Thursday, January 28, 2010

Nostalgic Punchlines Episode 2: Tuba Snake

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Consisting of bad jokes, classic film footage, and immature soundscapes, the Nostalgic Punchlines series aims to re-contextualize these elements and transform them into a cohesive vision that accents, derides, and celebrates the communal media memory banks of our bastardized culture.

Nostalgic Punchlines Episode 2: Tuba Snake from Apocalypse Popsicle on Vimeo.


youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaAJJJNLuGc

Audio samples culled from the following freesound.org contributors: Texas Radio Theatre Company, Connum, junggle, nicStage, Robinhood76, bigjoedrummer, sandyrb, J.Zavurek, and payattention.

Coming next for the Nostalgic Punchlines Films Strip Series: Imperialism! Hilarious!
But before our next installment of that illuminated serial, an SF Oliver Audiobooks original story of creative non-fiction. "The Distressing Contents of Last Season" part 1 to be released soon.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Nostalgic Punchlines Episode One

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Nostalgic Punchlines, Episode 1: "My Mom" from Apocalypse Popsicle on Vimeo.


Audio samples culled from the following freesound.org contributors: Texas Radio Theatre Company, harri, Syna-Max, dataset, KorgMS2000B, Benboncan, jrssandoval, and digitopia. The music that bookends the short is by Texas Radio Theatre Company and is a re-recording of some of the actual music that originally accompanied the films of the silent era. This score is called “Sailor” and comes from the Sam Fox Silent Movie Book. The grainy orchestral section was recorded as an answering machine message via cell phone microphone. KorgMS2000B missed the call, but he now owns two minutes of mystery music; I have used it here to help spread its fame and mystery. It's so badly recorded, you'll be convinced it's an artifact from the annals of audio reproduction.

Nostalgic Punchlines
Episode 1, “My Mom”

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

It Came From Skullbrain 2: Group Show, this Saturday, January 16 2010

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This Saturday, January 16, is the second annual "It Came From Skullbrain" group custom toy show hosted by the generous folks at Super7 at the Super7 Store and Gallery. The show starts at 7 p.m. and the gallery is located at 1628 Post St, San Francisco, CA.
http://super7store.com/

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This is my second year submitting to this show which focuses on the artistic output of the Skullbrain community, an online forum for Japanese toys, art, and culture. Skullbrain is a tight-knit international community of collectors and artists. While the majority of artists and culture discussed is decidedly focused on vintage and current Japanese toys, many other international artists are both fans and participants in this growing niche subculture of art collecting.

This year I am submitting two pieces.

First is an airbrushed M1 Woo featured in the "photo essay" at the top of the post. He is meant to be in the early process of moulting as winter shifts subtly to spring. This Woo is an evolution from a winter coat version that I painted about a year ago. You can see the original as compared to my show submission below.
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Winter Wakes to Spring
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My second piece for the show has a lot more resin elements included in it. The toy was originally a Secret Base Bagman. I modified it, giving it the head of my mutant Sea-Urchin creature Uni-chan. Sporting a couple of heads on his left hand and a leaky probe on his right hand, he became the Secret Base Muppet Seijin. He has two small buddies which each wear a mask and perform as part of the puppet show. One is a small Doom Penguin with original skeleton glove mask. The other figure is one of my Melancholy Molly figures from the Fat Lady Crew. She sports the original interior vinyl head of the Secret Base Bagman figure.
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Both pieces will be for sale on the night of the show and online thereafter should they not sell at the show. M1 Woo- $44 Secret Base Muppet Seijin Set- $70

Here's a pic of my two pieces from the last show. These are both M1 toys from Japanese monster shows that I painted with the airbrush.
These two are dressed to kill.
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Christmas Ornament Sets Now Available!!!!

Each set is $15 plus $5 shipping in the US. $10 shipping to the rest of the world.
I will make sure you get these before December 25th. If interested, please email me at apocalypsepopsicle@gmail.com for availability.
I will mark sets as sold as people order. Thanks.

Set A, 3 Fat Ladies
-Pearl white
-Pearl Red
-Clear Green
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Set B, Mixed Pour Pearl Set
-Pearl White Wing'd Rhino, yellow wings
-Pearl Green Wing'd Rhino, pearl white wings
-Pearl White Fat Lady, partial gray wing
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Set C, Mixed
-Pearl white, Fat Lady
-Clear Wing'd Rhino
-Clear green Mori Katatsumuri
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Sunday, December 6, 2009

The Fat Lady Crew: Maintenance Division, Bureaucracy of Death

New Toys from Apocalypse Popsicle: The Fat Lady Crew
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Working for the Bureaucracy of Death, under the official auspices of the Almighty, the Fat Lady comes to sing reluctantly aging celebrities and has-been stage performers into the great beyond by taking their place in the limelight for one final lullaby. Appearing as a hallucination in front of an ailing former starlet, the Fat Lady's underlings will perform a mocking satire wherein the mortal's life is ridiculed. At the proper moment, the Fat Lady will indeed begin to sing, ushering the doomed on to the afterlife.

