hillbilly epicurean.

I don't "surf" much - normally when I look something up I have something in mind, either very specifically or generally.  There are a few sites that break that mold, of course, sites that I come back to daily or weekly because they're just darned interesting (e.g. BoingBoing, Neatorama, io9, and Uniwatch).  One of those, that may be a bit surprising, is the homepage of PBS.  Why do I like their page?  Well, its great for lunch - you know, articles that can be read in about ten, fifteen minutes and, of course, tons of fireworks for the ojos.  Recently I came across an interesting little feature on PBS that I felt was flat out cool enough to give it its very own, very special bookmark on my browser - specifically, it was the website for the television show Art: 21.  Now, I'll admit - I have never seen an episode (I wonder whether my local affiliate carries it and, perhaps more significantly, why I haven't bothered to look and see when it comes on my living room companion Ol' Brainmelter).  But the website is pretty nifty and has the added advantage of hitting me in the face with a lot of excellent artists who have never had a show in Wise, Virginia.  Geez.  Regardless, one of these artists in particular blew my mind - Mr. Walton Ford.  Ford can only be described as, and I mean this seriously, Audubon and Albrecht Dürer's intellectual love child - with figurative clues from Rodin.  I know.  It is insane.

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So, Bjarne Melgaard - I never heard of him before today.  I know.  Hard to believe that I have never heard of someone with such a totally awesome name.  Well, today I remedied that error - thank-you Google!  Basically, I was looking, as I often do, for expressionist artists to draw inspiration from and bring up at cocktail parties with people who wear primarily black and embroidered flowers.  And, naturally, I found a man who - well, let me quote my friend Wik E. Pedia:

Bjarne Melgaard (born 1967) is an artist based in Berlin.


Melgaard was born in Sydney, raised in Norway and works and lives in Berlin. Early in his career Melgaard created controversial installations referencing subversive subcultures such as S&M and heavy rock music. Currently, his practice consists of an emphasis on expressionistic paintings and drawings, often containing text.

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I remember very clearly the first time I saw that most disturbing of comics, Maakies.  My parents had taken my little brother and I out of town - I was in high school, a freshman I think, and Trev was till blowing his silver trumpet in the middle school band room.  I don't remember which town it was - Roanoke, Virginia maybe, or Charlotte, North Carolina, or any of a million other medium-sized Southern cities with a huge white and beige faceless mall.  We were eating in a chain restaurant, a nice one as I remember, and it was raining outside. I had distractedly picked up one of those entertainment weeklies (as I still do) hoping for comics, a decent news story from an unexpected angle, or at least a crossword.  And then I saw it - a four panel comic that had all the beauty of the great comic strips from the earliest years of that art - Little Nemo, Krazy Kat, and of course the early pie-eyed, newspaper version of Mickey Mouse a la "Plane Krazy" and "The Sky Pirates."

There was, however, a most substantial difference.  Maakies is totally, utterly, completely insane.  It is vulgar, violent, and post-modern - it makes jokes out of life's greatest horrors.  It takes the Platonic, immortal, classic cartoon character and, to be frank, makes it Nihilist.  And it is brilliant.

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"It's noon now and all the mailboxes have been emptied
And all the letters are inside
He counts them, he checks them, he looks for clues and finds
The ones with hearts on the outside." Read the full story »

"Bet you never think it's right
Bet you think you have to but it doesn't feel right
Bet you never think it feels right
Famous-sounding words make your head feel light


Petals getting picked with the love-yous and the love-you-nots
Five years going by, everyone is staying on their side" Read the full story »

I started keeping up with Spookshows.com this past spring - it is one of those simple websites where someone (the Halloween Guy) decided to (A) put together a collection of something cool (vintage Halloween goods and decorations) and (B) make  little money by re-integrating these beautiful designs back into our lexicon.  In point of fact, I'm going to throw three separate but equally important websites at you:

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