Topics | Dangerous Minds (2024)

02.24.2015

01:09 pm

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You certainly can’t judge a Kindle by its cover as some of these badly illustrated titles are certified Amazon bestsellers—which either means they’re good reads or the author comes from a very large family.

The best thing about Kindle is the opportunity it gives wannabe writers to publish their work, but conversely, the worst thing about Kindle is the opportunity it gives to wannabe writers who want to publish their work… because some of them will.

Then of course there are the Kindle covers which vary from the tacky to the plain bizarre to the truly f*cking ugly. So popular are these bad covers there is even a Tumblr site celebrating their awfulness, from which this small selection of abominations is culled.











More kooky Kindle covers after the jump…

02.24.2015

01:04 pm

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Since he supplied us with a visual vocabulary for cutesy dread over many decades, perhaps it comes as no surprise that Edward Gorey designed a set of whimsical tarot cards. The set is called the “Fantod Pack,” the word fantod signifying “a state of worry or nervous anxiety, irritability” and thus possibly the most Edward Gorey word ever. (David Foster Wallace was fond of the word as well, using the phrase “howling fantods” multiple times in Infinite Jest; the main clearinghouse website for DFW information is called The Howling Fantods.)

Not surprisingly, Gorey’s tarot set is (a) not precisely a tarot set, (b) reflexively downbeat, (c) more like a parody of a tarot set, and (d) utterly hilarious. Seriously, and I know that he is known for this style of humor, but looking over the Fantod Pack will give you a whole new appreciation for the possibilities of the deadpan mode of humor. Why is the “Stones” card so funny, when it’s just a little drawing of three plinths of varying size? Somehow the silly self-seriousness of the project is communicated. The backs of the cards feature a typically Goreyish creature called a “Figbash.” Here’s one now:



Authorship of the Fantod Deck is attributed to a “Madame Groeda Wyrde,” which might engage the minds of those of you who enjoy anagrams. The instructions are as hilarious as the other elements of the set, as for instance:

Interpretation must always depend on the character and circ*mstances of the person consulting the pack. What might portend a wipe-out for a teenage hotdogger from Yokohama, might warn an octogenarian spinster in Minot, North Dakota, of a fall in the bathtub, though, of course, the results might come to much the same thing.

Ahem: “To read your fortune, first shuffle the pack and take it in your left hand. Stand in the centre of a sparsely furnished room and close your eyes. Fling the pack into the air. Keep your eyes closed. Pick up five cards and place them face up in the form of a cross.” Then you’re supposed to read the cards in the following fashion. The center card shows your current situation, the top card depicts “something from the past that continues to affect your future,” on the left is your “inner self,” the card on the right shows “the outer world,” and the bottom card displays “something about to come into being in the near future.”



Every card comes with an evocative list of associated words, and these too are simply brilliant. Unfailingly austere and morbid—nobody’s meeting a dark & handsome stranger in this set—the peculiar word choices only enhance the grim comedy, with bizarre words like chagrin, bêtise, megrims, impetigo, catarrh, inanition, cafard, barratry, and champerty lending everything a flushed air of erudite and anemic horror.

Some sources falsely attribute the deck to the 1995, which is when Gorey made the first set available. Its origins actually trace back to an issue of Esquire in the 1960s. An unauthorized deck was printed in 1969, after which an authorized limited edition of 776 copies was created (750 numbered, and 26 lettered) in 1995. Since 2007 it is available as an unlimited deck; you can get it from Amazon for about ten bucks. Copies of the 1995 limited edition set run much, much higher, though—there are three of them available on Amazon for $450 each.


“The Sea”
January / wasting / loss of ears / an accident in an elevator / lurching sickness / cracks / false affection / vapors / a secret enemy / misdirection / demons / estrangement / chagrin


“The Limb”
February / miscarriage of justice / gapes / a forged snapshot / morbid sensations / a useless sacrifice / alopecia / a generalized calamity / broken promises / ignominy / an accident in a theatre / fugues / poverty


“The Stones”
March / a forged letter / paralysis / false arrest / falling sickness / evil communications / estrangement / a sudden affliction / anemia / strife / a distasteful duty / misconstruction

The rest of this great tarot deck is after the jump…..

