White Trash Art

Monsters of Glam #1: Iggy

Not terribly great likeness of the man as a youth, but I think the schlong is spot-on.

oil on canvas 24"x36"

Hope Chest

oil on canvas 24x36"

More Big Fat Bacon

The bacon craze has evolved and morphed into new innovative uses of salty, smoky pork fat since I penned my last bacon tome: Big Fat Bacon. Bacon infused vodka and chocolate sea salt bacon ganache truffles have already gone to the land of sooooooo yesterday by in-the-know foodies.

New on the plate:

The in house butcher shop at Chicago's James Hotel sells freshly prepared bacon fat candles that can be lit, melted, and poured onto your favorite dish for consumption. The hotel's restaurant, David Burke's Primehouse, offers the candle as a extra fancy condiment to their steaks and scallops.

On the bacon technology forefront:

Never get popped with hot grease ever again with the incredibly myopic and single-purposed kitchen utensil - Fusion Silicon Finger Tongs. They look remarkably like a creature from Mystery Science Theater 3000, and allow you to stick you hands directly into boiling hot lard.

For a bit of pork overkill, go to Chicago's Theory for their bacon-wrapped ribs. For even more insane pork over kill, make a Pork Suicide Roll.

The cookbook Seduced by Bacon offers bacon porn aplenty. Also slathered in grease is Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient. For online bacon gratification, take a look at the varied bacon offerings from the city of Chicago alone. I mean, Chicago was the meat packing center of the universe after all.

Check out this angry vegan who has set up a site to vent about carnivores (Suicide Food), and has a special section for bacon.

Coke is the perfect food

New recipes added to White Trash Haute Cuisine:

• Coca-Cola Glazed Salmon
• Coca Cola Marinated Grecian Green Beans
• Fluffy Coke and Twin Cheese Dip
• Diet Cherry Coke Lentil Soup
• Coca-Cola French Onion Soup
• Rum and Coke Chiffon Pie
• Cousin Janet's Rockin' Cherry Coke Jello Surprise
• Coca Cola Pickled Cauliflower Relish
• Root Beer Jelly

Also:

• Taco Sub
• French Fry Sandwiches 4 Ways
• Kountry Kitchen Kasserole
• Sloppy Joe Casserole
• Microwave Goldfish Tuna Casserole
• Kuntry Kitchen Kasserole

American Heroes and Madmen #11: Annie Edson Taylor

acrylic on canvas paper 12x16"

Annie was an educated, well traveled Civil War widow who had spent the many years after her husband's death going from vocation to vocation. Nearing old age and wanting to secure a nice retirement income for herself, she agreed to go over Niagara Falls in a specially designed barrel. She took the plunge on her 63rd birthday (although she told the papers she was 43) and became the first person to live through the feat. Her retirement plan of living off of the publicity that followed was cut short by her manager absconding with the barrel, which she traveled and posed with all over the country. After an unfruitful attempt to get the barrel back with the use of private detectives, she drained most of her savings on their fees. Sher spent her golden years working, as she always did, where she found a niche - as a clairvoyant and giving therapeutic magnet treatments.

Snookie Box

ink, marker, acrylic, decoupage, nail polish on cardboard shipping box, left intact to put any old trash in. about 8"x12"x2"

Fist pumpin.

American Heroes and Madmen: The Salt King of Southern Illinois

One of the most shameful historical slave sites in Illinois is in a tiny village named "Equality".

In 1842, a wealthy salt mine owner named John Hart Crenshaw, along with his brother Abraham, built this Greek revival style mansion from the vast amounts of wealth they had accumulated operating two lucrative salt mines in southern Illinois. The Crenshaws were influential and ridiculously wealthy. At one point John Crenshaw's income equaled one seventh of the revenue of the entire state of Illinois. 3 A young state representative named Abraham Lincoln actually attended a gala at the home, dancing a waltz in the second floor ballroom, likely with kidnapped slaves stuffed into concentration camp style bunks in the third floor above him. In a town called Equality. Now that is some fucking irony.

The house in the 1960's, courtesy of this site

Part of the reason for the massive wealth was due to the fact the "Salt King of Southern Illinois" was allowed to use slave labor. Prior to emancipation, there was a law in place allowing businessmen to "import" slaves from slave states into free states like Illinois and use them for especially miserable tasks (like working in salt mines). Soon, this Illinois entrepreneur found that he could increase his profits by kidnapping free black men and women and selling them back into slavery in the south. The house is the last standing vestige of a once thriving "reverse underground railroad" system.

By many accounts Crenshaw also had a side hobby of siring the most virile and strong men with fertile women slaves to produce more slaves to sell. A man named "Uncle" Bob Wilson, who was known to have been one of the primary "breeders", was quoted by staff at Elgin State Hospital in 1941 (after he had been picked up in Chicago wandering 'ill and confused' ) as saying he had been forced to father over 200 children as a stud slave in the Hickory Hill house as well as others in the south. 2  He died at the Elgin facility in 1948 at age 112, and was Illinois' oldest living veteran at the time of his death.5, 6

Crenshaw kept his slaves in the third floor attic, shackled in tiny blood stained stalls ("The attic of this house has twelve small rooms, ranging in size from nine feet square to six feet by two and one-half feet. Some of the rooms contain shelves, which may have been used as bunks" 1). The open stalls were used for "breeding" as well as living quarters. The room itself was likely stifling, with only two windows and dozens of people crammed together.  I don't know if you've ever been in an attic room in the summer in Illinois, but I can tell you from my parent's farmhouse and their third story attic, it gets miserably hot and chokingly muggy. The room was rumored to have secret passages that lead to the main house and the river, to expedite his illicit dealings at night. He took to beating the slaves, sometimes to death.

