Art – A Sacred Life

May 29, 2024May 29, 2024

Fire, Acid, and Poison

Last September, my Good Lady Wife added two foundling kittens to our pride of house lions. They were lately born when she discovered them, but now they are old enough to be integrated with the rest (two of which are elderly) on a more or less permanent basis.

There’s an old adage about the curiosity of cats, and the potential outcome of same. So we spend a good deal of time telling them to get down, get off that, don’t bite that, etc. In the hope that eventually they’ll either learn it’s not safe, or simply tire of being yelled at about it.

The little princess though, has decided that I am her people, and that she must at all times accompany me in whatever I do. This includes, according to her anyway, my time in the studio. I have explained to her why this is a bad idea, using exactly the words of the title, but she seems unconvinced as to my sincerity, and remains intent on exploring the obvious cave of wonders I am keeping hidden behind that door.

See Below — We’re very interested in what you have to say here.

There is indeed fire. In addition to two actual high-temperature torches, there are several soldering irons, at least a pair of wood burners, and at any given moment there will be incense and/or candles burning.

As to acid I keep several kinds. Some for metal work, some for printmaking, and some for the odd mad scientist experiment and/or old school film photography.

And under the heading of poison, I have quite a selection. There are alcohols, acetones, ammonias, caustics, coal tars, cements, latexes, polymers, binders, adhesives, pigments, dyes, and inks, not counting things that come premade that most people would recognize as paints. I even have the alchemical standbys of several small vials of quicksilver and a large golden hunk of pure brimstone. ( and never you mind what for).

There’s various powders that are bad for the lungs and/or toxic if not deadly when improperly handled. A large number of the containers are marked with “Highly Flammable” and “Use With Adequate Ventilation” and a few that require protective gear.

And on top of that are the other “odd” things which may include crystals and oils and “organic materials” that should only be rarely touched and never tasted.

So in short everything that would delight and entice a curious kitten into a grand but all too brief adventure. Hence the door to the studio stays closed.

I have started to think more and more about the quantities of very bad things that I have amassed in the name of art. And aside from a few things that are just “vibe” in the space, the majority of this collection is for the making of art of various sorts. In my career as an artist I have thankfully seen a shift into less toxic, less carcinogenic, and more environmentally and even vegan friendly materials. But in some cases there’s just no substitute for the bottle of danger ketchup.

I am now old enough to be sensible regarding handling these materials. When I was in my twenties in art school, I would routinely eat, drink, and smoke in front of the easel. As with many artists, the paintbrush was conveniently held in my mouth when both hands were needed. There is no doubt I ingested paint that included some dangerous heavy metals, and toxic pigments. To the extent that I absorbed enough of this to do permanent harm is anyone’s guess. I don’t have the symptoms of heavy metal poisoning that may have been responsible for some of Van Gogh’s insanity (or at least exacerbated it). But then it’s hard to say whether my present weirdness is some lasting legacy of eating cadmium and snorting turpentine in the early 1980s. Among other things.

Part of this new awareness has been a deep dive into the formulation of various artistic materials, as well as into their history. I am looking to find means of producing works of longevity, while at the same time minimizing exposure to material that may decrease my own.

At basis, most art materials consist of two or three components. The first is pigment, the thing that actually makes the color. Next is the binder, what causes the pigment to stick to the paper, canvas, panel, wall, or boulder. Finally, for some there is a solvent or diluent, that makes it possible to mix the binder and pigment into a form that can be easily applied, but which will later on be permanent.

Depending on your pigment, there may be some toxicity issues. Natural “earths”, organic plant pigments, and synthetic industrial colorants can contain chemicals that are inimical to the meat suit. The cadmium and cobalt colors are becoming harder to get and then only at a premium. This reflects as much the rarity of the compound as it does the environmental hazards in handling and preparing them.

Binders, on the other hand, seem less of a problem, unless you are allergic to latex. Synthetic polymers are being substituted for natural gums and resins, and beeswax is being eschewed to make vegan friendly materials. The downside, though, is that synthetics are inevitably petroleum distillates or by-products of the petrochemical industries. As such they carry along the same downsides as any fossil fuel: environmental pollution and resource depletion.

The solvents are frequently the most dangerous part of the mix. The oldest of these is probably turpentine, made by distillation of pine resins. In combination with certain other plant and nut oils, this chemical makes a painting medium that allows dry pigments and powdered resin binders to be spread by a brush, and to achieve a hard cure. “Mineral spirits” another euphemism for petroleum distillates, is a more modern second, and then special preparations like alcohol and acetone round out the gamut. Because they are designed to break down or at least liquify the organic matter of the binder, and then to cure by oxidation or evaporation, the volatile organic compounds given off by these solvents are a big problem in the artist’s studio as well as the general environment.

Smokey Montage — What is it you have there? Can I see it? I’d really like to see that? Can I?

Forty years ago, the detail of this wasn’t part of a general art education. There were vent hoods over the acid vats, and crossed bones over the poisonous cocktails, and in some spaces no smoking signs, but getting deeply into both the chemistry and operation of what made a paint was not part of the curriculum unless you were taking a special course in grad school (or were a chemistry major looking to score a job with Dow or Dupont).

In fairness, most of the students in my painting classes had little interest in that level of detail, and I probably would not have either, except that I was always trying to paint on things that weren’t meant to be painted on. This encouraged a broader understanding of the various compounds available, but no necessarily the awareness of what they were made from, or how they worked. Over the years a large number of these compounds have left the market, because they were toxic. An example of this is the so-called “magic marker”

Magic Markers — If you have ever used these you may be old enough for Medicare now, and you may need it for the damage they caused to your liver.

This term is frequently applied to any sort of felt tipped ink pen used for drawing or coloring. But the original trademark was a clunky combination of a metal ink cannister and screw on cap with the felt wick. These were developed about mid-century and aimed initially at illustrators and layout artists. The Madison Avenue advertising industry used them to produce brightly colored idea studies in rapid fashion.

The chief drawback of these was that the ink solvent was xylene or toluene. While not fully proven carcinogenic, these were linked to birth defects, liver and brain damage, and frequently caused dizziness, headaches, and disorientation. These were the same compounds used in the “airplane glue” the kids of the 70s were huffing to get high. So this should explain a bit about some of the advertising you saw created in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Most felt markers since the 1990s use an alcohol or water base, but the adult coloring craze and the demand for low-cost materials means possible importation from less regulated overseas manufacturers. I have sets of “professional” alcohol markers, and I have “discount” alcohol markers, and while I’m not sure that the cheaper ones are using something as toxic as toluene or xylene, they’re definitely more pungent and powerful in a closed room than the high end ones.

I wonder how many ancient shamans scarred, marred, and potentially ended themselves trying to find the exact combination bear fat, beeswax, bird egg and berry juice would render the perfect bison on that cave wall. I’m sure there had to be a number of disastrous failures before time honored formulae were able to be passed down to the apprentice and the acolyte. Such knowledge was magical and sacred, and conveyed powers which were beyond that of the rest of the tribe.

Throughout our history the connection of art and ritual is constantly reinforced. Art as ornament, until the most modern of times, still carried some sacredness or symbolic cachet. Likewise the making of such art was closely guarded, practiced by specialist like the scribes of Egypt and the masons of the Medieval Gothic. We can analyze and dissect and understand their methods and materials now in a more democratic sense, but in doing so, we have left the sacredness behind.

Most of the artists I went to school with simply wanted to know what combination of A and B was required to get their paint to flow smoothly and dry quickly (or slowly) or be thinner or thicker. The “why” of it was on no interest to them. I see a great deal of this echoed in much of the magical community, looking for a “practical” approach, like a cook book, and speaking of “theory” with the same derisive nostril as a third grader might speak of “math”.

The one without the other certainly is functional. A list of things to get, step by step instructions, and what to do if you catch the curtain on fire, and that’s all. But what if that doesn’t work. What if you prefer pecans instead of walnuts in the brownie? Is it a simple matter just to substitute one for the other?

There are those who would argue that, but I’m not sold on the concept as a universal truth.

There are oil paints. There are water-based paints. There are now some paints that can be mixed with oil or water. But not all of the water-based paints can be used with the oil based paints and vice versa. Luckily, these are labeled relatively clearly down at the art store.

But this is not the same with everything, and not the same with spell work.

For instance, there is a thing called an oil pastel. Presumably, this is because it was devised to create the same kind of immediacy and painterly approach that chalk pastels were used for, but without the crumbliness and dust. All well and good.

Chalk pastels are made by taking color pigment, fine kaolin clay, and enough binder to get them to stick together and to the paper. As a consequence they are quiet fragile and dusty and require applying a “fixative” of some sort to the finished work to glue it down. Prior to our modern aerosol cans this was done by atomizing a dilution of water and gum arabic or rabbit skin glue onto the work.

So around the turn of the century pigments mixed with wax instead of clay came about, and these were softened with “mineral spirits”. Labeled “oil” pastels because they contained a petroleum based solvent.

Now the natural inclination is to think that oil pastels and oil paints are fully compatible, and that one could use the stubby little crayons as a perfect means of drawing your composition under your painting.

It turns out that this is a really bad idea, because unlike the linseed or walnut oils commonly used for oil paint, the petroleum oil in the pastel never actually “dries”. So the oil pastel oil will dissolve the oil paint oil, or at very least make it tend to slide off the drawing.

Mixed Media — Despite similar names, shapes and brands, these things are all very different chemically and do not always play well together. Substitution, co-mingling, and the mixing of media requires a deeper understanding of how they interact, how to coax their cooperation, and how to insure that the final work not only meets expectation but also creates a lasting result. This is analogous to spell crafting from scratch. You have to know about all the pieces or the results can range from failure to outright disaster. At very least you may have to start over, and at worse, something may spontaneously combust (it happens).

This is further confused by the fact that you can use turpentine and oil painting mediums to “paint” with oil pastels and achieve a limited chemical curing that makes them behave more like oil paint and be less subject to surface damage.

Then there’s the oil stick, which is really oil paint in a stick form, not to be confused with oil pastels.

Making these work together harmoniously is a job in itself, and only achievable if one has a really deep understanding of not just the how but the why.

Making them work, and making them archival, so that an art collector or museum can expect the value of the piece will be protected in the long term, is an even more complicated task, with additional layers of chemicals and processes arcane and obtuse.

I view the process of “deep magic” with a similar eye. And I use that term to distinguish from the archaic and elitist notions of “high” and “low” magic. Practical magic, is by definition intended for general purposes to get things done. I use it. I have great respect for it. It works.

