Monday, March 31, 2014

Andy Warhol greets Pope John Paul II/a note on Andy's religion

By Mona Goldwater, Religions Ed.


No one really thought of Andy Warhol as being especially religious when he was alive.  He did, however, attend church regularly.

In an interview with Lee Radziwill, conducted by Warhol and Fred Hughes for the March 1975 Interview magazine, Andy talked about going to church regularly and taking communion "sometimes."


From the piece "Warhol at Home" in Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters by John Richardson (published by Pimlico in England in 2001), page 247:


"To believe the envious Truman Capote, Andy was a Sphinx without a secret. In fact, he did have a secret, one that the kept dark from all but his closest friends: he was exceedingly devout - so much so that he made daily visits to the church of Saint Vincent Ferrer on the Upper East Side of Manhattan... Although famously thrifty, he was also secretly charitable. Besides giving financial support, he often spent evenings working in a shelter for the homeless run by the Church of the Heavenly Rest. It was not soppy social consciousness or guilt that prompted Andy's good works; it was atavism as personified by his adored and adoring mother, the pious Julia."
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ATIT reheated: UFO and a green-faced entity seen at Nike Missile Base in Redmond, Washington

[From All This Is That, March 2005]

By Jack Brummet, Alien Lore Ed.




From a MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) Report. This UFO and alien sighting occurred a couple of miles away from my office.

DATE: June 24, 1988
TIME: Sometime between 12:30 and 2:00 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time
LOCATION: Redmond, Washington
DURATION: Estimates vary, around 7 minutes for sighting of UFO; about 45 minutes total duration including sighting of face, possibly longer

SOURCE OF SIGHTING: UFO Information Service (Goudie)

INVESTIGATORS:
Donald A. Johnson, Ph.D., MUFON
Don Olson, MUFON
Rita Andreeva, MUFON


Four 11-year-old girls who had attended a private Christian elementary school together were having a slumber party reunion at the home of one of the girls on Education Hill in Redmond, Washington. At a few minutes after either 12:30 AM or 1:30 AM they were looking out the window to see if they could find the girl's dog. They were downstairs in the TV room, while the parents and brother and sister of the host were asleep upstairs. They witnessed a craft-like UFO, described as either a domed-disc or two plates put together edge-to- edge, hovering in the night sky. It had white and red lights and possibly faint green lights around the rim of the object. Of the two girls interviewed, both thought right away that it was a UFO (i.e. "spacecraft"), and not an aircraft because it was similar to a picture they had once seen in a book.



The UFO was hovering at about 30 degrees above the horizon when first sighted. It was described as smaller than a house in size, possibly 25 feet in diameter. The UFO moved to the right horizontally about 10 degrees, reversed direction abruptly and moved back in a straight line to the left 10 degrees, moved back to the right 5 degrees to a center position, and then moved really fast straight down. It moved down behind some tall evergreen trees and the girls thought that it probably came down in a clearing in Nike Park, about 3-4 blocks from the girl's home where they were staying. The UFO was reported to be visible through the window of the TV room for a total of between 2 and 7 minutes.


Sometime later, within 15 minutes to a half an hour, two of the girls witnessed a frightening face. The accounts of how the face appeared to them varies. In one account the girls thought they saw something like a shadow or a figure at the top of the stairs leading up to the kitchen. The became scared and hid in their sleeping bags; they zipped them over their heads and lay next to each other. They conversed through the bags and agreed to look at the same time, so that it would not be too scary. As they pulled the bags down from over their heads they saw a dark, mossy green face only about arm's length away. Really frightened, one of the girls pulled the sleeping bag over her head, and when she looked out again in a few minutes, the being was gone. The other girl's account said they were lying on their backs trying to get to sleep and staring up at the ceiling when all of a sudden they both saw this green face. She watched it for about 45 seconds, "and then it just, went away". Asked if it just vanished like it was a slide from a projector or something, she said, no, it wasn't like that. It was just like a real face, but it was green in color and it was looking at them. The second girl appears to be unclear about how the face appeared because she also reports she covered her head with the sleeping bag at one point but can't remember when.

The face was described as greenish in hue, with red, glowing eyes. Interviewed separately, both of the girls said there was something like a dent in one of the cheeks. One girl said it looked
like the "face on Mars" photograph she saw in the newspaper about a week later, while the other girl said it had pointy ears and bushy eyebrows. When asked a direct question later about the pointed ears, the second girl said she didn't remember any ears. If the face had indeed been attached to a body, one girl figures that the being must have been about 3 1/2 to 4 feet tall.

