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Beyond a few broad, core truths (the Nazis are Evil, the Axis are a Threat), propaganda is by its very nature filled with falsehoods, exaggerations, and lies. It reveals far more about the country that created it than its actual target. In the following cartoons, which cast the most popular animated characters of the time into situations both comic and nightmarish, the concerns of World War II America are laid bare: it's scared, defiant, and strangely obsessed.
Wrath
During a parable about the idiocy of signing a non-aggression pact with a man who is a wolf AND a Nazi, the Three Little Pigs run into the eldest pig’s house, which is made out of bricks and heavy cannons. There’s a sign on the door which says: “No Dogs Allowed”, except “Dogs” has been crossed out and
"That's probably the hardest I've worked on any project," says Avi Spivak, the illustrator behind Norton Records' recent issue of Kicksville Confidential. And if you've seen Kicksville, released this past October, you'll understand what he means by "hard work" -- the Brooklyn-based artist's painstaking renderings of Norton stars are as detailed as they are funny, and they're clearly the toil of someone with a deep interest in u-ground comics and gutsy r'n'r alike. In Spivak's enthusiastic scrawl -- part Kaz, part MAD, part G. Panter, part urban daydrunk stupor -- some of the Norton stable's more colorful tales come to life, and we see, for example, Hannibal's fabled ride through Midtown Manhattan on an elephant, a Screamin' Jay Hawkins/Esquerita street-level fistfight and Hasil Adkins's rural shootout.
Spivak's resume prior to Kicksville is no less impressive. In addition to commercial art and various other projects, like the mural he painted outside of the now-defunct Mars Bar, he's contributed to Maximum RocknRoll, The Scientist, Vice -- and Al Goldstein's SCREW, for which he illustrated a cover in 2006.
Last week the web was wriggling with outrage over The Disney Store Corporation offering for sale a Mickey Mouse™ T-shirt in the graphic style of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures albumcover -- not that the iconic white-on-black waveform image (plucked from the Cambidge Encyclopedia of Astronomy by drummer Stephen Morris) was any stranger to absurd marketing schemes.
On Surface Noise, Joe McGasko presented a show decked with soul. Listen to this New Birth. song. After annoucing, he continued with late 1970's Isaac Hayes. Compare the lush instrumentation to modern, mechanzed grooves: Small Change returned to WFMU this month for several editions of Nickel And Dime Radio. Hear "Bach Goes Balie Funk" by Ophex, followed by two N-ron tracks.
Joe Belock on Three Card Monte played 1966's "Show Me The Way" by Great Scots, then "The Answer Was You" by Sloan. Both have a straight-foward rock vibe, but notice the Sloan selection is much more lush. Sloan continually mines Beatles/Small Faces layering.
You won't hear this in Sonny Sharrock, free jazz's most famous guitarist after Derek Baily. Hear his atonal six string shards on "Portrait Of Linda, All Three Colors." Sharrock probably offered his music's best description. "I'm a horn player with a really fucked up axe."
Finally, as this weekend's record fair approaches, WFMU began Singles Going Steady week. The station plays only 7" records. Irene Trudel ended this week's show sounding exactly like early 1970's FM radio, playing Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, The Lovin' Spoonful, and John Lennon,. If , like me, you weren't there in those days but wish you were, begin here!
Trubble Club is an informal group of Chicago comic artists that meet every week to produce collaborative comics. Inkers such as Edie Fake, Jeremy Tinder and Grant Reynolds delight in farting out the most absurd panels full of gross-out humor and ridiculous surrealism.
The content presented herein will most likely offend someone's sensibilities, in some capacity or another, and there are profanities as well as haphazard juggling of taboo subjects in an insensitive fashion involved, and the reader should consider herself WARNED about them! If every generation is doomed to fear for the following one, Trenton Willey may be one of our foremost warning signals. Some of his shenanigans might be unsettling, but they do at times bring to mind how we are in a time where the swastika is almost as innocuous as the fanny pack. We are drowned in the tedious irony of bad fashion in a decade without any distinctly remarkable cultural shifts beyond that of the push for recycling, and in light of this, Trenton, a Maine native, comes off like some kind of ham fisted crankhead beatnik of a spiritual leader.
