The Monster's on the Loose!!! Non-Chaney, Pt. 2: Werewolves Along the Wall

Les Lupins by Maurice Sand
[click to enlarge]

Just a few short years ago, a visit from an old chum from back home found myself and my wife (then merely my longtime girlfriend) visiting the Pasadena Antique Mall at a mostly hoity-toity retail area in Southern California. Pasadena was not a very familiar area to us; in fact, it was my first time there, and so I tackled the fresh spot in my usual way: checking out any antique, record, comic book, or book stores I might happen to cross on my wanderings that afternoon.

Entering what seemed like just any old antique store's book section to me, I discovered an overly well-kept if not crowded place. Its trappings appealed to me greatly, and all that needed to happen was a memorable purchase to seal my love for the location in my heart forever. About two minutes into the visit, it happened. After seeing a nice collection of antique Big Little Books on a shelf that nearly had my wallet saying, "Everything I have, please!", I took a sidelong glance at a table featuring various volumes being featured exclusively by the store. Most seemed to be autographed books or first editions, and while I am interested in such things on occasion (depending on the author, title, or genre), my purposes for visiting such stores are usually tied up in looking for more unusual fare, often on a mental list of particular titles that have longed escaped my grasp or with which I was formally familiar but have not seen in some time.

Sitting prominently (and still quite strangely to me) upon the table was a book by Montague Summers titled The Werewolf. The cover is doused in a blood red coloring, with black only at the fringes and dotting the figures, but it was what appeared in red that caught my eye, apart from the book itself. For anyone else, the sight of the cover would reveal the red silhouette of a series of wolf-like creatures standing on their hind-legs, but without any other reference on the cover, the design could have been a negative image of a sculpture or woodcut or some other art form. There is no real definition to the image to betray what it really is to the eye.

Unless one happened to have been looking for that exact image, and even perhaps some form of that author's writings on the subject (without remembering who the author even was or what the book was called), since one was a mere child.

Short of heading back to the third of three elementary schools of my youth to check with library records to see if they ever carried a copy of that exact book – and since forty years have passed, it is more likely that any such volumes have likely been purged from the shelves by crazy, Satan-fearing moms (hey, it's your religion that believes in such things, not me, so quit squatting over my fun) – I will never know if this is indeed the book that captured my attention way back in fifth grade or if Montague Summers was the author of record. [I am going to skip discussion of Summers himself for now, because it would take some time, and he was such a right weirdo that a brief paragraph or two would not do him justice.] But what I do know is that the real source of the cover image of The Werewolf, a drawing by the artist Maurice Sand titled Les Lupins, lies in full form as a frontispiece in this book in the same manner as it did in the book from my youth. Because, out of everything in that book that may have frightened me in the text or in the other illustrative plates scattered throughout the volume, nothing got to me more than Sand's Les Lupins.

The image is never truly gratuitous but it was stunning to me when I was young in its implication; implication that would run roughshod with my emotional state for quite a few years, especially when placed in conjunction with my home location. Les Lupins is a nighttime study of an unspecified region most likely in France, where a pack of werewolves, numbering ten or so with most standing on their hind legs, prop themselves up along a long wall as if in conspiratorial conversation underneath the moonlight on a mostly overcast evening. 

While the foliage shown in the picture is lush and overflowing in abundance, the layout and relative sparseness of the trees speaks more of the pastoral and nowhere forested. Indeed, the scene seems to either take place on the edge of an estate or some other such structural enclosure, perhaps even on the edge of a gated town. In the text of The Werewolf, however, in the section on France, Summers wrote, "In Normandy tradition tells of certain fantastic beings known as lupins or lubins. They pass the night chattering together and twattling in an unknown tongue. They take their stand by the walls of country cemeteries, and howl dismally at the moon."

I lived nowhere near a cemetery when I lived in Eagle River, Alaska (I don't even know if there was one in town before I moved, since Eagle River was, and still is, a part of the Anchorage municipality), so I had nothing to fear from werewolves at one of those. And we certainly lived nowhere near France as well, let alone Normandy. And we were deeply mired in forest, living at the base of a mountain as we were. So the scene as described visually and then married to Summers' tale brings my upbringing nowhere close to that of the image. Regardless, Les Lupins still sent a chill through me from the moment I first saw it, already at the beginning of a long, unpaid career as a fan of monster movies, but it would take a walk home after school one afternoon to solidify werewolves as my creature/demon of choice for the rest of the time that I lived in Eagle River.

