MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 6

Suffering sometimes brings rewards, and two nights of crap make a good night that much more pleasant.

El mundo de los vampiros (1961) was written by Alfredo Salazar, and directed by Alfonso Corona Blake who went on to bless the world with Santo Versus the Vampire Women and Santo in the Wax Museum.  In the case of Sr. Blake I can assert that this movie right here was the greatest thing he ever did, probably.  I have seen more vampire movies than I can count and I have never seen one quite like this. Filmed on the startlingly large and elaborate well-lit sets of Churubusco Azteca, it has a great look from the very first shot of a hand groping out of a slowly opening coffin.  Multigenerational family curses seem to be a feature of Mexican horror stories, and this one is the three hundred year vengeance curse of Count Sergio Subotai, Vampire, against the descendants of the Colman family, and if he doesn't get his vengeance venged right now he will have to wait another hundred years.  Another feature of these stories is hairy-handedness - when you get vampire bit the first sign of impending vampirism is you get hair on your hands.  That is the universal sign of something going wrong in your life, when you get hair on your hands, because the next thing you know you are going to get claws and probably a big hairy pig nose and soon you will be running around in a cape and top hat going RAAAAAR! That doesn't happen in this though, I am just talking. You can forget about the plot and just watch the crazy things happening - the Bone Organ, the Pit of Impalement, the mob of stupid looking masked sub-vampires and spooky looking she-vamps, the fortuitous appearance of an expert on the psychological effects of music.  And this:

 

I like to fell over when I saw this insanely wonderful human-headed bat.  I have never seen that before ever.  I have also never seen the main vampire suddenly in the middle of the big fight inexplicably grow big furry bat ears.  To help him fight.  Every minute of this movie is full of great stuff to see, even if it is just the imaginative way the big fancy set is lit - it's as gorgeously filmed as any great Hollywood b-movie of the 1940s.  This is going on my list of all time favorite horror movies, second only to El espejo de la bruja (The Witch's Mirror).  I have used up all my raving and will just fill this out with absolute proof of my assertions in the form of these images:

The lovely Erna Bauman, who went on to grace El vampiro sangriento 

and La invasion de los vampiros with her solemn beauty.

Go and do likewise.

The Two Mona Lisas

This morning I spent some time looking at the website of The Mona Lisa Foundation, proponents of the "Earlier Mona Lisa" theory. I have never thought much of the Mona Lisa as a painting, but there are features to this thing that I found interesting enough to think a little about and to have an uneducated opinion about.  Here are the two Mona Lisas:

 

These are just details of the face - there is a lot more to each picture that bears looking into. The assertion of The Mona Lisa Foundation is that the picture on the left was painted by Leonardo eleven years earlier than the picture on the right, and that he painted both pictures.  They seem to have a lot of evidence which they say supports this; far more than I care to dig through.  That is why my opinion must remain uneducated.  However I live in the Kooks Museum and our shelves are full of books by people with something to prove and the one thing they all have in common is that whatever it is they have to prove, whether it is perfectly sensible or completely crazy, they all prove it, at least to their own satisfaction. I am also a painter and I have found that people who set out to prove things with lots of supporting evidence usually think in a very different way from the way a painter thinks, as I have pointed out in the past.

Here is what my opinion is. It is my opinion that this is not necessarily a person painted by same artist eleven years apart.  One painting is copied from the other painting.  I am an artist and I am going to paint the same person eleven years after I first painted her.  I have painted a really good portrait of a cute little gal and eleven years later I say I want to paint you again as a kind of stodgy matron only everything else will be EXACTLY the same except for the background. I will even give you the same hands and not paint the hands you have now which are eleven years older. And she and her husband are going to say okay that sounds good.  What gets me is the line of her hair on the left side.  I might be able to cajole a woman into wearing the same costume and same hairstyle and into striking the same pose eleven years later - which itself does not make much sense except in a 'conceptual art' context which I don't think even existed then - but her hair is not going to do the exact same thing as it did eleven years before.  It isn't even going to be the same hair.  Her hands are not going to be in exactly the same position, the folds in the sleeves are not going to be exactly the same.  Or maybe I would just have a couple of assistants copy the previous painting and I will just step in and do the face and make her look kind of flabby and grumpy compared to the peppy little doll in the old painting.  Then I have to make sure they don't see the first painting so they don't go what the hell you made her look like her own mom, that's not what we are paying you for.

One of those pictures is copied from the other one, so side by side comparisons of the proportions of the two paintings don't prove anything because all you need to do is use any one of three simple mechanical devices to copy the forms and proportions exactly, which any apprentice could do.  They both seem to be painted with a great degree of skill and they both look pretty old.  As I said I have never been able to grasp the romantic ideal of the Mona Lisa so I don't really get what a great painting it is, but it seems to be well executed.  Both of them.  I am not qualified to make any statements on how much of Leonardo's paintings were done by assistants, how often he used what kind of pigment on what kind of board or canvas, etc. but I will tell you this as an artist - I am not the only person on earth who has looked at that painting and said, "That would be a pretty good picture if you fixed up her face a little, because frankly she is not that great looking a gal."  I think that is what we have got here.   But what do I know.

HATE VIRUS

HISTORY'S GREATEST SECRET REVEALED!!

