La momia enmascarada

Some more sketchbook filler. Inspired by precode comics, The Wild Wild West and other zany pulp western adventure television and movies, and, well, the bizarre blender that is my brain.

Burgerhosen

Here’s some sketchbook nonsense from this evening.

Slow News Day

I don’t subscribe to a daily newspaper for a couple of reasons, primarily cost and time to actually read an issue a day to validate the expenditure. I do, however, get a neighborhood circular a couple times a week. Since it’s primarily a mouthpiece for a few local journalists and no real news outside of the East Side of St. Paul, it usually goes straight from step to recycling bin. 

On occasion I will crack it open to see exactly what bad stuff is going down around me in the crime blotter. Although there is always more than a few examples of truly reprehensible behavior (sexual assault, home invasion, assault with a deadly weapon), there are occasionally a couple oddball nonsense items like this one that simultaneously make me chuckle and shake my head.

Remembering Jack Cole

December 14th marks the anniversary of the tragic end of one of comicdom’s finest talents: Jack Cole. There are any number of both sincere and ham fisted tributes out there, so I won’t bother to do a bio piece that regurgitates the same material you can glean from Wikipedia. Perhaps the best celebration of Cole is...well, his work. Probably best known as the creator of Plastic Man and an illustrator of highly influential pinup art for Playboy, Cole was one of the great talents of the Golden Age of comics.

I highly recommend checking out the original Plastic Man stories from Police Comics. They’re fantastically humorous, full of action and 100% fun. Before Cole’s declining mental state (presumably) that led to some incredibly dark stories at the end, before mysteriously taking his own life 60 years ago today. Sadly, the modern revamped version of his brilliant brainchild seems to be a one-note sexual predator with a Dane Cook sense of humor, but, as with all remakes or bastardizations of great source material, we’ll always have the originals.

For a much better understanding of the man and his work, I highly recommend visiting the excellent Cole’s Comics links on the right-hand side of this page.

For Cowards Only

I was fortunate enough to spend a Saturday evening at the Trylon Cinema for a showing of the 1959  William Castle classic House On Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price, Carol Ohmart, Elisha Cook, Richard Long and the sadly ill-fated Carolyn Craig. 

It was presented in a fashion akin to Castle's original "Emergo", where, near the end of the film, when a skeleton appears to rise from an acid pit in the titular house's basement, theaters would loose a plastic skeleton on a pulley system over the audience's heads for a scare. The Trylon's presentation had a staff member running in to the theater at the proper time, waving a glow-in-the-dark skeleton with blinking red light embellishments, and screaming as he made his rounds down the main aisles. 

I didn't get to stick around for the second feature, 1961's Homicidal, but I did get to sign the prefunctory waiver before entering the theater, and I got the FOR COWARDS ONLY novelty certificate ensuring I'd get my money back if I couldn't stomach the feature. At least I didn't have to take a seat in the COWARD'S CORNER in the lobby!

On the subject of Homicidal, I find it interesting that Hitchcock was inspired by House On Haunted Hill to make Psycho, and then Castle was inspired in-turn by Psycho to make Homicidal. It's no secret that Castle was a fan of Hitchcock's, and both were gimmick-meisters extraordinaire and clearly cut from the same cloth, even if one is largely considered comic book kitsch and the other highly-praised classic cinema. 

Trailers for House On Haunted Hill and Homicidal below.

Happy Halloween!

It was a pleasantly low-key Hallow's Eve here in the Secret Basement Laboratory. I made some baking powder biscuits, tried to calm my animals with each chime of the doorbell, and watched two Halloween-themed episodes of The Andy Griffith Show: "The Haunted House" (Season 4, Episode 2, from October 7th, 1963; also the episode that formed the foundation of The Ghost And Mr. Chicken when Don Knotts left the show to start his film career), and "Three Wishes For Opie" (Season 5, Episode 14, from December 21st, 1964). In the former Opie loses a baseball in The Old Rimshaw House and Barney, Gomer and Andy go in to retrieve it. The house appears to be haunted, but in fact is a front for moonshiners. The latter finds Barney with a fortune telling kit that has an eerily high batting average with granting wishes via the power of Count Ivan Teleky! (Even if some of them are based on misunderstandings.)

And while I was watching, I drew this guy!

I'm all about the simple pleasures.

Yes, in case you were wondering, I am a seventy-year-old in a thirty-seven-year-old's body. I believe someone once described me as "an old soul", which, in the parlance of the kids means that I'm a real square. A real L-7, daddy-o! 

