The Malware Saga

> Transmissions, Technology

Ok. That totally sucked. Here’s the skinny. The site got hacked early this week. Infected with bad code, malware, general hacker obnoxiousness. So the site was chloroformed, quarantined, and branded an “attack site” by Google… arrgh! A few frantic days later, with considerable help from my superb hosting service, pair.com, the WordPress community, and after a total reinstall of the blog, it’s all sorted. phew… Google has released the blog back into the general population…

The whole experience was galvanizing. First off, for anyone with any kind of a Internet presence – seriously – get to know the details of your security, and make sure it’s tight. Slightly paranoid geek tight, not 70’s suburban bicycle chain tight. The weird thing, though, was dealing with Google. !#@!$@! It underscored how much power they have over our online lives and I’ll tell you, it was disconcerting. I’m going to post on this aspect of the magilla in a few days once I have my thoughts together, but it had a real Soviet Logan’s Run Smiling Robot Takeover Westworld kinda feeling… more soon.

Welcome back.

The Straight Shave

> Sketchbook, Culture, Design

A preview of a few photographs for my upcoming essay on shaving in issue 7 of Uppercase Magazine. It will be out this fall. They were shot mostly at John the Barbers on Wharton & 13th Street in South Philadelphia. The place is a treasure and a visit a privilege. The article features, along with my observations on the genteel art of shaving, buy vicodin usa walk-ons by Virna Lisi, John Waters, and Robert Goulet, a salute to the Gillette Sensor and Barbasol, praise for the French, a raspberry at ESPN, a brace of fetching pin-ups, and ends where these pictures began, at John the Barbers. Oh, and Uppercase Magazine? Again, with lapel-grabbing enthusiasm, here, and here.

The Free Design’s Chris Dedrick: 1943-2010

Culture, Music

Sad news. Chris Dedrick, the lead singer/songwriter for ’60s cult favorite lite-psych group the Free Design died last Friday… One of the great critical faves/commercial flop stories in rock, their complex harmonies, deceptively simple melodies, orchestral arrangements were hugely influential for many retro-inclined indie bands, most notably Stereolab.

Their first album, Kites are Fun, produced by space-age pop maestro Enoch Light, is a classic, and contains their finest single moment – “The Proper Ornaments.” The song is a rare thing indeed – a flower-power indictment of shallow consumerism and suburban detachment that actually convinces – with quietly devastating power:

There’s your brand new car, sir, here’s your hat and gloves
There’s http://www.mindanews.com/buy-accutane/ your pretty wife, sir, whom you almost love
There’s your color TV set and your impressive pad
There’s your little baby girl you’re almost glad you had

Such a pretty dress, miss, such a graceful walk
Bubbling femininity, authoritative talk
There’s your man he’s prominent; treats you like a queen
All your little secrets kept, your reputations clean
The proper ornaments of life.

It’s all about the ominous “almost…” I’ve always thought it should have been the opening theme to Mad Men – it concentrates the entire existential drama of Don Draper into just under three minutes. Listen, below. More info in their career and records here.

Free Design: Proper Ornaments [download]

[audio:https://shepelavy.com/audio/FreeDesign_ProperOrnaments.mp3]

Summer Stock

Art, Culture

Spotted this at a stodgy antique mall in Ballston Spa, New York… Rarely have any of Norman Rockwell’s paintings struck me as powerfully as this one, entitled “Summer Stock”

Thing is, I have acres of respect for the considerable chops of Norman Rockwell, but his obsession with capturing and venerating everyday life often leads to him to over-compensate. A strained exaggeration creeps in, cracking the integrity of his scenes, exposing them to gusts of corniness.

Here, everything gels… As the young actress applies her lipstick she is, for the moment, utterly divorced from the opulent costume she inhabits – a separation underscored by the abrupt shift between her strawberry blond hair and the bight brick red wig atop it. The power of this painting lies in locating this ordinary moment underneath and amidst the artifice. This is Rockwell’s wholesomeness at its most subtle – theater, and by extension, art, letting down its guard to remind us of its essential humanity.

Raygun… Naked Raygun.

Art, Music

Everything I love about the legendary Chicago band Naked Raygun is embedded somewhere on this, the cover of their latest 7.” A foxy cat-suited astro-cutie making a space jump while trailing a 50’s era satellite is not only awesomeness incarnate, it’s a great distillation of the whole Naked Raygun vibe.

Raygun filtered basic anxieties through the context of their cultural obsessions: comics (esp. Batman,) post apocalyptic movies, cold war espionage, car mechanics, and oddball dictators, to name a few at random. The result was muscular, brainy and cool and it extended to every facet of the band – amazing songs, striking album art, and effortless swagger & charisma (plus one of the great logos in rock – that raygun-R is the only tattoo I’ve seriously considered.) Recording again after close to a decade, it’s easily my favorite record art of the year, and a most welcome return.

Naked Raygun: Just for Me (B-Side) [download]

[audio:https://shepelavy.com/audio/NakedRaygun_Justforme.mp3]

Slide Rules

Design, Technology




A couple of things here… The design of the gizmo itself has some unusually jazzy touches – The in-line rule and orange drop-shadow of OHMITE. The name OHMITE – so silver age Marvel Comics, the Jack Kirby renderings basically draw themselves. The gutsy outline type of OHMITE MANUFACTURING COMPANY. The Bodoni-ish fat numbers.

It’s just rad to see such a brawny and practical buy cheap generic vicodin online tool have so much swing and style. And the numerical card is sublime… just marvel for a moment at how something so thoroughly determined by accuracy and rigor can pulse with such deft, complex rhythms and hum with such simple grace.

