FW Alden!

Frederick William Alden (1873-1955) was a Christian cartoonist known for illustrations appearing in the pamphlets of Rev. B.H. Shadduck - most notably Jocko-Homo Heavenbound, which was later to inspire Devo.

Alden's drawings are rich with a sense of the macabre, his disgust at evolution evident in bizarre hybrids of man and animal, modern day devils of scientific progress. Alden's use of symbolism is fascinating, and I love the metaphorical landscapes in particular.

Fire Hydrants of Tweed!

I spent the weekend visiting friends in Tweed, Ontario & was surprised to see that all the fire hydrants there have been painted over with funny designs, everything from animals to robots to rockets to cartoon characters.

Apparently the local fire chief is less than pleased, as the fire department likes their hydrants looking uniform and easy to spot. A good point I suppose but, speaking as a tourist to the town, I think they look great.













Bonus late addition! The Elvis Hydrant!

The Led Zeppelin-ABBA Sex Club Story!

I don't know how I missed this three years ago, but tonight I read about a situation that has to go down as one of the stranger evenings in all of rock'n'roll.

To back up a tad, none other than Led Zeppelin recorded their In Through The Out Door record in 1978 at a studio ABBA had recently built, Polar Studios in Stockholm, Sweden. Apparently, while this was going on, it was not unusual to spend evenings out in each other's company.

But I'll let Robert Plant explain:

"I knew Benny and Bjorn very well. Jimmy and I were hanging around with them most nights.

"There were some really good clubs. People would go to bed on circle-shaped mattresses in front of us.

"Men and women would start having sex while we were having a drink."

Imagine that:

Stockholm, Sweden. 1978. A live sex club. And who is sitting around talking and having drinks while the bodies are getting all sweaty and the fluids are exchanging?

Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson. Hot dog.

That may have actually happened. In fact, that probably did happen.

I'm going to imagine that, after one too many of these sex-club-fueled benders, the quartet caught a limo back to Polar, found Bonzo and John Paul Jones still there jamming out, and recorded a sex jam so filthy - so sleazy and nasty - that the very same night the master tapes were smuggled out under Stig Anderson's orders, and now lie forgotten in some filing cabinet somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered and set the world on fire.

JG Ballard!

Like so many, I first became aware of J.G. Ballard through the Re/Search edition of his Atrocity Exhibition, as well as their other coverage of his ideas. To say he was an influence is understating it - indeed, I was obsessed with the whole car crash thing for a long time.

From Re/Search:

R/S: We're interested in the problem of image thresholds building up in ourselves, because we have been exposing ourselves to more and more images of a horrific kind. I wouldn't call it a morality problem, yet—

JGB: There is an element of that, isn't there? You could end up in that sort of affect-less realm where you suspend judgment on everything. One's got to be very wary of denting one's own feelings, which is what happens to people who, say, work in labs where experiments are done using animals.

There was a girl on TV the other night—there's been some antivivisection activity going on at present, with members of animal liberation movements breaking into labs and releasing animals, many of them locked into electrodes and drips . . . She was saying that in working with lab animals, the thing that frightened her was the fact that she noticed she was becoming calloused or indifferent to the animals' feelings. And, that this was inevitable. If you're a man handling monkeys on a table to prepare them for some sort of operation, after awhile you just give them a goddamn thump! That's what happens, and after awhile you don't even notice it—the situation brutalizes you, numbs you, to any sort of response.

That's the problem with all this stuff—unless you're using it in some sort of informed way, out of some sort of imaginative commitment (I know that sounds like an easy get out, but it's still true), you are in danger of being numbed to the very powerful stimuli that attracted you in the first place. I mean, you end up with the worst of both worlds!

Now he has died and become past, particularly strange because he seemed always to be speaking from the future.

Video Overdose!

This collection of VHS covers is too good not to share.

Found via Metafilter.

Sleazy Meanz!

Announcing a MySpace page for my home-recording alias of the last few years, Sleazy Meanz.

Some of these songs you may recognize as No No Zero demos, others were recorded for one of a growing list of "Sleazy Meanz records" (which, in real life, are CDRs given to maybe two or three of my friends each at best).

I'm not practising with any band or playing any shows nowadays (boo hoo) so this is a way for me to feel like I still have my big toe in the water or something, I guess.

For the record, I've had a no MySpace bias until now (hence no No No Zero MySpace page) so I feel a bit sheepish here in starting one. I've been using the site more recently to hear new bands & (thus far) successfully managing to ignore all the other crap I hate about it.

This, and the rank despair over my own non-band-in state, tipped me over the edge to the dark side.

I'll see how it goes.