smegma
negativland
suicide
I drew the cover
On my bike on the way to town after
I beheld the arcane calculus of your
drawing I came upon one of the many
roadkill coons of N19th, speed limit 70,
& was overcome by the sublimity
of yer gory verisimilitude. Why do black
& white drawings seem more "real" to me
than almost any any color photo?
The most current "How to" books on surgical procedures still employ black and white line drawings rather than photography, color or otherwise. The camera is no match for the pen, pencil or brush when it comes to rendering.
That said, I think the Smell The Remains drawing is pretty darn crude.
Note that the album is from 1988, and the Original Raodkill Cookbook from 1987. Have we located the point at which roadkill became "cool"?
(Don't you just love scholarship?)
Mid-seventies The New Yorker published
a profile of a deep-south road-scavenging
redneck-savant replete with boiled possum
recipes. In the late eighties the McLeod Bar,
a quonset hut vending whiskey, guns & chain
saws, changed it's name to the Road Kill Cafe.
The next year Batman, the Road Warrior, Whoopi
Goldberg, Brooke Sheilds & Tom Fucking Brokaw
all bought spreads on the Boulder & West Boulder
drainages thus ending authentic dirtbag culture
& instituting the dawn of the Celebrity Roadkill
Chic forcing me to move to Bozeman, a two bit
pop stand named for a two bit Indian Killer whose
murder, falsely attributed to Blackfeet, sparked
the removal of all the remaining original inhabitants
of the valley of flowers, named for it's profusion of
Arctic Poppies, now gone as well.
Kentucky Doctors Warn Against a Regional Dish: Squirrels’ Brains
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE for NYT, 9/29/97
Doctors in Kentucky have issued a warning that people should not eat squirrel brains, a regional delicacy, because squirrels may carry a variant of mad cow disease that can be transmitted to humans and is fatal.
Although no squirrels have been tested for mad squirrel disease, there is reason to believe that they could be infected, said Dr. Joseph Berger, chairman of the neurology department at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Elk, deer, mink, rodents and other wild animals are known to develop variants of mad cow disease that collectively are called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.
In the last four years, 11 cases of a human form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, called Creutzfeldt-Lakob disease, have been diagnosed in Kentucky, said Dr. Erick Weisman, clinical director of Neurobehavioral Institute in Hartford, Ky., where the patients were treated.
“All of them were squirrel-brain eaters,” Dr. Weisman said. Of the 11 patients, at least 6 have died.
Within the small population of western Kentucky, the natural incidence of this disease should be one person getting it every 10 years or so, Dr. Weisman said. The appearance of this brain disease in so many people in just four years has taken scientists by surprise.
While patients could have contracted the disease from eating beef and not squirrels, there has not been a single confirmed case of mad cow disease in the United States, dr. Weisman said. Since everyone of the 11 people with the disease ate squirrel brains, it seems prudent for people to avoid this practice until more is know, he said.
The warning, describing the first five cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, will appear in tomorrow’s issue of The Lancet, a british medical publication.
The disease in humans, squirrels and cows produces holes in the brain tissue. Human victims become demented, stagger and typically die in one or two years. The people who died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Kentucky were 56 to 78, lived in different towns and were not related, Dr. Weisman said.
He cause of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies is hotly debated. Many scientists believe that the infectious agent is a renegade protein, called prion, which can infect cells and make copies of it self. Others argue that a more conventional infectious particle causes the disease but that it has not yet been identified. In either case, the disease can be transmitted from one animal to another by eating of infected brain tissue.
Such diseases were considered exotic and rare until 10 years ago, when an outbreak occurred among British cattle. Tens of thousands of animals contracted a bovine variant called mad cow disease, and their meat along with bits of brain tissue was sold as hamburger. Thus far 15 people have died of a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy that they seamed to have contracted from eating infected meat.
