Idiot Box: Artworks inspired by old TV shows

Earlier in 2009 (during April 2nd to April 23rd to be precise) Los Angeles-based art gallery Gallery 1988 hosted the Idiot Box Art Show. 100 artists contributed work inspired from various old (predominantly 80's-early 90's) TV shows that have become ingrained in the minds of many who grew up in that era, or were exposed to such shows later on in perpetual rerun hell.
There were some really cool artworks included in the exhibition.

Here is a link to where you can see a whole bunch of them. They range from the cute to the absurd to the sinister.

Unfortunately it appears a fairly substantial chunk of these pieces are no longer available to view on the site I just linked you. But there are still plenty of gems in there. The names of the pieces and the artists who created them are still listed under the pictures that are no longer there, so a bit of copy/pasting into google should sort you out if you're absolutely dying to see what a particular missing artwork looks like.
Vortex fave Jim Mahfood was one of the contributing artists. His piece isn't included in that link, but you can see it here.

I admit I don't watch all that much TV, and some of the shows referenced I'm not at all familiar with. But that's fine, I still enjoy the art as it is.
I find it interesting to see how a pop-culture force such as a successful television show inspires people who express themselves in other mediums such as pictorial images and sculpture. Even though the shows have finished their run they continue to live on in the hearts and minds of many. Sometimes this a good thing, sometimes not (I hate you Urkel).
However, I find it even more interesting how certain artists in this collective have filtered these shows through their own twisted psyches to end up with unique creative product which at times can be amusing, captivating, and in some instances... rather disturbing.

But also very entertaining. So go check it out won't you pleeeeease?



Chloé

Pictures used in this post:
"The Family" © Anthony Clarkson.
"We can Has A.L.F.?" © Casey Weldon.

What We Did On The Weekend - by Zöe Kovac

My cousin Zöe has been bugging me for a while now to do a guest column for Randomitronica, so after much whining about it on her part I have finally decided to concede to her wishes. So take this as a warning people. I’m just going to leave her entry the way it is and not proof read any of it. I have added some pictures to this post though. As its Randomitronica tradition to have pictures with these things.
There wasn’t any fire by the way, it was just me forgetting about how Zöe’s toaster is incapable of doing anything but burning toast.
-Chloé



Greetings folks, I’m Chloé’s cousin Zöe. That’s all the introduction you’re gonna get from me. I don’t know you people!! No names have been changed to protect anyone.
I’m writing this on Sunday morning. I currently have a hangover that could crush the skull of a less seasoned individual than myself. I can hear someone stumbling about in the living room coughing and muttering something about “dancing pants.” Guess who that is.
Cousin Chloé and I got up to a few things this weekend, so seeing as I was going to do a guest Randomitronica I’ll write about that.
On Friday night we went to see Pearl Jam in concert, as I needed to do a review of the gig for work. That was fine by me. I got two free tickets out of the deal. I gave one to Chloé as a birthday present, despite her protests that she’d “rather have [her] tits ripped apart by weasels than listen to one single second of any of the languorous pap Pearl Jam has shat out for the last 13 years”. I cared not for her whinging. It saved me having to actually pay for a birthday present for her.
I finally managed to convince her to come with me by letting her know that a certain guy she fancies (we’ll just call him “Simon P. Southberry”) would be coming along too. Ah lust. It can be so handy when it comes to getting people to do what you want them to do.
Liam Finn plus Ben Harper & the I dunno, Deflated Ballsacks or something were playing support for Pearl Jam, but they’re both rubbish so we just stayed near the bar while they were playing. Jesus Christ the beer there was expensive. $11 for a bottle of Corona? That’s insane!

Where was I? Oh yeah, so Pearl Jam started their set only about 25 minutes after the tickets said they would, so that was pretty good going. Some giant sasquatch of a man drunkenly stumbled into me during Pearl Jam’s first song (Daughter) which wasn’t too cool because I’m small and was already half pissed by this point. So I did the only decent thing I could do really, and tripped him up as he careened out of my personal space. Ha ha! What a dunce.
Chloé wasn’t too happy about that cos by tripping the big guy up it caused him to fall onto Simon, who spilled his drink (red wine) on Chloé’s white blouse. But who cares. Whoooo! Pearl Jam!
Pearl Jam put on a very solid performance, the band played pretty much flawlessly, and Eddie Vedder was in fine voice. But they were at the end of a tour, so you’d expect the band to be tight and firing on all cylinders. It was also good to hear the road hadn’t worn out Vedder’s vocals. About two thirds through the gig it looked like he was soothing his throat with some kind of spirit from a big-ass bottle he had near him. Probably why he invited Neil and Liam Finn up on stage with him during the second encore for a rendition of that Chris Knox song “Not Given Lightly”. Which was a moment that was both patriotically rousing and incredibly fucking cheesy. Some people held their lighters aloft during this song. I wasn’t sure if they were trying to be ironic, they were full of boozed up silliness, or if they were just idiots. Probably all three. I wanted them to die.


They had a huge monitor on either side of the stage so you could see the band members clearly as various cameras focussed on what various members were doing at any given time. This was very much appreciated by me, even though it made me realise just how much of a walking cadaver Stone Gossard looks like nowadays. Seriously. If you shaved that guy’s head he’d be Nosferatu incarnate. But Nosfuratu with a guitar. In other words, getting dangerously close to farcical territory, ya hear me Gossard?
It was cool to see Matt Cameron live again. He’s one of my fave drummers, and the only other time I’ve witnessed him live was during a Soundgarden concert many years back (coincidentally at the same venue this PJ gig was at). I prefer his drumming in Soundgarden though, his beats in Pearl Jam are more pedestrian, not as inventive. But whatevz. You adapt your style to suit the band eh. I’m a drummer myself, I know how it goes.
I wish it had been Soundgarden playing. That would’ve cheered Chloé up. The grizzling bitch.

Pearl Jam played for quite a while, about two and a half hours or so. We left a few songs before the end of the concert in order to avoid a huge crowd of people all leaving at the same time. We could still clearly hear the band playing when we were way down the street from the venue. We then had to wait as a multitude of taxis went past us while Chloé was stubbornly smoking a cigarette. I tried explaining to Chloé that we needed a taxi that could accept credit cards so we shouldn’t be mucking about, but she wasn’t having a bar of it.
Well we finally managed to get an appropriate taxi, so Simon, Chloé and I went back to my place. The rest of my housemates had gone down to Taranaki for the weekend so it was just us in the house. Which was good, cos we felt like being rowdy.
We proceeded to hang out in the living room, threw the old I-Ching, ate some chips, drank some daiquirís and had some whippets. Chloé didn’t have any whippets though, because she considers them to be “retarded”. We had the music channel playing on the TV, they played a bunch of Pearl Jam, which was nice, although I was kind of glad when the Pearl Jam stuff finished as Chloé was giving me the evil eye after a while.
Then they started playing a Billy Idol marathon, which we were thoroughly entertained by.


By this time we were all starting to get pretty sloshed. I remember Rob Zombie’s “Foxy Foxy” clip came on the TV, which made Chloé stand up and roar “goddammit what the fuck is this turgid dross? Rob Zombie’s had a fucking lobotomy!” at the top of her lungs, spilling chips everywhere. It was really funny. I think the outburst scared Simon a bit. Or maybe it was just the whippets making him look a trifle unsettled.
Simon wanted to play truth or dare but its no use playing that with Chloé and I as we’ve known each other since we were little kids, and pretty much know all of each other’s sordid little secrets.
My recollections of the night get fairly blurry after that.
I got up to go to the loo at some point and when I returned Chloé and Simon had disappeared. I assumed Chloé had squirreled him away in the spare bedroom to have her wicked way with him, but she soon returned, complaining that Simon had passed out on her.
Boys. Useless.

