A small man with a big…umm…heart
Behold, Matthias Buchinger (1674–1740) (or Matthew, as he lived much of his life in Britain), the proverbial man with no arms and no legs. Well, he had bits of arms and legs, but no hands and feet. He had little kind of flippery things.
…with which he played a half dozen musical instruments, was a crack shot and loved to build ships in bottles. He was also an accomplished magician, conjurer and card sharp. He made his living as an artist of insanely detailed engravings.
He engraved this self portrait, and if you look very closely (not in my little jpeg, obviously) you will see that the ringlets of his wig are composed of tiny Bible verses.
Oh, also he was married four times, had at least seventeen children by at least eight women, but was rumored to have fathered brats by seventy different ladies. He was so well known a cocksman that the 18th Century vajayjay was popularly known as Buchinger’s boot (which explains the smirk on his face).
What have you done today, Mr or Ms Smarty?
Dead Pool! Tomorrow! Six WBT! Be here!
July 12, 2012 — 10:27 pm
Comments: 16
Kilroy, B.C.
This spooky image was made by one man (a man, I assume), about 5’10” tall, using just his right hand to apply pigment…
…upwards of 30,000 years ago, making this thing and all the artwork in Chauvet Cave about twice as old as that in the famous Lascaux caves, discovered in 1940. Actually, it looks to me like there were two pigments, a dark charcoal-y pigment followed by a pale yellow one, giving the drop shadow effect that makes these pop off the wall in such an alarming way. Chauvet was discovered (also by accident) in 1994 and there has been controversy about the dates, but the carbon dating of pigments and bones has been repeated several times from many different spots in the cave.
I actually think the drawings in Chauvet are more sophisticated than Lascaux (though similar in style), and beautiful…and I’m not just saying that because you’re supposed to think ugly, primitive crap is wonderful. I generally hate folk art in all its ugly, primitive crappiness. These drawings are well-observed and rendered in a suprisingly sophisticated way, given that the artist(s) had nothing but dirt and soot to work with.
If you like this kind of thing, you can burn many a happy hour at Don’s Maps, the website of Don Hitchcock. who I assume is an archeologist (a modest fellow with no About Me page). Yes, there are maps, but mostly there are hundreds of pictures of archeological sites and artifacts from around the world.
UPDATE: oh, pooh! Fie! And also piffle! That hands image isn’t a real cave image, it’s a computer reconstruction of how the “bison made of dots of red” wall art was created. Thanks to Crabby Old Bat for swinging the clue bat. The rest of the art is still way cool, though.
July 2, 2012 — 10:16 pm
Comments: 21
That’s my stat camera!
As I’ve mentioned before, I started my career in commercial art a handful of years before computers began making in-roads into graphics. That means I had to learn to do everything one way, and watch as, bit by bit, computers swept away most of the jobs I had just learned to do.
It was awesome.
If the bomb ever strikes, we will never go back to doing things the old way again. Pre-digital printing technology was as complex and far more time-consuming and expensive as anything you can do with a computer. It was all photographic materials and layers and fiddly alignment tools and calculation charts and masking. In a lot of ways, it was fun — sort of a cross between flower arranging and carpentry — but it was a whooooole lot of work.
Anyhow, someone on an art forum posted a link to the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies. If you’ve ever taken so much as a mechanical drawing class in High School, you will recognize and (I hope) enjoy paddling around in this collection. The sheer amount of junk we need to do our jobs was staggering.
So many old friends <sniff>
February 28, 2012 — 11:39 pm
Comments: 27
Four things I did not know about Edweard Muybridge
Y’all know Edweard Muybridge, right? He settled a very old argument and kind of fathered the moving picture in the process.
Horsey folk had argued for ages whether a running horse ever had all four hooves off the ground at once. Muybridge was a well-known photographer in California when Leland Stanford (former governor, race horse owner and founder of Stanford University) hired him to answer the question. Took him years to work it out, but Muybridge eventually wired a bunch of cameras along a track with tripwires, ran a horse down it and got the answer.
Which was: everybody was wrong. People in the NO camp believed a horse always had at least one hoof on the ground. People in the YES camp thought they were all four off the ground, with the front legs aiming frontwards and the back legs aiming backwards. Like a rocking horse. Whee! Turns out…well, look at the picture.
Muybridge went on to take upwards of 100,000 photos of people and animals in motion. Which is, to this day, a cherished reference for animators and illustrators. Lumme some Muybridge!
So anyhow, I was looking up the date of that first definitive horse series (1877) and I discovered four things about him I did not know before.
