I have willed these paintings to the Museum of Bad Art

Well...actually not yet. I haven’t put these fabulous bad art paintings in my will just yet, because I haven't written my will. But when I do, I hope I’m enough of sound mind to remember that it is in a museum that these paintings belong.

If you’re wondering about the Museum of Bad Art, here’s a story that ran on CBS Sunday Morning, March 16, 2014:


The video may take a moment or two to boot up. Also, if you just get a black screen and nothing ever comes up then it was removed by CBS, not by me.

I found these earnest but awful paintings at a thrift store years ago for $1.00 each, and I practically wept with joy. To me they are beautiful in their awfulness. Bad perspective, bad drawing, bad everything. The only thing redeemable about the paintings is the foliage is done in an impasto technique, where the paint is built up, almost 3-D in its effect.

“The Pink House” (my title) is built on a hill, with a driveway that apparently goes straight down...to where? We can’t see. Within the walls of the Pink House, also unseen by us, is a master gardener who has lavished much time on the flowerbeds. Based on the mailbox flag being up, the resident has also left a letter for the mail carrier to pick up. A happy, bucolic, spring scene: pretty flowers and blossoming trees.

“Monster Children on the Lawn” (again, my title), are playing with what look like canes, and have something resembling a ball they are probably using the canes to hit. It looks more like a pumpkin, but like “The Pink House” this picture looks very springlike, so I assume it’s a ball.

What is interesting to me is the children have no faces, as shown in this detail.

The children may not have faces, but the ball appears to have a face. More likely just random brush strokes by the painter, but this detail reminds me of Georges Mèliés’ Voyage to the Moon.

 Fantastique! Fabuleux! as our French friends might say.

I think you will agree that these paintings belong in a museum, especially the Museum of Bad Art.

Rare air in Utah: healthy bodies, unhealthy minds

Utah has a split personality when it comes to personal health. An article in the February 16, 2014 Salt Lake Tribune claims Utah is one of the states with the healthiest residents. That’s no great surprise. We are like the lyric from an Adam Ant song, “Don't drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?” On the other hand, we have high rates of mental disorders.

According to the copyrighted article, written by Kristen Moulton:

“While both trends have been apparent for years, there’s still no definitive research into why Utahns suffer the highest rate of mental illness while also enjoying relatively good health and well-being.

There are plenty of theories, though, many having to do with cultural influences of the predominant faith [Latter-day Saints/Mormons], a dearth of psychiatrists and inadequate health insurance even while healthy living is prized, and the fact that statistics can be interpreted in differing ways.”

Whenever I read anything about the mental health of my fellow Utahns it always comes out that more people in Utah are treated for depression.  And that could be that more people in the state recognize the symptoms and seek help. Depression, as I once heard it described, is the “common cold of mental illnesses.” The large number of residents treated for that condition could be skewing the results toward higher rates of mental illness. .

Nationwide I’ve found there is still a dearth of public knowledge about what mental illness is, and many still view it as being a defect in character rather than a brain disorder with an organic cause.

The Tribune article goes on to give at least one other hypothesis for higher-than-average rates of mental illness:

“But one idea continues to gain ground in mental health circles: Mental illness might sometimes be linked to altitude.

The theory places Utah in the wider context of Rocky Mountain states, which generally see the same pattern: high mental illness and suicide but otherwise healthy residents. The region is sometimes called the suicide belt.”

Suicide belt! I hadn’t heard that before. It wouldn’t fit in with the state’s tourism advertising for our national parks and skiing to mention we are also in the suicide belt. And I don’t doubt that living in rarified air could have a consequences for the brain. It would also explain why I feel better and have more energy when I go to sea level. My brain can breathe!

I’ve never been embarrassed to admit I take an anti-depressant, and have for almost twenty years. I trace my major depressive episodes back to six-years-old, and have sometimes thought of my life up until my mid-forties as being at least one serious depressive episode a year. It got worse over the years, when the episodes started coming more frequently. Even though I have clinical depression I don’t think of it as a mental illness. But the health profession, and the folks who provide my medical insurance classify me as a mental case. I see myself as someone with a medical problem, not unlike having diabetes or any number of organic diseases that have to be managed if they cannot be cured. I wish the rest of the public saw it the same way.

P.T. Barnum’s London Scrapbook

Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in an agriculture rich area of Connecticut. A good student and later an astute businessman, he had the gift of making money. He opened Barnum’s American Museum in New York City, the city’s most popular attraction for 23 years from 1842 until 1865. After going into the circus business — at age 61 — he joined forces with James Bailey and his Traveling London Circus for a combined operation as “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

Barnum died in 1891. He was a 19th century man, having lived and died exclusively in that century. In his time he established the template for self-promotion, showmanship, publicity, flamboyance and hucksterism still followed by his spiritual descendants today.

In this article from the December 1961 issue of American Heritage, artifacts and ephemera that Barnum saved for his daughter in a scrapbook are shown, celebrating his triumphant series of shows in London in 1889.

For all of his humbugs, fakes, exaggerations and outright lies, Barnum is now renowned as a master showman and public manipulator. It is also interesting that the most famous saying attributed to him, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” was never said by Barnum, but by a man suing him. I guess that pithy remark has been sealed to him because it sounds like something he might say. It is “just so P.T. Barnum.”

Copyright © 1961 American Heritage

Fish stories in heaven

There were a couple of obituaries on the same page of the Salt Lake Tribune this morning. The obit pictures show each as fishermen holding catches they are proud of.

I’m no connoisseur of fish, but both look pretty good-sized to me, which is why these men are holding their trophies up for a photo. After all, when fishermen swap stories, the legend is they always exaggerate the “one that got away,” so Sam and Jackie are making sure their fish are documented.

Big fish.

Really big fish.

If there is a heaven and Jackie and Sam are there now, maybe they are swapping fish stories. Heaven to them would be a boat on a placid lake, and no limit to how many they can catch.

If the families of either of these gentlemen happen across this blog, I want them to know I sympathize with what they are going through. My best friend’s father died this week, and my mind is on those who are grieving.

Anne Hathaway, time traveler?

T. N. Thompson was an assistant to pin-up artist Earl MacPherson. When MacPherson contracted polio in 1950 Thompson came into his own as a calendar artist.

These are some examples of his art from a 1957 calendar. I did a doubletake when I saw them, recognizing a face.

Actress Anne Hathaway has the face I recognized.

So what happened? Did Hathaway, who was born in 1982, dip back into the past to pose for Thompson and his 1957 calendar? Not very likely, but there is a striking resemblance to the modern actress and the beautiful model Thompson used to pose for these paintings.

“Can I get a divorce in heaven?”

For several years Lois (not her real name), who is a devout Latter-day Saint, has been a close family friend. Despite the fact that Sally and I dropped out of the Mormon church when we were teenagers and Lois knows it, she sometimes shares with us stories about her church and its impact on her everyday life. Recently Lois, who is our age, told of her father who is now 93 and ailing. Because Lois’s parents were also raised devout Mormons her mother and father were married in a temple ceremony for “time and all eternity.” It is necessary in their religion to attain the highest degree of Mormon heaven, the Celestial Kingdom,* where they are promised they will live in the presence of God.

Lois’s mother died several years ago. Her father did not really want to re-marry after his wife died, but a lady in his Mormon congregation wanted to marry him. They reached an accommodation. Since an LDS man can have several wives “sealed” to him, he is allowed to re-marry in a temple ceremony and those women will be with him and his first wife in heaven. Sounds weird, but it’s a legacy of their early belief in earthly polygamy as applied to the afterlife. It gives something of a lie to official Mormon statements that the modern church eschews polygamy. On this earth, that is. So Lois’s dad, who probably figures his late wife won’t appreciate seeing him in heaven with another wife in tow, had a prenuptial agreement with the second wife that they not be sealed for time and all eternity, but a “‘til death do us part” marriage.

The old man is ill, needs transfusions quite often, and is ready to die. The second wife is prolonging the inevitable by making sure he gets medical care. The other problem is while he may not wish to be sealed to the woman for time and all eternity, when he dies she can petition her ecclesiastical authorities to be sealed to him. According to Lois this is causing the old man quite a bit of distress.

“Do you think when I get to the other side I can clear this whole thing up?” he asked Lois. In other words, even if wife #2 is sealed to him can he break that bond somehow with a heavenly divorce?

Lois has an opinion that no, what God hath joined together, et cetera, et cetera, and poor Dad will end up in heaven with some baggage in the form of that second wife. To us outside the Mormon church it seems an odd thing to worry about, but they are serious about it. There are temple divorces on earth, and they can happen for purposes of adultery, abuse and abandonment and all the other reasons people are divorced on earth. But he can’t get a preemptive divorce for his heavenly state. I can just imagine the poor guy, sick and old, lying in bed, thinking of the consequences of him dying and showing up at heaven’s door, then trying to explain to his wife that sooner or later she will have a sister-wife..