But it’s closer to a sketch than an oil painting. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no need to take the time and effort and complicated process of making an oil painting when a sketch will do.

There are a lot of how-to books that take the approach of a cookbook. This is the same for art as it is for spell craft. There are a few that take it to the next level, where there’s a bit more said about the bits and pieces and putting them together. But in the end you probably won’t find a single art book that gives you the how and the why at that level of detail, and you aren’t likely to find a spell book that will either.

At least I haven’t. I’ve had to go put the pieces together from a lot of different places, and I’ve had to grow the knowledge to know when what I find is potentially useful, and when it’s purely selling something.

I hope you have found this rambling potentially useful. It is last minute due to the demands recurring ill weather on the Gulf Coast is imposing from my day job, and thus there are fewer images here than usual.

Perhaps next week we can get back to a better balance. Thank you for reading to the end.

May 22, 2024May 22, 2024

The Need To Be Invisible

My artistic journey began hand-in-hand with my magical journey in very early childhood. When one is still forming their awareness of the world, and learning to separate self from other, the distinctions of time, space, reality, and the imagined are not as clearly cut as we often pretend they are in later life.

That’s certainly evident when we examine so many of the classic works of children’s literature, like the work’s of Roald Dahl, Lewis Carrol, A.A. Milne, J.M. Barry, and Dr. Seuss. These stories delight in taking liberties with our grasp on the “real world” and frequently draw the attention of artists and illustrators who want to play in those fertile grounds.

Along with these and a tattered copy of Grimm’s, my youthful creativity found equal inspiration in film and television, and often did not distinguish the blossoming of science fiction with the actual events of America’s voyages to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, There was frequently cross-over by artists depicting both the real and historical, and the futuristic and fantastical. I quickly became a fan of the works of Chesley Bonestell, Robert McCall, John Berkey, and Syd Mead.

I answered the siren call of comic books at about the same time, and through experimental graphics works by such masters as Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko, I was introduced to the artistic movement of surrealism. Likewise, the bizarre and fanciful art direction of people like Maurice Noble, Chuck Jones, and Bob Clampett on the Warner Brothers cartoons immersed my malleable mind in the distortions one might encounter in the works of Salvador Dali and Joan Miro.

It was about the time I entered high school and had my first formal art classes that I became aware of the work of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, and this was through the now defunct Omni Magazine. His most famous pieces, produced mostly in the 1960s, became widely seen and copied in popular culture about this time. The so-called “Man in the Bowler Hat” or “Man Who Isn’t There” inspired several interpretations on book and album covers, music videos, and poster art. In those days I just felt that his work was “cool to look at” but like Dali and other surrealist painters, the depth of their messages escaped me.

Not A Pipe — This is possibly Magritte’s most famous work, at least in artists’ circles. For those who are deficient en français, the inscription reads “This is not a pipe.”

It is, in fact, a painting of a pipe. For that matter, it is a digital image reproduction of a photograph of a painting of a pipe. It should not be surprising then, to discover that the name of this painting is “The Treachery of Images”. It basically states what we all know, or at least think we know, that the image of a thing is not the thing itself. In doing so, it plays with that old human conception that lies at the root of all sympathetic magic. The image of the thing is somehow equal to the thing, while clearly, in our “reality” it isn’t. It’s just a picture of the thing. Yet we accept that the images of things are the things, at least in some way, as the basis of our communication of that shared reality.

As I get older (and weirder) my appreciation for Magritte and the other surrealists has grown, and the inspiration they provide both for my artwork and my thinking about life, the universe, and everything is much more profound.

A couple of week’s ago I took a long weekend in one of my favorite getaway spots, to celebrate my 34th wedding anniversary. In that time, inasmuch as possible and practical, I “unplugged” from the interwebs, and particularly social media.

This necessary disconnect was both to spend more time and attention on my Good Lady Wife, but also to simply clear my mind from the kind of artificial experience that most of us take as “reality” in the early 21st Century.

“Social media” is a skosh over two decades old. According to the Google AI now summarizing what it thinks it found on the Internet, the ancestor of all, the original MySpace went live in 2003, with Fascistbook and Twaddle following a few years afterward.

Like many interweb startups, MySpace collapsed and vaporized, to be replaced by Web 2.0-A type networks that somehow inexplicably found a way to keep tweaking the algorithm so that everyone kept coming back.

But this means that for the last 20 years or so, we’ve been living “online” instead of “irl” and this has changed our perception of reality and how we operate within it.

Social media engineers bank on the “fear of missing out”. What did you not see in your feed? Which messages of vital importance and life changing wisdom has the algorithm buried during the 0.087 seconds that you weren’t scrolling through, that you will never ever ever see again? Unless, it goes viral and becomes that cat meme. Or the one with the girlfriend. Or Batman abusing Robin.

If you are the same vintage (and now apparently the term vintage is also important) as I am, you can remember the world pre-social. I even predate the interwebs themselves. Consider the implication of how human beings function with each other that this thing has wrought.

While I am thrilled to find a bully pulpit for my lunatic ravings, and hopefully a viable market for weird art, I am a pre-net dinosaur and remember how different things were, and actually still are.

“In real life”, aside from immediate family, and perhaps a few neighbors and co-workers, we generally were not, and actually are not, in constant contact with all that many people we know. Our friends often live at some distance, and we see them when we visit them, they visit us, or we make arrangements to meet somewhere to do something.

Yet life “online” asserts the principle that we should be constantly inveigled with each other, to the point that every action online gets copied to everyone in our friends list. Whenever we like, everyone knows we liked. When we know someone, everyone knows we know someone. And they should know them too. Everything about us is assumed to be of interest and equally interesting to everyone we know.

This is not socializing. Socializing was based on choice. This is marketing. The sheer amount of unconnected and uninteresting goods and services that have gained some tenuous status of being liked or looked at by a friend of a friend of a friend that dumps into my feed daily inspires me to disconnect and distance.

Friends, we are not supposed to be this connected. There’s supposed to be distance. There’s supposed to be mystery. Sometimes we need to be invisible.

Magritte’s “The Blank Signature” plays with our perception of space and reality. It’s exceptionally powerful because our brains are wired to fill in the parts of the image that aren’t there, and make assumptions about the “depth” of the space.

Though, again, we are looking at a flat surface that represents the illusion of depth using changes in tonal value and color. Like the false pipe, this image deceives us into thinking we see the invisible parts of the horse and rider, and that they are properly imposed across the background.

A further magic here, though, is that we think we are seeing more “wrong” than their actually is. We mentally “feel” the horse and rider are cut up into several strips, but it is really only just behind the neck, and the imposition of the background tree behind the rider that creates this effect.

What we see is what we think we see. The visible is no less an illusion than the invisible.

Invisibility seems an especially important trait for wielders of magical secrets. Merlin and Gandalf frequently disappear for weeks, months, and even years. The Wyrd Sisters of the Scottish play show up as required to further the plot, but seem to hold no permanent space in relation to the world inhabited by Macbeth and his cronies. Faerie godmothers, woodland witches, and sea sorceresses are not usually to be found wandered down the village high street. Their remoteness and difficulty in contacting marks them as creatures to be sought only in cases of direst need, or greatest peril, because they do not care to be disturbed.

There is a two-fold nature to this. In dealing with the “invisible world” one must have some bit of a toe on the threshold. The beings we frequently truck with “not of this earth” don’t have Linked In Profiles and pages on Facebook. They are not to be summoned on TikTok.

I do enjoy sharing the dark humor of fellow witches and weirdos. And there is knowledge to be passed, in quiet conversation and private chat, but perhaps not in the repeated meme. But we must also remember the old adage – “to know, to dare, to keep silent”.

There are those people who still, even in the early 21st Century, look upon the occult and those involved with it as Servants of the Devil^TM (and some are, willingly and with full knowledge) and seek to “save souls” or suppress difference, whichever is easier. There are people who will use politics and bigotry to that end, exploiting the frequently misguided, and perhaps not terribly intelligent mob. This has always been the case.

This is also why the ancient practices were kept secret, even in societies where the working of wonders was accepted and appreciated. Those who did such working were a people apart, and spent much time “away” from the rest of their culture. They would go on spirit quests, or seek the gods on mountaintops or celebrate mysteries in darkened sanctums of ancient temples. They were not posting thrice daily on YouTube.

Magritte’s Decalamonia is one of several paintings with a similar symbolism. This one, and “The Pilgrim” are often reimagined by other creatives to show an empty suit, a so-called “invisible man” though he never specifically painted that image.

These views of clouded vistas and other landscapes, framed by the shape of the ubiquitous middle class mid-century European man in a bowler hat recur through his art. The critics, and perhaps Magritte himself, would suggest this is a dreamscape, but it augers to me that our external reality is entirely framed by our own minds. Ironically we are always separated from it, because we are we and it is Other. So we only have the internal world, and it creates our impression of the external one, which we can’t truly verify.

My approach to the internet, as my approach to the blog and social media, is not “content-based”. I encounter people, through serendipity for the most part, and build relationships with those people. In that context, I probably interact more with them than I do with people “irl” outside of my wife, children, and cats. But then I am something of a an old hermit.

It is difficult to say if these relationships are any more or less illusory than “irl” relationships that require meeting in person and doing activities that are mutually enjoyable. We are all aware of the isolated nature of being, and the extent to which an online person is any more forthcoming or presenting themselves authentically compared to an “irl” person is debatable. But the machinery of the interwebs tends toward surface more than substance.

In order to continue to connect with persons we like, we have to engage, and deliver “content” that the algorithm favors. This is opposite to “irl”, where we have some measure of control over the interaction. We can call our friend up, go have dinner, see a show, play a sport, take a trip, or otherwise engage without the intermediary interference of the algorithm.

So by the nature of thing, the personae we present online are skewed to favor engagement, even if that’s not our general intention. And consequently the algorithm demands that we are online as much as we possible can be. This is anathema to the old wizard going out and wandering the woods and speaking to the trees and rocks (who do not have Threads accounts…so far.).

I personally find this condition to be ultimately unhealthy and eventually intellectually and creatively stifling. Your mileage may vary,

In the few months that I took off from blogging earlier, I found new ideas emerging and I have since entered a period of artistic creativity and energy that I haven’t felt in ages.

