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Sculptor Carl Andre was found not guilty on February 11, 1988 of charges that he murdered his wife by pushing her from the window of their 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment. Mr. Andre, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his spotless blue overalls, stood silently and received the verdict without any sign of emotion. As he rushed from the 13th-floor courtroom of the Criminal Courts Building to an elevator being held for him by courtroom officers, Mr. Andre said only: ”Justice was served. Justice was served.”

But as they stood outside the courtroom and watched the elevator doors close, the mother and sister of the victim, Ana Mendieta, called him a murderer. ”I know he killed my daughter,” the mother, Raquel Oti Mendieta of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said. The sister, Raquel Harrington, said: ”He might be getting away with murder now. But he’ll get his just rewards. Just wait and see.”

The death of Ms. Mendieta, who was 36 years old, and the subsequent arrest of Mr. Andre, 52, was a shock to the world of art. Mr. Andre is credited with founding the minimalist school of sculpture in the 1960’s. His works are in the Tate, Whitney and Solomon R. Guggenheim museums. Ms. Mendieta, who was born in Cuba, was lesser known, but her sculptures were gaining prominence.

In prosecuting second-degree murder charges, an assistant district attorney, Elizabeth Lederer, said the defendant’s calling the 911 emergency telephone line was an incriminating factor. A tape of the call showed Mr. Andre saying: ”My wife is an artist, and I’m an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.”

Evidence at the trial showed that Ms. Mendieta had consumed a considerable amount of alcohol before her death. There was a fight, Ms. Lederer said, and it escalated in the bedroom, and ”he caused her to fall out the window” at 300 Mercer Street. Mr Andre later told the police that he and his wife had been watching television before she went to bed alone. He said when he went to bed, he found that she was not there and that the bedroom window was open. A doorman working nearby testified that he had heard cries of: ”No! No! No!” just before the body hit the ground. Mr. Hofffinger said any seeming inconsistency between what Mr. Andre told the 911 operator and later said was a result of Mr. Andre’s ”eclipsing” events the night of the death.

‘Walking on Carl Andre’ (1998), by Sylvie Fleury

 

In November 2002, Timothy Boham appeared on the cover of Freshmen magazine (considered to be the best ’18-25′ magazine of young gay, but not twinkish, men). In the annual survey in 2003, Marcus Allen was voted “Freshman of the Year” by a wide margin, and again appeared on the cover (June 2003). This led to opportunities such as with Falcon studios. With Falcon Entertainment, Boham appeared in a dozen adult movies under the name “Marcus Allen” in 2004 and 2005.

As Marcus Allen, Boham was on the cover of Mandate magazine in July 2006, apparently for All World’s Video. Boham also appeared on the cover of Playgirl Magazine’s “campus hunks” issue (November 2006). The Advocate reported that Boham left porn in 2005 and went to live in Denver, eventually working for John Paul “J P” Kelso but only for about 10 days before failing to show up for his job. Kelso was co-owner of a Denver debt recovery business called Professional Recovery Systems; he was a philanthropist “… giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars to charities around the world….” and was openly gay.

Boham had the right look but not the right attitude for modeling work. He didn’t like people telling him what to do. He seemed like an angry person. His opportunities were tapering off. Lara Holland, who lived in a Denver mansion on High Street in an apartment a floor below Boham, gave an interview. “Boham has an explosive temper and owned a large collection of guns, including a rifle with a silencer and a scope”, Holland said. Boham, who has a 5-year-old daughter, also picked fights over petty disputes with friends, she said[citation needed]. “He got into bloody fistfights,” Holland said. “He just had anger issues.” Boham told Lara Holland, that he “sanitized” his apartment by thoroughly scrubbing it because a gay man had lived there previously, she said. “He hated (gays),” she said. “He hated their lifestyle.”

A housekeeper found Kelso, 43, shot to death in the bathtub of his upscale Congress Park home on November 13. The police named Boham as a suspect in the slaying. Kelso, reportedly often hired the services of male dancers/escorts. Boham was arrested on November 16 at the U.S.-Mexico border in Lukeville, Arizona. He was extradited to Colorado and is being held without bond. According to the Denver Post, Boham told his family that he killed Kelso because he believed that Kelso kept $100,000 to $400,000 in his household safe.

The Post reported that court documents said Boham planned to use the money to go to South America with his girlfriend, he told his mother and sister shortly after the shooting, the records allege. But Boham said his plan went awry when Kelso refused to open the safe, and there was a brief struggle during which he accidentally shot Kelso, according to the Post. Boham told his family that when he cut the safe open, it was empty and “so he had done this for nothing,” according to a police affidavit.

Timothy Boham now identifies as a woman and is serving her sentence at a correctional facility for women.

 

One of France’s biggest rock stars was released from prison recenty after serving half of an eight-year sentence for killing his actress girlfriend in a jealous rage over a text message. Bertrand Cantat, 43, lead singer of the left-wing group Noir Désir, was driven by his band’s drummer from a Toulouse jail to his country home at midnight.

The charismatic Cantat first came to the attention of France’s music scene almost 20 years ago. Celebrated for his enigmatic performances as the lead singer of Noir Desir, he was hailed as the French Jim Morrison. But Cantat was known in France for his strong public stance on issues such as globalisation and racism as much as his on-stage persona. A rebel with a love of literature, a star with a social conscience, Cantat became an idol to thousands of anti-capitalist teenagers during his years in the spotlight.

Cantat became the centre of a lurid drama in July 2003 when he punched and slapped Marie Trintignant, 41, in an hotel room in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. They had quarrelled over a text message that Ms Trintignant, a mother of four and the daughter of Jean-Louis Trintignant, a 1960s film idol, had received from her former husband. She struck her head on a radiator and died in a Paris hospital a week later.

Cantat pleaded that he never meant to kill but was convicted of murder in Vilnius and returned to France in 2004. A court last month approved his release on condition that he received regular psychological counselling and refrained from public reference to the murder in interviews or in music.

Noir Désir ‘Des armes’

 

Tom Melford entered Columbia in 1995. His major was visual arts, and his freshman year seemed to go well enough. With little money for winter clothes, he could be seen trudging through snow in sandals, jeans and a T-shirt as if he were strolling through warm California beach sand. He formed a band called Couchcase and recorded a few songs featuring his frenetic guitar playing and scruffy voice. He also had several cartoons published in the student newspaper, The Columbia Spectator. His cartooning revealed a mordant, Mad magazine sense of humor about many subjects — designer drugs, Internet sex, infomercials. In one cartoon, a man and woman trade a series of insults and ugly confessions, culminating with the man saying, ”The voices told me to kill you in your sleep.” The woman then screams, ”April Fool’s!” The man replies, ”That’s today?”

Mr. Nelford spent more and more time on his art at the expense of academics. He dropped out of college in the spring of 1998 and returned to California. His mother sent him to counseling, but he expressed ambivalence about re-enrolling at Columbia. He told friends that he wanted to wander the country like Jack Kerouac, one of his literary heroes. He wanted to live the life of an artist, a nomad with a sketchbook. In early 1999, Tom Nelford, then 22, returned to New York City with no specific plan. Back on the fringes of Columbia, Mr. Nelford floated along. He fell in with a small group of students, and spent his summer days in-line skating, writing songs, smoking marijuana and playing his guitar on the roof of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house, where he often slept in an oversized storage closet. Tom Nelford lived off the generosity of his friends and sometimes bartered his art. Once he used coat hangers to make a sculpture for a friend as thanks for allowing him to crash on her living-room couch. Sometimes he would sing for his supper. His primary response to everyday setbacks was a beatific ”Dude, it’s cool.” His outlook seemed neatly summarized in one of his songs: ”Things could be better, but I feel content. Because what I’m after, I represent.”

In the fall, Mr. Nelford underwent an abrupt transformation as he began to date Kathleen Roskot, the first serious girlfriend his Columbia friends had ever seen him with. He cleaned himself up, got a crew cut and took a job selling jeans. Some of Mr. Nelford’s more bohemian friends did not understand the attraction. She seemed preppy, standoffish. Once, when Mr. Nelford introduced her to a friend whose bedroom walls were plastered with photographs of marijuana buds, it was clear that she wanted to get out of the room fast. But the two had things in common — athletics, contemplative natures and a passion for the music and literature of the 1960’s. Ms. Roskot decorated her room with posters of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. She stuck up favorite Kerouac quotes. Before long, Mr. Nelford was spending many of his nights in her suite on the fifth floor of Ruggles Hall. After she failed to show up for lacrosse practice one Saturday, her room was checked and her nude body was discovered. Were it not for the fact that Mr. Nelford subsequently threw himself in front of a subway train, dying instantly, his friends said, they would have found it impossible to even imagine that he had slashed her throat.  Did he or didn’t he?  That’s the ongoing assumption, but the truth will never be known for sure.

 

Three days after William Burroughs returned to his home in Mexico City from a South American trip, his wife Joan (Vollmer) was balancing a water tumbler on her head as her husband aimed. Burroughs missed and Vollmer, 27, died later that day from a bullet wound to the skull. The death was ruled a culpable homicide, after Mexican police investigated and Burroughs gave several contradictory versions of events. He initially claimed he accidentally shot Vollmer during a William Tell act, but changed his story, possibly after being coached by his Mexican attorney, Bernabé Jurado. The day after in court, Burroughs claimed he accidentally misfired the gun while trying to sell the weapon to an acquaintance.