While it may seem buffoonish at first, Willey's surrealistic stream of brutish puns and psychedelic one liners eventually seem like they are transcendent; Some kind of ultra reality where humor is only the pretext for the sort of nonsense that finds us leaving theaters feeling drug-addled after a particularly mind bending movie, or just guiltily laughing our asses off. He appears as someone who happened to take mental imagery of dinosaurs, care bears, made for TV movies, and soap operas, along with mass murder, racism, sexual abuse, daily news, political correctness, and various media histrionics all into the blender of his mind, set on liquefy. But rather than presenting these sometimes turbulent concepts as a means to shock people with the severity of them, he presents them with the sort of aplomb that one might expect from Mister Rogers and in the context of total madness. When I heard that Trenton was talking about going for the Guinness Book of World Record for the longest stand up comedy set (40 hours), I invited him to do stand up on the phone for 6 hours with no audience, to be aired on my radio show.
I'm fascinated by the concept and the purported benefits of image streaming, and I'd be happy to uphold someone who would be able to go through with it, especially if he is keeping with this style of slinging ludicrous word diarrhea throughout. It would certainly add to his body of work; endeavors such as interviewing his father about gay animal marriage, making a play with a dead cat, the animated film "Hair Camp" (featuring Venus, a vegan cannibal Venus flytrap with a British accent), teaching invisible children about death (WARNING: this one is particularly viscous), a group protest where every person protests something different, stabbing himself during a knife dance, and getting chased by hecklers. In this case, Trenton didn't make it 6 hours, his phone kept dying. I believe he can do it. Instead, the series of recordings start off with a pretend interview with a dinosaur, and a decline into drunken depression/distant, pitiful domestic arguments that bring to mind Happy Time Harry. Trenton granted permission to air the entirety of the recordings unedited. Below is a video clip of Trenton's stand up, as a tooth sandwich appetizer.
It is, perhaps, a strange and unsavory thing to say but, alas, the truth must make itself known: Beavis and Butthead had a profound impact on me as a kid. I remember sitting on my basement couch in an uncommon state of awe and laughter; I felt high, though I’d never so much as known the smell of weed at that point (I do now, thanks). All of the MTV-produced programming at that time blew my spongy little mind. Shows like The State, Liquid Television, and even Remote Control all had nuanced, well-developed sensibilities that spoke to me in a way that the sound-stages of sitcoms could not; it all felt so new, and almost revolutionary. However, it was Beavis and Butthead that ultimately won the largest share of my heart.
I obsessed over the show. I watched the re-runs and would write down the funnier lines in a spiral notebook. I bought the video game, and the guidebooks, and saw the movie four times in the theater. Every time the pair sunk into a fit of laughter, I joined in with them, narrowly avoiding death by choking on whatever salty, powdered snack I was inhaling. My hair, at the time, was a large brown poof and braces lined my teeth. Someone once called me Butthead, and I was surprisingly okay with it.
At the time, I couldn’t be certain why exactly it was I loved them so. True, I had always been partial to fart jokes, but looking back, I was nothing like those characters. Though every episode makes it clear that
Recently I went to The Netherlands for the Roadburn Festival. Thanks to Duane Harriot for running the Fun Machine for a week and not wrecking the gears! Last weeks episode was a full three hours of music and photos from the most enjoyable fest I have ever been to, and if you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it (not because it's my program, mind you - it is my taste, but it was really programmed by those who put Roadburn together- thank them, not me)!
Since last year's festival was disrupted by a pesky volcanic eruption, I thought it would be wise to take an extra day ahead of the festival and eliminate the stress factor. I made my ever important sleeping bag connection ahead of time, and decided to head over to the town of 's-Hertogenbosch to check out the Jheronimus Bosch Art Center.
All of Bosch's works are in name museums, so I was not sure what to expect. This town probably would have no one paying attention to it except for their famous, intensely talented son. I'm not going to even go into describing his artwork here; if you are unfamiliar, go check out a link or two and get the scoop on this man.
The Art Center is housed in what had once been a church. It looks like a church, but when you step inside, all your senses tell you nearly right away (there's a large red curtain that separates the entrance from a lot of the exhibit area) that you may have actually stepped into a delightfully quirky version of hell. There is a telltale sculpture outside as well to tip you off, that in most ways, this was not going to be a religious experience, at least of a churchgoing nature.