The Cat In The Cactus Mask

The door separating the office block from the warehouse slammed shut behind me, and I pushed a hand through my hair to brush off the dust of the day as I crossed the parking lot to my car. It was quarter-past five, and being October, the daylight had already dwindled to dusk. I hadn’t seen the sky–or natural light for the matter–since my lunch break at noon. Since then the bright blue had bruised over for the most part, and the few rags of cloud sleepily floating in the darkened blue-grey, reflected in their folds the ember-glow of the setting sun, which had lingered at the horizon long enough to cook the lowest strip of visible sky medium-rare before continuing its slide to the other side of the globe. 

As I reached my car I paused, keys in hand, sucking in the welcome fresh air and weighing the ritual inanities of my personal life. What to do with one’s self on a lonely Thursday night? I could haunt the aisles of my favorite used book store, but I still had a small cityscape of unread novels waiting for me near my nightstand from the last visit. I suppose I could have stopped at one of the handful of small, quiet restaurants I frequent, grab a bite to eat before heading home to read one of those books and wait for sleep to drive me to bed.

The routine was comfortable, but in all honesty it had become a bit stale. The gears needed greasing with a liberal application of joie de vivre. 

Well, I didn’t want to fall into the trap of watching the sands of my evening slip to the lower half of the glass while trying to figure out what to do with it, so I got in my car and headed home. Halfway there I decided to pull in to the grocery store and find something for dinner, maybe break up the dregs a little. And it was there, in the vestibule between the two sets of sliding doors, that fate dropped a whopper into my shopping basket.

I didn’t see it at first, and I wouldn’t have at all if a little kid hadn’t pushed it on me. Or, rather, me onto it. I was walking through the skrish of the sliding door, into the carpeted entryway, as a little boy and his mother were coming out. The kid had one of those small junior shopping carts they give to children to push around so they can feel like they’re doing the shopping too; helping keep their little hands and minds occupied, so they’re less likely to get fidgety and cause a ruckus, and training them to be nice little consumers in turn. I heard “Ethan, watch your cart, honey!” and then found myself dancing to the left to avoid getting said junior shopping cart square in the kneecaps. I ran slam-bang into the cork bulletin board on the wall, feeling the jab of several plastic pushpin ends in my shoulder blades. They must’ve caught in my shirt, because as Ethan and his mother pushed through into the parking lot, her giving me an “I’m so sorry, he’s really a good boy” expression, without actually voicing an apology, I stepped away from the wall and heard them clatter to the floor along with a couple of the flyers that they had been tacking up.

I grabbed the handful of pages off the carpet—mostly ads for local Daycare providers, carpet cleaning services and lawn care businesses, when I came across this sheet of yellow paper with the most enigmatic promise on it:

OASIS SLIM PRESENTS: DESERT BLUES

ONE NIGHT ONLY

OCT. 6th 7PM

Maplewood Cultural Center

Desert blues. There was no description beyond the title and time and place; no picture of the performer or tag to the come-on “Desert Blues” to build up what it might mean. I have to admit I was intrigued. Normally I don’t go for local cultural events beyond the occasional movie on the weekend, but I had just been bemoaning how stale my routine had become. Maybe it was worth checking out. Having taken Friday as PTO for a much-needed three-day weekend, it wasn’t like I had to be at work in the morning,.

I bought my groceries and headed home, all the while pointlessly weighing the possible scenarios of what leaving the house and trying something new might bring. It’s a little head game I play with myself. All it really accomplishes is building my anxiety and keeping me a misanthropic shut-in; but I get excited about something and then create these two ideals in my head—one this incredibly fulfilling experience, the other a banal letdown—and then I let the two wrestle it out in the arena of my psyche until one dominates and I either pull myself up by my sneaker laces and go, or decide it’s probably not worth it and just stay in; maybe read another book or go to one of those handful of small, quiet restaurants and tell myself perhaps next time. 

It could be great, I thought. It sounded so exotic: Desert Blues. I was a blues fan—the old stuff; everything from Slim Harpo, Big Maybelle and Lead Belly to R.L. Burnside. I was still mulling it over when I got home. An internet search left me clueless and frustrated. Whoever Oasis Slim was, he didn’t have any semblance of an online presence. No social media accounts, no website, not even a cryptic review of a past show on some online bulletin board somewhere, and the Maplewood Cultural Center’s website had nothing to offer beyond what  bare bones information had been enigmatically printed on the flyer. Was it some local guy who played in his garage on the weekends? Someone more invested in the joy of performance than selling CDs or working a regular gig? If so, that would explain the lack of information online. Especially if he was older and maybe not so internet savvy. In that case, though, what if he was one of these boring suburban Strat’ slingers that considered Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughn the apotheosis of the genre? I wasn’t in the mood for an evening of middle-aged white guy bar blues.