Burroughs was held in custody on murder charges for two weeks before being released on bail after his brother arrived from St. Louis to dispense thousands of dollars in a variety of legal costs, which may have included bribes to Mexican jailors. Vollmer was buried in Mexico City and her two children were taken back to the United States. Her daughter Julie was raised by her father, Paul Adams, and his family; her son was raised by her in-laws. For a year, Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent attorney worked to resolve the case. However, when Jurado fled the country after accidentally shooting and killing a trespasser on his property — a child of a government official — Burroughs re-entered the United States, where he was fortunate that Louisiana had not issued a warrant for his arrest on the previous narcotic charge. In absentia, Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer’s death. He received a two year suspended sentence. In essence, the Mexican justice system effected a penalty of two weeks incarceration for Vollmer’s death.

In the introduction to Queer, a novel written in 1953 but not published until 1985, Burroughs states, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death … [S]o the death of Joan brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out.”

‘Burroughs William Buys A Parrot’

 

Richard Dadd was born August 1, 1817 in Chatham, Kent, England. At age 13 the family moved to London, and in 1837, Dadd, age 20, was admitted to the Royal Academy of Art. Dadd showed talent at the Academy and gathered a number of painterly friends, known collectively as ‘The Clique’. He won several awards while at the Academy, and began exhibiting his work during his first year. Overall, his style was not particularly remarkable, no more so than any other moderately gifted painter in Victorian England during the stylistic phase now referred to as “The Fairy School”.

In June 1842, Dadd and his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips, left England to travel extensively in the Middle East and Europe. Things were going well until Dadd, in Egypt, encountered a group of old Arab men smoking a “hubbly-bubbly”, an arabic style waterpipe. Dadd joined them, and according to his later claims, spent five continuous days and nights smoking. Though the men never spoke, Dadd became convinced that the sound of the bubbling pipe was actually a form of communication. By the fifth day, he had deciphered a message, which he claimed was from the Ancient Egyptian god Osiris.

Dadd left Phillips and returned to England, where his family had a physician specializing in mental illness examine him. The doctor found him to be “non compos mentis”, legally not of sound mind. Unfortunately, instead of being institutionalized, Dadd convinced his father that all he needed was a rest, and together they travelled to a country village called Cobham, where Dadd claimed that he would “disburden his mind” to his father. It was on August 28th, 1843, at a chalk pit called Paddock Hole, a forested area just outside of Cobham, that his life changed forever. Rather than disburden his mind, Richard Dadd chose to brutally murder and dismember his father with a knife and a razor. (read more)

Richard Dadd – The Artist and the Asylum

 

While traveling with friends and a relative named Will Stafford in 1917, the great blues and folk musician Leadbelly got into a fight in which Stafford was fatally shot. Though Leadbelly maintained his innocence, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 years of hard labor on Shaw State Farm in Texas. Leadbelly served seven years of his 30-year sentence working on chain gangs. After a prison escape failed, he tried to drown himself in a lake but was apprehended. Back in prison, he used his musical talents to gain favor with the prison guards.

While Leadbelly was serving time at Shaw State Farm, his father died. Just before his death, Wes Ledbetter had tried to bribe prison officials into releasing Leadbelly. But in 1925, Leadbelly won a full pardon on his own. Oddly, the pardon came after the governor of Texas went on record as opposing pardons. The governor had visited the prison several times to hear Leadbelly sing, and Leadbelly later maintained that he won over the governor with his song “Please Pardon Me.”

One night while performing a song titled “Mister Tom Hughes’s Town,” Leadbelly became involved in a brawl that left him with a horrendous scar on his neck and left the other man with permanent brain injuries. Other fights would follow, leading Leadbelly into further conflicts with the law. After a fight in which he claimed that six men tried to steal whiskey from his lunch pail, Leadbelly was convicted of assault with intent to commit murder.

In 1930, Leadbelly was sentenced to ten years at the Louisiana state prison in Angola. After the authorities discovered Leadbelly’s prior conviction, he was disqualified from any chance at early release. n 1933, a Harvard-trained expert on American folk music, John Lomax, was making his way through Southern prisons and recording musicians when he stopped at Angola and heard Leadbelly sing. Lomax made some preliminary recordings of Leadbelly’s songs. Although Leadbelly later maintained that he was pardoned because the Louisiana governor had been moved by his prison song, records indicate that he was released as a cost-saving measure.

The only known footage of Lead Belly

 

One of the greatest murder mysteries in the history of art appears to have been solved with new evidence that Caravaggio, the Italian artist, killed a rival in a botched attempt to castrate him. For almost 400 years historians have asserted that Caravaggio, who painted a number of Renaissance masterpieces, murdered Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606 in a row over a tennis match.