Many Fat Ladies
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In the performance of her duties, The Fat Lady is assisted by two (natural born) demons that are enrolled in a heaven-sponsored rehabilitation program. I say "natural born demons" as to differentiate from those former cherubs in Satan's fallen host. "Natural born demons" were always monsters and represent the flip side of the angel coin; when creating the angels to be hyper-beautiful, He essentially had to dissect all the nasty bits of hubris and ill-intent and toss them aside into the wastebin, Hell. Living in varying levels of filth, violence and depravity the demons were quite at peace with the internal instability of that dark realm. Hell was a miserable cesspool of perverted mutants, yet the inhabitants were content to live in their homeland and act out those nasty attributes that were central to their Godly creation. The brimstone and damnation era didn't come about until Lucifer's revolt, subsequent Fall and the creation of mankind and original sin. For several hundred millenia,it was their home. Until much like the Native Americans, Lucifer and his boys put them out to pasture on a reservation or else conscripted them into labor camps for decades at a time.

Old Testament God was tough on crime. But New Testament Yahweh has grown soft now that He's become a Father. Kids will change a man, it's true. A newborn baby's tiny fingers and little, adorable toes can quickly force the mean streak out of a once lone wolf.

God's new policy is Nurture over Nature (though he can't find a loophole to reverse that original sin clause). So naturally, His generous nature has led Him to fund several metaphysical non-profit groups in an effort to make reparations to those "natural born demons" who have been so oppressed for all those generations that came after the dawn of man. That's when Hell really started getting crowded and rent started skyrocketing. Naturally, the hellbound reservations for NBDs seemed like a good option to many demons in those early centuries.

Melancholy Mollies
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Melancholy Molly and Bad Baby Banana are two ill-tempered demons whose naturally performative personalities made them a likely fit as understudies for The Fat Lady. Molly's propensity for self-obsessed depressive ranting and compulsive lying were traits that The Fat Lady could hone for the pre-Afterlife chorus line. A slug-like lemonhead of a beast, she is an amalgam of angelic personality flaws. As is His Divine Right, He just mushed together these essences of disfunction, stuffed them in the equivalent of an airtight jar, and tossed it down into Hell to incubate. Certainly an annonying demon, but hardly evil. Ill-willed, yes. Completely blood thirsty and demented? No. Stamped approved for rehab and paroled from Hell in the late 1800s.

More Mollies
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Bad Baby Banana, on the other hand, is a natural slapstick comic. With a big shoe made for kicking ass, he loves to give unsuspecting butts the big banana boot. Unfortunately, following every successful wallop, Bad Baby Banana falls on his own ass. He's only got the one leg, after all. Unlike Molly, God molded Bad Baby around only one unfortunate behavior that was deemed unfit for Angelic composition. Bad Baby Banana likes to laugh when people die. Like farting is funny to children, dying is funny to Bad Baby Banana. But not him dying, you. Anyone, really. "So much left undone," he'd say, choking back a tear, while he visited the newly deceased that were awaiting pre-processing outside the North gate to Hell. Then he'd kick some poor dead sap in the ass, fall down, and just laugh, laugh, laugh. But again, not really evil, just cruel. He is quite aware of his phallic nature and will often wear a hat that makes his head appear quite nipple-like. He enjoys the attention this brings. It amuses him. But still at its root his perversion is of a non-murderous and primarily non-sexual nature, so the Board said he was up for rehabilitation. Released from Hell on Halloween, 1929.

Bad Baby Bananas
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The Fat Lady found Bad Baby Banana's talent for debasing others with a "smile" to be helpful in getting through her case files quickly. While BBB can unsettle the most stoic of aging idols reluctant to let loose that mortal coil, Melancholy Molly helps by being overwhelmingly and blatantly more self-absorbed that even the most selfish, delusional former child stars were left speechless. (Shirley Temple Black, the sands are rapidly accumulating at the bottom of the glass. Just some notice, wear something nice. When? Everyday this week sound good? Between 8am and 8pm. That's right. Like Comcast).


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Never a fallen angel, the Fat Lady more physically resembles the form of a natural born demon, but with the requisite 33% angelic soul content needed to hold rank in the Bureaucracy of Death. Since her Creation occurred after the Fall, she is not technically a hellion and takes orders from the Big Jew Upstairs.

Toys will be available for purchase soon. Some sooner than others, look for the Fat Lady and Friends Xmas Ornament sampler coming later this week.

