New Giclee Print Preorder: Mark Of The Beast

See the full-size image here.

NOW AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER: “Mark Of The Beast” Giclee print. 20″x 24″ Edition of 50, signed & numbered. $120.

Email me (coop666 at earthlink d0t net) or leave a comment with your email if you are interested. Prints will ship after August 22.

Billiken, 1600 Washington Blvd.

I’ve been obsessed with this little guy ever since I used to live in a nearby building. Today, I remembered that I was about to drive past on the way back from getting some paint, so I whipped out the Leica and grabbed a few shots at the stoplight.

Hard to believe he’s survived all this time, but his inacessibility (he’s about 12 feet off the sidewalk) might have something to do with it. Notice also that when the building was earthquake retrofitted, they made a nice u-shaped brace to go around his little alcove, instead of just destroying it in the name of expediency.

L.A. is a place where you can find magic and oddness, but you have to be patient and wait for it to come out of hiding, into the light. You always get rewarded with stuff like this.

Oh, and what’s a billiken? Glad you asked.

Fink Ephemera: Ed “Big Daddy” Roth Water Slide Decals

I scanned a huge chunk of my Ed “Big Daddy” Roth collection, and uploaded the whole sweet mess to my Flickr account.

I know that some of these images are controversial or downright offensive in these more PC times, (just like i’m offended by hipsters wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, but that’s another story) but I ask you to consider the era and intended audience. Roth’s entire output was meant to be obnoxious and offensive to the "squares," as his customer base consisted of surly teens, hot rod hooligans and outlaw bikers, all groups who loved to provoke the ire of the buttondown crowd by using symbols and images that were in bad taste. (see also the “sick humor” fad of the sixties.) Likewise, Roth’s Vietnam output was intended solefy for the poor bastards drafted and shipped overseas to fight in a war that they had no interest in fighting. To the extent that these images feature racist asian imagery, well, yeah, of course they do. I think the guys sweating in the jungle in ‘Nam were less than concerned about offending the sensibilities of the people they were killing and being killed by. If it’s any consolation, I know for a fact that today’s armed forces don’t allow imagery like this to be used anymore.

Here’s a few choice gems:

Full set here.

P.S. All this stuff is © copyright Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, so don’t be a fink!

Don Mossi: The Premature Ejaculator’s Best Friend

Paintblogging: Killing The Devil

The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it. – Paul-Muad’Dib Atreides

In 1993, my friend Tom Hazelmyer contacted me about providing an image for a line of custom Zippo lighters. The company was called Smoke King, (later re-named Flamerite) and I was to be one of the first five artists in the line. In about 30 minutes, I whipped up an image of a grinning devil smoking a big cigar. I was in such a hurry to get that art to Tom, (this was before I could simply email the art as an attachment) I just stuck the original in a manila folder and sent it off to Minneapolis.

I was just beginning to dip my toe into merchandising at this point, and I quickly saw that the smoking devil I had drawn for Tom was a potent image. I began to print the image on stickers and t-shirts. They sold like those proverbial hotcakes that everybody mentions at times such as this. Eventually, the devil image ended up on just about any item that I could print it on. The Smoking Devil (as we named him) made his way into the world.

He quickly gained a life of his own. Lots of cars, trucks and skateboards, tool boxes, laptops, etc. ended up plastered with a Smoking Devil sticker. I started to meet people with the Smoking Devil tattooed on their body. It was at this point that I started to realize that I had, pretty much by accident, created something powerful. However those lines and forms came together, it had a power all its own. It was becoming something more than a piece of art or merchandise. It had become a symbol of something, a little talisman that people used to signify something about themselves and their lives. Pretty heady stuff for a dumb hillbilly such as myself.

As is often the case when an image reaches this level of recognition, it started to become bigger, something that was beyond my control. Like Frankenstein’s Monster, the creation often thwarted the will of its creator. The Smoking Devil started to pop up in places where I never intended it to be. It was knocked off as merchandise, used without permission to adorn bars and businesses. I began to understand how Nagel must have felt the first time he saw one of those hideous paintings in the window of a nail salon. (That’s probably what killed him.)

