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Jeanne Mammen: The fierce artwork of a woman dubbed a ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis
08.12.2020
01:40 pm
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“Woman with absinthe glass, Moulin Rouge” by Jeanne Mammen (early 1900s).
 

“I have always wanted to be just a pair of eyes, walking through the world unseen, only to see others.”

—a quote from artist Jeanne Mammen from the only interview she would ever do during her career, with art historian Hans Kinkel, 1975.

Described as “artistically gifted” at a very early age, Jeanne Mammen’s family would move from her birthplace of Berlin to Paris when she was five. She immersed herself in French literature—especially that of the great Romantic novelist Victor Hugo and the poet Charles Baudelaire. In 1907, at the age of seventeen, Mammen and her sister Adeline attended Académie Julian. The Académie Julian was an artistic refuge, especially for women who were allowed to enroll and where they had access to nude male models as subject matter. This is important as other art-centric schools had been slow to admit women into their institutions. If they did, women were not allowed to participate in painting or life study classes with their male counterparts.

Jeanne and Adeline would move on to Brussels to continue their studies. Then to Rome, where they attended both the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma and the Scuola Libera del Nudo dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma (aka “The Scuola Libera del Nudo,” or “free school of the nude,” for the teaching of life-drawing). The sisters would return to Paris in 1912 only to be forced to flee the city with their family. Unfortunately, their successful merchant father, Gustav Oskar Mammen, was labeled a “foreign enemy” and all of the family’s possessions, including their home, were confiscated. By 1916, the Mammen family was impecunious and living in Berlin doing any kind of work they could collectively find to keep financially afloat. After some time, Jeanne and her sister were able to afford to rent a studio apartment. The small apartment would eventually become a place Jeanne seldom left and where she would bring her observations of Berlin to life. Her work was widely published in magazines, as well as her writing. She was finally, once again, financially secure. But as 1933 and WWII loomed, Mammen would once again find herself out of work, but that didn’t mean she stopped working. Here is another quote attributed to Mammen’s lone interview on how she managed to keep creating despite the Nazis’ best efforts to stop her and other artists whom they categorized as “degenerates”:

“With the advent of the Hitler era, a ban on, or ‘Gleichschaltung’ of, all the magazines I was working for. The end of my ‘realistic’ period. Transition to an aggressive painting style, of fragmenting the object (in contrast to the official art world). World War II: no oil paints, no canvas—all pictures from this period are painted with gouache on cardboard. Ration cards, unemployment registration, hard labor, bombing, forced training as a fireman.”

Influenced by artists such as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas, Mammen seemed to embrace Figuratism as early as 1908, painting in this style for approximately six years before her work became more aligned with Symbolism. A wildly prolific artist who worked in various mediums, including watercolor, Mammen’s muses included members of Berlin’s queer community, a plethora of women, and vivid interjections of religious imagery and symbolism. Following the conclusion of WWII, Mammen would allegedly tell her longtime friend, Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist Max Delbrück, that “the ruins of Jeanne can be found in the ruins of Berlin.” After seven decades of creating artwork that still refuses to be defined by a singular artistic description, Mammen would pass away in Berlin at the age of 86. Mammen’s long career and artwork have been the subject of a couple of books including Jeanne Mammen: Paris – Bruxelles – Berlin (2017), Jeanne Mammen The Observer: Retrospective, 1910–1975 (2018). Her work is also featured in Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic: From Otto Dix to Jeanne Mammen (2018).

Images spanning Mammen’s impressive career follow.
 

 

“She Represents” (1928).
 

“Two Women Dancing” (1928).
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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08.12.2020
01:40 pm
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Debutantes, drag queens & Vaseline: The epic ‘Coming Out Party for Miss Alice Cooper,’ 1971
07.29.2020
03:50 pm
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An alternate image for Alice Cooper’s album ‘Killer.’ This image was also used for a calendar that came along with the record.
 
In the May 6th, 1972 issue of Billboard, there’s an amusing story about how a controversial poster of Alice Cooper (pictured above) ended up plastered on a “staff only” door in the White House during Richard Nixon’s administration. Allegedly, someone at Warner Bros., Cooper’s label at the time, had a pal (described as a “semi-longhaired fellow”) who worked at the White House. The W.H. staffer’s rocker friend would send him care packages full of records and other Warner-related stuff including a poster of Alice Cooper hanging from a noose covered in fake blood. The image was an alternate for Cooper’s 1971 album Killer and also appeared on a nifty Alice Cooper calendar for 1972, included in the record. The staffer then took the poster and stuck it on a door at the end of a “staff only” corridor in the W.H., presumably until it was discovered and burned by one of Tricky Dick’s dicks.

Did this really happen? One can only hope, as Bob Regehr, one of Warner’s greatest assets in the 70s and 80s, was Cooper’s champion and likely had everything to do with the circulation of this fantastic piece of folklore. Regehr was instrumental in signing acts like Roxy Music, the Sex Pistols, and Laurie Anderson. Back in the day, Cooper had Regehr in the first spot in his Rolodex, and for their next act to keep Killer on everyone’s mind, they devised a plan to throw an elaborate party in Cooper’s honor. And when I say “elaborate,” I really mean “deranged,” which makes more sense since this was 1971 and Alice Cooper was involved.

But before we get to the party to end all parties, there’s a little twist as to why the party was dubbed “The Coming Out Party for Miss Alice Cooper.” According to another Warner executive, Stan Cornyn, he was part of a conversation about Killer with Joel Friedman, Warner’s head of distribution for the U.S., and Regehr, who was heading up Warner’s Artist Relations. When Cornyn heard Friedman say, “Alice Cooper! Her record is doing great!” he and Regehr dreamed up the idea of Cooper “coming out” to the world during a star-studded, debaucherous party. And that’s precisely what happened—because it ain’t a real party until the gorilla suit rented for the occasion goes missing during the festivities, never to be seen again.

Held at The Ambassador Hotel, the hotel staff did not know any of the details behind the “coming out” party to be held in their Venetian ballroom. Here’s the wording on the invitation:

“You and a guest are cordially invited to attend the summer season debut of Alice Cooper, to be held at the Venetian Room, Ambassador Hotel, 3400 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, the evening of Wednesday, July 14th, 8:30 PM to midnight. Formal dress or equivalent costume is requested, but hardly mandatory.”

