Some paintings I’ve done over the last three weeks. They are all painted on bristol board unless otherwise stated. If you want to purchase any of them it is $150 unframed, or $250 with a glass picture frame. Prices on all other ones will be stated below. FUCK YAH…

Send all purchase inquiries to hart@tawdryproductions.com

EXCELSIOR FATHEAD.

JACKIE ONASSIXXXX.

MONGOLOIDS UNITE.

MATING SEASON.

MOVE IT SLAVE.

FAYDRA.

THE SCREAMING TWINZZ.

YOU ARE MINE TO KILL.

CANCER, YOU GOT IT. AKA. CHECK THAT TIT.

POLIO.

SPINA BIFIDA.

WAYNEO.

KLAUS KINSKI.

LICE.

YOKO.

TOTO.

STEVE’S E GO GO GO.

WAYNE’S BROTHER RAY.

THAT’S MOTHER FUCKING IRRELIVENT.

ELEPHANT DICKS.

THAT WILL BE MEOWTEEN DOLLARS AND A WOOF PLEASE.

THE PROFESSOR.

MEET YOUR NEW GYNOCOLOGIST.

The following two paintings are on stretched canvas measuring 20 inches by 20 inches. $150 each.

THE BISHOP.

EGGS.

The following three are on wood.

ANATOMY OF A PYGMIE. $300.  4 and a half feet tall.  1.5 ft wide.  On Wood.

BELLY RUB. $250.  4 and a half feet tall.  1.25 feet wide.  Chipboard.

NO NECK TWO HEADS THREE BACKS. $500.  4.5 ft by 4.5 ft.  On wood.

Below, an interview from an art magazine I bought recently profiling a John Waters art show and promoting his new book role models (A book where he discusses his role models, from anti-fashion fashion designers, Baltimore legends, Little Richard and his moustache, A Manson girl, contemporary art and outsider porn among other things.) Below are the photos from his art show and a few parts from the interview where he talks about the art (the rest of the interview is focused on the role models book, which is good, but it serves no purpose showing dialogue discussing parts of the book without any reference. So I won’t do it!)

INTERVIEWER (italics): I had to laugh at my mom, who walked through your show’s opening a few times last night, eavesdropping on what people were saying. She loved hearing a woman waxing philosophically on one of the stills from pecker about what it was and what it really meant. Mom thought, “You idiot, it’s a picture of a light socket from a film set.”

JOHN WATERS (bold): It is, but it’s for the crew. It’s art for the crew. It’s noticing something that no one else notices and photographing it. It isn’t the normal things people would take a picture of if they were on a movie set. They want to take picture of the actors or of the cameras. They don’t want the tiny little details that only the crew has to care about or notice. I did another series where I photographed the marks that the actors had to hit with their feet. I’ve shown them before, which was the only thing that can’t be in a movie still. It’s art that only the crew sees; it’s clutter, teeny little still life that no one would notice on a movie set.

In rewatching Pecker, I especially loved the part, with regards to art and noticing things, of Shelly (Christina Ricci) saying to Pecker (Edward Furlong), “You’re crazy, you see art when there’s nothing there!” Has that been a blueprint for your life?

Art is exactly when there’s nothing there and only you can see it. Art’s magic. If you go to art galleries all day and you really learn to see, when you walk home, at least for a couple hours, you’ll see something on the street that will remind you of art. It fades; you have to go back to galleries. But then everything you see will look like art, if you learn to not have contempt about what contemporary art asks you to do, which is usually see things that regular people can’t. I did a piece once that said, “contemporary art hates you.” It does. It hates you. If you’re the kind that walks in and says, “my kid could do that,’ or ‘that’s ridiculous,’ because you aren’t giving it a chance, because you aren’t seeing it in a different way. If you can’t see it in a different way, it hates you. You have to stop, and not have contempt before investigation, which most people have about contemporary art as they walk through the door of a gallery. That’s why galleries don’t care if they’re in out of the way neighborhoods; they don’t want people to walk in off the street, because they will hate it. They want people that want to go there; that’s why Chelsea started.