Where it leads, I cannot say. I am still working out the need to “engage” sufficiently to find a market for the work. Although I get tremendous joy and satisfaction from the process, the mortgage company will not accept my joy and satisfaction as monthly payment, no matter how tremendous it is.

In any case, I recommend that all of us who walk a creative or strange and unusual path practice a healthy introspection and cultivate self-awareness of how the interweb is affecting our practice and our identity.

The people who want you to believe that you can’t be invisible from time to time are doing it because they are selling your visibility -like magic beans- to the advertisers who don’t understand how to reach people in any human way.

I’ll continue to be visible each week, at least for now, unless something is out of my control. I appreciate the interest you have taken in my words to read all the way down here.

April 24, 2024April 24, 2024

Hashtag Occultartist

Sing O muse of the wrathful Achilles, Peleus’s son
Who brought much woe upon the Achaens
The Illiad – Homer

Given the brevity and inconsistency of recent posts, I am this morning again in possession (for the moment) of inspiration for something a bit more long form.

In truth, last week I had gotten busy in the studio and had resolved to just skip posting on Sunday, but I saw that my interview on Your Average Witch Podcast was going to be released, and of course it would be bad form to ghost on that.

So I cobbled some pics from the phone and posted a bit of something. I feel less than satisfied about that, but it’s again that struggle between the time to do the work, and the time to talk about doing the work. And doing the work needs to become my priority.

Finding the balance is an ongoing task, but then there is that return of the inspiration that fueled the first year of articles, and the rewards of writing as an artistic work in itself.

So this is why I began with the opening line from Homer. His second great epic, The Odyssey (which may have come first in a very Hollywood prequel fashion) opens with:

Tell me O Muse, of that man of great resourcefulness,
who wandered wide and long after ruining the sacred citadel of Troy.
The Odyssey – Homer

From both of these (and there are so many translations, but these are paraphrased to mine own sensibilities) it’s clear that the blind poet, if he actually existed as a person, felt the need to invoke a deity to begin his works.

To the modern mind, this is simply the blandishment of poesy, oft copied by the modern romantic odist. Yet to the ancient Greek, and certainly to his audience, this was a very real and clearly magico-spiritual invocation.

Mandala Wip — This piece in progress betrays it’s more esoteric origins. The idea came to me while I was working with the Hindu/Buddhist objects known as Vajra (Sanskrit), or Dorje (Tibetan). These are a stylized representation of the the Thunderbolt of Indra, and might be considered analogous to both the Thunderbolt of Zeus and the powers inherent in the Merkaba shape and the Chariot Tarot card. It is an expression of will or force,

When I obtained the objects, there were two version, one that had the “claw” shape on either end, which is the more usual, I believe, and one that had four such “heads” in the shape of an equilateral cross. In my earliest working with them, I found that putting the two ended one across the four ended one seemed to generate a natural jolt, so this variation came about. The next logical extension was to put it over a hexagon (and this then also connects it to the merkaba shape). From there ideas for representing it two-dimensionally began to flow into my mind.

Several additional images sprang from this, so I believe that the “jolt” I speak of has definitely opened me up to something, and I’m going to run with that. If the end images find an audience, then that’s great, but one does not create a mandala to sell it. The purpose of the mandala is in the creation.

At very least, the invocation of Calliope (muse of epic poetry) would be equivalent to the modern “break a leg” used by actors in the theater to warn off a bad performance. That still, is a summoning of spiritual intervention or influence in the forthcoming endeavor. It is a summoning that Homer in his recitations would have felt necessary, and one his listening audience would see as supremely important.

Angering the gods, after all, was what the whole Illiad and Odyssey thing was about. Acknowledging their role, then, in the performance of the work, was necessary, especially if one was to get their cooperation for tomorrow’s matinee show.

The artist, poet, and musician in our modern times use the muse euphemistically to mean that spark of idea that comes from seemingly nowhere, that informs the work, and provides an energy and mood that makes the creation of art a joyous and uplifting thing.

Working without the muse, is to descend into the mundane and commercial and technical.

It bogs down progress. It leadens the spirit. The end result, while perhaps technically correct and adequate – possibly even superior in its way, is never as alive as that work produced through the hands of inspired spirit.

In the quickly composed article of last week, I alluded to working on two different projects. One was a life painting which provided a number of challenges and rewards, but might hardly be called “muse-inspired” That is, the work was essentially a response to the scene before me, and the artistry was in how I would translate that scene to the paper, given the tools available. It is not without joy, mind you, and it is intuitive as well as technical, but it comes from a place very much extant and “real”.

The second piece, underway in the studio, while appearing to be more rigidly technical, is actually the piece that is more inspired from spiritual or preternatural source. It is a painting that has no external analog, and it something that grew from working with certain symbolic tools from Hinduism and Tibetan Shamanism, and Buddhism.

I acquired the tools as my interest in some of the various esoteric teachings of these related cultures attracted my attention in recent years. But the inspiration is not from any of those teachings. It was a flash, and then that flash expanded, and then the image formed in my consciousness. I sat about trying to bring it into greater focus mentally, and then eventually began to construct it with a sketch and then that sketch became a blueprint -a very structured drawing that would allow me to express this image on canvas as I had conceived it.

This path to the thing is by no means as clear and relatable as the one people who were walking past my table at the restaurant looking at the painting of the street scene could easily make out.

And this is the nature of the muse moment. It is that quicksilver revelation that may only be experienced directly, that words fall short of describing. Like the climax of the passions, even the tongues of poets strain to convey the full transport of it.

And this got me to thinking about the experience referred to in todays occult world as Unverifiable Personal Gnosis, or UPG. The thing that we “know” or are given to know that hasn’t come to us through teaching or tradition or externally demonstrable scientific proof.

We simply know.

UPG is a hot-button topic in discussions of magic. In a world dripping with Tik Tok hot takes on so many ideas and traditions, anyone asserting personal revelation as a key to their practice is almost immediately going to be the subject of skepticism, scorn and ridicule.

But the artist’s muse is exactly that experience. It is the thing that comes from nowhere, that we just know to be right. We are moved to create by it, we are almost compelled to get it out on paper or canvas or into clay before we lose that brief spark.

Frontispiece 1989 Sketchbook — The artist in their youth is generally more open to exploring methods and imagery that go against convention. Subject that are taboo are not so for them, in fact, seeking out these edgier contexts may be a goal in itself.

As time passes, however, one may find themselves pushed into a kind of conformity, whether this is to bring about a desired commercial success or because they become used to working in a place of comfort. Perfection may not be the enemy of good, but every artist has a near perfect image in their mind when inspired. That this perfect image may not be executed due to limitations of skill, media, or even mood, brings about a paralysis. The dread of being frustrated bars action. Like writer’s block, the canvas sits empty, or the artist produces only what they are comfortable doing.

It’s a hard-learned lesson that the making of the work is the reward. How the world will react is out of the control of the maker. If the end result is satisfying, or even elating, then this is an added boon. If the anticipated frustration wins out, the final piece is not up to the intent of the artist, or is rejected by audience and critic, then this will either inform the artist to improve, or to change their approach.

To do otherwise is to stagnate, and eventually decay and be replaced by those willing to keep striving.

As an occultist and an artist, my muse moments are frequently indistinguishable from the UPG.

Frequently the creation of the art is a means through which the esoteric and often obscure message of the UPG sheds itself of the dross brought across from the other side, and becomes full-fledged and full formed in my consciousness.

Sometimes the thing comes clear to begin with, and the execution of the artwork is the goal of process. It is a magical construction that has some sort of purpose.

Perhaps it is for me personally.

Perhaps it is an homage or gift to a particular spirit (consider it like a magical commission to paint a portrait).

Perhaps it is destined to hang on a museum wall in some distant future when I am gone to dust, and pass along it’s true message to a lucky soul who will know how to make use of it.

To be fair, I am not often sure of that purpose, even when the bell rings loudly and the image is fully formed and yelling at me to paint it.

As an artist who draws upon dream imagery and such subconscious inspiration as this, I may often be employing symbols from many cultural and magical systems. I do not see this as an exploitation, because I am responding to the voice of the muse. It is what is being sung to me. I am one who believes that all these various cultural and magical systems are the shared heritage of a human race, and that they all developed from the same source so long ago that we do not fully understand how or why they came about.

Human beings make art. Human beings practice magic.

Other animals use tools and mourn their dead and have complex social structures for the getting of food and the rearing of young and protection of the social group.

But it is our relationship with the muse that began our great journey as a species out of that plain, to an awareness of our cosmos, and hopefully a dawning understanding of the importance of that journey. After eons of exploitation of the Mother of Us All, we have reached a point where our population is threatening to alter the nature of the planet in ways that may not be recoverable.

Looking for a purely technical solution does not really appear to be working. There is a deplorable tendency for such advances to be held and hoarded by the few elites, who will use to add even more pieces of silver to their burgeoning coffers. Even if this were not the case, having such solutions adopted across cultural boundaries with very different ideas of the nature of our cosmic experience is difficult.

Fear and ignorance are at least as much a barrier to solving our looming ecological crises as greed and avarice.

The occult community is not free of these issues. In many ways what I have observed on social media in the last year or so is a microcosm of these larger issues. People fixate on dogma. People separate over traditions. People argue trivialities. All the while asserting, ironically, that they are building a future free from these trappings of the patriarchal capitalistic monotheist religions that “stole” their traditions.

As the late great Jimmy Buffet puts it, “It ain’t that simple.”

Opening ourselves can be a difficult process. We are creatures of both habit and environment. We may have been brought up to believe in one thing, and even if we later rebel or refuse or escape from it, the influence of it is permanently there. This is the same for society as a whole as it is for the individual. Thus the systemic change necessary in the widely variable human culture, nuanced by thousands of years of tradition, lore, and history, and hemmed in by very different economic realities, is not something that has a simple, immediate or even generational solution.

I’m old enough to remember when the hippies were going to change the world. Peace and Love for everybody regardless of anything that was different.

Some things did change. Some things that changed only appeared to change. And still other things were simply sweep under a convenient rug in a “developing nation” where the self-righteous no longer had to smell it.

Thus conveniently removed, such distasteful things as slave labor, environmental pollution and unbelievably unsafe workplaces were pronounced “fixed” and convenient and cheap production went on to fuel the fortunes of tech billionaires and global corporate e-tailers.

The new awareness of a new generation that these old things didn’t actually get fixed is much the basis of the widening gap between those hippies (now designated “boomers” in the most derogatory way possibly). my own generation who were basically let run feral for a couple decades as said boomers grasped at a fading youth, and the “millennial” (also a derogatory designation) , Gen Z, and whatever the newest group are being grouped as.

