Sam Moore / April 28, 2021

One of the first, most potent images in Wakefield Poole’s groundbreaking 1971 adult film Boys in the Sand is that of Casey Donovan emerging from the waves before making his way onto the beach. The image feels like a queering of a common cultural touchstone: a figure of great beauty surrounded by water, as if the waves and sea came together to create it. From Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Ursula Andress in 1962’s Dr. No (subverted decades later by Daniel Craig in 2006’s Casino Royale), there’s something about the water as a site of (re)birth that’s full of power and myth. This idea of a loaded geography, at once physical and representative of something greater, runs deep in the DNA of Boys in the Sand; the film wouldn’t exist without the Fire Island locale that it calls home. 

Poole’s film explores both the reality and mythical unreality of New York’s Fire Island, a place that’s taken a heightened place in queer art and culture for decades now—a kind of sanctuary, a place of freedom, one made all the more tempting by the fact that it isn’t available for everyone. In the director’s commentary for Boys in the Sand, Poole says that when it came to Fire Island, “a lot of people had heard of it, but never seen it.” Boys is a kind of strange travelogue, capturing both the island’s reality—how elemental it is, the heat and the water—and also imbuing it with a kind of magic, helping to turn the place into a myth. The film is a perfect escapist fantasy: there are no straight people, there’s no violence, all the men are beautiful, and the sex is plentiful. It becomes something utopian, the kind of gay-only place that people might normally have only dreamed of. The nature of queer life at the time, the extent to which it was something that had to be kept secret, is one of the things that’s gone on to make Fire Island such a staple of queer culture, an iconic part of its history. This idea—attractive men bathed in a sunlight so bright that it seems almost unreal—is echoed in a lot of art that explores the Fire Island milieu, perhaps most explicitly in the images detailed in Tom Bianchi’s 2013 Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-83. 

Bianchi’s images echo the aesthetic of Boys in the Sand, and looking at Donovan in the film alongside some of the men who appear in Bianchi’s Polaroids, it becomes clear that they share the same approach to Fire Island: both artists echo the same Arcadian myth of the pines. A certain type of body populates the vast majority of the snapshots: buff, gym-going, masculine, tanned—the tan lines on Bianchi’s subjects, in fact, are often vivid in contrast to their sun-kissed bodies. Poole’s actors fall into a similar camp, and this creates the sense that Fire Island is a place that’s by and for a narrow group of people within queer communities: conventionally attractive men. The prevalence of these images inverts similar ideas in a straight tradition: tempting women on distant islands, stretching all the way back to the sirens in The Odyssey. From a queer perspective, this idea is both new and old all at once; while it changes the ways in which male bodies are viewed—and challenges mythical traditions that often only frame female bodies in this way—it continues to show that only certain kinds of bodies are worth immortalizing via images. 

For all of the possibility in the air, the bodies that occupy these spaces make it clear that the Fire Island that exists in queer art is a place to showcase a certain type of body, a way to look and a way to live that’s the price of admission for this very specific utopian escape. Boys in the Sand finds power in these bodies as objects of desire—a magical pill literally causes a boyfriend to materialize out of thin air in the film’s “Poolside” section—the currency with which the place is navigated. This is echoed in some of the queer art that comes in the wake of Boys in the Sand. The Andrew Holleran novel Dancer from the Dance (which uses one of Bianchi’s Polaroids as a cover photo in a recent reprint) is obsessed with the mythical image of Fire Island, populating it with characters who exist through gossip and assumption as much as through their own lives, much like the island itself, so it makes sense when Holleran writes: “we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality, i think, in that order.” None of these things exist in the images of Fire Island put forward by Poole and Bianchi; the sun is always out, and the real world is always on the other side of the water. 

How one stayed at Fire Island is one of the other great dividers of the place. Poole himself acknowledges this in his Boys commentary, where he argues that the economics that defined much of the island came down to whether you came in on the ferry or owned your own boat. None of Poole’s characters seem to be on the lower end of the economic spectrum; the houses they stay in are nice, and the integration of domesticity—a lot of the characters in Boys want relationships beyond a sexual fling, and there’s an air of loneliness that exists in a push-and-pull dynamic with the possibility inherent on the Island—carries with it the idea of a kind of ownership that not everyone can afford. The idea of loneliness—both on and beyond Fire Island—is echoed in an interesting way in Bianchi’s Polaroids: it’s rare for any of his subjects’ faces to be seen, as if the specter of the world beyond the island stops them from revealing all of themselves to the camera. 

This is one of the things that makes Fire Island such a strange, liminal place in queer art. It exists in a singular way, unlike anywhere else, and also unlike a real place. There’s a scene in Boys where a door is opened to seemingly nowhere, a sort of non-space that’s divorced even from the rest of the island. The episodic structure of the film—”beachside,” “poolside,” and “inside”—break the place down into a series of fragmented landscapes, at once connected and not connected to one another. This is never a place that people will stay in for the long-term, we know. Even if the domestic moments suggest some kind of future, it isn’t a future that’s possible here.​

​And yet, queer art keeps returning to Fire Island, this place that’s at once impermanent and inescapable. For Poole, much of the drama in Boys is the act of cruising itself: the slow-moving camera that follows the movements of his lonely lovers, the immediacy and intimacy that’s only available on Fire Island. For Bianchi, it’s a bright escapism, even if his images don’t always show all of their subjects—that incompleteness allows viewers to fill in the blanks, imagining their own dream man.

Holleran’s novel makes for a fascinating contrast with both Poole and Bianchi. He seems more willing to engage with the idea of the myth, where the others, knowingly or not, contributed instead to the act of myth-making. The echoes of Fire Island also echo some of the problems inherent in the ways that queer culture is understood. There’s a reason that the bodies across all these different media are so uniform, and one of the strangest, most compelling parts of the Fire Island myth is how explicit it is about the fact that freedom and joy won’t be offered to everyone who arrives. The thing that most clearly, most viscerally ties together the film, the photographs, and the novel are these bodies—their conventional, masculine attractiveness serving as a kind of shorthand for the acceptable face/facelessness of Fire Island, a small sample of the kind of men who are most likely to be accepted here. Even though the entrance to Fire Island is restricted—by how you look, by how much money you have—the return, season after season, still seems inevitable. It makes sense. All of these people, fictional or otherwise, escape here because the island offers them something that the real world won’t.

Sam Moore‘s writing on queerness, politics, and genre fiction in art has been published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, Little White Lies, Hyperallergic, and other places. Their poetry and experimental essays have been published in print and online, most recently in the Brixton Review of Books. If their writing didn’t already give it away, they’re into weird stuff.

Artist unknown. An earlier post on the Tarasque can be found here.

Noah Berlatsky / April 14, 2021

The Angel Levine was greeted with irritation, befuddlement, and a good amount of indifference upon its release in 1970. Organized and produced by Harry Belafonte, the movie is an allegorical discussion of Black-Jewish relationships using a mix of realism and fantasy that managed to appeal to neither Black nor white audiences. A contemporary New York Times review labeled it “a failure of major proportions.” The Black press barely covered it, despite Belafonte’s fame and standing as one of the leading Black entertainers of the time. After the DVD release in 2002, a mostly sympathetic critic admitted, “the best that can be said about it is that it doesn’t quite come together.”

Watching the movie now, it’s clear the film is not exactly ahead of its time. Even post-Get Out (2017), with interest in Black speculative fiction on film at a historic high, it’s difficult to imagine The Angel Levine finding much of an audience. The fact that the movie continues to alienate seems significant, though. Truly egalitarian cross-ethnic solidarity remains difficult for creators and audiences to imagine. 