…………

I have a studio. And in my studio is certainly every little thing that can give me ideas. I’ve had the roach things for a long time and I”ve had rats and roaches in my movies. “Decorative” is sometimes the meanest word you can use in art, a real no-no, I did the roach stuff to keep decorators, or the kind that buy art to match the furniture or to put over the sofa, away. Although, my art would fit over the sofa because it’s long and thin, so it’s a joke! I don’t know how many people want to hang the The Process, the giant, scary one of someone who worships Christ and the devil over their sofa, though. That’s what I like’ it might be sofa sized, but not sofa-subject appropriate.

The first Christmas ornament I put on my tree every year is your “Seasons Greetings, John Waters” plastic roach in the clear ornament ball………WIth the “Passion of Audrey Hepburn” and ‘Product Placement’ in particular, you’re manipulating pictures of icons. Are you worried that Audrey Hepburn’s ghost is going to be irritated that you reinvented her with hickeys all over her neck?

No, because she has the most famous neck in the world. If you really like to give hickeys, wouldn’t she be the most ideal person to give hickeys to? She’s so famous, she’s so iconic, she lived in Switzerland, and she had a sense of humor. It’s parodying an image that’s almost sacred, which I do a lot.

You’re definitely the most impeccably scheduled, hardest working person I know. I’ve said in the past that I need to be a little bit more structured like you to get more work finished in my own life. Do your habits come out of something instilled by your parents? Or Catholic school? Or is it what works for you to get everything in that’s needed for your day?

Not Catholic school. I went to private grade school, public junior high school, and Catholic high school. My Father, I think, probably instilled it in me. I look back and think, how did I make those early movies? I took LSD all the time, I went out every night. How did I do them? I don’ remember! Did I go to sleep the night before? But nowadays I’m very organized. Sunday to Thursday I don’t go out, certainly, I even schedule a hangover three nights in advance.

Reading about the bars of Baltimore in the book made me want to go to Baltimore, if just for them.

You can get beat up at those bars. I wouldn’t advise just walking in.

When you’re in SF or New York, do you do a similar bar night?

In NYC I can’t find bars like that. If they’re biker bars, they’re fashion biker bars. If they’re hillbilly bars, it’s hipsters dressed as hillbillies. There are other bars I do go to, yes. The difference is that the next morning there are pictures of me online, posted on blogs that I don’t even know are being taken. That doesn’t happen in Baltimore.

Excerpts from The Western Lands written by: William S Burroughs.

-                                         -                                                -                                   -

A Kansas vet known as Joe Lazarus was the instrument of altered destiny.  He had been kicked in the head by a mule and pronounced dead at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, but was returned to life.  Like Saint Paul, knocked off his ass on the road to Damascus, after his miraculous recovery, Joe Laz knew what he had to do.

He set out to produce a fertile mule.  He exposed horse and donkey sperm to orgone radiation in a magnetized pyramid, and inseminated the mare-didn’t hack it.  So Laz went further: he rigged a magnetized stall and bombarded the copulating animals with DOR-Deadly Orgone Radiation.  He sewed himself into a goat skin and whipped his beasts to wild Pan music-any woman hit by the Goat God’s whip will conceive-and finally he created a fertile mule.

Skeptics pronounced Joe Laz’s mule the most colossal hoax since the Piltdown Man.

“I had it up my sleeve,” Joe deadpanned.

-                                         -                                                -                                   -

As the doctor surmised, Joe’s blind left eye was not blind.  Joe had devised an artificial eye, wired into the optic center, that presented his mind with pictures, often quite at variance with the reports of the right eye.  This was especially noticeable when he looked at human and animal subjects, and he came to realize wo what extent that which we see is conditioned by what we expect to see-that is, by a habitual scanning pattern, whereas the artificial eye had no scanning pattern.  The lens was fixed and Joe had to direct it by movements of his head.  On the other hand, the lens could be adjusted to a wide angle, which greatly extended the range of his peripheral vision.  He found that he could read motives and expressions with great precision by comparing the data of the good eye, which was picking up what someone wants to project, and the data of the synthetic eye.  Sometimes the difference in expression was so grotesque that he was surprised it was not immediately apparent to anyone.

-                                         -                                                -                                   -

On building McDonald’s and Hilton hotels in the the last great Rainforest.

He can see it already.  The jungle Hilton’s…”When Orchids Bloom in the Moonlight” on the Muzak…the bar, with orchids and a tank against one wall full of piranha fish.  The management throws in live goldfish and pieces of raw meat.

The motels and souvenir shops and hamburger joints, drunken Indians, polluted rivers, the gritty bite of diesel fumes.  In front of the Manaos Opera House, tourists pose with a boa constrictor.

Terrible scandal: a big pop star, in a jealous rage fueled by cocaine, grabbed his girlfriend’s Yorkshire terrier and threw it into the piranha tank.  As the piranhas attacked the floundering dog, the hysterical starlet threw a heavy bronze ashtray which shattered the tank, spilling snapping fish and bloody water across the patrons as the disemboweled, screaming dog dragged its intestines across the floor.  Quite a scene it was, and of course there were plenty of camera to capture this edifying spectacle for posterity and export.  It’s the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed.

-                                         -                                                -                                   -

The only way forward is through a hybrid being.

The Zoo Team plunges into an orgy of outlandish operations on the animal subjects…hearts, kidneys, lungs, livers, appendixes are exchanged in the operating room where often six operations are underway, the surgeons passing organs and instruments back and forth, slipping on the bloody floor.  Brains are slopped from one pan to another like scrambled eggs.

“Move over!  I got a pregnant wart hog here.”

Each day, stretchers loaded with patched-together animal cadavers are carted off for autopsy, and some to Recovery.  It is surprising that the animal subjects were able to exhibit any behavior for study after such surgery, but some of them were able to walk, bark, howl and snarl.

There were no meows, since Joe would have no cats in the Zoo, nor any raccoons, skunks, minks, foxes, lemurs or any creature with a high cuteness rating.  He did not want even want to contemplate or describe dubious surgery on these creatures, mute evidence that at one time a Creator with skilled, delicate and loving fingers drew breath on planet Earth, before the bad animal, Man, put an end to creation and so brought the evolutionary process to a halt.

For Man in indeed the final product.  Not because homo sap is the apogee of perfection, before which God himself gasps in awe-”I can do nothing more!”-but because Man is an unsuccessful experiment, caught in a biologic dead end and inexorably headed for extinction.

“All right, boys, let’s cut our way to freedom.”

The hybrid concept underlies all relations between man and other animals, since only a being partaking of both man and animal can mediate between two species.

-                                         -                                                -                                   -

So in his pride of prowling healers, the runty, ugly, half-impotent pathologist finds a big surgeon humping his old lady.  So he frames the adulterous surgeon for prostate cancer and everybody knows there is only one cure.  The surgeon is castrated and his nuts sent down to Pathology.  Holding the nuts of his enemy in his hand gets him hot and he surprises his wife with a real pimp fuck.  He’s got another surprise for her: as she comes, he shoves the severed nuts down her throat.  As the Germans say, unappetitlich.

An excerpt from an essay written by Philip K Dick, the Science Fiction writer.  Really puts things in perspective.

+

What could a man living in 1750 have learned about himself by observing the behavior of a donkey steam engine? Could he have watched it huffing and puffing and then extrapolated from its labor an insight into why he himself continually fell in love with one certain type of pretty young girl? This would not have been primitive thinking on his part; it would have been pathological. But now we find ourselves immersed in a world of our own making so intricate, so mysterious, that soon a man may have to be restrained from attempting to rape a sewing machine. Let us hope, if that time comes, that it is a female sewing machine he fastens his intentions on. And one over the age of seventeen-hopefully, a very old treddle-operated Singer, although possibly, regrettably, past menopause. Of course a time may come when, if a man tries to rape a sewing machine, the sewing machine will have him arrested and testify, perhaps even a little hysterically, against him in court. The leads to all sorts of spin-off ideas: false testimony by suborned sewing machines who accuse innocent men unfairly; paternity tests; and, of course, abortions for sewing machines that have become pregnant against their will. And would there be birth control pills for sewing machines? Probably, like one of my previous wives, certain sewing machines would complain that the pills made them overweight-or rather, in their case, that it made them sew irregular stitches. And their would be unreliable sewing machines that would forget to take their birth control pills. And, last but not least, there would have to be Planned Parenthood clinics at which sewing machines just off the assembly lines would be counseled as to the dangers of promiscuity, with severe warnings of venereal diseases visited on such immoral machines by an outraged God-Himself, no doubt, able to sew buttonholes and fancy needlework at a rate that would dazzle the credulous merely metal and plastic sewing machines, always ready, like ourselves, to kowtow before divine miracles.