The helpful women at the desk were concerned with the size of my backpack and could see I was being taxed by it's weight. They took it off my hands immediately although there was no coat room. The entrance fee was laughably cheap and I was given an audio guide to boot. It was when I got to the other side of the curtain that I thought to myself "I'm going to be here for hours and hours"...
Beyond a few broad, core truths (the Nazis are Evil, the Axis are a Threat), propaganda is by its very nature filled with falsehoods, exaggerations, and lies. It reveals far more about the country that created it than its actual target. In the following cartoons, which cast the most popular animated characters of the time into situations both comic and nightmarish, the concerns of World War II America are laid bare: it's scared, defiant, and strangely obsessed.
Wrath
During a parable about the idiocy of signing a non-aggression pact with a man who is a wolf AND a Nazi, the Three Little Pigs run into the eldest pig’s house, which is made out of bricks and heavy cannons. There’s a sign on the door which says: “No Dogs Allowed”, except “Dogs” has been crossed out and replaced by “Japs”. No other mention of the Japanese is made during this sequence. Frankly, it seems like an afterthought -- like they completed this cartoon and sent it through the editing process, where it was determined that there was just not enough racism against the Japanese. By then, it was too late to add, say, a horrible buck-toothed reptile sidekick for Wolf Hitler, so they slapped the sign on the house and called it a day.
They really went out of their way to portray the Japanese as inhuman, too. Hitler and Mussolini are caricatures of people: Hitler is thin and floppy, while Mussolini is fat and bull-headed. Hirohito, on the other hand, is practically an alien--he’s got bright yellow skin, a face that seems to be composed entirely of buck teeth, long ears, and pinprick eyes. Last time I checked, Japanese people do not possess any of those characteristics (I would say, “anime doesn’t count”, but this doesn’t even happen in anime).
Gluttony
The wolf wants more. He will not use what he gains. It is enough for him that it is there to make his own. He will blow down the house of straw and sticks, and try to blow up the house of cannons. He will eat the pigs. All of his minions are either obese (they have gorged themselves well) or rail-thin (they are starving of their want). He will send his crow after you, to catch your duck. He will fill your children full of death. The wolf wants more.
Lust
How many times are people going to get shot in the ass in these cartoons? There’s something very strange going on here -- you Nazis may have annexed the Sudetenland and made war on civilization, but we’re gonna shoot you in the butt! Wolf Hitler gets chased around by bombs and shells that seem to have been designed to seek out his rear end. Nazi Donald Duck (more on that later) is prodded to his fascist re-education by bayonets that poke him in the ass. In the title screen to his starring role in this rump drama, Daffy Duck shoots a Nazi duck (not Donald) directly in the asshole with a rock from a slingshot.
I understand the need to be aggressive against Nazi Germany, but do we really need to move from invasions to invasions? If you watched The Fog of War, you’ll know that General Curtis LeMay (whose dying regret must have been that he never lived to use a railgun on a communist) never went near recommending anything of this nature (mostly, his strategy was bombs, regardless of anatomical location). I’m not sure exactly what this reveals about the mindset of the gentlemen animating these cartoons, but if I had a communications device that ignored the boundaries of space and time, I’d tell them to cool it down a bit. I would also tell them to make a prequel to Space Jam, this time featuring bespectacled giant and early NBA icon George Mikan, on the condition that they put aside a small percentage of the profits in a trust fund for me.
Greed
It’s perhaps a little vulgar when the three little pigs launch bullets literally full of money at Wolf Hitler. They’re helpfully labeled “Defense Bonds”, which is a nice little reminder to the American public to get crackin’ with the bond-buying. Additionally, the exhortation to BUY WAR BONDS gets repeated an awful lot during the less-subtle cartoons, but this is to be forgiven. Tanks were needed to crush the Nazis, and tanks are not free.
Envy
One very specific type of envy, to be accurate. A hint: observe the number of cannons in these cartoons. Cannons abound. Tanks have two at minimum, sometimes as many as five. Sometimes, the cannons go limp. A pig will feed the cannon vitamins, and it is ready once again to fire away.