The details of the party were left to Dennis Lopez who had plenty of experience throwing unforgettable bashes all over San Francisco for legendary drag troupe The Cockettes. Cooper was known to spend time with the Cockettes whenever he came through S.F., as Cooper dug their “gender fuck” vibe, and likewise, the Cockettes dug Cooper’s over-the-top showmanship. Advertised as a “formal dress” kind of ball, many guests did arrive dressed to the nines. Inside the Venetian Room, an orchestra was in full swing. After guests were greeted by a Cockette dressed in a gorilla suit, more Cockettes (many with beards, beaded gowns, and headdresses) threw red roses as approximately 500 party goers entered, including Randy Newman, various Beach Boys, Gordon Lightfoot, Donovan, and Cynthia Plaster Caster. Because it’s not a fucking party until someone sticks their dick in a plaster mold. Other members of the Cockettes were dressed as cigarette girls offering up cigars, cigarettes, and Vaseline. In addition to the orchestra, Elsie May, aka T.V. Mama (a former backup singer for James Brown), and her “stoned-freak out soul band” ran through a few numbers before T.V. Mama (a lady of “ample” proportions) stripped down to her undies and performed topless. But what about the guest of honor, Alice Cooper?

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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07.29.2020
03:50 pm
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Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy: Fifty years ago The Cockettes turned drag upside down


A photo taken by Clay Geerdes of author and Cockette Fayette Hauser wearing a homemade grass skirt ensemble.

The catastrophic effect of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has hit anyone working in the gig economy incredibly hard. Book tours over the years have become big business for authors and independent bookstores hosting author events in support of newly released literature. Many authors, set to embark on Spring/Summer book tours, have had to scrap their plans, with some publishers even holding back on releasing their books. Thankfully, this was not the path chosen by drag trailblazer Fayette Hauser, she of the pioneering gender-bending performance troupe The Cockettes. It is my great privilege to be able to share a bit about her glittery, LSD-drenched book, The Cockettes: Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy—a magnificent 352-page volume detailing the three-years the Cockettes conquered San Francisco and turned the drag community on its magnificently wigged head.

As Hauser recounts in the book, she was “rendered speechless” by a hit of strong acid at a party and soon found herself sitting on the floor only able to sit upright with help from the wall behind her. During this voyage, Hauser became acutely aware of the individuality of the people surrounding her to the point where she was not able to recognize their gender or her own. The year was 1968, and the Summer of Love had led masses of people to detach themselves from modern conformity, liberating their ability to express themselves freely. Eventually, The Cockettes would pave the way for others, whether gay, straight, bisexual, or pansexual, with their provocative performances and their communal way of life by living by the term “Gender Fuck.” And if you’re wondering what exactly is “Gender Fuck,” it made sense to go directly to the source, Hauser herself, to help define this very direct description of a person not identifying as exclusively male or female:

“The term Gender Fuck emerged as many of our descriptive phrases did, in an Acid flash! This term, gender fuck, became a way of describing our look, which was highly personalized, very conceptual, and without gender boundaries. We wanted to mystify the public so that the onlooker would declare, ‘What Is that? Is that a boy or a girl?’ We wanted to open people’s minds to the terrain between the tired gender binary models, which were much too mentally binding and boring as well. We unleashed that open space in between. We explored the fluid nature of the Self, which led to the term Gender Fluid. I think we succeeded in opening that Pandora’s Box of multi-dimensional, organic self-expression through body decor.”

In 1968, after graduating with a BFA in painting from Boston University, Hauser, a New Jersey native, moved out to San Francisco. Soon she would form a collective with like-minded, free-spirited people, and the Cockettes would officially begin their reign in 1969—specifically on the stage of the Palace Theater in North Beach on New Year’s Eve. The ever-growing troupe would first communally inhabit a grand Victorian-style home on 2788 Bush Street and then, after a fire rendered the home uninhabitable, a building on Haight—one of San Francisco’s most notorious streets. There was also a home known as The Chateau on 1965 Oak Street, where members of The Cockettes spent their time devising their next performance, creating costumes and personas, and tripping on LSD. The Cockettes took so much acid that they would often become non-verbal. This would lead to other forms of communication by way of personal adornment using makeup, clothing, and anything else that would convey the silent message emanating by the troupes’ diverse members, including 22-year-old Los Angeles native Sylvester James Jr., soon to become R&B disco queen Sylvester. Before his short stint with The Cockettes, Sylvester was a part of a group called The Disquotays—a performance collective comprised of black crossdressers and transgender women.
 

Sylvester during his short time with The Cockettes. Photo by Clay Geerdes. Unless otherwise noted, all photos provided to Dangerous Minds are for exclusive use.
 
The Cockettes’ performances were the be-there affair for all the counterculture chicks, dicks, and everyone in between. When director John Waters touched down in San Francisco to show off his 1969 film Mondo Trasho, the screening landed the director in jail for conspiracy to commit indecent exposure. The film made its debut at the Palace Theater where The Cockettes performed their knock-out drag shows on the regular. At the time, Waters was not aware of The Cockettes, but that would quickly change for the director as Divine would end up performing with the Cockettes as “Lady Divine”—one of the first times would be in the first annual Miss de Meanor Beauty Pageant at the Palace, where Divine played the pageant host, Miss de Meanor. In addition to confessing to the Tate/LaBianca murders, Divine would lead the other participants in the show (Miss Conception, Miss Shapen, Miss Used, and Miss Carriage) in a tournament to the death, where the queens had to fight with their fists for the coveted crown.

Divine would go on to win the ‘The Miss de Meanor Beauty Pageant’ in 1971. The following year, during The Cockettes’ last official show (another ‘Miss de Meanor Beauty Pageant’) at the House of Good, John Waters wrote a speech for her to read onstage, described by Cockette Scrumbly as “brilliant”. As the idea of Divine reading a speech written by John Waters is everything, I asked the director if he was willing to share any memory he had of this drag-tastic moment, and he very kindly responded with the following:

“To be honest, I’m not sure a written copy of that speech even exists in my film archive at Wesleyan Archive, and if it did, it would be word-slash-words that only I could understand. I do remember it was punk-ish (before the word) in a hippy venue that was bizarrely the Peoples Temple church, that was rented for the occasion after Jim Jones and gang had moved out. Divine ranted about following hippies home, eating sugar and killing their pets, or some such lunacy. I do still have the poster hanging in my SF apartment. I’m glad Scrumbly remembered it because I always did too. Quite a night in San Francisco.”

 

A flier advertising The Cockettes’ last show featuring Lady Divine.
 
