#Joe Coleman

[sandmandaddy69]

Joe Coleman

[arconinternet]

Some Comics by Gerard Ashworth (Comics, Gerard Ashworth, various years)

Some comics from the Australian independent cartoonist. You can read them here. Includes some issues of the Sick Puppy comics anthology, and Flayed Intentions, a guide to Australian comics of the early 90's.

[gotankgo]

«Joe Coleman's painting of Harry Houdini is part of this exhibition at Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. Opening Sat Sep 14.»

[candont]

Extremely no-budget and probably a little to impressed with itself but surprisingly effective in spots.  Scenes of attacks felt especially uncomfortable to me at least.  And there’s sequence intercutting in and out of pov footage of riding an old wooden roller coaster that I rolled my eyes at at first but is deftly done and disorienting.  The soundtrack does a lot of the heavy lifting here too featuring tracks for the likes of JG Thirwell and Diamonda Galas. 

Almost as interesting as the work itself was the internet rabbit holes it sent me down.  Inspired off of an actual murder that I surprisingly have no recollection of whatsoever despite not only its relative proximity on Long Island, the amount of news coverage it generated and that it was referenced by bands I was listening to at the time (including Big Audio Dynamite no less).  Actual details of said event seem pretty afterschool special to me: drug use, petty theft, high school drop out satanism.  Despite that or more likely because of it the story had legs and seems to pop up numerous times.

It’s also populated with all sorts of downtown NY types from the time and Survival Research Labs even has a mention in the credits.  I had always thought of them as more west coast based.  I get it is also mocking the idea of satan made me do it but Joe Coleman’s one note satan character wears out its welcome even if initially used well in the aforementioned roller coaster section.  But thanks to this I have read Coleman described as both the last serious painter of religious icons and a low rent pop surrealist; so he obviously does have range.

[jgthirlwell]

Joe Coleman's '100 seconds to midnight' show. Photos can't do justice to the mind-boggling amount of miniature detail and insane technique in this show. At Andrew Edlin Gallery in NYC.

[espantajerias]

Joe Coleman.

[mywifeleftme]

90: Joe Coleman // Infernal Machine

Infernal Machine Joe Coleman 1990, Blast First

Joe Coleman emerged in the late 1970s from the alternative comix scene established by artists like Art Spiegelman (Maus), Kim Deitch (Waldo the Cat), and Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead), but found greater notoriety as a painter and a shock artist. Here’s Spin’s Dean Kuipers on a performance (as his character Professor Mombooze-o) that resulted in one of Coleman’s numerous arrests:

“Boston, October 22, 1989. Reel after reel of ancient hardcore porno films flash onto a black screen onstage at BF/VF—the Boston Film/Video Foundation—grey and grainy, somebody else's fucking and sucking memories of indeterminate age. After 20 minutes, the hundred people in the audience are quiet and disarmed. The lights come up.

Joe Coleman instantly comes whapping through the film screen from behind, hanging upside down from a climber's harness attached to the ceiling, screaming and choking like a man condemned. This is the man everyone came to see. Green flames and acrid smoke belch from his chest as strapped-on explosives detonate under layers of shirt, ratty duck jacket and lab coat. Half a minute later, the booming and gnarling subside and Coleman's wife, Nancy, leaps out and douses him with goats’ blood to put out the fires. She cuts him down and he tears away what's left of the black screen to reveal a dead goat hanging upside down, twisting slowly. The goat is real. The odor of spattered blood and gunpowder seeps into the stunned crowd.

'Here are Mommy and Daddy!' cries Coleman, rushing to the front of the stage and pulling two live white mice from his pockets. He sits down on the edge of the stage and holds Mommy and Daddy up to his scorched beard and talks to them. Meanwhile, Nancy pulls out her Zippo and torches a cloth/plastic effigy of Coleman. The stage is consumed by fire as Joe screams at the squirming mice, 'I'll eat the cancer out of you!' and bites the head off Daddy, spewing it back into the audience. Then he snaps Mommy's head: hers he swallows.

This is Joe Coleman's stone ritualization of his mother's death. Four days earlier, she had died of cancer.

The befuddled firemen who arrive minutes later are sure that this must be the meeting of a satanic cult. As police investigators pick through the chaos of greening humans, brown smoke and bloody carcasses, the owners of BF/VF finger Joe and Nancy, then fire manager Jeri Rossi. All three are arrested and Joe is charged with—among other things—an old Massachusetts blue law charge that hasn't been used since the 1800s: Possession of an Infernal Machine."

