryor for example. He’s been a guest many times on the show and he’s always a clown, right? We all know him for being a clown. But we found out that Richard's secret desire is to be a singer, is to sing. Well there’s no secret anymore because here is another one of the many talents of Richard Pryor.
Following a burst of applause, Richard appears on stage clicking his fingers along to a double bass and sings Nobody Wants You When You’re Down and Out.
Nobody Wants You When You’re Down and Out was written in 1923 by pianist Jimmie Cox and made famous by Bessie Smith after she released her own rendition in 1929.
Later Nina Simone took it to the charts in 1960, and Richard Pryor may have learnt the song from her as he opened for Nina in the early 60s as he started his comedy career.
In his autobiography Pryor Convictions, and Other Life Sentences, Richard wrote about possibly his first appearance on stage at the start of the 60s. After telling a club owner he could sing and play piano, Richard was hired. The problem was he barely knew four chords, as he wrote:
“For my nightclub debut, I sat at the piano and improvised using the three or four chords I knew. I sang whatever words popped into my head. I saw that people didn’t know whether I was putting them on or weird…Afterward, I tried to look cool, but…I still had sweating pouring off me.”
Rather than fire him, the club’s owner gave Richard a job filling the intermission time between sets. It became his first paid job as a comedian.
According to Scott Saul’s Becoming Richard Pryor, the next time Richard was on stage singing was his performance for the The Kraft Summer Music Hall in 1966. Then one year later, he changed his comedy act into something less family friendly.
Filled with swearing which shocked his audiences and drew many complaints, the infamy around his act meant he has remained one of America’s most well known comics decades after many of his contemporaries had called it quits.
Now that he was best known as a comic, any later musical appearances on TV were mostly played for laughs. Such as in 1974 when Richard played drums with Sly Stone, and when he sang There’s No Business Like Show Business on his own TV special in 1977.
The lone recording of Richard Pryor really singing appears to be from that one episode of The Kraft Summer Music Hall in 1966. It’s a beautiful and moving performance, and it’s unfortunate he didn’t record any more.
https://medium.com/the-riff/when-richard-pryor-sang-the-blues-7882cf699a3
James Gaunt
While these days Richard Pryor is known for his many outrageous comedy antics, he was a lot less controversial in the early 1960s and often appeared on TV variety shows.
During 1966 Richard worked as a writer and regular performer on The Kraft Summer Music Hall, a music and comedy variety show which ran as a spinoff from the long running Kraft Music Hall. Of the eleven summer episodes, Richard appeared in five.
On August 8 1966, the show featured standup comedy routines by Richard and ends with him joining the cast to sing a medley about rivers. The episode isn’t available online, but Vulture previously wrote about it in detail, noting, “Based on his enthusiasm I can’t tell if he was forced to do it or if he requested it. Either way, hearing Richard Pryor sing was the last thing I expected from the Kraft Music Hour.”
Although it was unexpected, he did perform at least one other song, and that has thankfully been shared on YouTube.
In the episode from August 1, host John Davidson introduces him as follows:
There’s a funny thing about show business. Many times singers want to be actors or serious actors just dying to be comics, you know to say a funny line. And sometimes comedians want to sing. Now take Richard Pryor for example. He’s been a guest many times on the show and he’s always a clown, right? We all know him for being a clown. But we found out that Richard's secret desire is to be a singer, is to sing. Well there’s no secret anymore because here is another one of the many talents of Richard Pryor.
Following a burst of applause, Richard appears on stage clicking his fingers along to a double bass and sings Nobody Wants You When You’re Down and Out.
Nobody Wants You When You’re Down and Out was written in 1923 by pianist Jimmie Cox and made famous by Bessie Smith after she released her own rendition in 1929.
Later Nina Simone took it to the charts in 1960, and Richard Pryor may have learnt the song from her as he opened for Nina in the early 60s as he started his comedy career.
In his autobiography Pryor Convictions, and Other Life Sentences, Richard wrote about possibly his first appearance on stage at the start of the 60s. After telling a club owner he could sing and play piano, Richard was hired. The problem was he barely knew four chords, as he wrote:
“For my nightclub debut, I sat at the piano and improvised using the three or four chords I knew. I sang whatever words popped into my head. I saw that people didn’t know whether I was putting them on or weird…Afterward, I tried to look cool, but…I still had sweating pouring off me.”