So then we watched Pumpkinhead.
I woke up several hours later on the couch feeling like someone had shanked me in the head. Chloé was busy burning toast. After we’d both had showers, woken Simon and kicked him out of the house sent him on his merry way I got a text message from my pal Johnny who was having a barbeque round at his place. Chloé had a whole bunch of mp3s that she wanted to give to him for his radio show, so we took a bus round to his house at about noon. We sat about in Johnny’s “man cave” (a smallish sunroom in the front of his house) for a while drinking Coronas and watching random bits of Samurai Jack episodes.
At some point one of Johnny’s mates arrived and we watched a clip on youtube he’d directed of some local political rally. There was an angry heckler guy in this video who got escorted from the premises by some rather large security dudes. Johnny’s mate had filmed the whole debacle. The angry heckler dude called out one of the security guys (“whatcha gonna do now ya fat maggot?!”) which I found so funny I laughed beer through my nose.

There were about ten of us hanging out in the house at this point. We all decided to go down to the park near Johnny’s house, as there was a free concert happening down there and you could bring your booze along. Johnny still had the 3/4 full bottle of Chivas Regal that I’d left at his house a few weeks earlier, so I took that along with me. Chloé wasn’t too keen on the idea of me bringing the whiskey along, she was all like “you shouldn’t take that with us, remember what happened last time you drank that stuff”. But she needn’t have bothered as I wasn’t going to listen. Because I don’t remember what happened last time.
We got to the concert thingy, and Johnny and his mate went off to find some people to film. A bunch of us sat up on a hill drinking and watching the various musical acts perform. Che Fu played a set. He was in Supergroove y’know. He was called Che Ness back then. His set was really lame and boring MOR RnB shit. I got frustrated with it after awhile and kept yelling that he should “shut up and fuckin’ play Scone Farm” until Chloé pointed out that Che never sang on that particular Supergroove song. Ah tits, man. I wish he’d played it anyway, that would have been something.
Don’t get me wrong though, to each their own with their personal music tastes. I just flat out don’t care for RnB. Che’s a pretty decent, versatile singer and his voice suits the RnB style, I just miss his “rock vocal” style he employed in Supergroove.
By that point the whiskey was starting to kick in so we thought it best that we walked back up the hill to Johnny’s while we were still able to stand.
I think we lost a guy on the way.

Johnny and a couple of his mates tended to the barbeque while Chloé and Johnny’s missus Trudy played Tekken 6 on Trudy’s Xbox. I just walked around the house talking to myself and humming Depeche Mode songs. I was to find out later that rather than humming the songs like I thought I was I was actually singing them very loudly and out of tune. And apparently my house wanderings had cumulated into me sitting in the empty bathtub for about forty minutes. But hey, at least I didn’t fall into the barbeque.



I don’t remember if I managed to get out of the bathtub myself or if I was dragged out, but I do remember that by that point there were way more people there and all the barbeque had been eaten. Bastards.
At some point I had a cigarette, I think, as there is half of one in my pocket. I must have been pretty soused to have done that.

And that’s pretty much all I remember. I’ll have to ask old Coughing Girl out there what went down during the rest of the evening, all I know is somehow Chloé and I made it back to my house.
I can hear her yelling. Something about Rob Zombie. Must be that clip on again.
Holy shit the fire alarm just started up.

~Zöe
.

The Wall of Death: Lion Drome

"My ride's cooler than yours"

A fine example of the sort of things people got up to for the sake of entertainment before television, video games and the Internet arrived to wreak havoc upon us all. Click on the photo and see it full size I say. It was taken circa 1929 at Revere Beach, Massachusetts, in da US of A.
My (admittedly brief) research on lion dromes indicates that during the time period when this photo was taken, one could buy a ticket to watch this sort of inspired lunacy right under one's nose for around 10-15 cents, which was about the price of a movie ticket in those days.
Motordromes are still operating today (although they're not nearly as popular as they were back in the 1930's when these events were at their peak of public interest), but minus the lions*.


Yeah, this picture has been floating around on the internet for a wee while now, but for those who are interested here's the story of how it found its way onto the Internet, plus a brief history of the motordrome.

*Gee, I wonder why?


◕‿◕ Chloé

Skeptics - AFFCO

Ladies and gents, I would like to play a video clip for you.

Its a song about meat. Or, more specifically, the processing of meat. It was written by a band named Skeptics (or The Skeptics), who formed in 1979 in Palmerston North, New Zealand.
The song featured here is entitled AFFCO, which is an acronym for Auckland Farmers Freezing Company Ltd. Here is a brief description of the company AFFCO, taken from their official website:
"AFFCO is one of New Zealand's leading food companies, having operated in this competitive and innovative sector of New Zealand’s primary sector since 1904.
AFFCO processes and exports more than 150,000 tonnes of meat products and by products every year and is a major earner of foreign exchange earnings for the country."

