* (restored)

“I like blowing people’s minds. It’s a buzz. Like a fix, for 20 minutes. I like the spontaneity of doing it there and then. We broke the mold by not using the fashion-show-production people. I found Sam Gainsbury, who’d been doing pop video. So it became more cinematic.” – Alexander McQueen

Lee Alexander McQueen was the quintessential bad boy made good. He had brains and brawn, having survived over ten years as a solo designer and being brought into the Gucci Group stable, which bought a 51 per cent stake in his company 2002.

Born in 1970 in the East End of London – the son of a taxi driver and one of six children. He left school at 16, with one O-level in art, and trained on Savile Row at Anderson & Sheppard, whose clients included Prince Charles and Mikhail Gorbachev, after he saw a television program about the apprentice shortage in traditional tailoring. He reportedly once embroidered a suit for the Prince of Wales with the words “I am a cunt” (in the lining). He went on to work for Gieves & Hawkes, theatre’s famous Angels & Bermans costumiers, and then worked in Japan and Italy, and returned to London in 1994, hoping to work as a pattern cutter tutor at London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins fashion school. Thanks to the strength of his portfolio, he was persuaded to enrol on the course himself.

Central Saint Martins MA graduate portfolio, Jack the Ripper Stalks his Victims, Fall/Winter 1992.

Isabella Blow

In 1994 his entire degree show was bought by influential stylist Isabella Blow, whose later suicide in 2007 led to him dedicating his entire spring/summer 2008 collection to her memory. He earned his master’s degree in fashion design from London’s Central Saint Martins (formerly Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design) in 1995.

Fall/Winter 1994, Banshee

Spring/Summer 1994, Nihilism

His “Highland Rape” Collection was about the “rape” of Scotland by the British, self-referential retrospective to the experiences that have shaped his own ethnic-cultural location and identity. For the actual showroom, McQueen transformed a loft-like industrial space into a brooding battleground of mayhem to symbolize 1746’s Battle of Culloden in which his actual ancestors, the Jacobite Highland-Scots, were defeated and then subsequently ousted by the British troops under the Duke of Cumberland, “the Butcher.”

Moreover, he insisted that his attitude towards women is informed by his having witnessed as a child scenes of violence involving his sister: “Everything I’ve done since then was for the purpose of making women look stronger, not naïve,” he was quoted in The Independent Fashion Magazine in 2000, “models are there to showcase what I’m about, nothing else. It’s nothing to do with misogyny.” The show introduced the “Bumster” trousers and immediately made him one of the most talked about faces in the industry.

Bumster trousers

“It was an art thing, to change the way women looked, just by cut, to make a longer torso. But I was taking it to an extreme. The girls looked quite menacing, because there was so much top and so little bottom, because of the length of legs. That was the concept, nothing to do with a ‘builder’s bum.’” – Alexander McQueen, on the “Bumster” Trousers

Fall/Winter 1995, Highland Rape

The president of LVMH, Bernard Arnault, controversially installed McQueen as John Galliano’s successor at Givenchy in 1996. A rebellious nature saw him quoted as saying the founder of the famous house was “irrelevant”. McQueen told Vogue in October 1997 that his debut couture offering for the label was “crap”, but he stayed with the house until March 2001 – continuing to create challenging collections, including one featuring car-robots spraying paint over white cotton dresses, and double amputee model Aimee Mullins striding down the catwalk on intricately carved wooden legs – until the contract which he said was “constraining his creativity” was ended.

Spring 1998

Spring 1998

In the fall of 1998, McQueen presented a collection called “Joan” within the confines of an abandoned industrial trash depot. Green warehouse lanterns began to sway ominously over an army of chain-mail clad, head shaven models with blood red eyes. The clothes, operated within a strict color palette of black, ashen grey, and a menacing scarlet red. Metallic black patent leather waistcoats paired with sadomasochistic red lace voyeur masks suggested a humorously sobering hardcore aesthetic not geared toward the faint of heart. The somber crackling of burning wood chips over the speakers was quickly offset by a red backdrop that tore open like a gothic portal to reveal a model navigating the asphalt slab runway. The finale of the show was marked by a blaze of fire that encircled a bondage-clad representation of Joan of Arc’s ghost in order to celebrate the power of femininity against the institutionalized machismo of both French military leadership and modern dayreligious institution. While the set reflected the ecclesiastical cell of Joan of Arc and the clothes themselves were given a medieval context, it was apparent that McQueen is contained and operates in a suspended past space as a way to process structural inequalities on the social and economic level.

