The walls of Dis are guarded by fallen angels, the Furies, and Medusa. Dante emphasizes the character of the place as a city by describing its architectural features: towers, gates, walls, ramparts, bridges, and moats. It is thus an antithesis to the heavenly city, as for instance described by St. Augustine in his book City of God. Among these structures are mosques, "the worship places of the most dangerous enemies of medieval Christendom." In Dante's schematics of Hell, some Muslims and Jews are placed among the heretics. The presence of mosques probably also recalls the reality of Jerusalem in Dante's own time, where gilded domes dominated the skyline.

Punished within Dis are those whose lives were marked by active (rather than passive) sins: heretics, murderers, suicides, blasphemers, usurers, sodomites, panderers, seducers, flatterers, Simoniacs, false prophets, barrators, hypocrites, thieves, fraudulent advisors, sowers of discord, falsifiers, and traitors. Sinners unable to control their passions offend God less than these, whose lives were driven by malizia ("malice, wicked intent"):

Of every malice (malizia) gaining the hatred of Heaven, injustice is the goal; and every such goal injures someone either with force or fraud.

There is perhaps a distinction between malizia as the characteristic of circles seven and eight, and the matta bestialitade, "inhuman wickedness," of circle nine, which punishes those who threaten "the most basic civic, familial, and religious foundations of happiness."

They were huddled in like cattle during muster,

Entering the doors not in order but one cluster.

I’m tired, I’m bored or wow, does that guy stink!

I travel with CityRail 5 days a week and find the service great! I pay less than $40 per week and I am taken from my home to work and back again. What more could I ask for…yes, I could ask for five star luxury, a massage during my trips and free meals but remember, I pay less than $40 a week!

People are constantly complaining about things that when viewed from a large perspective and in relation to other countries, are really pathetic (in my opinion).

In China the public train service employ workers to physically push the commuters in to the carriages and I’m sure we have all seen the photos from India and Bangladesh of passengers riding ALL OVER the outside of the train…People should be grateful for the service we have!

Is it hypocritical that I complain about people that are complaining!? I think it may be but it really bugs me that people have gripes about a service that actually works!

Yes there are delays and train cancellations sometimes but really, is it that bad you have to carry on about it?

I mean, what’s the worse that can happen, you’re late to work or an appointment? If you were that concerned about being on time you would have caught an earlier train to leave some spare time anyway…

Man, it feels good getting something off your chest….maybe these complaining people are on to something!

This image is part of my Rhyming Captures Set

More shots from Sydney

of all the reasons I have to care about you it's your smile that gets me every time.

This is an outtake from yesterday's paint antics. I saved it 'cause it was Demi's favourite. :']

About to do an almighty tag description. If you don't want to find out obscene amounts of irrelevant information about me, leave now ;)

1. Favourite 5 Disney movies.

- UP.

- Nemo!

- Pirates of the Caribbean

- The fox and the hound :']

- That one about the mouse.. not tales of despereux though.

2. what makes you happy, and what makes you sad?

- I have a feeling most of you would be able to guess this. I'm happiest when around certain people; the one's I'm close to, usually the worst influences. The ones who make me laugh my stupid loud laugh and whose company I feel genuinely at home in. I'm happiest when talking to them, or spending with them, or even just wasting time with them.

What makes me sad, more than anything, is seeing those people upset. I try not to be but I'm easily influenced by them and their emotions and while I often steal happiness from their supplies the same can be said for their sadness.

and 3.

- What's the last movie you watched? Ooft. A documentry on the spanish american war ;)

- What's your favorite noise? laughter.

- Do you like some kind of light on when you go to bed, or just darkness? I used to be afraid of the dark and now I can't bear the light.

- What's the weirdest thing you've ever eaten? Not sure; some sort of bizarre concoction formed at a sleepover during a dare, no doubt.

- What's something you really want right now but don't need? Summer, I guess.

- What's your hair look like right now? Wet, tied back.

- Have you seen Waldo? If so what the heck man! Weirdest question ever? It's called Wally here. and yeah, I saw lots of adults running round the city dressed as him one saturday night :')

5 thoughts I've had today,

- I've had a nice day.

- Am I hungry?

- Why do I spend so very much time on public transport?!

- Must update ipod.

- I hope that works out.

10 truths:

Oh dear.

- I don't drink tea or coffee, I drink steamed milk and vanilla syrup.

- I have a fairly good taste in music, but some very very guilty pleasures. Usually involving american teen stupidly-famous actors.

- I will literally forgive anyone for anything and am trying to stop doing it.

- People who don't make an effort annoy me more than anything, but that makes me a hypocrite sometimes.

- I have three scars; one from falling down a drain in malawi by the roadside, one from burning my hand on the oven when I got home from malawi and one from chickenpox when I was tiny.

- I spent most of last year in the doctor's surgery at least once a week pretty much, because I have so many minor maladies.

- I'm a complete geek when it comes to videogames like pokemon.

- I want to be head girl.

- I spent a long, long time wishing I was someone else but now I no longer wish that because I've seen them a little more through someone else's eyes.

- I clearly crave attention :')

Hahaa, and this:

1. Thing you cannot leave the house without? camera.

2. Favorite Brand of Make up? ehh, maxfactor mascara, I'm impartial about everything else.

3. Favorite Place? Home (:

4. Favorite clothing store? Ruby red boutique :)

5. Favorite band? Uhm, too many to count. Blink 182 maybe.

6. Heels or flats? Pahaa, flats by day, heels by night ;)

7. Do you make good grades? Generally

8. Favorite colors? Deep red

9. Do you drink energy drinks? No :')

10. Do you drink juice? Too often.

11. Do you like swimming? Love it.

12. Do you eat fries with a fork? Depends who I'm with!

13. Favorite song? Iris - googoo dolls

14. Do you want to get married later on in life? Yep.

15. Do you get mad easily? Oh yes :)

16. Are you into ghost hunting? Nope, but going on a ghost hunt soon xD

17. Any phobias? Fire.

18. Do you bite your nails? Not unless something's on my mind

19. Have you ever had a near death experience? Nope. touchwood!

20. Do you drink coffee? Not YET. ;)

5 places I'd like to visit:

Rome (or Florence)

New York

Tokyo

Mexico city (beginning to sound like my geography case study list)

Bavaria

Allright. And now the almighty ten facts.

