The WEAM. Does the name ring a bell? No? No, probably not. But it’s one of the more captivating gems I found on a recent visit to Miami, Florida. Buried within that pastel deco tourist wasteland is an unassuming glass entryway with a small sign and a nude statue in the window, a table with some brochures, and an elevator. I happened to see the statue and sign as I was walking by on my way to somewhere else, and was just intrigued enough to drag my companions into that elevator for a peek.

What we found was an unattractively-lit foyer and a high entry fee. Too curious to back down now, I insisted on checking it out so pay we did and in we went. The place was enormous and filled with art and artifacts. “Curated” would not be the right word to describe this haphazard cacophony of objects, arranged on shelves, in glass cases, on pedestals and hanging on every inch of wall space. There were some two dozen rooms and nooks, sort of arranged by place and theme but not really. There are French caricatures, offensive “African primitive” cartoons, horrible paint-by-number nude portraits, serious carvings and phallic sculptures, paintings by many amateurs that seem to be included only because they feature boobies, fetish posters from the ’80s, glass dildos, naughty mechanical sex-themed snuff boxes, a giant four poster bed whose four posts are GIANT PHALLI OVER A FOOT IN DIAMETER… I could go on.

The real treasure, totally unexpected and unadvertised, is located toward the end of the museum. We’d plodded through each of the 20 or so rooms, examining the motley collection of objects erotic, repulsive, curious and hilarious… we were starting to feel fatigued and pressed for time… and then there it was.

The fibreglass rock-a-penis. The very same gleaming white sculpture,
called “The Rocking Machine” featured in A Clockwork Orange. I was
standing face to balls with it. Literally six inches away from it in
all its smooth, shiny glory.

Total. Wholesale. Nerdgasm. Meltdown.

…It’s not for sale. I asked.

(Dejected by this, I turned to the internet, which had happier news for me: Herman Makkink’s famous kinetic sculpture has been recast in a “limited edition” (of a reproduction?) and can be had via his website. I know you’ll sleep better knowing this.)

How does one raise their flag in the flickr ocean and have it be seen in the midst of all those images? There is just so much to sift through in this ever-growing collection of work! Nature photography, self portraiture, explicit sexual imagery, thousands of kitten photos [403,430 at the moment, to be exact] and more, always more. There are a few streams I’ve been following since joining the site two years ago, and I believe they deserve your attention, starting with Vorfas.

This young photographer’s experiments in digital are endlessly entertaining to watch. On parade are mermaids, noir vixens, a circus you’ll want to run away with and a vast collection of self portraits. The  platinum-haired beauty captures herself as silent starlet, dominatrix, bubbly pinup and disgruntled nymphette among a long cast of characters. It has been fascinating to see Vorfas’ work progress from portraiture to the surreal and narrative. Perhaps an overactive imagination can be blamed for some of my reaction, but nothing looks like just a pretty picture anymore. There’s a little universe behind each of these frames that beckons to keep watching.

More Vorfas awaits, after the jump!

Evil-Last, new painting by pinup artist Brian Viveros

Arist Brian M. Viveros has the “don’t mess with me” girl-with-a-cigarette pinup down to a science. So many dense fetish permutations, so little time! Here’s helmet + goggle + octopus + tentacle marks. Or: eyepatch + band-aid + mickey mouse ears + fetish gear. Etc. The transparency of the source material is at times a bit distracting (i.e. this obviously came from this), but the images remain fun nevertheless.

I imagine a young Brian coming face-to-face with the cover of Tank Girl: Apocalypse, and just being scarred (in a good way) for life. Or an alternate-universe, born-50-years-too-early Viveros going off to war and ignoring the pinups that the other soldiers were so crazy about, jacking off to the U.S. Department of Public Health-issued pamphlets instead. Inspiration is where you find it!

• Brian Viveros

See also:

• Katsuya Terada
• John John Jesse
• National Library of Health’s Venereal Disease Poster Gallery

Don’t Hate by Ingrid

I often gush about Doctor Sketchy’s Anti Art School, but today the news is not so sunny. Last weekend in Portland, Maine a Sketchy’s model fell victim to a violent hate crime. Found unconscious on a sidewalk by a passing stranger, the 31 year old recalls little of the incident after sustaining a blow to the head. He was walking home after midnight on Friday, when two men approached him, spitting homophobic slurs and eventually resorting to violence, all because the young man “looked gay”. The victim, who suffered a concussion and bleeding to the brain, was released from Maine Medical Center to recover at home. The police are searching for the alleged perpetrators.

From Maine Today:

The suspects in this case are described as being in their early 20’s. One is a black male, between 5-feet-6-inches and 5-feet-10-inches tall, with a muscular build and shaved head or very short hair. The other suspect was described as a white male, thin build with long brown hair. The car they fled in was a late model white four-door sedan with “fancy” chrome wheels, police Captain Vernon Malloch said.