The movie is based on a short story by Bernard Malamud, “The Angel Levine,” which was originally published in Commentary in 1958. Malamud was one of the postwar Jewish writers who took advantage of diminished antisemitism to celebrate his ethnic identity as a storytelling resource. His stories were often set in the Yiddish New York of the ‘20s and ‘30s, even as they dealt with contemporary themes. “The Angel Levine” is the story of Manischevitz, a Jewish tailor cursed with multiple catastrophes: his shop burns down, his insurance is insufficient, his back goes out, and his beloved wife Fanny becomes deathly ill. Burdened beyond endurance, he is startled one day by a Black man who appears unannounced in his apartment. The man says his name is Alexander Levine, and that he is an angel. Manischevitz doesn’t believe him, and the man leaves. But as Fanny grows worse, Manischevitz becomes desperate. He goes to Harlem, tracks Levine down, and finds him drinking and dancing in a very un-godly manner. Nonetheless, he tells the angel he believes in him. The angel returns to Manischevitz’s door, grows wings, and flies into the sky in a fluttering of black wings. Manischevitz enters his house and finds his wife has been cured.

Malamud’s story has Black people in it, but it’s told from a white Jewish perspective. Manischevitz is the main character, and the third person narrative is in his head; you see only what he sees, and he is the only character whose thoughts you know. The story is about the need to believe in others, and about welcoming Black people into the circle of Jewish ethical commitment. “Believe me, there are Jews everywhere,” Manischevitz says to Fanny in the story’s last line. But it is white Jewish people doing the welcoming. Levine merely waits to be summoned.

Belafonte was a singer who drew on a broad array of musical traditions, and who saw connections between working class struggle across racial, ethnic, and national boundaries. He was drawn to a story about mutual faith as a foundation for solidarity and transformation. But he didn’t want to follow Malamud in presenting that story entirely from a white perspective. Instead, he carefully assembled an interracial group of creators to work on the film. Slovakian Ján Kadár, who had been interred in a Nazi work camp, was brought on as director. Zero Mostel plays the lead, renamed Morris Mishkin, and Polish actress Ida Kamińska took the part of Fanny. But Belafonte also brought on writer Bill Gunn, who would later create the much-admired Ganja and Hess (1973). Gunn was specifically tasked with expanding the character of Alex Levine. There’s also a role for Levine’s girlfriend, Sally (Gloria Foster). Finally, Belafonte created an apprenticeship program so that young Black and Puerto Rican filmmakers, mostly excluded from the film industry, could get paid to work on set, contribute their talents, and gain experience for their own projects.

In short, Belafonte wanted Black experience to be at the center, rather than the periphery, of the filmed The Angel Levine. He accomplished this in part simply by appearing in the film himself.  Belafonte is an enormously charismatic presence, who effortlessly steals scenes even from a character actor as accomplished as Mostel. It’s impossible to see Belafonte as a figure in someone else’s drama, or as a kind of comical enigma. His smile manages to be both beatific and lived-in; you want to know more about him, because you know he has his own story to tell.

The movie, contra Malamud, takes pains to tell that story. Levine, in this version, is a small town hood who is killed by a car while trying to escape with a stolen fur. When he got to heaven, he says he was told to turn around and come right back. (“Every white mother” went right on to heaven, he says bitterly, “but me they put on probation.”) He is tasked with getting Mishkin to believe in him. That belief will allow him to miraculously heal Fanny, and become a full angel in heaven. In the meantime, though, he has his own unfinished business. He wants to reconcile with his long-suffering girlfriend Sally, apologize, and tell her he loves her.

Giving Levine a narrative of his own creates a clash of genres. In accord with the Malamud story, Mishkin is still the main character in a white ethnic Jewish tale about endurance, suffering, and empathy, told in a sentimental register.  But Levine’s story draws on the social realism of Black protest genres. His angry soliloquies (“Nothin’! Nothin’! A whole lifetime with nothin’ to show for it!”) and his quick rage at Mishkin’s casual racist slurs (“You call me a schvartze one more time and I’ll knock you on your ass!”) echo the inchoate, yearning despair and simmering righteous violence of Richard Wright’s 1940 Native Son.  

The film uses its magical elements to try to bridge these contrasting narratives. Levine simply appears in Mishkin’s kitchen, through uncertain means, and the two must then elbow around each other in the cramped set, their bodies and stories squashed in together for better or worse.  Mishkin bustles around and tries to make his wife comfortable while Levine in the next room embraces Sally in an effort to overcome her skepticism. Repeatedly, Mishkin looks through the window in the kitchen, or through a door jam, gazing at Levine just as the movie audience gazes at Levine. Those who came to see a white Jewish drama are encouraged to see, with Mishkin, another story. “Mr. Levine, you have meaning for me,” Mishkin says. That’s a demand not just for understanding, but for interest, investment, and a recognition of relevance across difference and across genre.

Being in one another’s stories should in theory provide a common ground for solidarity. The movie makes numerous efforts to show intersections of Black and Jewish experience, and to suggest that the story of one can be the story of the other. In an early scene, Mishkin applies for welfare to a Black woman caseworker—a reminder that, despite racist messaging to the contrary, it’s not only or primarily Black people who sometimes need state aid. Later, during Mishkin’s final trip to Harlem, he drops in to ask for directions in a Black tailor’s shop, looking for help from a member of his own profession.

The most obvious appeal across Black and Jewish communities, though, is the fact that Levine belongs to both. This is an approach that should resonate more solidly now than at the time of the film, more even than at the time of Malamud’s story. In 1955, Malamud could write that Manischevitz “had heard of black Jews but had never met one.” In the ‘70s, Black Jewish people still did not have much public visibility; James Baldwin doesn’t mention Black Jewish people at all in his famous 1967 essay “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” Some five decades later, however, intermarriage has substantially increased the number of Black Jewish people in the United States, and Ethiopian Jewish immigration to Israel has been a topic of international discussion. Levine in 2021 isn’t just a symbol, if he ever was only that. He’s a screen representation of people who are rarely portrayed in mainstream Hollywood films. 

Mishkin’s attitude towards Levine in 1970 is one of incredulity; he demands that Levine recite the blessing over the bread and, in a hugely inappropriate move, asks if he’s circumcised. Again, Black Jewish people are significantly more prevalent now, but Mishkin’s racist notion that Jewishness is linked to skin color persists. Sandra Lawson, a Black rabbi, wrote at the Forward that she’d “never been in a Jewish space where I wasn’t questioned.” Black Jewish Texan Tracey Nicole says that she always introduces herself to a new police officer at her place of worship because “I am the only Jew of color at our synagogue. So when I walk into situations like that, I’m wondering if people will acknowledge that I belong.”

Malamud’s story, which is rooted in Jewish experience, imagines shared suffering and marginalization as a path to renewal and resurrection. And that’s not completely fantastic; many Jewish people did work prominently for Black civil rights in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and some even died for it. But Mishkin’s racism, and the way it is still echoed in white Jewish treatment of Black Jews, should make viewers hesitant about taking away a too hopeful message. Belafonte himself approached his film about faith with a good deal of skepticism only two years after the assassination of his friend Martin Luther King Jr. “For me, the miracle in America was Martin Luther King,” he said in a press interview about the film. “In the years that King and SNCC were coming to the people with love, the people didn’t believe. They finally believed when it was too damn late.”