Well, curiosity battered caution in the last round of deliberation, so I ate, cleaned myself up, and with a film of hesitance coating the inside of my mouth, headed to the Maplewood Cultural Center. 

I honestly don’t know what I was expecting. I pulled into the parking lot, a blacktop  patch in a cubby hole flanked by identical beige strip malls, and found myself nearly alone there. There were two or three other cars parked near the front of the building, which surely had to have belonged to whatever MCC staff were present. Maybe the date had been changed? I made my way through the front door of the Center, a squat redbrick building with some dark wood facade embellishments, and a foundation-to-roof A-frame peak on the front that led me to believe it had been a small church at some point. Inside I found two middle-aged women sitting at a card table, garbed in chunky sweaters, tasseled wool scarves, and fluorescent lighting so pale it almost looked green. On either side of them stood a darkened doorway.

Both of the women smiled as I approached. “Welcome!”

I proffered the yellow flyer.

“This is tonight, right?”

The woman closest to me took the sheet from me and studied it through her thick-lensed bifocals. “Oh, yes!” she replied, her smile somehow stretching even wider. “Right through the door behind me.” She jabbed a thumb at one of the darkened doorways. “It’s five dollars for the show, and the money goes right back into our cultural event support fund! Would you like some literature?”

There was a look of eager expectancy on her face, the way her hand went to a stack of folded pamphlets sitting on the table before her, but I really wasn’t concerned with their events calendar or whether the five bucks went to pay for future events or bags of that pink hand soap one was likely to find in the bathrooms.

“No thanks,” I replied sheepishly, handing her the five. It didn’t seem to diminish her smile any. She took the crumpled bill and dropped it into a small aluminum-colored cash box, then pressed a small hand stamp into an ink pad and raised it in my direction.

Seconds later I was maneuvering the aisles of the dim auditorium, a smudged smiley face stamped on the back of my right hand. There was a handful of people scattered throughout the room: a bored looking couple sitting in the back row, an elderly man with a houndstooth trilby and a meticulously manicured white beard up front on the right, someone I couldn’t quite make out a few rows behind him. I chose a spot in the middle, near the aisle, and waited.

There was no announcement, no emcee who stepped into the blazing circumference of a spotlight to tell us what was going to happen next. The smiling ladies from the foyer didn’t wander in to thank us for our attendance and gleefully tell us about what wonderful programming might be coming to the Maplewood Cultural Center in the upcoming weeks. The dim lights simply lowered further until the room was in total darkness, and then some scalloped stage lights flared to life. The stage, which had previously been a dark, black patch at the front of the room, was suddenly illuminated. A pair of crimson curtains parted slowly over a platform about six inches off the ground, and there, on a simple metal folding chair, small amp between his feet and sky-blue Fender guitar in his hands, sat Oasis Slim. 

I was dumbfounded.

He wore a grey wool suit with a white button-down dress shirt. The two black strands of a bolo tie dangled at either side of the descending strip of pearl-white buttons on the dress shirt, crowned by a steel clasp set with a small bird’s egg oblong of turquoise. His scuffed black dress shoes bookended the small guitar amp as if it might run off if he hadn’t. And his face…well, he didn’t have one. Not that I could see. You see, Oasis Slim’s head looked very much like a cactus, pricks and all.

Was this a put on? Some sort of theatrical flourish? Is this what was going to make the music Desert Blues—a cactus mask? I noticed that the backdrop behind Slim was a very stylized western desert scene that could’ve been pulled from the cover of any pulp cowboy magazine or novelty postcard, replete with a series of sandy plateaus fading into the distance, covered with whiskery cacti. A sun-bleached steer skull and busted wagon wheel nestled in the foreground under the watchful eye of a hungry tempera paint buzzard. 

Oh god! Had I stumbled into some esoteric amateur comedy act?

Well, it was weird, but I liked it! I felt like I was seeing something that hadn’t been seen before. And, if it had, how had Slim kept the lid on it so well? Someone—one of the couple in the back row—had chuckled at the reveal; otherwise the room was silent.

Finally, after seconds which had seemed to draw on for hours, Oasis Slim moved. His hand jerked from his guitar to his face—or his cactus rather; the movement quick and jerky, as if he were an animatronic display suddenly switched on. With a thumb and index finger, Slim chose one of the bone-colored needle stickers that covered his head, one from the area that would’ve been his right cheek had he had one, and plucked it out.