The Cockettes intermingled with, as you might imagine, lots of famous people who were intrigued by the troupes’ anything-goes take on drag and life. Author Truman Capote called the Cockettes shows “the only true theater.” Alice Cooper, who once jumped out of a cake surrounded by The Cockettes for a PR stunt dubbed “The Coming Out Party for Miss Alice Cooper,” was a frequent guest at the Haight-Ashbury house. And then there was Iggy Pop. When Iggy and The Stooges were recording Fun House in 1970, the then 23-year-old Iggy would start each studio session by dropping a tab of acid (as noted in the book Open Up and Bleed). The band decided to take a break and head to San Francisco for a weekend, playing a couple of shows at the Fillmore with Alice Cooper and Flamin’ Groovies. The first show on May 15th was attended by most of The Cockettes, who bore witness to Iggy on stage clad in the tightest jeans possible and long silver lamé gloves. Iggy was already a sweetheart of the gay community, and as Cockette Rumi Missabu recalls, Iggy distinctly gave them the impression he was “playing just for them.” Following the show, Iggy would become a regular guest of The Cockettes.

In the 2002 film, The Cockettes, Cockette Sweet Pam confessed that the collective “almost brushed their teeth with LSD,” to which Fayette would add, “contributed to the emphasis of flashy costumes.” Although the use of acid was the norm for the Cockettes, their art, sexual autonomy, and fierce expressions of individuality all contributed to the creation of High Drag. And, thankfully, the world would never be the same.

 

Cockette Wally in full regalia. Photo by Clay Geerdes.
 

Cockette John Rothermel Photo by Clay Geerdes.
 

Cockettes’ Dusty Dawn and Wally in pearls. Photo by Clay Geerdes.
 
Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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05.11.2020
12:06 pm
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Fellini originally wanted to cast the Beatles, Mae West, Groucho Marx and Danny Kaye in ‘Satyricon’

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In 1968, Federico Fellini decided he was going make the greatest homosexual movie ever made. What he meant by a homosexual movie, no one was quite sure, but it was going to be great. In fact, it going to be the greatest homosexual movie ever, or so Fellini kept telling anyone who would listen.

Fellini was living it large with the international success of La Dolce Vita, , and Juliet of the Spirits. He was now described by some critics as “the greatest living director.” What Alfred Hitchcock thought of this news, no one knows, but Fellini was not going to disagree. He travelled to America where he was fascinated by the rise of hippie culture, free love, and young boys with long hair who looked like girls. It was the Age of Aquarius, the hippies told him. Fellini was an Aquarian, born on the 20th of January 1920. He was superstitious and believed what he was told. This was then was the Age of Aquarius—his time. Who was he to disagree?

The subject matter for his new film was the first century story Satyricon by Gaius Petronius written during the reign of Emperor Nero. Petronius fell foul of Nero and was accused of treason. To avoid one of Nero’s gruesome executions, Petronius cut his own wrists, bound them up, then picked at them during a dinner with friends until he inevitably bled to death. Much of Petronius’ original text for Satyricon had been lost but this did not concern Fellini, as he was more interested in imagining what had happened in those missing gaps. This was not going to be Petronius’ Satyricon but Fellini’s Satyricon. It was the first time the director’s name appeared before the title of his film.

Satyricon told the story two young streetwise punks Encolpius and Ascyltus and their mutual lust for a boy Gitón. The pair fall into various misadventures before Ascytlus is killed and Encolpius abandons his lustful ways for a more-considered life.

Author Paul Gillette set the scene for Fellini’s movie in his introduction to the film-tie-in book of Satyricon:

Imperial Age Rome was a cesspool of vice and carnality. The leisure classes, having been turned from power, devoted themselves exclusively to the pursuit of pleasure. Marriage was regarded as a mere formality, more often than not ignored; bisexuality was considered the most desirable state of sexual appetite, the term being equated with ‘sexual completeness.’

When a boy attained the age of reason, or as soon as possible thereafter, his parents would seek to place him under the tutelage of a young man who had proved himself learned and wise in the ways of the world. It was the function of this wise young man, called a “mentor,” to teach the boy all worth knowing—not the least worthy of which was sex. At the same time that the lad was being taught logic, literature and numbers, he was being introduced to sexual experience in the form of manual, anal and oral contact with his mentor. When it was thought that he was sufficiently prepared, the boy was introduced to the heterosexual world; thenceforth, he was free to do as he chose. The same master-apprentice relationship existed among females.

Petronius’ tale was a scandalous satire on this world, poking fun at the people and their loose morals and practices.

Fellini saw a parallel between mid-first century Rome and the 1960s. But although this was a time of free love, rock concerts, and students rioting on the cobblestone streets of Paris, Fellini wanted an older, respected bunch of actors to appear in his movie. He called Danny Kaye and summoned him to the Cinecitta Studios. The versatile song-and-dance comedian arrived at Rome airport without the slightest idea what Fellini wanted, other than he wanted him to star in his next movie. Over lunch, Fellini told Kaye, he didn’t want him as the star but rather the villain of the piece, Lichas—a murderous gay transvestite pirate and mortal enemy of the story’s narrator Encolpius. He kidnaps Encolpius to keep as his catamite then marries him while dressed as a bride. Kaye baulked at the idea. This wasn’t the kind of family entertainment that had made him famous.

Taking on such a role might bring unwanted attention to Kaye’s private life. Kaye was bisexual and had a long-term relationship with Laurence Olivier. According to biographer Donald Spoto, Kaye once organized for Olivier to be stopped on entry to the US at New York airport. Kaye had disguised himself as a customs officer. He then allegedly carried out an intense cavity search on the noble Shakespearean actor, before revealing his true identity.

After his meeting with Fellini, Kaye quickly returned to America. Less said, soonest mended. Yet, seven years later, Kaye did play a dubious pirate with an obsessive interest in children, when he starred as Captain Hook against Mia Farrow’s Peter Pan. Perhaps Fellini had been right in his choice of Kaye. The role eventually went to French actor Alain Cuny.
 
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Undeterred, Fellini told the press he would cast Mae West, Groucho Marx, Jimmy Durante, Van Heflin, Boris Karloff, and Michael J. Pollard. No one was going to stop the great Fellini from making his movie. But Groucho Marx said “No.” Durante said “What?” Mae West turned the offer of playing a sex mad high priestess and mother figure down as she didn’t like the idea of being a “mother figure.” Boris Karloff was interested but too busy, perhaps a day or two in May?. Pollard said “Yes,” but nothing came of it.

Fellini even appeared on TV stating he was going to cast the Beatles. While this would have certainly been a more interesting film to make than the folly of The Magical Mystery Tour, the question was: which Beatle would play which role? Would McCartney be the young love interest Gitón? Would Lennon be Encolpius?  Harrison Ascyltus? And what about Ringo? The suggestion captured the media’s imagination. Fellini added that he hoped the Beatles would write the score for the movie. Meanwhile, back in London, the Beatles’ press office said they knew nothing of any proposal for John, Paul, George, and Ringo to star in any great homosexual movie, Fellini’s or otherwise.