It is a complication of applying earthly standards to a heaven and afterlife, especially if one strove to deserve such a reward during one’s entire life. Had I been Lois in that situation I would have comforted her elderly father by telling him I’m sure he'll be able to work it out. But then, I don’t share her faith, and of course she was being honest with him to the best of her knowledge of their shared beliefs.

It does make my own problems, which involve all-too-earthly vexations, seem minor by comparison to what this old gentlemen is worrying about. A belief in an afterlife usually involves a belief that one will be free of earthly cares, not pick up other problems — like an unwanted wife — in heaven.


*Temple marriage is not a right for an LDS couple; they have to be worthy. It creates some problems amongst family members who aren’t, and are not allowed to witness the actual wedding ceremony because they are excluded from the temple. They can be deemed unworthy for a variety of reasons, from very serious to what I think is almost frivolous, like drinking coffee, but that’s their religion. A local humor columnist, who is also LDS, opined that it means you could be in heaven not with family members like parents and siblings you might really like to be with because they weren’t worthy, but people whom you hated on earth who were.

Happy birthday George Washington from Jacky’s Diary

Jack Mendelsohn has been providing us laughs for decades. We might just not recognize the name. Among other things he has written are the Carol Burnett Show and the Yellow Submarine animated movie. He is a talented humorist but also a cartoonist who had a hit over 50 years ago with his Sunday comic strip, Jacky’s Diary (by Jacky Mendelsohn, age 31 1/2).

My brother and I read and loved the strip for the three years it was in our local newspaper. I found out from a book reprinting the entire three-year run of the strip, published by IDW and produced by Craig Yoe and his wife, Clizia Gussoni, that the strip was killed because it was too much of a hassle for the syndicate to prepare it for overseas publication. I imagine the child-like drawing is self-explanatory but there is a lot of wordplay going on, where Jacky substitutes words like “finely” for “finally” and “gruesome” for “grew some”...I imagine translating it would take some doing.

These two strips, which I have scanned from the book, celebrate today’s event, the anniversary of George Washington’s birth. (For the record, G.W. is 282 years old today.) Jacky gives the Washington story his own unique perspective. In other words, funny.

Copyright © 1959, 1960 King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Digital scans from the book are © 2013 Gussoni-Yoe Studio, Inc.

John Christie, the soft-spoken murderer

John Reginald Halliday Christie is one of those infamous serial killers who, by dint of his crimes and the era, has risen above the usual lot of fellow sociopaths who commit such atrocities. In England, where Christie lived and killed his victims, his murders and the aftermath brought about a change in the law concerning capital punishment.

I watched a DVD of 10 Rillington Place, which I first saw on its initial theatrical run in 1971. (It was on a double-bill with a re-release of Psycho, no less.) What I had remembered about the movie before watching it again 43 years later was the grim tone of the story, set in 1949, and its locale, a poor neighborhood with Dickensian living conditions. That London neighborhood has since been razed  and no longer exists.

I also remember the performance of Richard Attenborough as Christie, who spoke in a very soft voice even during the act of murder. A soft-spoken man with sinister purpose. Here, in an early scene in the movie, he lulls his victim with assurances, then gasses her into unconsciousness before killing her.

Christie, as I’ve read in various accounts of his life and crimes, was gassed in World War I, and claimed to have lost his voice for a few years. When he regained it he couldn’t speak much above a whisper. He was also supposed to have a bad back, which he used to excuse not working. His bad back didn’t prevent him from burying some of his victims in the garden, as shown in a chilling scene where his spade unearths remains of an earlier victim.

The movie touches on those things, but mainly focuses on his relationship with the family of Timothy and Beryl Evans, who rented an upstairs flat at the same address. Evans, played by John Hurt, was a van driver and liar with grandiose claims (among them that his father was an Italian count). He was also an illiterate with an IQ of 70. When his wife, Beryl (played by Judy Geeson), became pregnant and wanted an abortion, Christie, who was a poseur claiming to have medical training, told her he could do it. He then murdered the trusting Mrs. Evans and as was his M.O., raped her as he strangled her (we are spared graphic details, but get the drift of what is happening). 