The difficulty in crafting a white Jewish story and a Black story simultaneously is underlined in one of the film’s most telling exchanges. Levine, distraught, has gone to the roof. Mishkin follows him and tries to comfort him by referencing white Jewish experience of assimilation and waning antisemitism. “They’re not very nice to you now, but tomorrow they’ll be ashamed of themselves and do better,” he says with complacent assurance. To which Levine responds, “Bullshit.” Black people have been in America a good bit longer than white Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Time brought them not apologies, but the opportunity to be exploited by a broader ethnicity of white landlords. When Mishkin suggests he wants to draw Levine into the orbit of white Jewish ethics and experience, it’s meant to be beneficent altruism. But it could also be a self-serving lie. How can you create solidarity without flattening difference? How do you make another’s story your own when it isn’t yours to own?

Malamud’s “The Angel Levine” mostly ignored those questions, which is why it feels finished and coherent, if slight. The film version, in contrast, tries to answer them, and seizes up in the process. It obviously doesn’t know how to wrap up its runtime. As the New York Times review says, it keeps “stopping and starting up again.” It finally dead-ends in melancholy ambiguity, with Fanny hovering between life and death back at the apartment while Mishkin stands in Harlem, reaching up to try to catch a floating black feather that eludes his grasp. He fails, and the movie largely fails as well. Belafonte was trying to rework a Jewish idiom into a Black one to create a story about universal solidarity that retained particularity without condescension. More than half a century later, American cinema, to say nothing of American society, is still unsure how to do that. It’s not even sure it wants to try.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

Alex Adams / March 25, 2021

Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Godzilla is perhaps the most widely praised Kaiju film ever made. A special effects masterpiece at the time, the monochrome mother of all monster movies had bleak, fume-laden visuals, a gloomy, mournful tone, and an unambiguous anti-nuclear message. Even its conclusion, in which the pained Dr. Serizawa unleashes his hyper-toxic Oxygen Destroyer to finally rid Japan of its avenging lizard king, sees no redemption, as the weapon that banishes the beast also irreversibly poisons the Earth. Godzilla is rightly remembered as a serious, somber, and politically insightful cinematic monument with a powerful message and internationally historical significance. Its first dozen or so sequels, however, are quite another matter—a different beast, you could say.

For Godzilla would not remain an icon of manmade devastation for long. In the course of the next two decades, Godzilla would grow from a nightmarish God of Destruction into mankind’s dependable, child-friendly ally. “The dragon has become St. George,” wrote New York Times film critic Vincent Canby on the 1976 US release of Godzilla Vs. Megalon, in which Godzilla defends the Earth against the giant cockroach Megalon and his sinister ally, the buzzsaw-chested robot chicken Gigan. Godzilla’s role as the bane of modern Japan would be assumed by the many Kaiju successors he confronted, and the beast who had once embodied the apocalypse would now stand heroically between his antagonists and their desire to destroy the Earth.

Varying wildly in tone, the corpus of movies from the Shōwa era of the Godzilla series veers vertiginously between family-friendly entertainments—such as All Monsters Attack (1969), Son of Godzilla (1966), and Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1964)—and the more adult tone evident in the environmentalist psychedelia of Godzilla Vs. Hedorah (1971) or the WrestleMania spectacles of Destroy All Monsters (1968) and Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla (1974). These movies are fondly remembered by fans for their rough and ready practical special effects, their cartoonish, preposterous pugilism, and their deliriously inventive storytelling, which could use anything at all as the pretext for a monster battle—from an insect invasion of the Earth to a 24-hour dance competition.

Nevertheless, their lack of the thematic seriousness and visual restraint so evident in Honda’s first film means that they are often looked down on as a silly dilution of the original movie, a goofy world cinema novelty of interest only to kids, nerds, or the sort of weirdo who used to load up on caffeine and stay up late to watch men in rubber suits wrestling on cheaply painted sound stages. Naturally I, as just such a weirdo, think that this sneering, while understandable, underplays a great deal of the sophistication and interest of these wacky, silly, excellently distracting films. Not simply the impoverishment of a once-grand icon in the pursuit of ever-dwindling box office returns (although Toho has certainly never been shy of ruthlessly commercially exploiting Godzilla), Godzilla’s evolution from cosmic punishment to benevolent savior also makes him one of the most interesting, flexible, and dynamic popular cultural icons of the Cold War years.

Rumble in the Jungle: King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

King Kong vs. Godzilla is perhaps the best remembered of the Shōwa-era Godzilla movies, after the original Godzilla. The first time either creature would be seen in color, it remains the most successful and popular Godzilla movie to this day, in terms of ticket sales at least, perhaps due to the way in which it was marketed—almost like a high-stakes boxing match or wrestling bout. The genius of its combination of two iconic monsters at a time when both of them still remained fearful beasts, rather than comic or heroic figures, was powerful enough for the movie to remain a genre high-water mark for years to come.

This double-headliner structure, in which two A-list monsters were brought together in order to double the appeal of the movie, would initiate a run of versus battles that would last for over a decade. From 1964 onwards, Toho produced at least one Godzilla movie every year until the financial failure of Terror of Mechagodzilla drew the franchise to a screeching halt in 1975. Though Godzilla had fought against the Ankylosaur Kaiju Anguirus seven years earlier in Godzilla Raids Again (1956), it would be King Kong Vs. Godzilla that truly cemented the formal template for the many monster clashes to come: on some pretext or other, Godzilla would face off against invading life forms from outer space, such as his arch-nemesis King Ghidorah, or against creatures with more Earthly origins, such as the mysterious and oddly beautiful Mothra, the sea-monster Ebirah, or, indeed, the American myth King Kong.

At the same time as it is great knockabout fun at face value, the “versus movie” format also provides a tremendously flexible and rich conceptual palette for filmmakers to engage with social and political ideas. In his extraordinary book of mini-essays Mythologies (1957), French critic Roland Barthes observes that amateur wrestling is a kind of broad-brush theater in which good and evil battle for symbolic supremacy. “In the ring,” he writes, “wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.” The very simplicity and crudeness of the drama, he writes, is what makes these bouts transcendent. Further, he claims, its ramshackle nature—and the foundational role of the audience’s gleeful suspension of disbelief—also means that its value as symbolic play is brought to the forefront: “There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations.”

So it is in the Kaiju clash film, that unique brand of spectacle cinema that shares many formal and thematic traits with wrestling as well as other Japanese cultural forms such as anime and manga. The bold, lurid language of gesture, the vivid play of symbol and myth, and their open environmentalist and anti-nuclear ethical commitments make them a kind of powerful moral theater, at once sublime and ridiculous, at once ostentatiously silly and deathly serious. Crucially, it is equally redundant to point out that the special effects are unconvincing in King Kong Vs. Godzilla as it is to point out that wrestling is “not real” or that a play is made up (or indeed, that your Extreme Noise Terror record features a lot of shouting—what exactly did you expect?). What matters is not verisimilitude, or even a coherently sequential narrative, but the experience of grand moments of sensory power, scenes of epic destruction and wrenching pathos, and the realization of overwhelming visions of primal, fantastical worlds previously not imaginable.

You don’t, after all, go to a film about wrestling monsters expecting subtlety. But this doesn’t mean, of course, that they are without content. Even the original Godzilla derives its power from its total commitment to the enactment of one broad, bold idea.

The Meaning of Monstrosity

Toho’s first Godzilla film had such a potent social and political message that the creature would always be thought of in semiotic terms, always interpreted as a metaphor for the pressing concerns of the time. The subsequent Shōwa films, though, are chaotically flexible in this regard, and Godzilla cannot be read consistently as any kind of fixed or coherent symbol from film to film. More often, it is his foes who “embody” some social or political force against which the Earth needs to be defended, whether it is arms-race militarism (Mechagodzilla), pollution (Hedorah), renewed atomic testing (Megalon), or intergalactic imperialism (King Ghidorah, Gigan). Most of all, though, in his initial incarnation at least, Godzilla represents the unstoppable force, the mute, brute power of nature, the principle of sheer indestructibility.