Montague Summers, a right weirdo.

It was perhaps a problem of seasonal timing that led me to such a decision. It was winter when I began reading the book on werewolves featuring Les Lupins as a frontispiece in the library of my elementary school. I was in sixth grade, and was old enough to be allowed to go straight home with my own key after school. Of course, there is the requisite screwing around at the bus stop with your friends and other neighbor kids. It wasn't a long walk home from the stop, but it was one filled with distractions, in either summer or winter. Our neighborhood was more woods than house-filled, and there was always playing to do, sticks with which to sword fight, forts to build, snowballs to throw, and pranks to pull. But Alaskan winters get dark early; the deeper into winter, the darker. Currently now, on Halloween, the sun is to set in the Anchorage area around 5:55 p.m.; on December 21st, the date of the winter solstice, the time will be around 3:42 p.m. At that time of year and at that latitude, the sun is only seen for about five and a half hours, and for kids of school age, recess is the only real chance to get some sun during the school year. Otherwise, you were walking home after school in the pre-sunset. And if you dallied at all on your walk home and played around with your friends, by the time you got close to your house, you were even closer to the dark of night... or worse, deep into it.

I didn't need total darkness to practically crap my pants each time that I reached my driveway. I just needed something approaching the nearness of darkness. As I finished my walk home from the bus, after goofing around with my friends, the glow cast by the sun's going down towards the horizon as it passed through the widely spaced birch and spruce trees that lined the forest on either side of our long, sloping front driveway, reminded me immediately of the picture of Les Lupins. (As I stated in Part 1 of this article, we had a second, lower driveway at the back of our property that accessed our house more immediately, but you had to climb a set of stairs, where I was tormented by the Big Bad Wolf.) It wasn't that the scene of my driveway matched that of the picture. I never thought there were werewolves hiding behind each of the spruce trees. No, that was where Bigfoot hid. Your imagination does not need exactitude, just the merest implication that something could possibly come true in terrible, horrid ways. Most of all, once your mind connects the image that gave your imagination spark to something else in your life, it is over for you. Once I saw the trees, it would make me think of the picture with the werewolves reclining against the ivy-covered wall like drooling junkies anxious for a quick fix. Once I made the connection that my blood might be the very fix they required, I was lost.

My every trip home down that driveway after that point became a battle between my instincts to run down an often slippery path to make it all the way to our front door in time to lock it fast behind me, and my more logical brain that struggled to convince itself that werewolves were mere fantasy figures and that I should just strut safely down the snowy path and forget all this nonsense. In the end – at least to the point where we moved from that house to another following my parents' divorce not long after – the werewolves won the battle. Any time that I was alone from that point forward while I lived there, I was in fear constantly, and it carried over into my trips down that driveway in the summer, even when I was on a bicycle. But it was always when I was on my own. If I had a friend with me, or one of my brothers, and especially adults, I was just fine. Most of my fears only overtook me when I was left on my own.

There was still another factor playing into my werewolf obsession at this point, that took my fear nearly over the top, and I will get to that in Part III of this piece. But I wanted to sum up regarding the antique shop and the Montague Summers book. The moment of seeing the book before me in the Pasadena Antique Mall was yet another in a long series of encounters where my response is the same as if I were the one who had originally ridden my horse across the path of the Bigfoot in the famous Patterson film. That is, a series of seconds constructed around a stony wall of pure silence, while my jaw and limbs go numb even as my heart starts racing uncontrollably.

Instinctually, I knew this had to be the book. Picking it up, I flipped immediately to the title page, where I was greeted by the image of Les Lupins. It was exactly where it needed to be. This had to be the book, though the volume I remembered was not quite as thick as this one, and I did not remember a blood red cover at all. One would have thought I would remember such a detail. But reading the text in some sections brought a great sense of familiarity, as Summers' overly academic and archaic writing style is somewhat hard to not just get past sometimes but also to forget. The book seemed to be, especially from the text on the cover, a compilation of shorter volumes on werewolves he had written, and was broken into six distinct sections, each pertaining to different locales and their lycanthropic legends, or the supposed "science" behind the myths, and finally an exceedingly brief addendum on Witch Ointments that isn't even written by Montague Summers, but by a Dr. H.J. Norman. Since Summers died in 1949, and this first edition of the collection was dated as March 1966, I suppose it is possible that I had encountered a smaller collection at that library in my youth.

The first edition was going to run me, after tax, close to forty bucks, but for me, it was a foregone conclusion. Why, after looking so long for such a book featuring that image, would I not buy it? Sure, I had to put back a couple of other books I had found first when I entered, including one of those Big Little Books that featured Tarzan, but it had to be done. If ever forty bucks was going to be spent on a book just so I could own a single image, this was it. I kid about that, because I know that it was more important to capture the essence of the volume within my own library, to make it part of the whole, and to strengthen the ties to my own memory, along with my imagination once more. 

Getting the book home, however, after I started to flip through the book, revealed some intriguing sidebars to my initial interest. The book contains a great many notes, most of them in a constant hand, including a signature at the front of the book in the same hand, ascribing ownership to someone named Angela Allaire. The name meant nothing to me, and most of the notes are of a generic nature, reminders to pay this bill or that bill, a torn in half receipt for the San Francisco Examiner used as a bookmark, calling this person and her mom on the phone, extensive notes on menorahs and looking up more information on Hanukkah, but nothing regarding the actual text of The Werewolf. (That's kind of how people operated in the pre-iPhone days when you needed to make a note of something... use it as a temporary bookmark, to be just as forgotten as other notes.)

The Wolf article, The Golden Gater, 11-11-1980.

But there was something that triggered a deeper look into Ms. Allaire for me. There was a newspaper clipping from San Francisco State's campus newspaper, The Golden Gater (now called the Golden Gate Xpress) dated November 11, 1980. The article is headlined "Tales of terror to be catalogued" and concerns SF State's then professor of English and creative writing, Leonard Wolf, who was planning to release a book called Whole Catalogue of Unearthly Terrors. I knew full well who Leonard Wolf was, of course. I have owned a copy of his huge volume, A Complete Book of Terror, for about thirty years, which has proven instrumental in my getting to know a great many classic horror authors. I have another book of his in my library as well, and he is rather well-known as being the father of feminist and political writer and journalist, Naomi Wolf. 

The article about Wolf was folded around a piece of paper from a small notepad, on which a poem in two verses is scrawled in red pen ink:

"On the twenty fourth of May
I saundered [sic] in and planned to stay.
Fate put me in the fabled chair
of sweet and georgious [sic] Ms. Allaire

I did my job and worked so hard
and thought of you in my back yard.
Squirting cold water all over you
and putting marangue [sic] in your kazoo."

x The Author

Um... what did I just find in this book? Who is "The Author"? Was this love correspondence between Allaire and Wolf? Who puts meringue in a kazoo (unless it is of a euphemistic nature, of course)?

This meant that I naturally took to the internet to find out if Ms. Allaire was anyone of note who may have been more publicly involved with Wolf at some time. I found nothing to that effect, but did locate mentions of an Angela Allaire who lived in Chico, CA, but had died in 2005 from complications from ALS. Finding an obituary for her on a Chico website, I found this information: "Angela moved to Chico in 1975 and worked in the Administration office at California State University Chico, graduating from the college in 1978. She went on to receive her Master's degree in film at San Francisco State, then taught one year of film history at SFSU. Angela wrote three feature-length films and sold a script, which became a respected, remarkable story. She also wrote many liner notes on the back of VHS tapes and DVDs. She was successful working with the American Film Institute as a script supervisor."

