‘The Expulsion from Paradise.’
 
The miser’s gold won’t save him, nor the knight his belted armor, Death holds dominion over all and is indifferent to our pleading.

The story of Hans Holbein’s woodcut illustrations for The Dance of Death would fit snugly as a vehicle for Bill and Ted to explain the meaning behind these most excellent pictures with their bodacious representations of gnarly death playing a tune for all to follow into the grave. Cue air guitar riff. Which, Bill would add, is but a timely reminder to be most excellent to each other. And now here’s Hans Holbein (1497–1543) at San Dimas High explaining how his outstanding drawings were carved into wood by Hans Lützelburger, one of Holbein’s regular collaborators, who cut forty-one wood blocks before Death did call on him and lead swiftly him away.

But wait, let’s get an idea of size. These images are small, seriously small. Two-and-a-half inches by one-and-seven-eighths. The size of four postage stamps placed together to form a rectangle, as Ulinka Rublack notes in her excellent commentary in the Penguin edition of Holbein’s work. Fascinating she is too, as Rublack points out that these images came at a time of egregious turmoil when the Protestant Reformation was calling out the Catholic Church as most bogus and heinous and the Pope as ye AntiChrist. Think of this rising Protestant faith like emo Goths dressed in black, with a liking for The Cure and a bit death-obsessed. While the Catholic Church was like the New Romantics poncing about in fabulous costumes of silk and lace with a predilection for cardinals having a choirboy sitting on their cocks. This world was run by faith and disease. If the church didn’t punish you then the plague would.

The Protestants saw the Catholic faith as a false representation of Christ’s ministry on Earth. The Catholic Church was rich and corrupt. Its clergy indifferent, its flock abandoned (see the images of sheep wandering lost among the fields). The Church’s interest seemed more fixed on money (for indulgences, prayers, and masses to buy the rich a place in Heaven) rather than on souls. The Protestants wanted to bring the Church back to an austere faith based on the gospels. This is the background noise while Holbein worked on his pictures.

The idea of Death as some dancing skeleton was popularized by a 13th-century play The Three Dead and the Three Living, in which a band of three young noblemen while out hunting in the deep, dark forest came across three skeletons at three different stages of their journey. The story inspired a series of religious paintings and meditations of skeletons waiting to harvest the living. The skeleton unified everyone for one day we will all come to bone and dust. Once the image was set, the skeleton of Death soon had his victims dancing to his discordant tune.

And so it goes.

It’s not quite clear who exactly commissioned Holbein to produce these images. He was then an artist living in Basel with his wife and two children and the work was, no doubt, a welcome and lucrative commission.  He produced his drawings between 1523 and 1525, which were intended to focus throughts towards God—-or at least Death. And like Death itself, Holbein’s deeply serious yet to our eye darkly satiric illustrations take aim at all classes of society—even the infant child is not spared the grisly clutch of Death.
 

‘The Pope.’
 

‘The Emperor.’
 

‘The King.’
 
More from Holbein’s ‘The Dance of Death,’ after the jump….
 

The cover artwork by Rowena Morrill for the 1988 edition of Clifford D. Simak’s book ‘Project Pope.’
 
When Rowena Morrill scored her first book cover as an artist, the year was 1977, and she was one of a scant few women making a name for themselves in the male-dominated world of fantasy and science fiction art. According to the artist, her entrance into the world of fantasy illustration was a happy accident. After relocating to Philadelphia, Morrill found work in a local art gallery taking commissions for customers which mostly consisted of wildlife scenes. Later she would move to New York to work for an ad agency—a gig she detested, prompting her to seek a new job anywhere but there. Ace Books, the highly regarded and longest-running sci-fi publisher in the U.S. gave Morrill a job. The opportunity would result in her artwork appearing in or on over 400 books by authors like Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman’s hero R.A. Lafferty. Morrill’s work also appeared on the cover of National Lampoon, horror staple Creepy, Heavy Metal and was even swiped for the cover of an early demo by Metallica, Power Metal. The painting in question originally appeared on the cover of 1980 book Shadows Out Of Hell by Andrew J. Offutt. In a bizarre twist, the image would be one of two by Morrill discovered during the search and seizure of one of Saddam Hussein’s many lavish homes—in this case a tricked-out townhouse in a ritzy area of Baghdad in 2003 (images are at the bottom of this post).