The novelist Henry Miller watched Fellini’s performance on television and noted the director was merely improvising—riffing like a jazz player on the celebrity names he pulled out the air to see the response each one received. Now, he said he would cast Terence Stamp and Pierre Clementi who would star as Encolpius and Ascyltus. Fellini added:

I’d like [Elizabeth] Taylor, [Richard] Burton, [Brigitte] Bardot, [Peter] O’Toole, [Louis] de Funes, Jerry Lewis, [Marlon] Brando, Lee Marvin, the Beatles, the Maharishi, Lyndon Johnson and [General] de Gaulle, or else no one, not a known face, to increase the sense of foreign-ness.

It was becoming clear that it was going to be “no one”—though Michael J. Pollard was still keen.
 
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Fellini and ‘the unknowns’ he eventually cast.
 
More of Fellini’s ‘Satyricon,’ after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.04.2019
09:03 am
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‘Beware! Beware! We are not to be trifled with’: The work of pioneering genderqueer artist Gluck
08.28.2019
08:50 am
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Gluck, circa 1924.
 
Hannah Gluckstein preferred to be called Peter or Hig but liked “Gluck, no prefix, suffix or quotes” best. Gluck. A functional name. Gender neutral long before such a term existed. A trademark, a product, a producer of art.

Gluck was born into a very wealthy Jewish family on August 13th, 1895 in London. The first born, a daughter who was expected to grow happy and demure and marry a most suitable husband—someone who would make the family proud and strengthen the business. But that wasn’t Gluck. Early photographs show a long-haired girl staring fixedly at the camera with defiance and dreams of another life.

This life came with a growing interest in painting and drawing and a desire to be an artist. The family were not impressed. The Glucksteins were half of the business empire Salmon & Gluckstein, owners of (what was claimed to be) the world’s largest tobacco company, a selection of hotels (the Cumberland, the Trocadero), and the famous Lyon’s Corner House tearooms, which were a staple of British social life from the 1920s-50s—see Graham Greene’s novels for details. Art was a poor choice for business and a not a suitable career for a woman. Yet, Gluck’s parents indulged their daughter thinking this trifling passion for art was mere whimsy, a passing phase.

Between 1913-1916, Gluck attended the St. John’s Wood School of Art in London. The parents hoped this experience would cause Gluck to give up on this teenage fancy. Instead it proved to be three years that changed Gluck’s life and confirmed a startling talent and some deeply held ambitions. At the college, Gluck met another artist Miss E. M. Craig, a mysterious figure who was simply known as Craig. Together they eloped to Lamorna, Cornwall to an artists’ colony.  Gluck’s parents were shocked. This was not the kind of thing a good Jewish girl was supposed to do. They blamed Craig as a “pernicious influence.”

Yet still, when their wayward daughter reached the age of 21, Gluck’s father supplied a trust fund which ably supported the move to Cornwall, where Gluck bought a studio. The money also enabled Gluck to be the person little Hannah Gluckstein had once dreamed of becoming. Hair razor cut like a boy’s, a suit handmade by one of London’s finest tailors, and the adopting of the name “Gluck.”

Gluck was particular about this new name. People who used any other name, any former name, were cut off. Once, an art society sent a letter to “Miss Gluck”—Gluck resigned from the society immediately. It led many to describe Gluck as “a difficult woman.” Now Gluck was free to begin a new life.

In the 1920s, Gluck held a first “one man exhibition” of diverse artworks. It brought celebrity and commissions to paint portraits of the elite members of the establishment—lawyers, judges, and so forth. The solo exhibition was visited by members of royalty and politics, and brought contacts with some of society’s most influential enablers. The interior designer, Syrie Maugham, wife of writer Somerset Maugham, used Gluck’s paintings to enhance her creations which brought further fame and more commissions.

When Gluck’s father died in 1930, it was the younger brother who inherited the estate as the eldest male heir. This (understandably) proved to be an irksome bone of contention which meant Gluck had to ask, or go cap in hand, for any further monies. Yet, if Gluck had wanted to be truly independent then it would have made far more sense to cut all ties with the family and establish a career by hard work and perseverance. But the family’s wealth allowed Gluck to live a life of luxury, to live the life of an artist, or as Picasso once almost poetically put it—to be rich enough to live poor.

Money was important but a more important factor in Gluck’s development as an artist were the women who became lovers. One was Sybil Cookson, the journalist and writer who inspired Gluck’s paintings of horse races and boxing matches. The couple lived together at Bolton House in West Hampstead, bought by Gluck’s father and maintained by a staff of servants—a cook, a maid, and a housekeeper. The relationship between the two women lasted until Cookson caught Gluck frolicking with a dancer called Annette Mills, who was the actor John Mills older sister and was later famous as the presenter of the classic BBC children’s show Muffin the Mule (which perhaps brings a whole new meaning to the term “Muffin the Mule.”) This fling lasted until Gluck formed a new relationship with the florist and flower arranger Constance Spry who inspired Gluck’s sequence of exquisite floral paintings. This revelation of the secret relationship between Gluck and the married Spry only became public after Diana Souhami published her excellent biography on the artist in 1988—a book and a writer whose work I thoroughly recommend to all.

But the woman who brought Gluck to the height of artistic expression as a genderqueer icon was Nesta Obermer, an American who was married to an older, exceedingly rich Mr. Moneybags. Gluck fell deeply, passionately in love with Obermer and wanted to live with her “for eternity.” Gluck took the title husband and called Obermer wife. Gluck was so convinced this was the beginning of a bright and beautiful future together that old photographs, letters, and even paintings were burned as a symbol of this new beginning. Their marriage was confirmed in the painting “Medallion” or “YouWe” in 1936. A powerful portrait of an out lesbian couple or as Gluck described it in a letter to Nesta:

Now it is out and to the rest of the Universe I call Beware! Beware! We are not to be trifled with.

The two women in profile. Gluck the darker more pessimistic looking. The blonde-highlighted Obermer head up, eyes glinting to a better, brighter future.

And there was the rub.

If Gluck and Obermer married what sort of future would it be? How would they live? Obermer was not entirely smitten to cede the comfort and wealth of her rich aged beau, no matter how little she thought of him. She could never give up the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. The relationship lasted six years. When Obermer left, Gluck was devastated—as can be seen in the powerful “Self-Portrait” from 1942, which depicts Gluck looking almost as if recently bereaved and bravely attempting to carry on alone.

