The New York Times is running a review of the Whitney’s Summer of Love exhibit. I had considered a jaunt down to New York, partly to see old friends, partly to check out the new antiquities wing at the Met, and partly to remind myself why I live in California. Two days ago, I decided that I wouldn’t– but the lead image from the article almost makes me reconsider:

I’ve never seen this before, but it’s instantly recognizable as the work of Martin Sharp, for my money the best psychedelic artist of the 60s. Sharp was a co-founder & editor of OZ, the premiere London underground magazine. He personally handled the visual design and layout for the first 20 or so issues. It takes a few issues for OZ to hit its stride– but by, say, issue #8, the magazine becomes one of the most graphically inventive periodicals ever published. This was single-handedly the work of Sharp.

Issue 16, the wonderful & unbelievable OZ Presents the Magic Theatre, was designed and executed by Sharp alone. It stands as the best artefact of the whole psychedelic period. The visual and narrative complexity are astonishing. Also indescribable. It’s better to just go read it yourself. In fact, you can read the vast majority of issues of OZ here.

Look for the Lucifer ads, amongst other period hilarities.

Although I don’t think it’s mentioned in either of the two books (or are there three?) on the film, Sharp was clearly hired by Donald Cammell to do some, if not all, set design on Performance. Turner’s living room/performance space and Noel/Chaz’s basement flat both contain vintage Sharp, including a funny adaptation of the cover of OZ #15:

(My copy of the DVD is in LA, so I’ll have to wait to post the comparison image.)

A pleasure of returning home is the revisitation of old habits & things. Of particular interest is the book collection. As I’ve roughly 5-6,000 books stored in Rhode Island, I’m unable to bring them wherever I go. When I move, typically I take those books most salient to my present state of mind. This time, the coastal transfer put the kibosh on the deal. I brought 3 books. Strange days.

Knowing that I was coming back to Rhode Island, I had thought about what books I should open while at home– one was Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969, published by PictureBox, and edited by Dan Nadel, the imprint’s founder. When I saw this book at last year’s MoCCA, I bought it on the spot. The concept is great: unsung heroes given the high class presentation ordinarily reserved for the acclaimed Masters of the Form. You know, like Jack Kirby!

I was interested because the book contained some work by Rory Hayes, the oddest of the underground comix oddballs. Hayes was (in the awful and irresponsible manner of the day) metaphorically adopted by the SF scene and embraced as a contemporary. Except he wasn’t– in essence, Hayes was an outsider artist with minimal formal training. He was also about 18. It shows. My favorite (and totally unobtainable) example of early Hayes is CUNT Comics #1:

And that’s only the cover, folks!

Everything here is fantastic: the image’s unbelievable crudeness matched by the execution, the shock joke illustration underscored by the bawdy subhead, and then the hilariously unsubtle parody/worship attribution to “R. Fuck”. It comes across like the epitome of the kind of comic that would be produced by an intellectually precocious, emotionally immature and painfully undersexed 18 year old boy.

The beauty of SF & its underground comix scene was thus: Hayes may have written and drawn CUNT, but someone else published it. (Of course, the print run was only about 100 issues. Which is why it’s impossible to find.)

When I finally read Art Out of Time, I was disappointed– not only had Hayes been given about 5 pages, at most, but the book’s internal categorization of different artists seemed utterly random and meaningless. We’re talking about “Exercises in Exploration,” “Slapstick,” “Acts of Drawing,” “Words in Pictures,” and “Form and Style.” None of which inform the reader of anything besides someone’s memories of foundation year courses in art history & theory.

The categories wouldn’t be a problem if they in any way were defined. They’re not. Each has a terse, one-to-two paragraph introductory blurb as vague as the names. Furthermore, after a section has been introduced, other than changing names at the top of each right page, the artists appear one after the other with no break. This might be an appropriate if new each artist was different from the last, but this is often not the case.

Far, far too many pages are given over to the early days of newspaper comics. Two problems: one, the reproductions are small and barely readable. Secondly, few of the artists reproduced are distinct from one another. Most seem typical examples of their day– distinguished either by a supposed lack of formalism, or too much formalism, or a Strangeness of Content.

Given that the artists best loved from the early period of newspaper comics– McCay, Herriman, and Segar, for example– all produced unbelievably weird work & were all masters of the form, one starts wondering about the integrity of the book’s core concept. After 13 pages of Harry J. Tuthill bleeds into 13 pages of C.W. Kahles, this impression is only reinforced. Even more baffling is that the truly distinct artists, like Hayes, or like Fletcher Hanks or George Carlson, have significantly fewer pages than the aforementioned Tuthill or Kahles.

Hanks is what had me re-reading Art Out of Time. There’s been a lot of discussion of his work lately, brought on by the forthcoming Fantagraphics book. I’d found the online scans of Hanks’s work hard to read, so I had hoped that Art Out of Time might be an alternate resource. Inevitably, I was disappointed: there’s only one story, and while great, it’s 8 pages long. By contrast, it’s followed by 17 Sundays of Garrett Price’s White Boy, the most interesting feature of which is its title.

My final complaint, and a not insignificant one, is that the last 12 pages of the book contain breezy and uninformative biographies of the artists. While I recognize that space constraints determine the length of such things, I find these entries to be particularly uselessness.

Think I’m exaggerating? Let’s quote from the Rory Hayes bio:

“He, like Fletcher Hanks, drew without reference to any known world besides the one inside his head.”

And what does the Fletcher Hanks bio read?

“All of his work is crude, but like Rory Hayes, completely self-assured.”

Both artists are part of the ACTS OF DRAWING section of the book, and their bios are separated by less than two pages. What do these two sentences even mean? I assure you, they’re not taken out of context.

With Art of Time, you ain’t gotta worry about no context.

Yesterday’s post reminded me that I’d read an article about Rory Hayes in The Comics Journal. This lead to digging through back issues and old books. Eventually I found it: issue 250, February 2003. I was living in a basement outside Detroit. This was much earlier than I’d thought.

The article was written by Bob Levin, author of the Air Pirates book, and has since been reprinted in another of his books. I haven’t read the latter, but I’m sure that like everything by Levin, it’s fascinating, informative, and poorly written. I wouldn’t mention the quality of writing if Levin hadn’t himself poked fun at Hayes’s supposed grammatical errors. Glass houses, kids.