Fall 1998 Joan

Fall 1998 Joan

Fall 1998 Joan

The Fall/Winter 1999-2000 collection Overlook was based on Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining. The collection explored the psychological manifestations of haunting set in a simulated tundra. With an actual snowstorm taking place, McQueen’s eerie mannequins maneuvered an arctic plane while Kubrick’s twins, who were murdered by their father in the film adaptation, stared wrathfully at the crowd of onlookers.

“Oh, there have been some right old moments! That show, I had Miguel Adrover chucking more and more snow into the wind machine, with me shouting, ‘More snow, more, more! I want it to be like a snow-shaker!’” – Alexander McQueen on the Overlook collection.

Fall/Winter 1999, The Overlook

For McQueen’s Spring/Summer 1999 runway show, two mechanical robots were stationed around legendary model, Shalom Harlow on a spinning wooden platform. A sense of suspense was built up by the way the robots pensively moved, as if they were contemplating what they should do. When a decision is reached, the way the model reacts is up to our own interpretation. The story is given to us and we are the creators of what is actually happening. It takes a true artist to involve his or her viewer without literally interacting with them.

Spring/Summer 1999

For the Spring/Summer 2001 Asylum collection the audience sat around a mirrored cube forced to stare at themselves for a whole hour. When finally lit from inside, the cube revealed itself to be a mental-hospital holding cell. Demented girls, wearing hospital headbands and everything from extraordinary mussel-shell skirts to impossibly chic pearl-colored cocktail dresses, slithered and strutted while uselessly attempting to fly over the cuckoo’s nest. There were gothic, theatrical pieces, like a dress with a miniature castle and rat posing as a shoulder pad; a top made out of a jigsaw puzzle; and a huge feathered creation with stuffed eagles suspended over the model’s head, poised to attack à la Hitchcock. But amidst all the insanity, there was a cornucopia of startlingly elegant—and wearable—pantsuits, flouncy party dresses, and even a spectator pump or two.

How to top off such a climactic presentation? After everyone thought it was all over, another cube within the psychiatric ward-cum-runway opened up to reveal a nude Michelle Olley, her face covered by a mask, breathing through a tube, surrounded by fluttering moths. It was a truly shocking and enthralling tableau: Francis Bacon via Leigh Bowery and Lucien Freud. In a word, sublime.

“Ha! I was really pleased about that. I was looking at it on the monitor, watching everyone trying not to look at themselves. It was a great thing to do in the fashion industry—turn it back on them! God, I’ve had some freaky shows.” – McQueen on forcing his audience to stare at their own reflection for over an hour.

Asylum 2001

For Autumn/Winter 2002 Supercalifragilistic collection McQueen showed in the eerie medieval hall of the Conciergerie, the place where Marie Antoinette spent her last days, brought out many of the props that have made his shows so theatrical, including torture chamber neck-braces and Clockwork Orange bowler hats, and added a pack of caged wolves, and a stage designed by Director Tim Burton, to set the macabre mood.

“It was kind of Tim Burton, about little girls, a macabre Walt Disney kind of thing. And I had Little Lilac Riding Hood, with the wolves, but the wolves were her pets! Were they wolves? Ha! Mixed breed, I think. Half wolf, half mongrel.” — Alexander McQueen on the wolves in Supercalifragilistic.

Supercalifragilistic Part One

Supercalifragilistic Part Two

At Paris Fashion Week in 2003, Alexander McQueen put his models in an arctic wind tunnel and dressed them in long, flowing fabrics, so the wind would show off the shapes and structures in a way that walking never could. McQueen said he “wanted it to be like a nomadic journey across the tundra”.

