Schoolkids OZ

Jim Anderson found the art, by a French man If I recall right, but may have been found by the kids in one of his mags. I suggested using it on both front and back, designed it, positioned the strategically placed student, under orders from advisers, including Felix Dennis – to obscure the genitals.

Schoolkids OZ – Dot To Dot Do It

Clue: Shiitake mushroom

Schoolkids OZ – Rubert Bares All!

Please read the numbers in the bottom left hand corner, the rugged logic of this epic is only apparent when one reads down the columns – not across.

Here’s the Robert Crumb Rupert Bear strip collaged and hand colour-separated into Schoolkids OZ, done by schoolkid Viv Kylastron. This being one of the issues I helped design, I completed the overlay when Viv left it unfinished. Surprisingly this issue became the subject of a high-profile obscenity case with this cartoon attracting special note.

At first, because the names in the credits did not list the occupations of the accused, everybody listed was prosecuted. When we were all herded into John Mortimer QC’s paneled office there were maybe 8 people in the room all charged with whatever the cops had cooked up. Council worked some legal words and all except the editors, Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis, were able to leave.

I heard Felix talking to Richard at a ’95 Oz reunion in London saying that he’d heard from so-snd-so that the whole court case was pre-arranged by the government to first have the fusty old judge declare them guilty, to give ‘em a taste of jail, eh what, then let them go on appeal.

Mick Farren’s ‘Watch Out Kids’ inspires World Teleport in early hacking scandal

My indefatigable London correspondents R&M inform me that there’s a compact-size Mick Farren exhibition currently on show in riot-recovering Hackney. On the walls is every page of Mick Farren and Ed Barker’s 1972 book ‘Watch Out Kids’ for which I did the cover art, and in the corners a couple monitors with period and contemporary interviews featuring Mick.

Mildly irrelevant aside
Funny this should come up now, I’m painting a thirty-two foot high mural of the view down the valley I was living in in ’74 when Mick Farren visited and memorably said on looking down the burnt sienna and Umber scene of buccolic perfection, “It needs some Vegas neon.”

I think of this as I paint, thinking to subvert the sylvan Vedic vistas before me with a crass blaze of Nickelodeon brash. The valley is one over from the Zen Buddhist monastery, and has its own connections with zen through the library of Allen Watts, which is one of two rain-barrel houses designed by Roger Sommers. Set in a one time ‘deliberate community’ of about six main buildings with various outhouses and built to fool the building inspectors who never discovered the full extent of the habitats grouped in the euk’ knoll on what is now state park. When I was there in ’74 it was a mature 1950′s hippie scene, called ‘Druid Heights’, with Watts, the beat generations’ favorite buddhist Church of England priest wandering around in a robe with a bottle; Roger Sommers, a jazz playing visionary builder, who has in retrospect has become the founder of the Tiny Homes Movement – he studied under Frank Lloyd Wright; Margo St. James the Whore organizer with whom I went on to found the Hookers Ball; The King of Carpenters, a stylish craftsman and his potter wife; and the poet Elsa Gidlow in whose goat house I stayed. In one of two wood shops, lived the landlords son, Tagore, a chippie who went on to be an engineer at Enron, and his girlfriend with whom I got very well, Julie, the classical flautist whom I married. Julie went on to the South Bronx in ’82 and was influential in early Rap.

When I read Mick’s book back then I told him that I had thought of a sequel and would write it. It was from that forgotten story that the Street Lightnin’ Gang (The Graffiti Artists Union, with President for Life, Molly Rodriguez Bode) evolved, leading to the glorious discoveries of World Teleport, that so changed the diesel emissions standards of the world, and leading to cleaner skies everywhere.

My cover art for Mick and Ed's book

Walls: Some of the book. Video: Yippie invasion of the David Frost show 1970, with Mick in full flight heckle.

Exhibition signing-in book

David Wills and Barney Bubbles – Blow Up Oz 12

Welcome to a digitally inflatable copy of Oz 12. Click on an image once, and then when it has opened in a new screen click on it again and it’ll go supersize XXXL as never seen before on the world-wide-web.

Masie P does Bengali in Whitton on a visit to Colin Fulcher’s home town haunts

Masie P. writes: I had a brief stay back in Twickenham last week and had yet another culinary delight from Whitton High Street.  A new Bengali restaurant has opened where the John Greigs store used to be.  It’s in the style of Southall High Street eateries, but a little more refined than the stand-up takeaway.  It is of course, completely vegetarian and non-alcoholic and the food comes in pantechnicon-sized containers and costs pennies.

I took my son and eldest grand-daughter for a birthday treat… eight…  and the waiter was amazed that such a wee child was relishing the chillies in the dhosa.  Takes after her Nanna.

Been painting blue angels all week…  I seem to have a comic-book streak hidden away in me somewhere, that keeps making a break for it.

Barney Bubbles and Barney Google and Barney Rubbles: What’s the connection?