Without so much as a second’s hesitation, Slim gripped the needle between thumb and finger like a guitar pick, and began to play.

Whoever Oasis Slim was under that cactus mask, he must have been either damn good, or blind and playing purely by feel and muscle memory. There were no eye holes that I could see anywhere on that bizarre, bulbous green head. Slim started to play a basic twelve-bar blues riff without so much as a word of introduction. Just picking and pressing the strings into chords.

I noticed, a few minutes in, that the room seemed to grow warmer. I began to swab the roof of my mouth with my tongue, noticing my saliva had evaporated and leaving me with a bad case of cotton mouth. I could feel sweat start to bead at the back of my neck, right at the hairline, and trickle down my shoulders and spine like small beetles scurrying for shelter.

Slim played on but the music seemed to fade into the background. The songs were all instrumentals, and didn’t really have a beginning or end, at least not that I could tell. I felt a bit disoriented. I could still hear the tremolo of the strings around me, as if the soundtrack to some movie I found myself in, but the shadows and silhouettes of the dark theater had glommed together and become somehow faded, less definite. It was as if I’d developed some sort of miasma. I could see very little; all was a barely-lit darkness. I could swear, as the music continued, that I could feel the unfiltered heat of a desert sun baking my neck and face until it hurt. I felt downright feverish! I became aware of the coarse grit plastering my pores, the lethargy tempering my joints and muscles. 

There was the dry-hinge squawk of vultures somewhere overhead, but I couldn’t see them. The sensation of something brushing against my ankle caused me to grope for it in the darkness. For a second I froze, a cloud of ice blooming in my chest as my fingers found something rough and dry scuffing their tips, but a second investigation found only the coarse cotton weave of my socks.

Eventually the sensory spook show ended. The deluge of strange sensations ceased,   the darkness evaporated, and I found myself in the same raggedy seat in the same dark auditorium I’d sat down in. Slim, however, was gone. The few other people who had been in the theater were missing as well. 

I took a second to collect my thoughts–or to try rather, but there was little likelihood of any cogent brain activity. My skull was buzzing like a kicked hornets nest. 

Once I was sure my faculties were more or less in working order, I made my way to the lobby. The two women were still there, this time out from behind the card table and one was dragging a broom across the parquet floor, the other was half visible through a half-propped restroom door, doing the same with a mop.

“Have a good night!” chimed the woman with the broom. I wasn’t sure what to say, or necessarily how to say it, so I just nodded in her direction and kept moving towards the door.

Once I got home and sat down, made myself a cup of tea, I sat and tried to piece the evening together. An hour had passed from the time I’d walked into the Cultural Center to the time I’d gotten back into my car. And the kicker was, I wasn’t even entirely sure what had happened.

It was an experience, though. I have to admit that even though I wasn’t sure how to process what had just happened, my gamble had paid off in spades! I wasn’t likely to forget whatever it was for some time! More importantly, my thoughts strayed to Oasis Slim himself. How had he done what had he done? And, perhaps more importantly, that cactus head of his had just been a mask, right?

Shocktober Silver Screams Day 5: Svengoolie

It was going to happen sooner or later, so why not on a Saturday, when Rich Koz, aka Svengoolie, beams monster movie magnificence and jokes so old they were dusty during the height of vaudeville into our homes?

All you need to know can be seen over at Svengoolie.com

Shocktober Silver Screams Day 3: The Mummy

Day Three needs no explanation. I could go into the pre-code madness that is the great The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. I could point out how the opening title sequence alone is better than the sum total of most movies in the cineplex this very moment. I could gabba-gabba on and on about how it was directed by Karl Freund, who was the director of photography on Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Tod Browning's Dracula and John Huston's Key Largo.

Lobby card for Karl Freund's 1932 film The Mummy. Boris Karloff is wonderfully
billed here as "Karloff The Uncanny"! 

I could do all of this, or I could just show you my meager marker scribblin's in the semi-form of Boris Karloff as Adreth Bay / Imhotep, the titular Mummy. 

Shocktober Silver Screams Day 2: The Brain From Planet Arous

I went with a decidedly more comic book art approach for Day Two's material, since 1957's The Brain From Planet Arous is kind of the penultimate schlock fest that people either knowingly or unwittingly spoof and reference when they're poking fun and cracking wise about "bad" movies from the 1950s. 

The film is a thick slab of atomic age cheese, but a helluva fun watch. John Agar, prince of the B's, plays a nuclear scientist who becomes possessed by a cosmic brain from the planet Arous. Gor, the brain in question, has a taste for world domination, and, after being introduced to Earth women vis a vis Agar's fiancee Sally (Joyce Meadows), becomes a big ol' floating mass of prurient interests. Of course another, kindlier brain is trying to stop Gor; his name is Vol, and he hides himself in Agar's fiancee's dog.

