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Back in December, Dead Kennedys artist Winston Smith held a "Bat Show" at his studio in SF where artists submitted their own artwork of the bat logo for Alternative Tentacles, the independent record label owned by former DK lead singer Jello Biafra. I attended the show (though I did not submit any of my own art) and got to meet Smith there! A selfie of the two of us is on my Bluesky. He had a lot of interesting stories about places he'd been to and people he'd met over the years. I had a very good time, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he would have a collage workshop this February! The event was on February 9th and spaces were limited (only 12 seats), so I bought myself a ticket to attend. For this workshop, Smith brought out a ton of very old (and some recent ones too) magazines which attendees could cut out from. The last time I did a collage was maybe in high school, and it was interesting to look through all these old magazines from the 50s and 60s, seeing old timey photos and old advertisements. These magazines had a lot of cigarette ads and since these came from a time period before the negative effects of smoking were publicized, none of them had surgeon general warnings on them. Depending on the paper, some magazines were easy to cut with an exacto knife, while others were more rigid, which is why some of the cut outs here look more like they were torn out.

I mostly cut out strange phrases or odd faces. I found this advertisement of a Disney picture gun unusual, and one idea that occurred to me was to make an odd ad around it. I found a smiling face that looked very similar to the stagecoach from Pinocchio, and I thought it would be unusual to surround it with phrases about death and war. One ad I saw had a man holding a bottle in a way where his middle finger was pointing out, and removed from context it looks like someone could be flipping the bird. The man in the bowler had and President Truman were added just to fill space, and the lady with the red wig... umm, I dunno, she's there because sex sells or something? I have more scraps leftover that I didn't use, and I'll probably put them in a future collage. I had a lot of fun at this collage workshop and listening to more of Smith's stories. So go fight to kill your town today with a Disney picture gun, and make war your business.

I took pictures of every magazine I cut out of so I'd remember what my sources were. I don't remember which cut outs came from where, but here's a list of the magazines I used at the workshop. Dunno if some archivist has these online but you can probably find some of the cutouts I used here in some of these issues.

-Look, July 22, 1958

-Look, Nov 11, 1958

-Look, Dec 9, 1958

-The Saturday Evening Post, May 7, 1966

-The Encyclopedia of Popular Science For Young People, 1963 Edition

-Vice, volume 22 number 3

-The Saturday Evening Post, May 21, 1966

-The Saturday Evening Post, Nov 23, 1963

-Look, May 27, 1958