WORKINGMAN DEAD: ALTON KELLEY

Alton Kelley passed away Sunday

Psychedelic poster artist Alton Kelley died Sunday at the age of 67. Kelley, who teamed up with longtime collaborator Stanley Mouse (pictured below, Kelley on the left) created some of the greatest psychedelic posters of the Summer of Love, Haight-Asbury hippie scene, including iconic work for the Avalon Ballroom, the Family Dog, Winterland, the Fillmore, and various Bay Area bands like the Airplane and the Grateful Dead. They designed the covers of Dead albums "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead."

Kelley and Mouse helped create the acid-infused look of san francisco in the 1960s

"Stanley and I had no idea what we were doing," Kelley told The SF Chronicle last year. "But we went ahead and looked at American Indian stuff, Chinese stuff, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modern, Bauhaus, whatever. We were stunned by what we found and what we were able to do. We had free rein to just go graphically crazy. Where before that, all advertising was pretty much just typeset with a photograph of something."

CIGAR BOX ART

I love old cigar boxes -- and the old weird artwork that decorates them. The beautiful lettering, and rich lurid colors make me want to smoke a nice Cohiba or Montecristo -- and now that Castro has stepped down perhaps our fearless leaders will lift the longtime ban on Cuban cigars. (Damn, I promised myself I'd be civil. Oh, well.) Anyway, these are some of my cigar box favorites! Smoke 'em if you got 'em!

POST-APOCALYPTIC CAVE PAINTINGS

Gary Panter is great. Blowing out of Oklahoma like a doomsday twister, this guy knocked down barns and silos and blew up big in the LA punk hardcore scene, in the magazine Slash, and later RAW, contributing an often-imitated raw punk aesthetic to an anesthetic world of design. He later became head designer for the cool and weird Pee Wee's Playhouse. I like Jimbo, his post-apocalyptic comic about a man surviving in the future in a poisoned wasteland of cultural detritus. You know, like all of us.


"I was crazy about dinosaurs and art and robots and forced to read the Bible, in childhood. I didn't really read until the 4th grade. I sat in the car and taught myself to read on the OZ books of Baum. Read Swift, Poe and Twain. At 12 I decided it was time to read an adult book and so I checked out Fowles -- The Magus, because it had a minotaur on the cover and I was into Picasso heavily by then. In college read everything by Phil Dick, J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon and not much else."
-- Gary Panter, from an interview at Reader's Voice

Gary Panter website here. Say hello.

FRIENDS TRIP TO FLOATING WORLD

Friends of the Nib rides again! The notorious art gang is shown on a recent road trip to Portland for our opening at Floating World. The crew had a great time, met some wonderful Portland artists, got interviewed on the radio, and had a surprise visit from my family (that's my niece Siena, in the hoodie).
Here we're jamming in the backroom of Floating World. Afterward, we enjoyed some delicious salt and pepper prawns. Thanks, Portland!
Filmed by David "Bear" Lasky

FOTN art jam at Floating World

PUBBLICITA PARMIGIANO REGGIANO

You know how I love Italian food. This is a wonderful Italian ad campaign promoting the joy of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. This classic grating cheese -- also called Parmesan -- has been produced in Italy since the Middle Ages. In the twelfth century, Boccaccio praised it in the Decameron, writing about a mountain of Parmigiano to accompany his macaroni and ravioli.

I found this ad campaign on a great food site run by Bob del Grosso, A Hunger Artist. Any site that combines good food with Franz Kafka (the name comes from a short story by the Czech writer) can't be all bad. In fact, it's quite good. Check it out.

A Hunger Artist, website:
http://ahungerartist.bobdelgrosso.com/

A Hunger Artist, the Kafka short story:
http://www.lundwood.u-net.com/ahunga.htm