AHH SO MANY TAGS. :)

1. I played volleyball today; we kicked ass, but lost. In style. Ish.

2. I miss someone I see everyday and spend a lot of time with. Weird or what?

3. I feel like going and curling up with a book, which I'll do in a sec, since I acquired three today - the great gatsby, a history one and draculaaaa.

4. I would LOVE to work in a bookstore. I've applied, but so has my life arch nemesis.

5. HAHAH yes, I have an arch nemesis xD

6. I'm not in school much over the next few weeks, mixed feelings about this.

7. I must, must get a job. Or stop spending money.

8. Mum just gave me the local newspaper to read; my dad's school is in the midst of a money scandal. Oh, dear.

9. I had ice cream for breakfast this morning. Vanilla.

10. I also wear vanilla perfume.

OKHAY I'M DONE.

The Message to the Church in Philadelphia

7 “Write this letter to the angel of the church in Philadelphia.

This is the message from the one who is holy and true,

the one who has the key of David.

What he opens, no one can close;

and what he closes, no one can open:[c]

8 “I know all the things you do, and I have opened a door for you that no one can close. You have little strength, yet you obeyed my word and did not deny me. 9 Look, I will force those who belong to Satan’s synagogue—those liars who say they are Jews but are not—to come and bow down at your feet. They will acknowledge that you are the ones I love.

10 “Because you have obeyed my command to persevere, I will protect you from the great time of testing that will come upon the whole world to test those who belong to this world. 11 I am coming soon.[d] Hold on to what you have, so that no one will take away your crown. 12 All who are victorious will become pillars in the Temple of my God, and they will never have to leave it. And I will write on them the name of my God, and they will be citizens in the city of my God—the new Jerusalem that comes down from heaven from my God. And I will also write on them my new name.

13 “Anyone with ears to hear must listen to the Spirit and understand what he is saying to the churches.

www.facebook.com/AriesParcumphoto

#TrumptheHypocrite

I’m taking the MCAT in less than 36 hours and I am so burned out. I figured I could use a study break to make good on at least one of my long-ago ideas I proposed to you guys. Eh, I’m slightly hypocritical, whatever. I’m not making stuff specifically for Flickr anymore, I’m just continuing to collect and expand my collection for my own amusement. At least research backs up my self-serving bias haha.

With the exception of Sandman, most of these guys have been built for months already. I can update this with my signature text labels if anyone would like them.

Once again, credit to the incredibly creative Numbuh1Nerd for inspiring Mr. Terrific’s torso and to Max for the brilliant idea for Mr. Terrific’s right arm. Also to Roman for inspiring the torso for Alan and the head for Hawkman!

MUA and hairstyle:Marina Meboniya

Model:Kseniya

Presidential campaigns bring out the worst in everyone. We forget what we share, what we have in common and we embrace rhetoric with religious fervor. We cling to what we like, what makes us comfortabe, we preach it from our pulpit and breath fire and brimstone about the evils of our enemy, our opponent. We vilify, demonize, find the inevitable flaws (that every human being has). Twist the words, seduce the statistics, ignore all logic and bare-knuckle scream that we're right and you're wrong.

For 3 months we act as if we care about issues and laws and policies. We fight our friends, our family. "You're one of them", "You're full of hate", "You're telling lies". Then for 4 years we ignore that which we found so important. We hypocrites, we band wagoners, we party crashers.

We forget our freedom. We forget our liberty. We forget our purpose, our likeness, our humanity; and sit in a dark basement, hiding from light in the clutter and the mess and things that we store away that don't really matter. We forget that its never as bad as we make. That things always seem worse than they are. That the whole is the sum of its parts.

One of the best horror cards of the 1950s, the classic Curse of the Demon lobby #5, featuring a stunning close-up of the monster; ironically, this scene with the actual demon was added by the producers, over the objections of the film's director, Jacques Tourneur, who wanted to keep the threat more mysterious and unseen.

youtu.be/KcPcJ9ycEu4?t=2m22s Full Feature

This atmospheric British film, about a psychologist investigating a devil worshipping cult, features one of the most memorable creatures to come from horror films of the 1950s. The incredible monster showcased on this frightening one sheet is actually based on a woodcut print from a 1650s book on demonology. And even though the demon appears on this one sheet and in the film, director Jacques Tourneur didn't want to depict it, feeling that the mystery of what it looked like outweighed showing it.

Curse of the Demon / Night of the Demon

Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment

1957/58 / B&W / 1:78 anamorphic 16:9 / 82, 95 min. / Street Date August 13, 2002 / $24.95

Starring Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins, Niall MacGinnis, Maurice Denham, Athene Seyler

Cinematography Ted Scaife

Production Designer Ken Adam

Special Effects George Blackwell, S.D. Onions, Wally Veevers

Film Editor Michael Gordon

Original Music Clifton Parker

Written by Charles Bennett and Hal E. Chester from the story Casting the Runes by Montague R. James

Produced by Frank Bevis, Hal E. Chester

Directed by Jacques Tourneur

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Savant champions a lot of genre movies but only infrequently does one appear like Jacques Tourneur's superlative Curse of the Demon. It's simply better than the rest -- an intelligent horror film with some very good scares. It occupies a stylistic space that sums up what's best in ghost stories and can hold its own with most any supernatural film ever made. Oh, it's also a great entertainment that never fails to put audiences at the edge of their seats.

What's more, Columbia TriStar has shown uncommon respect for their genre output by including both versions of Curse of the Demon on one disc. Savant has full coverage on the versions and their restoration below, following his thorough and analytical (read: long-winded and anal) coverage of the film itself.

