ultralaser

Steve Osborne, 1983. Another American Gothic parody to add to my collection!

they still use that computer every day

they're still on usenet

they don't know about jpegs and they are THRIVING

A nudist wedding

Picture Scope, March 1956

american gothic ii: electric boogaloo

in the past two weeks i have been in all of these sections, so take this dumb venn diagram idea i believe is true

eddytrix replied to your post: As someone who has traveled extensively across the…

This is a joke, but also I feel really strongly that if you want to experience America in all its weird, creepy, democratic police state glory you need to travel by bus for a while. I have taken the bus with a load full of recently released parolees from a prison in Ohio. I have seen Immigration agents board a bus and check papers in Utica. I have gnawed on vending machine ice cream sandwiches too cold to bite in Rochester. I have watched all the small town Fourth of July fireworks shows along the entirety of I-86. #NightBusGothic is basically a clip show of the best of #AmericanRegionalGothic.

This is the American Gothic. If you’ve never been to the USA, this image sums it up pretty well.

The real horror is that most Americans can look at this image and say “I think I’ve been there”. 

I thought I’d been there, but then I realized that’s a Perkins and not a Sharis. 

Am American, have been here many times in many different places

I, uh, don’t think that’s what “Gothic” means.

Sadly, I live in an area that has stuff approaching this.

Been there. Will be there again someday.

Uh, yall, this is a turn off/highway junction off of what looks to be 95. It’s certainly near Philly (can’t tell by how much, but I think I’ve actually been past this turn off).

It’s not hyper consumerism. Or rather, it’s logistically amped up consumerism. You need the gas stations because you’re alongside a highway, hence the competition.

If people are stopping for gas, chances are they’ll want food, and what does the best business on the side of the road? You got it, fast food. That Walmart truck probz stopped off for a refuel and they’re headed back to the highway.

This isn’t the end of the world. At least not in the sense of the above handwringing.

As for whether this is Gothic, hey buddy pal, this is type A gothicness. It’s a liminal space, a place of transience, and undoubtedly open 24 hour, enhancing the eery feeling.

But, uh, yall, just like…if you’ve ever driven down a highway (at least on the east coast) I’m gonna wager you’ve seen these spots, whether you registered them or not.

also a lot of the unease with this kind of capitalist nexus is how explicitly **working class** it is, like this is truck stops and rest stops all across america, but it is also 82nd and MLK here in portland, two notably poor, working class, ethnically diverse strips

if this was a bunch of high end shops in, like, aspen, nobody would be calling it slightly unnerving, it would be aspirational **aesthetic**

for comparison here is times square today

and here is times square in the 70s

nobody looks at times square now and says it's a blight bc we already gentrified it and now it's 'cool'

This is the American Gothic. If you’ve never been to the USA, this image sums it up pretty well.

The real horror is that most Americans can look at this image and say “I think I’ve been there”. 

I thought I’d been there, but then I realized that’s a Perkins and not a Sharis. 

Am American, have been here many times in many different places

I, uh, don’t think that’s what “Gothic” means.

Sadly, I live in an area that has stuff approaching this.

Been there. Will be there again someday.

reblog if you support denim and hate capitalism

jommunism

white guys in overalls didn't build america

american gothic

Someone on Twitter pointed out to Amy Schumer that she looks like the woman from American Gothic. Her and JK Simmons quickly responded with a photo. 

Fanny Latour-Lambert

Touch Isolation: How Homophobia Has Robbed All Men Of Touch

Platonic touch is crucial to human development and happiness, and this article discusses the damage done to everyone when two men can’t casually touch without fear of backlash, and when the burden of physical affection is solely placed on women.

One interesting about modern Indian culture is that, because affection between couples in public is taboo, hand-holding and other platonic physical affection between same-sex friends is not sexualized or read as a gay act. So you can regularly see pairs of male or female friends walking down the street holding hands, or laying across each other at the park. It’s strange to see how the repression of romantic expression between straight couples has affected same-sex couples ability to express their friendship (or secret romance) in public.

Here are some photos to illustrate the last point.  Check out the guy’s shirt in the last pic btw

She walked screaming out of the white smoke, a black-clad goddess of death, exuding aggressive sex. Her eyes held just a tinge of threat. Her nails, phallic daggers of implied violence. Waist shrunken to a ghastly circumference, her eyebrows archly painted, her long black hair swirling behind and around her, she shocked, titillated, angered, obsessed.

She called herself Vampira.