Pride
There is only the barest mention of Russia in these cartoons. This may be a disservice.
Did you know that, out of the total number of German army soldiers who died in World War II, something like nine out of ten were killed by the Russians? Our image of that war is of America saving the day, and this is not without merit. England alone would have been unable to mount a counter-invasion on its own and would have been forced to surrender eventually had it not received American aid. It’s important to remember, however, that alongside Good Old Fashioned American Know-How and the Legendary British Resolve, the war was won by Millions and Millions of Russian Conscripts, dying in Stalingrad, clogging the gears of a meat grinder.
Sloth
Donald Duck is in hell.
He doesn’t know how he got here. It seems like he’s always been in hell, but the memories of another land flicker across his overworked brain like the last fireworks of the last Fourth of July. He is on an assembly line which stretches into infinity. His tormentors want him to build shells. His tormentors want him to hail the Fuhrer. They are not satisfied with the slightest delay in either of these actions. Earlier, in a different world, the Fuhrer was a wolf, but here, he’s a man. Someday, the wolf will be blown to hell, greeted by a leering band of devils, but Donald will not be there for that.
Donald has been up since four o’clock in the morning. He was awoken by a band of grotesques singing a song about the Fuhrer, and it seems like their chorus ambushes him at the worst possible times.
He is so very good at his job. His wings long ago evolved into hands, and they shame humanity with their quickness and dexterity. Small shells are no problem. Larger ones are a cakewalk. Donald could screw shells together forever, but his skill only encourages his tormentors. They finally trip him up. They may have never wanted him to succeed. If only they would stop screaming at him. If only the music would stop.
One day, Donald will wake up in America. He never left. He was only dreaming. The dream was eternity.
Joe DeMartino is a Connecticut-based writer who grew up wanting to be Ted Williams, but you would not BELIEVE how hard it is to hit a baseball, so he gave that up because he writes words OK. He talks about exploding suns, video games, karaoke, and other cool shit at his blog, The Toy Cannon. He can be emailed at jddemartino@gmail.com and tweeted at @thetoycannon. He writes about sports elsewhere. The sports sells better.
Jay's out of town this weekend and is expecting me to post something about Putin, but I thought I'd feature the Thunk Tank Reenactors doing the opening of the 10/12/10 show instead.
The other night, myself and a few friends; artist Hakumei Kusanagi (artwork here), Mad Man John, and
the Geisha of Gore (read her column on the Cinema Knife Fight site), went to the Japan Society event thinking we were only going to see Mutant Girls Squadas part of the NY Asian Film Fest. I was unaware that two of the movies' three directors were to be in attendance, and the Geisha of Gore greeted me at the door with her copy of the promo poster for Mutant Girls Squad signed by both of them, as well as her DVD insert for Tokyo Gore Police signed by Yoshihiro Nishimura (which was his directorial debut). Her grin split her face in half as if she was Ichi the Killer. I knew it would be a good night.
I thought it would be prudent to use the rest room before the action started, and I got sidetracked in the Japan Society's ladies room. Each stall had it's own device (see photo below) with many bidet settings - including an underseat dryer! I could have taken in all the selections, but wanted to take in everything that was going on outside of the bathroom, so ran back out to the action, the presentation was about to begin!
Yoshihiro Nishimura and Noboru Iguchi introduced the film with an interpreter, and Subway Cinema's Marc Walcow; the presentation was fun and whimsical; the two directors seemed genuinely thrilled to be there in a demented childlike way. They gave out prizes to the crowd and a bit of background on the film: "He likes asses; you'll see a lot of asses and a lot of things coming out of them", and of course the deep meaning in the meeting of the 3 directors minds "we all got together and got drunk and wrote the movie"... Also on the scene was Masanori Mimoto of Alien vs Ninja, screened earlier that day.
The official 2012 Olympic mascots have finally been let out of their cages. Yesterday a bunch of London students became the first children to be 'touched' by these oversized perverted teletubbies with scary names: Wenlock, and Mandeville.
Olympic mascots by their nature invite criticism, detractors often use the silly characters to make serious statements about the host country. China went through hell with it's 2008 mascots, the characters were appropriated by many foreign and domestic protest groups. The Chinese government got so red in the face over the trouble, they even changed the name from friendlies to fuwa.