I tried to accept this philosophically. I understood how all this worked, how our culture takes popular art and fucks with it, remixes it, makes the mass-produced personal. After all, my favorite artists and musicians do it every day, right? But it still gnawed at me sometimes.

Around 2003, I decided to return to painting. I spent a long time thinking about why I wanted to paint again, and what I could do that would be interesting and challenging to me, what direction would force me to grow and change as an artist. I began to formulate a plan of attack, a direction that incorporated my influences with my developing ideas about what art should do and not do.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Pop Art, and that became a major influence on what I was going to try to do, I began to think about the stuff I loved, the way Pop Art took the low culture we took for granted, recontextualized it, and presented it as art, worthy of attention and affection. The conventional wisdom is that this was purely an exercise in irony, a criticism of the base nature of consumer culture, but I have always read more into it than that. To me, artists like Warhol or Rosenquist were ambivalent about the culture they mined, and saw it as both beautiful and crass, often simultaneously. As someone attempting to straddle both sides of the fence, I could dig that.

So, when I started to paint, I realized what I needed to do is use this method on my own work, on the images that I had created and released into the wild years ago. They had (mostly) thrived in this uncontrolled environment, changing and evolving outside of my control. Now it was time to drag them back into the lab, dissect ‘em and see what wild mutations had affected their DNA.

I spent the next six months painting Parts with Appeal, a 78-foot-long multipanel painting that was my first try at using the theories that I had been messing around with. An obvious tribute to Rosenquist’s F-111, it was my own meditation on the role of innovation in the history of drag racing from 1955 to 1970, as well as an attempt to engage in the kind of large-scale painting I had always wanted to try. Best of all, somebody actually bought it.

So the experiment continued. I started to drag in more and more elements and techniques into the format I had created for myself, figuring it out as I went along. I had another show in 2006, Brand Recognition, that addressed my ambivalence about my own fascination with corporate logos and the art of graphic design in service of commerce.

Since then I’ve continued to paint, documenting it all here on the blog. Painting has become a very satisfying pursuit, the process becoming an often-exhausting ritual that consistently fulfills me like nothing else.

For this most recent painting, I decided to pull together all the elements that I have been working on, and put them to the task of assaulting the thing I have become most known for, the Smoking Devil.

As I said before, he had become something bigger than me, and had developed a life of his own. I wanted to attack the Smoking Devil, break him apart, smash him into atoms, and once again assert my will over the monster I had created.

I started as I always do, developing the composition by collaging elements in Photoshop, combining and changing images until a direction presents itself. Then the image is broken down into elements that can be transferred to the canvas, step by step. I started by painting a straightahead version of the Smoking Devil, much as he appears on all those stickers and lunchboxes.

I almost chickened out at this point. I realized that I could just clean up the linework, present the painting as it was, and it would be sold quickly. However, I did not succumb to temptation (see how that works?) and continued with my plan.

Next, I took the line art, reversed and enlarged it, painting it on top of everything else. That was the second devil. I had already decided by this point that there would be thirteen devils incorporated into the painting by the time I was finished.

Next, I took the painting down from the wall, laid it on the floor, and using a hand-cut stencil, painted nine more devils in an alternating grid. I used cans of metallic gold and orange metalflake paint that I had purchased at Pep Boys.
Again, I was tempted at this point to stop. The gold and orange looked so good against the purple and orange, the metallic gleam contrasting with the shiny acrylic paint.

I continued, painting the black line of the original devil on top of the newer elements, to reassert the authority of the original image.

Then, I used Photoshop to create a halftone image of the original line art, and painted this in magenta on top of everything else, then repainted the black line work again, to clean everything up. This was the twelfth devil. Then, I painted the thirteen and final devil, and I was finished.

So, did I accomplish the task I set out fo myself? I’m not really sure. I’m happy with the painting, but I’ll probably never successfully take back the image for my own. I won the battle, but I think I will eventually lose the war.

Oh, and the thirteenth devil? That’s secret. you’ll have to wait for the show to discover that one for yourself.

Full set of in progress photos here.

Greatest Hits: PLOMB Crazy

I apologize in advance to those of you bored with the toolblogging, but if I can’t use the internets to obsess over some topic to the point of mania, I would be forced to do something productive with my time.

Another great weekend for the garage sales. Among the bounty, this lovely old tool cabinet. I called it from the car, much to the consternation of Mr. Jalopy. I didn’t realize until later that it was in fact a Snap-On brand cabinet, which caused a bit of friction, as that is strictly Hooptyrides territory. Jalopy and I subsequently came to a gentlemen’s agreement regarding future garage sale tool finds. He gets first dibs on Snap-On, and I get first dibs on Plomb. Everything else is up for grabs! Otherwise, we would be little better than savages!

Having quelled a potential mutiny aboard HMS Hoopty, I returned to the studio with my prize. It looks quite presentable after a little elbow grease and careful application of a wire wheel, having lost much grime and rust, but not a bit of wabisabi. The perfect place for my Plomb tool collection.

I’ve been going Plomb crazy since I got those two ratchets a while ago, and my collection of Plomb tools has grown exponentially. (Ebay is a dangerous place for a man with a flush bank account and poor impulse control.)

Every day it seems that the mailman delivers a box containing a dirty wrench or a clanking collection of old sockets. I’ve been spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave. Fortunately, very few STDs can be transmitted via online auction.

Why have I gone overboard with these old tools? Well, for a perversely curious person with advanced packrat syndrome, such as myself, there is no greater joy than discovering some new thing to collect. Serial numbers and model names to remember, history to uncover, objects to covet, these are truly the things that make life worth living. Allow me to share a little bit of what I have uncovered so far.

Plomb Tools started here in Los Angeles shortly after the turn of the century, making tools under the Plomb brand until 1948, when they lost the brand in a trademark dispute, and changed their name to PROTO (short for PROfessional TOols.) Just like hot rodding, they were born in L.A. and achieved an aesthetic high point just before 1950.

The tools themselves are beautifully designed examples of a certain school of industrial design that flourished between World Wars 1 and 2. Not quite Art Deco or Streamline Moderne, but comfortable within those categories, it perfectly represents a certain era in time.

Just look at that logo. “Streamlined Tools” indeed. These are two NOS boxes of 9/32″ drive 1/4 WF-11 sockets. I should have included something for scale, as these suckers are tiny. You could swallow that whole box like a piece of sushi, one gulp.

All the Plomb tools with a WF serial number were part of the “Wright Field” line of tools that Plomb manufactured for the U.S. Armed Forces. Any tools that might have been used to work on a Jeep, Sherman tank, or P-38 are tools worth having, as far as I’m concerned. You could almost say these are Nazi-killing tools, and who would have a problem with killing Nazis? Not me, brother.

Two more examples from the WF series, a 9/32″ drive hinge breaker bar, WF-7, and a 9/32″ drive ratchet, WF-8.

More WF stuff, an incomplete 3/8″ drive socket set. I’m already working on getting the missing sockets, don’t you worry. I could just imagine finding this under the seat of an old hopped-up ’40 Ford quietly rusting in a barn somewhere.

Three 3/8″ drive sockets. The bottom two are the same serial number, 5249, but different styles, and the top is a WF-21. I know Mr. Jalopy will crab that I haven’t properly cleaned these tools yet, but I was caught up in the moment.

Assorted 9/32″ drive sockets, and two HUGE 3/4″ drive sockets, a 1 7/8″ and a 2″ You could serve cocktails in these things.

Of all the stuff I’ve gotten so far, this is my favorite. A 1 1/4″ crowfoot wrench, 3/8″ drive. It’s large, about two inches across, about 3/8″ thick, and satisfyingly heavy and chunky. I’ve been carrying it around in my pocket like a rabbit’s foot ever since I got it in the mail.

Just look at the ratchet hole. A raised lip, gently rounded on the outside, with a countersunk bevelled edge on the inside. The complex shape of the inside of the wrench. These touches add absolutely nothing to the functionality of the tool, and are only there to bring a little beauty to an otherwise utilitarian object.

How can something so simple and seemingly prosaic be so beautiful? If I saw this crowfoot wrench reproduced at a massive scale, inside MOMA resting on a pedestal, it would seem perfectly at home.

Update: Hmmm… one of my readers, Bret Haller, emailed to say that he believes the tool box is in fact a Craftsman, and I tend to think he knows what he’s talking about, since he nailed the year of production, 1975, which was stamped on the inside. I guess Mr. Jalopy isn’t quite the Snap-On expert he claims to be…

Greatest Hits: You Stay Classy, America

Just the other day, I was having yet another conversation with Mr. Jalopy about the halcyon days of our shared youth. Sure, the seventies always gets a bad rap; in many respects, deservedly so. Just forget about the gas lines, rampant inflation, and polyester, and try to remember the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, fiberglass-bodied Chevy Vega funny cars and Evel Knievel.

Our conversation began (as it almost always does) with a discussion of the glory days of drag racing, reflections brought on by the purchase of the book mentioned in the previous post. Truly, giants stomped on MOON aluminum accelerator pedals in those heady days, ten-foot-tall, mutton-chopped gladiators whose driving skills were matched (indeed, sometimes exceeded) by their reckless, uninformed-by-focus-groups-style and showmanship. “Big Daddy” Don Garlits, Connie “The Bounty Hunter” Kalitta, Shirley “Cha Cha” Muldowney, “Jungle Jim” Liberman, (and his bodacious muse, Jungle Pam!)

These were our bellbottomed gods and goddesses, coming down from the shag-carpeted comfort of Mt. Olympus in their metalflaked chariots to feud and fight for the entertainment of we mere mortals. The giants all went away eventually, and real drag racing went away with them, with the last example of the extinct species left in the person of motormouth pitchmeister John Force, bless him.

Drag racing was not the only place these sideburn-sporting titans battled with the fickle forces of Horsepower. From Formula One and Indy, all the way down to small-time demolition derbys, it seemed like our American birthright was finally being realized in a select group of crazy bastards willing to strap themselves in behind (or in front of) a Very Bad Idea and throw themselves at danger like flinging a water balloon at an electric fan, their only reward a shiny trophy, a can of Old Style, and the admiration of some sweet young thing with Farrah hair and a tube top.

Of course, if the subject under discussion is that of heroes dedicated to commiting acts of complete insanity involving internal combustion, lack of concern for life and limb, and white-toothed, white trash showmanship, then you need go no further than the apotheosis of the breed, Evel Knievel. He is the end point of the evolutionary line, the Tyrannosaurus Wrecks that tests the sustainable limits of the ecosystem. After he is gone, only small furry rodents remain.

It would be hard for someone born after 1980 to understand the hallowed place Evel held in the imagination of a kid back then. Forget fakes like Superman and Spider-Man, we had a real-life superhero to worship, a hero who dressed like a star-spangled Elvis, rode a Harley, smashed his bones like brittle Ortega taco shells, and who, in his ultimate act of insanity (and some would say of hubris) climbed into a red-white-and-blue rocket and shot himself over the gaping chasm of the Snake River Canyon. Like Icarus, he didn’t complete his flight; missing the far side of the canyon, he plummeted to the canyon floor, narrowly avoiding drowning in the river below. I can still remember witnessing this event on ABC’s Wide World Of Sports. just as I can instantly recall his painful slo-motion Caesar’s Palace crash, the Zapruder film of my generation. As a kid, I had all the Evel Knievel toys, of course, and later tried to jump drainage ditches on my dirt bike in imitation of Knievel, earning a broken collarbone for my troubles.

Yes, Evel was perhaps the ultimate example of the madness of the seventies, and held an honored place in the kid pantheon alongside Fonzie, Catfish Hunter, and those fat, minibike-riding twins from the Guinness Book of World Records (the book we couldn’t wait to order every year from the Scholastic catalog.)