Alas, Gluck did not carry on. The work faltered, and years were spent in correspondence with paint companies attempting to find better quality paints for artists. Worthwhile, yes, but not a subject to consume a talent as rare and as brilliant as Gluck’s.

After the Second World War, Gluck fell out of favor as an artist. A new world of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art dominated. In 1973, over thirty years since the last solo exhibition, Gluck held a final exhibition at the Fine Art Gallery. It was a last hurrah for this pioneering and distinctly unique talent. One of Gluck’s last paintings “Credo (Rage Rage Against the Dying of the Light)” (1970-73) captured the artist countering the inevitable decline:

I am living daily with death and decay, and it is beautiful and calming. All order is lost; mechanics have gone overboard—A phantasmagoric irrelevance links shapes and matter. A new world evolves with increasingly energy and freedom soon to be invisibly reborn within our airy envelope.

Gluck died at the age of 82 on January 10th, 1978.
 
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‘Portrait of Miss E.M. Craig’ (1920).
 
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‘Gluck. Before the races, St Buryan, Cornwall’ (1924).
 
More iconic paintings by Gluck, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.28.2019
08:50 am
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Rebel Without Applause: That time Sir John Gielgud got busted for cruising

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Being invested with a knighthood can have its advantages. The media will take a knight more seriously and give credence to their pronouncements no matter how inane. Financial services are generally easier to obtain. And there is the potential to be excused of questionable activities, no matter how criminal.

When the illustrious actor John Gielgud was awarded a knighthood in June 1953, he wrote to his friend Edith Evans to say that he “was very proud to be in such noble company,” and hoped to do his best and “be a credit to you all.”

Four months later, Gielgud was arrested for “importuning” an undercover police officer in a public convenience. He described this incident as a “moment of madness” that could have destroyed his career.

Gielgud waited a long time for his knighthood. He had been an international star of stage and film for over thirty years. He had starred in a record-breaking production of Hamlet on Broadway and caused a sensation in the lead of Romeo and Juliet in London’s West End. His contemporaries Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson had already been knighted by the time Gielgud received his honor—even though he was arguably the better, more respected and longer-serving actor. One can only assume that part of the reason for this delay came from suspicions over Gielgud’s long-time status as a well-known bachelor. This was something which had been a subject for comment and innuendo as far back as 1931, when in a eulogy to Gielgud’s performances in Romeo and Juliet and J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions, some dignitary named Justice Langton commented that although “Mr. Gielgud [was] still unmarried” (nudge-nudge, wink, wink) he hoped the actor would “soon meet with not only a Good Nymph but a Constant Companion.”

Gielgud was gay at a time when homosexuality in Britain was punishable by a fine, or imprisonment, or chemical castration—as what happened to the code-breaking war hero Alan Turing. Gielgud was highly discreet about his sexual orientation. Not from fear of imprisonment but to avoid upsetting his mother.

In 1951, the Conservative Party won the general election and Winston Churchill was returned to office to serve his second term as Prime Minister. Churchill had high hopes for his premiership with plans to develop Britain’s “special relationship” with America and maintain the country’s position as the third major force in the world. At home, the Conservatives were preoccupied with building a new future. However, Churchill was old and his health poor. In 1953, he suffered a mini-stroke. Rather than retiring, he continued with his obligations as Prime Minister much to frustration of his deputy Anthony Eden. Under the Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe, 1st Earl of Kilmuir, the Tories seemed obsessed with a “plague of sodomy” which they believed gripped the country. Buggers were everywhere—or so it seemed to Fyffe. He became determined to “rid England of this male vice … this plague.” The press were encouraged to manufacture homophobic hysteria among the public by which the police could use their full force to arrest and intimidate gay men. Prosecutions for “gross indecency between men” rose by almost 500% to 5,443 under Fyffe’s charge.

The law stipulated that a man could be arrested for merely the intent of committing an act of “gross indecency.” Bars and clubs were raided, phones bugged, suspected homosexuals placed under police surveillance and officers were sent undercover to entrap men in public locations such as toilets which were known for cruising or rather cottaging.
 
03jogiel.jpg
Gielgud in his Oscar-winning role as Hobson in ‘Arthur’ with Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli.
 
On the night of Tuesday October 20th, fired up by a few drinks and after a long day’s rehearsal on the play A Day by the Sea, Gielgud popped into his local public convenience on the off chance of some sex. There at the urinal lurked an undercover policeman to whom Gielgud unfortunately gave the “glad eye.” How he knew this unassuming young man was up for a bit of cock fun—one can only surmise. As the great Alan Bennett once joked, pointing percy at the porcelain for twenty minutes is a performance that merits an Oscar or a Tony—more often a Tony than an Oscar in such circumstances. Gielgud was arrested and taken to Chelsea police station where he gave his name as “Arthur Gielgud” and his occupation as “a clerk earning £1,000 a year.” He was charged with “importuning” and ordered to appear in court the following morning.

That night, Gielgud contemplated suicide. Though he reckoned his career was over, his greatest concern was the effect his arrest would have on his mother:

I thought it might kill her. She hated publicity of any kind. Thank God my father had died before that because he would never have got over it.

 
More dear Johnny, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.19.2019
07:02 am
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Rob Halford, Trent Reznor & the porn-star studded video for ‘I Am A Pig’


Rob Halford pictured on the front cover of the single for Two’s “I Am A Pig.”
 
In 1996, after calling it quits with his excellent post-Priest project Fight, Rob Halford had a conversation with a rock journalist friend while attending Foundations Forum—a heavy metal convention held in Los Angeles from 1988-1997. At this point, Halford was looking to start up something new and his pal suggested he get ahold of Marilyn Manson guitarist John 5 (John Lowery). Halford and Lowery hooked up for several days in LA collaborating on riffs, melodies, and lyrics. According to Halford it was a case of “synchronicity at work”.

His meeting with Trent Reznor, which led to Reznor’s participation in Two, came much later in the band’s development and most of the music Halford, Lowery, Bob Marlette, Phil Western and Anthony “Fu” Valcic had already been recorded and were “well past the demo stage,” per Halford. While visiting New Orleans during Mardi Gras, Halford simply walked up to Reznor’s former funeral home, Nothing Studios and knocked on the door. (Of interest is the door itself, taken from Reznor’s former residence—the Manson Family murder house once occupied by Sharon Tate and her husband, Roman Polanski.) The door was answered by another inhabitant of Nothing Studios, former Skinny Puppy member and producer, Rave Ogilvie. Ogilvie and Halford had never met, but when Rob Halford knocks on your door, the only right thing to do is to let him the fuck in—which Ogilvie did without hesitation.

