Category: Kids These Days

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Sunny Prestatyn

By Philip Larkin

Come To Sunny Prestatyn
Laughed the girl on the poster,
Kneeling up on the sand
In tautened white satin.
Behind her, a hunk of coast, a
Hotel with palms
Seemed to expand from her thighs and
Spread breast-lifting arms.

She was slapped up one day in March.
A couple of weeks, and her face
Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed;
Huge tits and a fissured crotch
Were scored well in, and the space
Between her legs held scrawls
That set her fairly astride
A tuberous cock and balls

Autographed Titch Thomas, while
Someone had used a knife
Or something to stab right through
The moustached lips of her smile.
She was too good for this life.
Very soon, a great transverse tear
Left only a hand and some blue.
Now Fight Cancer is there.

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Steve!

Youngsters watching this today won’t realize how funny and irreverent this was for 1978. You just didn’t make fun of self-important movie stars like this back then.

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The Soul Of Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Mistakes

Google Books has archived every issue of SPIN, which is what my original post was going to be about. Then I started digging around in an old issue from the summer after I graduated college (August, 1991), and rediscovered an excellent Paul Westerberg interview. Apparently, rock has always been on the verge of imminent collapse, to quote the man himself. We bastards were just the other day discussing rock’s back seat in pop culture, and this edition of SPIN is 27 years old! Anyhoo, I was amused by this …

SPIN: Is rock dead?

Westerberg: Well, is jazz dead? That’s the way I look at it. Rock ‘n’ roll is underground once again, but it won’t die, just like jazz won’t. It’s not the popular music of the day, but it’s not dead.

A little later, the interviewer asks if Elvis was king, which leads to this exchange …

SPIN: What about somebody like Alex Chilton? You made him a rock hero in your song.

Westerberg: No. I don’t know what Alex represents. Now I listen to his new Rhino compilation, and it’s like, I can’t make up my mind whether Alex is some brilliant chameleon or just a guy who fucking lost it real quick. I almost regret writing that song. It’s sad, because kids will come and ask me about Alex and you’ll see this look in their eyes, and they think he’s some guy in leather pants that jumps from amplifiers or something. It’s like, if they only knew.

Interview here, every issue of SPIN here.

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Shit

Stephen Hillenburg, creator of Spongebob Squarepants.

ALS got him. 57 is way too young.

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Help! Magazine

Holy shit, more pop culture dots connected. Before I forget, a few full issues of Help! are available online.

Help! is an American satire magazine that was published by James Warren from 1960 to 1965. It was Harvey Kurtzman’s longest-running magazine project after leaving Mad and EC Publications, and during its five years of operation it was chronically underfunded, yet innovative.

In starting Help!, Kurtzman brought along several artists from his Mad collaborations, including Will Elder, Jack Davis, John Severin and Al Jaffee.

Kurtzman’s assistants included Charles Alverson, Terry Gilliam and Gloria Steinem; the latter was helpful in gathering the celebrity comedians who appeared on the covers and the fumetti strips the magazine ran along with more traditional comics and text pieces. Among the then little-known performers in the fumetti were John Cleese, Woody Allen and Milt Kamen; better-known performers such as Orson Bean were also known to participate. Some of the fumetti were scripted by Bernard Shir-Cliff.

At Help!, Gilliam met Cleese for the first time, resulting in their collaboration years later on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Cleese appeared in a Gilliam fumetto written by David Crossley, “Christopher’s Punctured Romance”. The tale concerns a man who is shocked to learn that his daughter’s new “Barbee” doll has “titties”; however, he falls in love with the doll and has an affair. Gilliam appeared on two covers of Help! and along with the rest of the creative team, appeared in crowd scenes in several fumetti.

The magazine introduced young talents who went on to influential careers in underground comix as well as the mainstream: among them Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton and Jay Lynch. Algis Budrys and other science fiction writers were regular contributors of prose and scripts to the magazine.

A total of 26 issues were printed before the magazine folded in 1965. Volume one (Aug. 1960–Sept. 1961) had 12 issues, and 14 issues comprised the second volume (Feb. 1962–Sept. 1965).

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Ant Head

David Lynch’s new short film music video.

Featuring ‘Frank 2000’ and ‘Woodcutters From Fiery Ships’ from the lost album by Thought Gang; a collaboration between David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti.