Get Well Soon Ronnie James Dio

Jim Phillips & The Santa Cruz Aesthetic

Remember those glorious days back in the 80’s when skateboards were the shape of bodyboards and not the size of lollipop sticks? Wide enough to kneel or lie on, big enough to house all kinds of killer extras like rails and tail plates? They were also sufficiently big enough to provide a decent sized canvas for the spazzed out graphic doodling of artists like Jim Phillips.

Jim was at the helm of the movement defining Santa Cruz Skateboards art department, and was pretty much responsible for all the kick-ass board and wheel graphics that you remember as a kid. The ‘Slime Balls’ splat? Check! ‘Rip Grip’ alien? Check! Bullet & Slimeballs Wheels, the Slasher monster, Independent Truck Company cross? Check! Not to mention the actual Santa Cruz logo and his signature piece, the classic ‘Screaming Hand’. He’s also been producing a fine line in Surf and Rock art for over 40 years.

Bottom line, the guy is a legend! Andreas over at the excellent fecalface.com paid a visit to Jim Phillips’ studio with a few friends in tow, to check out Jim’s work, and ended up on what amounted to a guided tour through skate history.

You can also check out Jim’s site at www.jimphillips.com to see a run through of his genre defining work. Here are some of our favourites to get you loose!

Claus Grabke Clock Series

Jason Jessee Sun Design

Malba Cross Board

Classic Rob Roskopp Face Deck

The Slimeballs Splat!!

Various Phillips Wheel Designs

Jim Phillips: The Man, The Legend.

MTV Cuts ‘Music Television’ From Iconic Logo

When MTV beamed itself into our television sets for the first time on the 1st of August 1981, it blew the music world wide open, adding an extra dimension to music and changing how we chose to accept and absorb our rockstars. It changed the game, changed the kids, changed the planet. The MTV logo has become as much as a globally recognised symbol for American capitalism through consumption as Coca-Cola and McDonalds.

Of course, MTV has changed with the game over the years. Now you’ll be lucky to see a music video on the channel unless it’s being reported on by their showbiz news report. Today Music TV is a slick and saccharine home for semi fictionalised reality tv shows, featuring the air headed children of the first MTV generation and their idols.

So the corporation has decided to stop pretending it’s even remotely interested in music anymore, and drop the words ‘Music Television’ from under the iconic logo. Considering there’s probably not a person under 40 on the planet that doesn’t recognise that MTV stepped out of that game years ago, it’s still a sad day. Yes, they still broadcast their spinoff genre specific stations like MTV Base etc.., but as a home to new popular music of all genres, one that raised a generation of music fans on a diet of popular youth explosions like Hip Hop and Grunge, that had the power to shape the youth consciousness through their playlists (for good or bad), we’ll never see it’s like again.

The MTV logo itself, whatever it represents in these hollow days, is still cause for celebration. It was the first major logo to eschew a corporate colour, so that it could change with the times, with its subject matter, daily if (and was often) necessary. You can read the story of the MTV logo by the guy who helped design it, Frank Olinsky, at his site RIGHT HERE.

So to salute what was the most significant development in modern music since the electrification of the guitar, here’s a little video produced to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of MTV to transport you back to better times.

Iggy and The Stooges ‘Raw Power: Legacy Edition’

Raw Power, Iggy and the Stooges legendary but initially unsuccessful 3^rd album has been pencilled in for a reissue this 13th of April. It’s not the first time it’s been reissued. Back in ’97, Columbia Records goaded Iggy in to digitally remixing the album, giving him the chance to redeem himself for the hash he made of the initial original mix, and to outdo David Bowie’s subsequent rescue mix, which both he and the rest of the Stooges have publicly lambasted over the years. The 97 reissue turned out to be a bit of a pointless exercise, as fans poured scorn on Iggy’s digitally distorted remix, with the Stooges themselves eating humble pie by admitting that Bowie’s mix still came out on top.

This time around they’ve stuck with Bowie’s mix, but have thrown in a bin-load of extra’s over 3 CD’s. For your dollar, you’ll get the original album, a slew of out-takes and a bootleg recording of a ’73 Atlanta club show. Not so great, but if you opt for the Deluxe Box-Set which drops 2 weeks later on the 27^th, you’ll get some nice shiny bits and pieces like reproduction 7” artwork, photo prints, the Making of Raw Power DVD and a nice book of Raw Power testimonials from Lou Reed, Joan Jett, Tom Morello and perpetual gobshite Henry Rollins.

Get over to Stooges HQ to sign up to the mailing list for any advance on the down-low.

An introduction to Charles Bukowski's ‘Bluebird’

From a ruined mask, perched on the heavy hunch of a lumbering vessel, spewed forth seventy and more years of filthy woe and slanderous bellows. Beaten hard and hard to beat, life in the gutter bars, five dollar rooms, relentless heat.

A face as hard as the words it spat, hate wrapped in beauty, beauty cloaked in wrath. But though the black air and sour malt stench which kept guilty hours and only grew thicker, against the grain, a light would flicker, for which the Bluebird would wait and imagine a path. Its cage was strong, had its rules to obey, live by the lights of the night, and bear the shallow day. But the Bluebird would plead ‘til his voice drew thin, and once in solitude its cage would begin... “There’s a Bluebird in my heart that wants’ to get out, but I’m too tough for him.....”

King of the Soundtrack: Kenny Loggins

Some dude called Tory L has gone and dropped THE BOMB over at PopCandy. He’s blogged on his Top 5 Kenny Loggins Soundtrack Hits. That’s right, cuts from ‘Over the Top, ‘Footloose’, ‘Caddyshack’ and ‘Top Gun’!

Bow down, lowly dogs, to the King of the feelgood fistpumper. All Hail KENNY LOGGINS!!!!

The Art of Collision: JG Ballard’s Crash

‘Crash’ by JG Ballard is a perverse and thoroughly engaging hellride through the dead-ended lives of a few’s obsession with the sexual unification of the human body and the cold, protruding, projectile shards of automobiles during harrowing collisions, on the highways and overpasses of the protagonists minds and bleak environs. Ballard’s words can be as cold as mirror glass entering the cornea and as removed as the approaching ambulance sirens in the distant greyness.

Some elements will need to be mentally abandoned just as soon as they are absorbed, such troubles can the sexual mechano-violence cause in an unprepared mind. As addictive as it is repulsive with a fine line in characterless characters, it can inspire the unimaginable in even the most glacial of readers. So what can it inspire in the most absorbed of artists? Here are some of the better ones.

From Cover Project

By Leona Clarke

By Alex Pines

“A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status -- all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).”

JG Ballard