02.24.2015

11:37 am

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Richard Stanley’s one of the most fascinating human beings I’ve ever met. He’s a divinely demented film maker, necromancer, and pop culture provocateur with a rock & roll heart that beats time to a cosmic rhythm machine redeemed from some post-apocalyptic pawn shop located at the outer edges of absolute reality. He’s got the widescreen stare of a gunslinger in a spaghetti western and more than a few metaphorical bullet holes in his serape. Stanley’s been through some tribulation, the kind that can pulverize a man’s soul into a million little shards of crystallized dogsh*t. In the mid-90s, while still only in his twenties, this precocious and audacious filmmaker was given the opportunity to make a movie based on his visionary adaption of H. G. Well’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. What followed was a classic example of a young director’s rebel spirit bumping up against old school Hollywood politics and power games. Stanley was not only f*cked over by the heads of New Line Cinema, he was also mentally brutalized by the epically malevolent ego of Val Kilmer who he had cast, along with Marlon Brando, in a leading role. Only days after the start of filming, Stanley was fired and banished from the set of his ambitious and potentially ground-breaking movie.

The whole sordid saga of Richard Stanley’s cinematic trial by fire has been documented in the riveting Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau. Directed by David Gregory and released by Severin Films, Lost Soul shares much of the same dark humor, heartbreak and intrigue of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ill-fated Dune project, as seen in that recent documentary. Stanley, like Jodorowsky, saw his concept appropriated by Hollywood and twisted into something that was to his original vision what rape is to love.



Lost Soul is as entertaining as it is sad and infuriating. Watching studio heads blathering idiotically about a film they didn’t understand and hearing the crew and cast’s disgusted take on Kilmer’s ego-driven subversion of Stanley’s efforts to make the movie his way is a far more dramatic and engaging experience than the Hollywood bomb that was ultimately released.

Eventually, Stanley’s project was handed over to the long past-his-prime director, John Frankenheimer, a hired gun with a dictatorial attitude and almost zero interest in Stanley’s vision for the film. With nothing at stake, Frankenheimer essentially took the money and ran. The film he delivered to the studio was cinematic road kill, dead on arrival. The Island of Dr. Moreau debuted in 1996 to critical jeers and promptly crashed and burned at the box office. I actually went to see it the day it opened in New York City, mostly because of the presence of Brando and David Thewlis in the film. Overall, I hated the movie but loved Brando’s over-the-top, don’t-give-a-f*ck performance. You could tell he was intent on enjoying himself despite appearing in what he clearly thought was a steaming pile of sh*t. I think Brando was also slyly editorializing about the way Stanley’s ideas had been altered and corrupted. He liked Stanley and in my opinion was demonstrating solidarity with the young director who had been exiled from his own film. As far as Kilmer goes, that motherf*cker had blown his cred ever since appearing as Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s hate letter to rock and roll The Doors. Frankenheimer made no attempt to reel in Kilmer’s narcissism and the end result ain’t pretty. Kilmer spends most of his screen time doing a silly imitation of Brando which is both unfunny and insulting. I’m sure Brando didn’t even notice.

I met with Richard Stanley after a screening of Lost Soul during last year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin. A commanding figure with a delicate grace about him, Stanley was easy to talk to and extremely open about the passion and pain involved in creating a work of art that, had it been realized true to his vision, could have been a glorious thing.


Photo of Richard Stanley by Mirgun Akyavas.

I’m not easily impressed by most human beings these days. Few walk it like they talk it and fewer still are genuinely fearless in pursuit of their dreams, willing to take risks that could end disastrously or triumphantly or a little of both. Richard Stanley is truly an artist/warrior and he’s in the midst of a remarkable and well-deserved return to the public eye. Last week, he was the subject of an Entertainment Weekly cover story (good for you EW). The wheel of karma is spinning back in Stanley’s direction and it’s good.

In the few short hours that I spent talking with and videotaping Richard I felt like I was with a dear old friend. Before he left Austin, we met on the patio of the Alamo Drafthouse where I gave him a copy of Geoff Dyer’s book on Tarkovsky, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room and a small bag of medicinal herb from Northern California. These were not rare or expensive gifts, they were very modest. But Richard responded as though I’d given him precious feathers of an ancient mythological bird. His reaction was so heartfelt, so sweet and unfettered, that I was somewhat taken aback as he tilted his head down and gave me a huge kiss on the cheek. This was a kiss I would have expected from my born again mother after telling her I had gotten engaged to Jesus. Richard clearly liked my gifts. “Shall we smoke it” he asked, referring to the packet of herb in his hand, all the while grinning hugely. In that moment, I saw the face of a man whose spirit is impossible to contain, who will live to his fullest no matter what gets in his way. And that’s the ultimate “f*ck you” to the assholes who tried to take him down. I love it when the truly hep cat gets the last laugh.



Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau is currently streaming on Amazon and playing in selected theaters around the world. This coming weekend, February 28, he’ll be appearing onstage at Cinefamily in Los Angeles for a Q&A with the director David Gregory (and again on Tuesday, March 3). You can also catch the film at Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn this weekend, 2/27 and 2/28. For more goodness, you can visit Stanley’s website’s Tera Umbra- The Empire Of Shadows and this one here.

I started the camera rolling and let Richard do his thing. His life story is quite marvelous and he’s practically breathless in the telling of it. Among many things, he touches upon his early videos for Fields of the Nephilim, Public Image Limited, his feature-length cult classics Hardware and Dust Devil, Lemmy and Iggy, fighting with rebels in Afghanistan, his abiding love for Fairuza Balk and his home in southern France where he has a magical relationship to the mysterious Château de Montségur.

Watch the trailer:

02.24.2015

11:30 am

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Japanese juice company Kagom have done the impossible; they’ve created a wearable 18 lbs. robot that fits comfortably on your shoulders and dispenses succulent tomatoes into your pie hole whilst you go about your morning jog. The robot, called Tomatan, holds up to six medium-sized tomatoes. When you feel the need for a snack or suffer from hunger pangs while on your run, just pull the lever and a lovely tomato plops into your mouth.

This is the solution we have all been waiting for.

“Tomatoes have lots of nutrition that combats fatigue,” says Shigenori Suzuki of Kagome.

If you feel the 18 lbs. Tomatan is just too heavy, never fear, there’s also the “Petit-Tomatan” (which is half the weight of the Tomatan). The Petit-Tomatan will be tested out at Tokyo Marathon on Sunday. Should be interesting.

Watch the Tomatan in action, below:

Via Death and Taxes and IB Times

02.24.2015

11:00 am

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Back in 2003, I temp-worked as a secretary in a recording studio. One day the boss comes by my desk and says “you have to hear this.” What he played then changed my life forever. You don’t come back from a song like “A Little More Time.” It sinks its lamprey teeth into your mind.

The artist, “McFlee,” with his backing singers, “Photosynthesis,” had just finished a demo session in which they created this visionary masterwork of…uh… let’s call it Vibratospiritual Casiohop.

According to my former boss, who remains nameless to protect his innocence:

I remember [McFlee] came by and wanted to hear himself on the mic one day so we let him put on headphones and hear himself. He was super stoked. [The engineer] called me in the middle of the session absolutely stunned at the weirdness of the whole thing.

The engineer on “A Little More Time” recollects:

I remember he set up right in the middle of the room with his keyboard and he had about five or six different beats he would cycle through, and he was running everything live, and didn’t want to pre-record anything. We had the girls set up in the hallway for backing vocals. I just remember when he started the song I was waiting for the ending around the four minute mark, and was looking for Candid Camera around the seven minute mark of the eighth or ninth(?) chorus. I knew this was a classic in the making, and regret not having a camera rolling! It seemed like watching him, every “yeaaaaaaaaa” would get a little more animated, and he was getting comfortable about halfway through the song, with more and more vibrato.

“A Little More Time” hits all the criteria for the truest of “Outsider Music.” It’s an earnest effort to create something real and meaningful that breaks every possible musical and lyrical convention with zero self-awareness. It’s challenging in every way, yet holds its own as an impossibly unforgettable earworm. The track was recorded in September of 2003 and I was luckily able to sneak a copy out of the studio. This is a chopped/screwed edit which excises approximately eight minutes of instrumental passages. If you think this is “difficult music” in its present form, imagine it with an extra eight minutes of keyboard preset instrumental breaks!

Some have noted a striking resemblance between McFlee’s vocal stylings and those of Antony Hegarty (Antony and the Johnsons). Um, sure, why not?

Only a handful of people who were gifted dubbed copies have heard “A Little More Time,” but it’s worth exposing to a greater audience. The video, unrelated to the song, approximates what one imagines a live McFlee performance might possibly entail, and is provided to give the listener a visual to enhance the experience. Follow along with the lyrics or don’t. It doesn’t matter. Soon “A Little More Time” will be jammed into your head like a mental tapeworm, sucking out IQ points while lifting your soul to the heavens.