Another resource for much of Hayes’s art is this site. There’s about five pages of 15 scans each, but no complete stories. Still it gives one a taste of the artwork. The cover of Hayes’s first comic, Bogeyman #1, pretty much sums up the distance between he & his contemporaries:

Is there any other early underground cover as stark?

And for the hell of it, here’s a few more images:

(The promotional flyer for Bogeyman #1.)






(The Bogeyman hisself.)






(I assume this is the front page of CUNT #1.)

I’m mystified that Fantagraphics has yet to issue a collection of Hayes’s work– from Levin’s article, it seems that the entire output totals less than 150 page. If they’ll give Victor Moscoso his own book (where the posters are great but the comics kind of boring), why not Hayes?

Thanks in advance!

(P.S. I was wrong in the last post. More than 100 copies of Cunt were sold.)

Got around to screencapturing some of Performance. See this post for more background.

Here are the significant appearances of Martin Sharp’s artwork within the film. The first image contains a reworking of Sharp’s famous Bob Dylan poster. The last three are of the reworking of OZ #15’s cover, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the other images have direct antecedents as well. The last capture is the only place where we learn the name of Turner’s band. Turner’s Purple Orchestra. Well, yes. It was, after all, the sixties.

P.S. Buy the DVD! Ignore the hideous box art!

Amongst those who dubiously self-identify as Dylanologists (a stupid term coined by the vile A.J. Weberman, arguably the most loathsome of all 60s counter-culture figures) it has been long recognized that Bob Dylan suffers from a rare form of mental insanity. This madness, and madness it is, is not listed in the DSM but can be identified by its sole symptom: those with Bob Dylan’s Disease will, and for no apparent reason, put weak material on officially released albums while hiding simultaneously recorded material of superior quality.

With Dylan, this started early– “Mama You Been On My Mind”, “Farewell, Angelina”, and the masterpiece “She’s Your Lover Now”– and has continued throughout his whole career. Think “Up To Me”, “Abandoned Love”, and “Blind Willie McTell”. The appearance of “Mississippi” on Love and Theft, a track originally recorded for Time Out of Mind, makes us wonder if Dylan isn’t still at his old tricks. (Although it’s just possible that Dylan may have been in the right, as producer Daniel Lanois reportedly had layered polyrhythmic drumming on the Time original.)

With Tuesday’s release of The Lost Tracks of Danzig, a 2CD set of outtakes from the history of Glenn Danzig’s eponymous band, we must report sadly that we have found another sufferer of Bob Dylan’s Disease. Some of my readers might, of course, wonder if there is any genuine qualitative difference in any of Danzig’s output– ain’t that all just some gol danged heavy metal crap?

Well, no.

Glenn Danzig has had some strange luck– the Misfits were great, but what in the hell were they? A band so weird that it took suburban kids 15 years to turn them into a cheap psychobilly cliche. Samhain? Well, jeez, I love Samhain but even I can’t tell you what the heck that was about. And then, yes, finally, Danzig. Again the odd luck held– the first album was released in ‘88, the second in ‘90. Both surfed on a wave of accessible, radio friendly metal, getting Glenn Danzig a house in Los Feliz but tarnishing his reputation as a metal goon, something the man’s endless cock of the walk posturing has done nothing to abate.

Both albums offer a uniquely weird blues based rock structured around a super crunchy guitar sound and The Voice’s lyrical throwaways on the motifs that have consumed Danzig from, we presume, early adolescence– skulls, blackness, blood, demons and women. Then came Danzig III, an album I like, but which really is kind of metal, and then the live album/double-EP that gave us the ‘93 single of “Mother”, solidifying forever Glenn Danzig’s reputation as Metal Dude. The follow-up was Danzig 4p, a great album and the most successful of all of Danzig’s experiments. (It is also almost certainly the only major label release to reference the Scientology off-shoot The Process Church of the Final Judgment.)

And then came the darkness. With a demonic host of malign and bloody skulls, Danzig fired the band that’d been with him for all four albums (and was the final Samhain lineup) and made 5: Blackacidevil, an album of Trent Reznor fanfic about three years too late. Then 666: Satan’s Child, and then 7: I, Luciferi. The less said of either, the better. 2004 saw a happy return to form with Circle of Snakes. The Voice sounded terrible on the previous two albums, and while weaker with age, it’s fine on Circle; the major problem being production. For whatever reason, the album is poorly leveled on big systems while sounding just fine on headphones.

And that was supposed to be it: Circle of Snakes was the last album by Danzig, the band. But Glenn Danzig, the man, had a vault full of inverted crosses and unreleased tracks, and he began rumbling about releasing them, and so he has. And I am here to report that The Lost Tracks of Danzig is significantly better than anything since Danzig 4p, and also that Glenn Danzig has Bob Dylan’s Disease.

The first disc is all Danzig 1-4, and yeah, of course that’s going to be great. But the second disc has outtakes from 5-7, and they’re so much better than anything on those albums that unless you accept mental insanity as a defense, it’s impossible to figure out why they were omitted in favor of the tracks that comprised the original albums.

Music may be the only artform where murdering your darlings constitutes a mistake. That’s weird, but how else do you explain it? Actual insanity? Monstrous egotism? The total inability to discern one’s own efforts?

I have no idea! But boy I really like The Lost Tracks of Danzig. This is all.

George W. Bush’s Andover old boy attitude with an Irish interviewer, and Todd C. Murray’s comment upon it, reminded me of my second favorite piece of young Bush lore: the branding.

When I first heard that Bush had defended, and in the New York Times, the branding of members of his frat, it seemed like another hilarious example of the man’s astounding ability to manipulate his public image. How could an Andover/Yalie old-boy with a Connecticut Senator (and possibly Nazi profiteer) grandfather and a former President father position himself as a Washington outsider?

Now, after Abu Ghraib and post-Guantanamo it just seems revelatory.