A 2002 BBC documentary by Andrew Graham-Dixon, one of the world’s leading art historians, disclosed that the killing followed a dispute between the two over Fillide Melandroni, a female prostitute, whose services both men sought. It used documents held in the Vatican and Rome State archives to show that Tomassoni, a pimp, died when Caravaggio attempted to cut off his testicles.

The disclosures also altered a widely held perception of Caravaggio as a homosexual because of the large number of nude males that he painted. This image was consolidated in the 1986 film Caravaggio, directed by Derek Jarman, in which the painter was projected as a brooding homosexual.

Mr Graham-Dixon said, however, that a report written by the barber surgeon who examined Tomassoni’s dead body provided evidence that Caravaggio was, at least on one occasion, aggressively heterosexual. “Sure, he had an eye for male beauty, but he probably swung both ways,” said Mr Graham-Dixon, who is also a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine.

The barber surgeon’s report, made on the night that Tomassoni died, has also been re-examined by experts in the Italian art world. Monsignor Sandro Corradini, another historian who has combed the Vatican archives, said that the document showed that Tomassoni bled to death through the femoral artery in his groin, having been floored during the duel.

Mgr Corradini, who is author of a book about the artist, Evidence for a Trial, holds the post of Devil’s Advocate in the Vatican, assisting the Pope on whether long-dead nominees for sainthood should be beatified. He believes that Caravaggio pinned Tomassoni to the ground with his sword and then made a bungled attempt to castrate him.

 

The Richardson family murders involved the murder of three members of the family in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. The bodies of Marc Richardson (age 42), his wife Debra (age 48), and their son Jacob (age 8) were found by a friend of Jacob on April 23, 2006 at 1 p.m. Absent from the home at the time of the discovery was Jasmine Richardson, the couple’s 12 year old daughter. Jasmine was arrested the next day in the nearby community of Leader, Saskatchewan with her 23 year-old boyfriend Jeremy Allan Steinke, both charged with the three murders.

According to friends of Steinke, he told them he thought he was a 300-year-old werewolf. He allegedly told his friends that he liked the taste of blood, and wore a small vial of blood around his neck. He also had a user account at the VampireFreaks.com web site. Jasmine also had a page at the same site, leading to speculation they met there. However, later, an acquaintance of Steinke said the couple actually met at a punk rock show in early 2006.

The couple were also found to be communicating at Nexopia, a popular web site for young Canadians. Various messages they sent to each were available to the public, before the accounts were removed by Nexopia staff. Jasmine’s user page, under the name “runawaydevil”, included pictures of her in dark Goth make up, falsely said she was 15 and ended with the text “Welcome to my tragic end.”.

While the goth lifestyle can involve trappings of the occult — with followers preferring black clothes, white makeup, and underground music — a founder of a popular goth website says the movement does not condone or inspire violence. “It’s silly to assume that all we do is sit around in circles and talk about death and killing each other and stuff like that,” said Steven Vardy, founder of Toronto-goth.com. “I mean, what do you talk about with your friends? It’s the same thing.”

After the murders, the local school in Medicine Hat pulled a children’s book called Running from the curriculum. A concerned parent pointed out that the goth character might have been inappropriate material for the school at that time. One of the features of the book is having students take a black and white picture of themselves and to draw themselves in as a goth character. The school substituted the classic The Outsiders for the goth book.

Voltaire Interview on ‘Goth Murder Madness’

 

A Polish pulp fiction writer was sentenced to 25 years in jail on September 5, 2007 for his role in a grisly case of abduction, torture and murder, a crime that he then used for the plot of a bestselling thriller. In a remarkable case that has gripped Poland for months, Krystian Bala, a writer of blood-curdling fiction, was found guilty of orchestrating the murder seven years ago of a Wroclaw businessman, Dariusz Janiszewski, in a crime of passion brought on by the suspicion that the victim was sleeping with his ex-wife.

The killing of Janiszewski was one of the most gruesome cases to come before a Polish court in years, with the “Murder, He Wrote” sub-plot unfolding in the district court in Wroclaw and keeping the country spellbound. Janiszewski, said to have been having an affair with Bala’s ex-wife, was scooped out of the river Oder near Wroclaw in south-west Poland by fishermen in December 2000, four weeks after going missing. The police tests revealed that he was stripped almost naked and tortured. His wrists had been bound behind his back and tied to a noose around his neck before he was dumped in the river.

The police had little to go on. Within six months, Commissar Jacek Wroblewski, leading the investigation, dropped the case. It remained closed for five years despite the publication in 2003 of the potboiler Amok, by Bala, a gory tale about a bunch of bored sadists, with the narrator, Chris, recounting the murder of a young woman. The details of the murder matched those of Janiszewski almost exactly. Bala, who used the first name Chris on his frequent jaunts abroad, was arrested in 2005 after Commissar Wroblewski received a tip-off about the “perfect crime” and was advised to read the thriller.