Ladies and gentleman, prepare yourselves for the vibrato stylings and astonishing language liberty-taking of the one-and-only McFlee and Photosynthesis.

02.24.2015

10:50 am

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Keeping pace with our laughably inefficient abstinence-only sex “education” program, the drug education at my school was incredibly patronizing, to say the least. For chastity, we ripped pieces of Scotch tape off of one another; the metaphor became clear as the adhesive wore off—the more you sleep around, the less likely you will ever be able to romantically bond with another human being. For the drugs though, we had a more old-fashioned scare tactics—photos of black lungs, testimonials from former addicts and alcoholics (on video of course, can’t have the kids around anyone who has ever done drugs of any kind), statistics that were obviously skewed to make a joint appear as dangerous as black tar heroin and, etc.

Obviously it was disingenuous propaganda, but it wasn’t nearly as insulting to our intelligence as Smokey Sue Smokes for Two, the fetus in a jar with a doll head that smokes. It’s apparently supposed to teach you something about fetal distress? From a health teaching tools site that sells this abomination (for $163!):

Sue’s motherly instincts are questionable at best. There she sits passively smoking cigarette after cigarette, ignorant of how her vile habit is affecting her baby. Tragically Sue personifies many real-life mothers who don’t see that their choices influence the health of their babies. As Sue smokes each cigarette tar builds up around the gaunt fetal model and gradually tints the clear fetal environment a sickly shade of amber. Sue may not be able to think for herself but she prompts others to do plenty of thinking.

Seeing as even the youngest child understands the body is more complex—and pregnancy more involved—than a plastic fetus in a jar, I can safely say I don’t see this creepy fear-doll working. (And isn’t it kind of insulting to portray a woman as a literal baby-jar?)

02.24.2015

09:08 am

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My education in experimental music came in my college years. Between volunteering at the campus radio station and living in a cheap apartment building in a neighborhood that had historically been a freak magnet, I hooked up with a cadre of students from a nearby music school who were into the weird stuff, and were cool enough not just to clue me in on 20th Century classical, the New York School, atonality, musique concrète, et al, they even invited me to make music with them. Over the course of two or three years, we filled up a metric sh*tload of blank tape and killed a lot of innocent cannabis plants, and it was all time very, very well spent. But seeing this BBC documentary on a late ‘60s experimental music program in the schools of Shoreditch, London, UK, made me wish I’d been from a time and place where I could have had many of those experiences (likely minus the cannabis, or maybe not) in elementary school.

The doc puts student works on display, starting with a piece exploring “heat, radiation, relentlessness, intensity, stillness,” with instructor Brian Dennis (the man who literally wrote the book on Experimental Music in Schools), who then gives a conducting demonstration, and a demonstration of tape effects. There’s a lengthy, edifying, truly wonderful visit to a class of very young children learning the creative use of tape recorders, and a science fiction story by one of the students, scored with music and sound effects made by his classmates. Then we’re treated to a lively and cacophonous student composition, scored with an invented notation. The program concludes with a genuinely creepy piece of drama, written, scored and acted by the students, wouldn’t you know it, about a cholera epidemic.



The sophistication on display here, even from some of the much younger students, makes me weep for the ultrash*tty way US public schools treat arts education. (While athletics, naturally, are the inalienable milieu of young gods…) To keep myself from indulging in a rant about this—and I’d say nothing that hasn’t been said better by others, really—I transcribed my two favorite quotations from teachers in the program. There IS great educational value in difficult music, to wit:

“The children in this school have a great variety of creative experiences, musically, and we do try to make sure that the music is part of activity. All children are very interested in tape recorders, televisions, radios, in fact that is nearer their experience than are a great many nursery rhymes. Creative tape recording teaches them self-discipline, because they soon realize that if they talk at the wrong time it spoils somebody else’s work.”

“The children do have bizarre noise-making sessions as play, but I think this is quite a valuable experience. They soon learn that once they get used to the sounds, they need some other form of organization if they’re going to get more enjoyment. So naturally they progress to electing a leader or conductor, and they find there’s some need for notation of a sort, so they invent one, and they’ve progressed then from play to composition without actually being taught.”