A short time later as Ogilvie and Rob were hanging out listening to a cassette with some of the music from Two’s album, Voyeurs Reznor showed up, and Trent asked Halford if he could listen to his new tunes. He and Reznor hung out for a few more days in New Orleans, as Reznor was scheduled to appear in a few Mardi Gras parades. Halford returned to his home in Phoenix and a few months later Reznor called Rob and offered Two a record contract which, though Reznor and Rob had vibed musically, still caught the metal god off guard. Here’s more from Halford on that:

“When he called me up after listening to the album, a few months later, he said, ‘Do you want a record deal?’ I was like, ‘Ahhh… yeah… that would be great.’ But I couldn’t understand why? And then he told me that he had been listening to the music and he had a vision. He could hear them (the songs) in a different way. And could we take them and break them down and build them up again, with his interpretation.”

Reznor would take Two’s recordings and re-engineer them, though Halford had “no idea” what Trent had planned and was just really excited at the prospect of Reznor’s (as well as Ogilvie’s) participation in the project, and how his influence would impact the sound of Voyeurs. The album was already a diverse piece of work, and once Reznor was finished applying his sonic touches, it was released on March 10th, 1998, though the first single, “I am A Pig” started circulating late in February. And this is where we finally get to talk about one of the best things to come out of Rob and Reznor’s collaboration—the porn-star studded video for “I am a Pig” directed by Chi Chi LaRue, a prominent porn director and drag queen based in Los Angeles.
 

Two.
 
As it turns out, some of Halford’s friends had recently worked with LaRue, and this got Rob thinking that a video visualized and directed by LaRue would be just what Two needed for the “I Am A Pig” video. According to the story told by Halford, he really clicked with LaRue, who was also a massive metal fan. LaRue was totally into the idea of shooting a video for Two featuring all kinds of S&M action, a litany of adult actors of various sexual orientations, and, of course, a shirtless Rob Halford suspended from the ceiling with a gag in his mouth. While this sounds like a slice of fucking heaven to yours truly, it also went over big with Nothing Records and Interscope which supported the concept of the video completely. Before you take a look at the very NSFW video below, here’s the infinitely wise Halford breaking down the porntastic video for “I Am A Pig”:

“The song itself lyrically contains the idea that what we see as we are now is something different from the potential to be. Like whatever skeletons you have in the closet or whatever. We all carry two sides to our personality, one where we’re in the public domain, a really different person from what we are in private. So that’s the element of what the song is about. The video is just taking sexuality, physical sexuality, and using that as a metaphor to describe the feelings of the song. So we have all these different scenes going on in the video, of different people doing different things with each other. And collectively, it comes up as the boundary lying between being a pig and being a voyeur.”

If you’ve never heard anything by Two, I’m here to tell you “I Am A Pig” sounds just like you’d likely expect—kind of like NIN but with a metal edge and Rob Halford on vocals. Even with Reznor’s industrial influence, the song still reflects Halford’s style. That said, it is very hooky, and at this stage of Halford’s style evolution, he was cultivating a major goth vibe with a jet-black goatee and outfits that looked like they were ripped off from the future set of The Matrix. So yeah, the album might not have been well received initially, but as it has aged, opinion on the merit of Voyeurs has changed drastically, and now it resides somewhere in the realm of cult classics.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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05.24.2019
10:08 am
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The stop-motion cartoon of William S. Burroughs’ ‘Ah Pook Is Here’


The 1979 collection ‘Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts’
 
William S. Burroughs envisaged Ah Pook Is Here, an extension of the comix serial The Unspeakable Mr. Hart, as “a picture book modelled on the surviving Mayan codices.” However, after nearly a decade collaborating with artist Malcolm McNeill on an illustrated version of the tale, Burroughs was unable to find a publisher for his graphic novel avant la lettre. Instead, it appeared without images in Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts, a 1979 collection of Burroughs’ researches into Mayan, Egyptian, and space age magical techniques. (McNeill has since published his artwork for Ah Pook Is Here in a separate volume.)

Burroughs’ novella concerns an American plutocrat named John Stanley Hart, whose fear of his own mortality leads him to disturb the gods of the Mayan pantheon. Hart is a junkie with a jones for the suffering of others, especially poor people and ethnic minorities. Narcotized by the “blue note” of their pain, congenitally selfish and incurious, he can’t imagine that calling down awful deities from another dimension might have unwanted consequences: “Mr. Hart has a burning down habit and he will burn down the planet.” Before you know it, blood is spurting from delegates’ every orifice at the “American First” rally, and the Acid Leprosy has eaten a hole in time.
 

‘The Unspeakable Mr. Hart’ from Cyclops magazine (via Virtual Library)
 
Philip Hunt made this stop-motion film of Ah Pook Is Here as a student at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in 1994, taking the sound from Burroughs’ collaborations with John Cale on the Dead City Radio album. At six minutes, it is a distillation of the story, but a good one: death gods disturbed by a grotesque people-thing.

Given the vintage of Ah Pook Is Here, I can only interpret the suicide-by-shotgun at the end as a reference to the death of Burroughs’ former collaborator, Kurt Cobain—an unlikely candidate for Mr. Hart.

Posted by Oliver Hall
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03.22.2019
08:49 am
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Kembra Pfahler on 30 years of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, with exclusive Richard Kern pix!


Photo by Richard Kern, courtesy of Kembra Pfahler

On February 15, Marc Almond, the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Sateen, Hercules & Love Affair, and DJs Matthew Pernicano and Danny Lethal will perform at the Globe Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. This absolutely mental, once-in-a-lifetime bill will celebrate the second anniversary of Sex Cells, the LA club run by Danny Fuentes of Lethal Amounts.

Because I am so eager to see this show, and because the life of a Dangerous Minds contributor is high adventure, last Sunday I found myself speaking with Karen Black’s leader, the formidable interdisciplinary artist Kembra Pfahler, by phone, after she got out of band rehearsal in NYC. My condensed and edited take on our wide-ranging conversation follows. If I’d noted every time Kembra made me laugh with a deadpan line, the transcript would be twice as long.

Kembra Pfahler: My guitarist is Samoa, he founded the band with me; he’s the original Karen Black guitarist, Samoa from Hiroshima, Japan. And then Michael Wildwood is our drummer, and he played with D Generation and Chrome Locust, and Gyda Gash is our bass player, she plays with Judas Priestess and Sabbathwitch. I just came from band practice, and I am one of those folks that really enjoys going to band practice. Doing artwork and music isn’t like work, and being busy is just such a luxury. It’s been very pleasant preparing for this show we get to honorably do with Marc Almond. We’re so excited!

