MORE HALLOWEEN PHOTOS

I have plenty of photos that I somehow neglected to put up in the weeks preceding Halloween. I could file them away for next year, but what if I got hit by a car...you'd most likely never see some of this stuff. No, I'll put them up now, even though the holiday's over.

My favorite picture of the lot is this one (above), of a mildew ridden old shop that sells used masks as well as new ones. What a rational idea! Gee, seeing this reminds me of beloved old used book stores that were everywhere only a short time ago. Store like that were usually run by retired eccentrics who had difficulty counting the change, but who somehow managed to get books that no one else did.

Above, the classic Jack Davis Frankenstein.

Above, Dali's famous skull made of girls.

Two of my favorite Halloween movies are out of print now: "Burn Witch Burn," and a Stephen King adaptation for TV called, "The Langoliers." Burn Witch is based on a novel by Fritz Leiber  called "Conjure Wife," which I highly recommend. 

For me surrealism (above) has always been a comfortable fit with Halloween. Maybe that's because some of the scariest dreams are ones have to do with dislocation and disorientation. Somehow a feeling of dread arises from situations like that. They're the stuff of nightmares, but with humor added. 

Here's a nice shot of what in my fantasy I imagine to be an abandoned Victorian mental institution. Wow, if only the walls could talk! 

Above, a scary Aztec. It makes sense. Aztecs really were scary. 

My hometown library had a framed copy of this picture (above) hanging in the kids section. Putting it there was a great idea. It made me associate reading with high adventure.

Here (above) is the very essence of a scare: something jumps out at you from the shadows with the intention of killing you. Real life is sometimes like that. No one gets through life without being irrationally and unexpectedly attacked. 

Geez, that feeling of dislocation again.Water (above) isn't supposed to flow through streets like that. Seeing things the way they're not supposed to be can make you feel violated. 

How would you like to have this bust (above) in your living room?

Above, my guess is that this is from a recent East European version of "Nosferatu."

MUG SHOTS COULD REVIVE NEWSPAPERS!

If newspapers are going to build circulation again, they'll need to show more photos, and few things are more interesting to look at than photos of criminals (above).

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Dramatic crime photos like the one above are better suited for magazines than newspapers. Newspaper readers prefer something more sedate. They like to see unposed criminal faces that they can study at leisure. Maybe that's because most people want to confirm their belief that they're good at judging people by their appearance.

I like crime portraits that beg to tell a story. Take the one above, for example. The woman looks intelligent. In another life she might have been the District Attorney rather than a prisoner in the dock. How did she end up in jail? Did a man lead her astray? Was she born bad? Is she actually evil? You want to know more about her, and that sells newspapers.

Some criminals (above) look bad through and through. You need pictures of those people, too. Maybe seeing them caught and held up for public display satisfies the part of us that yearns to grab a torch and a pitchfork and storm Frankenstein's castle.

Most newspaper photos are served up in bad resolution, but that's an asset, not a liability. Marshal McLuhan said that old black and white TV was more emotionally involving than modern color TV. The mental effort we were forced to exert in order to construct images from the old TV scan lines compelled us to get involved with what we were seeing. Well, dot printing has the same effect.

Hazy newspaper reproduction forces us to become involved with the pictures. Newspapers are actually a perfect medium for a certain type of picture. By "certain type" I mean that  the subject matter has to be at least potentially interesting, something which current newspaper photos never are.

RANDOM THOUGHTS ABOUT SMOKING

No wonder people smoke. Smokers look sooooo cool!!!!

Unfortunately smoking can also make you mean. The reason is an aesthetic one: cigarettes and mean expressions just go together, why I don't know. In his quest to look good the smoker finds himself practicing mean smoking expressions til they inadvertently become permanent. 

I feel sorry for cruel and heartless people because they're forced to smoke whether they want to or not. If they don't, other cruel people won't hang out with them. 

Me (above), demonstrating how girls smoke. The cigarette is always held at the tips of the fingers. The 6th finger of the other hand is always raised.

Here's a smart smoker (above). He smokes in the shadows and lets the smoke drift up and develop in a shaft of bright sunlight. I imagine smart smokers also pick a part of the room with minimal air currents. Dead air favors the development of strings and spirals. Moving air destroys them. 

How do you create strings? It's the easiest thing in the world! A properly held filterless cigarette will create strings all by itself. Here (above) a cigarette has strings coming from both ends!

After a smoker masters his strings, he'll want to work on his crawls (above). The smoker learns to push out the smoke rather than blow it out. He learns to allow the smoke to crawl  up his face. On the first try, the smoke will probably go around the nose. That's not good because it then heads straight for the eyes, and becomes an irritant.

The smoker will need to train the smoke to go over the nose, and not in it, or around it. He'll want the smoke to rise over the nose, and up the forehead to the edge of the hairline. Observe how beautifully this smoker (above) does that.