Previously on Dangerous Minds
Langley Schools Music Project: children’s choruses sing Beach Boys, Bowie, Fleetwood Mac

With thanks to WFMU on Twitter

02.23.2015

02:52 pm

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Richard Linklater’s mission in life has apparently been to make experimental cinema techniques as accessible as possible. As a writer, his specialty is a certain humdrum ordinariness, which has had the virtue of giving his work a dollop of generalized familiarity even as it risks being colorless, plotless, meandering, or humdrum. (I say this as a fan—seriously.) His most recent movie Boyhood was one of the most lavishly praised movies of 2014, failing to win the Oscar for Best Movie last night but was still nominated for a bunch of important awards; it did win Best Supporting Actress for Patricia Arquette’s performance.

Despite its uncontested power to resonate emotionally, Boyhood possesses a near-total absence of plot and a protagonist, Mason, who is generic to the point of being a cipher, qualities that, as we shall see, have been part of Linklater’s directorial persona from the very start. In his career, Linklater’s efforts to represent Everyman have sometimes have resulted in movies about nobody in particular. Ethan Hawke’s Jesse from the “Before” trilogy, benefiting from oceans of dialogue, is more individuated than Mason, to be sure, and yet still flirts with becoming a statistically average member of Generation X. I had not heard of Linklater’s 1988 feature It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books until a couple of weeks ago. You can’t buy it on its own; you can obtain it only as an extra on the Criterion Collection edition of Slacker, Linklater’s breakthrough 1991 effort.



It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, shot on Super 8, is an almost entirely plot- and dialogue-free travelogue about a young dude, played by Linklater himself, who travels all over the western half of the country, mostly by train—he starts out in Austin (of course) and visits Missoula, Montana, and San Francisco, among other locales, before returning home.. Huge swaths of the movie were shot in train stations or aboard Amtrak trains.

Linklater employs two strategies that are very helpful to the novice filmmaker, being a commitment to ambient sound and an eschewal of reverse angles. The movie reminds me somewhat of Jarmusch’s first feature Permanent Vacation, although that movie was far talkier and unmistakably “downtown New York” in spirit. Atitudinally, Linklater is unsurprisingly gentle—you may not see the point of all the footage shot out of a train window, but it doesn’t make you angry, either. The train footage is reminiscent of Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/1971 as well as countless other experimental movies, while the emphasis on train stations reminded me of Chantal Akerman’s later D’Est (From the East).

It might be suggested that Impossible to Learn to Plow is a mix of Slacker and Before Sunrise. Given that Linklater himself kicks off Slacker by emerging from a bus station to narrate his multiverse dream to an indifferent taxi driver, it’s fun to imagine this movie as a prequel of sorts, ending a few minutes before Slacker begins.

The closest thing the movie has to a comedic scene is a bit towards the end in which the protagonist drives in a car and dips into a whole bunch of radio stations in a vain search for some good music (it’s the ‘80s, so he gets a lot of generic pop, although he does pass the Pretenders by). At the end, Daniel Johnston, of all people, pops up briefly to inquire after the protagonist what his shirt says (it turns out to be the movie’s title) and to give him a demo tape.

LInklater is said to have consumed 600 movies a year over a ten-year period, so one of the leitmotifs of It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books is the movie diet of our traveling hero. We see him watching Kubrick’s The Killing while perusing a recent obituary of Sterling Hayden with the suggestive subtitle “Actor loved the sea, loathed Hollywood” (Linklater might feel the same way). Later on he catches a few moments of another Hayden feature, I think it’s The Come On? He also catches bits of an old Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud and a Vincente Minnelli feature with Frank Sinatra and Shirley Maclaine called Some Came Running.

02.23.2015

02:29 pm

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Cynthia Plaster Caster (born Cynthia Albritton) is the famous “super groupie” who, in the late 60’s started using a substance concocted for dental molds to memorialize the Johnsons of celebrity musicians in plaster. On her website, Ms. Plaster Caster describes herself as having been a shy person when she was young. Looking for a way to stand out from the throngs of other groupies swarming around rock star hotel rooms, she created an official sounding “organization” called the Plaster Casters of Chicago and gained access to many a celebrity’s private parts, probably most famously, Jimi Hendrix.

Legend has it that there were a few complications with the Hendrix “procedure.”

Here’s Cynthia’s tale about the almost botched attempt to cast Hendrix’s apparently prodigious member:

Because this was one of my first shots at plaster casting, the end result came out kind of gnarly. I prematurely cracked the mold open, only to find a still-moist, broken cast inside. So yes, Jimi did in fact, break the mold! But thanks to Elmer’s Glue, I managed to reconnect the head to the shaft to the testicl*s. Very statuesque and antique-looking; like Grecian art. The Canadian underground paper Georgia Straight called it the “Penis de Milo.” There’s no denying that Jimi towers over most of my collection. His long, thick shaft combined with his disproportionately small head brings a shudder to the spinal cord!