Synopsis:

Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), a scientist and professional debunker of superstitious charlatans, arrives in England to help Professor Henry Harrington (Maurice Denham) assault the phony cult surrounding Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall McGinnis). But Harrington has mysteriously died and Holden becomes involved with his niece Joanna (Peggy Cummins), who thinks Karswell had something to do with it. Karswell's 'tricks' confuse the skeptical Holden, but he stubbornly holds on to his conviction that he's " ... not a sucker, like 90% of the human race." That is, until the evidence mounts that Harrington was indeed killed by a demon summoned from Hell, and that Holden is the next intended victim!

The majority of horror films are fantasies in which we accept supernatural ghosts, demons and monsters as part of a deal we've made with the authors: they dress the fantasy in an attractive guise and arrange the variables into an interesting pattern, and we agree to play along for the sake of enjoyment. When it works the movies can resonate with personal meaning. Even though Dracula and Frankenstein are unreal, they are relevant because they're aligned with ideas and themes in our subconscious.

Horror films that seriously confront the no-man's land between rational reality and supernatural belief have a tough time of it. Everyone who believes in God knows that the tug o' war between rationality and faith in our culture has become so clogged with insane belief systems it's considered impolite to dismiss people who believe in flying saucers or the powers of crystals or little glass pyramids. One of Dana Andrews' key lines in Curse of the Demon, defending his dogged skepticism against those urging him to have an open mind, is his retort, "If the world is a dark place ruled by Devils and Demons, we all might as well give up right now." Curse of the Demon balances itself between skepticism and belief with polite English manners, letting us have our fun as it lays its trap. We watch Andrews roll his eyes and scoff at the feeble séance hucksters and the dire warnings of a foolish-looking necromancer. Meanwhile, a whole dark world of horror sneaks up on him. The film's intelligent is such that we're not offended by its advocacy of dark forces or even its literal, in-your-face demon.

The remarkable Curse of the Demon was made in England for Columbia but is gloriously unaffected by that company's zero-zero track record with horror films. Producer Hal E. Chester would seem an odd choice to make a horror classic after producing Joe Palooka films and acting as a criminal punk in dozens of teen crime movies. The obvious strong cards are writer Charles Bennett, the brains behind several classic English Hitchcock pictures (who 'retired' into meaningless bliss writing for schlockmeister Irwin Allen) and Jacques Tourneur, a master stylist who put Val Lewton on the map with Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie. Tourneur made interesting Westerns (Canyon Passage, Great Day in the Morning) and perhaps the most romantic film noir, Out of the Past. By the late '50s he was on what Andrew Sarris in his American Film called 'a commercial downgrade'. The critic lumped Curse of the Demon with low budget American turkeys like The Fearmakers. 1

Put Tourneur with an intelligent script, a decent cameraman and more than a minimal budget and great things could happen. We're used to watching Corman Poe films, English Hammer films and Italian Bavas and Fredas, all the while making excuses for the shortcomings that keep them in the genre ghetto (where they all do quite well, thank you). There's even a veiled resentment against upscale shockers like The Innocents that have resources (money, time, great actors) denied our favorite toilers in the genre realm. Curse of the Demon is above all those considerations. It has name actors past their prime and reasonable production values. Its own studio (at least in America) released it like a genre quickie, double-billed with dreck like The Night the World Exploded and The Giant Claw. They cut it by 13 minutes, changed its title (to ape The Curse of Frankenstein?) and released a poster featuring a huge, slavering demon monster that some believe was originally meant to be barely glimpsed in the film itself. 2

Horror movies can work on more than one level but Curse of the Demon handles several levels and then some. The narrative sets up John Holden as a professional skeptic who raises a smirking eyebrow to the open minds of his colleagues. Unlike most second-banana scientists in horror films, they express divergent points of view. Holden just sees himself as having common sense but his peers are impressed by the consistency of demonological beliefs through history. Maybe they all saw Christensen's Witchcraft through the Ages, which might have served as a primer for author Charles Bennett. Smart dialogue allows Holden to score points by scoffing at the then-current "regression to past lives" scam popularized by the Bridey Murphy craze. 3 While Holden stays firmly rooted to his position, coining smart phrases and sarcastic put-downs of believers, the other scientists are at least willing to consider alternate possibilities. Indian colleague K.T. Kumar (Peter Elliott) keeps his opinion to himself. But when asked, he politely states that he believes entirely in the world of demons! 4

Holden may think he has the truth by the tail but it takes Kindergarten teacher Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins of Gun Crazy fame) to show him that being a skeptic doesn't mean ignoring facts in front of one's face. Always ready for a drink (a detail added to tailor the part to Andrews?), Holden spends the first couple of reels as interested in pursuing Miss Harrington, as he is the devil-worshippers. The details and coincidences pile up with alarming speed -- the disappearing ink untraceable by the lab, the visual distortions that might be induced by hypnosis, the pages torn from his date book and the parchment of runic symbols. Holden believes them to be props in a conspiracy to draw him into a vortex of doubt and fear. Is he being set up the way a Voodoo master cons his victim, by being told he will die, with fabricated clues to make it all appear real? Holden even gets a bar of sinister music stuck in his head. It's the title theme -- is this a wicked joke on movie soundtracks?

Speak of the Devil...

This brings us to the wonderful character of Julian Karswell, the kiddie-clown turned multi-millionaire cult leader. The man who launched Alfred Hitchcock as a maker of sophisticated thrillers here creates one of the most interesting villains ever written, one surely as good as any of Hitchcock's. In the short American cut Karswell is a shrewd games-player who shows Holden too many of his cards and finally outsmarts himself. The longer UK cut retains the full depth of his character.

Karswell has tapped into the secrets of demonology to gain riches and power, yet he tragically recognizes that he is as vulnerable to the forces of Hell as are the cowering minions he controls through fear. Karswell's coven means business. It's an entirely different conception from the aesthetic salon coffee klatch of The Seventh Victim, where nothing really supernatural happens and the only menace comes from a secret society committing new crimes to hide old ones.

