The challenge word on sugarfrostedgoodness.com this week is “joy”.
This is the first of two illustrations for the topic.
Joy Division were an English rock band formed in 1976 in Greater Manchester. The band consisted of Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris.
Joy Division rapidly evolved from their initial punk rock influences, developing a sound and style that helped pioneer the post-punk movement of the late 1970s. Joy Division’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures, was released in 1979 on independent record label Factory Records, and drew critical acclaim from the British press. Despite the band’s rapid success, vocalist Ian Curtis was beset with depression and personal difficulties, including a dissolving marriage and his diagnosis with epilepsy. Curtis found it increasingly difficult to perform at live concerts, and often had seizures during performances.
On the eve of the band’s first American tour, Curtis, overwhelmed with depression, committed suicide. Early on the morning of May 18, 1980, Curtis hanged himself in his kitchen. Curtis’s wife Deborah, discovered his body when she returned around midday.
Joy Division’s posthumously released second album, Closer, and the single “Love Will Tear Us Apart” became the band’s highest charting releases. After the death of Curtis, the remaining members reformed as New Order, achieving significant critical and commercial success.
Monday Artday: favorite book
The Monday Artday challenge this week is “favorite book”.
I actually did an illustration for my favorite book a while ago. My favorite book is “The Emperors of Chocolate” by Joel Glenn Brenner. The illustration I did was for the word “chocolate”.
For this challenge, I chose a book that is easily the most affecting and haunting book I ever read.
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. was written between 1957 and 1964. It was finally published in 1964. In the Eisenhower era of “Leave It to Beaver” and “The Donna Reed Show“, this collection of short stories chronicled the lives of the dregs of society. Centered around The Greeks, a scummy dive diner near the Brooklyn Airbase, it brings to life the most disturbing, disgusting characters and their filthy, drug-filled, liquor-filled, perverted sex-filled existence. Written in a “stream-of-consciousness ” manner, Selby shows no mercy and no pity for his cast of addicts, spouse-abusers, junkies, pimps, prostitutes, transvestites, pedophiles, alcoholics, kiss-asses and other lowlifes. The book is difficult to read on both a structural and content level.
My mother talked about this book a lot when I was a teenager. She said it was the most memorable and gut-wrenching book she ever read. She also forbade me to read it. I finally read it twelve years after my mother died.
She was right.
if you read the book, you’ll get the joke in my illustration.
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IF: choose
The Illustration Friday challenge for this week is “choose“.
What’s it gonna be boy?
Come on.
I can wait all night
What’s it gonna be boy – yes or no?
What’s it gonna be boy –
yes
or
no?
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Monday Artday: half beast
This week’s Monday Artday challenge is an unusual one ― “half beast“.
Somewhere between Bigfoot and werewolves is the legend of the wendigo. The wendigo is a figure appearing in Algonquian Indian mythology. In remote forest areas, sometimes groups of travellers, hunters or campers were cut off from the rest of their party by the bitter snows and ice of the north woods. Conditions became desperate and cannibalism became a necessity in order to survive. The belief was when a human ate human flesh, he would become a wendigo. Among northern Algonquian cultures, cannibalism, even to save one’s own life, was viewed as a serious taboo; the proper response to famine was suicide or resignation to death. On one level, the Wendigo myth thus worked as a deterrent and a warning against resorting to cannibalism; those who did would become Wendigo monsters themselves.
Though all of the descriptions of the creature vary slightly, the Wendigo is generally said to have glowing eyes, long yellowed fangs and overly long tongues. Most have a sallow, yellowish skin and are covered with matted hair. They give off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition. They are tall and lanky and are driven by a horrible hunger.
Wendigos were embodiments of gluttony, greed, and excess; never satisfied after killing and consuming one person, they were constantly searching for new victims.
Native Americans actively believed in, and searched for, the Wendigo. One of the most famous Wendigo hunters was a Cree Indian named Jack Fiddler. He claimed to have killed at least 14 of the creatures in his lifetime, although the last murder resulted in his imprisonment at the age of 87. In October 1907, Fiddler and his brother, Joseph, were tried for the murder of a Cree Indian woman. They both pleaded guilty to the crime but defended themselves by stating that the woman had been possessed by the spirit of a Wendigo and was on the verge of transforming into one entirely. According to their defense, she had to be killed before she murdered other members of the tribe. The brothers were to be tired. Just before the trial, Jack escaped and hanged himself. Joseph went to trial and was sentenced to death. No word on his last meal.
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IF: blanket
The weekly challenge from Illustration Friday is “blanket“.
It Happened One Night is a 1934 romantic comedy, directed by Frank Capra, in which a pampered socialite tries to get out from under her father’s thumb, and falls in love with a roguish reporter. It is one of the most beloved comedies of all time (It was Friz Freling’s favorite film) and is responsible for bringing lowly Columbia Pictures out of what was known as “Poverty Row”.
Clark Gable, who was under contract to MGM, was on loan to Columbia Pictures, as a punishment for his raucous off-camera behavior. Columbia was considered a lesser studio at the time of the film’s release. Both MGM and Warner Brothers would loan out temperamental actors to Columbia as a “humbling experience.” After filming was completed, Claudette Colbert complained to a friend, “I just finished the worst picture in the world.”
Gable and Colbert weren’t the first choices for the picture. Robert Montgomery and Myrna Loy were originally offered the roles, but each turned the script down. The role of Ellie Andrews was also turned down by Miriam Hopkins, Margaret Sullavan, Constance Bennett and Loretta Young. Bette Davis wanted the role, but was under contract with Warner Brothers and refused to loan her. Carole Lombard was unable to accept, because of a schedule conflict.
Claudette Colbert agreed to appear only when her salary was doubled to $50,000 and on the condition that her part be completed in four weeks so she could take an already planned vacation. When Clark Gable showed up for work on the first day, he said grimly, “Let’s get this over with.”
Filming began in a tense atmosphere as Gable and Colbert were dissatisfied with the quality of the script. However, they established a friendly working relationship and found that the script was no worse than those of many of their earlier films.
It Happened One Nightbecame the first movie to win all five major Oscars Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Picture. (That’s a feat only achieved by two more pictures, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest in 1976 and The Silence of the Lambs in 1992.) Claudette Colbert disliked the film so much she didn’t even attend the Oscars; when she won for Best Actress she was found about to leave on a trip. She was pulled off of a train and rushed to the ceremony, where she made her acceptance speech in a traveling suit.
In the very famous “Walls of Jericho” scene, one of the highlights of the film, Gable divides the twin-bedded bedroom into two parts by stringing up a clothesline. Then, as he drapes a blanket over the line between their two beds, Colbert dryly observes: “That, I suppose, makes everything quite all right?” He explains, “Well, I like privacy when I retire. Yes, I’m very delicate in that respect. Prying eyes annoy me. Behold the walls of Jericho! Uh, maybe not as thick as the ones that Joshua blew down with his trumpet, but a lot safer. You see, uh, I have no trumpet.”
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SFG: round
The sugarfrostedgoodness.com weekly challenge is “round“.
What happened on the sunny afternoon of November 13, 1982, would change the lives of Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini and Duk Koo Kim and the future of boxing. By the time it was over, Kim lay in a coma from which he would never awaken, dying five days later at the Desert Springs Hospital in Las Vegas.
Ray Mancini inherited his nickname from his father, veteran boxer Lenny “Boom Boom” Mancini. The name perfectly suited the younger Mancini’s wild, “whirlwind” fighting style. After a failed attempt against Alexis Arguello, Mancini defeated Arturo Frias and became World Lightweight Champion. Mancini’s first defense of his title went easily with a 6th round knockout. But it was his next fight that would change boxing forever.
Duk Koo Kim was brave, but he was wrongly ranked No. 1 by the World Boxing Association. And while his record was 17-1-1, he had but one knockout and had never been tested on a big stage nor faced the kind of force Mancini was at the time. Kim had to labor mightily to get his weight down to the 135-pound limit in the final days leading up to their showdown. Kim made weight, but not without draining himself. Yet round after brutal round, his reaction to being hammered by Mancini was to do what real fighters do. He fought back. He fought back bravely despite obviously hopeless circumstances. He fought back enough that the referee could never justify leaping between them to end Mancini’s bombing raids even in the 13th round, when Mancini rocked Kim repeatedly with 40 unanswered shots. It was a fight filled with action, but Mancini had an easy time hitting Kim during the 14 rounds the fight lasted. Kim left the ring on a stretcher. He sustained brain injuries that led to his death five days later. Later, it was reported that taped to the mirror in Kim’s dressing room was a note that Kim had written to himself. It read: “Kill or be killed.”
Mancini went to the funeral in South Korea and fell into a deep depression afterwards. He said that the hardest moments came when people approached him and asked if he was the boxer who “killed” Duk Koo Kim. Mancini went through a period of reflection, as he blamed himself for Kim’s death. Kim’s mother committed suicide four months after the fight. The bout’s referee, Richard Green, committed suicide in July 1983.
As a result of this bout, the WBC took steps to shorten its title bouts to a distance of 12 rounds. The WBA and WBO followed in 1988 and the IBF did in 1989. Ray had one final fight in April 1992, against former lightweight champion Greg Haugen. Ray was just a mere shadow of his old self, having only 2 fights in seven years, and the fight was stopped in round seven.
Some years later, singer Warren Zevon wrote a song called “Boom Boom Mancini.” Among the lyrics are these lines:
When they asked him who was responsible/For the death of Duk Koo Kim
He said, “Someone should have stopped the fight,” and told me it was him.
They made hypocrite judgments after the fact/But the name of the game is be hit and hit back
In fact, Mancini had never said the fight should have been stopped, agreeing with most ringside observers that Kim’s refusal to retreat made that impossible until he was finally knocked to the floor.
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Monday Artday: hidden message
This week’s challenge at Monday Artday is “hidden message“.
Harry Houdini, in addition to being one of the world’s greatest magicians, spent a portion of his life exposing fraudulent psychics and bogus clairvoyants. Houdini showed that psychics were using tricks that he, himself, used in his magic act. This practice eventually broke up his friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a great believer in spiritualism.
Prior to his death in 1926, Houdini told his wife Bess (who was also his stage assistant), that if there was a way to send a message from “the other side”, he would find that way. They devised a secret message. The message was based on both sentimentality and an old vaudeville mind-reading routine. The message was “Rosabelle- answer- tell- pray, answer- look- tell- answer, answer- tell”. Bess’ wedding band bore the inscription “Rosabelle”, the name of the song she sang in her act when they first met. The other words correspond to a secret spelling code used to pass information between a magician and his assistant during a “mind-reading” act. Each word or word pair equals a letter. The word “answer” stood for the letter “B”, for example. “Answer, answer” stood for the letter “V”. Thus, the Houdinis’ secret phrase spelled out the word “BELIEVE”.
Bess held a yearly seance, on October 31 the anniversary of her husband’s death. In early 1929, a very ill Bess was approached by Reverend Arthur Ford, a young and eager medium. Within weeks, Ford triumphantly announced that he had successfully delivered the correct message to Houdini’s widow. It did not take long for the press to discover that Ford’s claim was a hoax; and that Bess had inadvertently revealed the message to several reporters a full year before.
The 1936 séance, atop the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, was the last one that Bess conducted. Ten years was enough, and she admitted that she had never received the message from Houdini. (Actor William Frawley died in the lobby of the Knickerbocker in 1966. Read all about it HERE, in a previous post.)
Bess died in 1943 and was not permitted to be buried with her husband at Machpelah Cemetery because she was a gentile. Bess Houdini is interred at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.
(CLICK HERE to see a larger version of the illustration and look for the hidden messages.)
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IF: tales and legends 2
The challenge on Illustration Friday this week is “tales and legends“. This is my second entry for this challenge. My first one can be seen HERE.
The legend of Pecos Bill grew out of the imagination of southwestern range hands who told tall tales to pass the time. The story goes that Pecos Bill, the youngest of eighteen children of a Texas pioneer, was lost in crossing the Pecos River and was brought up by coyotes. He considered himself a coyote until a cowboy convinced him of his true identity, a human being. After returning to civilized territory, Pecos Bill became the cowhand who invented all the tricks of the ranching trade; in various tales he appears as a buffalo hunter, cattleman, railroad contractor, and oilfield worker. His activities include teaching gophers to dig postholes, using a snake as a rope and roping whole herds of cattle at one time. He rode everything in the West, including a mountain lion and a cyclone. He invented the branding iron to stop cattle rustling and the cowboy song to soothe the cattle. On their wedding day, Slue-Foot Sue, Pecos Bill’s girl friend, was determined to ride Bill’s famous horse, the Widow-Maker, but the animal pitched Sue so high that she almost hit the moon. Her steel-spring bustle continued to bounce her so high that Bill finally shot her to keep her from starving. Pecos Bill’s death is a matter of controversy. Some cowboys say that he died from drinking fishhooks with his whiskey and nitroglycerin; others insist that he died laughing at dudes who called themselves cowboys. Whatever the mode of his death, Pecos Bill exists in cowboy folklore as a symbol of the endurance, enterprise and other qualities required of cowboys.
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IF: tales and legends
The challenge from Illustration Friday this week is “tales and legends“.
Beginning in early 1888, several violent attacks and brutal murders, mainly prostitutes, occurred in rapid succession in and around the Whitechapel area of London. A number of the murders featured extremely gruesome acts, such as mutilation and evisceration. Rumors that the murders were connected intensified in September and October, when a series of extremely disturbing letters were received by various media outlets and Scotland Yard, purporting to take responsibility for some or all of the murders. One letter, received by George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, included a preserved human kidney.
Files kept by the Metropolitan police show that the investigation begun in 1888 eventually came to include eleven separate murders stretching from April 1888, until February 1891. These became known as “the Whitechapel Murders.”
Among the eleven murders actively investigated by the police, five are almost universally agreed upon as having been the work of a single serial killer. These are known collectively as the canonical five victims of Jack the Ripper. These victims were:
Mary Ann Nichols, killed on August 31, 1888. Nichols’ body was discovered at about 3:40 in the morning on the ground in front of a gated stable entrance in Buck’s Row, a back street in Whitechapel two hundred yards from the London Hospital.
Annie Chapman, killed on September 8, 1888. Chapman’s body was discovered about 6:00 in the morning lying on the ground near a doorway in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street.
Elizabeth Stride, killed on September 30, 1888. Stride’s body was discovered close to 1:00 in the morning, lying on the ground in Dutfield’s Yard, off Berner Street in Whitechapel.
Catherine Eddowes, killed on September 30, 1888, on the same day as Elizabeth Stride. This circumstance is referred to as the “double event.” Her body was found in Mitre Square, in the City of London. Mutilation of Eddowes’ body and the abstraction of her left kidney and part of her womb by her murderer bore the signature of a Jack the Ripper killing.
Mary Jane Kelly, killed on November 9, 1888. Kelly’s gruesomely mutilated body was discovered shortly after 10:45 a.m. lying on the bed in the single room where she lived at 13 Miller’s Court.
By today’s crime standards, Jack the Ripper would barely make the headlines, murdering a mere five prostitutes in a huge slum swarming with criminals. Why then, over a hundred years later, are there more books written on the subject of Jack the Ripper than all of the American presidents combined? Why is this symbol of terror as popular a subject today as he was in Victorian London?
Because Jack the Ripper represents the classic whodunit. Not only is the case an enduring unsolved mystery, but the story has a terrifying, almost supernatural quality to it. He comes from out of the fog, kills violently and quickly, and disappears without a trace. Then, for no apparent reason, he satisfies his blood lust with ever-increasing ferocity, culminating in the near destruction of his final victim, and then vanishes from the scene forever. The perfect ingredients for the perennial thriller.
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Monday Artday: transition
The challenge on Monday Artday this week is “transition“.
Up every evening ’bout half eight or nine
I give my complete attention to a very good friend of mine
He’s quadraphonic, he’s a, he’s got more channels
So hologramic, oh my TVC one five
I brought my baby home, she, she sat around forlorn
She saw my TVC one five, baby’s gone, she
She crawled right in, oh my
She crawled right in my
So hologramic, oh my TVC one five
Oh, so demonic, oh my TVC one five
Maybe if I pray every, each night I sit there pleading
“Send back my dream test baby, she’s my main feature”
My TVC one five, he, he just stares back unblinking
So hologramic, oh my TVC one five
One of these nights I may just
Jump down that rainbow way. be with my baby, then
We’ll spend some time together
So hologramic, oh my TVC one five
My baby’s in there someplace, love’s rating in the sky
So hologramic, oh my TVC one five
Transition
Transmission
Transition
Transmission
Oh my TVC one five, oh oh, TVC one five
Oh my TVC one five, oh oh, TVC one five
Oh my TVC one five, oh oh, TVC one five
Oh my TVC one five, oh oh, TVC one five
Oh oh oh oh oh, oh oh oh oh oh