It was to be the beginning of a series of events which led to Evans being charged with his wife’s murder, hanged for the crime, and then Christie’s own eventual confession. Because of the apparent miscarriage of justice and after much debate, several years later capital punishment in Britain was ended.

Christie went on to murder his wife, and eventually moved from Rillington Place. When the bodies were discovered he went on the run but was caught and confessed. He was hanged in 1955.

I have never forgotten the performances in this movie, and my first exposure to both Attenborough and Hurt. Hurt did an acting job I still marvel at today, playing a man who just doesn’t quite grasp what is going on around him.

Although it isn’t shown in the film, the real life Christie did consort with prostitutes, and some of them were victims. In reading various accounts of Christie’s history in several Internet articles (and beware the Internet and its accuracy, because several of the articles just lift whole pieces out of Wikipedia) I did not read about Christie being a Saturday morning pornographer, taking photos of prostitutes. That claim is made in this article from a sleazy 1970 magazine, Crime Does Not Pay (not to be confused with the infamous comic book of the same name). The cover is based on Christie’s crimes, yet doesn’t attempt to capture his actual appearance.

Christie’s life has been well covered by biographers and true crime writers. The movie is based on Ludovic Kennedy’s book, Ten Rillington Place. I have found there are two schools of thought on Evans’ guilt or innocence, One, that Evans was innocent of murdering his wife, as Kennedy claims, or that he killed her and claimed Christie did it, as some other biographies claim (the “two stranglers in one house” theory). The film took the Evans-was-innocent story. I am neutral in such an argument, since I don’t have all of the literature concerning the case, but that innocent theory is also held by this article. “The Sex-Mad Strangler Who Raped the Dead!” is written as titillation to sell a magazine, and I won’t vouch for its accuracy, but it is an article people who have read copious amounts of information on the case may not have read. It was reading this article that prompted me to rent the DVD.

Take it for what it’s worth; the article is not signed, after all.

Happy alien abduction Valentine’s Day!

I found these eerie alien-abduction Valentines still in their original box (above) at a local thrift store some years ago. They are dated 2000. I wonder if some mom was pressured into buying this box of Valentines by a child, then had second thoughts about them, relegating them to the donation bin?

Over a decade ago when pictures of the bug-eyed aliens were popular on t-shirts, posters, and even Valentine cards, a coworker of mine, Ben, was actually spooked. I think he’d heard of abductions and alien anal probes as part of medical experiments on helpless humans aboard their spacecraft, and he didn’t like to think about it.

I told him (with a straight face), “The government is behind it, you know. They are having companies put these images out there because they plan to eventually introduce the public to the aliens, who have been here on earth as guests of the U.S.”

His head whipped around and I swear his eyes were as big as those alien eyes. “Stop it, man! You’re scaring me!” From his expression, I believed I was.

Visitors cards ™ and © Miekeljohn Graphics, UK

Chasing Bigfoot‘s ghost

Bigfoot is a good example of a creature that some people swear exists, even without the kind of evidence that is produced when a species shows up in the flesh (think cœlacanth, the prehistoric fish caught in the Amazon, thought extinct since the Cretaceous). My thinking about Bigfoot is when someone catches one show me and then I’ll believe it.

When it comes to animals that may or may not exist in nature hiding in our forests or lakes, we also must consider how many species of critters live on this planet. After googling a question on the number I found this surprising answer from Nature, according to Lee Sweetlove:  

        “There are 8.7 million eukaryotic species on our planet — give or take 1.3 million. The latest biodiversity estimate, based on a new method of prediction, dramatically narrows the range of best guesses which was previously between 3 million and 100 million. It means that a staggering 86% of land species and 91% of marine species remain undiscovered.”

If we accept those numbers that is one helluva lot of species that have not been identified.*

But we were speaking of Bigfoot, weren‘t we? So is it possible for a Bigfoot to be hiding from us in the woods or not? Based on the sheer weight of numbers of so-far unidentified species you could safely say yes. But not so fast. In the 2013 book, Nick Redfern‘s Monster Files, from Chapter 21, “Specters and phantimals” author Redfern writes:

    “Despite the fact that there have been literally thousands of sightings of Bigfoot within the forests of North American, spanning a period of at least several centuries, each and every attempt to identify, trap or kill even one such animal has ended in complete and utter failure. Unlike just about every other animal in the United States, no Bigfoot has ever had the misfortune of being hit by a car or truck and killed, nor has anyone ever stumbled across the corpse of one of these elusive animals.”