Karswell keeps his vast following living in fear, and supporting his extravagant lifestyle under the idea that Evil is Good, and Good Evil. At first the Hobart Farm seems to harbor religious Christian fundamentalists who have turned their backs on their son. Then we find out that they're Karswell followers, living blighted lives on cursed acreage and bled dry by their cultist "leader." Karswell's mum (Athene Seyler) is an inversion of the usual insane Hitchcock mother. She lovingly resists her son's philosophy and actively tries to help the heroes. That's in the Night version, of course. In the shorter American cut she only makes silly attempts to interest Joanna in her available son and arranges for a séance. Concerned by his "negativity", Mother confronts Julian on the stairs. He has no friends, no wife, no family. He may be a mass extortionist but he's still her baby. Karswell explains that by exploiting his occult knowledge, he's immersed himself forever in Evil. "You get nothing for nothing"

Karswell is like the Devil on Earth, a force with very limited powers that he can't always control. By definition he cannot trust any of his own minions. They're unreliable, weak and prone to double-cross each other, and they attract publicity that makes a secret society difficult to conceal. He can't just kill Holden, as he hasn't a single henchman on the payroll. He instead summons the demon, a magic trick he's only recently mastered. When Karswell turns Harrington away in the first scene we can sense his loneliness. The only person who can possibly understand is right before him, finally willing to admit his power and perhaps even tolerate him. Karswell has no choice but to surrender Harrington over to the un-recallable Demon. In his dealings with the cult-debunker Holden, Karswell defends his turf but is also attempting to justify himself to a peer, another man who might be a potential equal. It's more than a duel of egos between a James Bond and a Goldfinger, with arrogance and aggression masking a mutual respect; Karswell knows he's taken Lewton's "wrong turning in life," and will have to pay for it eventually.

Karswell eventually earns Holden's respect, especially after the fearful testimony of Rand Hobart. It's taken an extreme demonstration to do it, but Holden budges from his smug position. He may not buy all of the demonology hocus-pocus but it's plain enough that Karswell or his "demon" is going to somehow rub him out. Seeking to sneak the parchment back into Karswell's possession, Holden becomes a worthy hero because he's found the maturity to question his own preconceptions. Armed with his rational, cool head, he's a force that makes Karswell -- without his demon, of course -- a relative weakling. Curse of the Demon ends in a classic ghost story twist, with just desserts dished out and balance recovered. The good characters are less sure of their world than when they started, but they're still able to cope. Evil has been defeated not by love or faith, but by intellect.

Curse of the Demon has the Val Lewton sensibility as has often been cited in Tourneur's frequent (and very effective) use of the device called the Lewton "Bus" -- a wholly artificial jolt of fast motion and noise interrupting a tense scene. There's an ultimate "bus" at the end when a train blasts in and sets us up for the end title. It "erases" the embracing actors behind it and I've always thought it had to be an inspiration for the last shot of North by NorthWest. The ever-playful Hitchcock was reportedly a big viewer of fantastic films, from which he seems to have gotten many ideas. He's said to have dined with Lewton on more than one occasion (makes sense, they were at one time both Selznick contractees) and carried on a covert competition with William Castle, of all people.

Visually, Tourneur's film is marvelous, effortlessly conjuring menacing forests lit in the fantastic Mario Bava mode by Ted Scaife, who was not known as a genre stylist. There are more than a few perfunctory sets, with some unflattering mattes used for airport interiors, etc.. Elsewhere we see beautiful designs by Ken Adam in one of his earliest outings. Karswell's ornate floor and central staircase evoke an Escher print, especially when visible/invisible hands appear on the banister. A hypnotic, maze-like set for a hotel corridor is also tainted by Escher and evokes a sense of the uncanny even better than the horrid sounds Holden hears. The build-up of terror is so effective that one rather unconvincing episode (a fight with a Cat People - like transforming cat) does no harm. Other effects, such as the demon footprints appearing in the forest, work beautifully.

In his Encyclopedia of Horror Movies Phil Hardy very rightly relates Curse of the Demon's emphasis on the visual to the then just-beginning Euro-horror subgenre. The works of Bava, Margheriti and Freda would make the photographic texture of the screen the prime element of their films, sometimes above acting and story logic.

Columbia TriStar's DVD of Curse of the Demon / Night of the Demon presents both versions of this classic in one package. American viewers saw an effective but abbreviated cut-down. If you've seen Curse of the Demon on cable TV or rented a VHS or a laser anytime after 1987, you're not going to see anything different in the film. In 1987 Columbia happened to pull out the English cut when it went to re-master. When the title came up as Night of the Demon, they just slugged in the Curse main title card and let it go.

From such a happy accident (believe me, nobody in charge at Columbia at the time would have purposely given a film like this a second glance) came a restoration at least as wonderful as the earlier reversion of The Fearless Vampire Killers to its original form. Genre fans were taken by surprise and the Laserdisc became a hot item that often traded for hundreds of dollars. 6

Back in film school Savant had been convinced that ever seeing the long, original Night cut was a lost cause. An excellent article in the old Photon magazine in the early '70s 5, before such analytical work was common, accurately laid out the differences between the two versions, something Savant needs to do sometime with The Damned and These Are the Damned. The Photon article very accurately describes the cut scenes and what the film lost without them, and certainly inspired many of the ideas here.

Being able to see the two versions back-to-back shows exactly how they differ. Curse omits some scenes and rearranges others. Gone is some narration from the title sequence, most of the airplane ride, some dialogue on the ground with the newsmen and several scenes with Karswell talking to his mother. Most crucially missing are Karswell's mother showing Joanna the cabalistic book everyone talks so much about and Holden's entire visit to the Hobart farm to secure a release for his examination of Rand Hobart. Of course the cut film still works (we loved the cut Curse at UCLA screenings and there are people who actually think it's better) but it's nowhere near as involving as the complete UK version. Curse also reshuffles some events, moving Holden's phantom encounter in the hallway nearer the beginning, which may have been to get a spooky scene in the middle section or to better disguise the loss of whole scenes later. The chop-job should have been obvious. The newly imposed fades and dissolves look awkward. One cut very sloppily happens right in the middle of a previous dissolve.

