I got the idea from Morbid Anatomy.

German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece was made for the Saint Anthony’s Monastery chapel. One of the things the boring aesthetic-based art histories never tell you is that Grünewald (not his real name) made this painting for a hospital specializing in skin diseases: its aim was basically to tell sufferers, “Shut up about your ailments, look what Jesus suffered.” From an article by Stanley Meisler in the September 1999 edition of Smithsonian Magazine:

The Antonite order operated the hospital in Isenheim largely for those afflicted by a disease known then as “Saint Anthony’s fire.”

That disease (now rare and called “ergotism”) struck down many in periodic epidemics during the Middle Ages. [According to the ergotism entry on Wikipedia, there was a 2001 outbreak in Ethiopia.] Saint Anthony’s fire set off painful skin eruptions that blackened and turned gangrenous, often requiring amputations. The eruptions were accompanied by nervous spasms and convulsions. Many victims died.

Saint Anthony’s fire came from the poison of a fungus that clung to rye and was inadvertently pounded into the flour used to make rye bread. The cause, however, was not known in Grünewald’s time. The monks treated the sick with a balm made from herbs and other plants and with prayers to Saint Anthony, who was believed to possess miraculous curing powers. The monks also tried to bolster the faith of the sick by reminding them that Christ - and Saint Anthony as well - had suffered even greater torments. Grünewald’s altarpiece played an important mystical and psychological role in the Isenheim treatment program.

The chapel burned down during the French Revolution, but not before some government officials saved the art. The painting is now in the nearby town of Colmar, where it is displayed in pieces.

Originally the crucifixion image you see above was the two top wings that opened to reveal another painting composed of two wings which themselves opened to reveal Niklas Hagenauer’s sculpture. Luke Ulrich shows how the painting originally worked in this very short video:

This other website explains the subject of each of the panels.

The top wings, or the crucifixion scene, has Jesus just off-centre, with his right arm crossing to the right wing of the altarpiece, in effect, amputated from his body, much as the hospital’s patients often suffered amputation of their gangrenous limbs.

Fun. Now eat your rye bread and be thankful no pus-boils-and-gangrene fungi is clinging to your grains.

I eat powdered milk with a spoon. Not mixed with water or anything. I just like the sweet, stickiness.

It might have something to do with the fact that I was fed formula as a baby. You see, I was a bit bite-y when I was young - my vampire heritage and all - and my mother’s doctor told her to stop breast-feeding me or else it would be curtains for her nipples.

Now, the medical profession would have you believe that breast milk pumps up a baby’s IQ and bolsters their immune system. Maybe. Maybe for some babies.

But not me. The lack of breast milk hasn’t prevented me from being immune to the common cold and dysentry. I drank faeces-laden soup and lived!

Back to powdered milk, Matt recently discovered my dark secret. He bought a large bag of the stuff and then had to go and get himself allergic to dairy products. Not just dairy, but also soy anything, red meat, crab, squid, all sugars (including my collection of twelve jars of honey), wheat, vinegar, alcohol and even duck, for fuck’s sake.

What this means is that I have to drink all the booze and eat all the chocolate before it spoils. I just finished my bowl of powdered milk and am on to my second glass of wine. I’m doing this for you, baby!

The powdered milk thing is ok; I like white powdery things. It’s when I finish off the wine and milk, that I have to work through the Campari. Now that’s gonna be torture.

When my friend Risa came over from Japan to visit last month, I kept pointing out how Japanicized the rest of the world has become:

• Every big bookstore now has a manga section.
• White high school girls attempt big socks (though they use slouchy legwarmers instead).
• Everyone and their racist meat-and-potatoes great grandmother eats sushi these days.
• The people really in the know - i.e. all of Vancouver contained within the traditional snob boundaries (King Edward and Nanaimo) - has moved on to izakaya food.
• Most coffee shops now sell green tea lattes, while some very advanced ones even have matcha tea.
• You can buy takoyaki in cultural voids like Port Coquitlam.
• Supermarkets now carry edamame.
• We even have hundred-yen stores.
• Our tv shows rip off Japanese ones - whether they’re restaurant makeover programs or silly Jackass crap.
• Snooty bars in New York have shiso- and yuzu lemon-flavoured cocktails.
• There’s a cherry blossom festival in Vancouver.

Risa pointed out that the export of Japanese culture has the Japanese rather pissed with us foreigners.

“What?!” I said aghast. “The Japanese love to show off all the cool things in Japanese culture. I mean, there are women who wait all their lives to rip off a foreigner’s clothes and dress them in the best kimono. And there are people who can’t resist feeding live fish to some naive outsider so that they can taste the freshest meat money can buy.”

“But that’s the problem,” said Risa.

As the rest of the world realizes that sashimi is damn good, there’s less tuna to go around. Now that any Russian mafioso can take his girlfriend of the week to sample fresh tuna in Moscow or any Joe Bob in Lubbock, Texas can stab his toro with his chopsticks, the big fish’s numbers have dwindled.

Thus the export of one of the hallmarks of Japanese culture, its cuisine, means that the Japanese themselves may soon be pushed out of the market. This is what has many Japanese complaining.

According to the New York Times, some chefs have experimented with venison and horse sushi. Others have studied North American abominations like our mouth-bursting everything-in-the-freezer-plus-tobiko rolls.

Hopefully this insanity for all things Japanese will bring over a few things I miss about Japan: paper stores that have nothing to do with scrapbooking, hanafuda, Ayako Miyawaki exhibits, Gegege no Kitaro, Doraemon comics, real Japanese onsens, Japanese panties (more comfortable and pretty than ours), and good customer service.

After years of curiosity, I finally watched the 1931 film M.

The Criterion copy reads: “Behind every great suspense thriller lurks the shadow of M. In this, Fritz Lang’s first sound film, Peter Lorre delivers a haunting performance as the cinema’s first serial killer, a whistling pedophile hunted by the police and brought to trial by the forces of the Berlin underworld.”

I’ve ony known Peter Lorre in Arsenic and Old Lace, Casablanca and the dreadful 1939 Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation (where he plays a Japanese man), and thus saw him more as a creepy gagster. Now I know how far creepy goes in describing him.

But what I didn’t know is that he was Jewish and fled Germany soon after the film’s release, supposedly warned by Josef Goebbels himself.

Peter Lorre was born László Löwenstein in Rózsahegy, in 1904 a part of the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now Ruzomberok in Slovakia. By 22, he was a bank clerk by day and an actor by night (from The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre by Stephen Youngkin).

The actor fled first to Paris in February 1933, then to London to play in Hitchcock’s 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much, and, in July of that same year, he made his way across the Atlantic to the US.

The 1933 Nazi propaganda film, The Eternal Jew, used his image in M as the stereotypical Jew, and the film was finally banned in July 1934.

He also played the first Bond villain, Le Chiffre, in the 1954 Casino Royale. He inspired numerous cartoon versions of himself, in Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck episodes, in Porky Pig’s portrayal of Mr. Motto, a fish in Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hatches an Egg, the Booberry cereal mascot, Ren in The Ren & Stimpy Show, a character in Corpse Bride, and others.

Much like Bela Lugosi, he never managed to avoid typecasting as a villain and later as a parody of himself. As one critic put it, Youngkin, the author of the exhaustive biography, wonders if Lorre thought “he should have stayed in Europe and faced Hitler.”

Fritz Lang, the director, left in 1933, soon after Goebbels offered him (and he refused) the role of the director of the German Cinema Institute. The position eventually went to Leni Riefenstahl.

M was based on a number of Weimar murderers:

Peter Kürten (1883-1932) - The Düsseldorf Vampire attacked men, women and especially little girls, starting with a burglary in 1913 and sometimes stabbing as many as three people in a day. On his way to the guillotine, he asked, “Will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck?”

Fritz Haarmann (1879-1925) The Butcher of Hannover, had a Hitler moustache like Kürten, but got away with more murders because he killed vagrants and male prostitutes. He killed his victims in true vampire fashion, nipping them at the neck, and later sold their clothes and their flesh as “pork.” Once, a merchant took the “meat” to the police to air his suspicion that it was human flesh; the police said it was definitely pork.

Karl Denke (1870-1924) This organ player killed and ate at least thirty people, sometimes selling the meat on the loca market. The Mass Murderer of Munstberg hanged himself in his cell the night of his arrest. He had a full beard.

Carl Grossmann (1863-1921?) The Berlin Butcher also committed suicide in his cell; police found the remains and blood of at least four victims in his apartment; he may have killed up to fifty young women. He sold the flesh on the market, and, like Haarman, throwing away the “non-edible” bits into a river. Now, are you ready for this? He also had a hot dog stand. The extent of his facial hair is unknown.

Peter Kürten is most often recalled as the single inspiration, though someone pointed out that the children’s rhyme at the beginning used Schwarzer Mann (”Black Man”) which originally was “Haarmann” for Fritz Haarman.

One of the early sound films, M uses sound to heighten the foreboding, as detailed in a Criterion essay - in the opening shot, the children sing of the murderer and how he chops his victims; the mother’s frantic calls for her daughter over a shot of an empty attic; the murderer’s whistling before we even see him. Visually, I was delighted with the idea of the M and of the would-be victim politely and unwittingly handing Lorre his dropped knife.

Three months late, our little book club finally met tonight. The book for October had been Dracula. To celebrate the book, MaikoPunk, MaikoPunk’s Husband, Matt and I held six commemorative activities:

1. We made a batch of mămăligă, which Jonathan Harker ate in Klausenburgh (or Cluj in northwestern Romania) a day before he met the count. Mămăligă is cornmeal (grits to southerners and polenta to Italians), which I served with sour cream and goaty feta cheese. If any had been left over, I could have eaten the rest with cold milk in the morning.

2. We made Bat Bites, a rum-and-cranberry concoction.

3. We made burnt rum punch. When Renfield meets Arthur Holmwood in chapter XVIII, he blurts out, of Arthur’s father, “He was a man loved and honoured by all who knew him; and in his youth was, I have heard, the inventor of a burnt rum punch, much patronised on Derby night.”

The Annotated Dracula provided a burnt rum punch recipe from The Art of British Cooking by Theodora FitzGibbon:

5 lemons
1/2 pound lump sugar
1 piece cinnamon stick
2 cups water
1 bottle rum

Rub lemons with the lumps of sugar until you have removed all the yellow zest. Put the lemony sugar into a saucepan with the lemon juice and the cinnamon stick; pour over the water and bring just to a boil. See that the lumps of sugar dissolve. Then add the rum, heat up, but do not boil, for fear of destroying the strength of the rum. Remove the cinnamon stick and serve hot.

I thought that, unlike paprika hendl (or paprika chicken) or impletata (”eggplant stuffed with forcemeat,” or patlagele impulute, according to the Annotated Dracula), mentioned, with mămăligă, early in the novel, burnt rum punch sounded like something worth attempting.

No, it isn’t. Burnt rum punch tastes like Vicks Cough Syrup.

4. We watched Nosferatu, the third-known film treatment of the novel. A 1920 Russian version and a 1921 Hungarian version by Karoly Lafthay called Drakula preceded the 1922 F. W. Murnau film. Most of us had seen this best of Dracula adapations numerous times; however, how can one not watch the classic again?

5. We watched Bela Lugosi’s film White Zombie, which he filmed two years after he made Dracula. Tonight’s crowd had all watched the 1931 film last October, so it was too soon for a re-viewing. White Zombie, however, was new to almost everybody except myself.

With Bela starring as zombie overlord ‘Murder’ Legendre, the Bela Lugosi school of acting is very much in evidence in this 1932 film. Lost until the 1960s, it is also currently the first known zombie film, albeit the zombies are of the voodoo variety and not the revenant ghouls.

6. We watched Freaks, directed by Tod Browning, the man who also did Dracula with Bela Lugosi. Of the treachery of trapeze artist Cleopatra, Matt said, “Seems like there’s a special level of hell reserved for stealing a midget woman’s man.”

As for the real sideshow cast, in Cleopatra’s words, “Great jumping Christmas!” Conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton learned self-hypnosis from Harry Houdini so they could spend time alone; Mexican pinhead Schlitze (or Simon Metz) dressed as a girl for most of his career; despite having no arms or legs, Prince Randian could really roll and light his cigarettes as seen in the film (he could also shave and paint). We all marvelled at the Half-Boy’s grace (played by Johnny Eck). Browning himself was once a circus contortionist. He made only four more movies after Freaks.

*****

I was not able to find any of Bela Lugosi’s other landmark films, Murders in the Rue Morgue or The Raven. I even went through Matt’s WC Fields DVDs to try and find the 1933 International House in which, as General Nicholas Petronovich, Bela finally had the chance to break out of stereotype and act in a comedic role. No luck.

I do regret not borrowing the Spanish Drácula from the library. In 1930, while Bela and Browning were shooting the familiar Dracula during the day, a Spanish-language version with Spanish actors used the same set by night. Starring Carlos Villarías (who looks like Bela himself or Nicholas Cage, depending on the source) in the title role, the film’s director George Melford knew no Spanish whatsoever.

Oddly enough, tonight we never got to doing the usual book club thing. We ran out of time to discuss What elements of the gothic genre are found in Dracula?, What is the significance of blood in Dracula? and What are the ways Dracula remains an icon in today’s popular culture?

Oh well.

Our next book is Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. On with the crotch-grabbing!

*****

Our previous bookclub meetings and books:

June: Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (and here)
July: Evelyne Lever’s Marie Antoinette (not documented) with an initial foray into the attractiveness of Madame du Barry, some Zamor bashing, the deaths of Princesse de Lamballe and the Duc de Brissac, and the current vogue for Marie Antoinette.
August: Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down
September: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (not documented)
October: Bram Stoker’s Dracula with literary surprises and a Halloween diatribe.

With all the recent flap about the combined crotches of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, I am reminded of the words of Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali:

If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem.

If the meat was covered, the cats wouldn’t roam around it. If the meat is inside the fridge, they won’t get it.

If the meat was in the fridge and it [the cat] smelled it, it can bang its head as much as it wants, but it’s no use.

As if proving the truth of the Australian cleric’s words, pervy types roam around seeking out celebrity upskirt photos.* They also tend to use similarly colourful and oddly hunger-inducing descriptions to explain the pink taco.

Thus -

The Top Ten Food-Related Celebrity Vaginal Descriptions

1. Weathered pastrami flaps
2. Beef curtains
3. Pork chops
4. Vagigantic mufflepie
5. Taffy crotch
6. Saggy bat wings (possibly a food source in some cultures)
7. Bacon lips
8. Ham wallet
9. Oyster ditch
10. My neighbour’s mastiff (also a food source if your city is under siege)

Who knew a bunch of white middle-class kids with an internet connection have so much in common with an old Egyptian imam? Hurrah for globalization!

Collected from comments here, here, here, here and here.

*Myself included.

Reading about Gorgonzola and pear ice cream, I was a little downcast because I like non-traditional flavours but I hate ice cream. Vancouver has plenty of gelato places catering to those who like non-chocolate-vanilla-strawberry ice cream, but nothing for the likes of me.

What I’d like is a store that serves up the usual stuff then has five hundred flavours of mixing and matching that’s the real backbone.

I’m thinking a takoyaki shop that has mentaiko-stuffed takoyaki (octopus balls with spicy roe). Or a croquette cafe that lists on brie korokke on their menu. Or a Transylvanian creperie with dill pancakes. Or a door-to-door peddler of shiokara-umeboshi-shiso-sea urchin yumminess (in other words, a dish of something mixing the mushy goodness of sea urchin innards with squid viscera, pickled plums and perilla leaves).

Nothing of that level of fusion weirdness, sadly, exists in Vancouver. Unless it comes in ice cream form.

Japan and Taiwan fulfilled many of my food fantasies. From Japan, the love of the shiso leaf was the perfect accompaniment to all dishes. In Taiwan, having bought a mystery sandwich in the dark, I realized that tuna and peanut butter are excellent sandwich buddies - we’re talking Taiwanese peanut butter, stuff that is to American peanut butter as mimolette is to pimiento cheese.

Trapped on the continent, there are two stops to whet an appetite for the daring.

The first is Wow Bao in Chicago’s Water Tower Place. Run by white people, with an Asian frontline staff, every time I am in Chicago I sneak up the Magnificent Mile every day to sample the buns. Sometimes I remember my lovely Chicago hosts and pick up a box of the frozen bao for them.

Photo Courtesy: Gino888

The scrumptious flavours include the ever-present Kung Pao Cashew Chicken bun (I suspect the “cashew” part of its name wasn’t there before), the Thai Curry Chicken bun, the more authentic BBQ Pork bun, the Spicy Mongolian Beef bun, and the Green Vegetable bun, more delightful than its name would otherwise suggest. The online menu also lists the Teriyaki Chicken bun, which must be new since my last trip to Chicago.

Photo Courtesy: Stacey Cookie

With no franchise information on their parent site, I am more than a little disheartened that I must continue paying the airfare to Chicago if I want to sample my dastardly Kung Pao Chicken bun.

Then there is New York’s Rice to Riches. Screw raisins, this rice pudding store takes the already-perfect dessert to beyond any heaven with 72 virgins!

As a rice pudding chef (I taught rice pudding class when I was a high school teacher), I drool over the flavours on today’s menu:

• Secret Life of Pumpkin
• Coconut Coma
• Forbidden Apple
• “Category 5″ Caramel
• Hzelnut Chocolate Bear Hug
• Gingerbread Joy Ride
• The Corner of Cookies and Cream
• and the greater-then-great Man-Made Mascarpone with Cherries

Annoyingly enough, there are no plans yet for franchising. Investing, yes, they want your money, but a load of good it’ll do me if I have to fly across three time zones to indulge. Rice to Riches does, however, ship their puddings overnight to anywhere in the US. At $49 USD, this expensive rice pudding does beat the frequent trip to New York.

Photos Courtesy: Mussels

Update: This post inspired Matt to present me tonight with a half-litre each of Gorgonzola-pear gelato and basil-Pernod gelato.

For the last month and a half, I have become mostly vegetarian. Partly for health reasons, mostly for animal rights, I occasionally slip and declare a meat holiday. For example, in a schnitzel restaurant, how can my Austro-Hungarianess resist?

I planned for brunch at the Elbow Room, the bad service satirists who serve the best multiplex eggs in town. Vegetarian choices include the Thelma (poached eggs, sauteed spinach, tomatoes, mushrooms and avocado on a sour dough muffin topped with camembert and feta cheese) and the pesco-vegetarian Ted McLaren (poached eggs, baby shrimp, imitation crab, diced tomato and green onion with avocado, served on a croissant topped with hollandaise). I closed my menu and clasped my hands in front of me, waiting for my breakfast companion to decide.

Matt looked up at me from his menu. “Would you be upset if I order the Brett Cullen?”

The Brett Cullen. Poached eggs, sauteed spinach, bacon, avocado and blue cheese on a sour dough muffin. Topped with hollandaise sauce. The stuff of my daydreams during work meetings, during long commutes, while washing dishes, when I brush my teeth at night. The Brett Cullen.

“Well, if you’re having a meat holiday,” I said, “Then I can have a meat holiday too.”

Confident that I could simply reach over to my breakfast companion’s plate and sample the Brett Cullen, I decided to order something novel. The Bryan with two poached eggs on a Bavarian smokie, topped with BBQ sauce, sauteed mushrooms, onions, tomato and melted cheddar cheese on top of a sour dough muffin would round out my familiarity of the hidden corners of the Elbow Room menu.

Forty-five minutes later, as I waddled out of the Elbow Room, I contentedly proclaimed Meat Holiday a success and was ready to go back to ordinary vegetarian living until next year.

Forty-five minutes after that, my soggy self made it to Science World.

For those of you not from Vancouver, Science World is a children’s science museum, well, science education centre. Science World is in a shiny metallic sphere full of hands-on exhibits about optical illusions, physics, human functions, animals and the like. Science World, though a non-profit, is one of the few, if not the only, Vancouver-area cultural institution to turn a profit. With Body Worlds, they’ve clearly met their 2006 budget many times over.

Operating under the aegis of education and health advocacy, Body Worlds 3, the exhibit Vancouver got, has some 200 body parts, sliced cross-section and entire corpses. Surely something someone of my morbid tendencies would revel in the sheer grotesquerie.

Having touched human bones before, the femur at the entrance was nothing. I stared hard at the red veiny things seeping on the femur’s extremities. Then my first full corpse.

Well, I am more a fan of goriness in the fictional form, in particular on celluloid, in the guise of a good zombie flick. I’ve spent a night in Transylvania with a dead body in front of a graveyard, and that got acquainted with the superstition terrors of the night. Anything too nonfictional, however, and I get queasy.

So it was at Body Worlds. I felt weak, as if I couldn’t lift my arms. Still I walked around each body, sometimes standing on my tiptoes to peer into cranial cavities and vacated abdomens. I began dissecting my reaction.

It wasn’t the gross-out feeling one would get from, say, a burn victim. It was more of, this is meat.

The muscles reminded me so much of food. I kept thinking, I could never eat that. (I am a fan of emergency cannibal nonfiction; Uruguayan rugby players wrecked in the Andes, the Franklin expeditions, besieged Muscovites eating one another, Donner Party horrors, Chinese rumours of WWII-era kidnappings.) I mean, I’ve helped out at pig and chicken slaughters, and at the time I couldn’t wait to eat my favourite parts. Looking at real human bodies reduced to mere meat, I was happy I’ve become vegetarian.

Then I further dissected my queasiness.

My stint in a law firm, looking at photos of liability claims, instilled in me an understanding that humans are fragile and anything - an escalator, a wedding ring - can become a weapon that tears the body asunder. I’d seen the pictures of a girl’s face ripped off by an escalator and a woman’s finger separated from her hand by a two-metre-long thread of tendon. I respect the dangers inherent in life, yet intend to live to 85 and pass away peacefully in my sleep.

Body Worlds reminded me that, though I may avoid sipping cyanide or signing up for mercenary service in Iraq, death might come riding as that extra doughnut or that third martini. Hell, I can limit myself to bran and lettuce; birth condemns all of us to death. Part of my fear of Body Worlds was that I began half-expecting that the ceiling would begin raining anvils to pulverize us the audience into snitzel pulp.

Halfway through the exhibit, there was a hands-on table, mimicking the children’s displays elsewhere in Science World, only this time with a plastinated kidney, liver and two arm cross-sections. I flapped liver slivers, poked my finger into a gouged-out hole in the arm, and held up the kidney to my nose to smell it.

Beside the touchy-feelies was a book, How Do I Become a Plastinate? I skimmed over the table of contents, then turned to the chapter on reasons for wanting to become a plastinate. Selflessness was the main reason, to educate the lay public and to continue being of some use to society after one’s demise. But also immortality. I want to be like the Egyptian Pharoahs, one said. Another, I worked hard to get my body into prime physical shape, I want others to learn from me.

Here’s something I have never admitted until now: I have a deep-seated fear that, if I were to become an organ donor, my consent would give a modern-day Burke and Hare a pre-mortem carte blanche. Immortality would not be Pharaonic but meaty.

Other visitors felt the human body reverberated with the trappings of a meal. “The intestines look like sausages,” said a young woman in her early twenties.

On the way out were cross-sections of the length of an obese man’s body, a warning about the dangers of eating lest any viewers mull the meatiness of the human body too much.

Two hours after Body Worlds, I sat in a movie theatre waiting to see Jan Svankmajer’s latest, Lunacy, a horror film about the two opposing methods of running an insane asylum.

The film is live action interspersed with stop-motion animation interruptions of ambulatory meat, the latter scenes accompanied by saccharine carnival music (photos here). The meat parallels the real actors, with tongues, slabs of meat, brains and eyeballs dancing out the travails of the humans. In the end, a hunk of meat in a supermarket pulsates against the confines of plastic wrap, mirroring the nightmare come true for the human protagonist.

“Repugnant palate cleansers,” says one of Lunacy’s critics of the parading meat. “A counter-melody reminding us that all is decay.”

Tonight I ate bread with vinegar.