This characterization of Godzilla remains, for many, the most compelling. Shusuke Kaneko, director of Millennium-era fan favorite Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001), famously commented that Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Hollywood interpretation of Godzilla was disappointing in part because of its fear of American ordnance. “Americans seem unable to accept a creature,” he said, “that cannot be put down by their arms.” (Rather than an adaptation of the Toho legend of the mysterious force of nature, Emmerich’s version recalls nothing more than the climax of the previous year’s Jurassic Park: The Lost World, in which a T-Rex runs amok in San Diego.) Godzilla is at his most attractive when he is at his ugliest, when he embodies a total disaster that can be momentarily deflected but never truly defeated.

In “Mammoth,” the 74th essay in Minima Moralia (1951), Theodor Adorno writes that “the desire for the presence of the most ancient is a hope that animal creation might survive the wrong that man has done it, if not man himself, and give rise to a better species, one that finally makes a success of life.” Adorno’s reflections on the appeal of prehistoric beasts have more than a little relevance to Toho’s reptilian colossus. Very often Godzilla is conceived of as the resistance or revenge of the natural world, an embodiment of nature’s apocalyptic judgement upon mankind, a kind of demonic scourge unleashed by the obscure yet vengeful conscience of the wronged planet. He retains this character in King Kong Vs. Godzilla—when he bursts out of an iceberg at the start of the movie, nobody is pleased that he has arisen from his slumber to save the day, as would happen in later films. Here, he is a wild, unpredictable cataclysm that cannot be stopped, a symbol of the natural world’s dominance over us and its indifferent ability to survive us.

Kong, too, is no stranger to social and political interpretations. There is a long and distinguished critical tradition of reading King Kong as a problematic and racist engagement with themes related to slavery, imperialism, and moral panics about Black masculinity and sexuality. Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 original, which draws heavily on the representational traditions of lost world adventure fiction, is widely considered to be an allegory of slavery and imperial exploitation, a tragic parable of man’s ruthless, irreverent, and self-involved abuse of the world’s majestic wildness. John Guillermin’s 1976 US version would more explicitly locate the story in the context of petropolitics, as the colonizing expedition to Skull Island is motivated not by a desire to capture a mythic beast but, more prosaically perhaps, to drill for oil. When Peter Jackson remade the movie in 2005, he made it a satire of the entertainment industry, casting Carl Denham as a roguish, self-destructive genius, an Orson Welles figure whose visionary talent threatens to destroy all of those near to him, and whose pledges to complete his work in the honor of the people who died in its course recalls the increasingly desperate dedications of documentarian-cum-unintentional-murderer Remy in 1992’s Man Bites Dog. For Jackson, Denham is like Kong, an unstoppable and doomed force of nature who destroys by loving.

Every Hollywood version of the original story, though, however sophisticated, simultaneously exploits the persistent racist panic about Black male desire for white women that is embedded into the fabric of the story. King Kong is, at its heart, a story about the violent death that inevitably looms at the horizon of Kong’s love for human women, a fable that has always been read as a racist allegory of the tragedy and illegitimacy of Black men’s supposedly insatiable appetite for the love of white women.

King Kong Vs. Godzilla is no exception here, as Kong’s storyline fuses critique of corporate colonialism with a problematic representation of Black desire. The characters’ extractivist plunder of Kong’s home island—changed from the enigmatic and unlocatable Skull Island to Pharaoh Island, a fictionalized landmass among the Solomon Islands—is the incident that prompts the confrontation between the two legendary beasts, and the Pacific Pharmaceutical execs who exploit Pharaoh Island for its pleasantly intoxicating fruit are shown as single-minded, hubristic buffoons as they capture Kong with the insane intent of using him to advertise their company. The clash of titans still makes time for a comedic critique of the ruthlessness of the capitalist advertising industry; so too does it retain Kong’s fascination with human women, as he scales a government building while clinging to a beautiful young woman he has captured.

The natives of Skull Island, too, are always a problem for these films. From Cooper’s original painted tribe of Kong-worshippers, to Jackson’s violent brutes (who recall the Uruk-Hai orcs from his Lord of the Rings trilogy), to the noble savages of 2017’s Kong: Skull Island (who recall Kurtz’s sinister and silent tribe in 1979’s Apocalypse Now), the human inhabitants of Kong’s home are routinely represented in extraordinarily dehumanizing ways.  

Once again, King Kong Vs. Godzilla follows suit. The tribe of Faro Island is portrayed by actors in full-body blackface, and the Pacific Pharmaceutical employees bribe them with a transistor radio and tobacco. This patronizing bargain, in which they steal the island god in return for habit-forming poison and toys, is part of the film’s critique of exploitative capitalism; it is also, however, played for laughs. No matter how progressive the themes, a film that features dehumanizing ridicule like this is irredeemably racist. It is interesting, too, that the first major development in the Godzilla franchise’s relationship with its US audience foregrounds anti-Black racism, as though one of the safe territories on which the US and Japan could rebuild their relationship was the imperialist dehumanization of Black people.

For King Kong vs. Godzilla is historically and politically significant most of all because it was an international co-production between Japanese and American filmmakers. Where the original Godzilla is a fable of the nuclear suffering that the US inflicted upon Japan, made only two years after the conclusion of the post-war American occupation, King Kong vs. Godzilla is a symbol (and product) of the renewed Pacific alliance and the reestablishment of geopolitical cooperation between the US and Japan. Ishiro Honda returned to direct the original Japanese version for Toho, released in 1962, and John Beck helmed the adaptation of the US version for Universal Pictures, which was released the following year. This collaboration would fuel a monster movie franchise that endures today.

“This is UN reporter Eric Carter with the news”

Prior to Emmerich’s 1998 adaptation, every time a Godzilla movie appeared in Western markets it would be bowdlerized in some way. The movies were often retitled, recut, or given comically bad English dubbing; some of them, such as the original Godzilla and Godzilla 1985, were reshot, with American stars retroactively given focalizing roles in order, it was thought, to make the films more appealing to American and European audiences. Many of the recuts were extraordinarily unforgiving—the NBC screening of Godzilla vs. Megalon, for example, savagely streamlined the movie down to just 48 minutes, cutting out almost half of the movie in order to accommodate commercials and a Godzilla-suited John Belushi’s accompanying skits.

King Kong vs. Godzilla is unique in the way it is recut. A great deal of Honda’s original is brusquely shaven off and replaced, not with dramatic scenes featuring American actors, but with newscast-style footage of a reporter, Eric Carter, explaining the events of the plot directly to the audience. There is an amusing irony here: in the Japanese version, Pacific Pharmaceutical needs to use Kong for advertising because their own TV show is “dull, boring, and without imagination.” Carter’s broadcasts are almost as dry as the output of Pacific Pharmaceutical’s fictional TV network, as clumsily direct and awkwardly literal an expository device as you are ever likely to see in any film. Carter, the voice of the movie, is the antithesis of “show, don’t tell,” sometimes dictating not only the events but the way we should feel about them, too.

This clunkily oratorical exposition may be dramatically flat, but it has the virtue at least of being swift. One of the enduring problems of the Shōwa Godzilla series is the grinding slowness of some of the utterly turgid exposition, so it is in a way gratifying for an audience to be simply given the facts rather than having to yawn through interminable dialogue. And Carter’s scenes are also, sometimes, wonderfully comic. The scene in which he invites a paleontological expert into the studio to explain Godzilla’s origins and anatomy, for instance, features this expert—purportedly from New York University—using a child’s illustrated guide to dinosaurs as a visual aid.

