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?