So, Ms. Allaire was at SF State at the same time Wolf was a professor of English there. It doesn't take too much in the way of imagination to summon up a scenario where the teacher, himself an expert on the field of horror literature, had perhaps recommended the Summers' book to one of his female students. In going through further notes contained in the book, Allaire mentions on one note "look at TV guide" after the word "tape," and on another line, the title Death Watch (there was a Bernard Tavernier sci-fi thriller that came out in 1980, if we are dating all of this to the year of the Wolf article, titled Death Watch). Another note ties directly into the film studies category, where she writes, "6) Write about similarities in 3 films" and goes on to notate possible areas of discussion. She also has a note about "invented genres: newspaper, gangster". A third note says "Sign up for projector 5-7," "Ask about Polansky [sic] (schedule)," and "see film class".

It becomes clear that this very likely may be the Angela Allaire in the obituary, with the revelation from the notes that she was involved in film studies at the time she was keeping notes in the book. A look on IMDb, however, reveals no credits for an Angela Allaire as a screenwriter, though I know full well there is a difference between the writing and selling of screenplays and actually having one made into a movie. The obit, though, is quite remarkably ambiguous as to titles, so it is doubtful anything was made, unless she went under a different name. However, if she had written anything of note, it would have likely appeared in the obituary.

The lack of actual notation in The Werewolf itself points to the book being not one for academic purposes but one of personal interest instead, or even a gift, possibly from Wolf himself if indeed he is "The Author". My guess is that the poem may have served the purposes of an inscription, and that the signing of "The Author" was to obscure any paper trail if an affair had occurred between her and the giver. But then the poem gets wrapped up by an article featuring Mr. Wolf, and then there is nothing left to do much make sordid connections where they may or may not be.

I guess one should always be careful where they leave their meringue.

RTJ

[To be concluded in The Monster's on the Loose!!! Non-Chaney, Pt. 3: Were-Rik? There-Rik! in the near future.] 

Mr. Mixtape-ptlk, Track #12: "The Vampire, Pt. 1" by T. Valentine (2012)

A good decade and a half ago, my pal Leif presented a gift to me – for either my birthday or Christmas, I can't remember which – which should serve as a lesson for all who find themselves stymied when it comes to figuring out what to get me for a present that will make me giddy with delight. Go weird. Go friggin' weird...

Leif gave me a CD by an act of whom I had never before heard. A fellow named T. Valentine, who appeared on the cover of the CD case with a telephone (old school, with a cord and everything) clenched in his hand while he crouched over the phone on his knees in what appeared to be great anguish. The title of the disc told the story of the photo (as far as I could ascertain at that moment of gift-giving, though I was correct): Hello, Lucille... Are You a Lesbian?

The title song was this T. Valentine person's strangely inspired response to Josie Cotton's 1981 hit Johnny, Are You Queer? It was a mangled mess of words, spoken in an utterly confounding voice (accent doesn't even come into play; Valentine is just... Valentine) supposedly about his ex-wife who left him just a few years before. The song is peppered with ranted lyrics (singing never even enters into it), such as "When I wanna make love, she got female trouble, or that other thing that women have e'ry mont'. She always wear pants, long pants; I never seen her in a dress, a skoit. When we go out, it like two mens out together. She wears her hair cut short, like mahn. She don' have any tits." Because he quite openly rails against lesbians and how much he hates them, the song might truly be considered risible if it weren't so laughable. It is clearly meant as a joke, if not a bad joke, that only comes to the fore because the writer/singer has a basic (and possibly stubbornly ingrained) misunderstanding of human dynamics.

Diving into the liner notes of the Norton Records-released CD finds they were written by noted music critic Nick Tosches, so you know it is meant to be taken equally as seriously as it is to inspire laughter. Such a feeling often comes when listening to what is considered to be "outsider music," where sometimes the individuals seem a tad (or even more so) brain-damaged and so you get a simultaneous feeling of exploration and exploitation, of laughing with the person at the same time you might be laughing at them.

But digging into Valentine's mostly self-released and promoted sides going back to the early '60s, finds a man barely conversant with any sense of music or rhythm, who pretty much shouts most of his lyrics in his odd patois and barely ever tries to sing at all. His earliest B-side, Little Lulu Frog, is absolutely fascinating because of this, built around a recurring belly laugh every couple of lines while strange frog sounds seem to back up the whole affair over a rollicking, danceable blues ramble. (I also really like the simple guitar riff on the song.) And I can't understand a word of it.

At the back end of the CD was a short, 48-second promo called The Vampire Radio Spot. It was exactly as described: a brief bit that aired on radio, probably between 1957 or 1959, promoting a three-part short play called The Vampire that T. Valentine had produced on stage in Chicago featuring himself as the titular vampire along with three female victims, before he had ever recorded Teen-Age Jump or any other singles.

Again, we have T. Valentine in full mush-mouthed mode, though he is a little easier to understand when he slows his voice down. "See the vampire... attack young women... kill them... suck their BLOOOOOOD!" If you have to give anything to Valentine, it is for sheer hustle and chutzpah, getting his own most likely shitty play produced in clubs in the late '50s, almost like a Chicago-side Ed D. Wood, Jr. Besides, the way he says his own lines is pretty much devoid of terror and sounds rather cute and pathetic instead.

Valentine's life is certainly intriguing, worthy of further discussion, and possibly even a feature length film study in the style of Ed Wood might prove to be rather interesting. But T. (the T. stands for Thurmon, but he prefers to be called Val) Valentine, born in Mississippi in 1932, is still with us and still shoutin' along to music. In 2012, he teams up with up and coming blues outfit, Daddy Long Legs, and produced a brand new album called... what else... The Vampire. 

Despite the self-referential title (and a fantastic cover image of Valentine wearing a Dracula cape), most of the songs are newer and seem to have no thematic connection to Valentine's old play. However, there is a track deep in the album with the same title as the album, and what can be discerned from listening to it is... um... um...

Well, see for yourself...

I thought about attempting to untangle the hedge of words and semi-words and arcane sounds and transcribe it for you, but I just don't have the time today. Or tomorrow. Or all of next year. I already have enough issues of my own. I don't need to make myself any crazier. I don't know if the words are straight from Val's play or not, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it is not that far removed from a normal Valentine performance: rambling, incoherent, and still pretty cool just in itself. As for the horror content, sure I added it to this mix because of its theme and title, but as in his radio spot, the unintentional comedy pretty much squashes anything scary about it, but that doesn't make it unworthy. He could be singing about a bar of soap, and it would still sound the same, but be completely fascinating to hear.

While Val will never become a real singer, Daddy Long Legs does seem to keep him focused and on track throughout the album, though it is still shot through with that certain touch of oddness that can only come from an artist as purely unfettered by actual talent as T. Valentine. The band itself choogles on admirably behind him, doing its job while clearly enjoying the moment for what it is. The song Cell Phone, while yet again having vocals that are nearly indecipherable by normal human ears and minds, almost has the feel of an old John Lee Hooker track when he teamed up with Canned Heat in the '70s. The full album is helped immeasurably by the band's steady presence behind Valentine, who is able to just keep being himself.

And really, that's all we need in this world.

RTJ

A PYLON EXTRA:

And for those still sticking around, for a taste of Daddy Long Legs on their own, here is a live performance on TV where they rather kick some serious ass with Motorcycle Madness...

...and even better, a devastating, soul-shaking performance of their song Blood from a Stone, on the Drive Sessions...

Mr. Mixtape-ptlk, Track #11: "Cemetery Girls" by Barnes & Barnes (1980)

OK, time to get creepy. I mean, really, really creepy. Unless you are the type who is actually into the sort of thing they are talking about in this song, and then I guess it wouldn't be creepy in the least bit to you. But for the vast majority of people, myself included, it's a pretty creepy subject, even when it is just part of a joke.

Though I am prone to say "good and creepy," because while the act of necrophilia described in the song Cemetery Girls is certainly not "good" by any measure, the song is by the infamous duo of Barnes & Barnes. So, for me, it's going to fall into the "good" category. Oh, but still yet into the "creepy" one as well.

I was originally planning to have another Barnes & Barnes track from later in their career as a selection on this mix, a medley of Wax Your Carrot/The Boogie Man and Dan, but then realized that I had used it on an earlier compilation. But I still wanted to get some B&B on the mix, so I switched to an equally strange track, but one that had any extra layer of sickness ladled over the top of it.

