Dali House

There’s an amusing video on YouTube showing how Disney has recycled all of the original drawings for its animated films, so that characters’ movements and facial expressions in more recent cartoons exactly match those of the classics.

Evidently Disney’s artists can’t be arsed to draw stuff from scratch.

But who would have thought the American Meat Council would make use of an old Nazi youth-recruitment poster?

The paintings of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1844-1934) are just so much better than the pictures of dressed-up pets constantly flowing through email veins. And that goes for the hand-drawn pictures too.

When the illustrator from Rochester, New York, produced “The Poker Game” in 1894, the cigar distributor who likely commissioned it would have had the image printed on cards to give to his regular customers.

The printers, Brown & Bigelow, also cranked out advertising posters, calendars and keepsake prints for the general public. Coolidge was almost as popular as Norman Rockwell in some quarters.

Pooches at the ballpark, rising to the defence in a court of law, going to work with a lunch pail. Who could beat it?

Coolidge has been to Dali House before: He stayed in this room.

I said I wasn’t going to post anything further about Damien Hirst, but when someone with the heft of Robert Hughes steps forward to explain why, who can resist?

I still shudder at Hughes’ ill-considered dismissal as valueless everything Dali did after 1939 , but in an article for the Guardian headlined “Day of the dead”, about the mid-September Hirst auction at Sotheby’s, he certainly hits nails on heads.

He begins by pointing out the nonsense in promoting the auction as “special” simply because Hirst was selling his work directly for sale, rather than through a dealer.

“Christie’s and Sotheby’s are now scarcely distinguishable from private dealers anyway: they in effect manage and represent living artists, and the Hirst auction is merely another step in cutting gallery dealers out of the loop.”

All that was special about the sale, he continues, was “the extreme disproportion between Hirst’s expected prices and his actual talent”.

“Hirst is basically a pirate, and his skill is shown by the way in which he has managed to bluff so many art-related people … into giving credence to his originality and the importance of his ‘ideas’.”

Hirst’s collages of dead butterflies are “nothing more than replays of Victorian decor”, the empty spin paintings just “enlarged versions of the pseudo-art made in funfairs”.

“His work is both simple-minded and sensationalist, just the ticket for newbie collectors who are, to put it mildly, connoisseurship-challenged and resonance-free. Where you see Hirsts you will also see Jeff Koons’ balloons, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s stoned scribbles, Richard Prince’s feeble jokes and pin-ups of nurses and, inevitably, scads of really bad, really late Warhols.”

Of the most famous shark since Jaws, in which fawning critics see a symbol of existential risk, “one might as well get excited about seeing a dead halibut on a slab in Harrods food hall”.

“The idea that the American hedge-fund broker Steve Cohen, out of a hypnotised form of culture-snobbery, would pay an alleged $12 million for a third of a tonne of shark, far gone in decay, is so risible that it beggars the imagination,” Hughes writes. See the rest.

Long before kids went Goth and cosplay turned them all into dolls, I was parlaying my interest in the monsters of classic literature and films into a potential career in makeup. God gave me some leash and then (mercifully) pointed me in another direction, but the memories still give me a kick.

This was during the early 1960s, after the previous decade’s horror and sci-fi B-movies had revived the popularity of the great Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff flicks of the ’30s.

Seeing these films on television rotated my bookworm radar to Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, and if their prose became too cumbersome for a kid, I always had the Classics Illustrated comic versions, and from there it was a turn of the page to one of my all-time favourite magazines, Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Like all of its avid readers, I idolised the editor, Forrest J Ackerman, whose picture appeared often, usually in some fright pose and with one of the stars of the movies he was writing about. “Uncle Forry” died this past December 4 at age 92.

For fellow fans, I’ve got a post about Ackerman, plastic models and Lon Chaney Sr here on my personal blog, Dorseyland, and all the Famous Monsters magazine covers are at MovieMags.com.

The Preussen with five masts, 47 unfurled sails, four lifeboats and 19 deck grates, sealed with a cork and rope around the neck, of unknown origin.

I don’t know why. One morning I woke up thinking about ships in bottles and was surprised to discover that I’d suddenly become interested in how it’s done. Probably this is a lump of wisdom that’s common as muck to most people, but I had no idea. So I gassed up the search engine.

YahooAnswers.com “best answer”: “They build the boat first, then they have Chihuly blow a bottle around it.”

Well, I know Dale Chihuly’s confusingly revered yet satisfying breakable work, so at least I started out with a laugh.

On his website Impossibottle!, Merlin refused to reveal the secrets, something like a magician. “The whole raison d’etre of impossible bottles is to make you think. It would be against the spirit of the thing for me to post methods for making the bottles, not to mention the fact that it would anger some of the commercial ‘bottle-makers’.”

That’s even funnier.

The real technique(s) soon emerged, and for anyone else that didn’t know, it goes like this:

Armed with long-handled tools, they build the ship first, with foldable sections, using hinges, and then slide it into the bottle and pop the folded bits, like the masts, back out. But other ships, “especially broader-beamed ships like motor boats”, the ship is indeed assembled in the bottle.

Something else I didn’t know: ships in bottles are part of a larger genre called “impossible bottles”, which Wikipedia for some reason describes as “a type of mechanical puzzle”. These are bottles containing any object that doesn’t appear to fit through the neck. Could be a boat; could be “matchboxes, decks of cards, tennis balls, racketballs, Rubik’s cubes, padlocks, knots and scissors”. See the rest.