Dave Dyment | My Friend Goo

Dave Dyment

My Friend Goo

Toronto, Canada: Paul + Wendy Projects, 2025

38 pp., 25 x 17 cm. staple bound

Edition of 200 

Today several people wrote to say that they heard Lee Ranaldo mention my Paul+Wendy Projects book My Friend Goo on a couple of recent podcasts. He’s making the rounds promoting a great new LP: a paired down ‘reimagined’ version of the soundtrack for Joris Postema's celebrated 'eco-doc' The System. 

In both interviews Lee is asked about Goo, Sonic Youth’s major label debut. He points out that they signed to Geffen Record in part because they were offered full creative autonomy, but then recounts a story about wanting to use a Raymond Pettibon drawing of Joan Crawford with the word Blowjob and a question mark, and title the record Blowjob. Geffen wrote to say “Ah, we know you have complete creative control, but please don’t do this to us.” 

Ranaldo: "We acquiesced and went with this cover, which is a way better cover and which has spawned a thousand variations. An artist in Canada named Dave Dyment put out a publication last year with about two hundred variations. You know: Luke and Leia, Dre and Eminem, Bernie and, ah, I don’t know who else was in that one, but there’s a million of take-offs. Ren & Stimpy in the car. So it was the right move." 

A few days before the subject comes up on The Broken Record podcast: 

LEE: "As a matter of fact, last year this Canadian artist put out a book - there’s a million spin-offs of the Goo cover: Obama and Hillary, C3PO and R2D2, JayZ and Eminem, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie - there’s hundreds of variations on that cover, they keep coming out all the time. There’s one called Islamic Youth with a woman in a burka, and some artist wrote this long conceptual essay about it and published this zine-like book with two hundred different examples of these spin-offs.” 

Listen to the East Village Radio podcast here, and the Broken Record podcast here. 

The System is released today and can be purchased here. 

My Friend Goo: Memes, Mashups and Remixes can be purchased from the publisher, here. 

My Friend Goo

Pleased to see my book made it into the hands of Raymond Pettibon. 

"The artist who created the iconic cover graphic for Sonic Youth’s 1990 LP Goo is no stranger to memetic dissemination. Raymond Pettibon was an early provisional member of his brother Greg Ginn’s punk rock band, Black Flag17 and proposed the band name and logo simultaneously, a stylized black flag represented as four black bars.18

"If a white flag means surrender, a black flag represents anarchy,” he told author Steven Blush. “I was a card-carrying anarchist when I was fourteen. The Black Flag was a symbol of anarchy; depicting that as pistons seemed to have some visual power, plus convey the actual form of the flag.”19

In Los Angeles, the image would soon become almost as ubiquitous as the anarchy symbol. The group spray-painted the logo all over the city: on the side of buildings, alleys, sidewalks, the freeway underpass, and “the back of 16 wheelers.” Because of the simplicity of reproducing the logo, fans began to take up the mantle. Keith Morris - the first singer of the band20 - described it as an early form of tagging.

“We saw the logo before we heard the band,” said Henry Rollins, who would later join the group as front person. It would eventually become the subject of countless memes, many in the form of fan tattoos21.

In the spirit of Punk Rock DIY, Black Flag self-released all of their recordings on their own label, SST Records22, virtually all of them with Pettibon illustrations on the cover23. Like Vaughn Oliver at 4AD or Peter Saville24 at Factory Records, Pettibon’s deadpan comic album cover and flyer designs came to define the visual identity of SST.25”

- excerpt from My Friend Goo: Memes, Mashups and Remixes

Dave Dyment | My Friend Goo

Dave Dyment

My Friend Goo

Toronto, Canada: Paul + Wendy Projects, 2025

38 pp., 25 x 17 cm. staple bound

Edition of 200

Astutely recognizing that the subject matter touched on a number of my interests1, Paul Van Kooy commissioned me to write a text about Raymond Pettibon’s cover for Sonic Youth’s Goo LP and the subsequent hundreds of memes it has inspired. We amassed over a hundred of them, most of which appear in this little publication, and I wrote a text that attempts to make sense of them. 

It traces the way a Moors Murders paparazzi photo became a Raymond Pettibon drawing, then a cover for Sonic Youth’s major label debut and then a template for people to address subjects as varied as companionship, fandom, escape, corruption, trans rights, police killings, threats to democracy around the world, Covid19, and countless other contemporary concerns. 

The book is designed by Emma Wright (who designed Roula’s fantastic Index), features a cover illustration by Leanne Shapton2 and comes with a bookmark by Jonathan Monk3.

Thanks, of course, to Paul, Wendy, Emma, Leanne, Jonathan, Lee, and Roula. And special thanks to Annie Koyama for making this (and so many other things) possible.

The book is available from the publisher, here. 

1. Sonic Youth, Raymond Pettibon, album covers by artists, the ways that culture takes shape, etc.

2. Leanne Shapton is an artist, art director and publisher. She has designed lettering for the covers of two  Chuck Palahniuk novels and the credits of Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. She also created the "armpit sex drawing" for Spike Jonze's 2013 film Her.

3. The first hundred copies include a bookmark made from a receipt drawing with an illustration of another SY album cover, Daydream Nation (see next post). 

"A wonderful look into not just our mashup but the whole history of them. I loved the historical antecedents - and the footnotes are as good a read as the text! Really wonderful to have this text about (or, in reference to) our album cover and Ray’s drawing.”

- Lee Ranaldo

Lenka Clayton | How We Thought It Would Be And How It Was

 

Lenka Clayton

How We Thought It Would Be And How It Was

Atlanta, USA: J&L Books, 2025

48 pp., 29.2 x 24.2 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Designed by Jason Fulford (who runs J&L Books with his partner Leanne Shapton), Lenka Clayton’s latest publication collects twenty-three of the more-than five-hundred drawings she has produced using a 1957 portable Smith-Corona Skyriter typewriter. 

This series consists of works made in 2020, during the early days of the Covid pandemic, including her grandmother’s thumb on the camera during a Zoom call, kitchen haircuts, quarantined mail, empty supermarket shelves and tea towels repurposed as face masks.  

The book is available for $30 US, here. 

This week on Tumblr: Book covers designed by Artists

http://artistsbooksandmultiples.tumblr.com/tagged/book-covers-by-artists

Beck | Song Reader

Beck has just announced that his forthcoming album, his 12th, will be titled Song Reader and will feature 20 new songs, including "Do We? We Do" and "Don't Act Like Your Heart Isn't Hard". It is slated for release in December. However, the album will only be issued as sheet music. There will be no recorded component to the release - no CD or vinyl, and no MP3s.

"Song Reader is an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012 — an alternative that enlists the listener in the tone of every track, and that’s as visually absorbing as a dozen gatefold LPs put together," according to publishers McSweeney's.

I'd personally prefer the sheet music to be released straight, without visual accompaniment, but given McSweeney's lavish approach to publishing, visual embellishment was inevitable. The 108 pages of music will come in a carrying case and new artwork has been commissioned to illustrate each song. The artists include Marcel Dzama (whose work was used for the cover of Guero) and Leanne Shapton.