The generation gap was a thing invented in the 1960s, and wow, retro again today. This may be the first time in our history as a species we’ve had so many generations around to be blaming each other for whatever great ill and frustration confronts them.

I knew one of my great grandmothers. She was born in 1895. In her lifetime we advanced from the steam locomotive to having people land on the moon. In my lifetime, we’ve gone to a permanent human presence off the planet, in orbit, capable of phoning home to anyplace in the world. We have a global community with near instantaneous communication, and it is no longer possible for iniquity and injustice to hide in the dark. But somehow they still manage to do so.

Somewhere there’s a war going on. Somewhere there’s always a war going in. Somewhere hate is driving action. Villages are burning. People are dying. Somewhere someone is making bank on that. This is the human condition as it was since we came down out of the trees, and began struggling for finite resources on a small rock in the middle of a great big inhospitable nothingness.

We haven’t managed to fix that. Even in the utopian futures imagined by the science fiction fabulists, there is inevitably an “enemy” somewhere out there, who threatens the stability and peace of the protagonist society. That’s a construct, to illustrate the desired state of moral superiority in no longer being like said enemy.

I’ve been a believer in the brighter future of the Star Trek TV show since I first encountered in the late 60s and early 70s. Yet the first iteration had enemies that bore perhaps too close a resemblance to current foes of the American state. It’s hard to look at the “grand vision” and not see a certain jingoism. But it is a thing of it’s time. To hide the dialogs about war, bigotry, and other social issues, the producers had to provide the type of adversarial adventure that would get sponsors to pay because viewers tuned in. Later versions of the show attempted to show a rehabilitation of the relationship between those enemies (as foretold in earlier episodes). But that only meant that new enemies were discovered or invented that echoed the changing geopolitical climate.

Put most simply, we don’t even seem to be able to imagine a future where we won’t have someone somewhere at war for something.

That’s a frightening and profoundly disheartening thought.

Normal Odd — When I transitioned from the generally free environment of academia into the results-oriented cash-driven world of gainfully employed adult, I gradually reduced the number of really strange and unusual pieces I produced. Such that I did make, were themselves a more pedestrian type of thing, geared toward illustration of popular science fiction or fantasy, and while technically very professional, they weren’t terribly imaginative or inspired. And along the way there were a lot of pieces that were certainly more “normal” being produced, because that was feeding my family.

Of course that is also frustrating, and leads to dissatisfaction with one’s position and one’s life, and can feed back around into other aspects of one’s life and relationships. Creative people, whether they are painters or writers or musicians or inventors or motivators, have an almost physiological need to harken to the call of the muse. When they are stifled in this process, whether through their job or their personal life, they will suffer at a very deep level, sometimes without even realizing it.

That I am capable of creating things that are arcane, odd, eerie, and disturbing, while at the same time able to produce mainstream mass market traditional imagery, and enjoy doing both, is testament to a long life of contemplating that issue. If someone is attracted to the one, but the other causes them to not buy my work, that’s fine. I really don’t want my work owned by someone like that. And it doesn’t matter if the potential buyer wants the creepy stuff but is put off by the normal stuff, or vise versa. If they are unable to enjoy the image they are attracted to because my other works are upsetting to them, then again, I’d rather not have them owning either work.

Both come from the same head, heart, and hand. I have nothing to prove. This is my time to make the work for me. If you like it, great. If you don’t, well, that’s about you.

And perhaps it is the frustrated musings of an aging artist, who sees the ticking away of the days, and the accompanying difficulty of making the work, particularly at a time when the voice of the muse may be coming clearer than it ever has.

I celebrate that I am lucky enough to have reached the age when I can contemplate making work simply to please my own soul. That is not to say that I haven’t, and didn’t have opportunities to make works of this kind over the years. But in those years between the experimental freedom of youth and the late stage of a career, there is first and foremost the need to make a living.

Providing food, shelter, care, and comfort for oneself and one’s chosen family is no sin. We can wrangle with the moral implications of the few super rich occupying the highest echelons, and the disparity between our relative comfort in the Western World, at least if we are part of a particular ethnic background. But to be alive is to have certain real needs, and these are not met by wishful thinking, or philosophical stance.

I have made art for myself. I have made art for others. And I have made art for money.

I will make art for myself. I hope to make art for others. And I have no doubt that I will make art for money.

This is neither selling out nor compromising my artistic integrity. There is still joy in the creation of subject matter that has a more “commercial value” even if that is not where the muse sings loudest to me. On the other hand, my willingness to see that experience as joyful, as valuable, as something that helps me grow, has been rewarded by a flood of visions and ideas that are fresh, and freely given. I am encouraged to conceive of works that in earlier parts of my life I would have found strange, or uncomfortable. I have broadened my own thinking of what the moniker of “occult artist” might include, and feel like I have passed the secret door to a whole new cave of wonders.

And in receiving these new songs, I feel that many things I’d once have considered “too far out there” may actually also have “commercial value”.

The frustration, of course, is having so much I want to do, and struggling still for the time to do it. The mundane and necessary business of business that puts food on the table, a roof over my head, meds in the cabinet, savings in the retirement fund, and keeps my cats in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed still takes priority over my desire to execute the next grand idea.

So I beg indulgence, O Muse, that you have patience. Do not withdraw from me because you mistake my need for the daily bread an indifference to your gift. Understand my struggle to sip the nectar of your song at the end of an exhausting day in “the real world”.

I know that your cup holds restoration and healing. Were that I had strength but to bring it to my lips.

You’ll no doubt notice that this article has returned to the previous Wednesday at 5:00 PM Central Time live date. That was working. The reschedule was not. If it’s not broke…

The muse responsible for these articles seems to be cooperating again, in concert with her sister more involved with the visual and plastic arts (or they may be one and the same). If such favor holds, I’ll be here next week.

April 14, 2024April 24, 2024

Time and Tides

Yesterday I spent on the front porch of a local restaurant working on a watercolor of the buildings on the opposite side of the street.

I remembered as I worked that the last time I had such an experience was from a garret balcony in Montmarte almost 30 years ago.

It’s not that I haven’t made art. I have. I have made pieces both digital and traditional, for personal enjoyment and for profit (and luckily sometimes both). But to sit down with no other intention than to make a record of the scene in front of me hasn’t been something I’ve done in too long a time.

The exercise is not just to work in the wild, but to determine how to execute the image with the tools at hand. While I have a full set of the Derwent Inktense pencils and blocks, the paint pans, similar to a watercolor tin, only has about a third of the colors. Yes, I can, and did, expand that with the bigger gamut of the pencils, I was quite surprised that the colors didn’t really have the subtle faded pink, sage green, and yellow ochres of the scene. Choosing how to interpret the scene is the artist’s process.

Frankly that’s my own damned fault, and my own damned vanity. Working from life is a core competency of the professional artist, and it’s my own laziness that I’ve not invested the time to get out there and do it.

The spontaneity and interaction with both the subject and the working environment are essential to any one claiming to be competent with their media. So yesterday was a return to the practice, and I expect to be spending more time engaged in it, even if the final pieces are not spectacular or commercially viable.

Today I am in studio, working on various projects that are a good deal more structured. This is not simply because I am shifting media back to oils, which of necessity are not as spontaneous. It is because the nature of the imagery requires a more “engineered” method.

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. There will doubtless be some times where working in the open air with a live scene will require a certain deliberated method. And likewise, even a very complex and arranged studio piece will benefit from the occasional happy accident that may take it in a completely different direction.

Magic, of course has some parallels. The seat of the pants “what’s in the cupboard” approach of practical witchcraft is analogous to the plein air impression of the live street. And certainly the heavily structured rituals of so-called “high magick” has commonality with the premeditated studio work. Yet they both partake of and inform each other.

The intended outcome is, of course, the primary yardstick for the efficacy of method. In my long practice I have almost always wiggled along somewhere in the middle of both, but I confess I’ve had more freedom and courage to trust the wildness of traditional improvisational witchcraft than to be comfortable with facing the changing light of a street scene or landscape. And for that I chastise myself.

The studio piece has been worked out from rough sketch through a geometric design in the computer. The final will be hand painted, and will hopefully be more representative of a freer approach, but the use of structured technology as a step in that creation is something that I have been doing for quite a while. The patience required to cut out and apply the masks comes from commercial illustration projects, which ironically hardly employ these methods in the digital age. In essence I am utilizing a hybrid archaic process that has been superceded by layering and masking digitally. The method is still the standard for much airbrush work, but for the majority of illustration it’s become a forgotten art.

It’s never too late for the old dog to go back and relearn some tricks.

That’s all I have this week. If you find it a tad brief, I invite you to join me and Clever Kim on Your Average Witch Podcast this Tuesday, April 16, where I ramble on about a number of topics. I’m looking forward to seeing what she was able to edit together from my typical puddle of consciousness conversations.

Till next week, then. At least I’ll try to.

April 7, 2024April 7, 2024

A Brief Message From Our Sponsors

Restarting the articles has proven more difficult than I expected.

The previous two weeks unforeseen professional and personal demands on my time prevented even this simple message. The good news is that such demands appear, for the moment, to be resolving positively.

I am continuing to use my time making art. I am pleased to say that the general shift of my emphasis has resulted in a number of fresh ideas for images.

That these images depart from my previous experience painting delights me. But my desire to successfully execute these ideas means that much more time needs be spent in preparation and testing of the methods in mind. Even a decade ago I would have lacked the perspective or patience to make these experiments. I would have feared the final product might escape my imagination.

Minotaur Skull -material test of the Derwent Graphitint pencils and paint pans. The idea evoloved from a desire to have an underlying image on a canvas I am using to test various methods of gilding.

Now, I find that the experiments not only yield the necessary experience to work on the original idea, but that new ideas emerge from the experimentation process.

I hope my small cadre of readers will forgive this period of unevenness in the blog. I cannot say with certainty if it will resume the regular cycle I had committed to. I hope it will, because I believe such commitments to one’s audience is important. I’m old-fashioned that way.

Another test of the Derwent Graphitint. I was looking to get the effect of fog. In the end, I used some Winsor Newton Cotman watercolors to deepen the foreground intensity. I like the Graphitint, but the basic 12 color pencils set and the half-pan paints didn’t really have enough “oomph” to sell the effect I was looking for.

In the meantime, please accept the art candy here, and rest assured I am working toward resumption of our regularly scheduled programming.