But Bala was released after three days for insufficient evidence, despite the commissar’s conviction that he had his villain. When further evidence came to light, Bala was re-arrested. The case against him, however, remained circumstantial. Police uncovered evidence that Bala had known the dead man, had telephoned him around the time of his disappearance and had then sold the dead man’s mobile phone on the internet within days of the murder.

All along, Bala protested his innocence, insisting that he derived the details for the Amok thriller from media reports of the Janiszewski murder. The court heard expert and witness evidence that Bala was a control freak, eager to show off his intelligence, “pathologically jealous” and inclined to sadism. “He was pathologically jealous of his wife,” said Judge Hojenska. “He could not allow his estranged wife to have ties with another man.”

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yes, I remember being surprised to even find that ‘XMAS USA’ was accessible. Okay, I’ll check out Clooney’s new one. I don’t know him, but he does give off interesting, cool guy vibes. ** Sypha, Hi. Shame (and surprising) that there isn’t video of the Godzilla tree. Great about the eBook debut. Everyone, James ‘Sypha’ Champagne’s most recent and excellent novel ‘Harlem Smoke’ is newly available as an eBook, and you can score it here. ** Bill, I’m not hugely surprised, no. I’m not either apart from the Buche windfall and liking what the decorations do to buildings I’ve seen naked a hundred times. Right, Black Forest cake, of course. It’s partly known for its coconuttiness, if I’m not mistaken? Hm, there must be any number of German pastry shops here. I’ll go wander around with my Map app open on my phone and see what I can come home with. Holiday errands … like what? Do you have people you need to gift up? ** Misanthrope, I suppose it would be immodest of me to say no, it’s not weird. Well, I hear the relief package deal is set, so what’s done is done, and good luck to all the indisposed recipients. What a shithole, that ear place. Yeah, rip them a new, gaping, chemmed up, piggy slut bottom online presence. That’ll show them. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. If you get to Paris again, that Huyghe is in the collection of Fondation Louis Vuitton, and it was up and on display recently during the Cindy Sherman retro. And it’s even more wonderful in person. Now that is a very nice Xmas tree. Got me in the mood singlehandedly. But what has really made Xmas feel like itself is your miraculous discovery of a UK Xmas attraction fiasco. I was worried you guys had sadly not added to your legacy this year. Thank you a billion for alerting me. Everyone, If you’re like _Black_Acrylic and me and find nothing more Xmas-y festive than a good old fashioned holiday-related, UK-based rip off, you’ll want to know about ‘Creepy’ drive-through grotto ‘an absolute fiasco’. ** Steve Erickson, Expanding battery, eek. Look forward to your top ten. ** Brian O’Connell, Hi, Brian. Thank you kindly bud. I was kind of right! I love when thats happens. Ah, gotcha, re: ‘Salo’. The original ‘Funny games’ is a good substitute. I’m a Haneke fan. I usually don’t like being blatantly manipulated, but he gets a pass. Congrats on getting ‘The Kindly Ones’ under your belt. I have a feeling that its unwieldily length will forever ward me off it. ‘Black Christmas’: my thumb, like yours, jets upwards. My weekend wasn’t any great shakes, but it wasn’t bad. Some writer/reader friends in the States have started this ‘book club’ kind of thing, except ‘short story club’, and we had our Zoom meeting to talk about our assignment, which was David Foster Wallace’s ‘Girl With Curious Hair’. That was fun. And I met up with friends and took long walks and tried unsuccessfully to de-procrastinate about some due assignments, and that was the whole ball of wax. How’s your week looking? ** Right. Today you get a quite old (maybe 10, 11 years) zombie post from my blog’s previous, murdered incarnation. Why this post? I don’t know. Whim? See you tomorrow.

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Roman Signer Room with Christ­mas Tree (2010)
A dec­o­rated tree, which runs on an engine, cre­at­ing its own orna­ments. It then spins at high speed causing the ornaments to fly away and destroy the walls.

 

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Olaf Breuning Snow Drawing (2014)

 

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Charles Ray Shoe Tie (2012)

 

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Great Sky Gifts Chirpee Singing Christmas Ornament (1976)
This vintage Christmas decoration plays a repeating chirping bird sound. Want to buy this?

 

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Cameron Jamie & The Melvins Kranky Klaus (2003)
In the snowbound villages of central Austria on 6 December, villagers congregate in homes to await a visit by a benign St Nicholas bearing seasonal gifts. They are also waiting for the Krampus, strange mythical beasts with shaggy coats and serious attitude. As St Nicholas rewards the good, so the Krampus punish the bad. Kranky Klaus tracks a herd of Krampus as they work their way through the village mauling and menacing to the very limits of acceptable intimidation.

