The 1960s smashed the cliché of the isolated and introverted artist. Drugs, experimentation, and the search for freedom led troves of hippy artists out of urban scenes and into rural art communes. Artist Michael Fallon’s blog The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America tells the story of one such artist, Dean Fleming. After playing a pivotal role in sparking Manhattan’s SoHo art scene, the painter turned his back on New York to make a life for himself in Colorado. Fleming found inspiration in the area’s Native American culture and mountainous scenery on a visit to Drop City, the United States’ first rural hippy commune. The unsustainable chaos he observed there led him to found a commune of his own, the Libre Community, in 1968. Fleming hoped Libre would allow artists of all kinds to escape the city and recharge. It must have worked, because the commune still exists today.

(Thanks, GalleryDriver.)

—Erik Helin

At one point in the adult entertainment industry’s sordid history, the Internet was considered the greatest thing since the videocassette. The first time some enterprising entrepreneur uploaded a risqué photo must have been like the moment when two lovers with equally shady pasts finally met and, well, fell in love. Now, some ick-flick traders are saying the Internet and DIY porn are killing the industry, according to an article in Halifax, Nova Scotia alternative weekly the Coast. And some of their claims sound eerily similar to those coming out of the print media sector. Amateur porn may be the adult biz’s version of blogging and citizen journalism, and studio-produced porn may go the way of the newspaper, some old-school porn producers fear. The fact that the newspaper hasn’t yet gone the way of the newspaper shouldn’t affect these doomsday predictions. Not in an industry where Paris Hilton can “accidentally” become one of its most successful practitioners.

—Morgan Winters

The 999 Eyes Freak Show, which is featured in the March-April Utne Reader, has caused a stir in St. Paul. Lobster Girl, Samantha X, and the rest of the human oddities in the 999 Eyes crew were supposed to perform on June 14 at a benefit for the History Theatre, but the alternative weekly City Pages reports that event organizers got cold feet when they decided the “carnie/sideshow language” used by 999 Eyes to market its act “was very offensive to people with disabilities,” says event organizer Steven Katz.

It appears that 999 Eyes recently changed its descriptor from “Carnival of the Damned” to “Freak Show,” but still, we’re confused by the confusion: The outfit is perfectly upfront about its counterculture/retro shtick, and it isn’t easily mistaken for a troupe of singing poster children. No word yet on whether A Prairie Home Companion will invite the snubbed freaks to Lake Wobegon for the weirdest episode ever. —Keith Goetzman

This deceptively simple video from Current_TV is nothing more than a split screen shot of people describing each other. The reality, though, is that people’s first impressions and hidden biases are exposed. Explaining the video doesn’t do it justice. You really just have to watch it.

—Bennett Gordon

Order us a double whiskey and put a sad country song on the jukebox. We just learned that music magazine No Depression is about to stop publishing. Its May-June issue will be its last after a 13-year run.

Here at Utne Reader, we’ve long been fans of No Depression, nominating it five times for arts coverage in the Utne Independent Press Awards (including last year) and passing around each issue to browse its smart, clear-eyed coverage of American roots music. We admired No Depression’s trend-bucking moves, like putting 79-year-old Porter Wagoner on the cover, its general avoidance of music-mag clichés, and its ability to take us deep into the back corners of this country’s rich trove of homegrown music. In a world full of guys wearing Western-style shirts, they helped sort out the real deal from the posers.

No doubt, No Depression had a challenging mission in getting its hands around an amorphous category of music, most often called Americana, alt country, or No Depression, that at times encompasses folk, country, blues, soul, gospel, Cajun, zydeco, bluegrass, and various subsets of rock. But it navigated this broad landscape with pluck and verve, attracting a loyal readership that according to its editors hasn’t dropped significantly. What did drop was the amount of record label advertising, a result of “the precipitous fall of the music industry,” they write in their farewell notice.

No Depression was an earthy antidote to the glossy, glib, trend-obsessed coverage we often saw in the mainstream music press, like drinking a quenching brew instead of a gimmicky stunt martini. Looks like we’re going to go thirsty more often.

—Keith Goetzman

Pop culture thrives on novelty, and the concept of the “dancing bear,” outmoded since the demise of vaudeville and carnivals, requires an update. Enter Bearforce1, the world’s “first bear band,” from the gay subculture where men take pride in their great physical size, their manliness, and, most importantly, their hairiness.

This community may now have solved our dancing bear deficit with its own musical representative: The band’s members are straight outta the Netherlands, and you can experience their sound, their fun-loving message, and their chest hair on their website.