A lobby card featuring John Agar with his "possessed" foil-lined contacts,
the very same used by Gary Lockwood on the Star Trek episode "Where No
Man Has Gone Before."

The film was directed by Nathan H. Juran, a Jewish Romanian filmmaker whose family emigrated to the USA and settled in Minneapolis, where Juran studied architecture. He did eventually set up his own architecture office in Massachusetts, but the Great Depression forced him to try his hand at freelance illustration due to the construction freeze. He found work as an art director in Los Angeles and was nominated for Academy Awards for his work on John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1942) and the 1946 film The Razor's Edge. He did win the award for How Green Was My Valley, but eventually moved out of the art department and into the director's chair for some Audie Murphy westerns and, eventually, landing a deal at Universal, directed some of the classics of 1950s b-cinema; most notably The Deadly Mantis, Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and 20 Million Miles To Earth (both with Ray Harryhausen!). 

Apparently Juran wasn't too thrilled with his horny world-enslaving brain picture, because he changed his name in the credits to Nathan Hertz. The film received more jeers than cheers, but found a new life in the fallout as a cult classic. You can see a neat press package from Howco International films at the great Zombo's Closet website.

Scribble Art

Wild!

Here's a quickie pen doodle I did while in bed on a Friday night, waiting to fall asleep. Something in the vein of the men's interest magazines of the 1950s and 60s. 

The House of Hebe

The Fifth Street entrance to the WPL. It was the building's main entrance until 1987
when the Johnson Street entrance was opened to alleviate congestion.

This is going to fall into the "Why would I care?" category for potential readers of this blog.

The Winona Public Library was a special place for me as a child and a younger man. When I was young, it was a place where I could be quiet–nay, expected to be quiet!–and not have to fear the oratorial repercussions from anyone regarding such, and how not running at the mouth at all times is somehow less than what I should be contributing to society as an upstanding, normal human being. (This was a frequent discussion had at me by teachers, parents, friends of my parents, parents of friends, other students, for most of my first 18 years.) It was a place where learning was fostered and exploring other worlds, other points of view, and thusly broadening and questioning my horizons as a bi-product, was de rigueur, and the other side of the mirror as far as the environment I was subjected to at home.

The second floor book shelves. You can see the little red
skull icons on the spine tags on the right. There are little
red rocket ships for science fiction / fantasy as well. 

 If you want more historical information on the building, you can read an excellent write-up here, on the WPL's own website. These pictures were snapped this past August, when I stepped inside to revisit for the first time in decades. It looked about the same, though, as the old cliche goes, somewhat smaller than I remembered it.

The glass floors of the third and fourth floor book rooms.

Before the Winona Middle School was condemned (a long overdue decision, believe me,) it was right next door, nestled up against the back of the library. When I was in junior high, as soon as the bell rang for the day, I would often walk next door and set myself up in the reading room with a small stack of books until someone could pick me up.

Statue of Hebe in the Reading Room.

The Winona Public Library was where I fell in love with dinosaurs and where I found the Crestwood House monster movie books (pictured below), based on classic monster movies from the 1930s and 40s. I must've checked each book out about a hundred times. Apparently they've become quite the collector's item, as they're going for ridiculous prices on Amazon and eBay.  It was simultaneously mind boggling and comforting to know that there were other people out there that had somehow cultivated the same tastes I had; even at nine years-old it was reassuring that the world didn't just cater to the standard set of interests that seemed to be endemic to most of the people I met or knew. Here were books that fed these interests, in a place where I wasn't judged for indulging in them, while at home I was often lambasted for liking "monsters and make-believe", when the preferred route prescribed by my parents was more in the areas of discharging firearms and riding ATVs through mud pits.

The Winona Public Library is where I met Tarzan, Johnny Dixon, The Shadow (there were cassette libraries in the books-on-tape section with old time radio shows on them), Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, James Bond, Stanislaw Lem, Charles Beaumont, H.P. Lovecraft, Terry Pratchett, and so many more. When I became interested in art–really interested, not just copying images from comic books into notebooks to see if I could draw Wolverine the way the pros did–it was where I went to learn about art: art history, different artists from different time periods, art techniques...anything beyond the ubiquitous Terry Redlin and Maija prints that my relatives and their associates seemed to believe were the sum total of true artistic expression.