Anyone with information is asked to call Portland police at 874-8604 or visit the department’s Web site, www.police.portlandmaine.gov, and click on “citizen input”.

• Full article on Maine Today
• Website dedicated to this case

How exciting these Satanic ’70s! This magical time when reality and fantasy are so cleverly disguised by the media masters. Full color shootouts nightly on all channels. In the movies. In the news. Fact or fiction? Check your local TV listings if you’re left confused.

Here at The Paradise we offer you a special blend of fantasy and fact. Atrocity and art. Music and murder twice nightly. And is the horror you witness mere theatrics, or is it real? The only way to be sure…is to participate.

At The Paradise our performers are contracted to entertain you at any cost! And entertain you they will.
Trust me…Swan.
-From the liner notes to the Phantom of the Paradise soundtrack

They all sign up in one way or another.
-Borgia Ginz, from Jubilee

They’re powerful, immensely so, and rich beyond a mere prole’s wildest dreams. They tread the earth as megalomania-driven gods. If you’re a musician (or anyone, really) they want your talent, your creativity, your voice — above all, they want your name on the dotted line.

That’s the archetype of the Satanic Record Mogul, a creature that’s now receded into the shadows. But these scoundrels are at the center (or hovering over it, puppeteer-like) of such cult masterworks as Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (which deserves its own post in the future) and Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise. Even Mr. Boogalow of The Apple fits the mold.

But he is an imitator, a poseur, and The Apple is simply too damned bad for him to hold his own with the heavyweights. No, for the real better-to-rule-in-hell types, we’ll look in on two classic villains: Jubilee‘s Borgia Ginz and Phantom‘s Swan. Hoary old ghosts they may be, but beneath the cackling mad, gaudy exterior lurk the very real fears that still plague the music world, if with much less flair. Everyone signs up in the end.

“I paid for a lap dance, not a desk dance.” Caption/image via Pop Sensation.

Faux lesbianism – yet another value that this great country has lost. Just look at Katie Perry’s disgrace of a music video, “I Kissed a Girl.” As heyguysitsthebible points out, “Katy Perry is no fake lesbian. She’s fake questioning. She’s fake experimenting. And that’s not good enough.” Indeed. The author proceeds to dolefully recount the good old days, back when this country still had some backbone, in which bands like t.A.T.u had to actually make out with each other to prove that they were indeed true fake lesbians. The depths to which this nation has sunk! Not only does Katy Perry fail to lock lips with a single female in her music video, but to add insult to injury, in the end she actually wakes up next to her boyfriend, realizing that her super-safe, bowdlerized lesbian fantasy (or was it a fantasy about being in an ad for Claire’s Accessories?) was just a dream. Damn it, we are better than these last eight years.

Jill Sobule, whose catchier, wittier “I Kissed a Girl” video became a controversial hit in the pre-Ellen mid-90s (to be fair, her video doesn’t have a kiss in it either, though it does have Fabio in uniform, which somehow makes it extra-gay), isn’t bothered: “I don’t feel precious about the title, but I’ve gotten tons of e-mails from annoyed fans,” she recently told EW.com. “Maybe I’ll write a third ‘I Kissed a Girl’ for fun… it will be about how I kissed her, left the dull boyfriend, got gay-married in California, and really no one gave a shit.”

Meanwhile, real lesbians continue to make music! Uh Huh Her just released a new music video. The luscious Leisha Hailey looks oddly like Cylon Six in it, but the real star is still the hipster unicorn.

“taken”, Oil & graphite on wood 19×26, ‘Mayoi Michi’ @ Copro Nason

The work of 26-year-old painter Audrey Kawasaki, LA darling of the pop surrealist movement, always forces me into the persistent place between discomfort, cynicism and arousal.

On the one hand, her wood-panel paintings of languid, smooth and pale-skinned androgynous beauties are meticulously rendered with a sure hand and extreme eye for detail and aesthetic flow. The flawless pink and white skin of her sexy imaginary youngsters always seems to glow from within the image, the subjects look longing out with their impossibly big cartoon eyes as though they’re just aching to be touched, stroked, set free from their 2-D prison. The Art Nouveau-inspired flower, branch and seaweed forms that often surround the figures seems to undulate suggestively, giving the fantasy portraits a honey-slow-motion feel and matching soundtrack (in my head, anyway). I sort of want to go dunk my head in a bucket of icewater just thinking about the glistening parted lips and come-hither stares of her paintings. Ahem.