I recently played a compendium of  Vaudeville tunes and heard for the first time a song with a catchy hook called, “Barney Google with those great big googly eyes” which  Barney Bubbles may have been familiar with, he certainly had the googly eyes to match. (Possibly this song was an  antecedent of the search engine Google’s name too.)  He never mentioned that song – but I know he was a fan of  ‘Barney Rubble’  from the Flintstones (he would have been ‘Flintstoned’ no doubt) and their phrase “Yabbadabadoo !” which he frequently used.

.. And here ladies and gints, is the song itself, which seems to imply carnal love of a horse, nabbed from the Wikki entry for ‘Barney Google’, who was the eponymous character from the strip cartoon out of Chicago begun in 1911:

Who’s the most important man this country ever knew?

Who’s the man our Presidents tell all their troubles to?

No, it isn’t Mr. Bryan and it isn’t Mr. Hughes;

I’m mighty proud that I’m allowed a chance to introduce:

Barney Google—with the goo-goo-googly eyes,

Barney Google—had a wife three times his size;

She sued Barney for divorce,

Now he’s sleeping with his horse!

Barney Google—with the goo-goo-googly eyes!

Who’s the greatest lover that this country ever knew?

Who’s the man that Valentino takes his hat off to?

No, it isn’t Douglas Fairbanks that the ladies rave about;

When he arrives, who makes the wives chase all their husbands out?

Barney Google—with the goo, goo, googly eyes,

Barney Google—bet his horse would win the prize;

When the horses ran that day,

Spark Plug ran the other way!

Barney Google—with the goo-goo-googly eyes!

The Shepherds Bush Mob at the Rusoff’s

1968 or more possibly, March 1969, 28 Addison Gardens, watching BBC TV TW3(?) from far right: that’s writer and teacher, with Afghani soft-hat and moustache, Gary Rusoff; upagainstthewall with thoughtful hand on chin is the drama person in a cap, Carol Rusoff, both of whom whom we met at the Front Room Indian Restaurant on North End Road; Rudi, as in the song, takes a hit on the bong; next, with black Trilby embroidered with colorful braid lurks the secretive American draft protester ‘Rod’; all in white is high school teacher in Washinton State, Judi Cowper,whom we met through the Arts Lab crash pad switchboard; with tricorn and a blaze of light sits the Barney holding a torch (what I now call a flash light) probably hoping it would obscure his face; looks to be someone in a hooded mask, lower left, could be Judi’s husband, or it could have been, but wasn’t, the guy from the Moody Blues who lived upstairs, maybe it is Gary’s cousin Barbara(?), or it could be Diney Bercel just before she left for Florence, nope, I think she was there already; and I think that’s me top far-left, time lapse photographer, Wills, in cap, sweater and regalia.

Perhaps Gary or Carol will oblige us with their thoughts.

The ‘Sounds good evening’

Photograph by David Wills Copyright 2011.

Here the jolly fun at Leigh Court is captured during the Sounds Good Evening in 1967 in a photograph by me. Various folk are recognizable, but many of the names are a part of history that escapes me. Lower right is Jenny, the football (soccer) poet, Crispin’s amour.  Jenny and Crispin are still an item, living in Spain I think. No doubt some of these good people will bless us with their mems of the occasion. More than that I’m lothe to conjecture, maybe more words will come as I sleep on it. Was that a good time or what? This was the time we lined the flat in plastic to avoid a repeat of the flying pastry dough on the carpet. It was the primer for all parties that followed.

It is an irrefutable fact, acknowledged by all, that the future Right Honorable Lady Wordsworth, with or without spectacles, is nowhere to be seen in this assembly.

Barney Bubbles and ‘Naz’ Nazar’s well-worn, Inner City Unit t-shirts

David Wills wrote: Hi Nazar, Why do you get so carried away in a frenzy of excitement when you spy a Bubble?  How have the products of Ditchwater Designs affected your mating habits? Tell all, avid arters are waiting. Short or long, no matter. Thanks,

‘Naz’ Nazar writes: Hi David. Great to hear from you. The simple answer to your question is YES! Coincidentally, I’d taken some snaps earlier this week with a view to sending them to you, and here they are.

These are two (well-worn) t-shirts produced for Inner City Unit in 1981.

First t-shirt features a Constructivist design by Barney,

with the band’s name in cyrillic font. The shirt was sold at the merch table at the band’s gigs. I remember raising concerns about the frivolous use of Constructivist motifs by some other designers in the early eighties. Barney’s take on the situation was simple. “We all rip off the same people Naz,” he said.

The second shirt was produced by Avatar Records to promote the release of the band’s “Maximum Effect” album.

The type is taken from Barney’s design for the album cover, where it was originally laid over a photograph of Nik Turner avoiding a swinging light bulb, taken by Brian Griffin. Nik asked me to produce a songbook for the album, and Barney kindly handed me a bunch of spare prints of the Maximum Effect type, without the band’s name over it, which I cut up and collaged into my own drawings (not shewn). Cheers, Nazar.

•••

We got a comment in Russian on this post, which my Polish friend Zeno was unable to translate with ease, anybody out there got any idea what it’s all about?

Пора переименовать блог, присвоив название связанное с доменами может хватит про них?

… international experts assure me that the message is somewhat dull, it’s an ad for a web site, duh.