Man, this (above) is Olympic level smoking!  Here she allows the crawl to split over the nose then she directs it outwards, like bull's horns. How on Earth does she do that?

BTW: Thanks to commenter Shawn Luke for the great quote about smoking, which I'll print below. I still don't recommend smoking because of the health risk, but this positive statement about it deserves to be heard because of the beauty of its expression. From Ayn Rand:

“I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."

PIZZA: THE SECRET INGREDIENT

I don't know why anyone would make pizza from scratch at home when great pies can be had cheap almost anywhere in America. Hmmm...well, wait a minute, maybe I can imagine why. You go to all that trouble because you have an idea for an improvement that could beat what the pros do.

Okay, here's my idea and I'm dying to test it. It's something you add to the sauce.




That ingredient is...(drum roll)..stock! That's right, stock, just like you find in French cooking. I'm no expert, but I know from the internet that it's possible to make both cheese and mushroom stock (stock = a condensed essence of a food's flavor that's much more intense than the real thing). Has anyone ever tried using stock in pizza? We'll never know because professionals don't share their secrets. Anyway, I'm dying to try it.

I'm also dying to try aromatic stock.  That's a stock whose purpose is to make the food smell good.

Making aromatic stock might be more complicated than it sounds. My only knowledge of aromas comes from a movie called "Perfume." According to the film a great aroma is a combination of three scents: the first is a the "grabber" smell. It's immediately intriguing and delightful, but doesn't last very long. The second aroma is the long lasting body of the smell, the one that everyone associates with your product. The last smell is the aroma's soul...the unexpected scent that gives a unique character to the product.

The film explains that the initial smell requires a tiny amount of alcohol for fast delivery to the nose, but that quickly evaporates. The second smell requires fat because the smell of fat stays on the nose for a long time. The third smell...well that's the tough one. I wonder what unexpected smell could give an ordinary slice of cheese pizza...a soul.

BEAUTIFUL GIRLS

WARNING! 'Nothing obscene here, but this is not office or school safe!

Fascinating! On a whim, I googled a few variations of "girls posing like hood ornaments" and discovered these two pictures, above and below.

This is the kind of pose you want on a statue resting on a pillar near your easy chair.

A sidebar on the adult site containing the hood ornament pictures led to this amazing picture (above)! The woman on the left is obviously having second thoughts, and who can blame her? The photographer set her up with some Li'l Abner-type wild woman. The mind boggles to think of what this session must have been like!

 I can only guess that a shortage of edible squirrels and mice brought her out of the hills, down to the outer edge of civilization. Maybe she lived out of dumpsters for a while, then came to the attention of the law when she was caught pilfering Rogaine. 'Just a guess.

Emboldened by my success with the opening pictures, I got a sandwich and a beer and hit the adult sites in earnest. I discovered a whole site devoted to overweight women in tight skirts. Man, this picture (above) makes me want to draw!

A visit to a nerd site resulted in this photo (above). I'm guessing that the photographer provided the glasses, which are larger than people wear now, but which add character to the face.

Believe it or not, this girl (above) was on the same nerd site. Does she seem like a nerd to you? I must define the word differently than other people do.

On a different subject, I thought I'd mention the things I bought on the day after Halloween, when everything was 50% off. Well, I got a great vampire castle but it's a kit  and it'll be a while before I can build it. I also got a terrific beret, but that's for a future story about beatniks.

The only thing I can show here is a pair of wax lips, the best I've ever seen. Don't underestimate wax lips; there are dozens of things you can do with them. Here (above) they allow me to be Edward G. Robinson,

THE PROPER WAY TO SMOKE

I don't smoke but the subject interests me, maybe because it strikes me as odd that cigarette smokers don't seem to enjoy it very much. Cigar and pipe smokers enjoy it. Look at them: they have magazines, clubs, internet sites...all sorts of fan outlets. What do cigarette smokers have? Nothing. No clubs, no magazines...zip. They seem to smoke just to satisfy an urge. Why is that? Why the difference?

I think it's because current cigarette smokers don't know how to smoke. They only know how to create mist, and there's no fun in that. Real smoking is almost a lost art.

Pushing a shapeless mist out of the mouth like the two women above is not smoking. It's...I don't know what to call it..."evacuating." Smoking implies that you enjoy watching and manipulating the slowly unraveling thing called smoke.

And why wouldn't you enjoy it?  Unlike mist, smoke tells stories. The smoke above, for example: I see four little ghosts happily nibbling on a spinal column til two of them disappear, sending their friends into a panic. Moments later this scene might be replaced by cats attacking a school bus or Indians eating pies. Smoke puts on a show for you, while mist is just...well...mist.