Most people withCreutzfeldt-Jakob disease are elderly, but the British victims were all young, which alarmed public health officials. The outbreak in western Kentucky has occurred in older people, Dr. Weisman said, “which makes me think there may have been an epidemic 30 years ago in the squirrel population.” Transmissible spongiform encephathies have a long latency period, he said, which means many people in the South may be at rick and not know it.
Squirrels are a popular food in rural Kentucky, where people eat either the meat or the brains but generally not both, dr. Weisman said. Families tend to prefer one or the other depending on tradition. Those who eat only squirrel meat chop up the carcass and prepare it with vegetables in a stew called burgoo. Squirrels recently killed on the road are often thrown into the pot.
Families that eat brains follow only certain rituals. “Someone comes by the house with just the head of the squirrel,” Dr. Weisman said, “and gives it to the matriarch of the family. She shaves off the top of the head and fries the head whole. The skull is cracked open at the diner table and the brains are sucked out.” It is a gift-giving ritual. The second most popular way to prepare squirrel brains is to scramble them in white gravy, he said, or to scramble them with eggs. In each case, the walnut-sized skull is cracked open and the brains are scooped out for cooking.
These practices are not a matter of poverty, Dr. Berger said. People of all income levels eat squirrel brains in rural Kentucky and in other parts of the south. Dr. Frank Bastian, a neuropathologist at
University of South Alabama in Mobile, said he knew of similar cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Alabama, Mississippi and West Virginia.
Squirrel hunting season began last week, and it lasts through early December, Dr. Berger said. He and Dr. Weisman are asking hunters to send in squirrel brains for testing, including those taken from dead animals found on the roadside. A mad squirrel would be more likely to stagger into the road and be struck by vehicles, Dr. Berger said.
The recording and illustration were done in 1986 if memory serves me correctly.
I feel a bit goofy tooting my own horn like this, but what the heck.... I shot the video for "Cheenaroka" on Alan Vega's solo album "Dugang Prang"
It was directed by detroit filmmaker Dan Rose. It's a pity I can't find a site for him. HIS is a horn to toot. Some of the artists Dan has directed for are blues legend Junior Kimbraugh, Iggy Pop, Lorette Velvette, detroit punk outfit The Gories and rock-a-billy legend Cordell Jackson (Dan looked her up and found that she was selling real estate having retired from the music scene in the early sixties. He financed a 45 and video and got her on The David Letterman show, whereupon the Anheiser Busch company saw her and signed her to a multi-million ad campaign for Budweiser.)
The list of his work is extensive. Dan has never made a penny on any of his videos, and in fact has financed most of them himself.
Keep a lookout for his up-coming film "Wayne County Ramblin"(video relaese only most likely) Dan spent 12 years trying to get this film off the ground and has just completed the rough cut. And the soundtrack is not to be missed!
|
negativland
suicide
- bill 6-10-2001 3:50 am
I drew the cover
- steve 6-12-2001 3:48 am [add a comment]
On my bike on the way to town after
I beheld the arcane calculus of your
drawing I came upon one of the many
roadkill coons of N19th, speed limit 70,
& was overcome by the sublimity
of yer gory verisimilitude. Why do black
& white drawings seem more "real" to me
than almost any any color photo?
- frank 6-27-2001 10:21 pm [add a comment]
The most current "How to" books on surgical procedures still employ black and white line drawings rather than photography, color or otherwise. The camera is no match for the pen, pencil or brush when it comes to rendering.
That said, I think the Smell The Remains drawing is pretty darn crude.
- steve 6-28-2001 3:15 am [add a comment]
No darn cruder than old roadkill.
- frank 6-28-2001 5:28 am [add a comment]
I love that drawing. It's literally gut-wrenching, not only because of the Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter in the foreground but the coldness of the Sunday-drive-by scenario and sarcastic knife-twist of a caption.
- tom moody 6-28-2001 12:03 pm [add a comment]
Smegma lead vocalist Big Dirty was very specific about what he wanted for the cover. The way the dog looked, the model of the car and the Smegma lettering. He wanted a pastoral background that looked "as if it had been drawn by a children's book illustrator who had once been a hippy" It's great to illustrate for someone who knows just what it is that they want.