November 15, 2023November 15, 2023

Queen Of The Night

Tomorrow is one of the dates celebrated as Hecate’s Night, so this, I suppose, is Hecate’s Night Eve.

My own relationship with the Goddess of the Witches is a complicated one. But then my relationships with most of the gods and spirits is complicated, because relationships are complicated. They form organically, and grow, or die, over time.

As Hecate comes ostensibly to us out of Greek mythology, she was never top of mind for me when I was younger. Of course, I read the stories, knew the names of the gods and heroes, and how they equated to the Roman names that cropped up in astrology, astronomy, and on the various NASA programs. But I was, and remain, deeply involved in the culture of Ancient Egypt.

Hecate nevertheless made herself present in my life some years ago, as muse if nothing else. She inspired a painting I made for, and I believe still belongs to, a young witch of my acquaintance.

We referred to her simply as “The Witch” or the “The Witch Painting”. It was a singular work, one of those portraits where the eyes follow you around the room. The affect was accidental, or at least synchronistic, as by intention and artifice I have not been able to reproduce it. There are no photos in my possession of this painting. This was made in the days of analog, when you had to shoot with film, develop and print same, and there was a cost associated that a young “starving artist” could not support for a mere work of vanity and friendship.

But the image remains more or less in my brain, and I have made a couple of stabs at reproducing it since, though I fully doubt the power imbued in that original will ever occupy a later copy, nor should it, and I am okay with that.

Over the intervening years, however, I have come to know that this painting was a votive or shrine or altar to Hecate. It’s a portrait of her, or at least of the aspect of her she showed me those years ago in the student ‘s studio. It does not have the usual trappings, but there is no doubt in my mind that she is connected with it. and to a lesser extent, the one’s I have made later for my own collection.

Because of that I have dug a little deeper into her background and found that she is not Greek, but probably imported from Anatolia, and like the Titans she is frequently grouped with, represents the beliefs of a much older culture, with closer connections to creative chaos than the Olympian soap opera. I try not to bring these things up. Everyone has family drama, and frankly, her background is none of my business. Think about it. If you were being summoned by some sorceror, would you want to be reminded of all the crap that you had to deal with growing up? I certainly wouldn’t. And it certainly wouldn’t incline me toward granting any potential boons.

We all have a right to our private lives, the gods no less than anyone else.

Some may think my regarding the gods and spirits with such familiarity is out of keeping with their status. Yet I would counter that this is simply the way I have come to know them, and interact with them. I do not find it useful, practical, or realistic to regard them as some distant entity residing in a crumbling ruin in a far away land. I would think the gods have moved on, or rather, that their presence has shifted to other focal points.

Look at it logically. Imagine you are a small business with a few loyal employees providing a valid service for the community. But due to changes of fortune, you start losing customers. People stop dropping in. You can’t really afford to keep your staff on, or even maintain the property.

Would you hang around there moping for an eon or two, or would you go look for greener pastures?

Yes, clearly there are spirits that haunt certain places, and I have no doubt that if you found a temple dedicated to Hecate that you might have a good chance of drawing her attention by performing an ancient secret ritual. Who doesn’t like a bit of nostalgia now and again.

But the gods (and other spirits) as we encounter them, thrive on, or at least enjoy, our interaction. So they are going to go where that interaction is, even if it’s a blasted heath in Medieval Scotland.

Thing is, though the Bard’s story was set in an earlier period, he was doubtless drawing on knowledge (or at least awareness) of the contemporary regard for Hecate as a goddess of witches, commander of lesser shades and spirits, and an excellent necromancer in her own right. While Dr. Dee and other “scholarly mages” were summoning angels to compel the denizens of the graveyard to divulge cosmic secrets and the locations of any nearby buried treasure, the common folk had recourse to witches, and the witches were clearly still worshipping Hecate.

If you are looking for specifics as to the nature of that worship, you’ll have to find it elsewhere. I understand that there’s a feast or supper traditional to the Hecate’s Night commemoration, but I have little details. The Wyrd Sisters cooked up that hell-broth we all know so well, but free-range newts are so hard to find these days, let alone fenny snake filet. They don’t even carry it at Whole Foods.

I am not a petitioner of Hecate. I was given a gift by her many years ago, and that was to paint a version of her portrait to give as a gift to another witch. Like a post hypnotic suggestion, it is only through many intervening years that I have been able to realize that it was Hecate. And it is thus entirely possible that it is only now that I should consider approaching her again.

And this brings up that question of familiarity. As I have reached this awareness of the goddess, I have gone looking for authentic sources on her nature and proper conduct of rituals. Like much of modern magic, and particularly as AI and search-engine based texts are being used to feed the new market, it is virtually impossible to look to any of these sources and be comfortable that they have a true historical or even moderately well researched link to the actual fact of how this goddess was worshipped, or even understood, in antiquity.

This can be extremely frustrating for those, either novice or seasoned practicioner, seeking to expand their awareness and connect with any spirit or god. There are a number of current practices regarding the Egyptian gods that I personally cannot connect with, both because of my awareness of the history of the worship of those gods, and because of my familiarity with those spirits through years of interaction in my own way.

Jason Miller in his Consorting with Spirits and other works suggests that one should most probably approach a spirit or god using the methods that have come down to us from elder times. I don’t disagree with him entirely about that. The reasoning he expresses is that these beings are very different in nature than us, and dwell, or at least exist primarily in some kind of space-time dimension that is separate from ours. These continua operate under a different kind of physics, and thus respond to manipulation in different ways than our own dimensional space. Chanting a spell from Ancient Greece may be an entirely viable method of manipulating the dimensional boundaries between our existence and theirs, and making possible a wee crack in the door.

On the other hand, Miller himself admits to having encountered Hecate in a charnel ground in Asia, while pursuing a study of Buddhism. This argues two points. First, the gods and spirits are not bound by our ordinary space, and may manifest as it pleases them. They don’t necessarily need their temple or an idol to inhabit, or even a ritual to be performed. They exist wherever and whenever they want to.

Secondarily, the spirits can choose to interact with humans the same way humans choose to interact with a spirit. They can, and do, decide to introduce themselves to persons who have made no attempt to propitiate them or even get their attention. And in those situations, the usual rules may be suspended, or at least flexed a bit.

Aside from Zeus notorious philandering, the Greek myths are replete with stories of one or another of the Olympians favoring or aiding mere mortals for their own reasons. The capriciousness of many of these encounters is often given as the impetus for a war or an adventure that widens the myth cycle.

Older gods out of Egypt and Mesopotamia are a bit more aloof. These cultures had a very strict caste system and the gods were at the top of it. While they might deign to aid a king, high-priest, or upper-class born hero, their connection to the peasantry was only a trickle-down. The gods smiled upon Pharaoh, because he was one of their own. Pharaoh smiled upon the people and that was enough.

This didn’t keep the common folk from going and making offerings in the temple, or praying (after a fashion) to the gods for help, but this was through the mechanism of the priesthood; a method later adopted by the Christian theocracy. These were political and economic strategies rather than an intersession from deity.

For now, I am still pursuing knowledge of Hecate, and weighing the sources accordingly. I am not much for predestined outcomes, but my conception of the world of gods and spirits includes the existence of very different timescales, and that “future” and “past” are not necessarily as fixed in these other worlds as they are in ours. The perception I have of the time since I made this portrait and my present interest in learning more about the sitter, may only be moments to her.

In any case, I wish to all, especially the good lady herself, a most respectful and propitious Hecate’s night, and hope she notes the tip-tapping of my keyboard as I write. I’d happily buy her dinner for the peace that painting continues to bring me.

I’ll be back next week.

November 1, 2023October 31, 2023

Ghosts and Goblins

So, as noted previously, this week’s article is going to be a photo dump of the installed props I’ve been working on since around August.

I am usually exhausted after mounting this project, and this year is no exception. Secondarily, last night was Halloween, Samhain, or Beltane south of the equator, so for all of us with a witchy bent, it’s a super busy time.

In just under a week it will be my birthday, and perhaps I will wax eloquently about the passing of the years or perhaps I will rage against the dying of the light. In either case, I hope you will be satisfied with a handful of pictures. The gremlins, or goblins, or some malefic bunch of pranksters conspired to make this year’s installation exceedingly problematic. I don’t think that I will be doing this next year in the same venue. But my house is probably going to be the creepiest one in the neighborhood…well, on the outside for a change.

October 25, 2023October 25, 2023

I Hope People Come To See Them

Snippets of conversations with my oldest as she started her customized Funko Pop side hustle:

Her: Dad. I need (insert exotic art or craft supply) for this Pop project. Where would I get that?

Me: Upstairs, My Office. Brown Cabinet, Fourth Drawer. Left side.

Her: No…no. I meant where can I buy it.

Me. Why? I already have that upstairs.

Her: But I need to know.

Me: Will you need it again? Ever?

Her: Well, um, no.

Me: Upstairs. My Office. Brown Cabinet. Fourth Drawer. Left Side.

Also:

Her: Dad, why do you have 18 different kinds of glue?

Me: Because I need to be able to stick anything to anything and not everything sticks to everything.

This is what we used to call in the theater “Hell Week”, the run-up to opening night where everything that is not finished must be finished and everything that is not tested has to be tested and if it isn’t working has to be made to work. Because, on Saturday night…

I’ve been dabbling with prop and costume work since I was a wee laddie. It’s nice to actually be at a point in my life where I can go buy that special glue that sticks this thing to that thing and does nothing else. Of great importance during Hell Week is understanding just how long it takes for the special glue to fully set up, because, unfortunately, not everything can be stuck together with Krazy Glue, despite what the ads say.

I know, because at some time or another I have tried to use Krazy Glue on just about everything. Likewise hot glue. Which melts some things you want to stick together. It truly sucks to discover that during the last day before you go live.

Other magical “universal” adhesives are not nearly as universal as they claim to be. Some will work. Some will work but not well. Some will work but do damage (see melting above), and some will decide that you truly need to be humbled by the cosmos for not doing the proper homework and leave you with no choice but to start over with hours or minutes to go.

In these situations, we go for the roll of “duct” tape, or the more expensive and oft misused roll of gaffer’s tape. “Duct” tape is not actually duct tape. That is, it is a vinyl backed canvas scrim high tack tape that was originally designed to provide a water-proof seal on ammunition cans back in WWII. The word used then was “duck tape” as in “tighter than a duck’s…” “Duck tape is actually a brand name for this particular kind of tape.

