I admit to being properly confused by this image for Don’t Cry Brand sweet potatoes. What is going on here? Is it the story of one man losing a game of dice to a sugary tuber, or maybe the other way around? Is the gentleman rolling dice in order to procure said tuber? Are they comparing the consumption of sweet potatoes to illicit gambling? If anyone can definitively explain the imagery here please, leave a comment. Any illumination would be most appreciated.
Lovecraft written by Hans Rodionoff and Keith Giffen with art by Enrique Breccia, is a fictional take on H.P. Lovecraft life, combining it with his fiction. It supposes that Lovecraft’s father actually possessed a copy of the Necronomicon which gave him visions of very real, otherworldly horrors and allowed him to travel to an alternate Providence, known as Arkham, where he was known as Randolph Carter.
The graphic novel has received someharsh criticism for its portrayal of Lovecraft, specifically his sexuality which, in turn, leads to some mis-dated references to events in his life. The authors seem to take Lovecraft’s inferred, underlying misogyny and expand it into a fear of women and sex, turning his creations into psychosexual representations of feminine nether-regions.
This seems only as annoying as the reader makes it, in much the same way that the film Amadeus can be enjoyed as fiction or reviled as an affront to historical accuracy and Mozart’s legacy. Personally, I find it more interesting that the authors felt the need to change the name of Lovecraft’s cat from “Nigger Man” to “Necro Man” in an attempt to seemingly clean up his image. Needless to say that they do not quote his poem On the Creation of Niggers either.
As an arrogant Frenchman, I will not let you tarnish a proud part of France’s glorious colonial advertising past. The tirailleur sénégalais (tirailleurs sénégalais were Senegalese soldiers enrolled in the French army back in the 19th and 20th centuries) on the Banania ad is definitely not eating banana custard, but rather drinking chocolate milk.
I am relieved to hear it. A stereotypical African eating a dessert made entirely of bananas might have pushed the boundaries of social taste in a way that a black person smacking his lips over a tin can full of chocolate milk would not. Chocolate milk! It’s dark milk for dark people!
Banania is a cocoa powder brand still popular in France. Paradoxically, the ingredients never included bananas in any way, but the name must have sounded exotic at that time.
The slogan “Y’a bon” means “It is good” in petit-nègre (literally : little nigger) which is the French equivalent of broken english.
Again, let’s congratulate the French on their progressive stance towards renaming their linguistic dialects.
Due to legitimate complaints, the current Banania ads are slightly less racist.
I was in Dijon a few weeks back. No joke: I stumbled across an entire licensed shop selling nothing but vintage Banania memorabilia. There, I bought a cafe au lait cup larger than my hydrocephalic head with the “Y’a Bon” guy on it. I love it, but let’s face facts: obviously, they are still cashing in on this guy.
No, seriously, thanks Guillaume for setting the record straight. This is the best comment we’ve gotten all week.
A folio detailing my adventures as a house renter in Berlin would be filled with the most curious illustrations of art I have encountered in the pre-furnished tenants I have sublet. You are all, of course, familiar with the giant vagina hanging on the wall of my last apartment in Kreuzberg (the picture’s bad; it does not detail the lurid pinkness of the horizontal slit very well, nor does it show it’s horrifying depth. Trust me on this: skeptical house guests have all agreed with me it is, and only could be, a vagina). This same apartment had a very curious picture of two giant blue extraterrestrials, leaning in for a homoerotic kiss; this proved to be a theme, as the bathroom of another penthouse I inhabited for two weeks in Kreuzberg was decorated with a photograph of the pudendum of another cerule-colored alien, this one a woman, which afforded me many opportunities for excretionary contemplation on the divine nature of Neptunian motherhood.
I have just moved into yet another apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, and I thought you might all like to see the culturally sensitive vintage advertisements and magazine covers which tastefully adorn the kitchen walls.
This is music, at its rawest, most powerful, most visceral. Billie Holliday, her face racked with passion, describing the blue, black, purple faces of lynched corpses, the weight of their bruised bodies held up by shattered necks creaking the cheap cord rope as they sway under a tree in the wind. “Strange Fruits” was originally written by a Jewish scoolteacher who witnessed the lynching of two black men and Holliday reportedly performed the song in fear that she was describing her own end. The Wikipedia entry is very informative, for a change.
Saturday May 26th the VNN Vanguard Nazi/KKK group attempted to host a hate rally to try to take advantage of the brutal murder of a white couple for media and recruitment purposes. http://www.volunteertv.com/special
Unfortunately for them the 100th ARA (Anti Racist Action) clown block came and handed them their asses by making them appear like the asses they were.
Alex Linder the founder of VNN and the lead organizer of the rally kicked off events by rushing the clowns in a fit of rage, and was promptly arrested by 4 Knoxville police officers who dropped him to the ground when he resisted and dragged him off past the red shiny shoes of the clowns.
“White Power!” the Nazi’s shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.
Getting over the price of the initial investment, there’s money to be made in swallowing silver, if the example of Captain Fred Walters is anything to go by:
Argyria is an extremely rare condition caused by the ingestion of elemental silver, silver dust or silver compounds and the most dramatic effect of argyria is that the skin is colored blue or bluish-grey. The most famous person with argyria was Captain Fred Walters. Walters was born in England in 1855 and was a captain in the British army before a degenerative neural condition, locomotor ataxia, prompted his retirement. Treatment for his condition included the ingestion of silver and that regular ingestion caused Captain Walters to turn blue. He subsequently traveled to the United States in 1891 and began a career exhibiting himself for profit.
As time went on Walters allegedly increased his silver intake in an attempt to turn himself as blue as possible. For awhile, he was successful and his deep blue pigmentation resulted in more fame. However his heart eventually grew weak from the constant poisoning and gave out on August 20, 1923. He left behind a wife and a young daughter and his autopsy results, performed in Brooklyn, remain the most spectacular case of silver poisoning on record.
Gather round, dear readers, and you will hear of a time when “giant negroes” roamed the earth. These giants committed shocking crimes. Newspapers from sea to shining sea documented their foul deeds.
Especially the New York Times.
The Times first acknowledged the existence of these fearsome creatures on August 5, 1897. The headline was “Insane Negro Giant in Newark.”
Over the next four decades, the New York Times provided all the news that was fit to print about “giant negroes.”
As a journalist myself, I’m sympathetic: “Giant Chinaman”, “Monstrous Eskimo” and “Colossal Polynesian” just don’t conjure the same mental image.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