Night places both Andrews and Cummins' credits above the title and gives McGinnis an "also starring" credit immediately afterwards. Oddly, Curse sticks Cummins afterwards and relegates McGinnis to the top of the "also with" cast list. Maybe with his role chopped down, some Columbia executive thought he didn't deserve the billing?

Technically, both versions look just fine, very sharp and free of digital funk that would spoil the film's spooky visual texture. Night of the Demon is the version to watch for both content and quality. It's not perfect but has better contrast and less dirt than the American version. Curse has more emulsion scratches and flecking white dandruff in its dark scenes, yet looks fine until one sees the improvement of Night. Both shows are widescreen enhanced (hosanna), framing the action at its original tighter aspect ratio.

It's terrific that Columbia TriStar has brought out this film so thoughtfully, even though some viewers are going to be confused when their "double feature" disc appears to be two copies of the same movie. Let 'em stew. This is Savant's favorite release so far this year.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Curse of the Demon / Night of the Demon rates:

Movie: Excellent

Footnotes:

Made very close to Curse of the Demon and starring Dana Andrews, The Fearmakers (great title) was a Savant must-see until he caught up with it in the UA collection at MGM. It's a pitiful no-budgeter that claims Madison Avenue was providing public relations for foreign subversives, and is negligible even in the lists of '50s anti-Commie films.

Return

Curse of the Demon's Demon has been the subject of debate ever since the heyday of Famous Monsters of Filmland. From what's on record it's clear that producer Chester added or maximized the shots of the creature, a literal visualization of a fiery, brimstone-smoking classical woodcut demon that some viewers think looks ridiculous. Bennett and Tourneur's original idea was to never show a demon but the producer changed that. Tourneur probably directed most of the shots, only to have Chester over-use them. To Savant's thinking, the demon looks great. It is first perceived as an ominous sound, a less strident version of the disturbing noise made by Them! Then it manifests itself visually as a strange disturbance in the sky (bubbles? sparks? early slit-scan?) followed by a billowing cloud of sulphurous smoke (a dandy effect not exploited again until Close Encounters of the Third Kind). The long-shot demon is sometimes called the bicycle demon because he's a rod puppet with legs that move on a wheel-rig. Smoke belches from all over his scaly body. Close-ups are provided by a wonderfully sculpted head 'n' shoulders demon with articulated eyes and lips, a full decade or so before Carlo Rambaldi started engineering such devices.

Most of the debate centers on how much Demon should have been shown with the general consensus that less would have been better. People who dote on Lewton-esque ambivalence say that the film's slow buildup of rationality-versus demonology is destroyed by the very real Demon's appearance in the first scene, and that's where they'd like it removed or radically reduced. The Demon is so nicely integrated into the cutting (the giant foot in the first scene is a real jolt) that it's likely that Tourneur himself filmed it all, perhaps expecting the shots to be shorter or more obscured. It is also possible that the giant head was a post-Tourneur addition - it doesn't tie in with the other shots as well (especially when it rolls forward rather stiffly) and is rather blunt. Detractors lump it in with the gawd-awful head of The Black Scorpion, which is filmed the same way and almost certainly was an afterthought - and also became a key poster image. This demon head matches the surrounding action a lot better than did the drooling Scorpion.

Savant wouldn't change Curse of the Demon but if you put a gun to my head I'd shorten most of the shots in its first appearance, perhaps eliminating all close-ups except for the final, superb shot of the the giant claw reaching for Harrington / us.

Kumar, played (I assume) by an Anglo actor, immediately evokes all those Indian and other Third World characters in Hammer films whose indigenous cultures invariably hold all manner of black magic and insidious horror. When Hammer films are repetitious it's because they take eighty minutes or so to convince the imagination-challenged English heroes to even consider the premise of the film as being real. In Curse of the Demon, Holden's smart-tongued dismissal of outside viewpoints seems much more pigheaded now than it did in 1957, when heroes confidently defended conformist values without being challenged. Kumar is a scientist but also probably a Hindu or a Sikh. He has no difficulty reconciling his faith with his scientific detachment. Holden is far too tactful to call Kumar a crazy third-world guru but that's probably what he's thinking. He instead politely ignores him. Good old Kumar then saves Holden's hide with some timely information. I hope Holden remembered to thank him.

There's an unstated conclusion in Curse of the Demon: Holden's rigid disbelief of the supernatural means he also does not believe in a Christian God with its fundamentally spiritual faith system of Good and Evil, saints and devils, angels and demons. Horror movies that deal directly with religious symbolism and "real faith" can be hypocritical in their exploitation and brutal in their cheap toying with what are for many people sacred personal concepts. I'm thinking of course of The Exorcist here. That movie has all the grace of a reporter who shows a serial killer's atrocity photos to a mother whose child has just been kidnapped. Curse of the Demon hasn't The Exorcist's ruthless commercial instincts but instead has the modesty not to pretend to be profound, or even "real." Yet it expresses our basic human conflict between rationality and faith very nicely.

Savant called Jim Wyrnoski, who was associated with Photon, in an effort to find out more about the article, namely who wrote it. It was very well done and I've never forgotten it; I unfortunately loaned my copy out to good old Jim Ursini and it disappeared. Obviously, a lot of the ideas here, I first read there. Perhaps a reader who knows better how to take care of their belongings can help me with the info? Ursini and Alain Silvers' More Things than are Dreamt Of Limelight, 1994, analyzes Curse of the Demon (and many other horror movies) in the context of its source story.

This is a true story: Cut to 2000. Columbia goes to re-master Curse of the Demon and finds that the fine-grain original of the English version is missing. The original long version of the movie may be lost forever. A few months later a collector appears who says he bought it from another unnamed collector and offers to trade it for a print copy of the American version, which he prefers. Luckily, an intermediary helps the collector follow up on his offer and the authorities are not contacted about what some would certainly call stolen property. The long version is now once again safe. Studios clearly need to defend their property but many collectors have "items" they personally have acquired legally. More often than you might think, such finds come about because studios throw away important elements. If the studios threaten prosecution, they will find that collectors will never approach them. They'd probably prefer to destroy irreplaceable film to avoid being criminalized.