And this formal oddness did nothing to stop the film’s popularity, as it was a hit on both sides of the Pacific. Strangely, though, given the film’s walloping success, Godzilla and Kong would never meet again until this year’s Godzilla vs. Kong, produced as part of Legendary’s MonsterVerse, which will be released almost a full sixty years after the movie it pays homage to. This seems odd, given that Toho retained the rights to Kong long enough to make King Kong Escapes in 1967, and that Toho was keen to make Godzilla face off against certain foes repeatedly—notably Mothra (four times), King Ghidorah (six times), and Mechagodzilla (five times).

The original was also uniquely difficult to acquire on home video for years, which meant that King Kong Vs. Godzilla became something of a myth, a legendary “lost” movie, particularly in my wet corner of Tory England. It was rarely if ever screened on British TV (not even in the small hours of the morning), and when a series of affordable VHS releases of Shōwa classics was released to coincide with Emmerich’s Hollywood Godzilla, King Kong Vs. Godzilla was nowhere to be seen among them, much to my adolescent disappointment. The US version was unavailable on DVD before 2006, and until the release of the 2019 Criterion Shōwa Blu-Ray box set, one of the only ways to get hold of the Japanese cut of the film was through obscure mail-order catalogs or DVD-R bootlegs.

Its iconic success, its lack of repetition, and its unavailability led to the attachment of a quasi-mythological status to this singular and mysterious film—a film that for many years of my pre-internet youth I couldn’t even confirm existed. Tantalizing half-truths and outright falsehoods circulated among fans like whispered playground rumors, further distorted in the retelling. The most enduring of these claimed that the two versions ended differently, with Kong winning in the US version but with Japanese audiences seeing Godzilla emerge victorious.

Perhaps inevitably, when I saw the film for the first time it was extraordinarily disappointing. The US cut is far less coherent than the Japanese, with characterization, comedy, and subtext stripped out; the Godzilla suit looks tired; and the Kong suit is almost unbearably goofy (despite what I said about special effects not being important, it still smarts to see them be quite so poor). But such is the unpleasable nature of fans: nothing, no matter how spectacular, could have lived up to the King Kong Vs. Godzilla in my head, nurtured by years of feverish daydreaming and speculation.

In the final analysis, what is perhaps most striking about this movie is that its legacy—the structuring principle of the Kaiju battle film—saturates every Godzilla film to come. The natives of Infant Island, home of Mothra, bear a striking resemblance to the natives of Faro Island, and the franchise as a whole is more than a little indebted to the problematic Kong mythos, not least in its representations of monster-infested lost world islands that seem to have avoided the great extinctions. This movie, and the trans-Pacific alliance of which it is so powerful a product, is in some ways the distilled essence of all the Shōwa Godzilla films: goofy, imperfect, but magically suggestive.

Alex Adams is a cultural critic and writer based in North East England. His most recent book, How to Justify Torture, was published by Repeater Books in 2019. He loves dogs.

Mike Apichella / March 24, 2021

From Creepy Things #1, July 1975. Art and script by Tom Sutton

Today’s sophisticated communications infrastructure did not emerge fully formed as totalitarian surveillance. Its annihilation of privacy was merely the price we had to pay for an unprecedented level of reliability within an endless array of applications. The drive to eliminate the slightest material discomfort and provide instant gratification is nothing new—air conditioning and central heating technology first became widely available in the early 1900s, home refrigerators in the 1940s, TV and transistor radios in the 1950s. By the end of the 20th century, millions of people were immersed (billions still could not afford to be) in a world where technology could manage or minimize any kind of deprivation, danger, or imperfection.

Nature’s unpredictability was marginalized, and this new marginalization bore new phobias. Horror comics like Swamp Thing, Heap, and Man-Thing, films like The Legend Of Boggy Creek (1972), Frogs (1972), Jaws (1975), and Prophecy (1979), and novels by Guy N. Smith, John Halkin, and James Herbert presented situations that spilled out beyond the control of modern society. These narratives were set in places where technology was hard to come by, rural areas steeped in folklore, far from the reach of telephone service, big electrical grids, broadcast signals, and synthetic environmental conditioning. Charlton Publications’ acidic title Creepy Things embodied this new fear of technological deprivation.  

By 1975 Charlton had reached the peak of its creative powers. The company boasted a large, diverse roster of anthology titles that usually contained non-serialized content, and they offered artists and writers more creative freedom than any other mainstream American comic publisher. Some of their biggest sellers were horror comics; no less than eleven different mid-’70s horror titles carried the bold Charlton bull’s eye logo. Many of the Charlton’s comics adhered to an eccentric house style that favored post-impressionistic art paired with stories that were sometimes so limited in narrative content and character development that they bordered on absurdity.

Themes explored were standard genre fare: zombies, vampires, ghosts, and other undead monsters; werewolves and other lycanthropes; wizards, witches, and various ominous mystics; aliens, robots, and other sci-fi terrors; a menagerie of giant wild animals, swamp monsters, killer insects, slime creatures, and deadly plants. These latter beasts were often the subject for stories by Tom Sutton, one of the ’70s most prolific and innovative creators. Sutton’s Charlton material pushed representational art to abstract extremes. Conversely, his scripts were more nuanced than those of most other Charlton writers. In many ways, Sutton’s work epitomized the distinct tone of Creepy Things, which debuted in July 1975. In place of a fan mail page the first issue ran a bizarre manifesto that summarized the new series:

What do you think of when you read the title CREEPY THINGS? Snakes? Spiders? There are ants, rats, wriggly things in the mud when you go swimming, things you find under rocks… We neglected to mention the creepiest creep of all. Lest we forget, the deadliest species on planet Earth is Man! And, when Man gets a little twisted, spaced out, or peculiar, he can do some mighty funny things. You find sadists, psychos, killers, and all kinds of weirdos all over the place.  

This cynical outlook proved to be one of Creepy Things’ biggest narrative tropes. A powerful element of that anti-human fervor was the title’s host, Mr. Dee Munn. All Charlton horror titles featured wisecracking Crypt-Keeper-type narrators decked out in scary costumes that recalled the classic style of Universal monster films and Hammer’s sexy goth chillers. While he did have pointy elven ears and plentiful one-liners, Dee Munn didn’t look much like the other ghost hosts. He gave off the aura of a mafioso with his fine tailored pinstripe suit, neatly trimmed devil beard, and tinted cop shades. He chomped on cigars and kept a pet raven by his side at all times. Paunchy and balding with slicked back hair, he certainly looked creepy, but not in a Bela Lugosi way; more like some sketch bag who’d be lurking around at your seedier local gambling den or red light district.    

Even in stories that were literally flooded with slimy amorphic monsters, nothing was scarier than the series’ main human antagonists. These were nasty degenerates who brought cruelty and neglect to children, the disenfranchised, romantic rivals, pets, and livestock. Their tendency to prey upon the vulnerable and their lust for control stood as symbols of the cold-blooded authoritarianism that’s infected world progress since civilization’s earliest days. For the swamp mutants and supernatural globs of Creepy Things, brutal violence often functioned as a kind of vigilante justice doled out in order to keep “the creepiest creep of all” in line.    

“The Grass Is Always Greener” was the cover story of Creepy Things no. 3, one of a small but powerful selection of Charlton horror tales written by Mike Pellowski. Here we are introduced to Rud Pangley, an obnoxious alcoholic living in a swamp in America’s Deep South. After a “hard” day avoiding work and soakin’ up corn liquor, Pangley stumbles upon a cherubic community of “green folk” frolicking in a cool glade. Clad in bikinis and loin cloths made from tropical blossoms, the hairless, lime-skinned beings enjoy a utopian existence—until one of them strays unwittingly into Rud’s grimy clutches. Overcome by greed and distorted ambition, the sloppy drunk quickly puts together a crude side show that exploits his green captive, whose curious presence, up until this point, was considered to be nothing more than local myth.