We played with Marc Almond at the Meltdown Festival that was curated by Ahnoni in 2011. That was a great show with Marc Almond and a lot of other incredible artists. And I have an art gallery that represents me in London now, which is called Emalin, and I had an art exhibit there, and Marc Almond, thankfully, came to it. He’s friends with one of my collaborators called Scott Ewalt.

I’m not a religious person, but I did think I had died and gone to heaven. When artists that you have loved your whole life come to, for some strange reason, see the work that you’re doing, it’s one of the truly best things about doing artwork. I’m very much looking forward to this concert.

Can you tell me what you have planned for the show? I’m sure you want to keep some stuff a surprise, but is the disco dick in the pictures going to be part of the set?

You know, the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black has always made a lot of props and costumes, and I never really just buy things. I’m not much of a consumer. I’m an availabilist, so I usually make the best use of what’s available, and we are going to have a lot of props and costumes in this show that I make myself, and I have art partners in Los Angeles, collaborators. We’re going to have a big grand finale sculpture that’s going to be my Black Statue of Liberty holding the pentagram. That’s a huge pentagram sculpture. I made that with a friend of mine called Brandon Micah Rowe.

That sculpture lives on the West Coast, and it comes out when I go to the beach and go surfing. I usually take the Black Statue of Liberty with me, ‘cause it’s a great photo opportunity on the beach. And the last time I was photographing the Black Statue of Liberty—‘cause of course I have several—I took this Black Statue of Liberty in a truck and drove down to Sunset Beach, right at the end of Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, and I just have a great memory of almost drowning with the Black Statue of Liberty. It was very much like reenacting Planet of the Apes. That was the impetus for the Statue of Liberty; I’ve always loved the last scene in Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston realizes that the future is just a disastrous, anti-utopian, dead planet. Kind of similar to what’s happening to us now.
 

Photo by Brandon Micah Rowe
 
[laughs] Yeah, it’s uncomfortably close to the present situation.

To me, it’s very close. I mean, film has always been very prophetic, to me. Orson Welles always talks about magic, and historical revisionism, and truth, and the ways that film can actually inform you of the truth in politics, mythological truth, cultural truths. And I’ve always learned the most just by watching films. That’s why I named the band Karen Black, because I was so educated by the films of Karen Black. I know that sounds sort of wonky, but what I’m getting at is I love listening to Orson Welles speak about magic and truth and film as a way to articulate that truth.

Are you thinking about F for Fake?

I’m thinking about the little tricks and happy accidents that occur in film that are what Orson Welles spoke to. I mean, Kenneth Anger talked about magic and film constantly, and light, and Orson Welles just had a different articulation of the same side of the coin.

I grew up in Santa Monica, so I always loved Kenneth Anger; I was always happy that I lived near the Camera Obscura on Ocean Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard. I thought, I don’t fit in with any of these other Californians, but Kenneth Anger was here at the Camera Obscura. I can’t be doing everything wrong.

I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and my family was in the film business, and I left for New York because I wasn’t accepted by my family and the community, because I was interested in music, and it wasn’t fashionable to be a goth or be into punk when I was in high school. So I moved to New York. But no one was going to New York when I first moved there. I really just moved to New York to be as contrary as possible, and I knew no one would follow me at the time.

You moved to New York in ‘79 or thereabouts, right?

Yeah, I did.

I think the LA, probably, that you were leaving was more, I don’t know, provincial. . . I can imagine the appeal that New York would have had in 1979.

Well, also, the thing was that I really wanted to be an artist, and I got accepted to School of Visual Arts when I was in 11th grade at Santa Monica High School. That’s why, really. The Los Angeles that I was familiar with wasn’t provincial at all. I mean, there’s been generations and generations of weird Los Angeles. My grandparents met on the baseball field: my grandmother was playing softball, my grandfather played baseball, and my father ended up being a surfer, and I’ve always had exposure to a really incredible kind of lifestyle that I think people mostly just dream about. Like, Beach Boys songs at Hollywood Park race track in the morning and surfing in the afternoon. If you think about being born into this time when the Beach Boys and the Stones and the Beatles are playing, and then Parliament-Funkadelic’s playing, and then. . . just the most incredible exposure to music and art and nature, surfing even, surf culture. I mean, when most people are born in countries where they can’t even eat dirt for breakfast, I was born in the most incredible place, that I’ll never forget.

It’s such a huge part of my work, I named my interdisciplinary music and art class at Columbia University “The Queen’s Necklace.” Because when I was a child, I used to meditate on all the beach cities. Starting from Zuma Beach, I would meditate on the cities by saying: [chants] “Zuma, Malibu, Topanga, Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, Venice, Torrance, Palos Verdes”. . . I’d say all of the cities that represented the Santa Monica Bay area. That was in my field of vision, that was what I saw every day. All those piers, all those waves, and all of the mythology that I grew up with was all about beach culture.

So Los Angeles, I feel closer to writers like John Fante than anyone else. Do you have books in your library that you’ve had your entire adult life that you would say represent your thinking, more so than any other books? Do you have your favorite, favorite books? One or two books that always are with you.

Oh my God, I’d have to think about it. 

I do. I mention that because one of them is Ask the Dust. Another one is David J. Skal’s Cultural History of Horror.

What’s that?

It’s a great book that talks about the horror film genre being quite prophetic, and it’s kind of what I was trying to speak about, as far as how film and horror kind of teach us about the future. That’s one book, and also Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, Volume 1 and 2 is important to me. Do you know that book?

I do not. Is it like a case study?

It’s a case study of men’s relationship to women during World War II and pre-World War II. It’s about men’s relationships to the women in their lives, in Germany, particularly.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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02.07.2019
01:18 pm
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Born To Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey
01.10.2019
08:15 am
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Cultural critic Mark Dery, whose erudite essays have appeared in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post, Village Voice and his own collections, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, returns with his remarkable biography of the comically sinister author and illustrator Edward Gorey. This delightful combination of biographer and subject has been praised in the New York Times, the New Yorker, at NPR Vogue and other prestige outlets. We’re pleased to present a short excerpt from Born To Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey (Little, Brown) at Dangerous Minds.

In the following excerpt from my just-published biography, Born To Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey (Little, Brown), I explore Gorey’s role, alongside Seuss and Sendak, in the postwar revolution in children’s books, a gleeful insurrection that killed off those insufferable, simpering Goody-Goodies, Dick and Jane, for good. In so doing, Gorey and other writer-illustrators reshaped American notions of kids lit and even childhood itself, making way for a more honest acceptance of the facts of life: divorce, death, racial tensions, queer desire. As well, the new wave slyly satirized not only the mainstream culture of the ‘50s and ‘60s but the conventions of children’s literature itself, many of which dated back to the cautionary tales and nursery-rhyme sermonizing of the Victorian era, when the children’s book as we know it was born. Whether Gorey’s work really was kiddie fare or arsenical treats for adults ironically disguised as picture books is still up for debate. Regardless, his influence is stronger than ever, identifiable at a glance in the YA novels of Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events) and Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children), the twee-goth movies of Tim Burton, and somber memoirs of “the miseries of childhood,” as Gorey put it, such as Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home.