Autumn 2003

In 2004, McQueen hosted one of his most theatrical presentations with “Patheon as Lecum”. Pantheon As “Lecum” expressed McQueen’s fascination with alternate states of consciousness, aliens and space travel – when he first interviewed Sarah Burton for her job he had asked her whether she believed in UFOs. At the end of the show the lights went down and onto the darkened stage stepped a ghostly figure that drifted across the stage, the woman’s silvery, lampshade-like dress a vision of light illuminated by an LED necklace. The music faded and was replaced by the sound of a heart monitor. The heartbeat slowed until it finally flatlined and the model, bathed in a beam of light, raised her palms towards the sky and waited to be transported to the next dimension. The image articulated McQueen’s desire for transcendence, for a state beyond his earthly existence.

Autumn/Winter 2004 Pantheon As Lecum

McQueen designed the 2005 collection “It’s Only a Game” around the idea of a chess match between America and Japan. Each ensemble corresponded to a particular chess piece.

The queen wore a short, thigh-high dress, which was wide at the hips, a silhouette based on the eighteenth century. A kimono collar, obi sash, and an undershirt beautifully embroidered to look like tattooing were all drawn from Japanese culture. Next to her, the king appeared as an American football player, with shoulder pads and a helmet covered in Japanese tattooing.

In the runway show, the models moved as if they were pieces in a life-sized chess game, an idea inspired by a scene from Harry Potter. Taken as a whole, the collection revealed McQueen’s remarkable ability to look across cultures for inspiration.

Spring/Summer 2005 It’s Only a Game

Only Alexander McQueen could have provided the astonishing feat of techno-magic that ended his Fall 2006 show. Inside an empty glass pyramid, a mysterious puff of white smoke appeared from nowhere and spun in midair, slowly resolving itself into the moving, twisting shape of a woman enveloped in the billowing folds of a white dress. It was Kate Moss, her blonde hair and pale arms trailing in a dream-like apparition of fragility and beauty that danced for a few seconds, then shrank and dematerialized into the ether.

This vision was in fact a state-of-the-art hologram—a piece by the video maker Baillie Walsh, art-directed by McQueen. The gown, a pale cascade of multiple organza ruffles, wasn’t just an optical effect, though. It subsequently reappeared in the collection’s victory line up, which wound its way around the glass box as the audience was still reverberating with wonder at witnessing this incredible event.

Fall 2006 (Kate Moss hologram)

On the circular runway of the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, Alexander McQueen presented a Spring/Summer 2007 collection that would rectify his love for grand theatrics and his desire to please the critics that had so relentlessly criticized him (either for being too theatrical, or for forgoing theatrics altogether). Looking to the past for inspiration, the collection was a confection of 19th century silhouettes, dresses of architectural marvel, and covetable, wearable items like sleek grey trousers and ornamented tunics.

A baroque chamber orchestra was set up in the middle of the round, performing works befitting of the highly ornamented, couture-worthy gowns under a stunning chandelier. There were menswear-inspired looks with fantastic trillby hats, dresses made of swaths of chiffon that floated across the runway, and gowns with exaggerated hips and angel-wing shoulders. However, the most stunning was perhaps the final gown, completely covered in real flowers. As Tanya Dziahileva slowly made her walk down the round, flower heads fell off of the dress, leaving a trail of them on the runway.

Spring/Summer 2007 Sarabande

McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 2008 collection centered on a fairy tale narrative devised by McQueen about a girl who descends from a tree to marry a prince and then become a queen. It was inspired by a 600-year-old elm tree in the garden of the designer’s Sussex home. At the center of the set stood a giant tree swathed in fabric, inspired by Bulgarian artist Christo, who is renowned for wrapping buildings with material.

Autumn/Winter 2008 The Girl Who Lived in a Tree

The stage for Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2009 runway collection was a cheeky environmental scene- with a globe of the Earth revolving in the background, models emerged through a runway of taxidermy-like stuffed animals, from peacocks to elephants and zebras. Entitled “Natural Dis-Tinction, Un-Natural Selection”, it was a clear reference to Darwinism, both industrial and humanistic.