It turns out the green folk can only survive on a plant-based diet and not the meat and potatoes that Rud tries to force feed his prisoner. The little green meal ticket promptly dies—starving behind bars in a makeshift cage before a noisy audience of angry hecklers. It’s a moment that emboldens a view of humanity as a nexus for all things selfish and callous. Abandoning the dead creature’s carcass, Pangley scampers back through the brush, hot on the trail of another hapless victim. Things don’t go quite according to plan, and artist Mike Vosburg renders this fateful twist with tenderness. The painful sequence makes Rud seem almost as victimized as the green folk.

Two other Creepy Things standouts come from the title’s second issue, an oozing tour de force by Nick Cuti and Tom Sutton called “Slimes, Slogs, and Glumps,” and the anti-classist Joe Gill/Rich Larson yarn “A Spell Of Misery.” The former tale centers around yet another community of surly swamp folk. The main character is a young boy fond of bringing home all kinds of swamp critters and keeping them as pets in his family’s shack. The kid’s father is a loudmouth control freak who wants none of it. With flagrant disrespect for the sanctity of life, the dad’s short fuse incurs the worst consequences for all involved.

Some of Creepy Things’ horrific locales possessed a remoteness caused by human negligence. The NYC ghetto setting of “A Spell Of Misery” is a prime example. In conditions nearly as miasmic as the swamp from the previous tale, we find the impoverished residents of a shambolic low-income housing complex struggling to survive, until slumlord Edmond Ruggles falls victim to the magic of benevolent local voodoo priestess Mama Carafino. Ruggles’ wretched indifference is matched by the horror of voodoo born monsters, gigantic versions of the dangers that plague the tenants daily (i.e., rats, roaches, fire, etc.). The landlord’s wife Ethel comes off as a shallow materialist unphased by her husband’s gross mismanagement. The elderly couple are depicted as snarling malcontents dissatisfied with themselves and each other despite their comfortable, antiseptic, and well-fortified suburban mansion far from the unfortunates whose rent checks bank roll their luxury.    

The 1970s witnessed the rise of what is known today as folk horror, and Creepy Things was one of the first comic book series to represent the genre, which works by contrasting the modern world’s scientific arrogance to the timeless forces of magic and mysticism. “The Star Of Siva,” an action packed Joe Gill/Rich Larson work from Creepy Things no. 6, presents a deadly clash where earthly strategies are no match for divine neutral chaos. Three greedy criminals (a French drug pusher, an AWOL American soldier, and a Viet Cong deserter) invade a Southeast Asian religious site with intent to steal a priceless treasure trove of artifacts. The deeper they go, the closer they get to their own destruction. Their hateful blasphemy is only surpassed by their disrespect for each other, culminating in the story’s grisly conclusion. With fierce energy, Larson’s depiction of the mercenaries’ meeting in a sleazy, smoke-infested metropolis stands in stark contrast to the jungle tranquility of the sacred enclave’s surroundings. The site’s rugged charm is preserved within a bubble of obscurity, much like the agrarian paradise Summerisle, fictional setting of 1973 folk horror touchstone The Wicker Man.      

You can’t talk about Charlton Publications without mentioning the company’s biggest superstar freelancer, Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko. One of Ditko’s greatest Charlton works was “Where Do They Flee?,” which ran in Creepy Things’ third issue. Yet another Joe Gill-penned folk horror parable, this one was partially inspired by real accounts of the strange beings who haunt abandoned British mines. It also boasts a complex sub-plot involving labor politics—Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary Harlan County, U.S.A. hit theaters shortly after the issue’s publication. The film follows the Brookside Strike, a violent labor uprising that occurred in a remote Appalachian town in southeast Kentucky. Tragedies connected to the strike and its impoverished proponents had been making headlines since the early ‘70s, so it’s easy to understand how these incidents could’ve impacted Gill’s script.

“Where Do They Flee?” melds archaic folklore with a politicized empathy for the desperation of miners and others suffering through the decline of the labor industry (a cultural development ingrained in many ‘70s and ‘80s historical narratives). Resembling a cross between zombies, ghosts, and mole people, the hollow-eyed, supernatural main characters secretly reside in squalid conditions hundreds of feet beneath the rubble of a decrepit Welsh mining tunnel (this locale could be a nod to another iconic artifact of the labor struggle, Idris Davies’ tragic poem “Gwalia Desert XV” aka “The Bells Of Rhymney“). The inhuman presence is just the right jolt needed in a confrontation between a close knit group of rural miners and their greedy boss, whose crimes against humanity bear close resemblance to those of the Brookside protesters’ arch enemy the Duke Power Company.  

Perhaps the most striking visual element of Creepy Things were the lavish cover paintings. Most of these were done by Sutton, with two exceptions: issue five’s cover featured a Rich Larson/Tim Boxell piece exploding within a dense zip-a-tone fade; the sixth issue brandished a moody, teal-soaked nightmare by Mike Zeck, who later became a mainstay at Marvel and popularized vigilante character The Punisher. The third issue’s Sutton cover is the major visual expression of Creepy Things’ philosophy. A distillation of “The Grass Is Always Greener,” it shows Rud Pangley overpowered by Lilliputian green folk. As they descend upon the grizzled opportunist all they can see is a threat that must be eliminated; the sanctity of human life isn’t even an afterthought. Surrounded by wilderness, impotence and terror etched upon his face, he’s paralyzed by the horror of an uncontrollable environment, pushed beyond the limits of science, immersed in a world where civilization is meaningless.

Mike Apichella has been working in the arts since 1991. He is a writer, multimedia artist, musician, and a founder of Human Host and the archival project Towson-Glen Arm Freakouts. Under his real name and various pseudonyms, his work has been published by Splice Today, Profligate, Human Conduct Press, and several DIY zines. Mike currently lives in the northeast US where he aspires to someday become the “crazy cat man” of his neighborhood.

Artwork found at the imKinsky auction house.

Artwork found at the imKinsky auction house.

Artwork found at the imKinsky auction house.

Phoenix 

Burning Narrative 

Phoenix 

The Fall 

Choice 

Heaven 

Hell 

Faust 

The Four Horseman of Destiny 

Redemptive Ideas 

 

You'll find the Iranian born artist's instagram here.

Artworks found at Dastan Gallery

Artwork found at the imKinsky auction house.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Demons," 1980 

The Omen, 1977 

Arnold Schoenberg's opera "Moses and Aaron," 1980

Satire on the Human Vices  The Marriage of the Devil in the Kingdom of Hades, around 1600  Devils torturing sinners in Hell
Swanenburgh's original works can be found in previous posts from 2017 and 2015.

"A stalwart monster, huge in size, Did streight frae out the river rise, His legs were horn, wi joints o' steel, This body like a crocodile..."  "Grim furies spread their forkit fangs, An drove at John wi furious bangs..."  "The Kelpy tried we John to grapple, But Arn caught him by the thrapple, And gar'd his carcase sweep the stanners, Whilk made a noise like corn fanners..."  "Her coatties pat the knees were kiltit, In eldrich notes she croone'd an' liltit..."  "Sae fently did she wing her flight, In a twinklin' she was out o' sight... "
 You can read the book in its entirety at Google Books.  The higher resolution images found thanks to Spl Hand Colored Rare Book Collection.

Moonlit Landscape, with a Witch and Young Dragons, 1876  After Richard Doyle - Witch Guiding Dragons, late 19th Century 
 Previous posts on Richard Doyle inlude a collection of his Jack the Giant killer illustrations, An assortment of dozens more of his paintings and drawings and the first post from 2007 including a smaller image of the witch with dragons painting. 
 Also shared last year was a post on Richard's artistic brother and father to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Altamont Doyle.