Smegma was one of the first "punk" bands I saw play live. They used tape loops, played guitars with the strings braided together, a Moog etc. to make this strange surf-jazz improv rock. I was too green to realize that they weren't really a punk outfit, that the punk scene was just a wave which they could catch and ride for awhile. They had actually been together since about 1971 doing various projects with the LA Free Music Society (LAFMS) Captain Beefheart's Magic Band (sans Don VanVleet) The Residents, Non, etc.
They used video in some of their shows. Sometimes multiple camera people would be taping the band and the crowd, with a cable feed to "the Smegma mobile unit" an old school bus parked outside the venue equiped with 3/4" editing system. There an onboard editor/director would do a live edit and feed it back into monitors in the club while communicating to the camera people via two-way headset.
Their house was interesting.....every surface was decorated and those decorations were decorated. Layer upon layer of adornment, each riffing on the previous layer. Not a bare spot for the eye to rest on. A cobwebbed old mobile made out of slices of wonder bread and velveeta hung in the kitchen above the cactus corpse garden. The slices of velveeta were covered with poetry and drawings done in blue marker. The living room was wallpapered with pages from porno and cooking magazines and festooned with thousands of feet of recording tape. Someone had rigged the wall clock to run backwards. Sitting on the sofa was a guarenteed case of the crabs.
- steve 6-28-2001 8:49 pm [add a comment]
Note that the album is from 1988, and the Original Raodkill Cookbook from 1987. Have we located the point at which roadkill became "cool"?
(Don't you just love scholarship?)
- alex 6-28-2001 6:03 pm [add a comment]
Mid-seventies The New Yorker published
a profile of a deep-south road-scavenging
redneck-savant replete with boiled possum
recipes. In the late eighties the McLeod Bar,
a quonset hut vending whiskey, guns & chain
saws, changed it's name to the Road Kill Cafe.
The next year Batman, the Road Warrior, Whoopi
Goldberg, Brooke Sheilds & Tom Fucking Brokaw
all bought spreads on the Boulder & West Boulder
drainages thus ending authentic dirtbag culture
& instituting the dawn of the Celebrity Roadkill
Chic forcing me to move to Bozeman, a two bit
pop stand named for a two bit Indian Killer whose
murder, falsely attributed to Blackfeet, sparked
the removal of all the remaining original inhabitants
of the valley of flowers, named for it's profusion of
Arctic Poppies, now gone as well.
- frank 6-28-2001 6:44 pm [add a comment]
Kentucky Doctors Warn Against a Regional Dish: Squirrels’ Brains
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE for NYT, 9/29/97
Doctors in Kentucky have issued a warning that people should not eat squirrel brains, a regional delicacy, because squirrels may carry a variant of mad cow disease that can be transmitted to humans and is fatal.
Although no squirrels have been tested for mad squirrel disease, there is reason to believe that they could be infected, said Dr. Joseph Berger, chairman of the neurology department at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Elk, deer, mink, rodents and other wild animals are known to develop variants of mad cow disease that collectively are called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.
In the last four years, 11 cases of a human form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, called Creutzfeldt-Lakob disease, have been diagnosed in Kentucky, said Dr. Erick Weisman, clinical director of Neurobehavioral Institute in Hartford, Ky., where the patients were treated.
“All of them were squirrel-brain eaters,” Dr. Weisman said. Of the 11 patients, at least 6 have died.
Within the small population of western Kentucky, the natural incidence of this disease should be one person getting it every 10 years or so, Dr. Weisman said. The appearance of this brain disease in so many people in just four years has taken scientists by surprise.
While patients could have contracted the disease from eating beef and not squirrels, there has not been a single confirmed case of mad cow disease in the United States, dr. Weisman said. Since everyone of the 11 people with the disease ate squirrel brains, it seems prudent for people to avoid this practice until more is know, he said.
The warning, describing the first five cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, will appear in tomorrow’s issue of The Lancet, a british medical publication.