Jimi’s pubes got stuck in the mold because I didn’t lube them enough. I spent the next 15 minutes pulling out each individual hair one by one, while he had intercourse with just the right sized repository — his negative impression! This unexpected delay made him late for his show that evening, where he was seen scratching his crotch a lot onstage.

The Plaster Casters of Chicago

Despite this early setback of sorts, Cynthia has had years to perfect her technique. In the ensuing decades she’s preserved the pricks of everyone from the MC5’s Wayne Kramer to David Yow of The Jesus Lizard eventually even branching out to breast casts, the only preservation process she seems to prefer these days. She’s cast the dirty pillows of Karen O from The Yeah Yeah Yeahs as well as those of performer/provocateur Peaches among several others. Indeed, for $500 you can have your own bust (whether of the male or female variety) preserved for posterity by the legendary artist herself.

And as if that weren’t stimulating enough, you and your significant other now have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to, as Cynthia Plaster Caster puts it: “Learn to Plaster from the Master!”

Here’s what she has to say on her website (where you can also find her contact information and a sidebar menu made entirely of animated dicks):

Rather than designing just another do-it-yourself kit, I thought it would be fun to teach people one on one (or, rather one on two) how to cast their significant other’s – significant body parts…

For $3500, I will walk two lovers, gay or straight, start to finish, through the entire process (approximately two days). This would consist of: mixing dental mold, making the plaster cast, cracking it out of the mold and filing off excess plaster. All materials are included. Your city or mine (Chicago). If I have to travel to your town, my round-trip airfare and hotel accommodations would be in addition to the fee. I’ll take notes as per my tradition, and issue a diploma – presuming the course will be passed with flying colors (hey, if I can do it ANYBODY can do it!). Cameras are allowed (but not for commercial purposes).

Just so you know – I won’t be doing any casting or stimulating. I’ll only be the coach on the sidelines. This is not for MY collection. It’s for YOURS! And YOU get to keep the trophies!

More after the jump…

02.23.2015

02:14 pm

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In one of the more disturbing yet hilarious feats of crafty design I’ve seen, Peter Jakubik has redefined the term “pony play” with these bondage-inspired rocking horses. You have the option of making your own by downloading a DIY template from Etsy ($22.09), or purchasing one of many completed and painted models($1699.37), each with their own names, unique accessories and backstories. Yes, whether you prefer lace and ruffles, elaborate rope-play or a vinyl facemask, there is a pony girl for you.

Take for example the lovely Gisele, above:

The flexible body of Gisele the Balerina [sic] is firmly tied by a rope maze forming an improvised body harness. She combines her delight in rope tying with a passion for scenic dance. You can transform a classic performance by your bizarre game to a “bondage” Swan Lake.

I’m actually a bit partial to the unfinished wood grain, below. It has a certain… rustic ambiguity.

See more below for an idea of the “variety” that’s offered. Obviously this is all well and good, but I think he’s really limiting himself by sticking to the female form—a pony boy would sell much better, in my opinion. Maybe the purchaser is attracted to men or perhaps they like the idea of sadomasoch*stic kitsch, but don’t want the antifeminist stigma that might be associated with such a surreal knick-knack?

I say get on it, Jakubik! You’ll have them chomping at the bit!




“Fille de joie Jacqueline has penchant for burlesque. Her panties, stockings, long gloves and a corset must miss ruffles in any event. At first glance she coquettishly invites you to sit in the saddle and be gently lulled.”


“Despite the donkey ears on the harness, Vanda is not as adamant as you would expect from the way she looks. In its wavy-trimmed negligee and eared harness she keeps standing in her place, obediently waiting for the regular evening ride.”


“Xenia illustrates real girl next door without any sexual inhibitions. She hides her innocent little face under the hood joining her hair into a thick tail. Cuffs on hands and feet bond up her momentary daftness. It’s just up to you to unleash, and turn a canter to a rodeo.”


“Helga gives a clear indication that her haggard appearance of a little beast is really not for a romantic nature. Her semi-transparent lingerie and latex stockings are held in place by a similarly toned garter belt and tightly tied by a body harness. She will definitely stand out from your collection of toys.”