I’ve heard some object that Bearforce1 are “not that hairy,” but people have also said I “can’t dance.” Bearforce1’s music can at least disprove the latter objection. Now excuse me while I get up on this.

(Thanks, OutTraveler.)

—Michael Rowe

I liked Juno. A lot. I sniffled when Allison Janney’s character rallied to her stepdaughter’s aid as a snide ultrasound technician waxed self-righteous about teenage pregnancies. I smiled when the two teen lovers ended up together at the end, strumming a cheesy hipster song as the credits rolled. And, though I had to suspend disbelief to compute Juno and her cohorts’ quick, hyperintelligent wit, I bought Ellen Page’s performance and screenwriter Diablo Cody’s tale of a precocious, love-struck high schooler navigating the emotional fault lines of social norms and personal mores.

While director Jason Reitman and Juno’s producers have no chance of nabbing Oscars for directing or best picture, Page and Cody have a real shot at best actress and original screenplay. And they’ve earned those bald gold men. But come Sunday, I don’t want to see them stumbling up the Kodak Theatre’s stage. Why? A) It will unleash another irritating round of rehashing Cody’s stripping career (it’s a contact sport among many journos, especially those in her onetime writing turf and Utne Reader home, Minneapolis). And, more importantly: B) It means we’ll be subjected to another torrent of outmoded feminist screeds attacking the movie’s irresponsible glamorization of the choice not to have an abortion.

As if the purpose of good filmmaking were to toe the party line by littering the silver screen with valuable life lessons. As if characters were supposed to be Eisensteinian archetypes or relatable Lifetime drama queens. There’s a name for that kind of artistically bankrupt storytelling: the after-school special.

Yes, as Caitlin Flanagan pointed out in a New York Times op-ed, Juno is a fairy tale of sorts. It doesn’t crunch the numbers to show that we’re in the midst of an epidemic of state-sponsored abstinence-only education that has teen births on the rise. Or show a harrowing tale of a young woman forced into a back alley by restrictive state parental consent laws. But while Juno may not tell a true story (“inspired by actual events”), it resonates truth, the truth that women—no matter what age—can struggle deeply with the choice to abort.

When the left rails against a movie—and a good one on that—for even fathoming the idea of a young woman shunning abortion and giving the child up for adoption, then we’ve abandoned the ethos of compassion and understanding that’s necessary to successfully engage the anti-choice machine. Juno’s opponents have chosen a faulty front in the culture war.

—Hannah Lobel 

As a young tyke I would spend listless hours drooling over the wares in the Archie McPhee catalog before settling down to my desk and letting my fevered brain run wild. The product of these fantasies was page after page of delirious marker drawings detailing made-up toys such as flying skates, a talking plastic parrot that would fight with other talking plastic parrots using its razor-sharp teeth and Lightning Wings™, and a putty that would change colors and taste like watermelon. I’d take these drawings to my dad and say, “Hey, pops, let’s buy these.” He’d rest his glasses on his nose, examine my art, and then tell me I did a great job. Never did we ever get to buy one of my inventions—which made sense because they didn’t exist. Well, if I were 8 again I would submit my drawings to Wham-O’s Kid Inventor Contest, which gives kids a shot at creating the next toy made by Wham-O—best known for its Superball and Slip ’N Slide. The contest ends March 31, so you have plenty of time to find your markers.

— Brendan Mackie

The cultural history of Brazil is in danger. The roots of the country’s world-famous music, as well as its folk medicine, storytelling, dances, and visual arts, lie in traditions that could die out as the older generation ages. The government-sponsored Griô Action program is designed to protect this endangered culture by finding the keepers of historical knowledge and helping them pass on their music, games, and traditions to a new generation.

In this video, Elizabeth Dwoskin, author of “Slave Songs in Brazil” in the March-April issue of Utne Reader, talks about the Griô Action program and defenders of Brazil’s traditions.

—Bennett Gordon

To hear more Brazilian music from the members of Griô Action, click on the links below. 

Listen Now:

 Lullaby: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

Listen Now:

 More music: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A music instructor and guitar shop owner in Vermont uses the popular video game Guitar Hero as a part of his lessons, not only because it gets kids interested but also, as Dan Bolles reports in the alternative weekly Seven Days, because it instills the player with a sense of rhythmic timing and a subconscious recognition of melody lines. “Essentially, what players see as little colored dots scrolling down a TV screen are actually a form of guitar tablature,” Bolles writes. “And when you connect those dots, you’ve got the makings of a real guitar player.”