Do Do Barbados

Culture, Fashion, Poetry

Barbados teams with Darlene Swimwear, circa 1966, to make a level-headed, brass-tacks case for increased tourism to this picturesque island nation. Strange thing is, on closer reading, the text is a little fractured, off kilter –  taking on, nearly, the cadence of verse. So here, in the spirit of summer, for your pleasure, a bit of found doggerel:

DO DO BARBADOS

Darlene does two piece for the show
at Silver Sands Beach.
Beautiful Ban-Lon
with crochet trim and boy leg.

Baby pink,
Lemon,
Turquoise,
Black.

Sizes 8 to 16

Do Do Barbados
Sun ceilinged, sea surrounded.
West Indian place
of happy exile.

Fly BWIA
the airline of the Caribbean

A round of happy smiles
pipes you aboard.
In little less than five friendly hours
you start your island affair
with the idol of the West Indies.

For flight information see your travel agent.

Robert Longo’s Place

> A Commonplace Book, Art

Shots taken by Todd Selby of Robert Longo in his studio. For me it’s the smudgy texture of everything surrounding his deep, velvety drawings. Especially evocative are the shots of his supplies – more like mechanics gear, overlaid with an archipelago of black smears. Everything here suggests a great physicality behind the smooth rich sheen and stark contrast of his finished work. Longo has compared his drawing style to sculpture, saying “when I draw with graphite I smudge it with my fingers, move it around physically, it’s like clay. Painting is painting on the surface, covering up, where drawing is putting the picture into the paper like a photograph.”

It’s a testament to their power that they retain a so much of this can u order vicodin online muscularity, materiality, and weight when hung in the hermetic space of a gallery. However, they seem especially at home in the studio. It’s like seeing a big ship being assembled in dry-dock from far overhead, and seeing the complex mechanics behind something that will later glide with such heavy grace on the water.

(Below for your pleasure, are a few selections from his iconic 80’s series Men in the Cities. They have, I think, aged particularly well, and seem, now, emblematic of their era rather than beholden to it. Longo also maintains an excellent, comprehensive website with generous galleries spanning his entire career. Also, Selby’s ongoing, long running series of arty glitterati in their homes is amazing and worth checking out frequently)

Teorema

Design, Movies

Absolutely stunning Japanese movie poster for Pasolini’s bewildering art house head scratcher, Teorema.

I Want to Believe
Uppercase Magazine #6

> Essays & Other Writing, > Transmissions, Culture

UFO_1

I staged these UFO photographs in the late 70s, when I was 9 or so, on the front lawn of my childhood home in Liverpool, New York.  When I look at these images now, they never fail to spark a small reverie — a welcome wormhole into kidhood.

Like the photos themselves, which have yellowed & faded with age, my affinity for the images has mellowed & deepened over the years. Now I think I’m as taken with the notion of staging UFO pictures as the idea of UFOs themselves.

I think the photos capture a profound human dynamic —inventing & crafting our own fantasies, while the same time ardently longing that they actually be true. Dwelling amid the tension is much more satisfying, ultimately, than being either a gimlet eyed rationalist or a wide-eyed true believer.

Uppercase_6

Thou Shalt Not…

> A Commonplace Book, Culture, Movies

Thou shalt not show the law defeated, or the inside of a thigh, or lace lingerie, or a dead man, or narcotics, or drinking, or an exposed bosom, gambling, a pointing vicodin to buy gun, or a tommy gun. — This 1940’s photo stacks all ten cardinal sins forbidden at the time by movie studio self-censorship regulations into a ziggurat of sin. Aces.

Stand By… Stand By…

> Transmissions

Heavy advertising, etc., for the rest of the week so the blog’ll be on the auto-pilot. Till next week then, and we’ll pick up where we left off….

Corrections

Art, Design

Beauty, right? I found this a few months ago rifling through files at DuPont’s Hagley Museum, doing research for my Nylon article for Uppercase Magazine (which I previewed recently, here.) A wonderful example of something so basic, so dashed off, so ordinary – some corrections on a galley proof – that happen to merge, by chance, into something really artful.

A sliver of the Seventies…

Culture, Design

I was upstate recently, visiting family HQ, and while combing though the bookshelves I found these beautiful music sheets for Scott Joplin’s ragtime classic The Entertainer (you know, the opening credits to “The Sting” – and the infernal refrain from a million confounded ice cream trucks…) I especially love the sheer Apple ][-ishness of the Dan Coates version. And it does get me thinking buy vicodin topix about how much great 70’s design I must have marinated in at the time, scarcely aware. (Incidentally, it also occurs to me now that my piano teacher at the time had a white long haired cat that looked exactly like Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s cat and that during instruction, it too occasionally sat in his lap. Hurm… go figure.)

Tony Rome

Fashion, Movies

Stills from the 1967 mod-noir detective flick Tony Rome, starring Frank Sinatra. As a caper the movie is solid if a bit by the numbers. As eye candy, though, it’s a glazed treat. Sinatra struts though the movie dressed basically like the old I.R.S. records logo –  the contrast of his black suit and fedora with the sun addled Miami backdrops is one of the movie’s chief visual order vicodin online reviews pleasures. Adding to the decor are a scrumptious Jill St. John and the fabled Fontainebleau Hotel and Casino (which was also memorably featured in Goldfinger.) The title song is a decent fuzzy lounge swinger by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. It was followed by the solid, if slightly shabbier sequel, Lady in Cement, with Raquel Welch providing the ornamentation and Hugo “Moogy-Moog” Montenegro providing the stellar soundtrack.