I was very happy to find a fascinating page on The Discovery and Demonstration of the Minoan Calendar, describing the work of Drs. Dempsey and Herberger in bringing the ancient Minoan Calendrical system to light.  You can enjoy it in detail on your own time but I have another, bigger secret to reveal here.  The Drs. were so struck by the "visual problems and broken patterns" in the decorative borders of a wall-painting that they settled down to crack the code contained therein and at last discovered the Minoan Calender.  It's pretty impressive how well concealed it is and how much analysis and diagramming must be done to pry that secret out of ancient dead hands.  So I printed out a copy of their work and got in my time machine and went back to Knossos when they were just finishing up the painting and showed it to them and they were like this:

I do not mean any disrespect toward Drs. Dempsey and Herberger or their work. But just look at the calendar on your own wall for a second and THINK ABOUT IT. They are what I have come to call Overanalysts, and I have been enjoying the work of Overanalysts for many years. There is a guy who carefully measured and diagrammed all the standing stone rings and lines he could find in Celtic Britain and Europe, and found that they were meticulously laid out in a highly complicated secret geometry.  There is an offshoot of the Holy Blood Holy Grail myth which shows that the seemingly decorative carvings in an obscure chapel in Britain conceal secret knowledge encoded in waveforms revealed by vibrations in metal plates of specific size and thickness - I swear this is true, they really did seem to find this evidence.  The interior structures of The Great Pyramid were found to precisely diagram the prophecies of the biblical Book of Revelations, up to World War One or so, and then it all had to be revised or forgotten.  Another scholar found that the temple sculptures of  the Roman Mithraic cult symbolize the interrelations between the constellations of the stellar sphere as viewed from the outside.

It's true that there are artists and craftsmen who are initiates into Ancient Brotherhoods and devote their skills to encoding the Secret Knowledge in complex diagrams, and they do Great Work.  Those people are very few and rare.  The work of Overanalysts starts at the opposite end of that process, with a picture or a series of carvings; it measures and compares, analyzes and ponders with a dozen books on the table, astrological and qabalistic diagrams on the wall and a three foot tall brass orrery showing the positions of all the planets except Pluto at any point in time.  If they didn't find a remarkable hidden secret with all their dedication and resources that would be a real shame and they would have wasted years of work. The thing is, these people are looking at art through the eyes of science, informed by scholarship and research.  They are not thinking with an artist's mind.  I have an artist's mind, and I also know quite a bit about science, scholarship and research, and human nature to boot.  That is why I am uniquely able to reveal to you History's Greatest Secret, regarding the encoded mysteries concealed in the works of craftsmen throughout history.

SOMETIMES WE JUST EYEBALL IT.

Sometimes we just start at one end and go to the other end and when we get there we stop.  If it looks okay then we do another part.  We stick the bull in the middle and arrange the two figures so the composition is balanced and try to get it done before time to knock off work and go home.  Sometimes we just stand the stones up in what looks like a pretty good circle or a fairly straight line and not worry too much about it.  We  carve what looks like a pretty even pattern and figure nobody is really going to be looking too closely.  We put three leaves on one side of a plant and five leaves on the other side because it looks better that way, not because there is a secret message we want to convey.  

So, I congratulate the Overanalysts of the world on their discoveries, and I like to think of the craftsmen and laborers who did the work, and what their ideas and lives and concerns were, and it is fun to think about.

YOU WANT IT WHEN +1

Back in olden times I think it was a law that you could not operate a print shop without a copy of You Want It When? somewhere on the premises.  It may have been optional for auto repair shops but it was mandatory for print shops. Nobody ever saw an original copy of  it, just re-copied and re-drawn, messed up and cleaned up versions with inexplicable features like the vanishing left arm of the third from left guy, merging into the side of his head.  A friend of mine researched and collected variants of this, but I can't remember if it was Kip or Dave.  Maybe they will tell me.

Anyhow on Google+ today I encountered this little oddity.  I thought it was one of the YWIW guys out of context but soon found it was not.  I tentatively attribute it to the Master of YWIW.  Note however the distinct difference in mood, joviality rather than hilarity, created by the lack of tongue.  

What does it mean? I don't know.  It's just a thing.  Make note of it for future use.  Just remember that somewhere out there may still live some old guy who one day created this proto-meme, waiting for a half-assed unnecessary documentary to be made about him.

INSTANT UPDATE!! This guy Mike Lynch posts information on a disputed claim to the origins of YWIW.   I am willing to credit Henry Syverson as the source of the single figure below, and the inspiration for the amateur artist who created YWIW.

GOODBYE

MUGSHOT

Nina Marie Erickson

THE SANEST MAN WHO EVER LIVED

"I'll soon be rid of my torture... 

then I'll be the sanest man who ever lived!"

Bela Lugosi in The Raven (1935)

LADY WITH A GUN

Luciana Paluzzi in Forgotten Pistolero (1969)

BRYCE 2011

Bryce is the only 3DCG art program I have ever been able to use because its interface is rightbrained.  It's possible to do amazingly complex and realistic scenes and landscapes with it, but naturally I ended up trying to do the opposite.  Here are a few examples of a minimalist series I did in August of last year.

SPIRAL STAIRCASE

BOLKAN

Brazilian-born Florinda Bolkan 

in Anonimo Veneziano (1970)

LANCHESTER

Elsa Lanchester in the psychological thriller

Ladies in Retirement (1941)

OIL RIG

WHISPERS IN THE DARK

Connee Boswell's puzzling performance in 1937's Artists and Models

ROOM 38

POLICE

Riot police in the Congo, from a photo by John Bompengo

ONE PICTURE PER HOUR

Five pictures in five hours, sourced from the 1969 yearbook of Notre Dame girls' high school in Quincy Illinois.

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY

ATTACK THE BLOCK

I got so involved in this I forgot to drink my coffee.