Here’s the original article:

For reasons bizarre & untold, I’ve been trying to make sacrifices to the Book God via the purchase of  books at full cover, an almost unheard of sin. A few days ago, I acquired the newly released unexpurgated, unedited hardback of Jack Kerouac’s Original Scroll of On the Road. Even now I find this choice inexplicable & can’t explain my actions– I have bad feelings towards the work of all the Beats (except Burroughs, and even then I find his 60s work nearly intolerable) but none so much as Kerouac’s, which I find a mixture of the boring & the offensive.

His personal history– ah, now there’s another story.

Kerouac was a New England boy made on the mean streets of Lowell, MA. He went to Columbia on a football scholarship– and while there, fell in with the dissolute crowd of junkies, queers and 8th Avenue hucksters who contributed mightily to the creation of the Writer of Renown. He died a delusional alcoholic, apparently thinking that Allen Ginsberg was a Nazi agent and trying to fight Kurt Vonnegut’s son, but for a while, Kerouac was the American Dream, what another now-deceased American Writer would have described as “pure Horatio Alger.” He was also French-Canadian; part of an ethnic group of New England immigrants that are often overlooked and forgotten.

So while there’s the Mythic Kerouac, there’s also the Lowell working-class kid who ended up dubiously labeled as a generational spokesman. In previous posts, I’ve written about poor Bob Dylan, Kerouac’s heir in this questionable honor. It’s fascinating that the two midcentury figures saddled with that terrible weight both were of ethnic & family backgrounds as far from the American mainstream as you get could get. (While, of course, remaining a “White.”)

I haven’t gotten through the 100+ pages of critical apparati of the Original Scroll, but the image on the back of the dustjacket is amazing. The most frequently circulated photos of Kerouac play up a young rough with an indistinct, James Dean glamor. The image in question, coming from later in the man’s sad life, was chosen, I assume, because it depicts Kerouac holding one of his famous scrolls. Fair enough, but it’s also the only image I’ve seen of the man (and admittedly I am no student of his iconography) where his ethnic, social, and geographical origins just spill out all over the picture. You can see Lowell, you can see the French-Canadian, you can see the football scholarship.

A great picture:

For reasons that I hope will become eventually obvious, for about six months I’ve had Bob Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone” on the brain. In itself, Dylan on the brain is not unusual, but the song choice is odd– I couldn’t listen to it for about two years, a period that coincided with the dawn of my truly heretical notion that the work from ‘64-66 is some of Dylan’s weakest.

The more that I hear the Thin Wild Mercury, the more Dylan sounds like what he was: a callow jerk in his mid-twenties. Having recently been a callow jerk in his mid-twenties, it’s a little too familiar. I prefer the work surrounding the period. Perhaps in my mid 30s I’ll be down on Planet Waves. “I love you more than money!? I love you more than blood? A little touch of your love? I’m goin’ back to New Orleans and puttin’ on Another Side of, dammit!” says the Future Self of 2012, just before the Mayan Calendar blows up the world.

Anyway. Back in the late 90s, I had a laugh with my friend Sam Tregar, author of CPAN module HTML::Template and its companion book, the rivetingly titled Writing Perl Modules for CPAN. The joke was that one should break up with a woman at the exact moment when she informed you that she believed “Like a Rolling Stone” was about her life. The theory being that this association bespoke a deep psychological problem that no amount of Love & Companionship could ever make right. Why would anyone want to be the subject of such a hate filled song? Or willingly admit a narrative similarity between their life and the song’s (apparent) protagonist?

But hello, part of why people are so nuts over the song is its profound superiority to any other piece of music from the First Rock period. God knows it is the best song of its decade, with a quality that prefigures Blood on the Tracks, an album of songs & lyrics of such astonishing quality that one is tempted to believe that Dylan was being ghosted by God. As with any work of Real Art, “Like a Rolling Stone” bares no real traces of its creation; it feels as though it has always existed, like Dylan (in his own words) “pulled it out of the air” and laid it down.

(Fear not, aspiring artists–”Like a Rolling Stone” took a lot to laugh and a train to cry. There’s a very documented history of Dylan struggling in the studio. The Bootleg Series, Vol 1 has an outtake of the song in 3/4ths time & accompanied by a harpsichord. So. Masterpieces are always made.)

I think the confusion of “Like a Rolling Stone” comes from the often unrecognized fact that the song contains two narratives– there’s clearly the very familiar, but never better rendered, venom and bile of Bob Dylan towards an unknown woman who hasn’t lived up to his (impossible) expectations, which is the A Story of the verses, but then there’s also the B Story of the chorus. The writing here is incredibly tight; in five repeated lines, Dylan manages to achieve a story as consistent and well rendered as the first, but one that also bleeds into and seemingly informs the A Story. Which is to say: you can listen to the chorus and think it’s about the same person as the verses.

With that in mind, you start seeing why a lot of people think the song is about themselves. Informed by the A Story, the B Story can be read as a ballad of the open road, of the freedom of being out on your own; it’s almost as if the chorus functions as a counterpoint to the verses– okay, yeah, Miss Lonely, you had to make juice with it, but here you go, you’re away from that darkness now, you’re out living the hipster dream of 1964, and by the way, how does it feel? The inferred answer being: “Well, redemptive and pretty good, actually.”

I’d argue the opposite: that the B Story is, if anything, Bob Dylan’s address to himself. It’s a cry of pain in the existential mirror of the Chapter One in a first novel. It’s about the dark side of the American Dream– I don’t mean some HST fantasy where hobo midgets dry hump your leg while you’re on acid & cops beat you for daring, daring! to dream, but rather what happens when America shrugs and allows you to make it; when you push yourself so far into your own destiny that you’re forced to realize, oh snap, I done done it and it ain’t no different. There’s no direction home because there is no home, and not in some grand delusion of being a pilgrim on the expeditionary road to oblivion, but being so bored & lonely & lowdown that every possible option is exhausted and you can’t figure out where to go or what to do, because ain’t it gonna be the same anyway? And how does it feel?

Awful, apparently.

And where do you go?

To a basement, to upstate New York, where you hide out and reincarnate as a 19th Century Mystic, a slightly less gay Walt Whitman. One of the roughs while everyone’s dressed in ascots & paisley.

Each of the last few years has had a strange cycle of Bob Dylan frenzy, generally culminating in a Significant Fall release. 2007 is no different and November offers Todd Haynes’s gimmicky biopic I’m Not There.

It’s hard to imagine a less necessary work. Dylan has long been a master of destroying his public persona through the medium of film. Remember: this is the man who gave us Eat the Document, Renaldo and Clara, Hearts of Fire and Masked and Anonymous. Rumor has it that Dylan kicked around the idea of an adaptation of “Rosemary, Lily, and the Jack of Hearts” and went so far to commission a screenplay. God. If only.

Anyway, the only significant thing to come from Haynes’s project is the commercial release of Dylan’s “I’m Not There (1956)” on the film’s soundtrack. This song was recorded by Dylan and The Hawkes/The Band during the so-called Basement Tapes sessions, and has been available previously only through bootlegging.

Having heard this news, I went looking for internet transcriptions of the song. Each one that I found was atrocious. As such, I’ve gone ahead and put together what I think is about the most reasonable and accurate rendering of the lyrics that can be found, along with explanations of the weirder lines. Words and phrases surrounded by double question marks indicate unresolved confusion on my part. Lines followed by asterisks indicate firm judgment as to what’s being said. Here:

“I’m Not There (1956)”
Bob Dylan

1 Ev’ry thing’s all right
2 And then she’s all the time
3 In my neighborhood
4 She cried both day and night
5 I know it because it was there

6 It’s a milestone but
7 She down on her luck
8 And she day makes her lone (*)
9 And but ??to make too hard to buck??
10 I be then (*)

11 I believe where she stopping
12 If she wants time to care
13 I believe that she’d
14 Look upon deciding to care
15 And I go by The Lord in ways (*)
16 She’s on my way
17 But I don’t belong there

18 No, I don’t belong to her
19 I don’t belong to ev’rybody (*)
20 She’s my prize-foresaken angel
21 But she don’t hear me cry
22 She’s a long hearted mystic
23 And she ??dare?? carry on
24 When I’m there she’s all right
25 But when she’s not when I’m gone

26 Heaven knows that the answer
27 She’s don’t calling no one
28 She’s the way, a sailing beauty
29 For she’s mine, for the one
30 And I lost her, hesitation (*)
31 By temptation less it runs
32 But she don’t holler me (*)
33 But I’m not there I’m gone

34 Now I’ve cried tonight
35 Like I cried the night before
36 And I’m leased on the highs
37 But I dream about the door
38 So long, she’s foresaken
39 By fate, worse to tell
40 It don’t hang ??proclamation??
41 She smiles fare thee well

42 Now I went out ??(undecipherable)??
43 I was born to love her
44 But she knows that the kingdom
45 Weighs so high above her
46 And I run, but I race
47 But it’s not to fast to ??slim??
48 But I don’t perceive her
49 I’m not there I’m gone

50 Well it’s all about diffusion (*)
51 As I cry for her veil
52 I don’t need anybody now
53 Beside me to tell
54 And it’s all affirmation (*)
55 I recede but it’s not (*)
56 She’s a ??lone hearted?? beauty
57 But she gone like the spot
58 And she want

59 Yes, she’s gone like the radio (*)
60 That shining yesterday
61 But now she’s a-home beside me
62 And I’d like to here to stay
63 She’s a bone forsaken beauty
64 And it’s dont trust anyone
65 And I wish I was beside her
66 But I’m not there I’m gone

67 Well it’s too hard to stake-in (*)
68 And I don’t far believe
69 It’s ??all bag?? for to musing
70 But she’s hard, too hard to leave
71 It’s alone, it’s a crime
72 The way she won’t be around
73 But she told for to hatred
74 But this ??long forsaken?? clown

75 Yes I believe that its rightful
76 Oh I believe it in my mind
77 I been told like I said
78 When I before carry on the grind
79 And she’s on bet to told her (*)
80 Like I said, carry on
81 I wish I was there to help her
82 But I’m not there I’m gone

Notes:

8. “makes her lone.” Lonely would be better, but alas, that ain’t what the man sang. The -ly suffix is dropped.
9. Fairly certain that “to make too hard to buck” is accurate but can’t be sure.
10. “I be then” is what’s sung. Given the structure of the other verses mostly ending with some variation of “I’m Not There,” it’s possible that this was improvisation gone awry.
15. 95% certain this line ends “in ways.”
19. Other transcriptions have Dylan singing “to anybody.” An accurate listen offers “ev’rybody,” a contraction used throughout his work in the 1960s and at the beginning of this song.
23. “dare” seems reasonable here, but isn’t the sound being made. Update: Sam Tregar suggests “deign.” It’s closer than dare, actually, but still not right.
30. I’m willing to render the final word as “hesitation” because this sounds more like a vocal stumble than a nonsense placeholder.
32. “Holler” sounds closest. Could be something else but I’m hard pressed to say what.
40. “Proclamation” is how everyone else transcribes this. I can’t tell.
42. Absolutely no idea.
47. Absolutely no idea, but it does sound a lot like “slim.”
50. A rare instance of a complex idea tracking from one line to the next. Dylan makes a sound a lot like “diffusion” and this makes logical sense, as the next line ends on “veil.”
54. “Affirmation” sounds right. Could be different. Makes sense with the following line.
55. “Recede.” Dylan starts singing “receive” and puts an “-ede” sound on the end.
56. Best guess.
59. Other renderings have this as “rainbow” instead of “radio.” Rainbow would be nice, as the next line would then inform this one, but sorry. He sings “radio.” Welcome to the world of Bob Dylan.
67. Definitely “stake-in.” No idea what it means.
69. Almost certain this line is as rendered. “All bag” is too difficult to say for sure, but “to musing” sounds right.
74. If anyone knows what kind of clown, please, please, please, email me.
79. An accurate rendering of ungrammatical English.

Hey, many days of no updates; a combination of Hard Living and finishing projects has made my blog time non-existent. ANYWAY, I’d like to point everyone to this fine post on Will Kane’s blog, discussing the art of Guy Peellaert.

I’d never heard of Peellaert, which is fascinating, as the images from The Adventures of Jodell appear to be stolen directly from my mind by a malicious djinn. This really is what goes on in my head. Reading down further, one will see images of another Peellaert strip, Pravda. Something clicked and I realized that I had seen one of the images before– in the set design for 1970’s Performance.