Now, it is used sometimes on ducts, but there is a duct tape that is adhesive backed heavy aluminum foil that is used to provide airtight efficiency for HVAC systems. It could be used in place of the duck type, but the duck type is not always a viable substitute for the duct type.

Gaff or gaffer’s tape is a special fabric scrim tape with a special rubber adhesive that leaves minimal to no residue, and most commonly comes in matte black. It’s original purpose was to secure electrical cables on stage and set. There are now color varieties and a glow-in-the-dark version for putting down actor’s marks or lighting steps offstage during performances.

I am sure you are enjoying this short education on the various kinds of roll based adhesive but there is a little imp in the back of your brain screaming about what in the world does this have to do with occult practice.

I’m not sure it does. The joke has been made that the “Force” from the Star Wars franchise is duck-type tape because it also binds the galaxy together.

But rather I am thinking the parallel, and it’s a thin one, is that need to understand what works in a given situation, and what doesn’t. Secondarily, much study, practice, and yes, terrible devastating failure may be necessary to gain that knowledge.

Put simply, you can spend hours and days and years and dollars on books and blogs and seminars and videos to “educate” yourself in the esoteric subject of your choice. There is some need for that, because trial and error, though instructive, takes a very very very long time to teach. On the other hand, if all you do is pursue the academic, to sit in the chat rooms or on social media ping-ponging back and forth over some minor point of lore or methodology, you are not putting your knowledge to any good use.

At some point you have to try to stick this thing to that thing and deal with whatever consequence comes of it. You gotta do the work.

And with that said, I will hang back to the theme-based title of this week’s article and share some WIP images of the props work that will go live Saturday. The next week’s article will feature photos of the same taken during the event, with lights and fog and hopefully a crowd willing to brave the elements and be entertained by the odd bits I have created.

Raw Material — This year I was blessed with some great finds in raw materials. I just happened to hit the right weekend at the end of August where there were deep discounts on skeletons and the big cauldron at Party City. The witch, coming in at a decent four feet tall, was next door at a last chance discount store. The tag had been torn off, and since a four foot witch is probably intimidating to a lot of shoppers, I was able to get a heck of deal. She and the cauldron are the core of the “Witch’s Kitchen” part of the event.

Hearts And Minds — I posted a pic with the “raw” brain a few weeks ago. This is the nearly complete final display that will be in the Laboratory. Along side it is the heart in the jar I’ve always wanted. Now I can tell people that I am not the cruel ogre that they think me, I have the heart of a loving child…in a jar, on my desk. There’s probably another joke here about winning hearts and minds, but you’ve been punished enough.

The Hat — So there’s always that meme out there about sometimes you have to put on the hat and remind them who you are. This year I am this hat, which I acquired back in the springtime. It’s a lovely costume piece, and though it lends itself to certain copyrighted characters, I will, as usual, make something very different for my performance.

The Spanish Inquisition — I don’t know how many people will be expecting this. The joke may be lost on the younger generation, in which case, they’re just spooky and weird. When I got the two-for-one skeleton deal shown above, I know I was going to mummify one of them, but not sure about the other. And then I realized I had costume pieces to make Biggles (on the right) already in the closet, so here they are. When assembled they’ll have another skeleton tied to a comfy chair that he’ll be poking with soft cushions. Maybe next year I’ll be able to get the costumes made for them to be the Fab Four, or I’ll come up with something equally wacky. After all, I’m only seven short of staging Leonardo’s Last Supper.

For the artist, there is always an exchange of energy when the audience is present. While we ultimately do what we do as a private ritual, the result of which is tangible within our minds, to deny that we want public accolades is disingenuous. They are two separate things, but they are connected.

There are, perhaps artists and creatives for whom the process is the ultimate reward. They can divorce themselves from the completed work emotionally, and either are indifferent to audience experience or view it only as a transactional matter involved in the fiscal support of that process.

There are others who are so emotionally invested in their creation that a bad review will send them into spirals of deep depression.

For me personally there is a sliding middle, and I think that comes from many many years of doing the work with the realization that if I want to consider it more than a personal hobby, I have to put it out there and deal with the public eye.

Since the nature of my work is generally outre in the first place, prior to the Internet the receptive audience was extremely limited. I am happy to have found a larger tribe these days, and I am happy that my children (and everyone else’s) live in a world where they will probably be able to find those who honor, respect, and enjoy their creative output, their personal quirkiness, and the life they choose to lead.

At the same time, I am troubled that even with this global perspective, there are those who still feel the need to limit and corral other people and dim their spark, simply because the “tribe” doesn’t conform to the vanity of their own egos.

As we move closer to our most cherished personal holidays, there comes the inevitable online snarking about the proper pronunciation of Samhain, and how all the modern Christian holidays are stolen from pagans, and whether or not veils are thinning, and a number of other unimportant diatribes that simply serve to puff up people on social media.

Such pedantry and dogmatism are for the unimaginative. WE are better than this. WE need to act like it.

Now, please excuse me. I have a mummy to wrap.

October 18, 2023October 18, 2023

My House Is A Museum

If you’ve been following along, I suppose you’ve noticed a theme going on here. A theme song, in fact. I’m sure you know the words. All the best weirdos do. An appreciation for re-runs of this odd ball 60s sitcom, and the various alternate versions featuring those strange people from the pen of cartoonist Charles Addams is something that runs somewhat commonly through witchy people of my acquaintance. To my mind is a part of the modern “witch aesthetic” that we hear bandied about online. But I’m sure there are some who are oh-so-serious as to debate that assessment.

I’ve written at length about the Addams family before, and am trying not to repeat myself overmuch in this series of articles. Yet the world is cyclic, and ideas come back around. Just like Halloween. That’s actually somewhat comfortable, and really somewhat necessary.

If we as a species could get everything right the first time through, we’d have all attained NIrvana and moved on to whatever challenges await us at that next plateau which is probably not the final state either. Or as surely as the oscillation model of the universe, we are disturbed and distributed out of that state to try and learn again.

Point being, things do repeat, they give us the opportunity to relearn, to renew, to grow and expand, and to re-experience, both good and bad. Re-experience and remembering is an important human activity, because we gear a lot of our lives toward it. We have our favorite foods, our favorite books, our favorite movies and TV shows, and all the assorted knick-knacks that go with them, so that we can treasure them repeatedly. It gives us a fixed point in an ever-evolving cosmos that can be awfully awfully big and awfully awfully indifferent and cruel.

So, yes, my house is a museum of my own life experiences, the things I have liked enough to collect over the years, and the things that I want to keep around me that probably have zero practical purpose.

Swords — Someday we’ll have a house where we can duel in the library again. Proper swordplay really requires vaulted ceilings. Yes, of course we could use the yard, but that seems awfully bourgeois.

Like a set of china my great grandmother acquired with S&H Green Stamps back in 40s. For those who have no idea what I am talking about, savings stamps were the precursor to airline miles or credit card cash back. They were typically given out by service stations (what you’d call a gas station now) as a premium when people made a fuel purchase. If you saved enough of them, by pasting them into a booklet they’d give you, then you could purchase items from a catalog provided by the stamp company. In this way, consumers could acquire things for which their ordinary cash flow was insufficient, without needing to qualify for a credit card or payment program, which in the elder days were much harder to get.

The practice of thrift – as it was known – was more fundamental to the middle and working classes in American society until around the 1980s. Saving more than spending was the way of things, because ultimately you’d need to get something that cost a lot, and financing was not something easily accessible to those who really needed it more than the Vanderbilts and Pierpoint Morgans.

It wasn’t just cash, of course, it was all the stuff. In my grandmother’s house were at least five complete bedroom sets, multiple tables, chests, cabinets, sideboards, buffets, sets of dishes, pots, pans, pickling crocks, butter churns, cake stands, and untold numbers of mason jars. Huge steamer trunks, ironically owned by people who had never seen an ocean until late in life, held quilts, blankets, and bedspreads, extra pillows and linens, and a variety of old clothes. There were baby cribs and high chairs. There were old toys and a few books, and a dark floorless attic where one might find the discarded wonders of a bygone age (or a Ouija board everyone swears was never in the house).

These were not collected as ostentation, or any sign of wealth or prestige. They had nothing to do with desire, nor were they a sign of a hoarding malediction. These things had accumulated into this house (and a thousand others like it across mid-century rural America) because they had been saved for the future. Because someday, somebody might need them. There would be children. There would be weddings and new households and grandchildren, and those people would need these things because they would not have them. They’d need them until they got enough S&H Green Stamps of their own to get things, and then they’d pass them on to their children and their grandchildren.

By the time we reached the 1970s, though, it became much easier for an emerging rural middle class to acquire new things. That set of old china became a revered heirloom rather than a practical useful item. It was only used on special occasions when all the family was back together for the holidays. And of course it was never used at the kid’s table, because heaven forbid we might chip one of these quasi-antique plates that, since Granny was no longer with us, had taken on a sacred nature.

So by the time my grandmother passed away, and her children were tasked with parsing out the collections of several human lifetimes, the china came to me, where it sits, sadly, in the top of a cabinet, unused, for fear that it’s age means it contained toxic lead in the glaze. In all likelihood, food will never touch it again.

Meanwhile, my generation has replaced our more disposable mid-century hand-me-downs several times, passed on to our own adult children mismatched sets of melamine and discount store china that survived from our earlier days, and are now faced with the daunting task of a looming inheritance of such things as soup tureens and sideboards that no longer serve our lifestyles or really that of anyone living below the millionaire line.

When my wife and I were younger, we entertained with the finest of plasticware and paper plates. Our peers, there for chips and dips and beer and wine, were content with that, since they did that at their own homes. “Charcuterie” often came on their own plastic presentation trays from the grocery, and being the thrifty sort, we washed those and reused them.

When children came along the inherent need for durability and practicality relegated the china and crystal to the domain of locked display cabinets, and very rare use from time to time. As the children got older more practical but “nicer” pieces were acquired, that suit personal tastes and sensibilities, and are easier and less expensive to replace should a guest have a bit too much wine and tip the glass over.

Now the children have moved out to an apartment, and considerably less space for such things, and their careers and lifestyle choices mean that they may always live in an apartment or condo with limited space and need for soup tureens and sideboards and quasi-antique possibly toxic china that will never be used. Their own personal museums reflect their tastes and time, and so these “old things” no longer live as part of the family, as they really should, and have become part of a memory that we can’t easily let go of.

