MY ZOMBIE DREAM (PART!)

Here's a dream about zombies that I had years ago, and still remember vividly. It was hard to find pictures for this, so I had to change some details, but the overall story is the same...well, sort of.

DREAMER (VO): "I dreamed I was hitchhiking and got picked up by a convertible.  

DREAMER (VO): "I turned to thank the guy who picked me up, but he wouldn't talk, or even acknowledge my presence. He just stared straight ahead while driving."

DREAMER (VO): " 'That's odd,' I thought."

DREAMER (VO): "I watched some of the other drivers as we passed them. They had the same glassy stare. 'What gives?', I thought."

DREAMER (VO): "One of the cars was driven by kids...." 

DREAMER (VO): "...Even they stared straight ahead, just like everybody else."

DREAMER (VO): "I couldn't believe my eyes. I turned away for just a moment, and when I looked back..."

DREAMER (VO): ".....the car was gone! No, wait a minute, it was there, but several feet above the ground, traveling alongside my car. What the....?"

DREAMER (VO): "Downtown the situation was even worse. People were out on the street like normal, but there was something odd about them, something I couldn't put my finger on."

DREAMER (VO): "Then I realized what it was...they were all walking in slow motion! It was subtle...you had to look hard to see it, but it was real. It was like watching a film slowed down.

And there was also a pervading feeling of malevolence, as if something was deeply, deeply wrong, and getting worse every minute. "

DREAMER (VO): "The car stopped and somehow I knew that if I stayed there something horrible would happen, so I got out and ran." 

DREAMER (VO): "But where to go?"

DREAMER (VO): "The rooftops were filled with people who looked like they were waiting for something."

DREAMER (VO): "It didn't take long to see what it was.  A giant airship churning out industrial sounds loomed overhead. It sucked the roof people up into itself, then spit them back onto the ground, where they scurried away like spiders."

  

DREAMER (VO): "Finally I found a rundown hotel tucked away in the shadows."

DREAMER (VO): "I was too tired to run any more so I ducked inside."

THE STORY CONTINUES IN PART II, BELOW.

MY ZOMBIE DREAM (PART 2)

IN THE HOTEL LOBBY: three old ladies, an old doctor, and a rude man.

RUDE MAN: "Hey, Bud! If we're not inconveniencing you, you might consider closing the door behind you."

DREAMER (VO): "Oh, Sorry!"

DREAMER (VO); "I ran back to the door and closed it, just in time to prevent one of the outsiders from getting in. He just looked though the glass and stared, as if he was in a trance."

DOCTOR: "He won't come in. The ones who look like that don't know how a door works."

DREAMER: "Don't count on it. Outside I saw somebody inside letting them in."

DREAMER: "They were climbing in the windows, too. They're probably all over the building now."

As if to punctuate what the dreamer said, the old ladies and rude man are sucked kicking and screaming through the window.

The doctor gasps in horror.

DOCTOR: "You say they're inside, too!!?? Are you sure!?

DREAMER(VO): "I told you, I saw them!"

DOCTOR: "Well, that's it then, isn't it?"

DOCTOR (VO): "I invite you to take some tea with me. I'll put a little something extra in it, and we'll both take a nice, long nap.''

DREAMER: "A long....!? You mean...no, you can't mean that! Life is a precious gift. You don't throw it away like that!"

DOCTOR: "No..... no, of course not. Well, I'll be going up to my room now."

He gathers up his tea cup.

DOCTOR: "Good luck, young man!"

All alone in the dark, and with the sound of the front door being pried open, I lost it.

DREAMER: "No, wait a minute! Wait for me!"

DREAMER: "WAIT! WAIT! Don't leave me here alone! Where are you? Where are you!!????

At the top of the stairs was a corridor with all windows open. There's no place else he could have gone. He must have...

Out on the ledge there was no sign of the doctor. 

I knew I couldn't go back in. 