Before we go any further, if you have not heard the song already, I implore the strong-willed, open-minded, and musically adventurous among you to listen to Cemetery Girls first. If you decide to get out while the getting is good, that's fine, but I will think you are a wimp. And if you do wimp out, you will miss out on some very odd sampled references that take place during the song that at one point were clues to the quite famous identity of one half of the then-mysterious, masked band. Lyrics are just below... if you dare!!! Mwahahahaha!!!

Cemetery Girls
(Art and Artie Barnes)

"I love to dance with cemetery girls
The moon comes out the earth unfurls

No time to waste the hours fade
They come awake the dead parade

(Chorus)
Fresh souls in the cornfield
Anthony put them there
And it's good, it's real good
[Anthony: You be dead!]

I love to kiss the cemetery girls
Their lips are hard, blank eyes like pearls

I call them up, they come to me
A zombie pomp pure ecstasy

(Chorus)
Fresh souls in the cornfield
Anthony put them there
And it's good, it's real good

I love to sleep with cemetery girls
Their legs are cold, sweet dusty curls

Pale, pale breasts pressed to my cheek
When we make love, stiff muscles creak

(Chorus)
Fresh souls in the cornfield
Anthony put them there
And it's good, it's real good

I love to love the cemetery girls
I love to love the cemetery girls
I love to love the cemetery girls
I wish they all could be cemetery girls... Yeah!"

See, that wasn't so hard, was it? Just a nice, normal "boy meets girl, who happens to be cold and dead, and so are all of her friends" kind of song. It's a sweeping, Ed Gein-style romance brought to life with spooky synth sounds that really do make it feel like you are taking a slow walk through a graveyard at night stalking your latest... conquest.

As with almost every single Barnes & Barnes song, the final word in the lyrics is "Yeah," which, depending on the particular song, is sometimes very obvious, sometimes not so. This time out, the "Yeah" comes as the tag after they briefly take a detour from their song's basic melody to cross over into Beach Boys territory to spoof the hook from the song California Girls.

But there is something else loose in this song besides the vivid description of laying down to make sweet love to female corpses. Floating about in each chorus is the voice of a very bossy little boy, saying things like "You're a bad man! You're a very bad man!" If you do not recognize the voice, the lyrics "Anthony put them there!" and "It's good, it's real good!" and further nods to fresh souls being out in the cornfield are direct references to an old episode of The Twilight Zone called It's A Good Life, for which show creator and host Rod Serling wrote the screenplay, based on a short story by Jerome Bixby. 

It's A Good Life is about six-year-old Anthony Fremont, who can read minds, bend wills, and pretty much create or do anything he wants with his absolutely god-like powers. When people do not think happy thoughts about Anthony, he can turn them into monstrous horrors and then wishes the result away "to the cornfield," which is shorthand for burying them away forever. And with the entire town of Peaksville utterly afraid of Anthony, thinking happy thoughts becomes a very hard thing to accomplish, but thinking how to stop Anthony is treasonous and very dangerous.

The episode is considered by many critics to be one of the best stories ever put on television, and is famous enough to have been remade when The Twilight Zone was adapted for the big screen in 1983. (The segment was directed by director Joe Dante, whose next project would be Gremlins.)

So, what is the connection of It's A Good Life to Cemetery Girls, besides someone wanting to sample a sound clip or two to add to an already creepy song? At the time of the song's release on their debut album Voobaha, Barnes & Barnes were completely (and purposely) unknown to the public. They had made their breakthrough in 1978 with the ultra-wacky song Fish Heads, which went huge after Dr. Demento started playing it and then Saturday Night Live played the video for the song two weeks back to back. Barnes & Barnes wear masks in the video, which, unbelievably, was directed by a pre-fame Bill Paxton, who also appears in the video, along with Dr. Demento. The pair are also masked on the cover of Voobaha, further obscuring their identities, but that doesn't mean they didn't playfully leave a trail of breadcrumbs.

Cemetery Girls has all of these added references to It's A Good Life for one solid reason: while Barnes & Barnes go by the names Art and Artie, even to this very day, when performing together, when they finally revealed themselves in the early 1980s, they turned out to be musician Robert Haimer and actor/musician Bill Mumy. Once upon a time, Bill Mumy was a child actor named Billy Mumy, who played the super-smart, boy inventor Will Robinson on the Lost in Space TV show. But years before that role, Mumy essayed the role of demonic little Anthony Fremont, the boy who sends people who don't think happy thoughts out to the cornfield in It's A Good Life on The Twilight Zone.