Another part from the Lynch on Lynch book where he talks about a deleted scene from Blue Velvet.  It sound’s Aye yi yi yi yi yi.

Although you weren’t required to cut any scenes out of the film, I gather you removed some yourself at an earlier stage. One sounded similar to the scene in ERASERHEAD with the two women tied to the bed. Something about a woman setting her nipples on fire?

Right. That’s one of my favourite scenes, but it was too much of a good thing. I wanna get this scene back, but I don’t know if that’s possible. I don’t wanna reinstate it, but I want it to be its own little piece. It could be three or four minutes long. It was completely cut out. It was a kind of a companion piece to Ben’s apartment.

What actually happens?

Well, Frank brings the guys and Jeffrey to the bar and they have the talk outside: ‘What kind of beer do you like?’ etc., etc., and then they enter Ben’s place. But there was another scene inside the bar where the bartender sees Frank and signals to someone who starts running for the back door. Frank yells, ‘Get him!’ and they grab this guy Willard. The back room can be seen from the bar but it’s sorta separated. There’s a pool table back there and another guy who has a hat with ‘I dig coal’ written on it. He’s this old, black blues guitar player and he’s got a white guy playing with him. And ‘I dig coal’ can sing these songs that’re just incredible. And then there are three or four completely nude girls back there who’ve been with Willard. They’ve been, you know, into something back there that’s broken up by Willard seeing Frank. But you don’t know what the problem is.
Meanwhile, the Brad Dourif character goes and orders one case of ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon L-o-n-g Neck’. [Laughs.] So Frank throws Willard down on the pool table, and he starts talking to him about the fact that Willard tore his pocket and he says to the girls, ‘Come here and take a look at a dead man.’ Willard is, you know, in bad trouble: Frank has him where he wants him, mentally, and Willard knows that he’s gonna get it. Some time. Then Frank goes upstairs. Everybody goes round the pool table on their way upstairs and Jack Nance says to Willard, ‘See ya, Winky,’ and they disappear. You hold there for a little while and ‘Winky’ sits up. This one girl has been sitting there and she strikes a match and lights her nipples on fire and says, ‘You’re really going up in flames this time, motherfucker!’ [Laughs.] And so that’s how it ends.

And the part of Willard was completely lost?

Completely lost. It had reference to….Jeffrey finds the ear in this field. Well, Frank had it in his pocket and he got into some altercation with Willard and his pocket was torn, so he lost the ear and his lucky piece of blue velvet. There are two cuts in Dorothy’s robe. One of them was made to replace the lucky piece - the one that he has in the bar when he, you know, works it. Anyway, all that wasn’t necessary. It actually took away from the scene upstairs in Ben’s apartment because it was, as I said, ‘too much of a good thing’.

An excerpt from the book Lynch on Lynch.

I don’t like to use the phrase ‘political correctness’ because I think it is an invention of the Right, but what does that phrase meant to you?

I’ll tell you what it means: it’s almost an evil, satanic plot! It’s a diabolical thing. It’s this false way of not offending anyone. To be politically correct is to be so sort of lukewarm, and in this weird little spot where there’s no offence committed. It’s like hiding.

An excerpt from Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut.

The widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.

I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives-maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on.

That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.”

How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”

When you are unkind to yourself, you will know no worse, and deserve no better.
Charles Bukowski. ‘Betting on the muse.’

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“His form is ungainly - his intellect small -”
(So the bellman would often remark)
“But his courage is perfect! And that, after all,
Is the thing that one needs with a Snark.”

