SPY VIBE RADIO: JOHN KLING

Greetings, Spy Vibers! It's been crunch time in the Spy Vibe lair lately. My art students just had their big annual spring exhibit last night. My 9th grade drawing and design kids put up some cool paintings based on designed works they like from book covers, album art, comics, etc. And I also had them experiment with an interesting design challenge to create grids based on the traditional motifs that developed in a region from their own ancestral roots. The results were really interesting to look at, but I think the highlight was just seeing them discover and celebrate how every area of the planet has exhibited cohesive aesthetics in their textile patterns, carvings, and writing systems. Every culture has treasures to discover. Other highlights from the show included a fun assortment of movies from my filmmaking students (everything from poetic experimental narratives to campy monster flicks) and it was one of the strongest photography shows from my photographers, which included beautiful abstract works, Star Wars figure scenes, and published portfolio books. It was a lot of work getting it all ready and arranged. Phew! At the very start of the month I also contributed my new monthly segment to the Cocktail Nation radio show out of Australia. This month I tapped into a fun little corner of genre thrillers I'm including in my upcoming book that developed in Germany. Popular novels about detectives and agents were a bit of a publishing boom in the 1920s and early 1930s and a character named John Kling was one of the regulars. Along with modern art, these stories were deemed degenerate and banned by the fascists. But all those closet fans were primed and ready to fuel a publishing (and eventually cinematic) phenomenon in the late 1940s and 1950s. John Kling made his comeback alongside the Edgar Wallace stories (and brand). Once spies became de rigueur in the Sixties, agent Kling and his partner made their way to the small screen in a television series called John Klings Abenteuer. In this episode of Cocktail Nation, I briefly introduce Kling and play the series theme by composer Gerhard Narholz. If the tune sounds familiar to some Spy Vibers, it might be because variations were once used in the animated show SpongeBob! You can listen to the episode here. 

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