The idea of mashing up confusion about Mumy's identity with a song about necrophilia shouldn't work on paper. But, despite the crudeness and "sick" humor in the subject matter, in circling back to that "good and creepy" definition earlier, this song has such a haunting quality to it, that I cannot help but want to include in a Halloween mixtape. Besides, Barnes & Barnes were never known for their subtlety when it came to wishing to shock audiences. Some other tracks on their albums include Boogie Woogie Amputee, Kiss Me Where It Stinks, The Public Toilet, Feminine Parts, Sit On My Lap and Call Me Daddy, Pussy Whipped, Work the Meat, Party in My Pants, and Swallow My Love. Some of these songs actually do involve clever wordplay and twists, and some of them are about exactly what you think they are about. But nobody coming to a Barnes & Barnes song is expecting it to be a walk in the park. 

A walk through a cemetery at midnight, though... maybe. And if that walk maybe involves kissing a girl or two in the cemetery, so be it...

RTJ

Guillermo Del Toro: At Home with Monsters at LACMA 2016, Pt. 2

[Note: To read Part 1 of this post, please click here.]

As I mentioned last time, the primary focus of the Guillermo del Toro exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (aka LACMA) that we attended yesterday (Oct. 26, 2016) was naturally on the films and artwork of Mr. Del Toro himself. With the massive collection of props, costumes, storyboards, sketches, and fully realized figures representing his monsters and characters on display, how could it not be so?

But the secondary – though equally as important – focus was on his influences, a great many of which (if not the vast majority) also happen to be my influences as well, but Del Toro filters them through his quite remarkable talent and attention to detail that a high percentage of the time produces hauntingly memorable cinematic art for the world. Me, I just take those same influences and go, "Wow, that monster was pretty cool."

As before, much of the artwork and collection is to be found (normally, when they aren't on display in an exhibition at a museum) at Del Toro's Bleak House. If anyone ever needed an absolutely on the nose answer as to what I would do if I had the money to do whatever I wanted, taking a look at this exhibition is pretty much what you would get. Well, apart from the fact that I would also have a life-size Robby the Robot, a Batmobile, and the Robot from Lost in Space. But you get the gist. Del Toro's commissioned pieces include diorama featuring Harry Earles, Johnny Eck, and Schlitzie the pinhead from Tod Browning's horror classic Freaks, a scene showing Ray Harryhausen sitting comfortably in a chair (while wearing slippers) as he handles some of the models he created for his still astounding stop-motion animation features, Jack Pierce applying makeup to a seated Boris Karloff as they work on creating Frankenstein's Monster, and a fairly elaborate scenario featuring the Monster meeting his Bride while a catty Dr. Pretorius stands aloofly to the side. There was even an oversized lifelike bust of master makeup guru Dick Smith.

Dick Smith, makeup artist extraordinaire.

Frankenstein plays a major part in the exhibition. The head of Karloff's monster looms large over the entrance to the room containing many issues of comics and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, and there are numerous spots where paintings of the monster, original Berni Wrightson drawings from his acclaimed illustrated edition (which I still need to replace; note to myself), various editions of the book, and even a life mask of Boris Karloff from 1960 were on display.

Among the life-size figures were writers who count amongst Del Toro's favorites and influences, including (in totally expected fashion) Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. There were also cases displaying the writings and books of Lord Dunsany, Charles Dickens, Andrew Lang, and many others. The case featuring Dickens also contained an assortment of spirit photographs from the mid-19th century, which proved to be one of the more unnerving displays for me, not so much for the supposed spirits contained in the photos but because they were deathbed images of real people.

Of course, Famous Monsters of Filmland and the other Warren Publications played a role in the exhibit. I was a little upset by the width of the box frame surrounding the issues because, in combination with the lighting from above, it served to create shadows on the top row of the comics and magazines making snapping a picture rather annoying. Scattered throughout the collection, I also found some pretty cool artwork from the Warren mags done by Richard Corben.

