“Dr. Winkie” was the nom de guerre of Bay Area entrepreneur and wannabe Warhol Lawrence Lin. Lin’s notoriety came from his ownership of the San Francisco discotheque Club DV8—pronounced “deviate”—remembered for its avant-garde music programming, as well as for the large Keith Haring murals in the eponymous “Keith Haring Room.”9 Before Lin/Dr. Winkie opened his club, he produced an inch-square computer chip with two flashing LEDs, one red and one green, which, perhaps due to its blinking face, he named “Winkie.
To sell the Winkie (and by extension promote Dr. Winkie himself), Lin in 1984 founded Xtronx Inc., a company that quickly threw together a plan for a publicity stunt in Los Angeles: a “living billboard” contest on Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood’s primary advertisement artery. This scheme was an endurance competition wherein a select group of individuals would compete to remain on the billboard the longest, surviving on its four-by-fifty-two-foot catwalk around the clock.
—ArtForum
In 1990, [two] brothers were arrested, and later convicted, for a foiled plot to kidnap and rob Lawrence Lin, also known as Dr. Winkie, the eccentric owner of the San Francisco nightclub DV8. (Wearing body armor and carrying semi-automatic rifles at the time of their arrest, the two improbably told cops they were on the way to protect Lin.)
—NY Magazine
A podcast episode about Winkie.
The promotional novelty song.
The Keith Harring wedding invitation:
