A few months ago, by way of an introduction to artist Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos, I mentioned a few pieces of art that my mother owned, when my sisters and I were children/pre-teens and which hung in our dining room area. At the time I only remembered one in particular, and described it thusly:
The poster in question, surrounded by Erté prints, and oversized posters of the major arcana from the Thoth deck (with a occasional B. Kliban thrown into the mix) was…well, I don’t exactly remember. There was a lady. There might have been a goblet, or a cat, or a long, winding strand of pearls. What I do distinctly remember was a scrawling signature at the bottom, utterly illegible except for a swooping “J”. Maybe a crooked “C” that trailed off to a distorted “W”. In my head, I began to refer to the creator of this fantastical art, as “JAW CRAZER” and I was astounded when, earlier today, I sent a text to my sister asking if the name meant anything to her…and she knew exactly which painting I was talking about. And I swear –I never, ever said that name aloud. Crazy. Or CRAZER, as the case may be.
Well. As it happens, I am not the only one who loses sleep over such things. My sisters were both in town for the Thanksgiving holiday and had retired to the guest bedroom area, which doubles as my office and houses a wildly uncomfortable captain’s bed (but it’s super cute). Unbeknownst to me at the time, in an unprecedented act of snoozelessness, Middle Sister lay awake perusing the results of internet queries, seeking out these mysterious works of art from our childhood. The funny thing is, I don’t even recall that we were discussing our memories of them earlier in the evening! But sometimes the sisterwave psychosphere just works that way.
I myself had crawled into bed maybe ten minutes prior, and just as I felt myself lightly slipping into slumber, my cell phone rang! It was my sister, calling me from across the house! How weird. Vaguely irritated, or I would have been if it wasn’t my own sister, I stumbled out of bed to see what the heck she wanted. I stood in the doorway and called into the darkened room to her. Though I could not see her face, her excited response frizzled my hair right to the tips and thrilled my heart to buoyant wakefulness: “I FOUND HER, SARAH! I FOUND JAW CRAZER!”
Dang! That’s some midnight detective work! I’d been looking for years to no avail.
Jane Whiting (J.M.W.) Chrzanoska was born in Germantown, Philadelphia in 1948 (the same year our mother was born!) An ambitious young woman, she painted her first mural, an 8’x12′ depiction of Napoleon at Waterloo on her bedroom wall, and later convinced what must have been a very understanding friend to offer his bedroom wall for her painting of ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. At age 16 she was accepted into the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and also made her first important sale, a study of 50 orchestral musicians, to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. After a few months at the Academy, Jane unfortunately grew bored with the emphasis on abstract expressionism and she began skipping classes and spending more time at the University of Pennsylvania city campus. She convinced the head of the Archaeology department, to let her practice drawing various artifacts in the collection and as it turns out, this new interest in archaeology would significantly impact her later work.
In 1969 she moved to Ithaca, N.Y. and then to Woodstock where she lived in a cabin with no running water and no electricity but was afforded the opportunity to view a private and well guarded collection of the works of Fra Angelico, owned by the Archdiocese of New York. In 1970 she moved closer to Manhattan and married her first husband, Benjamin Chrzanoski, where she continued to paint for the next ten years, exhibited in the city, and amassed an impressive list of collectors, singer/actress Cher, and and Addams Family creator Charles Addams among the more notable. In 1980 she was approached by Impress Graphics, a fine arts publisher. Her work was sold worldwide and afforded her the opportunity to travel. Over the next several years she traveled extensively throughout Europe and Peru, where her first child was born; but returned to the states five months after her second child was born, when terrorist activities moved too close to her home in Lima. After 20 years as owner/operator of the Mill Street Art Center in Mays Landing, NJ, Jane relocated to Hammonton NJ where she teaches and works in her new studio.
This last painting is one we just found today, and whose moody elegance never graced our walls–however!– oddly enough when, on a whim my sister did an etsy search for art by J.M.W. Chrzanoska, she found a set of three prints, including “The Mask”, just listed yesterday! Yesterday! (Though you can find some prints on Amazon, too.)This was too much of a coincidence to ignore, right? So ignore it I did not. These beauties will soon be making their way to us, and our of cup mysteries, brimming with our mother’s countless secrets and ciphers and coded mementos and memories, will soon be closer to leveling out.
It is November and I feel myself curling inward. Wrapping up in several layers of blanket burrito. Cocooning myself from everything in the world while I’m feeling weary, heartsick, vulnerable and, well…Novemberish.
November has always been a tough time for my family. I have awful memories from when I was a teenager of a certain Thanksgiving meltdown involving my mother and a broken freezer. This in itself is probably nothing unusual for families, and I bet everyone has dreadful stories of Thanksgiving meltdown trauma, but hers was fueled by addiction, and after the holiday we were motherless for a month or so while she was in a rehab facility. At least, that’s the way I remember it. My recollection of many, if not all, of my teenage years are hazy because they were just so wretched, and I think I have purposefully forgotten most of the details.
At any rate, a few years after that, my uncle died, and Novembers became a very sad time for my grandmother. I suspect Uncle Fred was her favorite, and she never quite recovered. With the passing of the years, each November would bring a deeper and deeper funk, and I believe that may have cast a pall over the rest of us as well. Then, a few years after that, my Aunt Carla died in November. A few years after that, my mother passed. Not in a November, but an early December. But still.
So…November-December is traditionally rough on my family. Now that both of my grandparents have passed (my grandmother just earlier this year) it is just my sisters and I–and of course our one cousin who is very nice and we aren’t as close as we should be and that is no one’s fault but my own–and while my sisters and are not exactly “lost”, we’re just feeling a little out of our depth sometimes, I think. I mean, everyone’s dead. We’re the “adults” now. Never mind that we’re all in our late thirties/early forties and have been adults for several years…it’s just that now we are literally all that is left. We have no one else to turn to for help or advice, or anything at all any more. Though to be honest, I haven’t needed to do that in a very long time (and my mother never had a lot of help to give anyway) …it’s just…we don’t even have that option now. They are all gone. It’s just us.
So, I guess I have some pre-Thanksgiving jitters. For the past 10-12 years or so, I’ve been doing the majority of the preparations and cooking for Thanksgiving, but my grandfather was around to peel the potatoes, which he always did with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade blaring in the background, as both my grandparents were terribly hard of hearing and neither ever wore their hearing aid. My grandmother would emerge from her bedroom wearing one of those festively seasonal old lady sweaters and a spritz of Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door. She and my mother would hover around me and insist that the dressing/stuffing (Which do you call it? We’re a “dressing” family) needed more broth–no, more broth!–make it soupy!–it’ll dry out in the oven! And answer all of my questions about how much onion or celery or sage do I need, and so on. I’d been making it forever at that point, and I instinctively already knew the answer to these questions, but it was, I realize now, such a comfort and …ugh, I can’t believe I am typing this because I hate this phrase…but a blessing to have them both there with me, at the same time, in my adult life to guide me through the rigors and rituals of Thanksgiving dressing. With and without oysters.
Thanksgiving dinner has always been at my grandparent’s house, for as long as I can remember and no doubt even before that. This year it will be my kitchen that the food is being prepared in. It will be my dining room table (and spilling into the living room, because our dining room table is not actually all that big) that my guests will be sitting at. We can have wine with dinner if we want! We never really did that before, what with all the rampant alcoholism that some people brought to the table. It’s just going to be weird. And different. Growing up, I always thought to myself, “when Ido Thanksgiving dinner, it’ll be different!” I suppose I thought turkey and dressing and mashed potatoes seemed a little homespun, or common or something. I wanted fancy. Or maybe exotic. Like … curry or something? … tamales? Who knows what I wanted. I just wanted …different. And now that it’s all up to me, and I have all the control I could want over this holiday’s menu, I just can’t help but think how nice it would be if we kept it exactly the same. Because things are already different enough as it is.
My youngest sister is in town now, flown in from Indiana on an early morning flight to spend the next week with us. We are both in Orlando, staying at our other sister’s house, for the first part of her trip. She arrived exhausted, and is napping in the guest room, channeling my grandmother with her house-shaking snores.
I think we are all cocooning over this next week. Slowing down, resting quietly together. We are all processing how different this year has been, how different this holiday will be, and trying to get to a place where things feels okay again or figuring out if that place of normalcy even exists. And I know that all of us, in various ways, are currently trying to do the same thing. You get it, I know you do.
So from my blanket burrito to yours, I’m wishing you peace and quiet and a soft place to rest right now. If we don’t hear from each other for a while, we’ll know why. And it’s okay. We will see each other again when we emerge from our cocoons.
In the meantime if you post your Thanksgiving menus in the comments, you will have given me many delicious things to ruminate upon over the next week 💗
Photographer and filmmaker Ashlea Wessel (Ink) has teamed up with award-winning director Kevin Burke (24X36: A Movie About Movie Posters) for a new project they describe as a “live-action horror/sci-fi short exploring North American colonial relations in a post-pandemic age. With Vampires.”
Currently on Kickstarter with a goal of only $15K, TiCK is the “heartbreaking, blood-soaked, pulse pounding story of a young girl finding her strength in the face of shame, fear and adversity”, that takes you through a fractured, post-pandemic society, after vampirism begins to appear in a small subset of the population. We follow one such girl, Nishiime, who lives in hiding from the organization who kidnapped and enslaved her family.
I got a bit of the scoop from Ashlea Wessel with regard to the film’s origins, and story concept…
“I’ve revisited the history of North American Colonization quite a bit of late, and I realized that there was so much that we weren’t taught in school or that was fully whitewashed. I think that because of that (among other things), people don’t understand what a huge problem there is in North America for the indigenous population and how colonialism is till alive and well. I thought of a future North America when many people believe that they are in a post-colonial, egalitarian society, but when a pandemic hits, they realize how wrong they had been. This is the basis for the world in which the story unfolds. I also love the idea that disease is what brings the power shift, much in the opposite way that it did in the early days of North America.”
Ashlea also shares with us some personal revelations with regard to Nishiimee, the main character…
“..her journey is almost a coming-of-age story, albeit a brutal one. Though she looks like a child throughout the film, for much of it, she’s actually an adult. She lives in a suspended state of childhood, afraid and ashamed and not realizing her own power until the end. I have this very weird connection to my childhood full of guilt for things that are absolutely ridiculous, that I had no power over, and I feel like Nishiime is a manifestation of that.”
And finally, she enthusiastically spoke to some of TiCk’s inspirations…
“Blood! When I got the idea for this film, and I realized I wanted it to be a vampire film, I was immediately filled with glee because I had an excuse to do scenes that are just DRENCHED in blood. Beautiful, full-tilt slow-motion, glorious blood. I’m giddy just thinking about it.”
There are some really neat backer rewards offered right now (that pink balacava!) so drop by the TiCK kickstarter site and give generously in exchange for some fantastic perks, and to ensure this sci-fi/horror gem gets made!
It makes me very grumbly that Halloween is not an official holiday and that I actually have to preoccupy myself between the hours of 9-5 on this day with things that have nothing whatsoever to do with ghosts or monsters or candy. Who can we complain to about this?
Being old farts, my partner and I are forgoing spooky soirées (not that we’ve been invited to any tonight, come to think of it) and staying home to pass out treats, carve up pumpkins, and watch Monster Squad. Maybe drink some whiskey. I might not even wait until the last kid has rung the doorbell! We’ll see what kind of night it is.
Speaking of soirées! I was actually invited to a Halloween party a few weeks ago, and I am shock–shocked!– to tell you that I had a fine time. I actually had fun. What! How can this be? Honestly, parties are pretty awful for me; I get anxious about a lot of things, but nothing sends me into panic attack mode faster than the thought of celebratory social interaction. I think what made this an okay experience is that I knew the hostess and had been to her home a number of times, I already knew most of the attendees in some capacity, and, well, I went with a date. Actually three! My sister, brother-in-law and partner were all there. Come to think of it, there was actually nothing to be nervous about. Huh. My costume, in case you couldn’t tell, was a skeletonwitch. Oh, what, you thought I was a panda? Are you blind or something? Unfortunately, this fabulous hat arrived after the event, but that’s fine. I’ll wear it while I’m watching Monster Squad and drunkenly carving children. Pumpkins, I mean. I’m not drinking already or anything.
Though we’ve had some glorious weather these past few days with lower temperatures that lend to layers and cloaks and tights and cardigans, the beginning of October was pretty wretched, as this time of year tends to be. I felt sorry for myself and bought an obscene amount of autumnal candles, spooky records, and a numberofhauntingreads. Also some “trock or treat” socks from Korea.
A few additions to the gallery over the past month: a lovely petite bat lady from Lady Weird and this wondrously elegant Martyred for Love sculpture by Carisa Swenson of Goblinfruit Studio
Knits finished in the past month: all patterns by Caitlin Ffrench. A thick, cozy shawl {Mabon} from her Wheel book, and two smaller altar pieces, each finished in a day.
Earlier in the month I spent the weekend with my best good friend in Orlando, who is moving out of state. I can’t believe she’s leaving, but we’ve been through this before. 15 or so years ago, I was the one who was leaving…and everything ended up being just fine. So, although I will miss her, I know this will just be a new phase in the adventure that is our weird and wonderful friendship. Anyway, she fixed the most amazing breakfast for me, during the course of our visit. Basically a toads in a hole slash avocado toast mashup. It may now be one of my top five favorite breakfasts.
Let me tell you about my other favorite breakfasts lately: rice with a little butter and soy sauce, topped with a runny fried egg and furikake; a “fake bagel”, which is basically a low calorie english muffin toasted and spread with laughing cow cheese, ripe tomato slices, red onion, and Trader Joe’s Everything But The Bagel seasoning, and salmon jerky. For real! Salmon jerky is amazing. Do you, like me, hate sweet breakfast offerings? Cereal, yogurt, most breakfast bars, etc.? Gah, they’re just the worst.
What are you up to this Halloween? Tricks? Treats? Napping with your cats and favorite monsters? That sounds pretty great, actually.
A gathering of death related links that I have encountered in the past month or so. From somber to hilarious, from informative to creepy, here’s a snippet of things that have been reported on or journaled about in or related to the Death Industry recently.
This time last year: Links of the Dead {October 2016}
Have you been keeping up with my 31 Days of Horror peeks over on facebook and instagram? There’s a mid-month recap over at Haute Macabre today if’n you’re interested and need some ideas! And please feel free to share your own favorites so far, as well!
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab are purveyors of fine esoteric goods, perfumes, and potions–and if you’ve spent any amount of time with me, or reading my blog here, then no doubt you already know all about them. But for those who may be unfamiliar with this marvelous perfumery, here’s the gist: Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has mastered the art of encapsulating allegorical ideas into singular olfactory experiences, and they specialize in eliciting emotional responses through perfume and creating unique, masterfully molded scent environments that capture legends and folklore, poetry, and the stuff of dreams and nightmares. TLDR; they make you stink real pretty in the most amazingly creative ways.
And not only do these singular scent slingers work long hours, toiling away to create compelling fragrances inspired by your favorite ghost stories/mythologies/comic books/horror movies/holidays (that would be Halloween, obviously,) for which to make your olfactive aura beautiful! The do-gooders at Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab also put in a great deal of time and personal attention in the attempt at making our world a better, more beautiful place, with many years of activism, community involvement, humanitarian work, and ongoing fundraising efforts and events under their belts.
About these efforts, my dear friend Elizabeth Barrial, owner of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, shares:
“Since the day we first opened our doors, helping support and strengthen marginalized communities has been of paramount importance to me. At Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, we have never shied away from our civic duty, and since the inception of the company, we have made it a point to do everything within our power to support organizations that provide emergency aid and disaster relief, support environmental and conservation causes, help the homeless, protect civil liberties and reproductive rights, and offer succor to the LGBTQ community and marginalized ethnic, racial, and minority religious groups. It is our way of helping to protect and provide for our communities, and we feel it is our obligation as human beings to help those who may not be empowered to help themselves.”
Jeanne d’Arc, Albert Lynch
BPAL currently offers a line up of scents inspired by Nasty Women and those who would persist; by courageous federal employees who risk their careers to ensure that the public is kept informed on issues of climate change; by those ceaselessly fighting injustice and hatred and bigotry. Scents to bolster courage as you refute ignorance and insincerity; scents to encourage kindness and compassion; scents to provide relief and recovery to those imperiled by disastrous circumstances. The proceeds from all of these scents go to such organizations as the ACLU, NCTE, Planned Parenthood, Emily’s List, NAACP, the National Parks Conservation Association and the National Park Foundation, as well as hurricane disaster relief efforts, and below you will find the descriptions and links to all of their current philanthropic, fundraising fragrances.
Alternative Facts: The truth hurts — so why tell it? Muffle the blow with Alternative Facts. If you truly want to obfuscate what you really smell like, this is the scent for you! Sugar-crusted vanilla, a firecracker-blast of cherry and sour lemon, a hint of scuttling spiders, encroaching fog, and trumpets of bombast, bluff, and bluster. Proceeds benefit the American Civil Liberties Union.
Fake News: A scent of misdirection, of 140 frantic characters typed out in spite at 3am, and paranoia-clouded churlish accusations hurled at perceived enemies: crushed pink pepper pod, bitter white tobacco, gnarled patchouli, all covered in glinting, garish slashes of gold. Wear it in vigilance as you sift through the memes, trolls, clickbait, hate-speech, and outright propaganda that continually threaten to overwhelm all the world’s kindness, wisdom, and informed expertise. Wear it in courage as you refute ignorance and insincerity at every turn — even from our nation’s highest-ranking figures — with indisputable facts from well-researched sources. Proceeds benefit the American Civil Liberties Union.
COVEFE: Is it abstract nonsense poetry? Surrealist performance art? Cryptography so subtle and devious that it would make an Enigma machine blush? This perfume makes no fucking sense: orange marshmallow cream, bitter lemon, black pepper, orange carnation, and gin.
Proceeds benefit the American Civil Liberties Union.
Nevertheless, She Persisted: A rallying call: golden oudh, frankincense, iris, and steel. Proceeds from this scent benefit EMILY’s List, an organization that supports electing pro-choice Democratic women to office.
Nasty Woman: “Such a nasty woman.” black fig and patchouli, filthy bourbon vanilla, honeyed amber oud, and loukhoum. Proceeds will be split between Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s list.
Irish Coffee Buttercream: Irish whiskey, granulated sugar, brown sugar, whipped cream, buttercream and coffee, and Spiced Rum Buttercream Coffee: Coffee and rum laced with allspice, nutmeg, clove, star anise, cardamom, and cinnamon gently whipped into buttercream. Two cheery, uplifting scents slated for a future, 2018 coffee-theme release which instead became emergency fundraiser scents in order to take an immediate stand to fight the reinstatement of the unconstitutional, immoral, and unnecessarily cruel US military ban on transgender people. Proceeds benefit the National Center for Transgender Equality and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Take a Knee: This is the scent of apple pie, as American as it gets, and a smudged grass stain. Taking a knee…this isn’t a protest of America itself, its flag, or anything that this country stands for. It isn’t disrespectful of the US military. On the contrary, it is the acknowledgement that we as a country can do better, that we must do better, and that we must renew our commitment to fight for equality and justice for all. Proceeds benefit the NAACP.
Theoi Nomioi: The National Park Service refuses to be muzzled. On January 24th, South Dakota’s Badlands National Park social media team defiantly posted a series of climate change facts from the National Wildlife Federation before being shut down. The Theoi Nomioi are the gods and spirits of the wild: the countryside, the pastures, the forests. Under their auspices, untamed nature thrives, the beasts of the wild feast and multiply, the mountains reach to the heavens with their stony, snow-capped fingers, and the forests grow thick and dark with mystery. Proceeds to the benefitNational Parks Conservation Associationand theNational Park Foundation.
And last but certainly not least, The Collected Poetic Works of Antonin Scalia, the “federal court’s beat poet of indignation and right-wing rage.” We’ve had myriad political figures throughout US history that have possessed acid tongues, but few in the modern era have provided such a constant stream of colorfully vitriolic superlatives as the Sick Burn Champion, the cranky, flamboyant, inimitable Antonin Gregory Scalia.
I haven’t sampled all of these scents, and more importantly, I don’t want my opinions on them to overshadow the fact that these scents exist in the world, doing good in the first place, so you won’t find reviews here today… but feel free to ask questions in the comments if you wanted my thoughts on any of them, and I will do my best to fill you in!
Are you a creator who gives a damn? Are you aware of artisans or indie businesses speaking up, reaching out, and creating art or goods to express outrage with injustice, promote anti-hatred, or which encourage safe spaces in their communities? Please let me know about them for future Friday Fripperies!
It is November and I feel myself curling inward. Wrapping up in several layers of blanket burrito. Cocooning myself from everything in the world while I’m feeling weary, heartsick, vulnerable and, well…Novemberish.