— Mark Dery

Nineteen-sixty saw the publication of Edward Gorey’s sixth book, The Fatal Lozenge, by the New York publisher Ivan Obolensky. Subtitled An Alphabet, The Fatal Lozenge was his first foray into the ABC genre. He would go on to perform variations on the abecedarium theme in six books, one of which, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, would become his best-known title. [They are, in chronological order, The Fatal Lozenge, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Utter Zoo, The Chinese Obelisks, The Glorious Nosebleed, and The Eclectic Abecedarium.]

The alphabet book is one of the oldest forms of children’s literature. Rhyming couplets, illustrated by woodcuts, aided memorization. Early examples wedded ABCs and Calvinist catechism. The New England Primer, ubiquitous in late-seventeenth-century America, is typical of the genre:

A In Adam’s Fall We sinnèd all.
B Heaven to find; The Bible Mind.
C Christ crucify’d For sinners dy’d.
D The Deluge drown’d The Earth around.

Gorey’s interest in the alphabet book was undoubtedly a byproduct of his interest in Edward Lear, well known for loopy abecedaria like “Nonsense Alphabet” (1845) (“P was a pig, / Who was not very big; / But his tail was too curly, / And that made him surly”). His library reveals a longstanding fascination with the form, with a predictable focus on the nineteenth century. On Gorey’s bookshelves, we find A Moral Alphabet (1899) by Hilaire Belloc, A Comic Alphabet (1836) by George Cruikshank, a Dover facsimile of The Adventures of A, Apple Pie, Who Was Cut to Pieces and Eaten by Twenty Six Young Ladies and Gentlemen with Whom All Little People Ought to Be Acquainted (circa 1835), and of course Lear in abundance. 

At the same time, he couldn’t have been oblivious, as an illustrator working in commercial book publishing, to the waves Dr. Seuss was making in kid lit. Alphabet books were playing an important part in reshaping American ideas about childhood. Consider Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra! (1955), whose boy narrator dreams up a new alphabet for kids who think outside the Little Golden box (“In the places I go there are things that I see / That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z”). Or Maurice Sendak’s Alligators All Around (1962), in which “shockingly spoiled” reptilian protagonists throw tantrums and juggle jelly beans with abandon. These and other unconventional abecedaria celebrate Romper Room radicals who flout the rules. Seen in their cultural and historical context, they look like premonitions of the hippie era, with its worship of nonconformity and its elevation of the child to a cultural icon, not to mention its stoner humor and acid-soaked song lyrics.

Though he seemed barely to notice the counterculture of the ’60s, beyond the Beatles, Gorey was in his own quietly perverse way more iconoclastic than Seuss or Sendak. In The Fatal Lozenge, as in The Listing Attic, his earlier book of macabre limericks, his combination of a children’s genre (in this case, the ABC book) with dark subject matter and black comedy is both mordantly funny and unsettling, especially when he crosses the line, as he occasionally does, into the “sick humor” of contemporaries such as the cartoonist Gahan Wilson. When an interviewer mentioned to Sendak that the grisly drawing of an infant skewered on the point of a Zouave’s sword in The Fatal Lozenge was the moment when Gorey went “down the road of no return as far as publishers were concerned,” Sendak quipped, “That’s why he was so loved. There’s never enough dead babies for us.”
 

 
The literary theorist George R. Bodmer places Gorey’s ironic, sardonic ABCs in the context of a postwar pushback, among children’s authors such as Seuss and Sendak, “against the limits of imagination, or the limits the outside world would impose on imagination . . .” In his essay “The Post-Modern Alphabet: Extending the Limits of the Contemporary Alphabet Book, from Seuss to Gorey,” Bodmer calls Gorey’s “anti-alphabets” a “sarcastic rebellion against a view of childhood that is sunny, idyllic, and instructive.” Gorey’s mock-moralistic tone satirizes received wisdom about the benignity of parents and other authority figures: a magnate waiting for his limousine “ponders further child-enslavement / And other projects still more mean”; two little children quail in terror at the sight of their towering, bearded uncle, for they “know that at his leisure / He plans to have them come to harm.” Yet Gorey also punctures the myth that children are little angels: a baby, “lying meek and quiet” on a bearskin rug, “Has dreams about rampage and riot / And will grow up to be a thug.” (The rug’s enormous, snarling head, with its bared fangs, is an omen of mayhem to come.)

Talking about The Fatal Lozenge in 1977, Gorey said, “This was a very early book and at that date I was not above trying to shock everyone a bit.” In that sense, his sixth book is so similar to his second that it might as well be called Son of Listing Attic. A good part of the book consists of the usual droll riffing on stock characters and situations borrowed from gothic novels, penny dreadfuls, Conan Doyle, and Dickens.

But just as clearly, there’s more going on in The Fatal Lozenge than enfant terrible-ism (“trying to shock everyone a bit”) or the larger trends identified by Bodmer: the bohemian backlash against the suffocating normalcy of the Eisenhower era and the growing resistance, led by Drs. Spock and Seuss, to outdated, repressive ideas about childhood and parenting. The recurrence of themes closer to home—the beastliness of babies, the depravity of the clergy (a nun is “fearfully bedevilled”), the furtiveness and shamefulness of homosexual desire, here associated with child molestation and even more monstrous perversions (“The Proctor buys a pupil ices, / And hopes the boy will not resist / When he attempts to practice vices / Few people even know exist”)—makes us feel, at times, as if we’re eavesdropping on a psychotherapy session. That these disconcerting images come to us in the reassuring wrappings of a children’s book makes The Fatal Lozenge even more disquieting.

It’s precisely that insinuating knowingness that Sendak loved about Gorey’s little books. “They all had what appealed to me so much—aside from the graphics and the writing—[which] was the wicked sexual ambiguity that ran through all of it.” Even Gorey’s artlessly brilliant covers for Anchor Books, Doubleday’s tasteful paperback line, exhibited an arch wit, Sendal thought. “I remember a jacket he did for…a novel by Melville, Redburn. And the jacket summed up completely the kind of confused homosexuality of that novel….So erotic and yet so simple. You can look at it any way you like. . . . [H]e buried a lot of information about himself in the art.”
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.10.2019
08:15 am
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