Dark Park

My hero Troy Paiva is still out every full moon to catch his vision of Lost America. Between releasing two books ("Lost America" and "Night Visions") he is kind enough to share his amazing work on his Flickr-site.




His nocturnal journeys have recently led him to one of my favourite subjects: An abandoned amusement park! I posted a selection of a similar project by another photographer recently, but when Mr. Paiva clicks his way through a lost and dark fun-park, it is sure to be something special.



I would love to invite Troy Paiva to come to Berlin to pay a full-moon visit to the spectacularly creepy "Spree Park", the former East-German amusement park which is left to rot since 2001!


Click pics to enlarge!

Lux Exterior

Lux Interior (Erick Lee Purkhiser) 1946 - 2009




At times The Cramps kept me sane, at times I forgot about them. There are not many bands that are so beloved by so many different sub-cultures over such a long time.

Who wouldn´t have loved to hang out with Lux and Ivy in their rumpus room, playing records while nibbling hot peanuts fresh from their "Liberace Hot Peanuts Dispenser"?!

For a far better and informative write up, link-parade and lots of exquisite videos head over to Media Funhouse!

Spot Checker

click pics to enlarge (very large)

When I was a kid my parents used to have one of those triptych bathroom mirrors with which you could create your private endless hall of mirrors. I think it was my first encounter with optical illusions and I must have spent hours losing my three-year old mind inside this green shimmering imaginary corridor.

Japanese superheroine artist Yayoi Kusama is obsessed with dots, spots, and reflections to infinity since she was ten years old. In 1939 she began to paint and cover everything around her with dots.


During the 1960s she stayed in New York were she created her most famous paintings, objects and happenings. Yayoi was pop-art personified but somehow she was even too far ahead for her own good. In the early 1970s she started her own fashion company and a semi-pornographic magazine. Without financial backing she soon had to close shop.

Broke and depressed she returned to Japan where she decided to go on living in a mental hospital. She kept on working and exhibiting and only a few weeks ago, one of her paintings was sold for over $ 5 million, which makes her the highest rated living female artist.


Some of her fascinating installations - like the above pictured - "The gleaming lights of souls" are completely mirrored rooms that are filled with constantly changing lights. Totally amazing!

Get Smart Fugitive - Pacific Ocean Park (Pt. 2)

Pacific Ocean Park (P.O.P.) was the last incarnation of the big amusement piers which once gave Santa Monica´s Venice Beach the title of "Coney Island of the Pacific".



The piers used to be a welcome open air background for the nearby Hollywood studios. There was hardly any silent movie star or slapstick-icon who wouldn´t use the rides and the lively atmosphere as a vehicle for their films at least once.



In the 1960s Disneyland was off limits for TV-productions so they went to P.O.P whenever a carnival was needed. By the mid 60s, the park, which started out as a serious competitor to Disneyland was already in serious decline. This might be the reason why two prominent series used the park as a spooky and empty stage-set for their respective episodes.



"Get Smart" used the park for the usual antics, but the final episode of "The Fugitive" used P.O.P. as a star attraction for the showdown between Richard Kimble and the one-armed man.
Aired in august of 1967, the episode "The Judgement" made TV-history as the most watched fiction program ever (a record that was only broken by the "Who shot J.R."-episode from "Dallas".)

Before the final showdown on the massive "Mahi Mahi" ride, there is an extensive chase that uses the bizarre and strange architecture to an almost surreal effect. Sadly even this media exposure didn´t help the struggling park. Only two months after the show aired, Pacific Ocean Park was shut down forever.

Here is the whole sequence in two parts:



Click here for P.O.P. pt 1. A place that kept my imagination despite I have never been there while it was in existence.
Part 3: In ruins

God Hates Signs

I agree, that movie was really bad.

via Laughing squid

"It must have been art, but it´s over now"

Since I am not "on the market" for a very long time, I am not exactly up-to-date with all the dating- and hook-up sites that are out there.
In the summer I came across this astonishingly bizarre collection of mostly German exhibits which were handpicked from the net.

A few weeks later I was re-blogged (on a different subject) by Justinspace who has actually published a book about this very subject. His Obscene Interiors gracefully whites out all the pictured cave dwellers. This way, the pictures look more like unpaid Diane Arbus photographs. Interestingly, the white outlines of the erased subjects are still giving away a lot about the person without distracting too much from the interiors.


All in all the shocks in "Obscene Interiors" are mild compared to the next purveyor of interior decline: Lurid Digs!


Be warned before you click on the link: This website goes to places where you hopefully never have to go yourself! There is nothing hidden or pixelled. If you have a job that doesn´t have you sitting all alone with your back to the wall in a basement room, you probably shouldn´t go there during office hours.

The pics I chose to show here are actually the only ones that appear to be relatively harmless (minus one). Some of the others will have you rolling and gagging on the floor (like this one):

Watch closely if you can. The devil is in the details (and Detail dons a ratty blond wig)

Each picture is cleverly discussed by the staff and tagged with great titles. A bunch of regulars add some funny and bitchy comments. But where to start with material like this?

The camouflage couch. Click to see it


This one is really interesting! The colour, the motive, the strangeness. Many of the commenters are wondering if the room is in America or in Europe. My first association was the "Bowman room" from "2001" and two comments share this idea. One even claims its from the perspective of the monolith!


Of course it is a bit questionable to re-distribute these pictures without blurring (at least) the faces, even if the owner put them up on a hook-up site in the first place. I am also against "watermarking" pictures which are not your own and posting them on a clearly commercial site. But anyway you look at it: Some of these photos are the funniest you might have seen and they are an amazing display of life, honesty, loneliness and horniness.