McQueen didn’t take the show in as dark a direction as would have been expected at the time, however: the collection was full of light colors and easy fabrics, albeit alongside skintight jumpsuits encrusted with jewels and leather corset belts. While much of the clothing had McQueen’s signature drape-y and sculptural silhouettes, the shoes and hair-styling were universally flat to the body- shoes that molded to each toe, or had nude stockings clinging to the ankles, and hair that was flat against the face, held on by mesh face masks.

Spring/Summer 2009 Natural Dis-Tinction, Un-Natural Selection

For his fall 2009 collection McQueen sent models down the runway wearing elegant skirt suits and dresses in shades of red, black and houndstooth that mirrored couture in craftsmanship and execution. As for the beauty look, make-up artist Peter Philips gave models bleached brows and now iconic extreme, oversized lips – exaggerated to the point of ridiculous and reminiscent of Leigh Bowery’s smeared lip. For the models who weren’t wearing Philip Treacy hats, hairstylist Guido Palau created sculptures on top of each model’s head with aluminium drink cans and plastic wrap. Echoing the beauty aesthetic, the collection was meant to poke fun at traditional French couture, with garments made out of trash bags and what looked like bubble wrap.

Autumn/Winter 2009

The Spring/Summer 2010 collection “Plato’s Atlantis”, was live-streamed on Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio.com, intercut with the photographer’s premade video footage. That was the plan anyway, but SHOWstudio crashed. Which may have replicated, in a whole new audience, the sensation of a young hopeful stuck outside a McQueen presentation, waving a standing ticket and being unable to get in. McQueen, according to an internal logic detailed in a press release, was casting an apocalyptic forecast of the future ecological meltdown of the world: Humankind is made up of creatures that evolved from the sea, and we may be heading back to an underwater future as the ice cap dissolves. There was a sparkling, illuminated runway in which two sinister, robotic movie cameras on gigantic black booms ran back and forth, while a screen played Knight’s video of Raquel Zimmermann, lying on sand, naked, with snakes writhing across her body. Then the models came out, dressed in short, reptile-patterned, digitally printed dresses, their gangly legs sunk in grotesque shoes that looked like the armored heads of a fantastical breed of antediluvian sea monster.

Plato’s Atlantis

“I didn’t plan out my life like that, when people recognize and respect what you do, that’s nice, but I don’t think you ever do this to be famous. Fame should be left to the film stars. We’re just offering a service.”
Lee Alexander McQueen , March 17 1969 – February 11 2010

McQueen And I – Alexander McQueen Documentary

BBC Documentary ‘The Works’ – Alexander McQueen ‘Cutting Up Rough’ 1997

The Story of Alexander McQueen | FTV.com

 

*Text collaged from various sources
**Special thanks to Black Acrylic, Patrick, and Yury

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, it’s a no lose situation. You don’t get a whole lot of those in your life. I used to really like the prickly sensation of smiling with chapped lips, I don’t remember why though. Maybe it’s obvious. The last time my lips got really chapped was when I was in the Antarctic. And boy, were they chapped. I could’ve declared the facial skin around my lips a National Park. How did you guess that the Permanent Sparkler was the thing I coveted the most. Maybe that’s obvious too. Thank you, in other words! Love bringing Alexander McQueen back to life to design the launch event for the new SCAB, free of charge of course, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Oh, yes, I remember. Oh, your MacMahon will appear here on Friday, the 25th. ** Bill, Thanks! My weekend was mostly pretty damned ok. How was yours? ** Misanthrope, The list of best blogs ever maybe. I think Ton was always into it. I saw some very, very late Mike18 video somewhere, and he looked like Lou Ferrigno. A good dictator is the ultimate oxymoron. Grr about your snow. We’re stumbling into spring here. The sky is being very schizo at the moment. Hope your weekend skyrocketed upward. ** l@rst, Did your weekend pan out as planned? I was on board with its concept. Okay, Chuck Tingle … I’ve only read about his thing and looked at some cover art so far, but, yeah, what a thing he’s got going on there. And it’s actually, you know, good or at least fun, you say? My next step is to tiptoe into the writing itself. So I’m a still kind of blinking newbie. Thanks for the turn on, man. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, interesting, I don’t know Nathan Coley’s stuff. I’ll pursue. Thanks, pal. Very mixed reports from my Netflix-sporting friends about that Warhol thing. I guess I should test it at least. Leeds lived to fight another day! Congrats, man. Warmest hugs about Wednesday. Stay as strong as you can be. Love from here and me. ** John Christopher, Hi. Oh, cool. About ‘QatD’. Did you know he was also almost swept into the stratosphere in a dreadful ‘Twister’ knock-off TV movie called ‘Night of the Twisters’? After checking his IMDb page, I really do need to do a Devon Sawa Day. And I’m on it. So on it. Later gator. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Yet another reason not to see ‘The Batman’. The director went into ‘Queercore’ knowing very little about it, and he grabbed the first and easiest approach he could and went with it. Same deal (in a different way) with his bad Burroughs documentary. ** R yn / ANGUSRAZE, I did have a pretty good weekend for the most part, thanks. Yours sounds to have been on the very far and high end of good, for sure. Did you get much of what you’re working on done? Man, excellent if you can make that video you dreamed up. Having made films, that’s a lot of work. But obviously worth it. Write it down! Always! I have a weirdly great memory, but I do anyway because you just never know. I hope your Monday is a checkered flag. ** Right. Years ago another long lost d.l. of this blog made a paean to Alexander McQueen for this place, and I thought I would breathe some life back into it and see what happened, and that’s your call. See you tomorrow.