East-German postcard by VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb, Berlin, no. 1602, 1961. Honor Blackman in The Delavine Affair (Douglas Peirce, 1954).

Yesterday, 6 April 2020, British actress Honor Blackman (1925-2020) passed away at the age of 94. She was best known for playing the Bond girl Pussy Galore opposite Sean Connery in Goldfinger (1964). Blackman became a household name in the 1960s as Cathy Gale in The Avengers in which she showed an extraordinary combination of beauty, brains and physical prowess. After a career spanning eight decades, she died of natural causes unrelated to coronavirus.

Honor Blackman was born one of four children of a middle-class family in London's East End. Her father, Frederick Blackman, was a civil service statistician. For her 15th birthday, her parents gave her acting lessons and she began her training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1940. Blackman received her first acting work on stage in London's West End as an understudy for 'The Guinea Pig'. She continued with roles in 'The Gleam' (1946) and 'The Blind Goddess' (1947), before moving into film. She debuted with Fame Is the Spur (1947), starring Michael Redgrave. Signed up with the Rank Organisation, Blackman joined several other starlet hopefuls who were being groomed for greater fame. She played small roles in the anthology film Quartet (Ken Annakin, Arthur Crabtree, Harold French, Ralph Smart, 1948), based on short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, the thriller So Long at the Fair (Terence Fisher, Antony Darnborough,1950), with Dirk Bogarde, and the Titanic drama A Night to Remember (Roy Ward Baker, 1958). Developing a solid footing, she filmed The Square Peg (John Paddy Carstairs, 1958) with comedian Norman Wisdom and A Matter of WHO (Don Chaffey, 1961) with Terry-Thomas. On television, she played in the Edgar Wallace vigilante series The Four Just Men (1959-1960). She secured her breakthrough when she was cast in 1962 as the leather-clad crimefighter Cathy Gale in the hit British show The Avengers (1962-1964), alongside Patrick Macnee as the bowler-hatted John Steed. Blackman had to learn judo for the role, and her tough persona allied to then daring costume choices – boots and figure-hugging catsuits – ensured she quickly assumed star status. One of its unlikely results was a hit single, 'Kinky Boots', recorded in 1964 with Macnee, which became a Top 10 hit in the U.K. in 1990. Blackman’s proficiency in martial arts helped her land what became her signature role, that of Pussy Galore, the glamorous villain assisting in Goldfinger’s plot to rob Fort Knox. Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton, 1964) was the third Bond film and was a global hit. Gary Brumburgh at IMDb: "Blackman went toe to toe with Sean Connery's womanizing "007" and created major sparks on screen, managing to outclass the (wink-wink) double meaning of her character's name."

After her rise to mainstream fame, Honor Blackman made noticeable appearances in such films as Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963) as the vengeful goddess Hera, the Western Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968) and The Virgin and the Gypsy (Christopher Miles, 1970) with Franco Nero. Simon Murphy and Andrew Pulver in The Guardian: "while she worked steadily in film, her TV work was higher profile, and included guest appearances in Columbo, Minder and Doctor Who. In 1990, she was cast in a regular role in the ITV sitcom The Upper Hand, playing the glamorous mother of the lead female character. Blackman expressed her fondness for the role, saying it “made women who had just retired and felt they’d been put on the backburner realise they had a lot of life left to live”." She earned raves on stage as the blind heroine of the thriller 'Wait Until Dark' as well as for her dual roles in 'Mr. and Mrs.', a production based on two of Noël Coward's plays. She also appeared on stage in The Sound of Music (1981), My Fair Lady (2005-2006) and Cabaret (2007). She was a staunch republican and turned down a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002 to avoid being a “hypocrite”. More recently, she joined a campaign to demand compensation payments for pensioners who lost savings in the Equitable Life scandal. Honor Blackman was married to Bill Sankey from 1948 to 1956. After their divorce, she married British actor Maurice Kaufmann (1961–1975). They appeared together in the slasher film Fright (Peter Collinson, 1971) and some stage productions. They adopted two children, Lottie (1967) and Barnaby (1968). After her divorce from Kaufmann, she did not remarry and stated that she preferred being single. She enjoyed watching football. Blackman died at her home in Lewes in 2020, aged 94, from natural causes.

Sources: Simon Murphy and Andrew Pulver (The Guardian), Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

it tooks half month

The Future Of Drag Racing, Anti-Drag Racism & Bigotry, And Fibbing. Is It George Santos & The Republicans?! - IMRAN™

There have been huge liars in every phase of history. But a bigger fibber always come around.

Just like previous dumbest American President George W. Bush was thrilled that Trump came on the scene to be the dumbest ever, and worst ever, person to be in the White House, the biggest liar Donald Trump is relieved that an even bigger liar, Republican Congressman George Santos, is in the limelight.

Not only is George Santos so full of $#!T in the stories he tells about himself, the irony is how much a source of amusement his real life & his lies to deny the actual truth are. Easiest source of comedy bits in modern history, even counting the Donny Drumpf presence in society.

As always, Republicans have been showing their hate of gays and others, especially by targeting drag-queens with their vitriolic attacks. Ironic now they are defending Santos, a known liar AND a known drag queen!

When I saw a drag racing video clip in my newsfeed recently, the caption on it made me laugh. I would not be surprised if George Santos claims to the champion of drag racing. Meanwhile, current Republicans are masters of anti-drag / racism.

© 2023 IMRAN™

#cars, #dragracing, #entertainment, #GerorgeSantos, #IMHO, #IMRAN, #InMyHumbleOpinion, #liars, #Meme, #politics, #Republicans, #traitors, #wordplay, #irony, #hypocrites, #NoShame,

L'Origine du monde was painted in an era when moral values were being questioned. By the very nature of its realistic, graphic eroticism, the painting still has the power to shock.

During the 19th century, the display of the nude body underwent a revolution whose main activists were Courbet and Manet. Courbet rejected academic painting and its smooth, idealized nudes, but he also directly recriminated the hypocritical social conventions of the Second Empire, where eroticism and even pornography were acceptable in mythological paintings.