Normally, I don’t buy these arguments about the vast benefits of video games (hand-eye coordination, anyone?), but this is the theory being put into practice by real music teachers. If only they’d had Saxophone Hero when I was in sixth-grade band.

—Jason Ericson

During World War I, a British soldier known only by his initials, JM, kept detailed visual journals of his life in the trenches of France and Belgium. The journals are filled with picturesque battlefield watercolors and wartime carnage but can also sport a bitter humor. One image, captioned “A battle in Flanders as pictured by the daily papers,” shows us a well-organized battle. The next, “Not pictured by the daily papers,” gives us a heap of dead bodies against a washed-out, smoky backdrop. The entire sketchbooks have been digitized by the Canadian University of Victoria’s libraries for us to peer through, giving an unprecedented visceral look into a bloody chapter of history.

—Brendan Mackie

Sex. Violence. Rebellion. While these are synonymous with success in today’s box office offerings, films containing allusions to—or, heaven forbid, actual examples of—such behavior were guaranteed a red light in Hollywood after the creation of the Production Code Administration in 1934. Thomas Doherty chronicles the film industry’s last-ditch effort to save itself from the censors’ scissors in his new book, Hollywood’s Censor, and in an excerpt published in Reason.

The Production Code Administration was tasked with upholding the film industry’s self-inflicted Decency Code. Producers and directors had generally ignored the code, but with a major boycott spearheaded by the Catholic Legion of Decency draining box office coffers, and with Roosevelt’s New Deal regulatory paroxysms pointing west, Hollywood producers knelt at the feet of censorship and kissed the insipid ring of values-based entertainment by agreeing to self-regulate film content.

—Morgan Winters

You may not have heard of the most popular, and perhaps most violent, Brazilian film of all time. Tropa de Elite, which came out last year in Brazil and is now in limited release in the United States, follows Captain Nascimento of BOPE, an elite military police battalion, as he prepares Rio de Janeiro for an upcoming visit from the pope. This involves the gruesome torture and murder of countless Rio residents, suspected drug dealers, and crooked cops. The film has been widely criticized for its depiction of brutality against civilians and its seeming advocacy of vigilante violence.

In an article for In These Times, Homes Wilson examines the film and the political undertones of its stunning popularity. The problem with Tropa, Wilson believes, is that the consequences of its gratuitous violence are ambiguous. Whether it is interpreted as destructively immoral, as director José Padilha intended, or as a necessary evil in Brazil’s war on drugs completely depends on the viewer’s point of reference. “If the filmmakers had purposely set out to weave Rio violence into a fascist propaganda piece,” Wilson writes, “it’s impossible to imagine them doing a better job.”

Recalling a police barbecue he attended after watching Tropa, Wilson describes the cops’ excitement about the film by comparing it to geeks’ love of Star Wars, leaving us to wonder what a Tropa de Elite convention might look like. If Brazilian police view the film’s vigilante violence against civilians, some of them children, as glorious rather than cautionary, then Brazil may be moving in a frightening direction indeed.

—Morgan Winters

Missed the latest episode of Lost? No problem. To get caught up, just listen to the weekly song by Previously On Lost, probably the world’s first “recap rock” band. Or you could just watch it online with the rest of the Losters.

(Thanks, BuzzFeed.)

—Morgan Winters 

Chicago poster artist Jay Ryan explains how he translates bands’ music into art and why cute critters are crucial to the process.

interview by Michael Rowe 

People esteem art for a variety of reasons: beauty, craft, projected cash value. But if what you seek from art is giggle-inspiring panache—just-one-step-back-from-adorable drawings of, say, a bear in socks running with scissors—then Jay Ryan’s posters demand your attention. 

Ryan’s work has been taped, stapled, and otherwise adhered to various surfaces throughout Chicago for the past decade. As the era’s most revered indie rock acts have come through town, they’ve tapped Ryan (himself a musician) for posters to promote their shows. Outside the Midwest’s borders, you may have seen his work adorning the jacket of Michael Chabon’s novel The Final Solution or the cover and incidental art for Andrew Bird’s album The Mysterious Production of Eggs. More recently, he’s been working with Patagonia, the eco-hip outdoor gear manufacturer and clothier, on a series of T-shirts having to do with animals and the environment (contractual promises bar further elaboration, he says). In other words, Jay Ryan’s work is out there, or coming soon, to some kind of canvas near you.   

As for the art itself (check it out on The Bird Machine online gallery), animals and deadpan absurdity abound, along with the stray marks and smudges received during their creation. They’re funny but not goofball, cute but not precious, cool but not pretentious. Utne.com talked to Ryan about how he comes up with the ideas for his posters, what the cartoon animals are all about, and how he’s handling the call of fame.  

Do you think of your concert posters as entertainment?

They’re entertaining for me as a way to be involved in the band playing live. I’m also often just amused sitting there making them. It’s not uncommon for me to be laughing at my drawing table, just giggling at what I’m drawing.

You did the artwork for Andrew Bird’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs, and some of that art alluded to the songs’ lyrics, but do you ever feel that you’re creating something unrelated to the music?

Well, the Eggs album in particular was sort of unusual, in that Andrew didn’t tell me specifically what he wanted, but we met several times to talk about what the songs meant to him. So there were concepts that he was coming to me with, and I was trying to find some way to express those concepts. That was a little more oversight than I’m used to getting for most of my work. Sometimes, I’ve got an image that seems like a good idea to me, but I’m not sure that I can really explain why I feel that it’s appropriate for the band’s music. As far as [the posters] being complementary or independent of the music, that, to some degree, is in the eye of the beholder.

Do you have any opinions about the future of album cover art in an industry where CD sales are going down? 

I think there are a couple of things happening. You’ve got mass-America—you know, McDonalds-eating people—who don’t really care about quality, who are delighted to just have MP3s and aren’t concerned with the artwork, don’t really care about the artists, and move on to the next thing. That’s going to be most people, as it historically always has been. 

Then, you’ve got the people who are really into the music, people who actually have an ear for good sound, people who care about the full experience of listening to the band and having an object in front of them. Honestly, I see CD sales continuing to drop and LP sales sort of continuing steadily. We’ll continue to see more and more bands make their albums available as downloads on their websites and as fancier LP packages. 

Like a lot of indie comic book art, your posters feature cute animals acting out human scenarios. Do you see a movement in this kind of substitution and why use cuddly animals in the first place? 

I find more use for cuddly than mean in my life. I’m in a field where a lot of what you see is skulls and hot rods and tits and corpses. A lot of clichés. And, I don’t know, maybe we [artists] are involved in making new clichés. 

When you have a character in an image, it’s fun and slightly interesting to be able to substitute a bear or a walrus for a person. As soon as you put a person there, you’ve got to make that person male or female. You have to have this or that haircut, wearing this or that kind of clothes. People look at that and project: “Oh, it’s a guy and he’s wearing baggy jeans.” Instead of a blonde, pony-tailed woman driving a convertible, let’s make an antelope driving a convertible. That way, I think more people can see what they want, whether it’s putting themselves in that place or being able to decide it’s this or that type of character.

Have you made comic book art? 

I had someone twist my arm into making me do one three or four years ago, and I don’t think it turned out very well. I don’t often feel like I have a prolonged story to tell. The posters are almost like stories, but just sort of one-panel stories, a little more like Far Side comics.

Is there something “Chicago” about your work?

I feel like there’s something kind of Chicago about my whole approach to playing in the band and doing the posters. Chicago, more so than L.A. or New York, is a “put your head down and work” kind of city, as far as these fields. I’m making a broad generalization, of course. 

I can’t speak so much to the music scene right now, but, say, ten years ago, it felt like you had a lot of bands who were really working hard, touring, and not necessarily grabbing for the spotlight as much as trying to make good music. And you get the same thing in the poster world. There’s a really active, vibrant poster scene here in Chicago. I guess I’m one of the bigger names, probably only due to the fact that I’ve been doing this for longer than most other people.

Are you interested in celebrity?

I’m interested in getting my next couple of posters done, so that the people who’ve hired me get their stuff on time. I’m concerned about paying the mortgage. I just want to be able to maintain what I’m doing—keep being able to buy food.

A number one goal for you.

Yeah, food is good.

One of my favorite comments to hear around an art museum is, “My kid could do that.” I also like, “A monkey could do that.” The website Reverent.org puts artistic wet blankets to the test, asking them to tell the difference between fine art and art made by apes. Other fun quizzes ask people to differentiate between priceless artwork and cheap furniture and between William Faulkner’s prose and badly translated German.

(Thanks, Very Short List.)

—Bennett Gordon

The film documentary Czech Dream, recently reviewed in Utne Reader, chronicled an audacious prank in which a fake superstore was created, working a bunch of shopaholic Czechs into an opening-day frenzy. Now a different bunch of Czech tricksters, the art collective Ztohoven, has seized the limelight by hacking into a public TV weather broadcast and inserting a mushroom cloud into a panoramic shot of the Krkonose mountains. Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times places both hoaxes into a long tradition of Czech “tomfoolery.”

—Keith Goetzman