About 10 to 15 minutes later the second girl, who lived there, saw a clump of rainbow colored lights slowly revolving in her kitchen and flashing light all over the ceiling and refrigerator. The first girl made a vague reference to lights in the kitchen but apparently did not see the rainbow-colored clump of lights hovering in the kitchen (the kitchen is partially visible from the TV room, up half a flight of stairs).

The girls became noisy discussing what they had seen woke the mother. The mother came down and ordered them to go to sleep. Apparently nothing further happened that night.

Of the other two girls, they are certain that one saw what they saw but would not consent to be interviewed by UFO investigators. They are unsure what the fourth girl saw. The second girl, the one at whose home the events occurred, reported that she had had a precognitive experience during that previous day, recalling during a croquet match that she had dreamed those exact events some weeks before. She also reports that since the UFO incident she is no longer subject to nose bleeds, which she reports have occurred to her chronically throughout her life and also occur with her father. She also said that a soccer injury to her knee no longer gave her any pain after the encounter, and she attributes the healing to the event.
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Sunday, March 30, 2014

71 year old German woman put in cooler for priest stalking

By Mona Goldwater, Social Mores Ed.


the stalker in court

An 71 year old woman was jailed for 14 months this week for stalking a Catholic priest for over a decade. She stripped naked and danced in front of him on more than one occasion, the court heard, and had harassed him since 2000 with letters, emails, and phone calls, telling him she loved him. On Thursday, she confessed through her lawyer.  The confession left the court with the decision on whether she should go to prison or to the laughing academy.
The woman often left flowers, love notes and condoms in the priest's front garden in Sauerland, North-Rhine Westphalia, according to the Essen, Germany newspaper Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.  She told the court that when she first met him, "It hit me like a bolt of lightning. I didn't know that he was the priest."
After testimony, in the Meschede,  court, she was sentenced to one year and two months in prison.
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Drawings: Sixteen Splats

By Jack Brummet

click to enlarge
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Saturday, March 29, 2014

Painting: India Ink spill (making the best of it)

By Jack Brummet


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Alien Lore No. 260 — Jackie Gleason interviewed about UFO's and higher life forms

By Jack Brummet, Alien Lore and UFO ed.

This is an interview between Jackie Gleason and a Jack (last name unknown), who was guess hosting Long John Neville's radio program November 16, 1958, on New York City's WOR. 
Jackie Gleason was fascinated with aliens and UFOs.  Some people, including Jackie's wife, have claimed that he and President Richard Nixon once viewed the bodies of aliens from a UFO crash at a secret Air Force facility) (See our article Alien Lore No. 225 - Jackie Gleason's tale of President Dick Nixon and "The men from Mars"

Gleason: I got this letter unsolicited and it came from a group (8) of atomic scientists and physicists.
Jack: Could you name the scientist?
Gleason: I can't and let me tell you why I can't. They are still in government employ.
Jack: What does that mean?
Gleason: Well that means they're under security provisions
Jack: What do you mean security provisions if there's a flying saucer there's nothing there reviewing?
Gleason: We're supposed to believe the official dispensation from the Air Force. We're supposed to believe that he's flying saucers are a matter of great national concern then I love the same outfit tells us they don't exist. At the same time they tell us that they do come out of the security provisions and they have several regulations that forbid that forbid government and military from even talking about the.
Jack: But these aren't government officials? You can talk about it?
Gleason: Yes I can talk about it. I can't reveal the identity of these fellows . You know what I did with Willie Ley (rocket scientist) one night on a show called “The author meets the critic”. This was several years ago . Really with giving Donald Keyhoe and myself a hard time and I asked him if I could show him a letter and show him who signed it and where it came from and whether he would let me read one sentence which is all I was permitted to read publicly. I showed him the letterhead and his jaw dropped open. I showed him the signature and it dropped open a little more. And the sentence said quote after 6 years of studying the material in connection with these so called flying saucers we are of the unanimous opinion that these are interplanetary devices conceived and operated by intelligent beings of a very high order."
Jack: Now was that letter signed by very important men in the government?
Gleason: Yes It was signed by an important physicist.
Jack: Are these men that would have been in contact with the president?
Gleason: No no I wouldn't think so.
Jack: So then they weren't big personages?
Gleason: No they weren't top flight men but they were men who evidently had a lot of ability.
Jack: Were they connected with the government?
Gleason: Well they were connected with an atomic enterprise
Jack: But not with the government?
Gleason: Well I don't know but they were analyzing stuff for the government. I wouldn't say that they were actually career man or anything like that, no, but they were hired to do a job.
Jack: Why should then that be a surprise if some kind of scientists or men attached to the atomic research , a private research organization - why should his drop jaw drop open when they stay there are flying saucers?
Gleason: I think he was surprised at first when he recognized the scientist’s name and his standing.
Jack: That he was on the government team?
Gleason: Well he may have been . I don't know exactly what his relationship would have been except that I would be glad to show you the letter sometime. You could figure it out from there. 
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Jack Nicholson moons reporters—St. Tropez 1976

click to enlarge
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The best Asian bootleg DVD cover ever: Break So Bad (a/k/a Breaking Bad)

by Jack Brummet, Travel Ed.