He would joke with hyenas, returning their stare
With an impendent wag of the head:
And he once went a walk, paw-in-paw, with a bear,
“Just to keep up its spirits,” he said.

+

“As to temper the Jubjub’s a desperate bird,
Since it lives in perpetual passion:
Its taste in costume is entirely absurd -
It is ages ahead of the fashion:”

Lewis Carroll. ‘The hunting of the Snark.’

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“It’s like today when I see kids who go to film schools, and writers who say that by page 13 you have to have this happen, and by page 32 you have to have this happen, and by page 106 it has to be over, blah blah blah. Well, we didn’t have all those rules, and it’s not that we even broke them, because they didn’t exist. Now I think these kids are hampered by rules - not that they can’t think beyond them, just that they don’t go beyond them, because they are axiomatic of what you do. I think there have been too many screenwriting schools and too many books, and people think that’s what they must do. They treat it the same way they treat mathematics, and it’s wrong.

Robert Altman. ‘Altman on Altman.’

I was given a new bed a small while ago. The thing is a palace. And beneath this forthcoming rant is my old mattress. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but sensed it would be good to keep. For guests I suppose. Soon I realized it served another purpose. I spray painted this face on it, propped it up in my kitchen. It is to the left of my fridge in front of this strange abandoned pantry. A couple of days ago, I had absolutely no food, I felt like I was starving, but that would have taken a few more days. When I opened this door I found three cans of string beans. They were from before I even moved into my apartment four years ago. This was a success. I was nervous. But it worked out fine. I use the mattress as a punching bag. I punch the party animal out while I play a best of Patsy Cline tape at full volume.

I’m never angry when I do it. I hardly ever act out of emotion.  Any violence in me is most likely directed at myself.  Although directing violence towards other people is often a veiled way of attacking yourself.  But I have no time for that.  Anyhow, the sense of your physical being and the feeling of your strength growing is a feeling that cannot be denied when you punch a spray painted mattress to Patsy Cline. And when you run head first at the rest of the world I suppose it’s a good idea to have someone to back you up. Even if that person is an appendage that spreads out from your neck and swivels with your spine.

The mattress is canvas though, and it tends to rip at the knuckles. Which is strange. Not the feeling, but the reactions. Sometimes people see a bruised knuckle and a weird certain respect emanates from them. And in other situations, say the library, talking to a very nice lady while your asking about where to find a Federico Garcia Lorca book of poetry it sends the wrong signal. But in the end everyone’s reactions are wrong, though sensible. The nervousness or fear lies in the fact that if someone is willing to say this or do this, what else are they capable of.  But everyone sees the world through their own eyes, and everyone is full of manipulative and selfish secrets and dark passions and dark fears that they spend half their lives trying to hide.  So they assume your secrets and lies must be of a darkness the depths outer space  could never fathom.   But finally I am truly truthful, even if exxxagerating or lying.

This is a major flaw in the understanding of things, though you cant understand anything fully, me or you. If you are a vessel through which you see things, how you relate to things, and you don’t fully understand yourself, then your judgments are lost and misguided.  But the most misguided always seem to have an urge to lead.   Anyways, I’ve made gloves out of old sweat shirt sleeves. I hate that your the toughest if you pretend to be, or the smartest if you pretend to be, or the most sensitive, or the most together, or the most apart. I hate how people care about other peoples perceptions, and how they perceive other people and themselves. You should know whats right, and strive to first satisfy that initial instinct, then worry about the others after, not the other way around.

Anyways, I am deep into the beers, and I’m rambling. This is the Punching bag. His name is Steve Sr., and he feels no pain.

Upon my nipple there is a hair much longer then the rest. Colored all of white as though of the head of Death. I pull, though it will not move, it stings with angry pain. As though it were not mine, but from some elder lions mane. I sense the pain within the flesh, and in its ugliness it is much stronger then the rest. And now it seems so pretty, like of Nicos head of young, you will last much longer, after even I am done. Rising from the earth, like a leafless withered tree. A thousand crows will come, and finally set you free.