Watch it here

 

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Katie Paterson History of Darkness (2010-ongoing)
History of Darkness is an infinite slide archive; a life-long project, it will eventually contain hundreds upon thousands of images of darkness from different times/places in the history of the Universe, spanning billions of years. Each image handwritten with its distance from earth in light years, and arranged from one to infinity.

 

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Various Santa Claus (20??)

 

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Keegan McHargue Boot (2010)

 

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Jeffrey Mandel Elves (1989)
There’s ONE elf! Not only that, but they didn’t use a kid or dwarf wearing a suit, they go and make top and bottom halves. You would think it was done that way so the elf could have all sorts of neat facial expressions, but it can barely move. Kirsten, Amy, and Brooke have this weird ceremony in the woods and bring the elf back to life. Soon Santa’s little killer is knocking off bit part actors, including a department store Santa. Hot on the heels of that death toll are the Nazis though, grandfather’s old friends know the elf was resurrected and want to help it mate with Kirsten. Nazis created the elf, and a perfect virgin will give birth to Aryans after it lays her. Mike takes over as the department store Santa and has something for Kirsten. The girls have a sleepover in the department store where Kirsten works. Mike shows up, the Nazis show up, and of course the elf shows up. After that Mike rushes around learning about the Nazis’ secret elf program to save Kirsten.

 

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Gary Hume Back of a Snowman (2002)
The 10-foot-tall, half-ton, faceless snowman stands outdoors. Hume has described the snowman as “the perfect sculpture, viewable from all sides, immaculate from all angles.”

 

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Ryoji Ikeda Spectra (2014)

 

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Alan Sailer War on Christmas (2012)
First, you may have noticed I like color, maybe a little too much. The gelatin gives me another color to play with. Second, the gelatin acts as a flexible medium to absorb energy from the pellet and transmit it to the item (in this case Christmas bulbs). The result is a pattern as the bulb breaks into little pieces.

 

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Gregory Markopoulos Christmas USA (1949)
Christmas U.S.A is not a primarily erotic film, containing no nudity or even nods to the act of gay sex. Instead, the film is a narrative about the gay psyche, surviving, enduring and eventually defeating oppression by the America so lovingly elevated in Post War America. Markopoulo’s looks upon the familial unit with revulsion and fear. Mother is haggard, kid sister is suspicious, even Father with his newspaper looks to his shirtless son in fear. The boy of our narrative wanders a Kafka-esque homestead of conservatism, kept propped up by mothers domesticity and fathers glowering presence. His mere presence, glowing shirtless like a ivory Greek statue, makes the dark rooms glow with eerie brightness, as he rests his head between his masculine arms. He cannot be contained, a ceremony occurs beneath a bridge, perhaps a known cruising spot in our humble town, a clean cut boy holds a candle stick, walking towards another boy, his arms spread like Saint Sebastian, bowing to him.

 

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Ulver Christmas (2005)
We revelled in the freedom of not having to play by anyone’s rules, our own included. With the EPs and all the stuff we did before, we had rules. The Silence EPs had rules because they were all based on mishaps. That’s the whole concept of glitch music. It has to be based on sounds that aren’t intended, in a sense. We also had rules laid out for the soundtracks, naturally, so Blood Inside got a little out of control. We just went all over the whole spectrum.

 

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John Baldessari Christmas (1986)
Acrylic on two black and white photographs. Overall: 37 x 20 1/4 in. (94 x 51.5 cm.)

 

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The critic Claudio Malberti defined painter Luigi Beneficent style as ‘Realismo Estremo’ or ‘Extreme Realism’. Benedicenti replaces the fish and meat that used to decorate the dining rooms of the leisure class with contemporary Italian patisserie, ice cream and classy drinks.

 

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Mike Kelley Toy Santa Claus (1993)
Color Photograph 9 1.4 x 6 inches 1993 Limited Edition of 100 *Stamped ‘MK 1993’ en Verso Provenance: Ikon Ltd. Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

 

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America’s Tallest Singing Christmas Tree (2015)
High School Choir Performs as 67 Foot ‘Singing Christmas Tree’

 

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Richard Billingham Fishtank (1998, excerpt)
A high-rise council flat in the Midlands at Christmas. The father, the mother, the brother. Some animals. The father drinks a lot, the brother plays around a bit, the mother holds everything together. The older brother films them with his handycam – closely, slowly, intently, recording whatever is going on.