Here’s Peellaert’s image:

And if you look to the center, here’s the same image in Turner’s basement, behind a gigantic head of Mick Jagger:

As I’ve mentioned, much of the set design for Performance was clearly the work of Martin Sharp of OZ fame and contains some of the more famous Sharp/OZ images, including a modified version of the Jagger cover from #15, and a heavily stylized version of Sharp’s famous Dylan poster. Seeing Peellaert’s comics, one retroactively detects his very obvious influence over Sharp.

Digging around the Internet, I discovered that Sharp + Co have begun selling artwork from the OZ days. While I believe that Sharp is the great unsung artist of the 1960s, and I can only applaud his decision to make this stuff available, it’s kind of depressing to see the wildly exorbitant prices of his prints. Who in god’s name wants a $299(AU) poster of the cover to OZ #16, Oz Proudly Presents the Magic Theatre?

You know, other than me.

This cover of John Fred and his Playboy Band’s Judy in Disguise (In Glasses) is from the second printing of the LP; the titular song is pretty well done, and supposedly a parody of The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” If this commonly accepted piece of pop lore is true, then the song ranks as a massive failure. Nothing other than the mild similarity in titles would indicate its parody status. Not the lyrics, not the music.

The song interests me, but more so the album art. I’m conceptually turned on by design degeneration– the process by which subcultural and quote-edgy-unquote design motifs and elements get absorbed into the mainstream, and there’s no period in which this was more fascinating than the post-psychedelic era of 1968-1969-1970. In America, anyway, this involved biting directly from the 5 or 6 artists who had defined the Filmore/Family Dog era of posters. (Little known truth: by about ‘69 most of the major artists had moved on to other things, leaving a whole new crop to produce successively less experimental posters for successively less interesting bands. For the record, I think the best artist of the period was the great Victor Moscoso.)

As I type this, I’m sitting beneath a framed version of this:

It’s dead on certain there’s no one else alive who loves this poster as much I do. From a design degeneration standpoint, along with cultural ramifications, there’s no better example of psychedelic artwork getting ripped off and abused by the Money Thresher of Mammon. Background: this is from Disney’s 1969/70 re-release of Fantasia, a naked cash-in on the druggie head-and-college crowd.

This particular image is too small to show all the details, but those orange blurs dancing down the yellow path at the left of the image are, in fact, magic mushrooms. Now in stereophonic sound! The function of the poster is a pure, commercial signal to the dope addled youth: this is what you want to see while high.

I believe this poster coincides with the period where Disney were unwilling to let young men with long hair into DisneyLand.

One of my more recent and disquieting obsessions has been a certain vintage of Romance Comics. I’m not going to bore anyone with a history of the genre, so let’s simply state that for three decades, comics publishers put out a large number of books whose audience was girls in their tweens-and-teens. Charmingly, the writers and artists on these titles were predominantly men. It may be safely generalized that these creative fellows were at least a decade away in age from the books’ target demographic. With 21st Century minds, this sounds like trouble– whom amongst us would be daft enough to allow today’s mainstream comics professionals near our daughters and sisters?– but somehow the stories were entirely heterowholesome, and, if it was your bag, rather instructive on the virtues of making a boy hold out while you hold out for his ring.

Thankfully, my obsession has yet to turn all-inclusive and is limited to Romance Comics from about 1968ish until 1973ish. Returning to the topic of an earlier post, this period fascinates because the entire aesthetic and look of the work mutates by encompassing the greater culture’s fashion and artistic trends. Presumably due to their subject matter (stylish middle class girls), Romance Comics proved unusually susceptible to the slow design bleed of the psychedelic era. Much of this mirrors developments in superhero comics– a break-out of artistic styles and experimentation– but, ultimately, no matter how wild Peter Parker’s bell-bottoms, the Spider-Man costume never changed. Romance Comics, desperate to stay relevant, required an au courant look and fashion sense. With the dawn of Mary Quant, and the eventual trickle down from elite to everyday fashion, Romance Comics got swingin’.

(The real stars of this period were DC. One amazing Steranko story aside– available in his Visionaries trade– Marvel’s romance comics of the late 60s/early 70s were ugly. Some Charlton ones were OK, but in the end it was DC who owned the dying genre.)

The change is best demonstrated visually. Here’s are covers from 1955, 1959, 1965, and 1966, respectively:

What I take away from these covers is their similarity. Yes, hair styles and clothes change slightly, but any one of these books could have been drawn in the same month as any other.

Here’s a load of dynamite from 1968:

Contrasted against the earlier examples, this cover demonstrates that while staying true to the genre’s basic themes of chastity and questions about true love, an enormous shift has occurred in both the look and plotpoints driving narrative. In many ways, this speaks to one of the chief virtues of Silver Age comics– a cheap medium’s ability to function on a purely iconic level.

Here are several great examples:

And, of course, the creme of the crop:

Guns & Butter Presents The Mystical, Magickal Powerhouse of Arcane Arts and YouTubed Youth Gone Wild, A Psychedelic Outing That’s Real Freakshow

 

FIRST UP: The Great, Tragic Syd Barrett in One Last Song with The Old Band

asking everyone’s favorite question:

“what exactly is a joke and what exactly is a dream?”

 

 

 

SECOND IN LINE: The Incredible String Band with A Number Not From Their Finest Album, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, A Favorite Around These Parts

but that’s ok

 

 

 

THIRD UP: The Andrew “Arcana Obscura” Harrison Recommended Wallace Collection, with “Day Dream”

Featuring an Unbelievable Number of Hippies Dancing to a Lilting Tune

 

 

 

FOURTH: “Dark Star Blues” by the Kings and Hierophants of Freak, Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Blah Blah Blah

what else can be said?

 

 

 

And, to take the badness away, here’s a truly bizarre performance of “Muswell Hillbilly” by everyone’s favorite anti-psych band, The Kinks. Replete with Ray Davies being a bit of a dick, butchering the song and impersonating Johnny Cash. Nice coat.

 

 

 

Actually, that’s wretched enough that it needs its own antidote. Here’s a live-ish version of “Days.”