Redfern then goes on to explain what it would take to feed a Bigfoot, based on what is known of an observable creature in the wild:

    “Given its immense size and build, Bigfoot, for example, would likely require a massive intake of food on a daily basis After all, a fully grown silverback gorilla requires an average of 45 pounds of food per day — and that's just for one animal! Indeed, one of the reasons why it is so easy to track the movements and activities of gorillas is the clear and undeniable evidence of their constant, massive foraging for food. Bigfoot rarely, if ever, demonstrates such evidence of its culinary delights.  . . . For the most part the hard evidence of its eating habits — which would have to be absolutely tremendous, considering the eyewitness reports describing creatures reaching heights of 8 feet and weights of an estimated 300 to 600 pounds — is inexplicably lacking.”

But at least one person has an answer why there are Bigfoot sightings, and yet no actual Bigfoots to be caught. They're ghosts! Redfern quotes paranormal expert Joshua P. Warren, who Redfern says told him of “the possiblity that the ghostly presence of certain extinct animals may very well explain at least some sightings of monstrous beasts, particularly those that seemingly appear and vanish in the blink of an eye. Joshua calls these phantimals.”

    “‘Maybe Bigfoot is a phantimal,’ said Josh, ‘perhaps even the ghost of a prehistoric creature, similar to the enormous extinct possible ape, Gigantopithecus, or maybe even the spirits of primitive humans.’”

Warren also shares that he thinks this explains Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, who would need a lot more food than is available locally in order to live in the Loch. To Warren Nessie may be a ghost of a dinosaur.

So that answer may satisfy some, but all it does for me is open up more questions, such as do animals have souls? If so, is there an afterlife for every animal who ever lived on this planet? Or do only animals that vex us because they are so hard to pin down have souls, and other animals do not? What about when my wife says she feels something on the bed, like a cat? Our cat died in 2000 — does that mean our cat’s spirit is paying us a visit?**

Like other things that require explanations, when the supernatural is thrown into the mix it becomes impossible for me to take it seriously. Tales of ghosts are entertaining, but when someone uses a ghost to possibly explain a creature like Bigfoot then it just shows me that there are no satisfactory explanations at this time, and because of that the fantasists have gone to work to provide answers from their imaginations. You can say Bigfoot was dropped from a flying saucer, or lives in caves hidden to humans, another dimension, or is a deceased animal or proto-human from hundreds of thousands of years ago, but those aren’t explanations. They are just speculation taken so far past the point of credibility that the whole subject becomes laughable.

++++++++++

*I read about one species I was not aware of, in the Sunday funnies no less!

Barney & Clyde, January 12, 2014.

**I wrote once before on whether animals have souls, Do animals have souls?.

Another one lost to drugs: Philip Seymour Hoffman

Having liked and respected actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in every movie of his I saw, I felt betrayed that such a talent lost his life in the throes of drug addiction.

Maybe betrayed is too strong a word, maybe disappointed would be more accurate. I thought he had a lot more great performances in him. Now he’ll be another Hollywood tragedy like River Phoenix and several others. Their epitaphs: Killed by drugs.

Heroin is some real powerful stuff. Even though the story, “The Poppy’s Strange Fruit” is presented as comic art with caricatured drawings, the message is deadly serious. It’s from The Big Book of Vice, published by DC Comics under the Paradox Press imprint in 1999. Story is by Steve Vance and art is by Gregory Benton. Maybe Hoffman could have benefited from reading it before he got into his deadly habit.

Copyright © 1999 Steve Vance/Gregory Benton

Here’s a page from a comic that influenced me when I was 15-years-old, and saw it in a 1962 comic book called 87th Precinct. It's from the inside back cover of a book-length story of a heroin shipment to New York City to feed the “panic” from a local heroin famine.

I remember the creepy feeling I got from looking at it. I was naïve about drugs, as were my classmates and our teachers. No one talked about it. In those days we suburban kids were kind of blinded and unaware of the grimness of drugs, addiction, and its effect on the minority communities. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until drugs moved into those same suburbs and the white kids started using recreatonal and hard drugs that lawmakers got interested and alarmed.

I’m not pure as the driven snow. I don’t take heroin but if caffeine was a dangerous drug I would have overdosed decades ago.

Again from The Big Book of Vice:

Copyright © 1999 Steve Vance/ Bahadir Boysal