Isegoria

Legendary pulp artist Frank Frazetta has passed away:

In recent years, as reported here and elsewhere, the Frazetta estate had been much in dispute among his four children, following the death of his wife, Ellie. After some family squabbles that could only be called stressful and embarrassing, peace was made, however, and the sale of some of Frazetta’s most iconic paintings had begun, notably with the $1,000,000 sale of one of his paintings to a buyer believed to be Metallica’s Kirk Hammett. Another Frazetta painting was recently put up for auction, although it was not owned by the family.

Below is one of the last known public photos of Frazetta, shown in February at a family barbeque in Florida with his daughters and grand­daughter.

Episodes of The Twilight Zone compress down remarkably well to two minutes.

(Hat tip to Chris Moody.)

Please watch the first minute or so of Werner Herzog on the obscenity of the jungle to familiarize yourself with the art-house film-maker’s world view and way of speaking:

Now, fully familiarized, enjoy this reading of a classic:

Steve Thomas has produced a number of arcade game propaganda posters.

In 1986, right before her Chicago talk show went national and made television history, Oprah Winfrey spoke with David Mills — and it’s abundantly clear how she got where she was, and how she kept on going:

Mills: I hope people don’t take it wrong when you say that race is not an issue to you. “Is she forgettin’ about us now that she’s making —”

Winfrey: Oh, that’s such a — You know, I have people call me up and say there are not enough black people on the show. You don’t do this for blacks, you don’t do that. You’re not black enough.

And I say: I look in the mirror every morning, just as my ancestors did, who came and worked in the factories for pennies-per-day labor, and they graced their mirrors every morning, and no one had to tell them they were black.

When I was 14 years old, I heard Rev. Jesse Jackson say that excellence is the best deterrent to racism. And it was a truth that resonated with me. And it is what I have always believed. Even before I heard him speak, it’s what I believed. It had not been articulated for me.

And the doctrine that I have followed has been: If you are the best at what you do — there’s nobody else better in the class than you are — then the teacher better have a damn good excuse for putting you back. I mean, there are no excuses when you’re the best. So my goal is always to be the absolute best, period.

If something goes wrong in my life, I don’t say it’s because I’m a woman, because I’m black. I say, well, first let me check out what I did or didn’t do.

I was taken off the air as an anchorwoman in Baltimore in 1977. I was taken off the 6 o’clock news. Friends of mine said, “It happened to you because you’re black. It wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t black.” I knew — this was what I knew — that if I had been the best, if I had been ready for it, they couldn’t have done it to me. They could not have done it.

I wasn’t ready. I was still very immature… and wasn’t seasoned enough for that market. And now I’m seasoned. Now I’m ready. Had nothing to do with race. So when I say it’s not an issue, I mean that I have never used my race to defend my ability or inability to do or not do something.

I certainly recognize that racism exists, and has to be fought. People have different ways of fighting it. Mine is to be the best that I am. …

Even during the whole Black Power movement when everybody was saying “Black is beautiful, black is beautiful,” trying to convince themselves, it had never occurred to me that it wasn’t beautiful. It never occurred to me that this was something I now had to tell myself, because I always thought I was.

It never occurred to me that I was less than any other white person because in every class, in every competition, I was always the No. 1 kid.

Malcolm McLaren, the infamous promoter of the Sex Pistols — and of himself, of course — recently passed away at the age of 64, from cancer.

Steve Sailer has quite a bit to say about McLaren and his sense of humor:

I always liked best Malcolm’s own 1983 minor hit single Buffalo Gals, which pointed out explicitly what I’d been saying since about 1979: rapping sounds an awful lot like that most uncool of all musical forms: square dance calling.

McClaren took the 1840s minstrel show song Buffalo Gals, which had evolved into a square dance call, and had some some New York rappers back him up while he rapped it (this was back in the early days before the racial wall hardened, when white people, such as Blondie, Talking Heads, and the Clash, were allowed to rap):

Buffalo Gals go round the outside,
Round the outside, round the outside
And dozey-do your partners

To make sure nobody missed his point, McClaren’s Buffalo Gals video features footage of square dancing. (Here’s an even better video of a Buffalo Gals square dance on the Lawrence Welk Show.)

I assumed that the world would now get the joke: rap was descended from minstrel shows and the dorkiest of all white forms of music: square dance calling. What more could shame black people, after four years of hip-hop, into going back to something they do very well, singing? Perhaps popular music would finally climb out of the rut of rap, the novelty music gimmick that had refused to die?

I was wrong.

And that was one of Malcolm’s better ideas.

Speaking of McLaren’s better ideas:

Around 1980, McClaren came up with the good idea of building pop music on top of tribal rhythms from Burundi, first for Adam Ant, and then he took Ant’s backing band away, including the prodigious drummer David Barbarossa, to form Bow Wow Wow. There was always speculation that Barbarossa’s album tracks had to be multilayered in the studio, but when I saw Bow Wow Wow around 1981, he was moving his hands faster than any drummer I’d seen.

But Malcolm could never have too much controversy, so he hired a 14-year-old girl to be a lead singer and promoted her as a sex kitten. At the show I attended in LA, she blew her voice out painfully on the second song, suggesting to me that 14-year-old girls shouldn’t be on rock band world tours.

Sailer, of course, always looks for a racial or ethnic angle — and tends to find one:

Anyway, when I was reading McClaren’s obituaries yesterday, being reminded of how far he’d gotten in the garment and entertainment industries on sheer chutzpah, I decided to look up more about McClaren because I thought it was striking that he could have the most stereotypically Jewish career imaginable, yet be a Scotsman named Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren. Pointing this out would be good way to shatter stereotypes!

But, then I worried that I ought to check his maternal line and his upbringing before saying this in public. To my surprise (although I shouldn’t have been surprised), when I looked up McClaren on Wikipedia yesterday, I found:

McLaren was born to Pete McLaren, a Scottish teenaged war deserter, and Emmy (née Isaacs) in the suburbs of post-World War II London. His father left when he was two and he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Rose Corre Isaacs, the formerly wealthy daughter of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish diamond dealers, in Stoke Newington. McLaren told Andrew Denton on Enough Rope, that his grandmother always said to him, “To be bad is good… to be good is simply boring”…. When he was six, McLaren’s mother married Martin Levi, a man working in London’s rag trade.