(You can watch an excerpt of a similar performance in the 1988 pseudo-documentary Mondo New York, though I do not recommend doing so if you’re troubled by animal cruelty.)

The Infernal Machine LP is a figurative soundtrack to the Mombooze-o character, which he retired following the Boston bloodbath. Side one (“Homage to Mass Murderers”) intersperses vintage country and blues murder ballads with exploitation film clips and interviews with murderers Ed Kemper and Charles Manson. Side two (“Infernal Machine”) is a collage of clips from TV shows and ‘40s films noir, audio from Coleman’s Mondo New York performance, and early live recordings by NYC noise punks Steel Tips.

The overall effect is eerie, and there are some powerful juxtapositions. The way the clip of Kemper’s tearful description of murdering his own mother segues into Eddie Noack’s 1968 recording of “Psycho” underscores the song’s unnerving potency; tucked between relatively jaunty tunes by Bessie Smith and Tex Ritter, a long clip of character actor Don Russell’s genuinely moving performance as a kidnapped schoolteacher begging for his life from 1963’s The Sadist (based on the Charles Starkweather murders) seems to represent man’s powerlessness in a capricious universe. Side two is bookended by excerpts from the 1947 film Nightmare Alley, in which a series of disasters reduce cocksure Stan Carlisle (played by Tyrone Power) from his position as a carnival barker to the role of a despised geek who earns a meagre living by biting the heads off chickens in front of jeering crowds. The implication is that, as Mombooze-o, Coleman himself has been similarly forced into the role of a freak by the diseased contemporary world.

The LP includes a twelve-page booklet of Coleman’s paintings and, most interestingly, a picture-disc reproduction of details from its cover image, Portrait of Professor Mombooze-o. I’m not normally much interested in picture discs, but the sight of Coleman’s zombified head spinning on the table (or the dead fish bursting from his crotch on the flip) really does complete the package. It’s as a visual artist that Coleman’s chief gifts reveal themselves. His obsessively detailed paintings, which he works out over months and sometimes years using a single horsehair brush, are the most successful transference of an alt. comix sensibility to the gallery I’ve come across. If the work in R. Crumb’s classic Weirdo anthologies could feel like a mutated, devolved descendent of the feverish iconography of sixteenth century religious art, Coleman’s paintings are that mutant culture’s return to high art.

Coleman frequently conflates people like Charles Manson with Jesus Christ, saying in a ‘90s tour of his collection of oddities that he keeps a lock of Manson’s hair and a sample of Christ’s marrow. Falling back on the Blakean idea of a marriage of heaven and hell, he claims that if the pair’s DNA could be mixed in a clone it would create a perfect Messiah. However, the mingling of deviants and prophets in Coleman’s hagiographic art does not, as Coleman seems to mystically intend, elevate the former towards divinity so much as it pulls the latter earthward. Serial killers are, almost without exception, insipid creatures, powerless to explain their own behaviour with any real insight—as are for that matter, many holy men. Maniacs and religious figures are akin in the sense that each possesses intense evocative potential. A crazed killer’s actions, which seem both primal and alien, tear at the fabric of our notion of a shared reality. It is tempting to read their murders, being as superficially inexplicable as miraculous events, as signs or portents, the killers themselves as visionaries. Put another way, both religious phenomena and psychopathic behaviour create a void of ostensible meaning that humans are agitated to fill. Meaning does not arise from their actions but is imputed to them by witnesses. In Coleman, these boring, broken men who kill find a witness capable of making them a genuinely mythic force.

Portrait of Charles Manson, 1988 I find Coleman’s art as inspired and fascinating as I find his philosophy stunted and dull. In an interview with Richard Metzger on the BBC series Disinformation, Coleman says, with reference to mass murderer Richard Speck, “I don't want to kill anybody, but I want to express that pain. I want to express what he was trying to express. What if he didn't have to do that? And maybe, just maybe, art is a thing where you can do that.” Ten years previously, Coleman told an anecdote in Mondo New York about covering himself in blood and harassing random women at New York bars; when their boyfriends would intervene, he’d light the fuse on the hidden explosives attached to his chest and then calmly walk out of the bar in the confusion, enjoying the screams and smoke. Whether he’s spinning a yarn or recounting something he actually did, it’s clear he gets the same petty thrill out of terrifying strangers as the sickos (both real and fictional) excerpted on the Infernal Machine LP do. This doesn’t make him a monster, but it does clarify that when he talks about “expressing” their pain he also wants his share of their freedom to do violence. Of all the reasons it’s good for Coleman that he ended up an artist instead of a cut-rate David Berkowitz, the most telling is this: if he had, what artist of his quality would’ve wanted to take him as their subject?

