Silhouette Masterpiece Theater

Why didn't I think of that first? Kudos to Wilhelm Staehle, whose website - The Dollar Dreadful Family Library - reads: "Founded by the horribly disfigured gentleman: Mr. Wilhelm Staehle and his perennial beauty, Mrs. T.D Rio, DDFL was established in 1882 and is running stronger than ever. Wilhelm and T.D. currently reside in a dark and secluded castle on the East Coast of the Americas." Another tidbit: "There is something to be found for all, be it occult adventures, mysterious crimes, woodsmen, foreign lands, or domestic disputes! Our exciting tales are short enough for those of short attention spans, yet thrilling enough to keep one turning pages!"

Check it out. Love it!

Via Silhouette Masterpiece Theater / The Dollar Dreadful Family Library

Giving Credit Where It's Due

Always good to know that people out there dig what I've been doing (humbly) here at Little-Pumpkins. I just found two new links in the past few days relating to previous articles I posted here at the site and that makes me very proud! Damn, I must be doing something right! Right?? The first one was at Wooster Collective on the Miami "Adam & Eve" murals by Fila and the second was at the lovely site called Smut Life, covering an older post on pornochanchadas that I did way back. Thanks guys for appreciating my efforts! I sincerely thank you...

Yue Minjun @ Queens Museum of Art

“Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile,” at the Queens Museum of Art, is the first American museum exhibition of Yue’s work and further evidence of his remarkable rise in the super-heated field of Chinese contemporary art. The work at the Queens Museum ranges from a grouping of 20 life-size terracotta soldiers grinning cast bronze versions of the famous statues unearthed years ago at the tomb of China’s first emperor, to a painting of a laughing version of himself holding another aloft in front of the Statue of Liberty. A few years ago, Yue was eking out a precarious existence in one of Beijing’s artist colonies, trying to figure out a way to weave China’s tumultuous experience into his works. Now, largely on the strength of his signature grin, he has achieved stardom internationally. The mesmerizing enigma of that reddish face painted over and over again, with the wide laugh and the eyes tightly shut from the hilarious strain, is subject to a multitude of interpretations. The smile has been variously interpreted as a sort of joke at the absurdity of it all, or the illusion of happiness in lives inevitably heading toward extinction. “There were also paintings during the Cultural Revolution period, those Soviet-style posters showing happy people laughing,” Yue explained. “But what’s interesting is that normally what you see in those posters is the opposite of reality.” He said his smile was in a way a parody of those posters. But, since it’s a self-portrait, it’s also necessarily a parody of himself, he added. At the Queens Museum, there is also a series called “Hats,” in which Yue has painted himself in all sorts of headgear, from an American football helmet to a peaked cap of a soldier in China’s People’s Liberation Army, with that unvarying laugh on his face. Mr. Yue was born in 1962 in China’s far northern Heilongjiang Province and moved to Beijing with his parents as a child. He studied oil painting at the Hebei Normal University and graduated in 1989, when China was rocked by student-led demonstrations and their suppression on Tiananmen Square in June of that year.

From Oct/14/07-Jan/08/08 at the Queens Museum of Art

Via The New York Times

Hoo-Ray For Massachusetts

My friend Seth - my Boston attache - sent me these cool images of a building in Cambridge, MA. Great stuff, huh? Swiss cheese and building blocks comes to mind. He also e-mail me this fun window from Camper on Newbury Street in Boston. I love the vintage-looking robot dude made out of shoe boxes. Faboo!