I shall warn you now, it is a video that depicts, in a very graphic way, what goes on every day in a meat processing plant. The video itself has stirred up quite a lot of controversy over the years, but its worth noting that the band (and film makers) are not making a case for animal rights here, nor are they celebrating the killing of animals for human consumption. This is a song about people who "pack meat", and thus the video clip and the song itself are merely a reflection of the band's impartial stance on this issue.
Plus it features lead singer David d'Ath (who died of leukaemia on the 4th of September 1990) wrapped in glad wrap and covered in baby oil and food colouring. That's got to be good for you all to see.



The song to my ears is a wonderful thing. I love the graunchy, stuttering and propulsory nature of this tune. The scuzzy, buzzing guitars, the clunky bass, the barked vocals and the claudicant drums all combine to make a rather selcouth aural experience. Especially for New Zealand in 1987. It comes from the excellent album Skeptics III, which is well worth checking out. If you can find it, aahahahaa. I have it on one of my hard drives in mp4 format.

What interests me is the sheer amount of public umbrage that has been stirred up over the years over this clip. Sure, some portions of it are by no means pleasant to watch, but this is what happens in an abattoir. I'm not going to sit here and judge anyone if they happen to enjoy eating meat, or if they are vehemently opposed to the practise. That's their business.
What I do find rather ridiculous though are people who eat meat and yet get all upset when shown how the meat gets to their table. The picture below that I've slapped together is a fine representation of the process, but notice how it misses a very important step, which is how the meat goes from animal to that fancy shit people pay too much money for at restaurants.



OK, so that's not sheep meat he's eating there, but you get the idea. He looks like a putz anyway.

I myself also have a very nonpartisan viewpoint on the issue of animal processing for human consumption. This post is merely about the song and its video clip. Hopefully I have come across as neither for or against this particular practice. Whatever views you may personally hold on this issue are none of my concern, and I'm certainly not here to judge either way.

You can read more about how the video was conceived and made by clicking here to read an account of the video's production by the guy who initiated, directed, shot, and edited it.
A well written mini-history of the Skeptics can be found here.

Chloé

#uselessmonsters

Right then. A few days ago Jimmy Misanthrope started making up useless monsters on his twitter, with the hashtag #uselessmonsters. This was primarily just for the sheer hell of it, but also it was a reaction to the usual boring and stupid things* that end up being hashtagged to the point of ending up in twitter's "trending topics". Things such as Bad Romance, #rihannasforehead, Zenyatta, Jedward, all of which I've just this moment culled from twitter's current trending topics.
For those who are unfamiliar with twitter, adding a hashtag to a word or phrase will automatically add that hashtagged word/phrase to a list automatically generated by twitter that includes all the examples of that word/phrase that have been hashtagged and tweeted.
*Boring and stupid topics, as a great deal of people are themselves boring and stupid, yes?

Twitter hashtags are yet another odious example of humankind's innate herd mentality. Something that is ripe for people like me to take the piss out of then. But whatever. This post is about a hashtag subject that started with "werepotato" and fairly rapidly expanded to include all sorts of wondrously creative examples of sheer silliness. Some were awesome, some were facetious, some were just plain stupid. And some my friends were utterly, utterly useless. In keeping with the spirit of the thing in other words.
Listed below are all the twitter entries (and the people who tweeted them) that came with the hashtag #uselessmonsters that actually listed a useless monster and weren't just replies or reactions to the topic itself. They are listed in the order from the first person who started tweeting useless monsters to the last person who did.


@JimmyMiz Werepotato. One headed hydra. Perma-stone gargoyle. Subterranean drop bear. Bonsai ogre. Toothpaste golem. Tropical yeti. Aquatic satyr. Single animal chimera. Eyeless cyclops. Beached sea serpent. ChickenGriffin. Eunuch incubus. Highly inflammable dragon.

@BloodyWilliam Spotted elephant. Charlie-in-the-box. Wingless harpy. Vegetarian vampire. Half man half house cat. Homicidal minnow. Tone deaf siren. Banshee with laryngitis.

@Starlogic Blind Medusa. Dissolving zombies. Butter octopus. Mute siren. Shaved mammoth.

@icypop Were-ladybirds.

@Bryn_Colvin Pretty much any Disney cartoon monster. The Black Cauldron is especially bad, ruined a good book that. The basalicks.


@Dagger_Arcana A one winged, bubble breathing dragon. Cerberus, the foofy poodle guardian of Hell. A blind basilisk. A blind cockatrice. A mute banshee. Paraplegic mummy.

@Tom_AIAC Brittany Spears. Flava Flav, yeeeeah boy! The Toxic Meanderer.

@scatmanfan Vanilla Ice.

@LaBarceloneta The Adorable Snowman. Cerberus after a bizarre dumbwaiter accident. Baronet Kong. Cthulu's Friend, Skippy the Huggable Lil' Bunny. Frankenstein's Mopper. The Appendix-less Horseman. The Chupacabriolet. Jack the Inadequate-Tipper. The Minotard. Were-Wolfgang Puck. Swamp Thingy. Vampire Hugger D. Dorcs. Medouchea.


@3horn Frankenstump.

@defconqueso Indifference Squid.

@mkmiddleton Were-Wolf Blitzer. Larry King Kong. iPodzilla.


@joangeluk In far off transylvania there lives a vampire duck. It's not his bite, that turns you white, but a very nasty suck. Were-Wolf Blass. Codzilla. Dr Jekyll and Dr Jekyll.

@whateversusan Gameramen.

@Jenksy The unundead. A mere wolf.

And last, but certainly not least:

@essjayess Talos made of jellybeans #harryhausenFTW #godIwishtherewasoneofthese

So there you go folks. An example of the avalanche of odd that one little werepotato is capable of creating. Notice that there was not one single mention of sphinxes. That is because nobody fucks with The Sphynx, OK?

The Sphynx © Winston Rowntree

☺ Chloé

Something to Cry About - An interview with comic creator Julz

The most tenebrous of Halloween greetings to you all!
To mark the occasion I've prepared an interview with Julz, a comic making lady from Cape Town, South Africa, and the artist and writer for the glorious spookycute webcomic Something to Cry About.

Something to Cry About focusses (so far) on three young ladies of the goth persuasion, cheerful Serah Tonin, sharp-witted Medi Kate, and main character Anne Aesthetic, a somewhat moody and introspective lass, who is dealing with the recent ending of a romance. Dealing with it very much like this:


I stumbled across this comic a few weeks ago purely by chance (I was browsing through someone's twitter friends and came across the StCA twitter, and my curiosity was piqued by the twitter avatar), and I can say in all confidence that I'm very pleased I did.
As someone who is myself very much a hopeless romantic (the operative word in my situation being "hopeless") I can really relate to what she's going through. Anne's starting to come around a bit though. Thankfully she has the aforementioned two friends to help her through this. The fact that its currently Halloween has probably helped her state of mind as well.
Personally, I'm a huge fan of the look of this comic. I love the big pupil-less eyes, the girls' various outfits, and the little details included within the comic, such as boxes of tissues being marked (t)issues. And despite it being rooted firmly within the aesthetics of "goth culture", the comic is very lively and genuinely funny. It has a playful sort of humour which I love to bits.
So I decided to email Julz and ask if she'd like to do an interview, to which she agreed to. I then sat down and tried to come up with some interview questions that were interesting to both Julz and anyone who might read the interview, and that would also make for an informative interview experience. Julz graciously emailed me back with some mighty fine answers.
But enough of my rambling and gushing. On with the interview!

Chloé Kovac: By the look of your site, and the subject matter contained within, its apparent that you have an affinity for the, shall we say, "spookier" things in life. What lead you down the path of spookydom? Was there a pivitol moment in your life that led you towards this particular appetence? Or was it a combination of things?

Julz: I was always a bit of a ghoulish kid, fascinated by anything spooky, even if it gave me nightmares. I always loved how ghost stories and the idea of monsters hiding in the closet stirred my imagination and gave me the shivers. I hope it doesn't sound too clichéd, but an awesome moment for me was the first time I watched Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. It was just the perfect combination of weirdly eerie and totally loveable, and I've been smitten with Mr. Burton's work - and the spooky/cute aesthetic - ever since.


CK: Its always good to get a creator's thoughts on their comic. How would you sum up Something To Cry About?

J: I'm hoping it's something that will make people laugh and see the lighter side of some of life's big, dramatic, heartbreaking moments. And sometimes it's just an excuse for me to whine about something!


CK: How do you go about constructing each page? How long does a typical page take to do?

J: My methods are really primitive! Originally I wanted to do the whole comic by hand, but after scanning a couple of my character images and re-drawing them in FreeHand, I found the result was much smoother and easier to work with. So once I decide what's going into a comic, I draw the characters in their various poses in FreeHand, then drop those images into my PhotoShop template, which includes the 4 panels and their borders. The amount of time it takes depends on the content of that comic - the quickest so far has been 1 or 2 hours, and the longest took about 7 hours.


CK: How long have you been developing this comic?

J: I've been drawing pictures of Anne for a couple of years now, but she never had a name or personality. I started thinking seriously about working on a webcomic about a year ago, and eventually came up with the title, concept and characters in April this year. I spent a couple of weeks working on the first few strips and getting the site set up, before launching in May.


CK: Is this your first comic, or have you worked on other comics prior to this?

J: No, this is my first. Although I do have some rather insane and illegible childhood attempts stashed away somewhere.


CK: Besides drawing StCA, what are your other interests? Do you find these extra curricular interests infuse the energy of your comic in a helpful way?

J: I'm a graphic designer and copywriter, so I'm in a fortunate position where my work and hobbies blur into each other. I love drawing, scribbling and doodling, which sometimes helps me find the inspiration I need. Sometimes it helps to get away from my desk and get some exercise - I'm lucky enough to live close to the beach, so taking a walk there really clears my head. I'm also a voracious reader; beautiful prose often inspires me, and I'm totally mad about comic book art. Occasionally I also paint truly awful paintings and bake disastrous cupcakes - which really are worth crying about :)


CK: Do you have any creative pals and/or people who you find influential that you'd like to include some links to in this interview?

J: There are so many awesome webcomics and talented artists out there! Check out StCA's 'Links for the Lonely' section for a list of my favourites. Two webcomics I'm really loving at the moment are Eerie Cuties
(http://www.eeriecuties.com/), an adorable horror-comedy about teenage monsters in high school, and Evil Diva, (http://www.evildivacomics.com/) about a super-cute little demon who just wants to be good. Both of them have that spooky/cute combination that I love.


So there you have it folks. A little bit of background info on the creator and her creative process, which should serve you well when you go and have a look at the eldritch delights contained within the Something to Cry About website.

Chloé

[Something to Cry About © Julz. Images used with permission]

A Couple Of Creepy Animations.

Halloween is drawing near, so what better time to celebrate with a couple of fine filmic examples of spookystuff?
With that in mind, I've decided to post a couple of clips of a creepy nature. Creepy as in "designed to give the viewer goosebumps" not creepy as in "old man lurking around a park wearing nothing but a long raincoat" creepy. Hopefully its dark where you are so you can turn off the lights, put on some headphones and turn up the volume in order to enjoy the full effect. Mwooohahahahhaaa!

First up Smile, is a short CGI enhanced student film from Israel by Yuval Markovich and Noam Abta, produced at Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design in Jerusalem some time ago. Warning: the preceding link is to their showreel, which features various instances of at times rather graphic animated violence.



Egads, that cat!

Personally, I regard Smile as being a fine example of creeping paranoia in action.

Next up is a trailer for the excellent 2007 French animated film Fear[s] of the Dark (Peur[s] du noir) which is all kinds of gorgeous.



If you enjoyed that I highly recommend you track down a copy of it. Its masterfully constructed and works on a number of visceral levels, really worming its way into one's subconscious in a delicious fashion. You can read a bit more about it here.
Official website (in English) is here.
And (at the time of writing) you can see a segment of it on youtube right here.



☺ Chloé