So while this article may serve to educate the docent who will eventually conduct a tour of my unused kitchen for posterity, it probably seems very far afield from ideas esoteric and occult. I’m coming to that.

Samhain in the Celtic tradition is the end of the year fire festival which closes out the living growing world of the Summer and prepares us all for the coming of the Winter Dark, with its unwelcome reminders of death and privation. It was against such death and privation that my ancestors, and possibly your own accumulated these “useless things” from one generation to the next. They were never really meant to become relics, but they almost always do. They end up being the things of the dead people that we keep around so that we remember those dead people.

I have mentioned in earlier articles and discussions with people online, that I don’t actively practice “veneration of the ancestors”. But I still keep Granny’s gas-station stamp china around. The history of these basically worthless objects, as I have shared it with you here, reminds me of the person that she was, the life that she lived, and the community of others who shared that culture, going back to when they came across the ocean from the poverty of Wales, and Scotland, and Ireland, many with just the clothes on their backs.

Paintings — Like most museums there are more pieces in our collection than can be properly displayed at any one time. This is especially true because the proper placement, care, and conservation of art pieces is not really the purpose of the average suburban home. One must carefully consider things like exposure to light, humidity, air currents, and other key factors in order to make sure you are not unduly harming something, even if it is not a rare piece by a famous artist.

This doesn’t even begin to take into account the problems in storing and displaying cursed objects, enchanted amulets, and other such items that museums have to contend with. So far most of the dead things in my collection seem content to remain silent, or at least, to only prank when they are lacking attention.

The day after the Celtic Samhain is celebrated as Dios de Los Muertos by the Latin American culture. The Day of the Dead is an overt veneration of the ancestors and festooned with feasting and music and bright colors and sugar skulls. We get more of it here in Texas than perhaps people do in the center of the country, though the Latin population has been expanding from the border for years. I think about the people pressed at that border now, with only the clothes on their backs, seeking some future they can only imagine. I think of the children and grandchildren that someday may look back to them on the Day of the Dead, and point to a plate or a bowl up on the top shelf of a locked cupboard and tell their stories, and remind themselves of the people that they were.

It is important to participate in these cycles. We none of us get to stick around here forever, and when we go, we don’t come back in that same way ever again. What is left behind, be it memory or relic, is important, not just to us but to the memory of us that it will carry into the future. The old plate speaks for us when we cannot speak for ourselves. That’s why we don’t get rid of them. That’s why we try to hold on.

Eventually the memories will change. My children have dim memories of my grandmothers, not nearly so vivid as the one’s I have of my Granny. And my children will probably not have children of their own, and that is okay too. That means that someday, someone may find a box of old plates at an estate sale, and take them to some new life.

Even if, in the end, they become nameless broken sherds in a trash dump, some future archaeologist may haul them into a museum and say, “look, this is what people in the middle 20th century used to eat on”, and there will still be some memory that we were here at all.

We all of us live in a big house on a little rock in space, and that house is our museum. It is our collective memory and the repository of the remains of every one of us that has ever lived. Time rolls out into the past in an unfathomably long scroll, predating our history, our pre-history, and even our being. It encompasses so many cycles of beings that we only comprehend the briefest bits, the tiny parts that through quirks of nature, have survived as reminders of other orders of beings that have lived before us. The time of the dinosaurs is so long ago, that it is conceivable at least one sentient advanced civilization might have arisen, flourished, and disappeared into dust, without leaving any tangible sign of their existence. It is entirely possible that in that vast ocean of years, a civilization could have arisen to leave the earth, and travel out into the stars, by some method we would not even now be able to understand. It is equally possible that such a race survived on a distant world and that because the time between us and them is so vast, they have evolved beyond anything that they or we would imagine came from this lonely little pebble.

The cycles keep turning. We are not the first to imagine and fear that “the end of time is nigh”. We can look into the recorded history and find this sentiment almost constantly plaguing the currently extant culture. It seems that our individual mortality predisposes us to think in terms of the mortality of culture, civilization, or way of life.

In truth, such things are very fragile. Lines shift on the map. The world I was born into is not the world we live in now, nor will the world I leave behind be the world as it is today. I am not always happy with this fact, but the awareness of it as an absolute is helpful in dealing with that discontentment.

All we may do is plant the seeds for tomorrow, and hope that they take some root. How they grow, and indeed, what they will grow into, is beyond our petty power to manage. If we live true to our natures, then perhaps our memories will be honored by those who come after us.

If not, at least the broken pieces may sit in a display case, and remind others how foolish and selfish we were way back when.

I am returning to my prop work now, and will be back in a week with perhaps lighter fare.

A bit of a housekeeping note. Owing to the changes made at the former Twitter, I have pulled the plug on the automatic update to that website. Since apparently my “interaction” doesn’t satisfy the New World Order’s standards for actually sharing my content, there is no point in continuing to post there. If you were someone who actually looked for the link on that platform, well, I invite you to visit my Instagram or the Facebook page for the reminder, or simply come by here Wednesday’s after 5PM US Central Time.

October 11, 2023October 11, 2023

Mysterious And Spooky

Having assayed the Threads platform for a bit, I am still not quite sure what my longtime involvement will be there. It waffles from intriguing forum for meeting new contacts to colossal time waster, and not much between. I trust human toxicity and the inevitable need to monetize the platform will make the decision for me soon, particularly with elections coming up.

Be that as it may, one of the most frequent “QT with your answers” themes for October is to list your go-to movies for the season.

Since last week I mentioned my deep interest and ambitions in the film business, I suppose this is as good a time as any to delve into my personal favorites, and why they are so, and maybe connect that up a bit with the usual themes of magic and the occult. I mean, should be easy, right?

In last week’s article I made a distinction between horror movies, monster movies, and slasher movies. This is how I personally break down the overall “spooky weird” film category, and I’ll explain why, but I will say that I don’t know of any official scholarly or critical school of thought to support it. There is overlap. There’s a lot of overlap. But this is how my brain splits them up, and so for purposes of analysis and discussion, we’ll use it, since this is my bully-pulpit. You won’t find it on Siskel and Ebert, or Joe Bob’s Drive-In or Elvira’s Movie Macabre, though I respect and have watched all those sources.

So, first, horror movies. Well, sort of. That term was first applied (and perhaps still is) largely to the genre of films made at Universal in the 1930s and 40s, beginning with the Tod Browning Bela Lugosi Dracula. This, was based on the play version authorized by Stoker’s estate, also starring Lugosi. Following Dracula, director James Whale made Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, both freely adapted from Mary Shelley’s work, which is possibly the oldest science-fiction novel. Then followed Boris Karloff in the original Mummy.

Well, sorry, I classify these as monster movies. The antagonist is a fantastical creature of some kind – vampire, golem, mummy, werewolf, gill-man, alien, giant bug, or city-stomping atomic monster. The plots are not generally complex (though many remakes attempt to be) and in the end, kindly old Dr. Exposition Character triumphs over the critter through his superior esoteric knowledge. It does vary as the offending critter gets bigger through the threat of nuclear radiation, but still, it’s hardly psychologically thrilling. It’s a good popcorn flick.

So what then do I call a horror movie? Well, something that’s really unsettling. Yes, the antagonist can still be a supernatural entity. They frequently are, but what it is, and how it works, inspires genuine fear. It has to literally keep me up at night, or at least, make me turn more lights on in the house.

The banner entry in this category is 1973’s The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty’s equally unsettling book and directed by the late William Friedkin. And yes, when I went back and read the novel, already having seen this movie, I did turn more lights on. The movie itself is very stylized, and as such has been copied in a number of other such films, and TV shows, including several weeks where Diedre Hall’s character Marlena Evans was possessed on the venerable Days of Our Lives soap opera. A fourth sequel is being released this Halloween season, with some of the original actors in supporting parts, and what appear to be very inventive effects. The trailers seem to remain somewhat faithful to what made the original so unnerving.

Faith, of course, is central to the movie. It concerns the possession of a young girl by Satan (at least that’s the initial story) and subsequent attempts by her formerly Catholic now atheist mother to obtain the Rite of Exorcism. One of the best things about this movie is that it shows the rational scientific approach to explaining Regan’s symptoms, and includes the Catholic Church’s policy to not sanction an exorcism until all potential medical and psychiatric origins have been ruled out.

Ultimately the Church banned this movie for good Catholics, citing a number of things that they found more offensive than the Devil himself. But at least at some point there must have been a consultant available. Blatty was on set and his research is impeccable, so perhaps that accounts for it, rather than involvement by the Vatican. But the ritual is fairly authentic based on my own research.

The chief origin for the plot was an exorcism sanctioned by the Vatican in the 1950s in St. Louis. It is believed to have been one of the last official such rites performed, as mental illness became better understood and the use of anti-psychotics allowed many of the symptoms of demonic possession to be treated clinically. But evangelicals have been known to perform brutal exorcisms on the mentally ill, children, and homosexuals or other “deviants” up to recent times.

I always found it curious that in medieval and Renaissance times, when the practice of psychiatry didn’t exist, that witches were not treated by exorcism, rather than being tortured and murdered. If one believed that an evil spirit could take over someone and make them do bad things, why was the witch not extended this mercy? The Church, and the Reformation both saw witches as willing participants, rather than hapless victims, so the ritual to drive out the unclean spirit was ineffective. But mightn’t a few of the thousands who were burned alive have been “under the influence”? Apparently no one considered the question.

On the subject of the Devil, I’ll mention two other 70s era horror movies that scared the hell out of me in my younger days – while at the same time, motivating me toward more research into esoteric knowledge. The first is The Omen, concerning the birth of Satan’s child as foretold in Revelations. This movie sparked the whole 666 thing, at least as it was applied in the late 70s and early 80s and alluded to every politico and would be dictator faster than you can say “Prophecies of Nostradamus”. And of course the need for the mass media market to wrap post-Christian quasi-political ecstatic prophecy with ancient Judaic traditions, evangelical political ambition, and obscure medieval French poetry made for a heady mix. Still, the original movie has some genuinely creepy moments and the internal religio-magic system is rather unique.

A less successful piece was The Sentinel, in the vein of Rosemary’s Baby (which is also a wonderful horror movie on its own) concerning the gateway to Hell being in an apartment of an old Brooklyn brownstone. What elevates this is the portrayal by aging veteran horror actor John Caradine as the devil’s doorman.