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Diego Trujillo The 300 Year Time Bomb, 2012
‘There’s something both disquieting and strangely appealing about a bomb engineered to explode in exactly 300 years time. Even if none of us will be there to experience it. The bomb’s timer displays the years in seconds making us question what meaning such a large number holds and changing our dramatic relationship with countdown timers.’

 

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Dietrich Wegner Playhouse, 2011
‘In Playhouse, I combine an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, with one of the safest places one can go, their childhood playhouse.’

 

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Nancy Spero Male Bombs, 1966
‘A series of works in which a bomb becomes an anthropomorphic form spewing sperm-like heads—smoky, messy, and seemingly blood stained.’

 

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Forensic Architecture The Bombing of Rafah, 2016
‘The Black Friday report is a collaboration between Forensic Architecture and Amnesty International. It aims to provide a detailed reconstruction of the events in Rafah, Gaza, from 1-4 August 2014, based primarily on material found on social media.

‘Because our investigation team was denied access to Gaza, Forensic Architecture developed a number of techniques aimed to reconstruct the events from hundreds of images and videos recorded by professional and citizen journalists. The images were thereafter located in a 3D model of Rafah. This resulted in the Image Complex, a device that allowed us to explore the spatial and temporal connections between the various sources and reconstruct the events as they unfolded.

‘Forensic Architecture has also located witness testimonies, delivered after the war, within this 3D model and corroborated the reported events with other audio-visual material. Where the metadata of image material was missing or inadequate, we used time indicators such as observed shadows or bomb clouds to locate sources in space and time.’

 

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Atelier Van Lieshout Pipe-bomb Clock, 2018
‘The Pipe-bomb Clock is steel, working clockworks attached to a pipe-bomb on a steel frame and pedestal. This improvised explosive device suggests that time is running out.’

 

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Gregory Green Suitcase Bombs, 1995
Mixed media

 

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Moira Dryer Bomb, 1982
casein on wood

 

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Robert Longo Sickness of Reason, 2003
charcoal on mounted paper

 

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Rocío Garriga Pop-bomb, 2018
‘Sculptural installation of 19 small brass sculptures representing popcorn in its different explosion stages, in a methacrylate urn with a black base intervened with texts of the 8 types of fire bombs most commonly used during World War II.’

 

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Jeremy Deller It is what it is, 2009
‘The car in Jeremy Deller’s It is what it is, was destroyed in a suicide bomb attack in Iraq in 2007. The mangled wreckage here, as is often the case in media reports of war, stands in for the destruction of human life, in this case the deaths of thirty eight people. Though we are all too used to seeing images of such vehicles, finding oneself confronted with the real thing is a wholly different experience. Deller has gone beyond this though and taken the wrecked car on a road trip around America.’