 

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Adam Parker Smith Pump (2011)

 

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John Armleder Untitled, 1985-2014 (2014)
Location: Neuretstrasse, at the edge of the forest behind The Alpina Gstaad

 

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Karen Kilimnik Switzerland, the Pink Panther & Peter Sellers & Boris & Natasha in Siberia (1991)
stuffed animals, fondue pot, toe shoes, pine bow, artificial snow, candy bars, pine cone with glitter, paper lace doily, bell, two drawings, mylar, cellophane, reindeer, masking tape and decals

 

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Tokujin Yoshioka The Snow (2010)
The material is feather, which I believe is the lightest material of the present day. The snowscape created with the feather would be more like the memory of snow lying with people rather than the actual snow.

 

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Per-Ingvar Tomren & Magne Steinsvoll O’Hellige Jul! (2013)
Coming from a group of enthusiastic Norwegian amateurs, O’Hellige Jul takes place in a small town the days before Christmas. Norway’s horror scene is still in its infancy, which means that mainstream movies play safe and independent movies are the ones pushing the envelope. No horror movies with two, three or four million dollars budgets have tried to be innovative in Norway so far, and O’Hellige Jul therefore joins the ranks of movies that are produced on shoestring budgets but still manages to go beyond most of what’s been seen before (FYI, a Norwegian shoestring budget could be 5 or 15.000 dollars, not the 300.000 dollars Americans call low budget).

 

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Polly Apfelbaum The Dwarves w/o Snow White (1992)
Apfelbaum paints with dyes on rectangles of crushed velvet that are then folded, showing the underlying layers of colors, and placed on cardboard boxes. The boxes function as pedestals for the painted velvet.

 

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Unknown Godzilla Christmas Tree (2011)
Photos surfaced online last year of this huge Godzilla Christmas Tree in the Aqua City Odaiba shopping mall in Japan. There aren’t really any other details about the holiday display.

 

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Paul McCarthy TRANS gum (2006)
TRANS gum is an edible image of Santa Claus individually hand silk-screened onto an eight-by-ten inch piece of chewing gum. The image is one of a special series of drawings by Paul McCarthy made specifically for the cover of TRANS> 8. By transforming the traditionally sanctified icon of a happy Santa Claus into a demented, sexual image—as seen in his video performances Tokyo Santa (1996) and Santa Chocolate Shop (1997)—Paul McCarthy examines the distressed state of the human psyche. Often staged as an act of violence and a perversion of certain behavioral patterns, his performances always combine such devices as irony, exaggeration, and the grotesque. Translated for the first time onto a pink, sugary, odoriferous, oversized stick of bubble gum.

 

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Pierre Huyghe L’Expédition Scintillante (2002)
“Like a lot of people in my generation, I’m interested in the notion of the departure point- in something that is a potential scenario rather than a plan- but that’s a process of suspension. Still, I like the format of the parable and, as I was saying, it’s really a haiku: it’s a very short way to express something, more to do with a poem than a novel.” — Pierre Huyghe

 

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bd594 Christmas Jumper (1998)
A video was posted by YouTube user bd594 from Toronto, Canada, over the weekend. Not only does the knit from Goodwill feature a festive tartan, it is adorned with a tinsel Christmas tree and is attached to a working toy train set which has also been decorated with cheap LED lights.

 

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Various Xmas Gifts (20??)

 

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Merry Xmas From 3D Porn Star Vivian Extreme

 

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William O’Brien Untitled, 2020
‘In 1817 The Society of the Separatists of Zoar, or Zoarites, arrived in Ohio. Together 200 separatists emigrated from Württemberg, in southwestern Germany, fleeing religious oppression from the dominate Lutheran church. They wanted to practice a simpler form of Christianity based on the writings of Jakob Böhme, a unique Lutheran Protestant theologian, philosopher, and mystic. Böhme’s concerns concentrated on sin, evil and redemption, however breaking with church was his questioning of the Fall of Man, contending a condition of reaching God, was for man to first pass through hell. Divine life being dependent on time spent with shame.’

 

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Françoise Sullivan Danse dans la neige (1948)
Danse dans la neige was conceived as one of a cycle of 4 dances themed for the seasons. L’Été (now lost) was shot on 16mm film by Françoise’s mother while on holiday in July,1947. A spur of the moment invitation from Jean-Paul Riopelle in 1948 sparked the improvisational performance the next day of Danse dans la neige. Danced and directed by Sullivan, recorded on film by Riopelle and on camera by Maurice Perron, only the photographs survive.