Factual information and education seem to have fallen into disrepair in the world around me. I know that that's a sweeping generalization made by an aging misanthrope, but we have these alleged wonder machines in the palms of our hands that are supposed to be able to connect us to answers–any answer to any conceivable question–in mere seconds, but what we've cultivated is a planet actually utilizing "alternative facts" and so distracted and disconnected from each other, that someone actually had to create a visual calling program called Facetime, so people could actually engage in some without pulling their eyes away from their cellphones. 

But I digress.

I think it's important that libraries remain an accessible social institution. We need houses of knowledge and resources and wisdom and escape that cater to all people from all walks of life on the same level. It's important that we have impartial knowledge to pass on to future generations, should, heaven help us, they be interested in "actual facts" at that point.

Long live the public library system, and long live the Winona Public Library; the refuge for an introverted child with interests and ideas beyond counting out life in increments of factory shifts between beer binges, hunting trips and "reality television".

Jimmie Lunceford

Here's a Doodle-A-Day card with a quick portrait I did of big band leader/ alto saxophonist Jimmie Lunceford. You can see him in action directing his swing orchestra in the 1935 short below.

Kong Goes Surfing

Here's another Doodle-A-Day card from yesterday.

The Wild World Of Exotica

Here are some mixed media pieces I did on a small pad of "printmaker's paper" which seems to be a sort of heavy stock combo watercolor / bristol board. I don't know if anyone would actually use it for screen-printing or lithography since the sheets appear to be postcard sized. 

Anywho, a mix of gouache, marker, Copic pen and graphite were used on these odes to the mid-century exotica craze and the floor shows of 1930s night clubs. 

Have I Got Noose For You!

Here's an impulse piece I made in my sketchbook. I wanted to do a bendy stage magician, the old fashioned type that used to travel from town to town, putting on shows at local theaters. I suppose that that's been a dead art for over half a century now. Now you mostly see "illusionists" at prom after-parties, corporate events and with residencies in Las Vegas or something. 

Anywho, I made this colored pencil piece up over the course of an afternoon. When I posted it on Instagram I got a lot of likes. Primarily from prestidigitators who will soon be sorely disappointed to learn I don't post a lot of magic-themed material.

A Night In The Cemetery

One of the amazing things that I've gotten to do over the last few years (this was the fourth, I believe) that falls into the category of "I can't believe I get to experience this!" but somehow had the good fortune to be a part of, is the Trylon Cinema and The Friends of the Cemetery "Cinema In The Cemetery" event. Over the last four Septembers I've gotten to sit in Minneapolis's oldest cemetery, the Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery on Cedar Avenue, and watch old horror films screened on a small screen erected directly in front of the caretaker's cottage. If you had told monster movie-obsessed child-me that I'd get to sit and watch Vincent Price in The Last Man On Earth or Hammer Films' Dracula in a cemetery, I'd have thought you were either bonkers or trying to sell me a line. 

Not only did that happen, but twice–during the first year, watching El Santo And Blue Demon Against The Monsters, and the following year during Dracula, of all things–the scene was complete with a full, blood-red harvest moon!

This year the program was a little different. The Trylon usually creates a theme, and runs one film per Saturday along that theme for the month of September. One year it was all Hammer Films productions; last year was a month of Vincent Price films, etcetera. This year there was only one outing scheduled, for whatever reason, and it was a showing of the 1924 silent classic The Hands Of Orlac, directed by Robert Wiene and starring Conrad Veidt as the titular Orlac. Being a silent film, of course, the music was crucial, and this was supplied not by pre-recorded soundtrack, but by a live ensemble called Spider Hospital. You can hear a piece of the music here.

I took my sketchbook along and did some doodling during the brief period of waning daylight before the show started. I didn't get much on paper before it was too dark to see, but that's fine. I was there to watch the movie, and the movie was great. The only irksome thing cantankerous old me finds with these outdoor screenings, is the crowd is often a mixed bag. Some old folks who remember the films and have remained fans, some film buffs out to catch a classic in an unique environment, and those who've shown up for a novel experience–usually families looking for something to do besides sit around the house and ask what there is to do. I generally have my Svengoolie shirt on at these things (solidarity is important) and usually get one or two middle-aged guys who point at the glow-in-the-dark design and say "That's what I'd be watching if I wasn't here tonight." 

Some sketches of headstones.