 

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‘A Coachella man has been arrested on suspicion of threatening to blow up the Desert X outdoor art exhibition. Phillip Carrillo, 32, was arrested 8:50 a.m. Thursday at his home in the 52-000 Block of Primitivo Drive, according to Palm Springs police. Desert X is an internationally renowned biennial art exhibition which offers digital and in-person opportunities to view work across 40 miles of the Coachella Valley, will feature 13 works that range from billboards to paintings.’

 

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Chris Burden The Reason for the Neutron Bomb, 1979
fifty thousand nickels and matchsticks, signage

 

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Fernando Botero Car bomb, 1999
Oil on canvas

 

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Inigo Manglano-Ovalle Dirty Bomb, 2008
‘Dirty Bomb is a full-scale replica of Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945, immaculately translated by the artist into white fiberglass and aluminum. Suspended from the ceiling, the bulbous, dirigible-shaped colossus has mud slathering its otherwise pristine snout, much of it dripping to the floor.’

 

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Cildo Meireles Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project, 1970
‘For the Coca-Cola Project Meireles removed Coca-Cola bottles from normal circulation and modified them by adding instructions for turning the bottle into a Molotov cocktail, before returning them to the circuit of exchange. On the bottles, such messages as ‘Yankees Go Home’ are followed by the work’s title and the artist’s statement of purpose: ‘To register informations and critical opinions on bottles and return them to circulation’. The Coca-Cola bottle is an everyday object of mass circulation; in 1970 in Brazil it was a symbol of US imperialism and it has become, globally, a symbol of capitalist consumerism. As the bottle progressively empties of dark brown liquid, the statement printed in white letters on a transparent label adhering to its side becomes increasingly invisible, only to reappear when the bottle is refilled for recirculation.’

 

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David Adey The New Bomb, 2007
‘A full-scale replica of a smart-bomb, like the ones used in operation Iraqi Freedom, is constructed with body parts from hundreds of identical miniature, pearl-glazed ceramic lambs.’

 

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GTA 5 Sticky Bomb Mod, 2021
‘The principle for sticky bomb explosion remains something similar across GTA’s different stages, however C4 explosion requires diverse key combinations from one stage to another. Here’s the manner by which to choose, place, and detonate sticky bombs in GTA 5 on your PC. Open the inventory menu by pressing ”Tab. Utilize the mouse to feature the throwable explosives weapon type. Utilize the mouse wheel look to find the C4 within the kind. Close the weapons wheel. Your person ought to hold a sticky bomb. Point the sticky bomb using the right-click on your mouse. Whenever you’ve chosen the area/bearing in which you need to toss the bomb, left-click while as yet holding the right-click. To detonate the sticky bomb (insofar as you’re within range), press ”G” on your console.’

 

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Gert + Uwe Tobias Ribbon Around a Bomb, 2013
ink and collage on paper

 

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Damien Marchal Garbage Truck Bomb, 2010
‘Garbage Truck Bomb is “an interactive sound installation for truck bomb and detonator”. The installation takes the form of a life-size wooden model of a garbage truck, inside which is hidden a cell-phone–activated GSM detonator which at any moment can set off a violent sound deflagration. Here gas bottles, often used in bomb attacks, are subversively remodelled as pressed wood sound sources which boost the resonance of the bass speakers inside them.’

 

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Robert Heinecken Breast/Bomb #5, 1967
Gelatin silver prints, cut and reassembled

 

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Alwin Lay Permanent Sparkler, 2012
‘Everyone loves sparklers, it’s a simple fact. Alwin Lay has created one that never goes out!’

 

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Joan Rabascall Atomic Kiss, 1968
‘Because the purpose of these works is not to cause fear; you have to show the writing of disaster. We are catastrophe illiterates. Legibility is needed to try to understand.’

 

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Lee McDonald Hand grenade, 2010
wood and cardbord

 

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Vandy Rattana Bomb Ponds, 2013
‘These tranquil, almost nondescript bodies of water are known as ‘bomb ponds’ in the Khmer language: craters created when the Americans dropped close to three million tons of bombs across politically neutral Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Despite the damage, injury and deaths inflicted onto Cambodian civilians who had no knowledge of the war being waged by governments, the bombings were not formally acknowledged for years. Like a dark secret kept hidden in plain view, the ponds remain officially invisible.’