I blame the ascendancy of mist on Flappers from the 1920s who, to judge from photos, didn't have a clue about the art of smoking, but I could be wrong. Maybe the decline of true smoking coincides with inhaling, which I'm guessing began in the 30s or 40s. Inhaled smoke turns into vapor. When you blow it out, it's just formless mist. It has no strings, no crawl, no shape, no imaginary animals or ghosts...it's just a haze. That's a pity because tobacco smoke is capable of so much more. It was just never meant to be inhaled.

Cigarette smokers who inhale like to think that they're superior to noninhaling smokers, but actually the opposite is true. Inhalers have limited imaginations and only smoke to be sedated. People who don't inhale are the real sophisticates. They're intellectually engaged in what they're creating. They enjoy the mysterious drama that unfolds infront of them.

Sometimes I wonder if the whole antismoking movement would have had the same zeal if smoking had prevailed over mist making. My guess is that smoke particles are larger and heavier than mist particles. They tend to cling to the area around the smoker, and fall to the ground at his feet. Mist on the other hand, fills the room and becomes part of the atmosphere that everybody has to breathe, whether they like it or not. Maybe the antismoking people are really just antimist.

Don't get me wrong...I don't advocate smoking. It's just too dangerous, even when it's done right. But if you're determined to do it anyway...well, geez, at least make an effort to enjoy it.

MY HALLOWEEN COSTUME

Aaargh! These are horrible, horrible pictures, but I don't have time to redo them.  Boy, this has been one busy week! I still haven't put up any decorations, but my daughter volunteered to help me tomorrow if I get stuck. I can't believe we're doing this so late!

 As you can see, my costume is the Muskrat lodge uniform, and if you're an especially good observer you'll note that I'm wearing the Grand Master hat. That's new...I just got it!  The epaulets are made of paper. I couldn't find the old braided ones. I kinda like the way paper looks.

In real life the hat looks great, but in photos it makes me look like a Bolshevik.

Aaaaaarghhh!!!!! This picture (above) genuinely scares me! It's me, but it's a different me.  It's a glimpse into a parallel universe where I own a small motel in Ohio, and play poker with the boys once a week.

That's it for the costume but hey, if you live in LA, stop by Boney Island in North Hollywood this Saturday or Sunday night. Milt Grey says a couple of Simpsons artists put together a huge, free Halloween display that rivals anything you can find at Knott's Berry Farm or Disneyland. Maybe I'll see you there! Here's a site with all the info:

http://boneyisland.com/main.html

IDEAS FOR HALLOWEEN DECORATIONS AND MASKS

A RIGHTEOUS MASK (above)!!!!!! But who sells these? Was this custom-made?

I see this Wolverton girl (above) as a sculpture made from a base consisting of a carved- out empty milk container (gallon size) and a ropey mop.

This Don Martin guy would look great 6' tall on the outside of a door. So would Clampett's indian, the one with a skinny neck and a big belly, but I can't find a good picture on the net.

Plastic or rubber skulls (above) always look good with a wig of flowing girls hair.

Redraw this (above) Tex Avery take picture very large and color it for your front porch. The kids'll love it!

Glue any old thing from your wastebasket onto a paper bag to make a mask. Add color.

Liberians considered this (above) to be a JUDGE'S mask!!!!????? Man, I'd like to see a Liberian trial!

Above, an interesting color scheme by Picasso. If you have something for the porch that needs to be painted.....

Believe it or not, these faces (above) were made from toilet paper tubes. First they were softened somehow, then painted. Then the artist used pliers and extra cardboard from other rolls to make faces. 

Holy Cow! A nifty monkey face sculpture, from somewhere in Melanesia, I think.

STEVE'S NEW CARTOON SHOW!

I did four posts about Steve Worth in the past three weeks, and just when I thought it was time to give some other topic a chance, Steve's internet TV show (above) debuted! Haw! Well, we'll just have to make room for a fifth post, because the event is historic. This is the first original YouTube cartoon show... ever!

Boy, Steve really got into the part (above) he's playing: that of a sorcerer who's trying to raise Walt Disney from the dead. Between attempts we get to watch three well chosen  cartoons, including one of my all-time favorites: "Swing You Sinners." Steve was a line producer for some pretty good people (Spumko, Bakshi, etc.) and is a long time cartoon fan, so he knows what the good stuff is.

All this is done in cahoots with Fred Seibert and his company, "Refrederator." Fred as you know, was the executive producer behind Cartoon Network shows like 'What a Cartoon," "Dexter's Lab" and "The Powerpuff Girls." Fred got together with YouTube to see if an internet cartoon show could be made to work, and this pilot is the result. If enough fans like it, expect to see a new show at regular intervals.

Let's see...did I leave anything out? Oh yes...the way it works is that you have to click inside the black box at the end of the video. The box appears only for an instant, so be ready. When you do that you'll be taken to the next video. The whole show requires several videos to play out, but they're all connected, like beads on a string.

Leave a comment on YouTube and let Steve know what you think!