On the other hand, my intellectual mind can’t help leaping in to question the reactions of my lizard brain. Her style is incredibly consistent, almost to an obsessive degree; the figures she paints could all be related, and they all appear to exist in the same world, the same erotic melancholy state of waiting to be touched and taken. I am here in stasis, they say, I am waiting for you.

“Kakure Zakura”, Oil & graphite on wood 20×15, ‘Innocents’ @ Lineage

• Kakurenbu Info
• Audrey Kawaski’s Website
• Audrey Kawasaki’s Blog
• Interview at Mactribe

[Please welcome our newest guest blogger, Irene Kaoru. Irene is a designer, photographer, model, artist, and sculptor. Irene’s blog can be found here, and prints of her work can be found here.]

Cemetery Screenings, one of the best things to do in Los Angeles on a summer Saturday night is nearing the end of its 6th season.

The Hollywood Forever Cemetery is a beautiful stretch of grass and graves, with lush trees, impressive timeworn mausoleums and a gorgeous reflecting pool. It’s dubbed “The Resting Place of Hollywood Immortals” and is home to the remains of of Cecil B. DeMille, Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone, Jayne Mansfield, Rudolph Valentino and many more. Few pastimes are more serene than an afternoon spent wandering around these grounds. The air is clean, the residents are quiet and the staff is fairly invisible. [Unless you decide to conduct a photo shoot without a permit, that is.]

The sky at Hollywood Forever Cemetery before a screening

Since 2002 the fine people of Cinespia have been conducting screenings of old, obscure and cult films, projected onto the side of Valentino’s mausoleum. Hundreds gather at the cemetery gates well in advance to ensure a great spot on the lawn. These lines are a captivating sight: strange caravans of all breeds of Angel City dwellers, their cargo of blankets, lawn chairs, wines and food at hand, to be arranged into picnics once a piece of lawn is secured. The projection begins with a slide show of vintage movie posters as guest DJs spin an eclectic selection of music and the people converge, set up and eat. The first time can be overwhelming, so the Cinespia website offers a few how-to tips for novices.

The three final screenings begin tonight with the Marx Brothers classic Duck Soup, followed by Pee Wee’s Big Adventure next week and culminating with the classic space drama, Alien, on September 20.

Photo via GETTY.

Oh, Artichoke and La Machine, how do we love thee? Let us count the ways. First, you brought the Sultan’s Elephant and the Little Girl Giant to London. And at this very moment, to the delight and terror of all, you’ve set a 50 foot-high, 37 ton mechanical spider rampaging through the streets of Liverpool. Incredible.

Despite being mortally afraid of arachnids, I wish more than anything that I could be there right now to see “La Princesse” coming to life. I’m sure many of you do as well. Is any of our UK readership getting a chance to witness this? Please, drop us a line!

Photo by Exacta2a via their wonderful Flickrstream.

Autumn is upon us, so I’m busting out all of my favorite fall records. First up: anything and everything Jill Tracy has ever touched with her long, thin, alabaster hands.

As can be plainly seen from this gorgeous music video for “Haunted by the Thought of You”, Madame Tracy is one classy dame. Cool as a cucumber. Who else do I know who could maintain such an unflappable air of poise and elegance as reanimated hearts, levitating chairs, creepy humanoid automata, and even the arse of Satan himself loom directly behind her? No one!

Jill Tracy performing live in NYC. Photo by Don Spiro.

I’ve been swooning over the Victorian parlor pianist/netherworld chanteuse ever since a video for her seminal song “The Fine Art of Poisoning” was released a few years back, but she’s been casting her Ghostly Gloom Glam Queen spell for well over a decade (since long before this latest incarnation of the “dark cabaret” movement picked up speed), always with unparalleled grace and sincerity.

The songs collected on her latest album The Bittersweet Constrain (two in particular: “Sell My Soul” and “Torture”) do indeed invoke a delicious sort of pleasure/pain, not unlike the burn of real wormwood absinthe trickling down the gullet; unsettling and exhilarating as receiving a languorous tongue bath from a black cat at midnight on some foggy, windswept moor. Highly recommended.

Also see:

• Kurt Weill: September Songs
• Jacques Brel: “Ne Me Quitte Pas”
• Nico: “No One is There”
• Edith Piaf: “No, je ne regrette rien”
• Tiger Lillies: “Bully Boys”
• Dresden Dolls: “Sing” (alternate cut)
• Reverend Glasseye: “Seventeen Lashes”
• Nicki Jaine: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”
  
• 2007 Edwardian Ball (Rosin Coven, Vau de Vire)
• Vermillion Lies: “No Good” live
  
• The Ditty Bops: “Wishful Thinking”
  
• World Inferno Friendship Society: “Tattoos Fade” live
• HUMANWINE: “Wake Up” live
• Sepiachord Magazine: “Music of a Past that Never Was”