 

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Jonathan Latiano Points of Contention, 2011
‘The piece features an explosion of wood, plastic, Styrofoam protruding from a rippling gallery floor.’

 

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Cai Guo-Qiang Drawing with Gunpowder, 2012
‘In March 2012, Cai Quo Qiang worked with over 100 local volunteers to create three monumental drawings made from gunpowder explosions — from the artist’s loose sketching and stencil work, to gunpowder application, to ignition.’

 

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Stephen Johnston Petrol Bombs, 2020
Oil on Canvas

 

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Adel Abdessemed Le Vase abominable, 2013
‘Le Vase abominable is a two-meter tall copper pot positioned on top of a replica of a large explosive device, a carefully crafted bomb, whose relationship to the vase remains ambiguous.’

 

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Andrew Waits Boom City, 2014
‘Photographer Andrew Waits splits fireworks down the middle to reveal their surprising innards of colorful powders, tubes, and conductors. Its seemingly harmless looking contents might come as a surprise, but beware.’

 

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Doug Beube Blast: If You See Something, Say Something, 2008
‘Anyone who has ridden a New York City subway post-911 has heard the frequent broadcast warnings: “If you see something, say something!” or “Backpacks will be inspected!” This work, which alludes to both cautionary announcements, consists of sixteen altered volumes of an Encyclopedia Britannica. Brown wax seals the top and bottom of the cylindrical books, with black and red connective wires clamping onto metal hooks embedded in the top of each cylinder, calling to mind an improvised explosive device.’

 

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Tajinder J Singh 24, Jack Bauer, SEASON 5, Épisode 1, 2011
Polystyrene, wood, plastic

 

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Roy Lichtenstein Wall Explosion I, II, III, IV, 1965
Enamel on steel

 

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Hajra Waheed The Cyphers, 2016
‘A large platform that viewers also look at from above and cull information from. There are 18 technical drawings and a number of metal objects and shrapnel that appear to have either been collected as debris from an explosion or to have fallen from the sky.’

 

