copied out

by Art Chantry ( art@artchantry.com)

ok, here’s that image by edmund sullivan that mouse spotted. this is the entire page i reproduce, rust stains and all.

i don’t quite understand the whole “copyright crazy” era we’re in. when i started out in this biz, nobody gave a rat’s ass about copyright. well, except the amateurs – and they were ignorant (i could tell you some funny stories about amateurs and copyright paranoia).

nowadays, the people who set the copyright laws are the corporations – people like disney, etc. to listen to their arguments and then somehow apply it to the lowly sole-proprietor artist is really foolish and dysfunctional.

the bottom line with copyright is the “von dutch manifesto” (which he actually wrote – i’ve seen it).

“go ahead and take all you want. i’ll just make more.”

basically, if you are so lame that you have to steal, go ahead and take it with my blessings. i’ll just continue making my art, just because i can – and you can’t.

this is really not an occult book, but a simple art book – and not a very fancy one either. i can hardly see it showing up in an occult library. so, i sorta doubt it.

as for the other logos/images, i managed to find owsley and had a few conversations with him via phone and email. he credits himself (and another artist whose name i forget – rob thomas, maybe?) with the creation of the lightning bolt logo. the ‘deady-bear’ logo is entirely his own concoction (taken from those turn-of-the-century printer’s dingbats of those little bears – the same bear used by ‘sleepy bear’ motels and all. it’s public domain – as is this skull-n-roses image.)

i tried to pump owsley (he goes by ‘bear’ now – he’s the offici

D roadie of legend) about the acid days – he was THE legendary acid maker of the haight. but, he claims to have no memory of those days any more. sadly, that claim i’ve heard a lot from famous old san francisco hippie icons. it’s sort of amazing how many really amazing stories of those days have been erased by too much acid. all that amazing incredible cultural history – gone. pffft!

…calling mouse an ‘appropriator” is sorta confounding. yup, he appropriated some amazing stuff and re-defined it utterly and forever. but, the bulk of his work had nothing at all to do with found imagery, he drew like and angel. he created everything out of his own two hands.

and yet, the stuff he drew was images lifted from his culture and the culture he grew of age in. – pinstriping, monsters, cars, flames, skulls, jesters, clowns, ice cream cones, chrome lettering, airplanes space age style, art nouveau, etc. etc. etc. the truth is that he was/is a product of the postmodernism era. a real classic example. he didn’t invent anything, really. he took what was around him and created new meanings for it. that’s the classic definition of post modern appropriation. it’s what our shared culture has done almost exclusively since WW2. we don’t really have new ideas in our culture any more. we take old ideas and give them new meaning. it’s extremely hard to come up with an example of a totally novel and new idea out there. almost impossible. everything now has many many layers of precedent.

mouse is a wonderful and iconic example. it’s also why copyright is so meaningless these days (except to corporations trying to cash in exclusively)….

…the career of mouse is just so strange. i imagine a lot of your know-nothings out there will look at this skull-n-roses image and just assume that mouse ripped it off and is a thief. but, rat fink (and a bazillion other ideas) were snagged from him by ed roth and others. mouse took his thinking from von dutch. dutch took his ideas from WW2 vets and american machinists. so, it goes on and on, a big spiral of thought. it’s a called a cultural dialog.

i can think of few other artists ripped of financially and conceptually more than mouse. did he get paid fairly by all those rock bands that took his ideas and copyrighted them straight to their bank accounts? fairly? really? and what about his lost copyrights to all his amazing poster work. he signed a “work for hire” deal with bill graham and lost everything. now, wolfgang’s vault is cashing is (after generations of other businessmen cashed in on mouse’s work.)

recently mouse sued disney over some sketches and treatments he did for them a long time back. eventually, they took his ideas and sketches and turned them into to the characters in “monsters, inc.” (the movie). he sued them for copyright infringement and won. amazing! he actually beat disney’s lawyers!

when his health quit, he was so broke that people held fundraisers to pay for his transplant.

so, the extremely peculiar career of stanley ‘mouse’ miller travels across so many borders and covers so much contradictory territory that it’s really hard to peg him down to a simple word like ‘appropriator’. really? is that all he was? i don’t think so. “hero” is more like it. …

…i know he popularized the big stadium stereo sound system. he sort of became the dead’s sound engineer and built that huge floor-to-ceiling sound system they introduced around 1970 (i saw that tour. i remember yawning a lot).

as for the idea of “inventing stereo sound”, well, that’s really pushing it. stereo music systems had been a around for almost 20 years. and the idea of sitting in a big concert hall and listening to music in stereo is not a new idea. before amplification, we all naturally heard in stereo, ya know?

but, he’s definitely credited with designing their amazing sound systems. crazy stuff….