feminine Victoriana…?

Ray Caesar was born in London, England on October 26 1958, the youngest of four and much to his parent’s surprise, he was born a dog…or so he claims?

Of his way of working he says:

“I draw automatically…”automatic drawing/modeling/creating”. I draw without thinking and let the hand do what the mind hasn’t decided on yet. I play like a child without plan and it just seems to end up as something that makes me feel I want to continue…”

le Sabbat des sorcières…

Francisco Goya, le Sabbat des sorcières.

A favorite seasonal past time in the wild places…

Satira del homicidio romantico por amor…or ending the hangover for good.

For all of you who have overindulged during the holiday…a little something from Leonardo Alenza.

Season’s Greetings

Merry Christmas Folks, and a very happy New Year to one and all…and remember – the best cure for a hangover, is to keep drinking!!

Silent Horror…

For your entertainment. See HERE for the top 10 Under Appreciated Silent Horror Films.

They don’t make ‘em like that anymore!!

Halloween…and that tapping on my door

Today, of course, is All Hallows’ Eve (Halloween), also known as All Saints’ Eve (so good we named it twice).

It’s a day in part derived from the Gaelic festival of Samhain, celebrating the end of summer, the lighter half of the year, and the onset of the darker half of the year, winter – Summer births, winter deaths. It is a time when the very fabric separating us from the unseen otherworld becomes so thin that the dead are able to reach back into this world of the living. In the ancient festival of Samhain, in Ireland, it was customary to hollow out turnips, carving a face on them to create lanterns that would frighten off the dangerous spirits…

But today irritating little monsters  children appear on the twilit streets, their faces hidden by plastic masks as they go door to door, calling: “Trick or Treat!”, their raucous yells putting the fear of God up little old ladies who live alone. Neither parents or kids have any real understanding of the history behind their dressing up – the pagan implications, the appeasement of the dead, the spirits moving into this world from the otherworld.

Nor I suspect do they have much comprehension of the Christian meaning behind All Hallows: the celebration on first November honoring all the Christian saints, both known and unknown…the spiritual communion between the living and those who have died in a state of grace to face purification in purgatory or their arrival in heaven.

Across Europe people visit the graves of deceased relatives and friends with flowers or lighted candles. The day coincides with “Día de los Inocentes“, the first day celebrating “Dia de los Muertos”, the day of the dead. “Día de los Inocentes” is for the children who have died, honoring their spirits and praying for their continued peace in the otherworld…

So parents, one and all, be aware what little Jonnie is about in the dark, in the night, all bundled up in his coat and scarf: he’s inviting the spirits from the otherworld into this one, perhaps; and as he and his friends scream “Trick or Treat” at some palpitating pensioner, ask yourself:

“What is that shape moving just now in the shadows behind them?”

Stripsody

For me, this says it all…enjoy.

Diana Gamet performs Berberian

Ever Wonder What Happened To The Little Mermaid?

BARBIE DOLL has her 50th birthday this year……

More advice from Rilke…

So you mustn’t be frightened…if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better. In you…so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else.

Don’t observe yourself too closely. Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally) at your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now meets you. But whatever errors, wishes, and yearnings of your boyhood are operating in you now are not what you remember and condemn. The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, surrendered to so many influences and at the same time so cut off from all real connection with life that, where a vice enters it, one may not simply call it a vice. One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often the name of an offense that a life shatters upon, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a quite definite necessity of that life and could have been absorbed by it without any trouble. And the expenditure of energy seems to you so great only because you overvalue victory; it is not the “great thing” that you think you have achieved, although you are right about your feeling; the great thing is that there was already something there which you could replace that deception with, something true and real. Without this even your victory would have been just a moral reaction of no great significance; but in fact it has become a part of your life. Your life…which I think of with so many good wishes. Do you remember how that life yearned out of childhood toward the “great thing”? I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.

And if there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is this: Don’t think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you much pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.

Rainer Maria Rilke