Though news reports noted the paintings hanging on Saddam’s party palace walls were original works of art by Morrill, they were in fact copies, as Morrill had sold the two original paintings to a Japanese collector many years prior. When images from inside the townhouse hit the news, Hussein’s “taste” in artwork was widely mocked. A reporter for The Guardian referred to the paintings as “universal cultural gutter” and “pure dreck,” which is somewhat understandable given the fact that the copies are nowhere near as wonderful as Morrill’s originals. In fact, Morrill’s work has been rightly likened to that of her male counterparts and masters of the genre, Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo.

I’ve posted images of Morrill’s vast body of work below; some are NSFW. Morrill’s art has also been the subject of a few books, including one by Boris Vallejo’s first wife Doris Vallejo, The Art of Rowena (2000).
 

Artwork by Morrill for the cover of ‘Night Walk’ by Robert Shaw, 1978.
 

The magnificent artwork by Morrill for the 1977 book by Jane Parkhurst, ‘Isobel.’
 
More Morrill after the jump…

‘Lafcadio’s Adventures’ (1953) by André Gide.
 
Edward Gorey claimed that he had “negligible” training as an artist—one semester at the Art Institute in Chicago in 1943 just before he enlisted in the army. He served his time at the Dugway Proving Grounds, a kinda hush-hush operative center where the military tested “biological and chemical weapon defense systems in a secure and isolated environment”  which makes me wanna know what he got up during his time there—probably guard duty…. After the war, he studied French at Harvard and was roommates with poet Frank O’Hara.

At Harvard, Gorey started developing his artistic talents—designing sets for theatrical productions, drawing posters, cartoons, and illustrations for various varsity publications. He amassed enough of a portfolio to impress the bigwigs at Doubleday’s new imprint Doubleday Anchor in New York. He was also lucky enough to know Harvard alumnus Barbara Epstein who was then married to the publisher at Doubleday Anchor Jason Epstein, who helped shoehorn him into a job at the company’s art department. Sometimes it’s who you know that helps a career flourish.
 

‘Bleak House’ (1953) by Charles Dickens.
 

‘The Secret Agent’ (1953) by Joseph Conrad.
 

‘Lucky Jim’ (1953) by Kingsley Amis.
 
Much more after the jump…

 
In 1976, legendary comic book artist Bernie Wrightson produced a series of paintings for a limited edition set of prints featuring key scenes from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. The portfolio consisted of eight prints and was limited to an edition of 2000. Most of these prints were signed by Wrightson, who was then still using the first name “Berni” so as not to be confused with the Olympic gold medalist diver Bernie Wrightson.

For the series, Wrightson produced eight paintings. However, the first painting for “The Pit and the Pendulum” (above) proved to be too bright and could not be used by the printers as the thick impasto paint caused considerable glare. Wrightson replaced the image with a darker far more atmospheric picture. It is noticeable that the prints have a slightly darker less vibrant appearance than their original paintings.

Also, unlike some artists who have elaborately illustrated Poe’s classic tales in dark, gothic, monochromatic tones, Wrightson’s work has a dynamic, comic book style that brings Poe’s characters and their actions alive. Best known as the co-creator of Swamp Thing, Wrightson produced an enviable catalog of work during his life, including a series of rare and much sought after illustrations for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the suitably-thrilling artwork for Stephen King’s The Cycle of the Werewolf.
 

‘The Pit and the Pendulum’: ‘I saw clearly the doom which had been prepared for me…’
 

‘Murders In The Rue Morgue’: ‘As the sailor looked in, the gigantic animal had seized Madame L’Espanaye by the hair…’
 
More classic Wrightson artwork for Edgar Allan Poe, after the jump…
 

“It’s the stink of death, citizens!” (Photo by Peter Hujar)

This hour-long BBC Radio special opens with “Old Lady Sloan,” the Mortal Micronotz’ interpretation of a Burroughs lyric about a happy pedophage, a record the host, John Walters, borrowed from John Peel for the occasion. If the program starts out sounding like a clip-show tribute to Burroughs’ cultural influence, it’s more than that. Aside from a chat with future WSB biographer Barry Miles (identified only by his surname), a little music, and Burroughs’ performances of the now-classic routines “The Do-Rights” and “The Wild Fruits,” the broadcast is given over to Walters’ lengthy interview with the author, champion of apomorphine, and devotee of the Ancient Ones.

Burroughs tells Walters about his years in England, and meeting Samuel Beckett and Bob Dylan; he observes that certain American politicians boast of their ignorance and stupidity. His (camp, I think) misogyny has softened by ‘82. What really sets the interview apart, though, is Walters’ enthusiasm, his openness, his willingness to risk sounding uncool. Here he is grappling with the implications of the cut-up technique:

Walters: What always attracted me when I first heard about that—I suppose, a lot of students at the time—it seemed to introduce a random effect, a found work, do you know what I mean? I wonder if it was so random as all that.

Burroughs: Well, how random is random? Uh…

Walters: Well, let’s put it like this. I was in a pub in Charlotte Street, of all places, in Soho, and a mate of mine had read Nova Express—this was ‘64, ‘65—was talking about this, “You must buy this book,” and started to try and explain to me his interpretation of cut-up and fold-in techniques, which he probably got wrong. And I couldn’t remember the name of the book when I got outside, and then an Express Dairy van from the Express Dairies came by, and I thought, “Express, Nova Express!” And I thought, “That’s what he’s trying to tell us. Random events can have a hidden meaning. We can get messages.” But I don’t think that’s what you see in it, is it?

Burroughs: Oh, exactly. Exactly what I see in it. These juxtapositions between what you’re thinking, if you’re walking down the street, and what you see, that was exactly what I was introducing. You see, life is a cut-up. Every time you walk down the street or look out the window, your consciousness is cut by random factors, and then you begin to realize that they’re not so random, that this is saying something to you.

More after the jump…

Paul Bowles in Fez, 1947

Paul Bowles’ contribution to The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook appeared under “Jams, Jellies and Confections,” opposite Robert Graves’ recipe for Sevillian yellow plum conserve. In it, Bowles explained how the people of Fez make one of his favorite treats: majoun keddane, a kind of jam that requires some dates, figs, walnuts, honey, spices, butter, and wheat, and at least two pounds of cannabis.

Embedded in this recipe was another, for an even more exotic and labor-intensive Moroccan dish called Beid El Beita F’kerr El Hmar. This was a kind of breakfast recipe said to bestow magical powers:

Buy an egg. Find a dead donkey, and the first night lodge the egg in its anus. The second night the egg must be put into a mousehole on top of a Moslem tomb. The third night it must be wrapped in a handkerchief and tied around the chest of the person desiring to perform the magic. The following day it must be given for breakfast, prepared in any fashion, to the other individual, who, immediately upon eating it, discovers that the bestower is necessary for his happiness. (Or her happiness; the sex of the two people seems to have nothing to do with the charm’s efficacy.)

More after the jump…

‘Salome.’
 
In 1898, when the artist Aubrey Beardsley was on his deathbed, he wrote to his publisher, pornographer Leonard Smithers, and demanded he “destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings… by all that is holy all obscene drawings.” Smithers took no notice of the recent Catholic convert Beardsley’s crise de conscience and made a very tidy profit publishing the infamous artist’s work after he died.

Beardsley was a phenomenon. It is quite difficult to grasp just how revolutionary and how utterly shocking this slight young man’s deceptively simple ink drawings were to both the critics and the public of Victorian England. His work was described as the product of a sick mind and damned as “grotesque” and “obscene.” Yet, despite this froth and seething outrage, Beardsley became, for a very brief time, famous, or rather infamous, and his work inspired a legion of imitators who made profitable careers from copying his art.

Beardsley was born into a lower-middle-class family in Brighton on August 21st, 1872. His father was a spendthrift who squandered money on drink and pleasure. His mother had pretensions towards a more genteel existence and did her best to encourage her children into the cerebral pleasures of art and culture. As his father was unable or more likely unwilling to hold down a regular job, his mother frequently sought funds from her own father—a former military officer—to pay the bills. From an early age, Beardsley showed a talent for art and music. He gave piano recitals with his older sister Mabel and the pair devised their own theatrical productions which they performed for the amusement of their mother and her friends.

He was a frail child and became severely ill with tuberculosis, which plagued him throughout his life and was eventually the cause of his death at a mere twenty-five years of age. His mother described Beardsley as being as “fragile as a piece of Dresden china.” However, his consumption fired his frenzied periods of intense work where he spent hours drawing before collapsing from exhaustion.

At school, he developed his own “perverse” style of illustration—first in the borders of his exercise books, then in the pages of the school magazine. After his education, he found work at an architect’s office, but Beardsley was far more interested in life as an artist than starting an office career. He was encouraged by the artist Edward Burne-Jones, who told him he never liked to encourage young men to be artists, but in Beardsley’s case, there was never any other option. Burne-Jones told Beardsley to enroll in classes at the Westminster School of Art where he soon discovered he had a style of drawing that was “freakishly” his own. He claimed he had seven styles of drawing and was determined to develop more. Two important influences on Beardsley came during a trip to Paris when he saw work by Toulouse-Lautrec and an exhibition of Japanese prints. These inspired him to finesse his own style into something new and highly original, something he liked to describe as “grotesque.”

Beardsley sent his latest illustrations off to various magazines. These were rejected. His work was considered too weird and too dangerous for the suburban readers of popular magazines. However, some work he had sent on spec to the publisher J. M. Dent, which brought Beardsley his first commission. He was hired to illustrate Thomas Malory’s tale Le Morte d’Arthur for £200. The work was long and hard and demanded considerable concentration, determined willpower, and strong, confident execution. Beardsley alternated between using pen and brush to create his pictures. Over the course of producing this monumental work, Beardsley changed and developed his style of drawing from the overly elaborate to a clan and austere simplicity. This was the start of his meteoric rise into London’s fashionable art and literary world.

According to his friend, the writer Max Beerbohm, no one ever saw Beardsley work at his pictures which he claimed he produced by candlelight in a darkened room. Beardsley was more likely to seen immaculately dressed hosting tea parties at his mother’s house or socializing with the likes of Oscar Wilde and Beerbohm at the Cafe Royale. He became friends with Wilde and drew the illustrations for his play Salome. These illustrations became more famous than Wilde’s so-so drama, in particular, the image of Salome kissing the freshly decapitated head of John the Baptist with his blood spilling down, giving sustenance to a lily. Beardsley was then hired as art director for the legendary and controversial Yellow Book which provided a home to many great writers and artists and was, unfortunately, to be the unlikely cause of his undoing.

When Wilde was arrested on the charge of sodomy, he was described as carrying a “yellow book.” This quickly became confused with the Yellow Book magazine for which Beardsley has supplied his “grotesque” illustrations. This unfortunate association was too much for the magazine’s publisher who immediately sacked Beardsley. Virtually overnight, the young artist’s celebrated career was snuffed out. Thereafter, he eked out a small living by drawing erotica for privately published books and magazines.

Beardsley’s reputation was as controversial as his art. He was considered effete and a homosexual, but was more likely asexual. He was rumored to have been involved in an incestuous relationship with his sister, which supposedly led to either a miscarriage or a stillborn child. He once wrote to his publisher Dent that he planned to dress up as a woman and have tea in drag at the Savoy. These are all most likely nothing more than rumors and schoolboy pranks. Beardsley relished notoriety and never evolved from a juvenile sense of fun. His drawings were filled with breasts and phallic symbols. The aftermath of Wilde’s arrest and trial led Beardsley to reevaluate his life. He became a Catholic (at the encouragement of his sister) and denounced his most scurrilous and offensive work. This included his comic and highly explicit illustrations for a privately printed edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the bawdy Greek drama of one woman’s attempt to end the Peloponnesian War by denying men sex.

Sadly, Beardsley succumbed to tuberculosis and died in France on March 16th, 1898.
 
From Oscar Wilde’s ‘Salome’ (1894).
 

 

 
More ‘obscene’ beauty from Aubrey Beardsley, after the jump…
 

Mistah Kurtz… he fucking nuts.

Boris Karloff is a bug-eyed Mr. Kurtz in this hip, bongo-fury, sub-beatnik fifties adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s tale Heart of Darkness. Karloff does his best over-the-top batshit crazy thing and is joined in a face-off by a half-naked, scenery-chewing and equally bug-eyed Roddy McDowall as Marlow, who overacts his way through the proceedings with considerable gusto.

This ain’t no run-of-the-mill take on Conrad’s classic story but one written by Stewart Stern the screenwriter of Rebel Without a Cause. And like that famous paean to teenage acne and angst, Stern has introduced a psychological subtext that gives the matter a topically Freudian twist which, to be frank, doesn’t quite work.

But heck, that don’t matter when there’s so much fever onscreen with Karloff and McDowall ably supported in their psycho-drama by Eartha Kitt as the Queen, Oskar Homolka as the Doctor, Inga Swenson as Maria, and Cathleen Nesbitt as the Crone.
 

Gone Daddio, solid gone…
 
Heart of Darkness was loosely based on Conrad’s own experiences of his time spent in Africa and was intended as a condemnation of the racist imperialism he had witnessed firsthand. This might get a bit lost in Stern’s script where the Africans are mainly presented as little more than enthusiastic child-like bongo players—but it is what it is and you’re all grown-up enough to make up your own mind about this strange and quite daring television drama.

And if you can’t, well, take a taste of what it’s all about from Gonzo-theorist Erich Kuersten’s long essay “Ride the Snake” over at his blog Acidemic, where he explains just how this “primitive TV broadcast of Heart of Darkness spews forth an admission of evil and in the process exorcises it.” Kuersten is one of those rare original and essential writers who really should have a book of his articles published. ‘Nuff said.

Any-old-how, enjoy the madness of King Boris.

Watch it, after the jump…

H.P. Lovecraft with Felis, the cat of Frank Belknap Long

It’s fitting that I learned of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Waste Paper” by listening to some interview or other Alan Moore did. Of course, as a parody of “The Waste Land,” Lovecraft’s poem begins with a totally obscure epigraph, unsourced, and in the original Greek: Πἀντα γἐλως καἱ πἀντα κὀνις καἱ πἀντα τὁ μηδἐν. This turns out to be part of the sole surviving verse by Glycon—not the snake god whose priest on Earth is Alan Moore, mind you, but the eponymous poet and inventor of “glyconic meter.” Just as Glycon the god was a hoax, “exposed as a glove-puppet in the second century” (Alan Moore), the Oxford Classical Dictionary says Glycon the poet probably didn’t even write the lonely couplet that comprises his entire literary oeuvre.

And, as John Brannon would say, check it out: the second line Lovecraft left out of this two-line poem, presumably because he didn’t know it existed, elegantly summarized his worldview in seven Greek words: πάντα γὰρ ἐξ ἀλόγων ἐστὶ τὰ γινόμενα. It’s enough to make you agree with what Glycon, or whoever, was saying all along in his single, slender entry in the Greek Anthology, to which one translator added the heading “NIHILISM”:

All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothing,
for all that is cometh from unreason.

Or if you prefer Christopher Isherwood’s translation:

All is but laughter, dust and nothingness
All of unreason born. . . .

HPL omitted the line about “unreason,” according to this Lovecraft scholar, because it didn’t appear in the Greek lexicon that was his source. But “all that is cometh from unreason” would have been the perfect title for the horrified reaction to “The Waste Land” Lovecraft published in his journal, The Conservative, if not the perfect title for his entire collected works:

Do our members realise that the progress of science within the last half-century has introduced conceptions of man, the world, and the universe which make hollow and ridiculous an appreciable proportion of all the great literature of the past? Art, to be great, must be founded on human emotions of much strength; such as come from warm instincts and firm beliefs. Science having so greatly altered our view of the universe and the beliefs attendant upon that view, we are now confronted by an important shifting of values in every branch of art where belief is concerned. The old heroics, pieties, and sentimentalities are dead amongst the sophisticated; and even some of our appreciations of natural beauty are threatened. Just how expansive is this threat, we do not know; and The Conservative hopes fervently that the final devastated area will be comparatively narrow; but in any case startling developments are inevitable.

A glance at the serious magazine discussion of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s disjointed and incoherent “poem” called “The Waste Land”, in the November Dial, should be enough to convince the most unimpressionable of the true state of affairs. We here behold a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general; offered to the public (whether or not as a hoax) as something justified by our modern mind with its recent comprehension of its own chaotic triviality and disorganisation. And we behold that public, or a considerable part of it, receiving this hilarious melange as something vital and typical; as “a poem of profound significance”, to quote its sponsors.

To reduce the situation to its baldest terms, man has suddenly discovered that all his high sentiments, values, and aspirations are mere illusions caused by physiological processes within himself, and of no significance whatsoever in an infinite and purposeless cosmos. He has discovered that most of his acts spring from hidden causes remote from the ones hitherto honoured by tradition, and that his so-called “soul” is merely (as one critic puts it) a rag-bag of unrelated odds and ends. And having made these discoveries, he does not know what to do about it; but compromises on a literature of analysis, chaos, and ironic contrast.

TL;DR: one racist reactionary prefers his own flavor of nihilism to another’s. Sounds like the narcissism of small differences to me! The poem, at least, is funny in parts. There are certain lines (“Meet me tonight in dreamland . . . BAH”) I can’t read without hearing the voice of the late Mark E. Smith.

Read H.P. Lovecraft’s “Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance,” after the jump…

 
During the mid-Seventies, when David Bowie subsisted on a diet of cow’s milk and cocaine, one of his favorite books was Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defense. It’s an instruction manual by a major-league Golden Dawn magician for diagnosing and guarding against attacks by other sorcerers.

Marc Spitz’s biography points out how one part of Bowie’s coke-and-milk diet violated a basic tenet of Dion Fortune’s program (“Keep away from drugs”), but the magician probably would have nixed the other staple, too. She didn’t invent soymilk, but she played an important role in its history as an advocate and experimenter. During World War I, while working in a laboratory for the Food Production Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fortune apparently discovered a means of making soymilk, as well as a method of turning it into soy cheese. In 1925, writing under her birth name, Violet Mary Firth, she published a book on the subject, The Soya Bean: An Appeal to Humanitarians.
 

David Bowie, 1969 (Photo by Brian Ward)
 
While I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet, a volume called History of Soymilk and Other-Non Dairy Milks (1226-2013) reproduces the table of contents and some of the foreword. Part I considers the ethical reasons to avoid animal products (chapter three: “Milk Is Not A Humane Food”), and Part II describes the wondrous properties of the soybean. She argues that commercial solutions to the problem of animal exploitation are more effective than “individual abstention from flesh-food.” The foreword begins:

The manufacture of a vegetable milk from the soya bean is a matter in which I was much interested during the war, and I think I may claim to be the first person, in this country at any rate, who succeeded in making a cheese from vegetable casein.

In Sane Occultism, however, Dion Fortune cautions against making “a religion” out of vegetarianism and says the practice is not for everyone, so maybe she would have just advised Bowie to lay off the yayo and put a few more sandwiches in his diet. Below, the Thin White Duke guzzles lowfat milk from the carton in a scene from Cracked Actor. (Maybe someday John Oswald will get around to making a Plunderphonics version called Lactose Cracker.)