Rather than fire him, the club’s owner gave Richard a job filling the intermission time between sets. It became his first paid job as a comedian.
According to Scott Saul’s Becoming Richard Pryor, the next time Richard was on stage singing was his performance for the The Kraft Summer Music Hall in 1966. Then one year later, he changed his comedy act into something less family friendly.
Filled with swearing which shocked his audiences and drew many complaints, the infamy around his act meant he has remained one of America’s most well known comics decades after many of his contemporaries had called it quits.
Now that he was best known as a comic, any later musical appearances on TV were mostly played for laughs. Such as in 1974 when Richard played drums with Sly Stone, and when he sang There’s No Business Like Show Business on his own TV special in 1977.
The lone recording of Richard Pryor really singing appears to be from that one episode of The Kraft Summer Music Hall in 1966. It’s a beautiful and moving performance, and it’s unfortunate he didn’t record any more.
https://medium.com/the-riff/when-richard-pryor-sang-the-blues-7882cf699a3
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
What really got to me was the walk.
Early in the film Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, we see the Emmy, Golden Globe and Grammy award-winning performer trying to walk down a city street. Even as his equilibrium is severely distorted by the effects of Parkinson's disease, Fox energetically launches himself into the task — moving forward with a lurching gait that seems as if he might spin off into an unpredictable direction at any moment.
Behind him, an aide who is also a movement coach gently reminds him to slow down and reset himself before every step. An admirer — a woman in a face mask — walks by and says hi; as Fox turns to acknowledge her, he gets caught in his own legs and falls down.
As the aide helps him get up and the admirer asks if he's all right, Fox drops the punchline: "You knocked me off my feet."
That's the kind of intimate drama which knits together the best moments in Still, a portrait of a talented and widely-admired performer who keeps fighting, even as Parkinson's slowly takes away many of the things he values most.
At times it is a showy film, knitting together re-enacted footage and clips from Fox's wide body of TV and movie work to recreate key moments in the actor's life. It begins with the instant in 1990 when Fox realized he had a tremor in his pinkie finger he couldn't control.
In that scene, director Davis Guggenheim (an Oscar winner for An Inconvenient Truth) melds footage of a body double in a hotel bed who's grabbing his own hand with clips from fight scenes in other Fox films to build a montage showing the feelings flooding the actor as he watched this digit which seemingly had a mind of its own.
Despite the fact that he was one of Hollywood's hottest actors at the time, "I was in an acid bath of fear and professional insecurity," Fox says in voice over. "The trembling was a message from the future."
Telling a painful truth without pity
Still accomplishes something amazing – it draws viewers into the painful reality of Fox's life with Parkinson's without turning him into an object of pity or martyrdom.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/12/1175736582/michael-j-fox-still-parkinsons
Early in the film Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, we see the Emmy, Golden Globe and Grammy award-winning performer trying to walk down a city street. Even as his equilibrium is severely distorted by the effects of Parkinson's disease, Fox energetically launches himself into the task — moving forward with a lurching gait that seems as if he might spin off into an unpredictable direction at any moment.
Behind him, an aide who is also a movement coach gently reminds him to slow down and reset himself before every step. An admirer — a woman in a face mask — walks by and says hi; as Fox turns to acknowledge her, he gets caught in his own legs and falls down.
As the aide helps him get up and the admirer asks if he's all right, Fox drops the punchline: "You knocked me off my feet."
That's the kind of intimate drama which knits together the best moments in Still, a portrait of a talented and widely-admired performer who keeps fighting, even as Parkinson's slowly takes away many of the things he values most.
At times it is a showy film, knitting together re-enacted footage and clips from Fox's wide body of TV and movie work to recreate key moments in the actor's life. It begins with the instant in 1990 when Fox realized he had a tremor in his pinkie finger he couldn't control.
In that scene, director Davis Guggenheim (an Oscar winner for An Inconvenient Truth) melds footage of a body double in a hotel bed who's grabbing his own hand with clips from fight scenes in other Fox films to build a montage showing the feelings flooding the actor as he watched this digit which seemingly had a mind of its own.
Despite the fact that he was one of Hollywood's hottest actors at the time, "I was in an acid bath of fear and professional insecurity," Fox says in voice over. "The trembling was a message from the future."