She introduced every show with a scream, a bloodcurdling extrusion that had to issue out of some cavern too big, dark, and lonely to live inside her impossible 36-17-36 figure. She screamed and looked directly at the camera, a goth Garbo who seized the eye of the audience, refusing to become a simple object of their regard. She seduced them with the offer of a night of B-movies, horror and sci-fi fare, mostly execrable, but seasoned with her spicy sweetness and her undertone of aggression that radiated underneath heavy white pancake make-up.

Nobody could turn off the TV. It was 1954.

Maila Nurmi screamed in a postwar America of chilling optimism, everyday repressions, and awkward silences. She was the child of Finnish immigrants, a runaway in the 30’s who worked as an actor, a model for softcore men’s magazines, and a burlesque dancer. She had a taste for the macabre that led her to delve into the sediment of midcentury America until it yielded its dark treasures. A pin-up model who found herself turned into the 50’s American middle class housewife, she refashioned herself to escape the confines of cultural expectation.

Nurmi had explored the tangled underside of the country since the mid-1940s; an underground gothic land lived beneath the sun- lit world of postwar America. As a young runaway, she performed in a New York horror/burlesque show known as “Spook Scandals” that had called for her to rise out of a coffin and scream. There she had begun to craft the character of Vampira, thinking about how the sexy and the horrific could intertwine, a dance between Eros and Thanatos.

“Dig Me, Vampira” was like nothing that had yet appeared in television’s brief existence. Premiering on April 30, 1954, it became an instant hit in the Los Angeles area. Then things exploded. *****

Vampira quickly reached a larger audience through a Life magazine photo shoot. She appeared on Red Skelton’s popular show alongside Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi. She hung out with James Dean and his entourage at Googie’s Restaurant, one of the few late night spots in 1950s Hollywood. She became part of “the night watch,” aspiring actors and directors that hovered around Dean, the strange and beautiful boy from Indiana who had yet to reach superstardom in East of Eden.

Ratings for the Vampira show shot through the roof in the year to come and Nurmi seemed on the verge of major stardom. But KABC cancelled her contract around the time of the death of James Dean. Despite her popularity, Vampira had spun a web of controversy that entangled her and the station. FCC warnings, a lawsuit by a starlet who thought her career had been ruined by the image of Vampira, and, finally, the end of Nurmi’s marriage to Reisner, a blow to the station’s public relations campaign that had attempted to portray her as a normal housewife who liked to play dress-up as a bit of “horrific whimsy.” Dean’s death, or at least the bizarre rumors that surrounded Nurmi in the aftermath of it, represented the final straw.

By the late 1950s her television career was over; she lived with her mother while receiving unemployment benefits. She appeared in the Ed Wood directed Plan 9 from Outer Space that, while later a cult hit, barely had any audience at all in the first years of its existence. True and lasting stardom never came calling again. By the 1960s, Nurmi supported herself as a tile contractor. Stories, patently untrue, circulated of roles in pornographic films. She became a figure of local legend in West Hollywood, part of a cast of peculiar characters who’d once been famous and now were not.

Vampira disappeared. But she thrived in the cultural underground. Maila Nurmi hung out with the punk/metal band the Misfits in the 80s at places like West Hollywood Vinyl Fetish. She also worked on a book she never finished, a memoir of underside of a 50s Hollywood that stayed up late nights at Googies Restaurant, popped pills, and lived off the warm glow of stardom it stalked.

She died, alone, in 2008.

Perhaps this is all that we need know of her story. Perhaps it’s more or less all that can be known. It’s true that her influence has spread far and wide. There may not be a horror convention where her visage doesn’t influence the tattooed seductress cos-players, not a horror host who doesn’t owe something to her camp humor, no mistress of the night anywhere whose ultimate origin point can’t be traced to this runaway, this late night comedian.

Vampira borrowed from many of the ghosts that haunted American culture, elements never before brought together with the kind of sexual energy and threatening cultural pose that Vampira adopted. She described her character as a monster crafted out of the elements of American history, the terrors of the great depression, and the postwar style of the Beats. She raises questions about everything we think we know about the American fifties.

Excerpted from Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror. Copyright 2014 by W. Scott Poole. Published by Soft Skull Press. All rights reserved. Photos: Collection of the Author

chickenvshockeystick:

[was he making toast when he burned the place down, or was the toast all he could salvage from the fire?  i love the idea of this hapless orc who means well and just wants some breakfast but, oops, hope the dark legion is hiring.]