Whenever I travel in Asia, Mexico, or South America, I see these "so bad they're good" covers on the bootleg DVDs sold on the street.  This Korean cover on a Breaking Bad DVD has to be about the best one ever, replete with images from Bryan Cranston's earlier sitcom.


"With the cancerous concern lonely man must use chemistry skill in making most potent of drugs methanphetimen. Danger and serious threat comes to man' s family to bring his to life to serious impact."
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Thursday, March 27, 2014

Drawing: Faces #689 - first skin graft

by Jack Brummet

I want to point out that I actually have no idea what a skin graft looks like. Yes, I know where I could find out, but sometimes it's just better to let your head and your heart run wild.  And not just sometimes. 

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Muhammad Ali talks a suicidal man down from the edge

By Jack Brummet, Heroes Ed.



I've posted a lot of photos of my heroes over the years on All This Is That, including dozens of Muhammad Ali.  But this one. . .wow.  What is more heroic than talking a potential suicide back from the edge?  This is the best picture I could find. You can also see a brief news clip of Walter Cronkite reporting the story below:

 
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Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Poem: Ghosts


By Jack Brummet



1
The scenery whirls by
In a drunken Gaussian Blur
Until I slow it down
And watch it unravel
In a multi-colored, quadraphonic
Parade of flora and fauna
Waltzing Venn Diagrams
Around each other.

2
I quit chasing ghosts,
But once in a while
I look over my shoulder
And find a face in the crowd,
With a sad smile and a halo.
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Living in Brooklyn, 1977 (The Summer of Sam), when the doctors nearly succeeded in killing me

By Jack Brummet, NYC Metro Ed.

My pal and my gal, Brooklyn, 1978

A shot I took from of our fire escape during a Brooklyn parade. The tall building is the House of Detention.
I shot I took from of our fire escape during a Brooklyn parade. The tall building is the House of Detention.

I moved to Brooklyn in June 1977, (The Summer of Sam), and after a couple of months living in a loft near The Bowery on the Lower East Side, we moved for two years to 324 Atlantic Ave. (between Smith and , right across the street from the Brooklyn House of Detention. On July 5th, I experienced a spontaneous pneumothorax that developed into double pneumonia with a fever of 106 one day (the very day the A/C was shut down due to the blackout).

It was seriously touch and go for a few days as to whether I'd make it or not. On July 13th, from my window in Long Island College Hospital, I watched as the lights on the World Trade Center dimmed and went out. And the great blackout and riots of 1977 began. I got out of the hospital three weeks later, in early August.

On August 10th, after a year of terror, they finally captured Son of Sam, and brought him, yeah, right across the street from our crib, to the House of Detention. It was a heady first couple of months in Brooklyn and NYC, to say the least. They've cleaned the place up a tad since we lived there. Back then, people would look kind of befuddled when you said you lived in Brooklyn. And getting a taxi home from Manhattan was virtually impossible unless you paid a double fare. It was a rude and harrowing introduction, but I loved every minute of it and Brooklyn and Manhattan have been part of my DNA ever since.

KeeKee Brummet and Jan Newberry probably saved my life that summer, and for that I'll be ever grateful to my pal and my gal.
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Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Poem: Dreams

by Jack Brummet


I think about dreams―not drifting
like this, but real R.E.M. dreams.

I don't know which is better―
to dream it or see it,

to see it right now,
or to have seen it.

I don't know which is better,
the memory or the thing itself.

The memory can be repeated forever
but loses fidelity like an old record

and the fictions your mind confects
start filling in the gaps

until the memory becomes a framework
for what we wanted to be, or what should have been.                      
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Poem: Robert Motherwell's Reconciliation Elegy

by Jack Brummet

I think about Motherwell's Reconciliation Elegy―
how he charged around his studio,

rolling vast, turgid highways
of black oil paint over acres of canvas,

and the wrong-headed people
who say "my child could have done that."

click to enlarge
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Monday, March 24, 2014

Alien Lore No. 259 - ACLU lawyer George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) lays down the facts about aliens and UFOs

by Jack Brummet, Alien Lore Ed.