The chiefly disturbing thing about these movies, and why I call them horror films, is that the dark forces, to paraphrase young Wednesday Addams, look just like everyone else. They are the evil that walks among us in our modern world, and certainly as many were set in the decaying and corrupt New York City of the late seventies, you can read them as social commentary, or at least a psychological attempt to grapple with the modern world not turning out to be the expected Utopia of the flower children.

I’ll backtrack to the monster movies now, and say that my favorites are tied for first. They are the original Boris Karloff version of The Mummy and the 1953 Godzilla, King of The Monsters which is the American release of Toho Studio’s post-war epic Gojira.

Themummy — This relief sculpture version of the lobby poster of The Mummy features billing of Karloff the Uncanny. This traded on the previous year’s success of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. It was also how he was billed in the film’s credits, though later movies would go back to using his full stage name of Boris Karloff. The actor’s name was really William Henry Pratt, not a terribly frightening moniker, so it was modified for the genre to sound more or less Slavic. His frequent co-star and competitor Bela Lugosi was an Hungarian actor named Aristad Olt. His stage name was perhaps easier to pronounce for the majority of movie goers in the 30s.

The man named Im-ho-tep in real life was a fascinating person, if what was attributed to him is even partially true. He is the inventor of the pyramid, creating the Step Pyramid of Saqqara for his pharaoh Djoser as the first stone building in human history. Additionally, he was considered a great magician and healer, and later would be elevated to demi-god status as patron of physicians. His shrines and temples at Saqqara are found to have hundreds of mummified ibises, the sacred bird of Tehuti, or Thoth, so this is certainly where the “Scroll of Thoth” came about in the movie. The basis for it, as well as the images shown on it, are from the Papyrus of Ani in the collection of the British Museum. We know it better as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Ironically it is, in fact, a long elaborate magical text for bringing the dead back to life, or at least for insuring that the part of the soul, which the Egyptians called the ka, that represented ourselves was able to re-inhabit his mummy and speak the important spells to reach the paradise of the afterlife.

The chief difference between the Japanese movie and the one I first saw (and I have them both now) is that the US release wraps the Japanese film with about twenty minutes of footage with actor Raymond Burr, who would shortly become famous as Perry Mason. These scenes were shot with a handful of Asian actors in a hotel in San Francisco, and serve to frame the action of the rest of the movie with it’s poorly dubbed scenes. Burr, as Steve Martin (and I always wondered if Steve Martin got his name from that) is an American reporter in Tokyo when the monster rises.

The atomic creature is presented as a mutation of dinosaurs, brought about by American H-bomb tests. Now universally seen as a metaphor for the horror visited on Japan by the only atomic weapons ever used in wartime (and against a civilian population), the truly terrible nature of Godzilla’s destructiveness is not as clear in the US version, and with reason. The movie was scarcely seven years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the early days of the US-Soviet atomic cold war. Many Americans did not wish to be reminded of the impact of those events. Many Japanese were still living who could not forget.

Godzilla was successful on both continents and spawned a number of sequels. Going into the 50s, Japan’s relationship with the monster became less clear, and it evolved into a sometimes threat/sometimes champion taking on a host of other giant monsters from pre-history, myth, and outer-space. Rebooted several times it currently is franchised with modern CGI in four US made versions, and is likely to spawn a few more. They just keep coming back.

The Karloff Mummy differs from it’s several sequels in that it is the only version where the mummy is seen out of his wrappings and up to no good. The priest Imhotep (an actual historical personage- in fact the first person other than a king we know from history) was sentenced to be mummified alive for the transgression of attempting to raise the Pharaoh’s daughter from the dead. She and the priest had been romantically linked, but the act was sacrilege. So Imhotep was sentenced to the long dirt nap, and to stop such future sacrilege the magical Scroll of Thoth was buried along with him.

Naturally, when everyone was digging up everyone in the twenties in the name of archaeology, someone opens Imhotep’s tomb, and of course, reads from the scroll.

Rather than being blasted to dust by Isis for such an act, the hapless digger is simply driven mad when he sees the mummy of Imhotep get up and walk away -taking the scroll with him.

Years pass and the mummy directs the son of the man who dug him up to the tomb of his girlfriend, with the intention of summoning her spirit so that they can live forever as decaying corpses. The hitch is that her spirit has been reincarnated in a modern woman, who in the space of a few scenes falls madly in love with the young archaeologist. Imhotep employs his ancient magical powers to draw her away, but she rejects him when he suggests that she needs to die and be embalmed for them to be together eternally. She pleads to Isis, who this time obliges with a handy lightning bolt obliterating Imhotep and the scroll.

It’s a neat movie, with a limited plot, and very little accuracy in terms of Egyptian myth or history, but it did instill in me a deep desire to explore Egyptology and Egyptian magic that remains with me to this day. In the final analysis, the story is simply Dracula, but set in Egypt, and Dr. Van Helsing is transformed into Professor Mueller, in the person of actor Edward Von Sloan who plays both. He also shows up a the “men should not meddle in such things” Dr. Waldman in Frankenstein. Typecasting in the Universal monster flicks insured the audience got the shorthand and didn’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out who was who.

A multitude of sequels followed, lifting the forbidden love and buried alive portions to the mummy of Kharis, who was reanimated through the use of the secret herbal Tanna leaves by a succession of dedicated priests, who at the end of each movie somehow became less dedicated and more self-serving.

Remakes abound. The Hammer one is fairly faithful to the original plot. The Universal one with Brendan Frazier is highly enjoyable and if anything far less historically and mythically accurate than the Karloff one. I try not to let it bother me. But like Godzilla, the old monsters keep coming back.

Which brings us round to the slasher movies. These are based upon the precept of violent dismemberment frequently including on-screen gore. The original, was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It’s still my favorite. It is derived from a Robert Bloch story, which is itself supposed to be based on a serial murderer in the Midwest.

There is actually very little gore and violence on-screen in Psycho. It’s implied, and very well. But that’s Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a true genius.

The next prominent slasher film got past implied violence. It was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It also was based on a true incident of serial murder, dismemberment, necrophilia, and grave robbing. in rural Wisconsin.

Then John Carpenter made Halloween and the world changed.

Slasher — “OMG, there’s ROMAINE EVERYWHERE!”

Anyone interested in seeing more vegan friendly slasher movies?

Before Hollywood became all activist, much of the blood and guts you’d find in your typical slasher flick was actual blood and guts, collected cheap down at the local slaughterhouse, and liberally slopped around the set. I’m sure there are probably still indie or low-budget genre movies that still use it, but most major productions have replaced the real things with silicon and latex organs. In addition to being PETA/ASPCA and animal friendly, they’re certain more sanitary. They tend to be rather durable. Once the fluids and semi-fluids are washed off, and the phony parts dried and stored properly, they can be used repeatedly on different shoots and different productions.

Real offal had a short and stinky “life” span, though it did have the advantage of drawing real flies (there’s now a special syrup used by the fly wranglers for that. Yes there are fly wranglers. Sit through the credits sometime) ,

Blood and ichor have been replaced by ecofriendly plant-based alternatives. My own first forays were with the tried and true corn syrup and food coloring, but now you can get stage blood that is glycerin based from a cup size all the way up to a 50 gallon drum.

For semi-fluids methyl-cellulose comes in powder form to mix to the consistency required, from slippery and slimy up to full goo blob. This translucent wood pulp material stands in for everything from saliva to alien ooze.

If you can’t track down methhyl-cel, you can use plain ol’ unflavored gelatin. Ooze level depends on the amount of water and the time you boil it. However, if you are vegan, I will tell you that it is an animal product, so consult your local stage supply or the interwebs for sources more to your liking.

Fun fact, in case you didn’t know, the blood in famous shower scene in Psycho is really just chocolate syrup. Stage blood options that were available didn’t keep their consistency and color when swirling toward the drain, so Hitch substituted a can of Hershey’s. It worked far better on the black and white film than the red colored “blood”.

The use of a spray painted Captain Kirk mask on the killer, and the eerie synthesize soundtrack were dictated by the miniscule budget rather than a planned aesthetic. Yet these enhanced the film toward cult status, and spawned a host of imitators. The unkillable Mike Myers of Halloween became the unkillable Jason Vorhees in the Friday the 13th franchise, and any self-respecting holiday that didn’t have an associated slasher flick attached dared not show its face.

In the midst of the copy-cats, Nightmare On Elm Street introduced us to the evil ghost of a child molester who was taking his revenge by killing teenagers in their dreams. Deriving from the urban legend that dying in a dream will really kill you, the pock-faced knife-fingered pursued teenager after teenager as they slept. The imagery was often inventive, and for a while, I had some interest in the genre again, but ultimately even these evolved into self parody, with Freddie Versus Jason, and Friday the 13th Jason in Space.

I’ve never been a great fan of slashers. I saw a lot of them when I was working part-time as a projectionist at the local theater, and they were all basically clones. Escaped lunatic takes vengeance on unwitting victims who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, usually trying to sneak some quick sex, which triggers said lunatic. Freddy Kruger was the first original thing to come along, and it quickly reverted to formula.

Like the Universal flicks of the 30s and 40s, or the giant monster and alien movies of the 50s and 60s, the formula was an effective means of promoting the content to a public who wanted to know what they were getting. These were never meant to be serious fare, at least not in the U. S. More thoughtful and more artful treatments don’t always find an audience and disappear into obscurity.

One of the more imaginative examples of this is The Hunger starring Catherine Deneuve, rising engeneue Susan Sarandon, and rock superstar David Bowie. As a trio of vampires, they stalk the New York singles scene at the height of the disco era, dealing with the problems of immortality and not-so-eternal youth. It features some outstanding makeup work by the late great Dick Smith, and gives us vampires without fangs. It’s a very chic and stylistic work, and still one of my favorites. It’s possible to see it metaphorical, or at least partially inspired, by the nascent AIDS epidemic, but I may be way off base with the producer’s intentions there. It was not as commercially successful as other fare that featured thinner plots and larger cup sizes.

So, if you’re waiting on that hellbroth to cool, or Instacart is slow in delivering your eye of newt, pop up some corn, grab the remote, and go browsing through the back stacks on the streaming service of your choice. I think all these goodies can be found out there somewhere, including other outre works that defy simpler classification like the original Suspiria and The Wicker Man as well as Viy, a 1967 Soviet-made horror film that evokes all sorts of dark Slavic imagery. ‘Tis the season, after all.

In the meantime, I am back to the lab to paint more eyeballs, and stitch electrodes into hearts in preparation for the big day. See you all next week.

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Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !