WEIRD Geometric Anomaly Discovered on Saturn's Pole
"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."
Last Friday, my friend Lance and I witnessed the heavenly glory of Japanese psych greats OOIOO at the Chop Suey in Seattle. I hadn't been to that venue since I saw the Melvins there (when it was called the Breakroom WAAAAY back in '99) so it was a treat to go back and check out the scene. Chop Suey seems to be doing well, I'm happy to report.
Don't know where to begin with describing OOIOO to those who haven't been fortunate enough to hear them yet. They began in the 1996 as something of a lark. Yoshimi P-we, the drummer, trumpeter and screamer of the legendary Boredoms, told a reporter from SWITCH magazine that she had formed a new band. She was joking, but an interview was set up and she spontaneously invited a few friends of hers to go along for a photo shoot to pose as her "band."
Afterwards, they decided it would be fun to actually turn the fictitious band into a real one, despite the fact that only Yoshimi and the drummer had had any previous experience as musicians. The guitarist and bass player had never even played before! Suffice it to say, they got better. Several tours and albums down the line, OOIOO has turned into one of Japan's leading experimental psychedelic bands.
Like the Boredoms. Hanadensha and other Japanese psych bands of their generation, OOIOO has gradually mutated from shrill mechanical squall to organic earth worshippers. But-if the term "earth worship" inevitably equates in your mind with navel gazing hippy jam bands like {{*shudder*}} Phish, then you couldn't be further off the mark with what OOIOO and their contemporaries are all about.
OOIOO is organic, but organic like a hurricane or the rushing torrent of a waterfall. This is nature in all it's sometimes frightening majesty, not a safe, flower covered pleasure park for bourgeois daytrippers. It's a sound difficult to describe, like fractured 70's afrobeat played through Link Wray's broken speakers. Tribal, yet futuristic...very much a music symbolizing the phenomenon of modern Japan.
Their performance was very tight. I've seldom seen a group of individuals more integrated towards a common musical goal. They even dressed alike! However, unlike the retro contrivance of the many uniformed neo-garage bands littering the landscape, they seemed more like robed priestesses than trendy fashion victims.
Their current album TAIGA, shows how far they've come since their inception. You should buy it. NOW!
If you are fortunate to live in one of the cities on their tragically short US tour, then drop whatever you're doing, change your plans and go see them.
I've long been an enthusiastic fan of primitive comics so I was delighted when I ran across this story while perusing FANTASTIC COMICS #12 (1940-Fox Publications)
The utter bizarrness of the artist's style immediately grabbed my eye-looked almost like an underground from the 60's!
I'd never heard of the creator, one Fletcher Hanks, but apparently as I lay napping, his work has been undergoing something of a revival & he's being lauded as the "Ed Wood" of comics. (God, almost any comic creator of that era could lay claim to that title..that's why I love Golden Age comics so.) Stardust has earned a webpage devoted to his surreal shenanigans & Fantagraphics is putting out a collection of Hanks work called I SHALL DESTROY ALL CIVILIZED PLANETS: THE FANTASTIC COMIC WORK OF FLETCHER HANKS.
This is some seriously brilliant shit..I mean, just LOOK at that apple-headed mother fucker(!) STARDUST THE SUPER WIZARD?..hee heeeee....you know the cat wuz high...
Good ol' Wikipedia has a article on Mr. Hanks, uv cuss:
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For me, the Golden Age of comics is the most interesting and creative period in comics history. There is a rough, youthful enthusiasm to the art that is miles away from the mannered, diagrammatic art of the Silver Age. (As for mainstream American comics after 1975, the less said about them the better, IMHO...)
IN the beginning, artists like Lou Fine, Will Eisner, and Jack Kirby poured love into each panel they drew. Thinking less of the few dollars per page they were paid and more about the sheer joy of putting their dreams on paper.
Alas, the realities of economic pressures, anti-comics crusader Frederic Wertham & the Comics Code eventually destroyed the glorius wildcat years of comics in the mid-50's and American pop culture has never been the same.
Most people know comic artist Steve Ditko either for his superhero work at Marvel in the '60's (Spiderman, Dr. Strange, etc.) or from his somewhat unhinged but highly entertaining Libertarian polemics (Mr. A, The Question, etc.) but for me the body of his work that most deserves renewed attention (and collecton into book form) are his non-series short stories done for Atlas, Charleton, and Warren from the 50's to the '80's.
An outstanding example of this type of story is the marvelously moody "Fly" from Eerie #7 (Jan. 1967)
, born John Roland Redd in St. Louis, Missouri, was a musician, composer, pianist, organist, and Television pioneer. He was known as "The Godfather Of Exotica". Arriving in Los Angeles, California in 1940, young John Roland Redd donned a turban and performed by the name Juan Rolando. Marrying a stunning Disney Studios artist (Beryl June DeBeeson in 1944), the two enhanced his image, eventually replacing Juan Rolando with Korla Pandit, and composing a romantic history for him as a babe born in New Delhi, India to a Brahman Priest and a French opera singer, who traveled from India via England, finally arriving in the United States. In 1948 Korla was contracted as Music Director to create mood music for radio's latest revival of Chandu The Magician. At an appearance that same year playing for a furrier's fashion show at Tom Brenaman's Restaurant in Hollywood, Korla and Beryl met Television pioneer Klaus Landsberg. Klaus loved Korla's look and offered him his own 15-minute daily Television show - which he named Korla Pandit's Adventures In Music - on the Los Angeles station, KTLA, with the stipulation that Korla would also provide musical accompaniment for another Television show that starred hand puppets. That live show, Time For Beany, was created by Bob Clampett and featured Stan Freberg and Daws Butler as the puppeteers and voices. Landsberg insisted that Korla not speak on his own Adventures In Music show, but rather just gaze dreamily into the camera and play the Hammond organ and Steinway grand piano, often simultaneously. Korla followed Klaus's directorial and contractual stipulations, and became an overnight star and one of early Television's pioneering musical artists. In the 1970's, when his Television popularity waned, Pandit supplemented his income with increased personal appearances at supperclubs, supermarket openings, car agencies, music and department stores, pizza restaurants, lectures, music seminars, private lessons, and the theater organ circuit. He died in Petaluma, California of a myocardial infarction. Two years following his death, it was sensationally revealed in an article by writer/associate editor R.J. Smith of L.A. Magazine that Korla Pandit was actually an African-American who had been born in the United States. Smith won a journalism award for his tabloid-style exposé. Korla Pandit's audio works number over two dozen albums recorded on 78 and 45 rpm records, LP Vinyl albums, and CD labels. His visual works were recorded on early music video type presentations by film pioneer Louis D. Snader of Snader Telescriptions (who eventually replaced Pandit with Liberace, which jump-started the pianist's career).
Here's a comprehinsive website about Korla and other members of his family:
(By a strange synchronistic coincidence, his wife former Disney artis Beryl DeBeeson Pandit was born in Bremerton, WA, the same city, where I sit typing these words!)
It remains, then, that I POSTULALE so much as is necessary for my purpose. And let me take as full credit for what I postulate as if I had demonstrated it, good reader, at the expense of your patience and my own. Be not so ungenerous as to let me suffer in your good opinion through my own forbearance and regard for your comfort. No; believe all that I ask of you — viz., that I could resist no longer; believe it liberally and as an act of grace, or else in mere prudence; for if not, then in the next edition of my Opium Confessions, revised and enlarged, I will make you believe and tremble; and a force d’ennuyer, by mere dint of pandiculation I will terrify all readers of mine from ever again questioning any postulate that I shall think fit to make. -de Quincey