RUINED CREPES AND THE SPIKED BLACK BALL

A few days ago I cooked Crepe Suzettes for friends. The verdict: "Awful. Soggy, sticky sweet, almost cloying in the sweetness and almost wet in their sogginess. This had to be user error somewhere along the way, but I can’t figure out where. I followed the recipe to the letter, so who knows. We ended up eating a few, then throwing the rest away." I used quotation marks because I got that description off the net and it was so apt that I simply had to steal it. The night was a disaster, what can I say?

It's horrible when you're the chef and you have to face a room full of disappointed people who are all trying to avoid looking at you. I watched them silently and lethargically nudge the creation around their plates while struggling to think of something nice to say. It was nice of everybody to try to spare my feelings, but I wish they'd just vented and released the frustration. As it was, a spiked black ball of anxiety hovered above the table for an hour and you can be sure some pets were kicked when people got home.

And there was another thing about that dinner...the crepes simply refused to cook, even on high heat. I mean it, they just sat there looking pale and wet, no matter what. Doesn't that violate some law of physics? Didn't Newton have something to say about that?

My analysis of the problem? I didn't use the right tools. To make Crepes Suzettes you have to use a crepe pan. That's a wide, circular iron pan with extremely low sides. The sides are low so you can slide your ridiculously long and flat crepe spatula under the crepe for the purpose of turning it over. It helps to have a crepe spreader, too. That's a "T' shaped wooden dohickey that you drag along the top of the crepe to give it a uniform thickness. Or...use an index card.

Well, live and learn.

THE BEST TARZAN PARODY EVER!

Mike Fontanelli turned me on to this: it's not only the best parody of Tarzan that I know of, but the character is one of Ernie Kovacs' all time best..."Leena: Queen of the Jungle." Sad to say, I think he only did Leena once. The show is on the bonus 7th disk on the new DVD set available from The Shout! Factory:

http://www.shoutfactorystore.com/prod.aspx?pfid=5257356&utm_source=redirect&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=kovacs#axzz1Mg2R3Ih9

Ernie's part starts close to the two minute mark.




Since we're on a jungle theme, I thought I'd throw in a little exotica.  Here's a terrific cheesecake jungle dance from "She Demons" (1958).

BOUCHER AND FRAGONARD (EXPANDED)

Francois Boucher was one of the great painters of 18th Century France, but he seems to have fallen out of favor in recent years.  If I had to guess about the reason I'd say that he's considered by critics to be shallow. Look at the picture above. The dress is exquisite but the artist doesn't seem to have anything  to say about the woman wearing it. Lots of his pictures are like that. Truth to tell, some of Boucher's work is a bit cold, there's no denying it. So why, you ask, am I writing about him?

The reason is that Boucher made a massive contribution to art in spite of his flaws. The critics were only half right.

Boucher's early heroes were Tiepolo and Rubens, except he didn't have their depth and insight. What we see in Boucher's first pictures is skill merely. They are kind of funny though. You can see the eroticism that characterized his later work (above) slowly creeping in, even though it seems out of place.

Boucher didn't really find his own voice til he got into soft core porn.  He became a favorite of the licentious French court, maybe because he somehow managed to connect eroticism with something deep and profound. The man who had difficulty drawing faces managed to articulate something important about sex and life that no other painter had before. He gave his subjects a light-hearted, delicate charm that came to exemplify the new French style.

Boucher's contemporary Chardin had that charm and so did his pupil Fragonard, but I think they got it from Boucher.

I digress to air this parody (above) of Boucher's picture.

Boucher also did some pictures (above) that were pretty extreme. They're well done, and even funny on some level, but they strike me as decadent and beneath Boucher's talent.

Poor Boucher got typecast and found himself stuck with doing endless paintings of nudes and cupids (above). His overtly sexual charm diminished over time, but never disappeared.  He just sublimated it into sumptuous lines and shapes and colors.

His pictures from this period are often juicy and erotic, even when the subjects aren't. The man who figured out how to put charm and delicacy into a nude, now figured out how to put it into abstract shapes. Pretty good for a guy who publishers deem unworthy of a book. 

