Pictures from Across the Way
This seal, which forms an acrostic of V I T R I O L, would have been useful back when I blogged under that other old alias of mine.
The Red Book (Liber Novus)
Sitting bored at work today, I was perusing Google News when I came across this article:
The Holy Grail of the Subconscious
It’s a lengthy read, but one that completely fascinated me. I’ve always been a fan of Carl Jung and his dream analysis, but I’d never heard of the “mythical” Red Book–an illuminated manuscript, bound in red leather, that he himself claimed was his greatest work. It has never been visible to the public at large and has never been studied by academia–it took a tremendous amount of diplomacy to convince the Jung family to retrieve the book from its secret location and allow high-res scanners to capture the elegant German writing and archetypal artistry of Jung while he explored the depths of his subconscious. The contents laid the groundwork for the Jungian method of psychoanalysis, but the family has been terrified that the never-before-published work would cast Jung as a madman, as its contents are creatively schizophrenic and at times disturbing. Jung did not hold back, and the Liber Novus (as he called the Red Book) captured all the gory details of his visions, dreams, and reveries.
I am going to try to procure a copy if at all possible–the first edition print run is only 5,000 copies, and each copy is already priced at over $100. Amazon has already sold out, and some other sites have started jacking up the prices… If this effort fails, I know what I’m going to request at Christmas.
One-Panel Comics: The Real Story
One of my friends recently forwarded the below comic strip to me and asked: is this anything?
On first glance, it appeared to be simply an inept one-panel “comic” attempting to make some vague statement about the Boy Scouts, the Salvation Army, the ACLU, and/or Walt Whitman. But looks can be deceiving! Surely, I thought, surely the intellectual giant who had created this work had some kind of goal in creating it. After a great deal of introspection, it occurred to me that my initial impression, that this was indeed a comic, was flawed. When those premises are removed, then the image makes a great deal more sense, and the thematic elements involved paint a clear picture that the author had an epic narrative in mind. So now, I will attempt to offer up my interpretation of the narrative of this non-comic:
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Many years ago, on his deathbed, Walt Whitman stared up into the sky and pleaded for more time on earth. God, in reviewing His records of Walt’s life, wrote the man off as a reckless sodomite of the highest (or perhaps lowest) caliber, and the Deity balked at the request. But Jesus, ever the hippy in the family, reminded God that there was one point in Walt’s life when he had been “born-again” in a small backwoods church, causing God to facepalm and sigh loudy.
“But I want to destroy him!” said God.
“Well, you can’t, technically,” said Jesus. “Isn’t there something else you could do?”
“I have an idea!” said Saint Sergius. He proposed transforming Walt Whitman into into a magical fairy and letting him be reborn on the Earth, where he would be free to frolic and roam amongst the mortals, which were his true love anyway. (Sergius was always a little fruity.)
“That’s awesome,” said God. “He gets to avoid Hell on a technicality, and I don’t have to put up with his hippy ass running naked up and down the golden streets of paradise.” They all had a Good Laugh and, with a wiggle of His nose, God made it so.
As Walt passed from death to life in the blink of an eye, he was transformed into a three-foot-tall being sporting moth-like wings. Beside him, a glowing wand lay on the ground. As he slowly opened his eyes for the first time, the shining stick caught his eye. He immediately reached for it and looked it over.
“Hmm… this looks like a magic wand…” he said to himself, swatting it about. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning flew from the tip and incinerated a tree.
“Oh shit, said the newly-reborn fairy. Instinctively his wings fluttered a bit… he hadn’t noticed them before, and it was only now that he realized that he had the appendages. He reached back behind himself and felt the papery, leathery appendages. A distinct sense of shock passed through him, and for the first time since he awoke, he realized that he had not a single clue who he was. He looked around furtively until he spotted a pond nearby, and he raced over to it.
Looking into the water, the fairy, completely oblivious to the fact that he was once Walt Whitman, saw himself and stood motionless, his mouth agape. He held up his hands and looked intently at them, turning his hands over slowly as he attempted to make out what exactly he was. On his right hand, he spotted a small, red scar at the base of his thumb. In small letters that appeared to have been cut with the point of a knife was the word ‘ACLU.’
“ACLU?” the fairy asked. He did not remember that, when he was Walt Whitman, he had fallen for a virile youth named Adam Campbell, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship. One evening, in a drunken haze, Adam had taken his pocketknife and carved ‘ACLU’ on his elder lover’s hand, so that he would always know that “Adam Campbell Loves U”. None of those memories were intact, so the fairy was left to puzzle over the significance of the scar.
“Perhaps this is my name,” the fairy thought, and the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. A strange name… a strange body… a wand that could incinerate trees… he realized he could only be a fairy. With a newfound identity, Aclu left the pond and walked back over to where he’d dropped the wand.
Picking it up, he looked it over again. “I wonder how you work this thing…” he thought. Pointing it and brandishing it, Aclu concentrated hard on something that he wanted to manifest. At that time, Aclu wanted to manifest a unicorn. Unexpectedly, a bolt of yellow energy flew from the tip of the wand, and in a puff of pink smoke, there stood before Aclu a giant, hairy monstrosity, clad in a red apron and holding bells in each hand. The creature appeared to resemble an ape of some sort, except his face was contorted in some unfathomable, indescribeable way. For the life of him, Aclu didn’t know what the hell he had just manifested.
“Umm…?” said Aclu, which was all it took to get the creature’s attention. The beast’s nostrils flared, and pure animalistic rage crossed over what had just been a face of endless confusion before. The creature raised both of his fists into the air, bellowing a most unnatural sound and shaking its bells violently. The din echoed over the mountain vale, making the outburst all the more terrifying, and was heard by picnickers as far as three miles away.
