Lyn suggests a loving wife is revolutionary. Medieval mythologists may have agreed.

From the Wikipedia entry on the Bicorn:

Bicorn (also known as Bicrone) is a mythological creature related to the Unicorn with two horns that has the reputation of devouring kind-hearted and devoted husbands, and is thus plump and well fed. His counterpart is the Chichevache, which devours only obedient wives and is therefore thin and starving.

It’s interesting to note that the Bicorn’s prey is exclusively kind-hearted husbands; the Chichevache’s prey only needs be obedient, not kind. The difference is that women, while expected to be obedient on the surface, were presumably not excluded from harbouring secret grudges.

My friend Maikopunk moved next to an abandoned children’s mental hospital called Woodlands. The times I’ve visited Maikopunk, I kept expecting some Session 9 creepiness. Maikopunk herself has never experienced anything supernatural.

Notorious locally for the treatment of the poor kids who were imprisoned within, the patients lived with rampant physical and sexual abuse. Some youngsters were committed permanently by parents who thought their kids were only going in for a weekend. Other children had their teeth removed if they were violent (or perhaps scared and bewildered). One nurse who tried to report the sexual abuse she witnessed, was herself incarcerated in another mental hospital. Woodlands closed down in 1996.

The government sold the land to the Onni development company, who built condos on the site, surrounding the remaining hospital buildings. The asylum buildings were classified as heritage buildings, which in the local Vancouver parlance means structures that may or may not be one day as valuable as Europe’s venerable examples. Eventually, as Onni’s deal with the City of New Westminster went, the company would spruce up the old hospital buildings.

Instead, they sat behind fences for years (my photos are from 2006) and housed a sizeable squatter population.

Maikopunk and I once went for a walk on the grounds once to find the headstones of BC ghost lore. The hospital’s graveyard was torn down a few years back, resulting in a ghost story that most readers of Robert Belyk’s Ghosts: True Stories from British Columbia remember.

In the 1970s, a Burquitlam apartment block - this area is a few kilometres north of the hospital - got itself some new garden stepping stones. Children flipped over the stones to find out that they were the headstones of Woodlands’ long-forgotten patients. Poltergeist activity then creeped out enough residents that the headstones were removed.

When Maikopunk and I finally found the remaining headstones, they were clustered behind a fence, waiting to be turned into a monument.

I’ve since passed the monument a number of times, but never got out of my car to photograph it yet.

As of last week, there’s no danger of ice picks to the eye on the Woodlands site any more. Good old Woodlands has burned down.

Maikopunk had to evacuate her building for one night. She reports that her place is alright, not even any smoke damage. The blame for the fire goes to the homeless people living inside the building. Of course, we’re all waiting to see what the arson investigation turns up.

Oops.

Onni got permission the next day to demolish what was left of the burned husk.

Conspiracy theories, anyone?

Vancouverites, whether they hated the idea of Woodlands as a heritage building or not, all have an opinion on what really happened.

It’s widely believed that Ruskin, upon his wedding night, was horrified to discover that his bride had pubic hair and couldn’t consummate the marriage. He had seen so many Greek statues and idealized paintings, that the real female body shocked him.

A Victorian art critic, Ruskin’s fame sparkles most fervently for Venetophiles like me. He wrote Stones of Venice, a detailed look at Venice’s art and architecture through its churches.

The romance that led to Ruskin’s marriage started early. Ruskin wrote a fantasy novel called The King of the Golden River for his future wife, the then-twelve-year-old Euphemia, or Effie, Gray. The girl married him in 1846, when she was 16 and he was 26. The marriage was annulled after six years. Ruskin then fell in love with a nine-year-old girl. Wikipedia untangles the possibilities of his possible paedophilia - his wedding night horror, however, is more entertaining.

Effie herself heard a gamut of reasons as to why he couldn’t bring himself to make love to his wife: “He alleged various reasons, hatred to children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason… that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April.” For good measure, he also wrote to her parents to say that her “person” (i.e. her body) was gross.

Wikipedia collects some of the speculation as to what exactly was wrong with Effie:

• Ruskin’s biographer, Mary Lutyens, started the pubic hair theory that many people now take as fact.
• Peter Fuller in his book Theoria: Art and the Absence of Grace, thought it was Effie’s menstrual blood.
• John Batchelor agrees that menstrual blood was part of it. He thinks Effie’s body odour also grossed out Ruskin.

Whatever it was, I feel sorry for the both of them. Effie has gone down in history as the hairy woman; Ruskin slipped in and out of mental breakdowns after his nine-year-old persistently turned down his advances.

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.

A few days ago I heard or read someone make mention of WWII having been a 6-year vacation.

I had heard that that particular generation was special in a way that those of us born afterwards would never know - it wasn’t just the hardship from fighting and supporting the homefront - it was born of the camaraderie developed from hundreds of young people dealing together to address unique situation.  Certainly, I bet the losers in the war, the Germans and their allies, the civilians over whose lands soldiers crushed their way, the Red Army POWs, the Allied casualties and their families, would not really agree.

But if you talk to North Americans of a certain age, you’ll hear how, despite everything, there was some fun involved in the war.  Dances, group outings, foreign travel; these coupled with a common purpose everyone shared (beating the Axis powers), plus the chance to work at something besides “work,” is this the vacation to which my unknown quote referred?

Has anyone else read about this?  Have you heard your parents or grandparents talk with happy nostalgia for the war years?

I recently made the mistake of watching the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. However, this won’t be a review of that movie (don’t see it). I wanted to explore one of the characters. No, nothing more on that Depp character. We all know about the Keith Richards thing. Smarter people than myself even suspect Depp’s reference to Adam Ant (maybe the next historical craze, now that we’ve gone through Antoinette, Greek fighting boys and half-serious pirate, will be English highwaymen).

What I do want to point out is the female Asian pirate. The Chinese pirate who didn’t get censored out of the movie by the Chinese government.

Credited as Mistress Ching and played by an American of Japanese extraction, Takayo Fischer nee Tsubouchi), I immediately suspected that this pirate was influenced by Zheng Yi Sao (or Zheng Shi in Wikipedia). A few years ago, this name appeared in a kid’s pirate book, with only a snippet saying that she was active in the first half of the nineteenth century and that she commanded thousands in the South China Sea.

Growing up, like all little girls who want to grow up to pillage coastal towns and keelhaul insubordinate minions, I read up about my predecessors. In those days, the only female pirates who made it into the classical pirate canon were Anne Bonny and Mary Read. All other women in history, the books implied by omission, stayed home and baked strudels.

When I looked up Zheng this time, besides a Wikipedia page (and some cultural influences - she appeared in a Borges story), she was joined by other Chinese pirates with two x-chromosomes. Seven of them according to this list. This other list has three more to add to this roster.

Here’s the total combined list, with possible redundancies and no standardization of romanization (I hate Wade-Giles):

1. Ch’iao K’uo Fü Jën (c. 600 BCE): Chinese legend.
2. Qi Sao (Seventh Elder Sister-in-law): South China Sea, commanded a fleet of 20 ships.
3. Li (wife of Chen Acheng) (early 1800s): South China Sea, was involved in at least 10 robberies at sea with her husband before she was captured and made the slave of a military officer.
4. Shi Xainggu (or Zheng Yi Sao) (1801-1810): South China Sea, commanded either five or six squadrons consisting of 800 large junks, about 1,000 smaller vessels, and between 70,000 and 80,000 men and women.
5. Cai Quin Ma (Matron Cai Quin) (died 1804): South China Sea.
6. T’ang Ch’en Ch’iao: alias “Golden Grace”.
7. Lo Hon-cho (Honcho Lo): took over command on husband’s death in 1921, was a supporter of the Chinese revolution.
8. Wong (1922): united her 50 ship fleet with Lo Hon-cho’s 64 junks.
9. Lai Sho Sz’en (Lai Choi San) (1922-1939): South China Sea, commanded 12 junks.
10. P’en Ch’ih Ch’iko (1936): commanded 100 pirates.
11. Ki Ming (this may be another name for P’en Ch’ih Ch’iko).
12. Huang P’ei-mei (1937-1950s): leader of 50,000 pirates.

Now the little girls of today can have other heroes besides Paris, Lindsay and Nicole.

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.

Though my French Revolution phase has abated somewhat, the new Marie Antoinette movie still inspires plenty of venom in me. Perhaps it’s the fact that stupid little girls who watched the movie have vandalized Wikipedia with anti-Madame du Barry vitriol that has no basis in historical fact:

The young dauphine also faced the spite of the Louis XV’s mistress, Madame du Barry. Du Barry was born Jeanne Bécu, a commoner who gained the notice of nobility as a courtesan. As Marie Antoinette felt it was beneath herself to associate with such a woman, Du Barry set out to make her life as miserable as possible, beginning by turning the king against his granddaughter-in-law.

The spite of Madame du Barry? Du Barry actually went to the effort of making Marie Antoinette’s life miserable? She turned Louis XV against Marie Antoinette?

Fuck that. Madame du Barry, as all historians note - including Antoinia Fraser who wrote the biography on which this movie is based - was too nice to ever hold a grudge. Madame du Barry may have been a bimbo but she was not mean.

The mean little bitch was Marie Antoinette. I’m sorry, girls, but read some history. Sofia Coppola can blame du Barry (in the film, she depicts the courtesan rolling around in bed with the king then plotting to have the Austrian princess humiliated), but Marie Antoinette’s problems were of her own making.

Perhaps it’s because the movie stars Kirsten Dunst, a bimbo who can’t muster much more on the screen than parting her legs.

Or perhaps it’s the annoying soundtrack.

Hell, I don’t care if the roles all went to American and British actors. I couldn’t care less that they do not speak with a French accent. But hip hop? And they dance to it?

My disgust decreased somewhat when I read another review: “Some say the biggest offender was the application of ’80s pop songs—the soundtrack to her own upbringing—to an otherwise detailed period piece.”

Eighties pop songs might not be so bad. Not period music, but as least bad as you can manage if you were to mix up such disparate periods.

Besides, Sofia Coppola probably couldn’t resist the apocryphal story of five-year-old Mozart proposing to little Marie Antoinette. For years afterward, Marie Antoinette, an undersexed wife in France, would masturbate with Rock Me, Amadeus blaring over her squeals of joy. So many eyebrows would have been raised in Versailles. Cut to Louis XVI out hunting, frustrated, as if he could hear his wife over the soundtrack as she joins in with “Baby baby do it to me rock me”.

And then, during all those times when Axel Fersen was cheating on her, poor little rich girl Marie Antoinette writes homesick letters to Schönbrunn, it’s Vienna Calling:

Ohoho, operator (so alone am I)
Ohoho, operator (I need you here tonight)
Hello, oho, Vienna calling, na na na na
Hello, oho, Vienna calling, na na na na

It’s too bad that Sofia Coppola ended her movie before the French Revolution because that leaves out Der Kommissar for when Marie Antoinette finally ends her life of dissipation on the scaffold.

While looking up the Latvian Thunder Cross mittens, I came across the Wikipedia swastika entry. It turns out that one of the small towns in the Rockies, Fernie had a women’s hockey team in the twenties called the Swastikas.

This is significant because I lived in Fernie for a very brief part of my childhood. And one of my oldest extent sculptures - a construction of Fernie found objects - is still in my kitchen, in front of me, in fact, as I type this.

The Swastikas was obviously quite a common name for hockey teams in the early twentieth century as Windsor, Nova Scotia also claimed the Swastikas (from 1905 to 1916) for its high-scoring men’s team and Edmonton used the name for its own women’s hockey team around 1916.

The Fernie and District Historical Society Museum has more to say about the team: “In 1923, 1924 and 1926, the Swastikas advanced to compete in Banff for the Alpine Cup, then the highest award given to any such team in Alberta and British Columbia. In 1923, they defeated the Calgary Regents to win the coveted award.”

According to the History of Hockey in British Columbia, the Fernie Swastikas “also defeated the the Vancouver Amazons who had won the Rocky Mountain Park Trophy the year before.”

(Cross-posted from Metroblogging Vancouver)

The poor Duc de Brissac. Louis Hercule Timolon de Cossé seemed like a nice enough guy.

As related in the Joan Haslip Madame du Barry biography, this last patron of the last royal favourite and one of Louis XVI’s most loyal courtiers suffered a gruesome death during the September Massacres on September 9, 1792:

…Hostile crowds had gathered along the route before they had reached [Versailles]…The convoy was brought to a halt at the corner of the rue de l’Orangerie, opposite the house which the Comte de Provence had brought from Madame du Barry, where in the days of her splendour she had given the most fabulous of balls…Then suddenly there was a mad rush - the horses were unharnessed and the mob fell on the prisoners attacking them with sabres, scythes and knives. The guards made no attempts to defend them…Sezing a stick from one of his assailants, Brissac put up a heroic defence till, blinded and mutilated, he was thrown to the ground. Three young boys fought with one another over his mangled remains, cutting off his head in triumph and transfixing it on a pike.

Wait, it gets better:

Yelling with a fearful joy, they paraded [the head] through the streets of Versailles, forcing an unfortunate woman who later died of the shock to kiss the bleeding mouth.

Blinded? I am picturing something along the lines of Gloucester in King Lear, only a thousand times better with the detail about the poor woman being made to kiss the head and dying from it.

At that point, the Duc’s head was a dishevelled version of the one painted below:

It was not unheard of to force friends or relatives of the decapitated to kiss the head during the French Revolution, or at least in its earlier days. On my sixth French Revolution book this summer and at least four heads got some post-mortem romance, if not lip action. The Duc de Brissac’s anonymous kisser is one of two women who died after encountering a head; however, the other woman, three years earlier, at the very beginning of the Revolution, may or may not have been forced to kiss the head.

Though the Madame du Barry fainted before she could see her lover’s head, she may have seen it later. Rumour has it that she buried the head in her garden. A skull was indeed found there many years later.