The shop and the land they owned was a desert ghost town, where in the largest building Calvin built his Fantasy Doll Theater, which was powered by a windmill he had built. Along with a clever contraption of strings, pulleys, hidden tape recorders and animatronics, trained ventriloquist Calvin would put on shows.  He carved the heads and made the bodies of over 8 dolls, which Ruby clothed. Most were female, and often based on friends, family and celebrities. The couple were childless, and Calvin often referred to his dolls as his children. The collection spread out for hundreds of yards along the roadside, either side of the shop. Each doll named, and carrying a sign around its neck.

Quite frankly the whole thing is utterly bizarre, that rather than informing readers of the horrors of the regime in Libya, it ridicules and parodies in a juvenile and often puerile way. Who the target audience was for this one-off comic book is anyone's guess. But it has become a cult comic book collectible. 

The album which was produced my Genesis P-Orridge and Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson of the avant-garde pioneers of experimental industrial music Throbbing Gristle. While living in Hull, in the north of England, they were doing a lot of mail-art, and were sent a magazine by General Idea in Toronto called FILE (a play on LIFE magazine). In 1971 they came across a piece in the magazine by William S. Burroughs that had his home address. They wrote an irreverent, satirical and somewhat aggressive letter to him. A while later a postcard arrived from Burroughs, offering an open invite to Genesis to visit Burroughs when he was in London. Genesis hitch-hiked down to London, to see Burroughs, and from their meeting and over one-and-a-half bottles of whiskey the two became firm friends.

During many conversations and letter between the two, Genesis brought up Burroughs's "tape recorder experiments". Burroughs thought no-one would be interested in a record of the tape recorder experiments, but after 7 years he caved, and handed over box after box of reel-to-reel tapes. Hours and hours of tapes from the 50s and 60s. Genesis and Sleazy poured over the tapes, listening to each one, noting down what they were about. Most where a mash-up of cut-up snippets of conversations, Burroughs talking into the microphone, bits of music, radio noise, all kinds of sound bites. After they finished, Burroughs asked whether they wanted to catalog the rest. They agreed, and they travelled to his home in Kansas where he had a room full of boxes of tapes. They spent two weeks, going through all the tapes. 

Now they had the material, they wanted to make an album of them, choosing the best, cutting them up, stitching the pieces back together. Cherry-picking from the never heard before "tape recorder experiments". At the time, Burroughs had fallen out of favour with the literary and art community. His books were out of print, people has lost interest in the Beats and in the work of Burroughs, particularly the artistic technique of "the cut-ups". A style of art that has since gone on to be a central part of modern media, movies, music videos, commercials, all manner of pop culture owes its roots to the cut-up technique that the Dadaists pioneered in the 1920s, but Burroughs made popular in the 1950s and 1960s. If it hadn't have been for the persistence of Genesis, and the members of Throbbing Gristle's desire to immortalise the tape recorder experiments, these seminal cultural artefacts may have been have been lost forever.

My little lad and I spent this evening working on our Nativity scene, which is now finally finished. My son made the stable, amazing what a three year old can do with an old shoe box, lolly-sticks, poster paints and glitter. I added the figures. The Bruce Lee shepherds, the three wise gargoyles, Darth Vader and a stormtrooper as Joseph and Mary. A cyberman as the archangel Gabriel, and of course wind-up Jesus as little baby Jesus. Note: The star of Bethlehem is a flaming neon crucifix I've had for years, finally found a use for.

His music was difficult to say the least, poorly recorded it assaulted the ears with no subject off limits and all taboos covered in horrific lyrical detail. Designed to shock, Allin said he wanted to make rock music "dangerous" again. The no-limits on-stage GG Allin first came to prominence in the mid-80s, when a limited released cassette tape of  Hated in the Nation  came out in 1987, which featured previously unreleased , live and rare recordings of Allin and his work with a number of punk bands.

Also by this time Allin was a heavy drinker, addicted to heroin and would consume pretty much any drug he could lay his hands on. He was constantly being arrested for his violence and regular on-stage nudity, as well as for the outrageous and often illegal stage antics. In 1989 Allin landed in prison for assault on a woman, that Allin claimed was a willing participant along with himself in a series of depraved sexual acts. He was jailed until 1991, during which time he wrote a manifesto and got ready to explode back onto the scene. Allin skipped parole after getting out, so that he could go on tour.to go on another tour. Footage of that tour was filmed for the 1994 documentary about Allin, Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies. The movie showed Allin in full performance mode, naked, shitting on-stage, assaulting the audience. At one point he throws a beer bottle into the crowd, hitting a woman in the face and breaking her nose.

His last performance was on Friday June 27th, 1993 at a small club in Manhattan. The gig was only two songs in when there was a power-cut, which enraged Allin. He went mad, smashing up the club and causing near riotous chaos. He left the club naked and walked down the street followed by a gang of fans from the gig. After a while he headed for an apartment of a friend, to keep partying. During the party Allin took a large quantity of heroin and accidentally overdosed. Sometime in the early hours of the Saturday died, aged 36 years old.

Weird Retro Fact:  Allin was obsessed with serial killers. He had written to and also visited infamous "Killer Clown" John Wayne Gacy in prison a number of times. Gacy painted Allin's portrait, which was used as the album cover to the soundtrack of the film Hated: GG Allin And The Murder Junkies.

In 1970 he struck on the idea of building a hot-air balloon, with a the message "God Is Love" stitched into it in big letters. He spent ten years sewing together the balloon from scraps of material on a donated second-hand sewing machine. Eventually the balloon became unmanageable, and with failed attempts to inflate it, it started to come apart at the seams. In 1984 he found himself near the town of Niland, and at Slab City. With the help of others he continued to try and get his balloon off the ground, realising one day that his dream was in tatters at his feet. He and and the balloon were deflated.

That's when he decided to start on what would eventually become Salvation Mountain. As the mountain grew, so did Knight's fame as an outsider artist. As the garishly painted artwork of concrete, adobe, straw and found materials grew on the side of once barren hillside. In 1999 Jarvis Cocker, leader singer with teh Brit-Pop band Pulp made a series of outsider art documentaries, in which he interviewed Knight. The Folk Art Society of America declared it a "a folk art site worthy of preservation and protection" in 2000. In an address to the United States Congress on May 15th, 2002, California Senator Barbara Boxer described it as "a unique and visionary sculpture... a national treasure... profoundly strange and beautifully accessible, and worthy of the international acclaim it receives" In 2007 Knight and his mountain had a small role in the movie independent movie Into the Wild, cementing Knight and his mountain in the cultural landscape of America.

Knight died in February 2014, aged 82, in a convalescent hospital where he had been a resident for more than two years. Local volunteers maintain the mountain, in an attempt to save it from the ravages of the harsh conditions of Colorado Desert where is resides as a monument to one man's dream.

Weird Retro Fact: Salvation Mountain is mentioned in the article Salton Sea & Slab City: Life, Death & Hope In The Badlands.

Confined to life in an institution eventually he ran away in 1940, mainly to avoid the physical examination for recruitment into the Japanese Army. This was when he started his wanderings through Japan, which lasted into the 1950s. Eventually The system caught up with him in 1944, he was examined and found incapable of military service. The story of this period in his life was written in the Wandering Diary (1956). The famous image of Yamashita on Ebisubashi Bridge was taken during this period. Yamashita became a well known cultural figure in Japan. In 1958 a movie was made based on his life called The Naked General (裸の大将), and from 1980 to 1997 there was a popular TV series based on him.  

Anyway... What I'm saying is... The guy's cool, he has songs to sing and stories to tell. What more should anyone want? He's a modern old-school troubadour, and that's a rare thing these days.