A clip from the movie Easy Rider (directed by Dennis Hopper, and written by Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Terry Southern.  The ACLU lawyer and town drunk, George Hanson (played by Jack Nicholson) lays out the "facts" about UFOs, and the alien takeover of earth.


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Sunday, March 23, 2014

President Garfield's ambidextrous parlor trick

By Jack Brummet, Presidents Ed.


He was only President 200 days (with a good chunk of that being mortally ill after being shot),   and is therefore considered one of the forgotten Presidents.

But. . .President Garfield was the first left handed President.  He was left-handed, and also ambidextrous.  He also knew a couple of other languages, and combined that with his ambidextrous hands to be able to write in two languages simultaneously, Greek with one hand and Latin with the other.  He would write a question with one hand, and write out the answer with the other. That was quite a parlor trick.
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Cenacolo di Foligno (The last supper a/k/a sleeping at the last supper) by Pietro Perugino


The Last Supper Fresco by Pietro Perugino (b. 1450, Citta della Pieve, d. 1523, Perugia)

According to The Wikipedia, Cenacolo di Foligno, pained in 1493-96 is located in the ex-convent of the Tertiary Franciscans of Foligno, transformed into the "Conservatory of poor and honest girls" in 1980 after the transfer of the nuns. The fresco was rediscovered in 1845 and attributed at first to Raphael, but recent critics have unanimously agreed it was the work of Perugino, dating it between 1493-96. The idea has also been advanced that it was painted over another fresco of the same theme by Neri di Bicci (1419-1491).

click to enlarge
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Saturday, March 22, 2014

JCBSUP? (Jesus Christ Built Seattle Under Protest)

by Jack Brummet, Seattle Metro Ed.


JCBSUP, a/k/a "Jesus Christ Built Seattle Under Protest" is a mnemonic allegedly used by taxi drivers to remember the order of Seattle streets in the downtown core, kind of from Pioneer Square up to Belltown.  You don't hear it so much now (I'm guessing because everyone has a map in their pocket on their "device."  The streets, south to north are:  Jefferson-->James-->Cherry-->Columbia-->Marion-->Madison-->Spring--> Seneca-->University-->Union-->Pike-->Pine.
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Thursday, March 20, 2014

The end of the line for Tubs, a Seattle graffiti landmark

By Jack Brummet, Public Arts Editor



I'm going to miss this place. I know people are really divided on graffiti, but after living in NYC five years, my time in Bogota and Cartagena Colombia, The Mission in San Francisco, and even in Russia, I have come to feel that, in general, it improves far more than it detracts. Is it art? Of course it is; it's just not the art that might be hanging in your aunt's living room. Adios Tubs

We've known it was on the chopping block for seven years.  Yes, many/most people considered it urban blight; I always thought of it as an ever-changing and wonderful "eyesore."

Tubs, the amazing graffiti sandbox, has finally been demolished, after years of sitting idle, and many years as an ever-evolving and changing canvas for local spray paint artists.  After the hot tub club Tubs closed in 2007, it was scheduled for demolition.  Finally, seven years later, they actually did expunge it from the face of the earth.

We are sad to see it go, since we know it will either be replaced by a strip mall, or the dreaded condo development with bottom floor retail.  It was good while it lasted.  Fare thee well Tubs! On a conceptual continuity note, I went hot tubbing there a couple of times in the 80's, and it was great.  By the time of its closure, it had become a notoriously skeezy hotbed of lord knows what. . .

We wrote this piece and took some photos on our last visit to the site, on January 2, 2012.

In March 2009 The Free Sheep Foundation (I think these are the same guys who liberated the Bridge Motel on Aurora) occupied the Tubs building in Seattle's U District, which has been "slated for demolition" for a couple of years now.  It's become an wonderfully and continually changing canvas for whatever artist or tagger shows up.  Early on, people were outraged by all the painting, but over time, it has become a popular stopping by point.  I think every neighborhood needs a building like this. 

I like what you've done with the place.

I always stop by when I am in the neighborhood, but have never seen anyone at work.  I think they only come out at night?  I believe there is some kind of loophole in Seattle's graffiti law, in which "the authorities" are unable to do anything about the artistic improvements to this long abandoned building.

If you're interested, there is a Flickr group that continually posts photos as the building evolves.  I took these seven photos on January 2, 2012.






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Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Favorite tear-off signs

By Jack Brummet & Mona Goldwater

Pulltab flyers, or tearoffs, have been popular for a few years now.  Here are some of our favorites, from the web and reader submissions. . .

You can make your own online here.

















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Drawing: Faces #676 - seven year itch

By Jack Brummet

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Tuesday, March 18, 2014

America without paint?

America w/o paint? It gets even worse when you think about art..


click to enlarge
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