A 1000 No 1s in Heaven

This could be the best present for your best friend or best enemy: The Neimann Marcus Christmas Book offers to ship you a vinyl-wave of tsunami-esque proportions. For just $ 275.000.00 (shipping not included) you can become the proud owner of each and every 45 RPM vinyl record that was listed on the Billboard Top 100® Rock and Pop charts from Jan. 1, 1955, through Dec. 31, 1990. Absolutely every disc for 35 years, every No. 100 up to every No. 1. There are some 18,400 records total. Some are even autographed.

Now there are some pretty valuable and great things in there, but I am sure that the amount of not-so-hot-singles must be gigantic!
I really don´t know if this is heaven or hell! In the words of Blixa Bargeld: "How do you listen to this?!"

Since you´ve been polyGONE

Norwegian born artist Bård Edlund has worked for over a year on his sad and touching animated short-film "Gone", which follows his faceless, continuously sad, polygon figures through a situation we all know too well.

Today, Edlund lives in New York and works as an art director with CNN. His Scandinavian melancholy seems to have followed him.

"DNA is the enemy of our freedom. We have to fight it!"

The title quote comes from artist extra-ordinaire Genesis P-Orridge, remembering an exchange with William S. Burroughs about the source of human control.


After he met Jaqueline "Lady Jaye" Breyer in an S&M dungeon fifteen years ago they both decided to fight their DNA by becoming one person. First the act called "pandrogeny" was simply executed by dressing alike but after ten years they both decided to undergo an endless amount of plastic surgery to resemble each other as much as humanly possible.
The above picture shows them leaving a clinic after extensive surgery in 2003.

P-Orridge emphasises that "Pandrogeny is not about the pain of a man being trapped in a woman´s body. Its about the pain of being trapped in any body at all."

Sadly, "Lady Jaye" Breyer P-Orridge died late last year, leaving Gen with the task of living his/her life for the both of them.

Read the whole touching story about the "wrecker of civilisation" and the love of his life at Radar Magazine. It´s an amazing read that manages to give a good re-cap of P-Orridges long an notorious career as an artist and musician who is so influential that we tend to remember his epigones more than s/him.

Death Race 2000: Cruisin´ for a bruisin´

Motorslug/Deathrape 2000


Stop trying to tie me

Pedal to the Metal

Stumbo



Death Race 2000! The ultimate car-crash film left the Roger Corman assembly-line in 1975. Directed by the late and horribly undervalued Paul Bartel, it´s an exercise in cheap, creative exploitation film making that puts its foot on all the right pedals at once. One of the very few films that offers thigh-slapping fun, while simultaneously working on all sort of meta-levels (if you want it to).

The cast is fantastic: Mary Woronov, the Catherine Deneuve of exploitation cinema meets with David Carradine and Sly Stallone, who was halway between ill-fated porn-career and future action-hero.

A sort-of-sequel will be released this august. Directed by the notoriously maligned Paul W. Anderson, a director who does "cheap" without the "thrills". The lead is played by Jason Statham, an action-hero who would be better suited as a porn-actor.
In short: The new Death Race will have it all wrong from the get go!


The music that goes with the pictures is by Wiseblood. A side project from the insanely talented and amazing J.G. Thirlwell aka Clint Ruin and a million "Foetus"-manifestations. Together with Swiss drummer Roli Mosiman (Young Gods, SWANS) he created a sound that is still unmatched in its fuel-drunken virtuosity.

"Motorslug" was the first of only 3 singles. This hyperspeed orgy of techno, rock n´roll, rockabilly, blues and orchestral pomp is so accelerated that its echo is still miles ahead of comparable efforts.

The flip "Death Rape 2000" is one of the most radical pieces of minimal music. For nearly 8 minutes it repeats the same 3-note orchestra-hit (the sample which was everywhere back then) without the slightest variation. Wiseblood used to open their gigs with this and it would hypnotize the audience and break their resitance, before the actual show had started.

"Stumbo" is from Wisebloods only album "Dirtdish", which also contains one of the most evil and threatening tracks of my record collection: "0-0 (Where evil dwells)".


"Pedal to the metal" and "Stop trying to tie me" are from the last "Wiseblood"-ep "PTTM" which features some of the most impressive jazz-sampling you could find in 1991.

I highly remommend to get all Wiseblood and Foetus records you can get your grimy hands on. Either here or here

My Favourite Website: Animation Backgrounds

Animation Backgrounds is an amazing blog!

I am sure that these random scenes strike a chord in everybody who was exposed to cartoons from an early age.




I was especially amazed to find background pictures of "Donald in Mathmagic Land" which I remember having seen aged six, as a pre-film to "Bambi". Somehow these expressive, blue landscapes have stayed longer in my memory than the traumatic main feature. (although I was always pretty bad in math!)


The magnifying focus on random scenes, such as kitchens, back-alleys and stages, mostly shifted out of conventional angles and perspective, offers a fascinating insight into the American landscape of the last 80 years.





I guess that the freaky rocks and desert roads which make up the background of the Roadrunner-toons were always more real to me as the real thing.

Despite it´s nerdy theme, the site created by Rob Richards, is no excentric niche-blog. Many commenters proof the worldwide interest in these pre-pop-art paintings, which seem to be sold for insane amounts of money.





Who would have thought that background pictures of old cartoons would have a longer life than any ACME-product?