Unpainted Blue Fat Lady Crew
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Sunday, November 29, 2009

White Teacher in a Black School

White Teacher in a Black School is a book by Robert Kendall, a former teacher in the Los Angeles School District. Published in 1964, the book rose to popularity following the Watts Riots and aimed to show the inequality present in schools primarily enrolled with black students. In fact, the book is credited with helping create standards for high school students in California. However, reading this book in 2009 will give you a different impression. Largely written in the dialect of mid-sixties black students, the text can be seen as a dark (and racist) anthropological vision of race relations in the 60s. Robert Kendall was also an actor in several television series and movies. One notable role is an uncredited turn as "Slave Boy with Pigeons" in the 1956 Charlton Heston classic, the Ten Commandments.

Completely coincidental fact: Robert Kendall died this month on November 12, 2009 at age 82.

This collage re-organizes some of the potent speech in the book while also incorporating images that attempt to tell a new narrative through juxtaposition and correlation. The artwork is on five separate wood panels and is not available for purchase. The other main source for the collage comes from an early sixties issue of the comic book Sad Sack. The rest of the images come from an assortment of print media advertisements and the (now-defunct) Weekly World News. Photo prints available on request.

Also, the cover art is pretty sweet.

black teacher white school

black teacher white school
Panel 1, Text A:
“Real sudden some big thing zipped across the whole place. Like a red piece of lightin it was. Scared the shit out a me and scared my chick too cause she grabbed me and I grabbed her back.
Panel 1, Text B:
And lookin down at that audience I think them all was as scared as us were. Some kind of funny spooky smoke came from somewhere. Then some kind of real giant spooky thing that looks sort of like the lines of a man’s hed comes fuzzy like thru the smoke.”

black teacher white school
Panel 2, Text A:
“He said the blacks should do everything they could to take the whites power away. Hit the whites in the pocketbook he says. Give bizness to black man and not to jew.
Panel 2, Text B:
“Cept when it came to pushin the white man out. Save money and buy houses where white man lives. Go to places where white man eats. March in lines demandin the rights that white man has. All kind of crap like that.”

black teacher white school
Panel 3, Text A:
“It was like his face was movin, like when you get mad, and there was two big eyes all red and spittin fire. Scaryer then any monster I ever saw in any movie. Then it started out talking!!!!!!!!”
Panel 3, Text B:
“It had a voice like come from the ded. It said how he had been a slave in Dixie and had been all beat up all the time but when he had given up the terble life he lived and gone to meet Jesus, Jesus had told him that the white man had to pay.”

black teacher white school
Panel 4, Text A:
“He said the more blacks in the world, the more there would be to take the power from the whites.”
Panel 4, Text B:
“He had told him that the white man was inferior and the black man was superior. He said the devil owned the white man’s soul and it was right for the black man to hate the white man cause evil nasty blood was in his vanes."
Panel 4 Text C:
“Then there was a sound like thunder and that old spook shouted to KILL THE WHITE DEVILS. The spazzes started shoutin it and kept it up like some crazy chant. My chick starts cryin and I dont blame her. I wants to cry too. Its all so dam nutty.”

black teacher white school
Panel 5, Text A:
“The orchestra comes up out of the floor agin playin that battle him agin and everbody was stompin and hollerin and carryin on like they was mad. The spook goes back to where he come from and the old curtin falls down on the stage. The spazzes start movin out, still all whipped up. I sort of just stood there, feelin funny, while my chick went on cryin, till that hell hole was empty. The lights went out finely. But I still waited a piece cause I didnt want no crazy nigger killin my chick cause she is white.”
Panel 5, Text B:
“At last we sneaked out a that old rat hole and I nevah want to go consortin with the devil agin!!!!!!!!!!!!”


EXTRA CREDIT
History of Sad Sack:
Sad Sack Wiki
Robert Kendall's hometown obituary:
Battle Creek Enquirer, Robert Kendall RIP

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Apocalypse Popsicle Printable Postcards

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How to print these postcards in Microsoft Word:

First save the back of the postcard image (located below this text) and print it out on the back of the paper you will be using. This is only if you want to give me credit for making these images. Please do this by placing the image into a blank Word document. Place the image into the document twice, one above the other separated by one line. By printing the reverse side of the document first, you avoid the ink smearing you might experience by doing the Front side first.

Save the front Postcard images to your computer and import them into a normal blank document. You will need to re-size the images using the Picture Toolbar. Maximum dimensions for US Postage postcard rate stamps (currently 28 cents) are 6" x 4". Minimum dimensions are 5" x 3.5". For the Revolutionary Rabbit image, you will have to use the Picture Toolbar to rotate the image in order to fit both images on one 8.5" x 11" piece of paper. Using card stock and a picture printer will work best. Orienting both images onto the same page

What would work even better would be a printer that could make these poster size. If you have one, print me out some and I'll pay for shipping and ink (up to $50 worth of ink).

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