“GOD IS DEEEEEEEEEAD!” growled the monster, and with a strength unknown in this mortal coil, hurled one of its bells toward Aclu. The fairy barely had time to react, but did a barrel roll to avoid the projectile. Then, enraged that he had missed, the creature began galumphing toward Aclu.
Instinctively, Aclu the Fairy jumped into the air and began flapping his wings. Through sheer force of will, he began to inelegantly ascend. As the aproned demon approached, Aclu flapped as hard as he could, gaining a good bit of altitude until he was twenty feet into the air. The beast rang its remaining bell angrily while Aclu winged his way toward a nearby Southern yellow pine, where he perched on one of its higher branches. A million thoughts raced through Aclu’s head as he debated what should be done. Should he just leave? The creature seemed singularly obsessed with him and, even after twenty minutes of bellowing and multiple attacks on the tree, showed no sign of tiring out.
“I need someone who can take care of this creature,” Aclu thought. “Maybe I can scare up a knight… yes! I will call up Percival or Galahad one of the other Knights of the Round Table to dispatch this beast!” With newfound resolve, Aclu stuck his tongue out and pointed at the ground, about ten feet away from the monster. In another flash of pink smoke, a silhouette roughly the same size as the creature was visible. The beast, who had been ranting and raving the entire time, fell silent with this, perhaps realizing that he was dealing no mere bearded weirdo.
“My knight!” Aclu proclaimed, “fell this unholy beast and you shall be well rewarded!” Aclu and the beast both watched as the figure took one step foward–to their astonishment, a foot clad in a high-heeled shoe emerged from the billowing pink smoke.
Aclu sighed. “This is going to be harder than I thought.”
God laughed a hearty laugh, like a sea captain, and gave Saint Sergius a manly pat on the back. “Serge, I knew there was a reason I let you and your fudgepacker boyfriend up here!”
Sergius chuckled uneasily. “Yeah… haha… hey, there’s Jesus, I’m gonna go hang out with him now…”
“Cool beans,” said God, returning his attention to the fairy, the transvestite, and the sasquatch dueling in the Sierra Nevadas.
Civilization
by Marco Brambilla, for use in a hotel’s elevator so that riders have something to watch between floors. The footage scrolls up or down depending on the direction of the elevator. The Stravinsky alone would have made this epic like whoa, but couple it with stock footage from “The Producers” and the Balrog of Moria and you turn it up to eleven. (Note: This video is best when watched in high-quality mode over at YouTube.)
Poetry Animations
Apparently there is a person who takes photographs of famous authors and digitally alters them to create “movies” of the authors reciting their most famous works. In some cases, when there exists a recording of the author, the audio of the author’s actual voice is used. However, in most cases, they have a voice actor reading the work. Some of them are a little exaggerated but others, like this one, are at least somewhat “plausible”.
Of course, I thought Lewis Carroll was creepy even before seeing this–now I’m convinced of his malevolence.
The Inimitable Davey Wavey
For those who have yet to be introduced to Davey Wavey, you are in for a treat. He is a thoughtful and insightful young web designer living a nomadic lifestyle, moving each season to a new locale. He does both text-based and video blogs (what he calls “talky blogs”) about his life experiences and his philosophical observations on life, love, happiness, and other pertinent topics (like his eternal lusting for Zac Efron). And did I mention that 99% of his blog posts and photos are with him being half-naked?
In addition to being a web designer, Davey also funds his lifestyle by selling (and starring in) his own workout videos. (Davey knows his audience well.)
Musings on the Fantastic Blue Peen
So, I’m sure by the title of this post that you know what I went and saw last night. And I must say… it did not disappoint. Zack Snyder’s rendition of Watchmen is uber-faithful to the original, and I have to give the man mad props for orchestrating an amazingly true-to-form cast, complete with spot-on costumes and “just like I imagined” performances. The effects, of course, were spectacular; I was particularly enamored with Rorschach’s mask. But, of course, the real star of the movie was Dr. Manhattan’s fantastic blue penis.
It was everything I imagined it to be, and more… much more. I found myself highly distracted in the scenes in which it makes an appearance. (Yes, I think it needs separate billing on the cast list.) Yes, I know it’s CGI, and yes, I know it’s glowing blue… but damn. For Laurie’s sake, I hope the Doctor is a shower and not a grower. No wonder Dan felt so impotent… most (straight) guys would too if they thought they had to compete with that nuclear-powered baby’s arm.
The most amusing thing about the showing last night was that there were a good number of tweens in the audience–some with a parent, some by themselves. When the credits rolled and the lights came up, the vast majority of them had left the theater. These were the people, I was sure, who didn’t know what they were getting into when they came to see the movie. The people who thought it was just going to be a “superhero movie” of some kind. What a shock that must have been! And while I can’t be exactly sure what drove off the younger crowd from the film (what with the intense scenes of graphic violence, the 2.5+ hour running time…) my own belief is that they all saw the cerulean manwang and the parents were fucking scared. After all, we’re a culture with a tolerance for watching people get limbs hacked off, but show a nice uncircumcized cock flopping around mesmerizingly for over a half-hour (I’m sure that’s how much screen time it got) is just too far. They don’t want to have to deal with questions like:
“Daddy, is that what all men are like? Are you like that?”
There’s power in that penis! (Certainly enough power to inspire rock star ex-BF and I to get up to naughty business after the movie… but that’s a different story.)
The Miscellany
Things out of context.
The Old Popularity Index