Thus it is impossible not to look at these monstrosities and wonder about possible connections to the new coalition government. Was there a last minute mascot intervention at 10 Downing Street? Was one semi non-retarded creature split in two? Is the giant blue crotch more Cameron or Clegg? And just as the Chinese forced Fuwa designer Han Meilin to incorporate the aims of the state into his creatures, are the giant eyeballs supposed to be friendly CCTV cameras?
The official origin story is of course much more Disney but I am not fooled!
***UPDATE***
This YouTube Vid suggests evidence of Free Masonry:
When Dan Clowes went to Hollywood and started making movies with Scarlett Johansson and Steve Buscemi I wondered if he would ever do another serious graphic novel again. Its been a decade since David Boring came out in book form! But this week Drawn and Quarterly release the full length graphic novel Wilson. It was worth the wait. (click on images for larger size)
Wilson is an odd bird. He tries to befriend stranger after stranger in coffee shops and bars, and later in prison - but he really doesn't like anybody. Mostly he just talks to himself. Its a sort of introspective misanthropy. Clowes draws Wilson in a variety of styles, but Wilson's awkwardness and our discomfort remains constant.
The individual pages are all moments of one epic pathetic story. After his father dies
Wilson sets out to find his ex-wife (who now has the tattoo "Property of Sir D.A.D.D.Y. Big-Dick" on her back). They hunt down their
teenage daughter, born after the marriage ended and given up for
adoption. Wilson believes they can make it as a family. Huh. Check out the D&Q blog for the Clowes tour dates (he will be at the STRAND next Wednesday.
I have no idea...mental breakdown dirty dancing to self-produced jams that sound like a cross between The Pod-era Ween and Right Said Fred. Watch all of Tonetta777's videos on his youtube page. Not necessarily NSFW, but it might creep some people out.
Department of Less-Than-Hilarious Comedy Albums/ Today's offering: The Okra Eaters. A scandalous, shocking, nasty damned dish. They really need little introduction, just pour a libation, settle down and get ready to laugh until some okra comes up. This is the complete 1974 adults-only lp, with ripping incidental music by the Johnny Otis Show, and another lovely (?) Laff Records cover designed by Howard Goldstein with Bud Fraker photography. Oh, and I fixed the tracklist- the original lp had the cuts listed wrong on the cover and the label. But who would care or notice? Tracklist schmacklist. Again--if you didn't glean this already--This is NOT work-safe or even safe for pets or children, for that matter- just very down and dirty. It hovers somewhere just short of 'foul' and nearby to 'cute'.
70's Culture Quiz: The concept "Karate Jaws" is a send-up of an ad campaign related to what 1970's icon?
Here is the link to the corrected cover art, and here are the 13 tracks: 01 Bazooms 02 House of Pleasure 03 Miscarriage 04 Eat My Okra 05 Chocolate Ice Cream 06 Proud 07 Hold That Tiger 08 Son in Law 09 To Be Sure 10 Bad Weather 11 Blowin' Mule 12 Big Mary 13 Dr. Weightoff
As promised, here are my final 25 cuts by the unforgettable Elton and Betty White. I think that due to the shortness of their songs, one needs to hear rather a lot of them to gain a better feel for what they did. I suppose I should describe their music to those who haven't heard it, I keep assuming that WFMU reader/listeners know about them; the best and most I could say is that they sing straight from the heart about some earthy, patently human things, and what they may lack in skill as poets and players disappears under the weight of their charm. I didn't even expect to be doing Elton and Betty as my first couple of regular posts here on BOTB, but fate seemed to push them into this spot, in several ways. By the way- I'm tickled to be here.
The second tidal wave of E & B hits after the break.
Pesky WFMU playlist termites The Bran Flakes have launched a new animated video ("What It's All About") in conjunction with the February 24 release of their album, I Have Hands (Illegal Art).
Animation by TBF's Sir Mildred Pitt. Shouts to fellow Flake Otis Fodder, who quit smoking last Friday "after 25+ years of a pack every day or two."
"Right now I am tettering on the edge of sanity," Otis reports. "It's been 72 hours and my smoking days are over. Yes yes. But where shall I go? Maybe smoking was my talent. Shoot me."