Demon 01, Satan & Soul series, 2017 

As Demon Noah 

As Demon Daughter 

Demons 

Satan & soul 07 

Satan & Soul 06 

Illustration from "Travels of Sandbad" by Mohammad Ali Sepanloo 

Melli Bank Reproduced, Retell Collection, Film cell on canvas, 2015 

Boasting Reproduced, Retell Collection, Film cell on canvas, 2015 

Photo of Ali in his North Tehran studio 

"Sadeghi is one of the most prolific and successful Iranian painters and artists from the second half of the 20th century to today. Born in 1937, Sadeghi is famous for his drawings, paintings and films are part of a well developed Iranian surrealist movement which was prominent from the 1970's until today. 

 Much of Sadeghi's inspiration comes from historical books including the Shahnameh where he uses cultural motifs and myths for the basis of his work. He initiated a special style in Persian painting, influenced by Coffee House painting, iconography, and traditional Iranian portrait painting, following the Qajar tradition - a mixture of a kind of surrealism, influenced by the art of stained glass." - quote source 

Artworks found at 50 Watts, The Real Riviera, Dastan Gallery and the artist's official site. 

 See more at an instagram account devoted to the artist. 

 

With The Master from Reza Sayah on Vimeo.

Annie Parnell / March 10, 2021

Originally released one month after the Apollo 11 moon landing, Jim Sullivan’s psych-folk hidden gem UFO (1969) is characterized by a drifting kind of hopefulness. Over the floating strings and upbeat horns of The Wrecking Crew, who famously backed The Beach Boys and Phil Spector, the album’s lyrics consider alien abduction and psychic links with loved ones with a curiosity tinged with despair. Sullivan weaves these unearthly themes together with transitory imagery of highways and train stations, a cosmic American landscape that calls to mind Gram Parsons, who he is frequently compared to. Throughout, he searches earnestly for connection, in “Whistle Stop” asking, “Do you know the feeling? Can you love someone you’ve only met a while ago?”

UFO paints love as an otherworldly link with another person who can “hear what I am thinking,” and the album’s title track extrapolates this idea further to consider the notion of divine love. Sullivan, who was raised Irish Catholic and is described by his son Chris as having grown up in an “age of exploration,” wonders in the song if the Second Coming of Christ might arrive by UFO, an idea that’s since been amplified by his better-known space-rock contemporary David Bowie. Jim, however, is no Ziggy Stardust—where Bowie’s odes to an alien messiah are jubilant, “UFO” is inquisitive and a little guarded, with a refrain that insists that he’s only “checking out the show.” For Sullivan, it’s not only hard to comprehend the seemingly telepathic sense of connection that true love offers—on both an interpersonal and a godly scale, it’s almost impossible to believe in it.

It’s a potent sentiment, and Sullivan’s idiosyncratic, wandering lyrics parallel the mystery that surrounds his life. Chris Sullivan explained to the New York Times in 2016 that Jim resented “the idea that he might have to be a square and go work for someone else,” but despite attracting the attention of Playboy Records and celebrity fans like Farah Fawcett and Harry Dean Stanton, his music career failed to pick up steam. This struggle between the talent he so clearly possessed and the recognition that stayed out of his reach is preternaturally visible on his debut album: in the song “Highways,” Sullivan is both dogged and lost, clearly stuck but stubbornly rebuking a world that refuses to let him live by his own rules. 

Six years after UFO’s release, Sullivan decided to drive cross-country to try and catch a break in Nashville. Along the way, he checked into a hotel in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, bought a bottle of vodka at a local liquor store, and disappeared without a trace. His Volkswagen Beetle was found abandoned at a nearby ranch. In the passenger seat were his wallet, his guitar, and a box full of copies of both his sophomore release Jim Sullivan (1972) and UFO. The latter’s listing on the label Light in the Attic’s website describes a conversation in which he claimed that if he ever had to disappear, “he’d walk into the desert and never come back.” Others point to a stop by police near Santa Rosa, which, as Chris notes grimly in an interview with FLOOD Magazine, has “a way of making people disappear.” A short documentary made by Light in the Attic touches on another theory: that he was abducted by aliens. Regardless, as his son points out, Jim was “great at what he did,” and the music on UFO is as intimate as it is enigmatic, asking questions about existence, the universe, and our place in each.

Sullivan’s quip in “UFO” that “too much goodness is a sin today,” as well as his gaze towards the stars for salvation, might have resonated with Judee Sill—another unsung singer-songwriter whose debut album Judee Sill (1971) is stuffed with references to aliens and the paranormal. A former church organist, she mixes these occult images more explicitly than Sullivan with Christian spirituality, crafting an intimate assortment of lyrical confessions that she once described as “Country-Cult-Baroque.” On “Crayon Angels,” the album’s opener, she sings gently that she is “waiting for God and a train to the astral plane.” Throughout the album, Christ continues to appear to her in a variety of far-out forms, including an “archetypal man” who’s “fleeter even than Mercury” and whose “moon mirage is shining.” 

In “Enchanted Sky Machines,” a gospel-influenced ballad near the album’s close, Judee is especially hopeful, blending salvation and spacecraft in a way that distinctly evokes “UFO.” On the live album Songs of Rapture and Redemption, she explains candidly that this song is “a religious song about flying saucers coming… to take all of the deserving people away.” Her Live in London BBC recordings reveal a deep-seated belief, explored through this alien metaphor, that “deserving people will be saved.” Unlike Jim Sullivan’s passive and cautious “checking out the show,” however, Judee’s hope for an alien, ’70s-style rapture is yearning, open, and at times deeply anxious. Early on, she admits—to God or to us?—that she “could easily love you if you’d just let me feel”; by the second chorus, she begs the titular “sky machines” to “please hurry.”

This urgency behind Sill’s search for space-age saviors seems intrinsically tied to the adversity she faced during her life on Earth. Sill began her career after spending time in jail for forgery and narcotics possession; a letter she sent along with her demos to Asylum Records detailed the ways her struggles with addiction had informed her music. She died at age 35 of an apparent drug overdose that was controversially ruled a suicide. A musing note about life after death that was found on the scene has been contended by those who knew her as a misinterpreted diary entry, or else the first draft of a song. 

Just as there’s more to Jim Sullivan than his disappearance, though, Judee Sill’s music goes well beyond a reflection of her personal tragedies, and her transformative ideas about God, love, and the universe are intrinsic to her work. Openly bisexual, she had public relationships with both men and women, and once described to Rolling Stone a fluid vision of gender, sexuality, and religion drawn from Carl Jung’s masculine force of the “animus” and feminine force of the “anima.” Her music is preoccupied with radical philosophical senses of redemption and acceptance, each with its own unearthly tint. “Jesus Was a Cross Maker,” for instance, delves into the grueling process of forgiving a former lover, written while she read Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel The Last Temptation of Christ. “Lopin’ Along Through the Cosmos” portrays her searching for answers among the stars, all the while insisting serenely to her listeners that “however we are is okay.” 

Outer space seems to suggest some of the same possibilities to both Sullivan and Sill: acceptance, transcendence, the possibility of leaving behind a flawed world where good and deserving people who chafe against societal norms are punished for it. Turning to the universe for solace when the world rejects you is an intrinsically reclamatory act—not only does it argue that the bindings of normative society are escapable, it also suggests that they’re not inherently natural or inborn. Jim Sullivan’s search for love and freedom within a repressive capitalistic framework is perhaps most zealous on “Highways,” when he insists that “my world is real, yours a dream,” while Judee Sill’s earnest belief in a better place is clearest on “Enchanted Sky Machines,” as she reassures the listener (or herself) that it “won’t be too far away.” 

