Photo comic, “Mutant Monster Beach Party”, starring Blondie’s Debbie Harry, Joey Ramone, and Andy Warhol, among others. PUNK magazine #15, 1978.
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Scenes from Studio 54. You must have heard of it—from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, the New York nightclub was the hottest hotspot on Earth, a temple of decadence, disco, and drugs, a cartoony caricature of the “in-crowd”, restyling city nightlife forever. It still stands as the extravagant symbol of the Era of Excess. Everyone who was anyone flocked to it like moths to a disco light (hehe), Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry and Bianca Jagger were part of the furniture. You had to stand in line to stand in line for it; inside, you had to stand in line to snort a line.
Free-thinking and flamboyant on its glossy and glittery surface, at its heart was a shallow pettiness, as manifested by its door policy, which was based on nothing but your looks, money, or fame. Hedonism was mad king, no one had yet heard of AIDS. Of course it could never last long.
Bianca Jagger on a horse… What is she doing, judging a Freddie Mercury lookalike contest? Horses love that though, you know. Crowds and flashy lights, and loud music. Horses love discos. Wild horses can’t drag horses away from discos. But I suppose it’s a joke: you know, horse. White horse. H.
Elton John, Grace Jones, David Bowie. Who else do we see? Jerry Hall—Jerry “I have an IQ of 146, you know” Hall, Olivia Newton-John, Paloma Picasso. Woody Allen and Michael Jackson look really out of place, like two nerds at a party no one remembered inviting. It can’t have been their scene. Other frequent visitors were the Trumps, Liza Minnelli, Cher, Brooke Shields, Truman Capote.
Exclusivity, to me, is like radioactivity: the more exclusive something is, the less I want it. A kind of natural ascetism prevents me from craving the latest stuff or wanting to be seen at the hippest places, so I look at these photos like an alien visitor: amused, fascinated, slightly repulsed. Hell, to me, has a Studio 54 sign. The scenes remind me of the WTC sequence from THE WIZ.
Debbie Harry and Blondie photographed by Mick Rock in 1978.
Recently, I featured some photos of Times Square, NY, in the 1970s. Let’s take a look at other parts of the city. All of these were taken between 1970-1979, when New York could be the kind of city where you might die alone in an alleyway, where you could take a wrong turn, where you never knew if that strange shadow was just a tree, or someone waiting for you. It’s the New York of The Warriors, the Son of Sam, CBGB’s, the new WTC, the Blackout. It’s where Travis Bickle wanders the mean streets, and where Serpico gets shot. It’s also the New York of old Sesame Street, and the backdrop of Bronze Age Spider-Man comics.
Credits: Lew Kampel; Eugene Gannon; Camilo José Vergara; Manel Armengol; Alan Benjamin; Susan Saunders.
Modern generations can never really know the kind of magical awe that audiences felt at the opening proper of THE MUPPET MOVIE (1979). We were used to seeing upper Muppet torsos cramped inside a square TV screen; now suddenly they had legs, and were surrounded by wide American vistas.
During the opening, the camera zooms in on Kermit, who’s sitting on a log strumming a banjo and singing “The Rainbow Connection”. How was it done? Nobody knew, and Jim Henson, very much pleased with everyone’s confusion, wasn’t telling. Was it a studio set, or was it actually filmed in a swamp in the deep south somewhere? Was Kermit radio-controlled—no, his movements were too fluent, too subtle and emotional for that. Was Jim really inside an underwater tank then, puppeteering Kermit? I remember wondering about it as a kid, and thinking, “That Jim Henson is one tough guy, sitting in a swamp like that and being surrounded by alligators.”
Of course we can look it all up now. And then we’ve learned something. But I think I prefer to believe that Kermit is a real character, sitting on a log in a swamp in the deep south, playing his banjo. The movie works better that way.
(The illustration below isn’t exactly how the scene was created, but it’s something like that. If you really want to know though: look it up!)
1920s movie poster designs by Boris Bilinsky (1900-1948).
Japanese graphic designer, Koichi Sato (1944-2016).
Star Wars art by Japanese illustrator, Noriyoshi Ohrai.
Cannon ad. Self-explanatory, really.
Isn’t this the Eightiest Eighties image? A ninja. Leg warmers. A headband, sweatbands. Aerobics. The skyline of a city at night. Magenta, pink, blue.
Anyone who grew up in the 1980s will remember the short but intense ninja craze. My brother used to make shuriken from tin cans. They were well-crafted, too. My brother, little MacGyver.
Karbonkel, from 1990s Dutch children’s series, IK MIK LORELAND. The illiterate, screeching monster terrified children so much that parents campaigned against him, and TV teams visited schools with the actual puppet to show (or at least pretend) the creature wasn’t real.
His name and the term “traumatized” often go hand in hand. My kind of monster.
1970s photo of Garibaldo, the Big Bird counterpart on the Brazilian version of Sesame Street, Vila Sésamo.
Ever since I caught the German Sesame Street while on holiday as a kid, I’ve had this strange fascination with foreign versions of the show.