Severed Heads and Arsenic: The Art of Victorian Lowbrow

What do sideshow freaks, strange medical exhibits,  funeral rituals,  Opium dens, and graveyards have in common? Why Madame Talbot of course.

The woman in question is a reclusive self-taught artist holed up in her 135 year-old haunted house in Oregon. Her interest include just about anything that has to do with the Victorian era 19th century. She also has a morbid fascination with Victorian death rituals and mourning techniques, medical antiques, blood letting, and loves visiting old cemeteries and graveyards.

This fascination can be witnessed in the items she has for sale.

Hand painted tombstones

Vintage medical instruments

Hand created "stump" dolls

She also creates “curios” out of various vintage (and often macabre) items. Take her shrunken head. Not only is it authentic, but she also includes instructions on how to make your own shrunken head, should you be interested. Here’s a sample:

Shrunken Head

How to Prepare a Shrunken-Head After the enemy had been decapitated (preferably while he was still alive), the head is cut off below the neck, taking with it a section of the skin from the chest and back.

On the back of the head, a slit is made starting from the neck going nearly to the top. Once the skin has been successfully pulled away from the skull without damaging the face, the skull is tossed into the river. The eyes are sewn shut with jungle fiber and the lips are pierced with wooden pegs.

She’s also on the lookout for new grisly items. At a recent auction, she picked up a Victorian skin grafting razor (think of a cheese slicer) and a stomach pump in velvet lined case. One wonders what you would do with a cheese sized slice of skin.

Madame Talbot is self-taught in nearly medium she tackles: painting, pen-and-ink illustration, and framed curio exhibits. She is a purist when it comes to creating her Framed Curio Exhibits. No gaffs or fakes here. If it says real human heart, she means real human heart. She creates several curios a without the help of any assistants or  machines (She sews everything by hand using only a needle and thread). She works alone and seems to like it that way.

Sample Curios

And as with all of her subject matter, Madame Talbot works within traditional Victorian Lowbrow themes that are at once timeless and current, merging the past and present with each individual piece that she creates in order to insure quality and care are of the utmost importance.

Victorian Lowbrow is a term coined by Madame Talbot to describe her work. She describes it as items both Victorian (of, relating to, or belonging to the period of the reign of Queen Victoria) and lowbrow (being uncultivated; vulgar; characteristic of a person who is not cultivated or does not have intellectual tastes). However a perusal through inventory shows a sophisticated array of macabre items guaranteed to send any Victorian steampunk or gothic into a frenzy.

Tim Kane

Walpurgis Night — The Dark Side of May Day

I celebrated this past May Day with my two-year-old daughter Lilly. She ran around a makeshift Maypole with some yarn. We decorated the house with flowers. All pretty innocent stuff. That night, my wife and I watched the movie The Wickerman as a way to get into the season.

The wickerman holds the sacrifice

First off, we saw the 1973 version with Christopher Lee, and not the 2006 version with Nicolas Cage. A world of difference. The remake paled in comparison. Though not all of it was Cage’s fault. He nixed the happy ending (having him saved) and opted to go down in flames (ironically, like the movie).

But this brings us to the darker side of May Day, also known as Beltane. You see, this is when Druids would sacrifice a human to ensure a good harvest in the fall. Yup. Watch The Wickerman and you’ll see it all go down. I know most of us think of pagan rituals with all the nudity and flowers. And Wickerman delivers. And then there’s the sacrifice burning to death in a giant wicker man.

This made me dig a little deeper into the whole human sacrifice thing. Most Beltane ceremonies use a symbolic sacrifice such as cake thrown in the fire. Maypoles in Spain were each topped with a male effigy which was later burned. Contemporary Pagans burn sacred wood and dried herbs as offerings in their Beltane fires.

Naked pagans

It turns out that Beltane has a whole host of other names, like Mayday, May Eve, or Walpurgis Night. When I think of Walpurgis Night, my mind goes instantly to Dracula. Just the way I think. This was the night that Harker arrived at Borgo Pass.

Walpurgis Night is named in honor of Saint Walburga, the patron saint of coughs, famine, plague and storms. Okay, who gets to be the saint of coughs? I guess she healed pagans in Germany (starting in 748) also curing plagues, rabies, etc. Still. I wouldn’t want to be known for diseases. Her canonization coincided with the pagan ritual of Beltane.

Walpurgis Night (April 30th) is the night when witches, demons and spirits hold a huge party. It is celebrated in similar to Halloween, with tricks played on unsuspecting people. Anything that isn’t nailed down—doormats or potted plants—is brought inside or it’ll disappear. In Germany, many people also put out a slice of bread liberally spread with butter and honey, called Ankenschnitt, for the phantom hounds in order to protect all from bad weather and ensure crops don’t fail.

The Phantom Dog is almost always black

Phantom dogs haunt gates and crossroads. They are sometimes accompanied by the sound of rattling chains, or they walk with an unnerving splashing noise. (Makes me think of trotting in blood). Many times these phantom dogs chase people. It is impossible to escape a phantom hound. The more you run, the faster the beast will give chase. Seeing a phantom dog is an omen of death. Either your own or a member of your family will die. So I guess I’m glad I’ve never seen one.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the legend of the phantom (or black) dogs in his story The Hound of the Baskervilles. The phantom was of course fake—an ordinary dog covered in fluorescent paint and starved until it is half crazed and prepared to kill anything—but the atmosphere of fear was on the mark.

A version of these death dealing phantom dogs appeared in the Supernatural series, episode No Rest for the Wicked. Here they were hell hounds meant to drag a victim to hell.

Noise is the most widespread remedy against evil beings during Walpurgis Night. As soon as the sun sets, everyone does their best to make as much racket as possible, from shouting and beating sticks to shooting guns! This is still Germany. People knock back the drinks and generally get into trouble. Which is why May 1st is a public holiday in Germany. Everyone is hung over. This sounds a bit like how we celebrate Cinco de Mayo.

So next May Day, lock your doors, drag in the welcome mat, and set out some bread or the phantom dog might visit you.

Tim Kane

And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

For average readers

For fans of the Beats

I just finished reading And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Overall, the book read like most books by these two authors. It was penned in 1945, long before either had become famous. But when I read it, I did not know this. I took it simply as another text by the beat authors.

Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, William Burroughs, New York 1953.

The story alternates, with Burroughs writing as Will Dennison and Kerouac writing as Mike Ryko. I listened to it on audiobook, so I didn’t have the benefit of flipping back to check this fact. Instead, it became obvious as the story moved along.

Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr probably the same month Allen met Jack for the first time, late Spring 1944, Columbia College Campus.

All Burroughs’s chapters had the character mostly in his apartment, sardonically commenting on the lunacy of the other characters. Felt like typical Burroughs. There’s even a scene of him shooting up. In contrast, Kerouac’s chapters were manic and misdirected, a pale shadow of what On the Road would become. Ryko goes to a bar, drinks, then another bar, drinks, then back to someone’s apartment, and drinks. The only semblance of his plot was an attempt to join the merchant marine and ship out to France (where he and Phillip Tourian wanted to jump ship and run to Paris).

The title was apt, because I knew that Mike and Phillip would never make it to their ship. They would be “boiled” just like the hippos. The title (according to the afterword) was inspired by a random snatch of a radio broadcast overheard by Burroughs and Kerouac. Kerouac said that Bill always remembered weird things like this. Another theory, which was mine until I read the afterword, was that it came from a cut up.

I found the book a little more interesting because I’m a big Beat fan. If you’re not, then you’ll probably be bored by the text, which rambles. The only interesting bit is the relationship between Phillip Tourian and a much older man named Ramsay Allen or just Al. Al met Phillip when the boy was 12 and he was somewhere in his 40s. He then devoted his life to following the young man (then somewhere in his 20s) in hopes that Phillip might reciprocate his love.

Al is painted as pathetic, trying once to sneak into Phillip’s apartment and just stand near him till dawn. Often, the girlfriends didn’t like Al, and he had to walk behind the group of friends like a stray dog.

The story ends abruptly. One minute we see Al lounging around an apartment with Ryko and Phillip and the next Phillip is ringing Dennison’s buzzer to announce, “I just killed Al and threw the body off a warehouse.” It then shows Phillip and Ryko meander through several more bars until they finally part, and Phillip turns himself in.

Only in the afterword did I learn that this was based on a real murder in 1945. Phillip Tourian was Lucien Carr and Al was David Kammerer. The murder made big headlines at the time. Lucian Carr apparently introduced the three key Beats together (Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsburg).
Kerouac and Burroughs wanted to try their hand at the story and wrote the fictional version of tragedy. (Carr, obviously, was against it). They shopped it around to several publishers. All passes. Kerouac, reportedly, said that the book wasn’t sensational enough for the popular fiction of the time or well written enough for the literary market. He then sat on the book for years, often alluding to the Hippos text like it was some kind of Holy Grail.

The afterword also seems to treat this book like the second coming. Its publication was blocked by Carr’s estate until all the principals died. Honestly, the novel’s not bad, but not that good either. Even Kerouac admitted that it didn’t make press at the time.

Tim Kane

Why are Fanboys so Thickheaded about Wolverine?

I’m looking forward to the new Wolverine movie. Apparently, multitudes of fanboys are not. They have been tearing this movie apart since before it went into production. Why, you ask? Mainly because the costumes aren’t right. Yes, that’s it. And recently, to top it off, a rough cut of the movie has been leaked and is currently making rounds on the Internet.

Wolverine in yellow and blue spandex

The FBI, Motion Picture Association of American and 20th Century Fox are rabid to find out who exactly leaked a rough cut of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. They vow to prosecute that person “to the fullest extent of the law.”

There’s even talk of the fanboys boycotting the Wolverine movie (although some of this had to do with Fox’s holding up Watchmen in court).

Now, lets examine the costume problem. In the comics, Wolverine is dressed in his trademark yellow and blue duds with that pointy mask. This costume was fine for the 1970s when he first appeared (Incredible Hulk #180, October 1974).

Now, honestly, if you follow the wolverine character, would someone with his personality ever dress in something so ridiculous? The comics have a tradition to uphold, but once it jumps to film, they can update the outfit, as they did for the X-men movies.

What fanboys fail to realize is that by moving to film, a whole new audience is opened up to the character. And film is always different from the comics.

Let me give you a personal example. I’m a HUGE Fantastic Four fan. My car is an orange Saturn

Hugh Jackman as Wolverine

Vue with the license plate THING F4 (All other iterations of thing, grimm, and Clobberin Time were taken). I have all the issues of FF from #32 and up. I’ve seen the horrific John Buscema years and the brilliant John Byrne issues.

So, of course, I was anxious to see the Fantastic Four movie. I had heard that originally it would be Peyton Reed doing a 60s spoof of the team, which might have been good. I knew that they couldn’t do any worse than the 1994 version made by Roger Corman.

So was I wowed by the final 2005 film. No. But it capture the sorrow of the Thing and the “family” dynamics of the team. I think they made a mistake with Doom, but ultimately the film worked as a whole.

There are certain limitations to each genre. Could a two-hour film sum up 400 issues of Fantastic Four history? No. But they were able to add elements in the film that the comics never could. Often, the issues of the FF I had the most trouble reading were the ones solely devoted to the family dynamics with little action. But the movie can have scenes that work. Chris Evans, though he didn’t look or sound like the Human Torch, brought to the screen the bravado and suave of the character.

So looking back to Wolverine. Yes, I’ve collected many of the comics, though I’m by no means a number one fan. However Hugh Jackman has certainly captured the character on screen. Although the X-men films fell down in several places, Wolverine remained the highlights.

2005 Fantastic Four

An in terms of costumes, which do you think a real life Logan would wear? Come on, yellow and blue spandex?

Tim Kane

Supernatural’s New War in Heaven

The Angel Castiel

I always like to see angels duking it out. In the latest episode of Supernatural (Head of a Pin), the secret is revealed and angels are killing angels. It’s nice to see angels portrayed as badasses once again. Also, that they themselves are not infallible.

The Seventh Seal

If you haven’t followed the series, you should. I could praise the show, but it’s better just to have you watch it. In this season (season 4), the plot arc centers around breaking the 66 seals and thus release Lucifer. This isn’t a new plotline. Check out The Seventh Seal (with Demi Moore).

Having angels turn to the dark side also isn’t new. The 1995 film, The Prophecy, has Christopher Walken as the angel Gabriel. He journeys to Earth to find a human soul that can end the war in heaven.

In Supernatural, it turns out that the angels, led by Uriel, one of the four archangels, wants to release Lucifer. It’s not to stop a war in heaven, but rather to start one. Uriel and others consider God to be an absentee landlord. (Check the quote from The Devil’s Advocate). Uriel wants Lucifer to lead the pack again.

Some interesting aspects in the series is how to kill an angel. The television series has us believe that only an angel can kill an angel. Uriel brandishes “The Sword of Lucicer”. This is most likely a made up weapon. The only sword I’ve heard of mentioned is the sword of St. Michael.

When I put in a search on “how to kill an angel” on interesting post floated to the top. It mentioned that angels were mortal on Earth (which makes sense). This post claimed that a perfume was the only thing that could harm an angel:

The Egyptians had a perfume called qeres that was used during mummification to provide the first ’sweet breathe’ of the afterlife. Qeres is extremely rare substance because its recipe has been lost, but small amounts still exist. this perfume is a lethal poison to an angel (fallen or otherwise), and if poured over, say, the blade of a knife, could in fact terminate an angel.

Most of this is probably hokum, but it sounds interesting. Whether Supernatural will really tackle the “End of the World” remains to be seen. More so, where would the series go after this? How can you top Armageddon?

Tim Kane