Courbet later insisted he never lied in his paintings, and his realism pushed the limits of what was considered presentable. With L'Origine du monde he has made even more explicit the eroticism of Manet's Olympia. Maxime Du Camp, in a harsh tirade, reported his visit of the work's purchaser, and his sight of a painting "giving realism's last word".

The commission for L'Origine du monde is believed to have come from Khalil-Bey, a Turkish diplomat, former ambassador of the Ottoman Empire in Athens and Saint Petersburg who had just moved to Paris. Sainte-Beuve introduced him to Courbet and he ordered a painting to add to his personal collection of erotic pictures, which already included Le Bain turc (The Turkish Bath) from Ingres and another painting by Courbet, Les Dormeuses (The Sleepers), for which it is supposed that Hiffernan was one of the models.

After Khalil-Bey's finances were ruined by gambling, the painting subsequently passed through a series of private collections. It was first bought during the sale of the Khalil-Bey collection in 1868, by antique dealer Antoine de la Narde. Edmond de Goncourt hit upon it in an antique shop 1889, hidden behind a wooden pane decorated with the painting of a castle or a church in a snowy landscape. According to Robert Fernier, Hungarian collector Baron Ferenc Hatvany bought it at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1910 and took it with him to Budapest. Towards the end of the Second World War the painting was looted by Soviet troops but ransomed by Hatvany who when he emigrated was allowed to take only one art work with him, and he took L'Origine to Paris.

In 1955 L'Origine du monde was sold at auction for 1.5 million francs. Its new owner was the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Together with his wife, actress Sylvia Bataille, he installed it in their country house in Guitrancourt. Lacan asked André Masson, his stepbrother, to build a double bottom frame and draw another picture thereon. Masson painted a surrealist, allusive version of L'Origine du monde. The New York public had the opportunity to admire L'Origine du monde in 1988 during the Courbet Reconsidered show at the Brooklyn Museum; the painting was also included in the exhibition Gustave Courbet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008. After Lacan died in 1981, the French Minister of Economy and Finances agreed to settle the family's inheritance tax bill through the transfer of the work (dation en lieu in French law) to the Musée d'Orsay, an act which was finalized in 1995.

St Mary, Woolpit, Suffolk

Woolpit is perhaps the most perfect of all Suffolk villages. Not particularly sleepy, and only a little chocolate boxy, but somewhere people actually actually live in. Its shops and pubs are arranged around the pleasant village square, and Phipson's crazy spire towers above them. Woolpit still has its school, and you wouldn't need to get in the car every time you needed to go shopping, as you'd have to do in some of Suffolk's more famously picturesque villages, like Kersey, Rattlesden and Tuddenham. Further, Woolpit has its mythology; the two green children, who climbed out of the ground, speaking a strange language and afraid of the sunlight. The boy died soon after, but the girl grew up and married; she learned to speak English, and told of St Martin's Land, from where she and her brother had emerged. There are holes in the ground around Woolpit, quarries where bricks were made in the 19th century. But perhaps there was once something much older, for every Suffolk schoolchild knows that the name 'Woolpit' is nothing to do with wool, but with the wolves that once haunted the pits here...

Your first sight of St Mary will be Phipson's crazy spire, visible from miles away, and quite unlike anything else in East Anglia. Suffolk is a county where spires are rare enough anyway. From the far side of the Gipping valley you can see this one and two others, piercing the soft harvest mist in autumn. They are Phipson's equally absurd Great Finborough, and the 1990s blade of St Peter and St Mary, Stowmarket. There are only about a dozen more in the whole of the county. The excuse for this one was that the tower was struck by lightning in 1852, bringing down the previous lead and timber affair (presumably like the one at Hadleigh). The font is contemporary with the tower, suggesting that the old one was destroyed by the fall.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the artist John Piper produced a series of screen prints of aspects of Suffolk churches; for most, he used the fine perpendicular tower, ramifying it in bold Festival of Britain primary colours. But for Woolpit, he chose the porch, because it is Suffolk's finest. Cautley thought it the best in all England. It is two-storey, 15th century, contemporary with the nave. Mortlock tells us that they were both built by wealthy Bury Abbey, who owned the living here. As at Beccles, it rises way above the south aisle, tower-like in itself.

A rood group of niches surmounts the shields of East Anglia above the door. More flank them. Mortlock says that the work began in the early 1430s, and the niches were filled by a bequest of 1473, suggesting that the porch was forty years in the making. The south aisle and chancel are slightly earlier, the north aisle slightly later, so it is the nave that promises us great things, and doesn't disappoint.

You step into cool darkness, and look up. It is breathtaking. This is Suffolk's most perfectly restored angel hammerbeam roof. It may not have the drama of Mildenhall, the exquisiteness of Blythburgh, the sheer mathematics of Needham Market, but it shows us in detail more than any other what the medieval imagination was aiming at, the summa cum laude of the genre. From the still, small silence of the church floor below, you look up into a great shout of praise. Here are hundreds of figures, both angelic and human. The profusion is ordered, as if some mighty hymn were in progress.

Perhaps it is a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus: We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord... To thee all Angels cry aloud, the Heavens, and all the Powers therein. To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry Holy Holy Holy Lord God of Sabaoth... The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee, the noble army of Martyrs praise thee...

The wallposts contain Saints, some with apostolic symbols, some with books, and some with martyr's palms. There are angels on the hammerbeams above, and bearing symbols below. John Blatchly counted 128 angels alone. Some of the shields have letters on them. Are they an acrostic, as on the east chancel wall at Blythburgh? Do they indicate individual Saints? The great Henry Ringham completely restored this roof in 1862, but Mortlock thinks that one of the angels is not his, and I agree - you'll find it in the south west corner.

Henry Ringham also restored the range of bench ends, by duplicating some of the medieval ones, as he did at Great Bealings and Tuddenham St Martin. All are rendered with his customary skill. If Ringham did restore this roof, then the imagery must have been destroyed at some point. One instinctively thinks of William Dowsing, the Puritan inspector of the churches of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, who progressed across the counties during the course of 1644. His naked delight in the destruction of angel roofs was matched only by that at the destruction of stained glass.