 

 

 

The best writing on the web about Steve Ditko’s Mr. A are here, here, and here. If you have no idea who the hell Steve Ditko is, or what Mr. A is, these posts are the place to start. They’re worth it.

A month ago, I downloaded a torrent of the two 70s issues of Mr. A. Re-reading these books (I own physical copies of both, but god knows where), I was struck by how perfectly Ditko’s content matches his form. His 60s work was always jittery, over-textured and really dense, but the pages from Mr. A are something else.

The above is a sixteen-panel page. It’s lively, incredibly paranoid and entirely of itself. Despite their failures at story-telling and entertainment, there’s never a doubt that every page and panel of Mr. A brings us into a unique world. I consider this an achievement of some kind. But I’m not sure of what.

Much has been written about Alan Moore basing the character of Rorschach in Watchmen on both Mr. A and The Question, a pre-Mr. A creation of Ditko. In its own way, Watchmen has a political agenda as extreme as Mr. A– the difference is that Moore’s politics are better disguised and on the side of pinko liberal righteousness, while Ditko is unafraid of seeming nuts. The narrative functions of Rorschach and Mr. A couldn’t be further from one another– Mr. A is a walking cipher, a morality tale that will mortally wound if he encounters a violation of his complex, yet painfully convoluted, code of justice.

To Ditko’s immense credit, there is never, ever a sense of wish-fulfillment in Mr. A.’s brutality. Rorschach, on the other hand, is the Dark Antihero at its most fully realized– the fascist vigilante appealing to the reader on a gutter level, inviting us to take a pleasure in the directness of his methods. I find that Rorschach destabilizes Watchmen– either you have a pinkboy liberal fantasy, or you write a gritty revenge comic. You can’t do both without compromising the moral purpose of your book. To any who would argue, I say: let us not forget the identity of the One True Soul in Watchmen, nor his noble reward.

Ditko’s concerns are entirely different– not crime, not man’s inhumanity to man, but the violation of a Randian Moral Code. Even if his beliefs strike me as an insane, I’m willing to take Mr. A at face value, and acknowledge that Ditko’s motivation, and its philosophical underpinnings, differentiate his work from the revenge fantasies of the decades that followed.

I’ve long believed that the 1980s rise of the Dark Antihero had more to do with the drug & crime epidemic of US Society than any real trends within the comics industry other than a disproportionate number of creators living in NYC, the epicenter. Is it any surprise that Giuliani Time killed the beast? Despite Ditko’s residence in Nuevo Gomorrah, his work clearly rests on a different foundation than the impotent rage of writers, artists and readers beset by a crime epidemic that they can not affect.

The Thoughtography of Ted Serios was a phenomena of the 1960s– as credulous a decade as this country has ever seen– and it produced an excellent work of Fortean literature, The World of Ted Serios: “Thoughtographic” Studies of an Extraordinary Mind by Jules Eisenbud, M.D. The good doctor tells the whole story– of witnessing Serios, in drunken rampages, projecting his thought-images onto Polaroid film.

And though Serios has been semi-convincingly debunked, I recommend the book– it’s reasonably well written, and it reeks of the subjectivity that paranormal investigation engenders, an in the moment loss of perspective which leads to dodgy but compelling narratives. It contains an enormous number of reproductions of Serios’s Thoughtographs. Whatever their value as psychic manifestations, they often are visually stunning. This is a Serios image of the Denver Hilton (he had been trying to produce the Chicago Hilton):

When I was traversing the archives, I discovered a letter that I had written to Serios in May of 2006. I had read this article by Calvin Campbell and thought, okay, sure, why not? In those days, of course, I still had a desire to Meet Interesting People– but that’s since been slaked in ways unimaginable. Serios never wrote me back–  it turns out that he died about half a year later. Too bad.

–

Jarett Kobek
Brooklyn, NY 11211

Ted Serios
[address redacted]

25 May 2006

Dear Mr. Serios,

Please forgive the intrusion of my letter—-I was hoping to inquire as to whether or not you are the same Ted Serios of Thoughtography? I saw some of your photographs on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit on occult photography and was fascinated by them—so I endeavoured to read Mr. Eisenbud’s wonderful book on the subject of your Thoughtography experiments. Upon finishing the last page, I felt that I must try and find the man capable of producing such phenomenal and radical images with only the powers of his mind.

I should like to ask you very many questions on the topic and hope that you should be inclined to answer them. Before I begin my course, however, I would like to receive confirmation that you are indeed the same Ted Serios! Otherwise I could be sending very strange letters to an unsuspecting individual!

Many, many thanks in advance. I am,

Most Truly Yours,

Jarett Kobek

Long a fan of 1960s girl groups, Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” has been one of the songs floating on the periphery of my consciousness; I know I’ve heard this thing a million times on the radio and some such, but until last night if I hadn’t ever placed names– neither song title nor recording artist.

Whilst I was doing a cursory search on the song, I found the following video on YouTube– an actual live performance from (I’d guess) 1964, which is about as perfect as the studio performance. The real interest lies in the video itself– the gauzy blur, tight angles and high contrast lighting combine with the haunting sound and Gore’s amazing hair and weird stage prescence to make this performance seem as if it had come beamed from Distant Regions of Far Space.

January 28, 1968, “Commerce in Hippieland” by Jane Wilson:

“Trade follows the fad. On the one hand stand the hippies, suppliers of psychedelic art, tribal crafts, drug religions, acid rock, love-ins, be-ins, underground newspapers and flowers. On the other hand stand the voracious teenyboppers, curious college kids, swinging singles, gimmicky housewives, and panicky over-30s, who fear that Life may be passing them by. The hippies are supplying something, the straight world is demanding something, and in the middle–guessing–stand a few fearless entrepreneurs. Some of these are Flower Children, some are businessmen, some are greedy, some are idealistic…”

My entire adult life has been spent as an unrepentant fan of Glenn Danzig’s musical ventures, providing no end of amusement for my chums and pals; after all, Danzig is a patently ludicrous figure– the so-called “Evil Elvis,” a five-foot-four New Jersey cockrocker with a propensity for losing fights and keeping bricks on his front lawn. I’ve never denied that Danzig has made an endless series of questionable choices which only reinforce his perceived status as a goon: the last time that I saw him live was in 1999, at Lupo’s in Providence with my pal Dave Asselin, and a good deal of the set was performed whilst Danzig modeled a vinyl battle-vest.