Brought to trial in 1842, he wasn't convicted on the first count of illegally trading slaves. However, within a short amount of time he was on trial again, and in a tiny nugget of instant karma, a slave whacked his leg off with an axe. The slaves rioted and burned down his mill. He died years later and was buried alongside his wife.

After the slave house was opened up for tours in 1926, it soon became the infamous home to sightings of apparitions and the sounds of moaning and chains rattling. One turn of the century paranormalist named Hickman Whittington spent the night there and died the next day from a sudden unexplained illness. Others, including some Vietnam vets who thought they had the gonads to stay all night, tried and failed in the quest to stay all night in the "haunted" attic. Finally, in the 1970's a local TV station put a TV personality up for the night in the slave quarters, part of a Halloween publicity stunt. He succeeded, a sort of prequel to the Geraldo Rivera's opening of the Capone Vaults (another Illinois media event) in that the spirits were apparently camera shy and they ended up with a pretty boring show. The longtime owners and caretakers closed off the house to overnight guests after a knocked over lantern nearly burned the old wooden building down. It was finally closed to the public in 1996 when the owners retired.

One-legged and sour, Kidnapper John Hart Crenshaw sits with his super-hot old lady and his crutch

A number of John Hart Crenshaw's descendents deny any wrongdoing on the part of their long-dead relative, accusing historians and folklorists alike of a "cruel conspiracy" to "besmirch" their "good" name, citing a paucity of hard proof pointing to Crenshaw's illicit activity. On one internet post regarding the house, former owner George Sisk was accused by an anonymous ranter of "making the whole thing up" and adding the whipping posts and shackles as props to try and add a horror element to attract tourists. This is an unlikely scenario.

The Old Slave House is located near the junction of Highway 45 and Highway 13 in Southern Illinois. It is 14 miles east of Harrisburg. If you're heading east on 13, when you get to the junction of Route 1, you turn right onto Route 1 and head south for a little over a mile and it will be on your right, up on a small hill.
Update: The State of Illinois has purchased the mansion with plans to open it as a state historic site, and appropriated $150,000 for it's renovation in 2006 4. However as of Feb 2010, spending cuts and ongoing state financial woes have kept it from opening as of yet.

New Obsessive Issue 006

featuring:

Battle Fish!
Cat Lady Fashion!
How To Manage Your Dictatorship, Now That You've Conquered!
Aero Disaster Omelets!
Must-See London Travel Sites!
Barfing In The Bread Bin!

American Heroes and Madmen #10: Russell Burrows

*this article and more are from my freshly updated Illinois oddities page

In 1982 retired Army Ranger and prison guard Russell Burrows claimed to have, while hunting along the Little Wabash River, stumbled upon a cave that held priceless artifacts from ancient man, including large amounts of gold and burial chambers akin to the Egyptian Pharaohs. Any artifacts that were shown to the scientific community were initially dismissed as "obvious fakes", and the text on the inscribed tablets were said by experts to be a gibberish combination of various dead languages. Burrows' story itself is fishy on many levels. He claims after being humiliated and badgered by critics he grew weary of the hubbub and simply dynamited the entrance to the cave in 1989.

Ten years later Ancient American Magazine founder Wayne May says that he convinced Burrows to show him his cave, and claims that Burrows in fact led him to a cave entrance that had been dynamited. In attempts to circumvent the damage and go inside, May said the cave had since flooded and filled with debris to the point of uselessness while afoot. Soooooo, May raised money and collected various experts to open the cave. This took 3 1/2 years, and when he returned to do so, he was told by Burrows:   1. that this was not the original cave, that the REAL cave was 40 miles away (take that, dirty scientist!!)    2. Burrows didn't even own the land on which this (equally nifty American Indian artifact filled) cave is   3. This new cave was to be referred to as "Tombs of the Embarras" (insert laugh track here), not "Burrows' Cave"   4. that Burrows' Cave (not the Tomb of the Embarrassed, er Embarras) is in the process of being excavated by a super-smart, super-secret team of  archaeologists who wish to remain anonymous. Mmmm - K.

Amazingly, May found evidence to support the original descriptions/maps of Burrows' Cave with ground penetrating radar. Read about it here. There is little to be found online on what the findings were on subsequent expeditions by May. Whatever was found since was apparently not Earth-shattering.

Theories surrounding possible explanations of a real burial chamber as described by Burrows are mind-bending and too numerous to list without devoting weeks of research. That's what google is for, my friend. Go for it. Lets just say there are folks who are really, REEAALLY into this story (either backing up Burrow or lustfully discrediting him), including the Mormons.

Burrows' cave is still causing controversy: in 2009 a History Channel program entitled The Holy Grail In America featured the story and artifacts.  Burrows has been described as having a penchant for wearing military uniforms of various eras as his everyday clothing. He sounds like a total fucking hoot, regardless of what the archaeology scholars think. I want to have him come into my bar so I can pour him a drink and listen to his bullshit for hours.

You can buy his autographed book for $23 here:  Russ Burrows, 117 Chestnut Street, Windsor, Colorado 80550.

When White Trash Collides

Just think of the babies they could've had. Happy birthday Dolly!