Telling a painful truth without pity
Still accomplishes something amazing – it draws viewers into the painful reality of Fox's life with Parkinson's without turning him into an object of pity or martyrdom.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/12/1175736582/michael-j-fox-still-parkinsons
‘SIMPSONS’ CREATOR MATT GROENING TELLS THE STORY OF THE RESIDENTS, 1979
The Residents, 1972
The Residents’ first fan club, W.E.I.R.D. (We Endorse Immediate Residents Deification), was founded in 1978, and one of its charter members was Life in Hell and Simpsons creator Matt Groening. As a member of the Residents’ second fan club, UWEB, I am bound by the most solemn oaths never to discuss any of the secret handshakes, passwords, ciphers, rituals, buttons, bumper stickers or T-shirts of the inner sanctum, but I can point seekers to this exoteric document: Groening’s “The True Story of the Residents.” This phantasmagoric bio of the group, first published in 1979’s The Official W.E.I.R.D. Book of the Residents and reprinted in 1993’s Uncle Willie’s Highly Opinionated Guide to the Residents, gives a wild yet relatively concise account of the band’s founding myth.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/simpsons_creator_matt_groening_tells_the_story_of_the_residents_1979
Ep 33: Flo Fox (Photographer/Designer/Activist)
Ep 33: Flo Fox (Photographer/Designer/Activist)
Flo Fox began her career as a photographer in New York City in 1972.
For the better part of her career, Flo Fox has been legally blind, as a result of multiple sclerosis that she contracted when she was thirty. She is Totally disabled from the neck down and has been confined to a wheelchair since 1999, Flo now shoots with an automatic camera and directs friends, attendants or people in the street to take pictures for her.
Throughout her career and with an archive of over 130,000 works, Flo photographed various subjects that chronicled the rich ironies of street life in New York City. During the early 80s she hosted her own show called the Foto Flo Show. Despite blindness, multiple sclerosis, and lung cancer, photographer Flo Fox continues to shoot the streets of New York City and never goes anywhere without her camera.
Flo Fox is the coolest person, artist, photographer, activist, designer you probably have never heard of. We talk about her early career making costumes for Broadway productions in the 1970's including "A Chorus Line". We talk about her Dicthology Project in which between the 1970's and 1990's she took creative Polaroids (with film Polaroid gave her) of penises all the men who entered her apartment over 23 years. (Vintage Annals will be putting out this book by late September) I want to be clear that neither Flo nor I want anyone to think her life, or this episode, is meant to be Inspiration Porn in any way. Flo would be ok with the porn part as she has always been a sex positive photographer and artist, and even did a Playboy shoot in 1976 that she designed and photographed. Flo has also been an activist and fought for the rights of disabled people for years. Lastly she is one of the funniest, and at times, raunchiest 77 year old jewish females I have ever met, which is also why I enjoy interviewing her for this episode, and why I am working with her now. Thank you to @twobytwomedia and @karengottfried2 for helping make this happen.
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/vaapod
Flo Fox began her career as a photographer in New York City in 1972.
For the better part of her career, Flo Fox has been legally blind, as a result of multiple sclerosis that she contracted when she was thirty. She is Totally disabled from the neck down and has been confined to a wheelchair since 1999, Flo now shoots with an automatic camera and directs friends, attendants or people in the street to take pictures for her.
Throughout her career and with an archive of over 130,000 works, Flo photographed various subjects that chronicled the rich ironies of street life in New York City. During the early 80s she hosted her own show called the Foto Flo Show. Despite blindness, multiple sclerosis, and lung cancer, photographer Flo Fox continues to shoot the streets of New York City and never goes anywhere without her camera.
Flo Fox is the coolest person, artist, photographer, activist, designer you probably have never heard of. We talk about her early career making costumes for Broadway productions in the 1970's including "A Chorus Line". We talk about her Dicthology Project in which between the 1970's and 1990's she took creative Polaroids (with film Polaroid gave her) of penises all the men who entered her apartment over 23 years. (Vintage Annals will be putting out this book by late September) I want to be clear that neither Flo nor I want anyone to think her life, or this episode, is meant to be Inspiration Porn in any way. Flo would be ok with the porn part as she has always been a sex positive photographer and artist, and even did a Playboy shoot in 1976 that she designed and photographed. Flo has also been an activist and fought for the rights of disabled people for years. Lastly she is one of the funniest, and at times, raunchiest 77 year old jewish females I have ever met, which is also why I enjoy interviewing her for this episode, and why I am working with her now. Thank you to @twobytwomedia and @karengottfried2 for helping make this happen.
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/vaapod
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