Librarian Sock Monkey Throws Down a Primate Challenge:Forgotten Art Appreciation

Ms. Monkeythong, the Librarian Sock Monkey has issued a challenge on her blog to her loyal readers:

Based on an article on the Guardian UK website, Ms. M has challenged her readers to list their favorite artists, musicians, writers, etc. that have been lost to Pop Culture history.

So here's the Zenfo Pro list....
(Consider this an "open-source" tag.)

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MUSIC
Urge Overkill
Wow, Saturation [1993 Geffen Records] totally blew my mind at one point. I stole a bootleg cassette version of this from an ex-GF after she left me for the Marine Corps. Overrated when they first came out with a major-label release, the Chicago trio was lumped in with the Grunge scene but really belong in that hybrid category with the Gin Blossoms and other psychedelic garage rock of the early 90s.

FILM
High Plains Drifter
Clint Eastwood's first Western in the Director's Chair, HPD has all the dark, dreary underpinnings of his later Oscar-Winning work and the weirdness of Leone's classic Westerns.

ART
Frederic Remington
Its amazing how few people east of the Mississippi have ever heard of Remington, the man who captured so much of the simple beauty of the American West. His bronze work represents some of the most amazing in American sculpture - its raw action represents the continental break from the Old World.

LITERATURE
Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen
Probably two of the world's greatest war poets, both men served in the British military during the First World War. Sassoon was spared the hangman's noose for treason by fellow writer Robert Graves...and sentenced to a military mental hospital to be treated for the "insanity" of being a pacifist. Owen, who Sassoon befriended and encouraged, died in the trenches as the war's end was being finalized in France.

Neither soldier-poet wrote touchy-feely accounts of warfare, nor did they glamorize it. They scribbled in notebooks surrounded by the stench of bodies rotting in barbed-wire entanglements, watching helplessly through gasmask lenses as German, Briton, and Frenchman alike choked to death on gas. With the current War in Iraq, its easy for folks to just turn the channel when reports stream in concerning the true cost of warfare.

ENEMIES, by Siegfried Sassoon, from The Huntsman and other Poems (1918)

HE stood alone in some queer sunless place
Where Armageddon ends. Perhaps he longed
For days he might have lived; but his young face
Gazed forth untroubled: and suddenly there thronged
Round him the hulking Germans that I shot
When for his death my brooding rage was hot.

He stared at them, half-wondering; and then
They told him how I’d killed them for his sake—
Those patient, stupid, sullen ghosts of men;
And still there seemed no answer he could make.
At last he turned and smiled. One took his hand
Because his face could make them understand.

PARABLE OF THE OLD MAN AND THE YOUNG, by Wilfred Owen

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven;
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.