I'm no puritan when it comes to the film viewing experience; unless there's someone gabbing on their cell phone during the picture, or standing in front of the screen, everyone's allowed to have a good time watching a movie. But I've found these things have a tendency to turn into amateur Mystery Science Theater 3000 events. Yes, films from the beginning or middle of the last century have elements that don't translate well to people who don't have the context or reverence for the material that I or other fans of the films might have. Especially when the film is a silent film. Of course there's no dialogue for the actors to utilize to help convey emotion or context, so they have to over emphasize body language and facial expression. Every concerned character becomes a wide-eyed, chest-clutching basket case on the  verge of a nervous breakdown, every swooning lover becomes a creepily melodramatic, bewildered caricature. It looks goofy to the CGI generations and that's understandable, but to constantly lambast and heckle the material and performances as if we were sitting around at the Internet Cat Video Festival gets a bit irritating after a while. Same goes for the guy sitting next to me who spent nearly all of the ninety-two minute running time scrolling through his various social media streams on his cell phone. Apparently the comments he was receiving in response to the comments he made on some picture of something was more riveting than what he'd paid $10 to experience.

I don't know why there aren't more events scheduled this month. Hopefully disgraceful acts like this won't prevent future screenings.

Rattlesnake Skeleton in the Moonlight

This is a minimalist painting I did on some black construction paper. I felt like utilizing the existing darkness as suggestive space, so I could hint at shapes and create more of a mood than a realistic depiction of what a rattlesnake skeleton or a cactus would actually look like. This is gouache with a little bit of acrylic. 

Sasquatch

Here's a large piece I've been working on a bit each day for a while now. It looks a little off because my scanner bed doesn't facilitate the scanning of the entire piece at once (it's about 10 7/8" by 15"). Also I'm no longer technologically inclined enough to be smart enough to press down on the scanner lid so the bottom edge isn't so blurry.

Submitted here, for your approval: A giant sasquatch in a stocking cap traipsing through a Minnesota landscape of unspecific locale. 

A Few More Drawings

Space Tiki!

As you may or may not know, I've been trying to do a "doodle-a-day" drawing exercise. I've found myself sitting down to the old sketchbook and ending up more frustrated than productive. I think the major barriers are: A) Coming up with something I feel deserves the time and paper, and B) Trying so hard to make something I think I'll feel proud of, that it stymies my attempt to do anything at all, which is counterproductive and antithetical to the whole sketchbook idea in the first place, right?

Spectral Luchador!

So the whole idea of my doing a doodle a day was to help loosen myself up and just engross myself in something that only had to be as fleshed out as it ended up being, using whatever medium I felt like, with whatever subject matter rattled to the front of my little mind. I know I tend to have a variety of styles, in that sometimes I like to do more comic book-y cartoonish illustration, and other times I really like breaking out the pencils and trying to do something a bit more "arty" if that makes sense.

Anyway, here are some more recent doodles.

The Curse Of The Ghost Of Dracula's Skeleton!

Ugh!

Fedora The Explorer

Here's a little comic I made.

The Bling Of Death

Here's an unflattering scan of an acrylic piece I've been working on. The washed out purple parts – the aura behind the coffin headpiece, the highlights on the folded bat arms and on the left side of the face, etcetera – are supposed to actually be a brilliant bubble gum pink. For some reason my scanner is washing them out, but, to quote The Ramones, "What can you do?" 

Until I get a proper snapshot of the color-correct version, this'll have to do.

**Update**

Here's a picture taken with an iPhone. It's still not great–it looks very orange now from the lighting in the room, and the phone's camera, but it's definitely a better representation of the colors used.

SBL Sunday Supplement

I am an introverted loner by nature, and a historian by proclivity. Hence this blog. Why the recent focus on Winona? you might ask. It's my hometown. It's where I grew up. True, I've not had a permanent residence in the Island City (which isn't really an island, by the way) in fifteen years, and haven't lived there for closer to twenty; and for a plethora of reasons that aren't important to this post, I don't foresee myself moving back anytime in the near or not-so-near future. When you're a child you don't necessarily think about place and existence beyond "this is where I live because it's where I was born and it's my town" and you simply exist and your life happens and that is your world; but when you get older, for some of us, we find that life isn't a plot of land where existence simply flourishes around you, but rather a roller coaster track of dubious construction that twists you and pulls you until you find a cart of reasonable comfort operating at a tolerable speed, and you nestle in, hoping that the wheels stay on the rails and that you don't spend too much time puking over the side. But I love history and research, and thoroughly enjoy excavating lost artifacts of my hometown's past. I miss many things about the town, both geographic places that have garnered a personal patina of sentimentality in my mind, the the few people still there with whom I am lucky enough to call myself friend. I now live on the East side of St. Paul, our state's grand capital. I've never been an urbanite. There are many things I now take for granted living in a metropolitan area that I never could have experienced staying in a small factory-and-college town, but I definitely prefer the small town quality of living compared to the chipped concrete-coated sprawl I find myself now maneuvering around. But I digress.

