Author: Chris Barrus

Thomas Kinkade’s Stepford Village

Dang. I usually try to stay current with every weirdo exburban trend that orbits out somewhere between Martha Stewart and the QVC network, but I totally missed this one. Unironic cult/shlock artist Thomas Kinkade (“America’s most collected living artist”) has made a living out of mass-manufacturing landscape paintings of luminescent New England kitsch: bridges, lighthouses, etc. Mostly stuff you would see on QVC, hotel rooms, motivational posters, or in Ned Flanders’ house. Not content with having his prints in one out of every twenty American homes, Kinkade took a cue from Martha and branded himself out the wazoo – with Kinkade-labeled “art-based products” including furniture, china, stationery, wallpaper, a novel, and… a housing tract. Er correction… a “Thomas Kinkade Painter Of Light Community”.

Salon visits the village and deconstructs the horror which, oddly enough (or perhaps not) is in Negativland’s sphere of influence. Fun fact from Kinkade’s web page: he used to work for Ralph Bakshi Studios. [via Robot Wisdom]

American psych versus English psych

A forward from the U-Spaces mailing list (which itself was forwarded from the BOMP list)…

In the 1960’s there was the American psychedelic music scene, and there was the English psychedelic music scene. Were they the same? Let’s compare, shall we?

American: Timothy Leary has all the answers
English: Lewis Carroll has all the answers

American: “Further!”
English: Backwards

American: We want to be treated like adults.
English: We want to be children again.

American: Let’s write a song about the man who sells us drugs
English: Let’s write a song about the man who sells us groceries

American: Long, shaggy hair
English: Long, neatly trimmed hair

American: Dress like everyone else in the movement, visit the thrift shop
English: Dress like everyone else in the movement, visit the boutique

American: Challenge pop music standards
English: Make sure it’s got a nice melody.

American: Hammond organ
English: Harpsichord

American: Electric Kool Aid
English: Tea

American: Hash brownies
English: Biscuits (normal ones)

American: Long, often boring, aimless and chaotic jamming, mostly weird guitar sounds (the guitarist is the icon of our country’s psych movement), loosely centered around a main tune to start and end on…This is our musical depiction of space travel, and it is enhanced by the awesome light show going on above us as we play. We’re The Grateful Dead.
English: Long, often boring, aimless and chaotic jamming, mostly weird guitar sounds (the guitarist is the icon of our country’s psych movement), loosely centered around a main tune to start and end on…This is our musical depiction of space travel, and it is enhanced by the awesome light show going on above us as we play. We’re Pink Floyd.

American: Let’s take a trip to that inner world of our mind… and write a song about it.
English: Let’s take a trip to the park… and write a song about it.

American: LBJ is a drag.
English: Maybe Harold Wilson would like to join us?

American: Psychedelic music is a live performance experience
English: Psychedelic music is a studio thing.

American: On the bus
English: On the morning train

American: Songs about Little Men (the oppressed, the minority, the victims of establishment and anyone else who can’t get their voice heard)
English: Songs about Little Men (trolls, gnomes, fairies, etc.)

Giant Siberian monoliths

 

siberia-monolith“This drawing was published in William Corliss’ newsletter Science Frontiers (Sept./Oct. 2000). The pictures illustrates the so called “… ‘Tombs of the Genii’, as they appeared circa 1876. These towering standing stones were – and perhaps still are – located on the Kora River in what was Soviet Turkestan, Siberia. When you learn of their sizes, you’ll realize that these lithic monsters must still be there… The largest of these standing stones rises 75 feet above ground level and probably penetrates 12 feet below. Its weight is in the neighborhood of 3,800 tons! This is more than 10 times the weight of Er Grah, the largest standing stone in Brittany and more than twice the size of the massive Trilithon still languishing in its quarry at Baalbek, Lebanon. This latter stone is routinely calimed to be the largest dressed monolith in the world. It isn’t! …” Any confirmation or information about these gigantic monoliths could be send to Mr. Ulrich Dopatka (dopatka@legendarytimes.com). More and other discoveries are published in our journal Legendary Times.”

[via 2012]

Raymond Chandler on Oscar Night in Hollywood

Chandler wrote this in 1948. Things haven’t changed much since…

If you can go past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of the human intelligence; if you can stand the hailstorm of flash bulbs popping at the poor patient actors who, like kings and queens, have never the right to look bored; if you can glance out over this gathered assemblage of what is supposed to be the elite of Hollywood and say to yourself without a sinking feeling, “In these hands lie the destinies of the only original art the modern world has conceived “; if you can laugh, and you probably will, at the cast-off jokes from the comedians on the stage, stuff that wasn’t good enough to use on their radio shows; if you can stand the fake sentimentality and the platitudes of the officials and the mincing elocution of the glamour queens (you ought to hear them with four martinis down the hatch); if you can do all these things with grace and pleasure, and not have a wild and forsaken horror at the thought that most of these people actually take this shoddy performance seriously; and if you can then go out into the night to see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the golden ones from the mob in the free seats but not from that awful moaning sound they give out, like destiny whistling through a hollow shell; if you can do all these things and still feel next morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong, because this sort of vulgarity is part of its inevitable price.

[via The Morning News]