Of the vast amount of artwork on display in the exhibit, I was more than a little skittish about shooting photographs of it. I know they were fully allowing photos, but for whatever reason – and believe me, I was also a tad bit shy about taking the other photos – I was weirding out a little about taking pictures of paintings. Eventually, I overcame my shyness, but I really wish that I could go back and see all of them again. There was a fantastic Dave Cooper painting over which my brother Mark and I – seeing it at separate moments during the morning – each went equally gaga. I took a quick snap so I could reference it later and look up information on it, but the result was not clear or good enough to post here. I really wish to go back to check it out again.

Other shelves and cases revealed a vast number of interesting images and models. One case which held special interest for me contained several cast statues by Ray Harryhausen from his original designs, such as Talos from Jason and the Argonauts and the Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth. Most striking to me was a tableau showing Harryhausen at work filming a scene on his table in his garage. The same case also held the mask from Brian De Palma's The Phantom of the Paradise, and a truly strange marionette of Peter Cushing which went largely unexplained, but was fascinating nonetheless. Another case held various memorabilia from assorted vampire movies, such as Bram Stoker's Dracula, Del Toro's own Blade II, and Nosferatu.

Will I get back to the exhibit again before it closes on November 27? Time and money are against me, but I sure hope to find an opening. There was so much there, I really regretted it after I stepped out to get a snack with the rest of the family, because once I left, I could not get back into it. I could have easily done another hour in there, if not more. Short of getting a chance to work with Del Toro in his real Bleak House, it's the closest that I will get. Should the opportunity arise, I will go again.

RTJ

Guillermo Del Toro: At Home with Monsters at LACMA 2016, Pt. 1

The inside entrance to At Home with Monsters, guarded by the
Angel of Death from Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

It was a long enough wait, and October 29th finally rolled around today. My brother Mark, his wife Marci, and my teenage nephew (and burgeoning rock star) Aerin were in town from the north part of the state to join Jen and I at the Guillermo del Toro exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (aka LACMA). We had planned this excursion a few months earlier in July and I, like many horror and fantasy fans in the area, was just beyond waiting any longer to go see it.

Titled At Home with Monsters, the exhibition, curated by Mr. del Toro himself, was meant to do multiple things. First was to celebrate the art and films of the man himself; second, to pay tribute to the influences – from art to literature to cinematic or otherwise – that have influenced del Toro since his childhood days and straight through his remarkable career in film; and third, to give us a glimpse into what his inner sanctum is like, in this case, his home base (though it is not his actual home) in Los Angeles that he has named Bleak House after a favorite Dickens novel. (He has so much crammed into Bleak House, that he has a sequel house already called Bleak House 2.) Most of the contents of this exhibit, from paintings to sketches to models and even the life-sized statues of figures such as Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Frankenstein's Monster, and Johnny Eck (from Freaks) take up space in this place that also houses his working office, art studio, and research libraries.

I have decided to split this photo essay in two. This first part will feature photos of costumes, figures, and props related to Del Toro's own films; the second part will be exclusively devoted to objects in the exhibit portraying the wide range of influences on his talent and career.

The Faun from Pan's Labyrinth.

The Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth.

In addition to the full-sized figures such as the characters above and below, many of the rooms had video screens on the walls that played montages (in loops) based around common themes in his work, such as Death and Resurrection, Monsters, or Beauty and Brutality. There were also several stations spread throughout the vast exhibit that allowed you to push buttons to select different pages that had been scanned from his working notebooks, to get a sense of how devoted he is to his craft at seemingly every moment of his life.

The Ghost of Edith's Mother from Crimson Peak.

An illuminated book created for Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

Insect paintings, sketches, and models in a section
mainly devoted to Mimic.

Costumes from Crimson Peak.

Weaponry and artifacts from the Hellboy films.

The Cronos Device (right) from Cronos.

Costume, weapon, and other pieces from the Hellboy films.

A wall-sized poster of a shot inside Del Toro's actual Bleak House.

Costumes from Pacific Rim.

An illuminated book from Pan's Labyrinth.

Pt. II, featuring some of Del Toro's major influences, will be posted tomorrow...

RTJ