Here are a couple of ads from the Winona Daily News for programming on KNWO 1230 on the AM dial. It was Winona's first local station, going on the air in 1938, and solely remained "The Talk Of Winona" until 1957, when KAGE joined the broadcast family. 

I became a regular listener to KWNO during my days in junior high and high school. As a chronic insomniac, I would often find myself up at all hours of the night, either unable to fall asleep or fall back asleep should I have gotten up to use the restroom or something. It's a problem that persists to this day. At the time, KWNO broadcasted Coast To Coast AM with Art Bell from midnight until two a.m. (it was a three hour show), and then the first two hours of the program were looped again until five o'clock, when local news or right-wing talk radio would come on the air. The when and where of Kiwanis Club luncheons or the views of Rush Limbaugh have never been of particular interest to me, but an all-night radio program devoted to the bizarre, which gave equal opportunity to experts, skeptics and plain-bonkers sociopaths, was right up my alley.

I thought, being about radio, this was a perfect segue into the second episode of my Secret Basement Laboratory Radio Theater program. Last time, in episode one, I presented a couple of radio programs featuring wisecracking detectives. This time I thought I would provide a show of weather-appropriate programming, meaning short-shorts. Short radio programs were essential for padding out scheduling blocks back in the day of old time radio. It was essential because they could fill out local news and weather breaks, and ingenious because, though the programs ran only from ten to fifteen minutes or so, they could be serialized adventures divvied up into several episodic chunks, which might hook listeners and keep them tuning in to hear the other parts of the play.

I've compiled a nice assortment of programs for you here. We're starting off with a Believe It Or Not minute, a fifty-second or so program created sans-commercials by Robert Ripley as an extension of his then-booming Ripley's Believe It

Robert Ripley and friend.

Or Not brand of sideshow entertainment where two bizarre–and "true"–factoids are related to the listener. I've selected one that briefly relates the attempts to poison Thomas Overbury, the English poet and essayist who was thrown into the Tower Of London after raising the ire of James I (King of England) and a scandal ensued. Here he is dubbed "The Iron Man" for surviving the poisonous diet he was fed and survived.

Second, we have an episode of Blackstone, The Magic Detective from Nov. 28th, 1948. For more information about the personnel behind the show–no, Blackstone the magician wasn't actually playing himself–go to this excellent write-up with mp3s of many more episodes. The particular episode I've chosen for inclusion here is episode nine: "The Ghost That Wasn't."

Thirdly is an eight minute quickie from Calling All Detectives, a one man operation by personality Paul Barnes, who does all the voices. And it shows. This was a novelty show in that Barnes would call a listener to try and get them to solve the crime before revealing the whodunnit. This episode, "Morgue Nightclub Is A Setting For Death" is episode No. 366, originally broadcast on February 3rd, 1949.

I've included another Believe It Or Not in the intermission, this episode (no. 6) about a witchdoctor who had to wear a mask to change his identity. Talk about government red tape!

Cugi and cocktail.

Next we have a musical program! Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands, a Coca-Cola sponsored big band program ran for fifteen minutes, Monday through Friday for a brief period starting in 1941. Each episode featured a "spotlight" on a different band. The one I've chosen features a personal favorite of mine: Xavier Cugat. Cugi was a Spanish bandleader who moved to Cuba and became the Rhumba king of the American music world. He's also famous (or infamous) for thrusting Charo on an unsuspecting world. 

Finally, I present to you a Ripley's competitor–Strange As It Seems, also based off of a syndicated bizarre minutiae factoid comic strip, presented by illustrator John Hix. Unlike Ripley's, which invited you to "believe it or not", Hix claimed that all of his bizarre facts were "...verified by a minimum of three sources." The show was sponsored by Ex-Lax, which will be evident as the commercial at the beginning of the program takes up a good minute-and-a-half, trying to convince you of all the chocolatey wonder that is everyone's favorite laxative. This particularly interesting episode is about a baby spy during the French revolution. The spy wasn't really a baby, but a 23" tall dwarf named Richebourg. He did in fact exist, and is listed in the Guinness Book Of World Records as "Shortest Spy".

As a bonus treat, I've rounded out the program with two tracks from Xavier Cugat. "Flute Nightmare" was released in 1954, utilized in the film The Americano, starring Glenn Ford and directed by William Castle of all people! The other is the b-side to a Mercury Records single released in 1952, titled "Jungle Flute."

Enjoy!