This wasn’t meant to be merely another empty exercise in nostalgia-humping. As fun as it might be just to blather on about all this stuff, the more important question is this: what happened? Why did these giants vanish from the earth, only to be replaced by bilious actors, slutty anorexic debu-tarts, and insolvent vulgarians with orangutan hair-hats? When will the giants return?

Greatest Hits: Marcel Proust Never Had A Shogun Warrior

Over at The Sneeze, Mr. Sneeze has a very funny post about the toy he always wanted, and never received, an Inch Worm. In the comments, loads of nostalgia-addled thirty-somethings (sadly, much like Yours Truly) trade hilarious war stories about the toys that got away, or got broken. Reading these comments filled me with a sweet, guacamole-like wave of nausea, as I remembered my own moment of supreme childhood toy horror, involving my beloved Shogun Warrior Gaiking.

Shogun Warriors were Mattel’s first attempt to get American kids to make their parents buy Japanese toys. This would seem to be an inspired idea, since at this time, the seventies, Japanese toy technology was at its most crazed zenith, and American toys, well, just sucked. The Shogun Warriors line consisted of repackaged versions of characters from popular anime shows in Japan. (The fact that American kids had seen none of these Japanese programs at that time apparently escaped the attention of the marketing department at Mattel, but no matter.)

The big guns in the Shogun Warrior lineup were these big, 24-inch missile-shooting badass robots. Known as Jumbo Machinders in Japan, these stiff-limbed, crudely-rendered figures were made from the same greasy plastic as bleach bottles. What they lacked in posability, they made up with firepower. Each of the Shoguns (Raydeen, Mazinga, Dragun and Gaiking) shot various and sundry missiles, projectiles and body parts in a flurry of cornea-damaging action.

Of the four, clearly the most desirable was Gaiking. The American Gaiking, itself a bare-bones version of the far more elaborate Japanese jumbo, featured a helmet with huge horns, a skull-shaped chest with missiles that shot from the eye sockets, and most importantly for our little story, a jointed arm that bent at the elbow, with a fist that could be launched with deadly accuracy towards both family pet and little sister alike. I think you can see why no self-respecting nine-year-old could possibly exist without such a wonderful toy.

The big event in my home every fall was the arrival of the Sears Christmas catalog. I can still remember the smell of the ink and wood pulp of those catalogs as I type this post. I mooned over that damned Gaiking all that fall and winter, and bless my indulgent parents, they actually got one for me. And I promptly broke the fucker.

The details of the incident have been lost in the mists of time, or perhaps I just willed myself to forget. As I alluded to earlier, the weak point of the Gaiking design was in the fist-firing arm that bent at the elbow. The connection point was a flimsy hollow peg that locked into a ball-joint on the forearm. This is where things went awry. The connecting peg snapped off cleanly at the base. I was DEVASTATED. I cannot express to you the horror I felt as the nightmare unfolded. My father tried his best to repair the broken arm, using a wooden dowel and gallons of glue, but sadly, it just wasn’t meant to be. Eventually he manged to cobble it back together into a semblance of normal function, but it was ruined for me, and Gaiking ended up stuck in the back of a dark closet.

Of course, as is seemingly the case with all members of my generation, when I entered my twenties, I had an overwhelming atavistic compulsion to buy back my childhood at a premium. Getting a replacement Gaiking wasn’t enough, however, and I just kept collecting until I had the entire Shogun Warriors line, and finally, a huge collection of Japanese toys that have completely overwhelmed my home and studio. Why? I don’t know.

Greatest Hits: From Junk To Restored to Street Rod

Brian Talbert’s 1929 Model A Sedan was a big inspiration when I was building mine. This is the first version of the car, built in the mid-sixties with a bitchin’ two-tone metallic blue paint job and Radir wheels. The car was cosmetically stock, with engine and drivetrain upgrades, and was a classic example of the style of cars being built by the Early Times car club, of which Talbert was a member. (Coincidentally, Richard Graves, another original Early Times member, did some work on my sedan, running brake lines and tweaking the front end suspension.)

Thanks to Jim Aust’s efforts to chronicle the Early Times club history, I was able to get a few more pictures of the Talbert sedan. The one above is from one of the first Street Rod Nationals. It looks like the ’29 is wearing Buick wire wheels by now.