The disease in humans, squirrels and cows produces holes in the brain tissue. Human victims become demented, stagger and typically die in one or two years. The people who died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Kentucky were 56 to 78, lived in different towns and were not related, Dr. Weisman said.
He cause of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies is hotly debated. Many scientists believe that the infectious agent is a renegade protein, called prion, which can infect cells and make copies of it self. Others argue that a more conventional infectious particle causes the disease but that it has not yet been identified. In either case, the disease can be transmitted from one animal to another by eating of infected brain tissue.
Such diseases were considered exotic and rare until 10 years ago, when an outbreak occurred among British cattle. Tens of thousands of animals contracted a bovine variant called mad cow disease, and their meat along with bits of brain tissue was sold as hamburger. Thus far 15 people have died of a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy that they seamed to have contracted from eating infected meat.
Most people withCreutzfeldt-Jakob disease are elderly, but the British victims were all young, which alarmed public health officials. The outbreak in western Kentucky has occurred in older people, Dr. Weisman said, “which makes me think there may have been an epidemic 30 years ago in the squirrel population.” Transmissible spongiform encephathies have a long latency period, he said, which means many people in the South may be at rick and not know it.
Squirrels are a popular food in rural Kentucky, where people eat either the meat or the brains but generally not both, dr. Weisman said. Families tend to prefer one or the other depending on tradition. Those who eat only squirrel meat chop up the carcass and prepare it with vegetables in a stew called burgoo. Squirrels recently killed on the road are often thrown into the pot.
Families that eat brains follow only certain rituals. “Someone comes by the house with just the head of the squirrel,” Dr. Weisman said, “and gives it to the matriarch of the family. She shaves off the top of the head and fries the head whole. The skull is cracked open at the diner table and the brains are sucked out.” It is a gift-giving ritual. The second most popular way to prepare squirrel brains is to scramble them in white gravy, he said, or to scramble them with eggs. In each case, the walnut-sized skull is cracked open and the brains are scooped out for cooking.
These practices are not a matter of poverty, Dr. Berger said. People of all income levels eat squirrel brains in rural Kentucky and in other parts of the south. Dr. Frank Bastian, a neuropathologist at
University of South Alabama in Mobile, said he knew of similar cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Alabama, Mississippi and West Virginia.
Squirrel hunting season began last week, and it lasts through early December, Dr. Berger said. He and Dr. Weisman are asking hunters to send in squirrel brains for testing, including those taken from dead animals found on the roadside. A mad squirrel would be more likely to stagger into the road and be struck by vehicles, Dr. Berger said.
- bill 6-28-2001 8:51 pm [add a comment]
The recording and illustration were done in 1986 if memory serves me correctly.
- steve 6-28-2001 9:04 pm [add a comment]
I feel a bit goofy tooting my own horn like this, but what the heck.... I shot the video for "Cheenaroka" on Alan Vega's solo album "Dugang Prang"
It was directed by detroit filmmaker Dan Rose. It's a pity I can't find a site for him. HIS is a horn to toot. Some of the artists Dan has directed for are blues legend Junior Kimbraugh, Iggy Pop, Lorette Velvette, detroit punk outfit The Gories and rock-a-billy legend Cordell Jackson (Dan looked her up and found that she was selling real estate having retired from the music scene in the early sixties. He financed a 45 and video and got her on The David Letterman show, whereupon the Anheiser Busch company saw her and signed her to a multi-million ad campaign for Budweiser.)
The list of his work is extensive. Dan has never made a penny on any of his videos, and in fact has financed most of them himself.
Keep a lookout for his up-coming film "Wayne County Ramblin"(video relaese only most likely) Dan spent 12 years trying to get this film off the ground and has just completed the rough cut. And the soundtrack is not to be missed!
- steve 6-12-2001 4:23 am [add a comment]
check www.waynecountyramblin.com for more on this Dan Rose project
- chavo (guest) 5-10-2003 1:41 am [add a comment] [edit]
the wayne county link
- bill 5-10-2003 2:31 am [add a comment]