There are two dominant cultural narratives of Danzig; the first is of the dumb rocker guy who sang “Mother,” a song that now resonates at sporting events coast-to-coast. The other, amongst those who care about such things, is that of the Punker Who Fell from Grace; the dude who wrote all of the Misfits’ music, invented at least two sub-genres and was the backbone of one of the most influential bands of the last 30 years (and now, given the prevalence of AFI and My Chemical Romance, might we not argue that Samhain has become as influential, if not more so, as the Misfits?) and then threw it all away to disappear in a haze of testosterone and strippers dressed like cats.

The curious thing is not the wrongness of these narratives. The curious thing is that they exist.

Pop quiz: name one American punk figure other than Henry Rollins who has immediate name recognition in the mass culture. A variation: name one post-1986 Metal Figure (and I do mean metal– no Axl, no Slash, no Marilyn) with an immediate brand recognition. Another pop quiz: when was the last time that you were able to leave the god damned house without seeing the Crimson Ghost on someone’s chest? Now, contrast and compare: how often do you see the Dead Kennedys logo, arguably the second most iconic image of American punk? Final question: how many people maintain a career in music for three years, let alone thirty?

These rhetorical questions hint at what has been a slowly dawning idea: that Danzig is best understood as a unique figure in American culture, with a remarkable persistence of musical prescence, and that, furthermore, his impact as a graphic designer and visual artist has been both considerable and virtually ignored. And it’s important, too, to realize that unlike Rollins (from the punk world) or even Ozzy (from the Grog Hall of Darkest Metal) Danzig’s recognition was achieved without ever transcending the various musical ghettos in which he dwells. There have been no spoken word tours and no shows on MTV or IFC.

The work itself (by which I mean: 85% of the Misfits catalog, Samhain and Danzig 1, 2, half of 3, 4p, Circle of Snakes and much of Lost Tracks) presents a surface level difficulty– the persistence of vision has revolved around a relatively simplistic musical approach (how many times can one man rewrite “Twist of Cain” and how many Misfits songs are reducible to Whoa-Oh-Whoah-Oh-Oh?) with an exceptionally thin lyrical palette. Put it this way: there are roughly 250 songs in total and 98% of them are about skulls, fire, demons, death and wicked, anthropomorphic she-beasts. Danzig’s easily dismissed personal appearance and choices only complicate matters. The dude who wrote “Attitude” was always going to be his own worst enemy, but something about the move to Los Angeles bloated his ego, and the New York/New Jersey visual edge of the Misfits/Samhain period became this:

In short: the man went Hollywood, and going Hollywood has always meant too much money.

The Misfits and Samhain were homegrown affairs, with Danzig designing the materials himself and never having the cash to afford a video, let alone one with a reasonably sized production budget. And thank God for that kindness, as we’ve seen exactly what we would have gotten: four dudes in black jeans invading Jumbo’s Clown Room and a red-headed ass show intercut with tight close-ups of Danzig’s own undulating face. (Note that he bears a odd resemblance to Paul Giamatti sporting the same haircut as one of my ex-girlfriends on her MySpace profile in 2006.)

By contrast, here are a few of the Misfits/Samhain fliers:

The last image– from the Die, Die, My Darling EP– is a less famous example of Danzig’s approach from the New York days, which revolved around a near-obsessive sampling of pulp media. The song is titled after the US release of a 1965 Hammer film; the band’s name comes from Monroe’s last film, and the EP features the best known Misfits logo– the letters of which were taken from Forest Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland. The central image of the cover was copied from Harvey Comics’ Chamber of Chills #19, which bears the not insignificant copy: “Here’s Looking at You Darling… On Our Happy Anniversary!”

–

Many will disagree, but I find no enormous disparity between the sound of the Misfits period and the early Danzig albums; there’s a certain amount of growth and slowing down, and The Voice becomes hugely apparent, but lyrically and musically the sound is not particularly changed. (Samhain is often considered the bridge between the two, but the issue of where Samhain ended and Danzig began is a non-starter. The final Samhain lineup was identical to the lineup of the first five Danzig releases. Different names, same band.)

I would argue that the perceived change had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with visual aesthetics; here are the original covers of the first four Danzig releases:

Let’s linger over the self-titled first release. Here’s the original gatefold LP all opened up:

Okay, so: this is a great piece of design, and it demonstrates just how completely bizarre Danzig was; 1988 may be known for many things, but two-tone minimalist cover art is not amongst them. This is, sadly, one of the last gasps of Danzig’s New York design sense; immediately after we move into (more!) weird close-ups and when your record label is giving you enough money to license the artwork of H.R. Giger for your third album, you know it’s gone to shit and then you’re getting Simon Bisley to draw big evil demons and there’s no point of return. (Except there was, sort of: Danzig 4p, the fifth release, had artwork designed by Danzig. It’s great but afterwards everything immediately goes to shit and never comes back.)

The lettering for the Danzig logo on this cover comes from another pulp source– the film poster for The Giant Gila Monster– and the Skull, also used for Samhain, and which seems so prototypically metal, was stolen from the most ridiculous source of all Danzig’s sampling: Michael Golden’s cover to an obscure Marvel comic called Crystar.

It’s the same damn thing. Musically, visually; it’s all the same until money corrupts the enterprise and gives the dude too many cameras and lick-whipping strippers. (The two most recent Danzig offerings– Circle of Snakes and Lost Tracks– were self-released. Both, musically anyway, are vastly superior to the previous 10 years of crap. It’s all come full circle.)

The “Evil Elvis” moniker becomes an enormously useful metric. While I’m in no way arguing that Danzig’s cultural position is any way commensurate with that of Presley in terms of influence or importance, it bears remembering that Presley was a major artist and musical force whose late career choices effectively destroyed his achievements.