90/365

[fuchinobe]

(1982, F1 Team, DM 931)

[mogkiompmovieguide]

Cinema of Trangression. p1

Where Evil Dwells

Tommy Turner, David Wojnarowicz. U.S, 1985, 28 min

Au fil de mes futurs posts je vous proposerai de découvrir ou bien de revoir les films du Cinéma de la transgression - subversif bien évidement, chaotique et dépravé, un mouvement flash essentiel aux scènes de la No-Wave et du cinéma underground new-yorkais en général.

Cinéastes transgressifs clés, dont Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Casandra Stark, Beth B, Tommy Turner, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, ainsi que d’autres collaborateurs comme Lydia Lunch, Joe Coleman et David Wojnarowicz, dans la lignée des œuvres pop-trashs d’Andy Warhol bien sûr, de Paul Morissey, Jack Smith, George & Mike Kuchar, ou encore John Waters et bien d’autres.

IIustrations, performances, sonorités rares et souvent dérangeantes, Cinema of Transgression est un mouvement chaotique et spontané, sexuel, marginal, brutal et mort-né. Rien qu’on ne puisse ignorer.

Where Evil Dwells

Initialement intitulé, Satan Teens, Where Evil Dwells est une collaboration inachevée avec Tommy Turner. En septembre 1985, Wojnarowicz et Turner ont commencé à écrire un script basé sur un reportage de 1984 sur Long Island à propos d'un adolescent adorant Satan en train de commettre un meurtre. Le script a pris trois nuits. Ricky Kasso, le chef des abuseurs de PCP, a assassiné son ami de 17 ans, Gary Lauwers à Northport, Long Island en le poignardant à plusieurs reprises et en lui arrachant les yeux. Kasso s'est vanté du meurtre, montrant des amis incrédules Lauwers décomposant le corps, tout en affirmant que Satan avait approuvé. Il a finalement été arrêté et s'est pendu en prison avant son 18e anniversaire. Wojnarowicz et Turner ont non seulement trouvé l'histoire humoristique mais aussi symbolique de la génération

Le film a été tourné à l'origine sur un appareil photo Canon 8 mm, que Turner a emprunté à Richard Kern. Bien que Turner affirme que l'audio et les images ont été perdus dans un incendie, Fales Library and Special Collections possède deux bobines de film Super 8 mm directement de la caméra d'origine. Le film peut être visionné avec des fragments audio originaux, y compris des voix-off parlées à travers une poupée Howdy Doody et la chanson Where Evil Dwells de Wiseblood.

Jim Thirlwell, à l'époque un leader du groupe Wiseblood et connu comme le leader du groupe de metal industriel Foetus, a offert sa chanson à Ricky Kasso pour l’utiliser dans le film, sous réserve que le titre de la chanson soit également le titre du film, Where Evil Dwells.

************************************************************************

CINEMA OF TRANSGRESSION

Over the course of my future posts, I will suggest that you discover or review the films of the Cinema of Transgression - "Cinema Of Transgression", subversive, chaotic and depraved, essential to the scenes of the No-Wave movement of the 80s and underground cinema. New Yorker.

Key transgressive filmmakers, including Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Casandra Stark, Beth B, Tommy Turner, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, and others like Lydia Lunch, Joe Coleman and David Wojnarowicz, along the lines of pop-trash 'Andy Warhol of course, by Paul Morissey, Jack Smith, George & Mike Kuchar, or John Waters and many others.

IIustrations, performances, rare and often sounds disturbing, Cinema of Transgression is a chaotic and spontaneous, sexual, marginal, brutal and stillborn movement. Nothing you can't ignore.

Beware all the same it will shake! Keep the fragile ones away.

These are not films to summarize. But to watch

Here are the first two for today. (Second one follows in another post)

Originally titled, Satan Teens, Where Evil Dwells is an unfinished collaboration with Tommy Turner. In September 1985, Wojnarowicz and Turner began writing a script based on a 1984 report on Long Island about a teenage boy worshiping Satan committing murder. The script took three nights. Ricky Kasso, the chief abuser of PCP, murdered his 17-year-old friend Gary Lauwers in Northport, Long Island by stabbing him repeatedly and tearing out his eyes. Kasso bragged about the murder, showing Lauwers incredulous friends breaking down the body, while claiming that Satan had approved. He was eventually arrested and hanged himself in prison before his 18th birthday. Wojnarowicz and Turner not only found the humorous but also symbolic story of the generation

The film was originally filmed on an 8mm Canon camera, which Turner borrowed from Richard Kern. Although Turner claims that the audio and images were lost in a fire, Fales Library and Special Collections has two reels of Super 8mm film directly from the original camera. The film can be viewed with original audio fragments, including voiceovers spoken through a Howdy Doody doll and Wiseblood's song Where Evil Dwells.