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Kichisuke Yoshimura Hiroshima, 1962
‘Their clothes ripped to shreds, their skin hanging down. On the riverbank I saw figures that seemed to be from another world. Ghost-like, their hair falling over their faces, their clothes ripped to shreds, their skin hanging. A cluster of these injured persons was moving wordlessly toward the outskirts.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Ian, Hi, Ian. Oh, man, big congrats on your impending son! Whoa, that’s huge. I didn’t know there were Star Trek books. But before I discovered avant-garde lit in my teens, I read almost nothing but novels based on TV shows I liked, and there were a shit-ton of them. It’s kind of nice to know that that genre is still ongoing, assuming that’s what you mean. Anyway, I hope your weekend will be exhausting-work-free. Anything cool happen? ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Not a bad version of that song, but after hearing the Basement Tapes original, it does sound a little chintzy maybe. ** Misanthrope, I’m pretty sure there are teenagers in that film, or at least people in their 20s pretending, but don’t hold me to that. I fear that we organic-doomed people are not of a sufficient number to make extra added effort on the design and manufacturing aspect of organic gear seem financially feasible or something. Ton started getting into scat when he was still pretty popular, and I assume that’s why his popularity declined, although he’s still in the field, or was as of a year or two ago. I hope for a stellar weekend for you, myself, and everyone in the entire world except for maybe a few dictators. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘Teenagers from Outer Space’ needs a remake, hopefully not a Marvel one. Great that your piece was well-received, and I’m super excited that you’re thinking about a novella! Very noisy, enthusiastic cheerleading from me. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Poor guy. The Richey Edwards connection in your head makes sense. Fundamentally, at least. Yeah, there used two be these ‘boy band mastermind’ guys, like the guy who made Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, and the guy who made Menudo, but I think all of those guys ended up in jail for molesting some of the band boys, so … I don’t know, although I guess the sad boy band members would get molested and feel a little sadder and think, ‘Yeah, what else is new’. Wow, that dry-lipped love was a very beautifully conceived love, not that I would want to kiss him in thanks, mind you. I’d buy one of his pantings. Heck, I’d give him a whole galerie show on the blog, I’m sure. Love hiding a million high powered bombs in every room in the Kremlin and detonating them during work hours, G. ** Marc Labelle, Hi, Marc! Good to meet you, although we’re friends on Facebook, so I already know you from afar. How cool that you read my blog, and thank you for the really kind words. I’m glad my sentiment struck home. I really believe in it. It has kept me going. Thanks a lot for the link/introduction to your band. I’ll go over there as soon as I get out of here. Obviously, any relationship drawn to GbV is equivalent to gilding my imagination. Awesome, thanks a lot! Please imagine my hand grasping your hand fervently even as I freak out a little bit at seeing a hand emerge from my laptop. Take care. And it goes without saying that it’d be only excellent if you want to come back in here and blab any old time. Great weekend to you! ** Bill, Hi. Yeah, that’s it. My friend said it’s a horror western that is unexpectedly very intense and gory. My review when and if I can find it. Film prep us is so far proceeding well, but our chickens are not being counted quite yet. Enjoy your weekend, sir. ** Sypha, Yikes! Scary! ** RrYyAaNn / angusrasgbfhsdjgds, Hey. What you said a few days ago is a golden rule that was unusually well described. Insecurities are inescapable, but knowing that’s what they are will kill them, or at least chloroform them for a while. It won’t surprise you that I think your audience’s reaction is the ideal reaction, so … victoire! I remember the name Natalia Kills, but I don’t think I’ve heard her. I’ll find her stuff, starting with the link, thanks. Take every compliment from a stranger, especially a stranger with talent that you can acknowledge, to heart because that kind of compliment is as guaranteed to be the truth if anything is. I hope your Saturday -> Sunday has a gradual ecstatic build. xo, me. ** John Christopher, Hi, JC! Oh, wow, thank you so much about ‘I Wished’. That’s amazing, thank you! In a way I do agree with the general consensus that Joy Williams’ stories are her best, but, on the other hand, I think my favorite book of hers is her novel ‘The Quick and the Dead’. ‘The Changeling’ is not among my top faves of her either. Ha ha, no, I have not done a Devon Sawa/Final Destination post, but that is an excellent idea. Hm, let me see if I can figure out a way to do that interestingly. And I will endeavor to. Thanks! Have a really fine weekend, and, yeah, come back whenever it suits your purposes please. ** l@rst, I’m going to go find out what the Chuck Tingle hoo-haa is all about this weekend. Speaking of, did you have the weekend of your dreams? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. The director interviewed me for about three hours for that documentary but didn’t use any of it. I have a real problems with that film, a big one being that it hugely overstates BlaB’s importance and centrality to Queer Punk, and in doing so it distorts what QP was and what its trajectory was. And there are a lot of other problems. Like LA had a huge Queer Punk scene and presence, but because a couple of key LA figures like Vaginal Davis refused to be in the film, he just ignored LA almost entirely. And he doesn’t even talk about Bimbox and Johnny Noxzema who were not only possibly the most important Queer Punk progenitors but who transformed and ultimately signaled the end of the movement. Not to mention that the film barely even acknowledges Jayne County who is arguably the progenitor of the movement. And it’s not like the director didn’t know all of that, he just decided to tell a greatly simplistic-fied version of QP artificially centred around BlaB. It’s a shame to think that there probably won’t be another, truer doc about QP to right its wrongs, or not for a long time anyway. ** Brian, Hey, Brian. Ah, okay, well, never mind then. Of course Shakespeare is a no brainer in that context. Wait, so your prof. doesn’t see the difficulty you guys face and isn’t willing to extend the deadline? So you all get punished because one guy didn’t hit one of the assignment’s marks? Fucked up. So sorry, man. Yeah, eyes on the prize of those expired two months, I guess. What choice do you have. Urgh, though. Your day sounds pretty swell, all in all. I detect a number of rewards in there. I hope you can organise whatever school shit into a digestible area and kick back in the margins at the very least. Deep breaths, and catch you afterwards. ** Okay. I made one these thematic posts that I obviously am into making these days, this time operating within the definition of the word ‘bomb’. See you on Monday.