This idea of a futuristic alien society more accepting than our own is certainly not a foreign one. In fact, it’s now a hallmark of the way that science-fiction themes have been explored in modern music, from Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist android-centric concept albums to The Butchies’ audacious queer punk anthem “The Galaxy is Gay.” Sullivan and Sill’s metaphysical pickings, however, came long before the social justice crossroads currently faced by modern country music, a realm that’s historically been considered a bastion of American conservatism. Like fellow ’70s trailblazers Lavender Country, UFO and Judee Sill not only call this characterization into question, but turn it on its head, using interplanetary imagery to imagine an open-minded world of country and folk decades before Nashville’s Music Row began to catch up with them. The holy connections each artist makes lend an additional layer of sanctity to the search—Sullivan and Sill suggest that not only is it natural and acceptable to diverge from the prescribed earthly norm, but it’s also righteous, sacred, and true.

In the decades since its original release, Jim Sullivan’s UFO has gone on to inspire folksy indie darlings like Okkervil River and Laura Marling, who have carried his ruminations to a new millennium of listeners. On the 2016 collaboration album case/lang/veirs, artists Neko Case, k.d. lang, and Laura Veirs paid tribute to Sill with “Song for Judee.” Another tribute album, Down Where the Valleys Are Low: Another Otherworld for Judee Sill, is due to come out this month. The modern resonance of these artists’ messages, half a century after they slipped into relative obscurity, is both tragic and hopeful. We certainly haven’t reached the utopia of Jim Sullivan’s UFOs and Judee Sill’s sky machines, but perhaps their songs provide their own kind of deliverance—a soothing, abiding prayer that a better world may be out there after all.

Annie Parnell is a writer and student based in Washington, D.C. who hails from Derry, Maine.

 

András Sütő- Adventures in Gandy-Wandy Land theatrical poster. 1987  Kecskemét Animation Film Festival, 1985  A Squished Nighmare, 1987  Stuttgart, 1987  Dracula
  Dostojevsky The Hollow Dweller, 1987  Day of the Cobra poster, 1981  Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács- HUE AND CRY film poster, 1988  2nd Film Festival of Animated Cartoons of Kecskemét, 1988  FIGHTS FACES poster, 2002  József Katona- Ban Bánk, 1987  Péter Pócs's Posters, 1988  HUNGARY IN HOLLAND (art exhibition poster, 1987)  Harold Pinter- The Birthday Partry, 1980  Shakespeare- Pericles, 1980  Sándor Weöres- Peter the Trickster, 1987
 
Many artworks found at the Poster Museum.
A Hungarian wikipedia article on the artist can be found here.

Basilisk, 1964 

Self-portrait, 1960 

Fantastic Beast, 1965 

Lion from Saturn, 1954 

Title Unknown 

Living Fire, 1963 

Jungle with a Dragon, 1967 

Landscape with a Dragon, 1973 

The Spirit of the Forest, 1963 

Troncs D' Arbres, 1964
 

The Middle Jungle, 1958 

Great Jungle, 1959 

Jungle, 1959 

In Paradise, 1969 

Fantasy Forest with Owl, 1966 

Raj, 1950 

Fantastic Creatures, 1959 

Meadow, 1960

Fantastic Composition, 1965 

Teofil Ociepka with his family, 1973, photo by Janusz Rosikoń 

 

"Teofil Ociepka (April 22, 1891 in Janów Śląski – January 15, 1978 in Bydgoszcz) was a Polish self-taught primitivist painter, occultist, and theosophist. Along with Nikifor, he was one of the best known Polish primitivists. 

His occupation was a miner, working at the Giesche's coal mine in Katowice as a machinist in the power plant. During World War I he served as a soldier in the German Army, where he was introduced to occultism. When he returned to Janów, he brought back with him the first works on occultism, including Athanasius Kircher's treatise on the Seventy Two Names of God. On the recommendation of his Swiss mentor, Philip Hohmann of Wittenberg, with whom he maintained steady correspondence, Ociepka became a member of the Rosicrucian Lodge and attained the status of Master of Secret Sciences. On Hohmann's direction, he organized a strong occultist community in Janów. He maintained contact with the Julian Ochorowicz Parapsychological Society of Lvov. He believed that he had a spiritual link with his master who telepathically inspired his art. Hohmann persuaded Ociepka to start painting circa 1927. He gave up his attempts in 1930 after receiving criticism from Tadeusz Dobrowolski, a Polish professor of art history and museum curator. He probably returned to painting either before or during World War II. 

 After the war, he gained a supporter in the author Isabel Czajka-Stachowicz, who in 1948 organized for him an exhibition in Warsaw, promoting him as "Polish Douanier Rousseau." She was aided by her friends, Julian Tuwim and Jan Kott. The Warsaw exhibition launched Ociepka's great world-class artistic career. 

 He saw his painting as God's mission, and so tried to portray absolutist themes, including the struggle between Good and Evil. His paintings depicting the imaginary fauna and flora of Saturn relate to the Rosicrucian ideology. During the early 1950s, in an attempt at political correctness, they were interpreted as Paleozoic Era landscapes. Later, his works depicted themes from fairy tales, legends, and lives of miners. They are characterized by wealth of imagination and bright, rich colors. The themes of his works, especially those from before 1956, were criticized as not adhering to the canon of socialist realism. 

In 1946 Ociepka partnered with Otto Klimczok to found an art group. In 1947 the group was reorganized as an Art Circle associated with the Cultural Center "KWK Wieczorek", which during the 1950s provided a base for a talented group of amateur artists. The group was known as "Janowska Group" after its birthplace, or more formally, as the Circle of Non-professional Painters. Ociepka was a member until 1959, when he permanently moved to join his wife in Bydgoszcz. Under her influence he broke contact with the Janowska Group and distanced himself from occultism. He died on January 15, 1978 from a brain aneurysm." - quote source 

 "One of the most interesting esoteric-related moments in Teofil Ociepka’s life was his awakening as a painter. Ociepka believed that it was Hohmann who made him an artist with a spiritual purpose. He claimed: “[Hohmann] wrote to me: ‘Teofil, a spirit will come to you and will teach you how to paint.’ I have never seen any spirit, but something Teofil Ociepka - Malarz. Fot. Eustachy Kossakowski/FORUM.undefined was born in my soul, which could be called love for the essence of beauty, that is for God. That was in 1927 and, from that time on, I began to paint and have been painting ever since with unfaltering joy and pleasure.” (Wisłocki 2010:43). " - quote source 

 The following is a plot description of the 2002 film "Angeleus" directed by Lech Majewski that centers around the artist and his familiar circle of painters.. "In the Polish town of Janow, during the 1930s, an occult commune was formed around Teofil Ociepka, an electrician at the local coal mine and a painter, who became a Master of Esoteric Science. Ociepka and his disciples, simple uneducated miners, searched for the Philosophers Stone and pursued spiritual perfection, which would permit them to penetrate the Principle and the Sense of the World and of God, to reach the mystery of Existence. Their activities combined elements of occultism, alchemy and theosophy with archaic and magical Silesian beliefs. During the bleak desert of the Stalinist era, the "Circle of Janow" marked a colorful metaphysical oasis, and its existence was consequently falsified by the authorities of the People's Republic of Poland." - quote source 

While difficult to find, a version of the film in its original language, regrettably without subtitles, was shared on youtube.

An article on the group of coal miner artists associated with Ociepka "Janowska Group" or "the Circle of Non-professional Painters" can be found at Culture.PL "Beneath the Surface: The Occult Inspirations of Poland’s Legendary Naive Artist Coal Miners"