Jim Thirlwell, at the time a leader of the group Wiseblood and known as the leader of the industrial metal group Fetus, offered his song to Ricky Kasso for use in the film, provided that the title of the song is also the film title, Where Evil Dwells.

Le film ICI

[sandmandaddy69]

Joe Coleman

[churchofsatannews]

Joe Coleman presents 2 special events in Coney Island. One Day Only—Saturday, March 30th!

Joe will be presenting 2 very special events as part of Coney Island USA’s “Congress of Curious Peoples” Weekend. 1208 Surf Ave. Brooklyn, NY 11224 At 4pm: Joe Coleman Presents: True Crime and Wax Museums In Coney Island An interview about the connections between true crime and wax museums in Coney Island on film in discussion with filmmaker Heather Buckley $20 Click here for tickets and…

[gotankgo]

«Following the recent publication of A Doorway to Joe, a comprehensive 450-page monograph of his work through Fantagraphics, Joe Coleman will make three rare public appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas in July.

On Wednesday, July 17th at 7 PM, Joe will appear at Avantpop Bookstore in Las Vegas, Sin City’s premier emporium for counterculture literature, and will discuss his work with Avantpop proprietor Shwa Leytart, followed by a book signing.

This will be followed by two ‘In Conversation’ and book signing events in Los Angeles. On Sunday, July 21st, 6-8pm, with author and journalist Chris Campion, at the Philosophical Research Society, in Los Feliz.

And on Wednesday, July 24th, 6-8pm, in conversation with gallerist Jeffrey Deitch, at the Artbooks @ Hauser & Wirth bookstore, in downtown LA. »

[musicmags]

[c-40]

A-T-2 441 Soul Selection

Keni Burke - Risin' To The Top UK 80s soul anthem co-written by Norma Jean Wright who was an original member of Chic. The other writers were soul/disco legend Allan Felder, Keni Burke and Dean Grant from the Invisible Man's Band. The Rick James written/produced All Night Long for his female group Mary Jane Girls released in 1983 has Risin' To The Top vibes

Joe Coleman - Get It Off The Ground Joe Coleman was in The Persuaders. Get It Off The Ground was only released in Canada, Italy, and Germany

Leroy Hutson - Nice And Easy Donny Hathaway's roommate and Curtis Mayfield's replacement in The Impressions, as well as writer extraordinaire. Leroy Hutson also wrote and produced The Next Movement - Let’s Work It Out for Prelude in 1982 A-T-2 407 with Nicholas Caldwell of The Whispers. Nice And Easy was covered Ruddy Thomas in 1982, this original is on Leroy Hutson's Paradise album. I'm fond of the title track

Maurice Starr - You And Me Michael Jonzun's brother, I know Maurice Starr as the producer of New Edition and New Kids On The Block. I even think he was on the New Kids cartoon

[bairdthereader]

The women at this dinner are SO. DONE.

Tori, who has anticipated the dynamics at this dinner all along and has pegged David immediately as the slimeball he is, is clearly wondering how she got sat between these two massive male egos. She's armed and ready for her confrontations with David (perhaps even looking forward to them just a tiny bit?) when things take a turn for the worse. Protective older sister mode activated.

I debated adding Jane here, but she's reacting to the posturing and conflict between the men just as much as Tori or Sarah, so she deserves to be included. She spends the meal deflecting, changing topics, trying to keep the conversation in safe waters. She silently but visibly disagrees when Charlie downplays his rugby abilities (thank you, someone, for acknowledging he's not actually that bad!). But when Nick finally confronts David, her face shows dread. Anyone who's read Alice's cannon knows Jane has a complicated family history riddled with conflict, and her instinctive fear shows clearly in this moment before she realizes that Nick is going to handle this problem gracefully rather than violently.

And Sarah. Having seen how lovingly she navigates life with Nick and how sensitively she helps him with his problems, we can only imagine that she has to have been pushed to the absolute edge by her time with Stephane to react the way she does here. I'm not even getting into the second half of the argument after Nick leaves the table--that's a whole other post--but Sarah is completely comfortable placing the blame squarely where it belongs, even in front of company. Sarah Nelson, putting men in their place left and right.

Leading ladies, indeed.