Some of the best Presley songs were recorded in the early-to-mid 70s period, but they remain hard to hear. The visuals of the period– the sequins and the jumpsuits and the fat– are overpowering. By the end of the 70s, Elvis’s aesthetic choices had done enough damage that Greil Marcus had to write Mystery Train to remind people of the revolutionary music from the 50s and 60s.

Presley was and continues to be discussed like an idiot, as if the multi-decade career was a mistake into which a country bumpkin had wandered; replace Memphis with Lodi, New Jersey and you’ll see the same kind of dismissal of Danzig. But if the 20th Century taught us anything, it’s this: anyone can get a record deal, but the only people who survived were the ones that knew what they wanted and understood what they were doing.

Last summer, when I attended the San Diego Comic Con, I was struck by its blankness– there was literally nothing that required photography and nothing, after the cease of the spectacle, that was worth remembering. My sum total of purchases was $3 for a grotty bottle of Vitamin Water.

This year gave me hardcore deja-vu, but I was prepared by the previous engagement– I managed about twenty photographs and achieved the holy grail of commodity fetishism: the acquisition of a relatively unique object in unrepeatable circumstances. Along with my toilet photograph, this triumph indicates, I believe, that I had a good experience– two Unique Moments in what is, after all, an event dedicated to specific conformity of product.

It’s been many moons since I last read Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and my memory of it is terrible– but I believe that much of its central conceit revolves around the idea of the mass media providing a perverted mirror of actual human relations which then cheapens and destroys the human relations that it mirrors, thus making its own reflection increasingly perverted.

It’s hard to attend an event dedicated to the replacement of personalities with corporate products and not feel a little bit like a freaked-out Left Bank intellectual. The best way to think about the culture of comics fandom, or any fandom, really– and establishing a way of weeding out enemy from friend– is this: are people reacting to the product as a thing crafted and created by individuals and engaging with the communication implicit within that creation, or is the consumer’s interest in the surface aspects like “plot”, “characters” and “story”?

This is what makes the hoopla-hoo about the recent-released The Dark Knight completely repellent; Heath Ledger’s performance requires that the audience care (or pretend to care) about the Joker, a one-dimensional construct with no implicit or explicit meaning beyond its reflection of pulp tropes from the 1940s and an ability to sell related merchandise for the parent owner, Time Warner.

Ledger’s turn is an empty thing– imagine Popeye learning how to method act and channeling Marlon Brando from One-Eyed Jacks– but it could never be anything else. The Joker, in every incarnation, is what the lowest brow entertainment of its origin period had to tell us about criminality and madness: barely anything at all.

We live in the first society in which media narratives are an embedded industry: sheer statistics demand and enforce a hierarchy of consumption. Just as there will always be a certain number of cars sold each season, so too will there always be certain kinds of films achieving varying levels of success. Some will be blockbusters, some will be sleepers. Others will bomb.

The products themselves, being delivery mechanisms for the intake and release of capital, contain surface level narratives that are essentially meaningless and variations on tired themes: this is why the same people who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer are now watching Battlestar Galactica. The analogue with the auto industry again becomes useful: just as young people buy “edgy” cars and mature individuals buy “solid” cars, reasonably above-average nerds watch “smart” television, but avoid “dumb” shows like Enterprise. It’s an interface of marketing and demographics, and, in the case of Dark Knight, Time Warner’s exceptional good luck that its actor sacrificed himself upon Mammon’s Altar of High Marketing.

The lead-in for 2007’s installment– Transformers– was nostalgia for enormous fucking robots that turned into cars; this year it was the actor who went too far into the Darkness of the Joker and Never Came Back. But, really, let’s be honest: there’s about as much depth and darkness in the Joker as there is in the infinitely repeating cliche of the Hollywood OD. These same empty cultural tropes have been recycled forever; and if you don’t believe me, ask Lupe Velez.

The real purpose of Ledger’s performance appears to be a granting of permission for a certain kind of man to smear his face with makeup. You know these people: they had a real hey-hey-hey-day after 1994’s The Crow, another comics property with a lead actor bearing an oddly similar resemblance to Ledger in Dark Knight, who also died tragically before his film’s release. (Memo to Hollywood males: properly apply your eye and lip liners.)

These people, the cosplayers and the costumed, are the blank ciphers on which the spectacle is writ.

And that brings us right back to the San Diego Comic Con, 2008, ground zero of the masquerade, where the most common costume was the Joker. Cosplay and costuming are pretty abstractly interesting– if you think about them hard enough, you start wondering about the basic nature of free will. Each cosplayer makes a specific choice to dress up as a media property, but what if that’s an inversion of the actuality? What if the media property itself– the platonic form of the commodity– is making that choice on a spectral plane of existence? What if some people are genuinely so blank and empty that their souls and their bodies are nothing more than a canvas on which the idea of the Green Lantern is writing itself? And if that’s the case, then what, really, is the Green Lantern trying to tell those of us that see it?

The masquerade is like everything else at the Comic Con– a practical reassurance for all parties, those in costume and those not, that the Hobbies and Interests of the attendees are safe, unchallenging things. There’s a faux-surprise with each outrageous costume; can you believe that chick is half-naked? Can you believe that the fat dude is dressed as Kazaar? But these are rhetorical questions and the shock is faked, another false emotion amidst five days of lucre hiding behind camaraderie. The freak parade is a giant advertisement disguised as a hug.

This year, I attended the Con with elly, my old chum and romantic interest, and weeks before, she had asked me about cosplay; somewhere in our discussion, I suggested that we attend dressed as characters from Art Spiegelman’s Maus. I’d go as one of the death camp mice and she’d go as a Nazi guard. After all, by the logic of the costumed, Maus is a pretty good property: well-drawn anthropomorphic animals. But for certain reasons– taste and laziness– this plan was abandoned. Instead we hit the floor and were awash in seventy years worth of filth and debris.

The only reprieve from the sea of flesh was our attendance of a panel in celebration of Blake Bell’s recently released book on Steve Ditko. Around these quarters, Ditko is a long-term idee fixe– the only comic artist whose work I actively collect. I have my thoughts on the man, some of which are poorly expressed here.

I have a lot of trouble with panels– they conflict with my inability to sit still for more than thirty minutes and my complete unwillingness to shut up– but I always attend at least one of the more obscure. These sequestered, fluorescently lit