He was English. Born in Southwest London in 1830. He moved to the States in his mid-twenties. He was born Edward Muggeridge, but apparently decided his name needed a little weirding up. Which explains why you’ve never heard of an Edweard or a Muybridge before (unless you have, in which case — do tell!). He got some nasty head injuries in stagecoach accident in San Fran, which may have left him a little…cracked.
Also, he killed a guy and got away with it. He discovered his wife had taken a lover — a certain Major Larkyns — tracked him down, said “Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here’s the answer to the letter you sent my wife” — whipped out a gun and BANG. Shot him dead.
His insanity plea (on account of his brain damage) was rejected, but it was ruled a justifiable homicide anyway. On account of, diddling other men’s wives was considered really unacceptable then.
Oh, a fifth and final thing — he then dropped his son off at an orphanage, assuming him to be Larkyn’s boy. Poor bastard grew up to look just like Muybridge.
Good weekend, folks!
February 24, 2012 — 11:14 pm
Comments: 27
Heh.
This picture tickles me.
So Grant Wood saw this neat old Gothic farmhouse in Cowtitty, Iowa and thought it looked cool. He imagined what sort of people would live there and made up this little story in his head about a bank manager or store owner and his grownup spinster daughter.
The woman is the artist’s sister. The man is the artist’s dentist. I’m not sure they ever stood next to each other before this picture was taken, but they certain never stood next to each other in front of this house. All three — woman, man and house — were painted separately.
And then, bullshit happened. It’s been described as a satire on wicked nasty puritanical rural Midwesterners. Or, alternatively, a noble portrayal of the indomitable American spirit (it was the Great Depression after all). Or…whatever. Pick your flavor. Whatever it is, it’s nothing to do with Grant Wood.
Take any great painting. I will guarantee you, the artist’s main thought process was, “whoa, that looks cool!”
February 20, 2012 — 11:25 pm
Comments: 25
One of my great heroes
Winsor “Silas” McCay (1869 –1934) was a cartoonist for the Hearst papers. Dude was enormously prolific and incredibly innovative — his surreal comic strips still stand as some of the best sequential art, ever.
Why is it that the first guys in any new medium are often unsurpassed by the people who follow?
If he’s remembered much at all today, it’s usually for creating some of the very first moving cartoons. Which he did all by himself. By inking, like, ten thousand key frames by hand.
The most famous is Gertie the Dinosaur, which he took on the road as a Vaudeville act. Where you see the speech panels in this YouTube version is where McCay would stand on stage talking and appearing to interact with Gertie on-screen. It must have been a corker of an experience for people who had never seen a cartoon before!
Hearst didn’t like McCay to be on the Vaudeville circuit, though, so he pulled strings to choke off his stage career. Which suits me — so many more McCay comic strips!
The most beautiful is the Little Nemo in Slumberland series, but my favorite will always be Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend.
It depicts the terrible dreams people have after eating toasted cheese just before bed. Sometimes funny, sometimes creepy, often spectacularly drawn and always trippy, this has been one of my favorite bedside books for decades. My copy has damn near fallen to bits.
So you can imagine my squee when I discovered there were 190 large-format Saturday strips I’d never seen before. Found the book by accident and ordered it straight away.
It’s funny. I can’t really find one good “representative strip” that gives a full idea of McCay’s talent. I think you have to see dozens in aggregate to see what a flipping genius the man was. But click here to see the full panel this one goes with.
Then imagine, like, 500 hundred more.
February 18, 2012 — 12:18 am
Comments: 8
Got $200M to spare?
Check down the back of the couch cushions, will you? On the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, they’re going to auction off over 5,000 items recovered therefrom, and a judge has ruled they all have to go in one, big lot to someone who will put them on public display. I’m not quite clear how a Virginia judge got jurisdiction, but good on her, anyhow.
I’m a Titanicophile — or was, until the discovery of the wreck, and the movie and the salvage and the whole Titanic industry. I have some deeply conflicted feelings about this whole business.
On the one hand, there’s no moral high ground in letting it all rot away and cease to be. I’m all for preserving as much of the past as we possibly can, up to and including digging up the ancestors. The wreck was two and a half miles down — finding it and salvaging any part of it took significant investment and significant risk — of money and real, live bodily harm.
On the other hand, the owner and profiteer is Premier Exhibitions, an organization with an ethical compass stolen from the vest pocket of PT Barnum’s stinking corpse. Their other main claim to fame is Bodies, a creepier rip-off of the sufficiently creepy Gunther von Hagens‘ Body Worlds Exhibition. Er, let’s just say, they felt compelled to put this disclaimer on the Bodies show:
This exhibit displays full body cadavers as well as human body parts, organs, fetuses and embryos that come from cadavers of Chinese citizens or residents. With respect to the human parts, organs, fetuses and embryos you are viewing, Premier relies solely on the representations of its Chinese partners and cannot independently verify that they do not belong to persons executed while incarcerated in Chinese prisons.
So. Huh.
Anyhow, the Telegraph has a great slide show of some of the stuff up for auction.
Happy thoughts, happy thoughts.
January 5, 2012 — 10:51 pm
Comments: 24
One of pre-history’s great WTFs
Okay, so the Orknies are those islands on the North coast of Scotland. Bleak, tiny and cold as witch titty. And eight years ago, archeologists discovered a gigantic Neolithic building complex up there. Presumably a temple complex, because the thing is so huge and weird.
How huge? Well the site — smack between two well-known stone circles — is (I believe they said) the size of four football fields end-to-end (presumably they meant soccer fields, which are even bigger than real football fields). They’ve only excavated a tiny part of it, but scans say there are about a hundred buildings total.
And by buildings, I mean dressed stone buildings with slate rooves and weirdly curvy walls fifteen feet thick. Some evidence of carving and painting on the walls, lots of tools and bits of pottery. Whatever they were doing up there in the ass end of nowhere, they were doing it for a thousand years, somehow keeping themselves amply supplied with workmen, man-hours and quarried stone. Peat for the fires and food for the priests.
Oh, and they found a pit full of beef bones. Testing showed the cattle were raised on fodder with a high nitrogen content — in other words, raised by farmers who used sophisticated fertilizer, presumably manure-based. But — get this — these cattle were all slaughtered at the same, or about the same, time.
They had a beef feast for 10,000 and smashed the whole place up, deliberately. Probably not invaders, because another similarly-constructed hall was then built on the ruins.
And this five hundred years before Stonehenge was assembled.
If you’re in the UK, you can catch a program about it on the iPlayer for another week (sorry, fellow Yanks — I can’t watch Hulu, you can’t watch BBC). If not, you can follow the dig’s own site (excavation ended in August and will begin again in June, but there’s lots of background information). Oh, if you must, here’s an overview from the Daily Mail
January 2, 2012 — 9:15 pm
Comments: 30
…and the winner is…
So, the EU has deposed the democratically-elected leaders of Greece and Italy and replaced them with EU puppets. Um…that there’s called a coup d’état. It’s like the UN toppling George Bush and replacing him with Madeleine Albright.
Holy shit.
I’m speechless.
When Italy said, “excuse us, we’d like to hold an election to replace Berlusconi”, the president of the EU said “This country needs reforms, not elections.”
Criminy buckets.
The president of the EU would be Herman Van Rompuy, the moldy gray leprechaun in the picture, of whom Nigel Farage famously said “he has the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low grade bank clerk.” Never heard of him? Well, he’s the King of Europe now.
You have to remember, the veneer of democracy — even nationhood — is pretty thin over much of Europe. Despite its great age and long history, many of the modern nations of Europe were cobbled together from principalities and city-states, busted up or invented out of nothing quite recently. The switch from monarchy to democracy is a shaky and incomplete project.
Well, this new thing won’t last. It can’t. The math doesn’t work and neither does the human calculus.
The Germans want the Greeks to grow up and act like Germans. The Greeks want the Germans to shut up and keep signing the benefit checks. You can substitute “Northern Europe” for Germans and “Southern Europe” for Greeks throughout.
Oh, man. And I’m going to be standing next to it when it blows.
November 14, 2011 — 10:21 pm
Comments: 41
Just this once
This year, Remembrance Day is 11/11/11. Also, it’s the 90th observance (I can’t make the math work on that, but the nice man who sold me an enamel poppy with “90th” on it told me so).
When the clock strikes 11:00 anywhere near Flanders Fields, you’ll all be tucked in your warm American beds dreaming your dreamy American dreams. Wait — eleven o’clock in the morning? Yeah, I probably will be, too.
So, why poppies on Remembrance Day? The corn poppy (popaver rhoeas) naturally grows on torn earth. We see them along the edges of the ploughed fields around here. In the blasted earth of the Great War, sometimes poppies were all that grew.
Anyway. Yes. Friday (6pm Weasel Blog Time) we will begin the next round of Laughing at Death. I just didn’t want that to be the only thing up here on Armistice Day. Didn’t seem right.
November 10, 2011 — 11:24 pm
Comments: 49