To keep from going crazy all those years, he amused himself by simplifying his humans and letting the cupids steal the show. They became more and more vivid and grotesque. Look at them (above)!  One of these days I should do a whole blog about the man's surly cupids!

Boucher's star pupil was Fragonard (sample above), who took up a lot of Boucher's themes and pushed them farther in the direction of what we would call illustration. You can see a large part of the future of art in pictures like this. In this one I see Mary Blair and Freddy Moore as well as fine artists like Renoir, Lautrec and DeKooning.

BTW, many art critics consider Fragonard to be as shallow as Boucher, but the public likes him so he grudgingly gets the occasional book. 

Fragonard (example above) had his teacher's knack for lightness and grace. Sadly it all came to an end with The French Revolution. According to a comment by Thomas, David helped Fragonard get a job at the Louvre, which at least kept him safe for a while. In a sense you could say that Fragonard prevailed, because a hundred years later his techniques, along with those of Boucher and Chardin, had a big influence on the Impressionists. 

Interesting, huh?

THE BEST BACKSHOT OF A WOMAN

The best sexy backshot of a woman ever drawn has to be the one Wood drew of Louis Lane for "Superduperman."

You'd think that a having a jacket like Lane's would break the clean line of the silhouette, and maybe it does, but it doesn't matter. The shoulders and lower back on the jacket form an arrow pointing down to the butt. The flare on the jacket bottom acts like a rising theater curtain, creating a reveal for what's below. 

Wood rightly perceived that seamed stockings trump unseamed ones, at least in cartoon drawings. That fine little line catches your eye, and makes you want to follow it upward.

Seams (above) are no longer a manufacturing necessity, they're there for looks.

While I'm on the subject of backshots, I can't resist mentioning that I like the dynamism in photos that show a woman walking briskly away from the camera.

Does this (above) remind you of the Don Martin's gag where the chivalrous men shoehorn a fat lady onto an escalator?

Painter John Currin's women (above) would never have that problem. They're designed for the modern urban environment.   

BACKSHOTS IN PHOTOGRAPHY

I promised to write more about Geoff Dyer's book of photography essays, and here I keep that promise. Reading Dyer, I'm amazed how many discoveries were necessary to bring us to the point that photography's at now, where it's universally considered an art form, and can handle almost any subject we throw at it.

Take the Ben Shahn picture of a sheriff's back above. In 1935 when this picture was taken, backs were a new subject for photography. Dyer says Dorothea Lange discovered them earlier that year, and the innovation spread like wildfire. Amazing as it sounds, backs had to be "discovered" by somebody!

I love this photo. Dyer's a British radical and he interprets the subject as a big American bottom and a big American gun. He extrapolates that this sheriff likes to sit a lot and probably spends a lot of time reading on the can. Haw! Maybe there's some truth in that.

What I see is a symbol for the fact that somebody's always regarding us and judging us, just as we're always regarding and judging others. We're like social insects who are always on the lookout for mutants and deviants.

Dyer, Lange and Shahn see authority figures (above) as lummoxes who are always looking to perch on something. It's a funny way to see the world, one that's very useful for cartoonists.

Some big people have the ability to enclose the space around them with their limbs. They carry with them a tiny universe and they're good at sucking you into it.

Lummoxes learn this behavior when they're kids by observing other lummoxes on the street. Most lummoxes are nice enough people but they're big and can't resist a little harmless intimidation of the skinny. It's just the way things are. It's lucky that we have cartoonists to point things like this out.

But I digress. The topic is backshots.

Even raggedy farm laborers (the Lange shot, above) possess great dignity in a backshot. When viewing somebody from the front we too often see what what we disagree with or take exception to. Look at the same person from the back, especially if that person is observing something and doesn't seem to be aware of us, and we see that person as a thinking human being...a noble creature who can take in information and make decisions of great importance.

Aaaargh! There's more to say, but I'll have to save it for another post!