Dead Elvis Style

When the saints go marching...

Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, as I've mentioned before, has found a place for Elvis in its pantheon of those to be remembered, and its imagery has infused the design cloud that envelopes the Dead Elvis phenomenon. For the Day of the Dead special at Casa Morito, Brixton Market's atmospheric Mexican cantina, I accessorized with Mixco's (the now dissolved design double act Alex Garnett and Nahoko Koyamo) ceramic pendant, a familiarly quiffed skull with the legend Elvis is Dead printed on the base.

Elvis is Dead, proof

Etsy has a number of Elvis skull cameos in various garish colours. The mold is available on ebay for those who want to dictate their own colour-scheme.

Elvis is Undead

Beyond the quiff is designer Elvis Jesus' Día de los Muertos t-shirts from this year's Spring collection, now pretty hard to come by. Elvis Jesus chose the two most recognizable names with images, guaranteeing brand recognition. His stock t-shirts take a famous pop image and substitute an Elvisy Jesus or slip both Elvis and Jesus into the mise-en-scene. 

Elvis is Dead Famous

It's almost as if Dead Elvis has a little more hipster kudos than living Elvis. Hardly surprising I guess; the protected, projected altered image is what you want it to be, but remains familiar; close but not too close.  

When The Saints Go Marching In

Who Are You? (Who Am I?)

814 Elvii can't be wrong

When it just so happens that the Bridgend Love2Walk group's annual festival coincides with the Porthcawl Elvis festival, well, you might as well see if you can break the world record for the most Elvis impersonators gathered in one place. So that's what they did. 

1, 2, 3, dang I don't have 814 fingers

The 814 Elvii (to qualify, the rules state, you need at the minimum an Elvis hair-piece, supplied by the organisers) sang a rousing Hound Dog, essential for the record to count, and then processed from Trecco Bay into Porthcawl town. They beat the existing record of 645 set in Las Vegas in 2010 and coordinated by Nike Western Europe with employees flying for the occasion from across the US. A Little Less Conversation was the song of course.

The bar's set high now; before Nike raised the stakes, the record was Way Down at 147, set at Australia's Elvis festival. The landlady of the Ship Inn, Parr, Cornwall. She's hoped for 148, but only 29 braved the rain. Fortunately, sun shone on Trecco Bay and fairweather Elvii came from far and wide. 

Who Are You? (Who Am I?)

Working on the Building

Earlier this month a friend of mine glanced out of her window onto her Oxford street only to be met by the site of Elvis cleaning windows while being papped. She sent me the evidence.

Papping pap papped

Well I puzzled over this, but not for long! The following Wednesday, the Oxford Times reported on Tim Crysell, by day a window cleaner with local firm DF Williams, and by night an Elvis impersonator.

When I'm cleaning winders, oh, hold on, wrong song

Tim took up the Elvis trade after being complemented on his karaoke Viva Las Vegas in Southsea. He's invested in a £3000 jumpsuit (my guess is from IC Creations) and nets £225 a night as the king. Catch him on October 20th at the Bystander at Wootton.

Pics: Wendy and Oxford Times
Thanks: Wendy
Working on the Building
When I'm Cleaning Windows

Animal Instinct

Over coffee recently with a forensic archaeologist the subject of DNA came up. She's researching how DNA is being used in the creation of national identity through the establishment of relationships between the living and war dead. It made me think about the possibilities of the use of Elvis's DNA. The amount of his hair going around, bogus or authenticated, as documented in auction posts (see labels), means that somewhere in the not so distant future we might get a glut of Elvis cloned creatures, exploited for all manner of purposes in the unregulated aether. Having your own bit of Elvis with which to build your fantasy relationships becomes a realistic possibility.... Of course, I'm not the first to think of this.

Elvis as a mouse

Koby Barhad, grad student at the Royal College of Art here in London and part of kn-studio, has modeled the possible recreation of Elvis as a mouse and the subsequent channeling of the Elvis mouse's life. In All That I Am, Barhad proposes that three products and processes available online to all comers could bring the Elvis mouse about, and asks questions about the veracity of such an event. Barhad's portion of Elvis hair was attained from ebay at the grand cost of $22. He asks, 'Does buying a pre-owned item gives one the legal right to another individual's genetic data?' I might add to that, hocking a guy's used pants around just isn't cricket.

The project design: 

From a speck of hair to a mouse model.

A combination of three online services can make this project possible.

Hair samples of Elvis Presley, bought on ebay were sent to a gene sequencing lab to identify different behavioural traits (varied from sociability, athletic performance to obesity and addiction). Using this information, transgenic mice clones with parallel traits were produced. The genetically cloned models of Elvis (in this case) are tested in a collection of various contemporary scientific mouse model environments, simulating some of the significant biographical circumstances of his life.

Is it possible to quantify our life through a series of conditions and events? What are the aspects of life that are responsible in making us ourselves?  
Does buying a pre-owned item gives one the legal right to another individual's genetic data?
Can mouse models of ourselves help us prepare for possible futures or will it impose them on us?
Will we make different choices Re-living the same life?
Can a mouse be Elvis? What makes you believe it can be? 

Barhad's socially engineering mouse house has been specially designed to replicate Elvis's life conditions to ensure that the Elvis mouse doesn't just look like Elvis but behaves like him too. The mouse will grow up in poverty with the love of his mother (whom he will be cruelly bereaved of later...), will have his army years simulated, and lastly will work himself to death on a treadmill.

Childhood model

Barhad's realised mouse house has been on display at the RCA, his submission as part of the RCA's Design Interactions programme through which artists explore the possibilities of technical futures. It's attained a fair bit of press interest, including a number of reports such as this one, which claim that Barhad has actually engineered Elvis as a mouse. Sadly he hasn't. But he can. 

Mouse house

Thanks: artists. Especially Koby Barhad. Archaeologists. Especially Layla.

Pics: Koby Barhad and kn-studio

All That I Am

Animal Instinct

Anything that's part of you II (but only if it really is part of you)

Hair today, gone tomorrow

Well wouldn't you know it, hair authenticators can't always be trusted. Those scoundrels at Mastro Auctions (I must emphasize these are not the good people of Julien's Auctions discussed in an earlier post) have just been done for selling hair that wasn't Elvis'. They did it first in 2003, but were caught out after the buyer's DNA tests proved the hair of questionable origin. But then, they did it again in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. How much hair can one auction house questionably sell? Brings the whole hair authentication business into disrepute. Well justice is done. They face up to 20 years in prison. Well fraud is a hairy business if you cut it too fine. Even by a whisker.

Grave business

And I also reported on efforts to auction Elvis' crypt by Julien's Auctions. Uproar across the Elvis community ensued, with fans demanding the crypt be kept as a shrine to the King. Well, Darren Julien proved himself a fine kind of an auctioneer by pulling the crypt from the auction. I can report however, that the authenticated hair went for $4160 while the x-ray went for $9375, a good $3k more than expected. Unexpected hit of the day was Elvis' nice beige boxed phone which wet for $20,480, $15k more than the estimate.

Calling Elvis

Anything That's Part of You

For sale: one crypt (hardly used); one lock of hair (one not-so careful owner).

Hair today, gone tomorrow

People often say to me, Pen, Pen they say, being born in 1977 don't mean that the King's soul just passed into you, hell you wasn't even born on the right day. Well, I say to them, on October 2nd 1977, just before I was born, Elvis and Gladys were moved from their crypt at Forest Hill cemetery in Memphis prior to interment in Graceland. Yeah.

We can't all have a piece of the King's soul it's true, but we can damn well try. On June 23rd for example, bidding opens at $100,000 for the very crypt Elvis spent a month and a half in thanks to Julien's Auctions and the good news is you can bid online for this delicious bit of marble. Yes, be interred where Elvis was. Surround your dead self with a lot of neo-classical white stone. Not quite got the money? $2000 - $4000 might net you an x-ray of Elvis' forearm and hand, and the injury therein sustained during a karate session. Penny pinching? Go for hair! You can't go wrong with hair. 

Hair: snip at the price

In November 2002 a strand of El's hair went for £70,000, but Julien's are only plumping for $1000 - $2000. Perhaps because the hair in question (cut by 'Gil', Elvis's traveling barber) hasn't been DNA tested, merely authenticated by John Reznikoff of Westport, Connecticut. But then John collects celebrity hair, and might be considered quite the expert. So let's go with that certificate and jar of hair. A snip at the price if the mere £1055 strand auctioned at Devizes in November 2009 was anything to go by. That's it Elvis collectors, the smart money's in hair. Anything that's part of Elvis.

Hair it is: authenticator

Hair: authentic

Elvis & Marilyn II

X-Men: Bullingdon Club

Sometimes I spend my time flaneuring about Oxford. No city has a right to be so pretty, but pretty it is and with pretty comes a bit of attention. Oh look, there's James McAvoy sauntering 19 times from Hertford to the Bodleian under an enormous silver umbrella that's making it sun. That'll be Xavier in X-Men: First Class. There's a story going round that when the blockbusters are in town, the ITV crew filming Lewis stick a notice on their vans saying: this is not X-men, or whatever big name is in town that day.  Ha. Ridiculous, surely everyone would rather have a nice cuppa with Lewis and Hathaway, Ma'am and Hobson than hang about with Young David Cameron and Magneto? 

Curling up with Lewis, king of kindness, in the episode entitled Generation of Vipers (which could in all fairness be the series name), I noted that his angry astonishment at the level of depravity on the internet, specifically an imaginary believable awful site called 'Barker', was further kindled by a particular article...

Elvis & Marilyn, pretend, on a pretend internet site in a pretend police station

Needless to say, Lewis and Hathaway put an end to the nasties running that particular show.

Elvis in Swansea: You'll Never Walk Alone

When the bookies profane the King's name it's bad enough, but when it's at the expense of the pride of South Wales, that's just asking for trouble.

Brendan Rodgers, manager of Swansea Town FC (the Swans), quite reasonable took exception to the claim by certain bookmakers that punters had more chance of seeing Elvis than Swansea did of staying in the Premiership. Facing Liverpool in their last match of the season, already in the clear to stay up, Rodgers asked fans to don Elvis costumes in celebration and in an effort to harness the strange and mighty power of Elvis' love. Fans took it seriously, and Swansea faced a shortage of Elvis costumes. Said Carol Guy of Swansea's Mardi Gras Fancy Dress shop to the South Wales Post,

"There were people waiting for me to open up this morning, and I wasn’t able to have my morning coffee until midday."

Swansea City's website met the demand by offering a cut out Elvis mask to download (eerily reminiscent of the Forbes Dead Rich list Hallowe'en death mask). And while Carol Guy suggested Brendan himself ought to dress up, Wales Online went one better and offered a Brendan Rodgers Elvis mask to celebrate Swansea's mid-table non-obscurity after the club managed to defeat Liverpool 2-0.

 
The Liberty Stadium filled up with multiple Elvii of all persuasions, Dean Mack, Elvis ETA (we've had him before in Bundoran remember?), sang The Wonder of You, and with that kind of home support, the erstwhile Merseyside anthem, You'll Never Walk Alone belonged to Swansea that day.

Elvis & Marilyn?

This scoop from Ed Demetry, on Driggs Avenue, in South Brooklyn, along the Williamsburg Bridge. On leaving a bar and his basketball team, Ed spies the news, which somehow seems better with Marilyn on top.

Sticky

So I looked into it. Did Marilyn even meet Elvis? I looked Marilyn up in the works of Peter Guralnick among others, but no: Bill Monroe, entries many; Marilyn Monroe, entries none. I looked it up in Greil Marcus's great Dead Elvis. "1987 [...] Elvis will become a movie poster, unanimated, still, like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe..." (p134). And indeed, in Chris Consani's various works, like Four of a Kind, you find those three hanging out with Bogey, still and unanimated. 

Stick

But I gotta tell you, in 1987, there was no internet.

I asked Google. According to Wikianswers, they dated once in the 1950s but Elvis thought Marilyn too short. And also Marilyn boasted that she'd slept with E. But Red West, one of the Memphis Mafia, says that Elvis never met Marilyn since she was too busy. But according to the Daily Mail online, Elvis's former agent Byron Raphael told the New York Daily Post that Elvis got him to pick Marilyn up one time and bring him to the Beverly Wilshire hotel, 1956. 

"When he saw her, they came together and, without a word, started kissing."

"I was in shock and didn't know what to do."

...

"The next thing I knew I was startled awake by the door opening and I dove behind the bar."

"And they both walked out stark naked. I didn't say a word, I just stayed quietly."

(According to Google, Elvis was 6'0", Marilyn was 5'5" and Arthur Miller was 6'1").  

Elsewhere, here, for example on Napa Valley TV, is Diana Dawn as Marilyn and "Lloyd" as Elvis. And here, Banbury Cross and Pete Storm do the honours. I could go on.

And I will.

This wonderful image. I got it here, I don't know where it came from originally. You'll see those pringle socks in the Elvis at 21 exhibition if you can catch it.

Edgy

And then there's the sticker itself. It's not just Ed who's been snapping away. Maltagracia's even found the same one.

We could go on. Elvis and Marilyn, together, forever, online and on the Williamsburg Bridge.

Thanks: Ed Demetry

Pics: Ed, Chris Consani; Internet

Graceland, Sevenoaks, sic transit gloria mundi

Working on the Building: 

Guest post by James Dixon, contemporary archaeologist

There used to be a little place on the Old Kent Road called Graceland Palace. It was an Elvis Presley themed Chinese restaurant run by Paul Elvis Chan. A few years ago Graceland Palace closed down and the Elvis murals all over its walls were painted over. Rumour is that Paul Elvis Chan became ill and returned to China to be treated by a particular Chinese doctor. The King was dead. Yesterday I walked past Survey House on Brockley Rise. It was being stripped out by a building firm using a second-hand Ford Transit van bearing the logo and contact details of its previous owner, one Paul Elvis Chan of Graceland Palace Chinese Restaurant (although an attempt had been made to remove this evidence).

So, the King is alive and stripping out buildings in south-east London. Today, I also hear unconfirmed rumours that he has been seen at the Memphis Inn in Bexleyheath.

Thanks: James Dixon

Pic: James Dixon

Too Much Monkey Business

Bequiffed Elvis monkey of Kachin
The Elvis monkey is among a couple of hundred species previously unknown to those that know about these things highlighted in a new WWF report on the Greater Mekong area of South East Asia. It might also be reported as the noseless Michael monkey no?

Too much monkey business for me...