I’m not sure who the gorilla is, but that looks like Jim “Jake” Jacobs’ Model A pickup in the foreground.

Sometime afterwards, Talbert did quite a bit more work on the sedan. Not only new paint and Buick wires, but a then-cutting-edge Jaguar rear end in the back.

I love this photo. I tried to replicate the look on my sedan. The original glass fuel filter, white-painted manifolds, and amber fog lights are the shit.

Greatest Hits: Such A Supple Wrist

Since Blogger screwed up my original blog, making it impossible to search, I thought I’d re-post some old stuff over here. First one:

Mister Jalopy just found a flippin’ sweet near-mint Captain Fantastic pinball machine, a castoff that a neighbor had set out at the curb for the trashman. (We should all be so lucky!) Captain Fantastic is one of my favorite Bally electro-mechanical pinballs from the seventies, and a sister machine to my Wizard pinball, and both are, along with Fireball, in my all-time top three. All three machines feature artwork by the king of pinball artists, Dave Christensen.

Few outside the world of serious pinball maniacs would recognize Christensen’s name, but I consider him a major influence on my own work, despite the fact that I only learned his name less than a decade ago. I grew up in the seventies, and I can distinctly remember playing machines designed by Christensen, and being mesmerized by the blinking tableaus of lowbrow decadence, images filled with lots of in-jokes, eyeball kicks and a heaping helping of big-boobed sexy girls that tantalized my adolescent libido.

There’s not a lot of background info on Christensen on the internet, beyond some basic biographical stuff. (I did just order this book, which I found whilst Googling for this post!) Most of the artists of that era worked for the silkscreen company in Chicago (Ad Posters) that screened backglass and playfields for all the pinball companies, but Christensen started at Bally, writing operators manuals, before becoming an artist for the company. He ended up co-designing and providing artwork for some of the best pinballs of the era.

Like the rock star that he is, Christensen is best remembered for one of his earliest hits, Fireball. From 1972, Fireball is generally considered one of the best electro-mechanical pinballs ever, with features like zipper flippers, multiball play (a real novelty at the time) and a spinning rubber disc “Grabber”. While the linework isn’t as accomplished as his later work, already his trademarks are evident, with sophisticated hand lettering on the playfield, a brilliant color scheme, and a detailed belt buckle worn by the blazing demon on the backglass. Bally tried to make lightning strike twice with Fireball II, but it was an early victim of the pinball malaise of the post-Pac Man era, and sadly not as good as the original.

Fireball was a huge success at the time, and Christensen became Bally’s star artist. All through the seventies, Christensen created a series of beautiful machines, all the while developing his idiosyncratic style with pinballs like Monte Carlo, Bon Voyage, Ro Go, Twin Win, Air Aces, Old Chicago, and on and on. Christensen’s deft handling of celebrity likenesses meant he also produced art for several cool licensed machines as well, beginning with Capt. Fantasic & Wizard, both created to as a tie-in with the film version of The Who’s Tommy. Christensen did machines for Dolly Parton, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Bobby Orr’s Power Play, a machine I remember fondly, having shoved endless quarters into it at a local bowling alley, when I was a mere pup.

Another favorite of mine as a kid, that I hope to eventually add to my collection, is Voltan Escapes Cosmic Doom. From 1978, it’s a full-blown work of mature genius from Christensen, here at the height of his powers. The backglass is unbelieveably baroque, evoking old Republic serials, classic sci-fi pulp illustrations, and the airbrushed faux-Frazetta van murals of the era, combined with a wink of camp, and oozing sleazy sex appeal. Just Fucking Awesome. Despite my prejudice against digital scoring, I would buy this one in a heartbeat.

One last thing, a few years ago, a private collector commissioned Christensen to do a backglass for an X-Rated Pinball, called Big Dick. The NSFW image can be seen here. I’m happy to report that I have this backglass in my collection!

Update. I recently participated in an art show dedicated to the art of Mr. Christensen, and loaned out my Wizard and Fireball pinballs for the show.