BY LIZ
About a month ago I became aware of the existence of David Klein, who
was an artist and illustrator who made a lot of weird and gorgeous
advertisements in the 1960s. He's maybe best known for all these TWA posters, which I'm in
love with. Apparently you can buy originals of some of the posters on
Etsy for hundreds of dollars, like the L.A. one on the left here:
There's a stupid lack of David Klein info on the Internet, but I did learn he was an active member of the California Watercolor Society, which charms my socks off. David's bio says the California Watercolor Society "often chose to paint watercolors depicting scenes of everyday life in the cities and suburbs of California," and that makes me wish David were still with us now so that he could illustrate everywhere I love in California, especially my neighborhood and Topanga Canyon and the weirdest parts of the Valley (Lankershim Boulevard in particular, where I took all of these groovy pictures).
But David Klein died in 2005. He came from Texas, and he was in the army and fought in World War II. And at first my whole point in posting this post was so I could do this:
#GEORGE
...but then I looked at more of David's work and saw that he also made posters for movies and foods and books and everything. I haven't found any David Klein music art, but I'd really love for him to make art for all these people/albums/songs/whatever:
-Outkast
-The Beatles, especially Help!-era Beatles
-Ex Hex
-The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society
-Courtney Barnett
-the first two Shins records
-that Strokes song about Hawaii
-mid-career Sonic Youth, especially Goo
-Ram by Paul & Linda McCartney
-late-era Pavement
-The Hollies oh god I love the Hollies, I love Evolution by the Hollies so much right now
I think my basic criteria for music being David Klein-worthy are (1) a fluency in the nuance of thoughtful/subversive whimsy and (2) an undercurrent of scrappiness, melancholy, and serious feminine energy to keep said whimsy from unraveling into precious bullshit.