 

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Carlos Aires Last Christmas I Gave You My Heart (2010)
Engraved kitchen knives

 

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Shimabuku Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere, 10 May 1994 (1994)
‘One day, I thought that if I became Santa Claus in the warm season, I had to feelthat I was in some southern hemisphere country that had Christmas in the warm season. It was spring, and I became Santa Claus in the vacant lot near the ocean, through which the train passed. I was the Santa Claus whom you could glimpse at from thetrain window, but could not look back and gaze at. The glimpse of me was the event that would linger in your mind, because of its momentary impression. I thought it would be wonderful if someone from Latin America or Australia wason the train, and, catching a glimpse of me as Santa Claus, recalled Christmas at home in the warm season. I picked up the garbage in the vacant lot. This Santa Claus in the spring held the bags that were blue and filled with discarded things. Sometimes, I think about Colombus. He tried to reach India, then he discovered America. Where can my “Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere” reach?’

 

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Philippe Parreno For Eleven Months of the Year its an Artwork and in December it’s Christmas (October) (2008)

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yum! Everyone, The new episode of Ben ‘_Black_Acrylic’ Robinson’s rafters-endangering, Cosmic Disco, Electro, Coldwave, et. al.-compacted Play Therapy podcast is the perfect way to rev up your weekend, and it’s here. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. The only Clooney directed film I’ve seen is ‘Confessions of a Dangerous Mind’, and I thought it was awkward and a waste of a great Charlie Kaufman script, but that ages ago, so I’ll try his latest. ** Misanthrope, Will the wonders of the online worlds never cease? $300 a week supplemental unemployment would be great if you’re homeless. Oh, I don’t know, the fuckers in charge will do what they’re going to do, and complaining from the peanut gallery doesn’t make the slightest difference obviously. Yes, brothels were just like small hotels with really tacky interior design. ** James, Well, thank you, sir. May your book have a glorious birth all around. Oops, I thought maybe you were being avant-garde there. I’ll try to find and snip the dash-y things. Bon weekend! ** Sypha, Yes, I saw your blurb somewhere. Am I wrong in thinking that was your debut as a blurbist? ** Bzzt, Hi, Q! I saw the ASAP review but not the Boston one. I’ll go find it, thank you! There was a quite negative review of the book somewhere, I think in the Iowa Review, but it didn’t bother me. I thought it was interesting. I feel pretty emotionally detached from WRONG’s reviews and stuff. I feel like that’s all for Diarmuid. It is kind of nice when the reviewers like the book’s main character though, ha ha. Sorry about your meh. It’s kind of a generally meh time. Oh, man, I hate writing personal statements. I’ve gotten so I refuse to do that unless it’s absolutely necessary. The task of hyping myself makes me go blank. I have to do that for the funding part of Zac’s and my films, but at least it’s about two of us, so I can pretend we’re some kind of third person who resembles a conjoined us. Thank you for writing about me in your statement. I hope my name doesn’t jinx you. Fingers stranglingly crossed that the programs recognise the boon for them that you offer. Great about the new story! And good luck in the basement. And I’m happy your love is going so well. That’s a biggie. I don’t really have any holiday plans. Everyone I know here has gone away for the holidays to see their folks and stuff. So I think I’ll just enjoy the Xmas decorations while they’re up and maybe buy another Buche and maybe give myself a Switch. How are you Xmas-ing? Have a very solid if not even transcendent weekend.** Jack Skelley, Mr. Skelley! Merry Xmas to you, maestro of the written word and old pal! Let’s Skype or Zoom or something if you’re up for it. It would be awesome to catch up face to face. ** Damien Ark, Hi, D. A little bird told me your Zoom event went very well. I was asleep at the time. But I’ll go see if it’s archived. ** Bill, Hi. Yep. I went to two of them: The Mineshaft, which was what one would expect, and Sewers of Paris because it was situated in the dead center of the old hustling strip in Hollywood, and my first boyfriend Julian was a hustler, as I know I’ve mentioned frequently, and I hung out with him frequently while he hustled, and Sewers of Paris let the hustlers (and me) come in out of the cold when it was cold. It was a nasty dive. But warm. But very smelly. German cakes! Do I even know what that would look like? Do they do a German equivalent of le Buche? I’ll google. ** Brian O’Connell, Hi Brian! Something weirder always takes weird things’ places eventually, I think? Or maybe just hope. I know, I know, I almost literally beat myself up at not knowing French and being such a Francophile. It’s moronic, but I just can’t seem to get fluent. I keep having this fantasy that I’ve secretly learned French really well and just have a mental block, and that one day someone is going to ask me complicated question in French and I will spontaneously answer them in perfect French to my astonishment. Brownies and ‘Salo’ are a most curious combination for all kinds of reasons that I don’t need to explain to you. That should enliven things. Thanks about my weekend. I’ll endeavour to make it count, and I predict yours will end in some variation on triumph. Was I right? ** Okay. This weekend I’ve restored an old, formerly dead Xmas show for you guys just to try to help get you in the spirit in my blog’s possibly inimitable style. See you on Monday.