And Dowsing did visit this church. He arrived here in the afternoon of February 29th 1644. It was a Thursday, and he had come here across country from Helmingham, where he had found much to do. He also planned to visit Beyton that day, but in the end stayed overnight at the Bull hotel, and inspected All Saints there in the morning. He then rested for the weekend - the following week, he had a busy tour of southern Cambridgeshire ahead of him.

Dowsing records in great detail what he found to do at each church. In the case of Woolpit, the angel roof is the Dog That Didn't Bark: My Deputy. 80 superstitious pictures; some he brake down, and the rest he gave order to take down; and three crosses to be taken down in 20 days. 8s 6d. There are only two possible reasons why Dowsing doesn't mention the roof. Either he didn't notice it (extremely unlikely) or it had already been destroyed. This second option seems certain; mid-Suffolk was a strongly protestant area, and nearby Rougham, which clearly had a similar roof, was not visited by Dowsing, but was vandalised even more comprehensively than Woolpit. Most likely, the destruction at both churches dated from a hundred years earlier than Dowsing's visit, although it is possible that the Rougham and Woolpit congregations had been puritan enough in the 1630s to do it to their own churches themselves.

Beneath the roof, the church is broad, its two aisles giving room for the panoply of medieval liturgical processions. At the east end of the south aisle was once the shrine of Our Lady of Woolpit, a site of medieval pilgrimage in connection with a nearby holy well. Apart from the front rows, many of the benches appear to be in their original positions. Some of the bench ends are 15th century, others are Ringham's 19th century copies. I wandered around the medieval bench ends, running my hands over them, crouching down and engaging them, face to face. For anyone educated in a Marxist or Weberian historical tradition, as most of my generation were, interpreting the less-obviously liturgical or theological features of a medieval church is fraught with difficulties. One possibility is to do a Cautley, and try not to interpret them at all. But it is more fun to try to do so, don't you think?

The bench ends of Woolpit are remarkable for their abundance. They are not representations of sacraments, virtues and vices as at Tannington and elsewhere, or Saints as at Ufford and Athelington. They are almost all non-allegorical animals, although not the art objects we find at Stowlangtoft, or the mysterious beasts of Lakenheath. Perhaps a good comparison is the similar body of work at nearby Combs. Indeed, although they do not appear to be from the same workshop, it is likely that their creators knew of each others' work. There are dogs, with geese hanging from their mouths, and another which may be a cat with a rat or lizard. There are lions and bears, and a chained monkey, and birds in profusion. So who did them, and why are they here?

There is one school of thought that says that they are simply there to beautify the church, and that they were made by local craftsmen doing what they were best at. If they could do lions, they did lions. If they could render a decent rabbit, then that is what they did. And so on.

But I think that there is rather more to it than that. On a recent journey down through France, I had spent an afternoon in one of my favourite towns, Autun, in Burgundy. One of the reasons I like Autun is its 11th century Cathedral of St-Lazaire; this is Lazurus, raised by Christ from the dead, and until the 18th century his relics were venerated at a shrine here. St-Lazaire is most famous for its great tympanum above the west door, generally recognised as one of the greatest Romanesque art treasures in the world, and with International Heritage status. It was created during the middle years of the 12th century, and shows the Last Judgement. To emphasise Christ's majesty over all the world, it features all manner of beasts, domestic, wild and mythical.

Throughout the Cathedral, animals infest the famous capitals, which tell the Gospel story. Abbe Denis Grivot, in his Un Bestiaire de la Cathedrale D'Autun (Lyon, 1973) argues that the 12th century creators of all this filled it with animals to echo the final verse of the 150th Psalm, the crowning point of that great sequence of hymns of praise: Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord!

Standing in the nave at Autun, I instantly recalledthe theory that the roof at Woolpit was intended as a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus. The Te Deum is one of the canticles; another is the Benedicite, traditionally sung through Lent: Oh all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him for ever... O ye whales, and all that move in the Waters, bless ye the Lord... O all ye Fowls of the air, bless ye the Lord... O all ye beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever! Could it be that the bench ends at Woolpit, and elsewhere in Suffolk, were intended to reflect and represent the praise defined in the canticles and psalms? Both would have been central to the liturgy of the medieval Catholic church. Perhaps the bench ends of Woolpit are liturgical and theological after all.

How would a carpenter, or group of carpenters, go about creating a set of benches like the ones at Woolpit? Who were they? Almost certainly, they were locals. They might have been itinerant jobbing carpenters, but I don't think so. The bench ends at adjacent Tostock are clearly by the same hand. But those at nearby Stowlangtoft and Norton are not, and a third hand seems to be responsible for those at Combs, as I previously mentioned. I do not think that the mutilated ones at Rougham and Elmswell are either; they were probably from the same workshop as each other.

So, we have a conscious attempt by skilled members of a community to create a hymn of praise in carved oak, by representing as many beasts as they felt capable of making. Where did they get their ideas from? They would have had no problems with oxen, cocks, conies - these were all around them, in their daily lives. The person who carved the hunting dog here was very familiar with it. Perhaps it was his own. What about monkeys and lions? These are more problematic. In medieval bestiaries, exotic creatures had fabulous legends attached to them, which gave them a theological symbolism.

But this symbolism doesn't usually seem intended when we see them on bench ends. Sometimes they are rendered accurately, but more often wild animals are fairly imaginary; I think particularly of Barningham's camel, and Hadleigh's wolf. It isn't enough to say that the carvers could have seen pictures of exotic beasts. This is fairly unlikely. Probably, the ordinary people of Woolpit never saw a book other than the missals, lectionaries and hagiographies used in church.

They might have seen pictures of lions and monkeys in wall paintings, either in other churches or here at Woolpit. They might have seen them carved in bench ends, for the same reason. In fact, the representation of wild animals varies so much as to suggest that this is not the case - compare, for example, the lions of Combs with those of Stowlangtoft. Probably, they were created in the imagination from descriptions and attributes in stories. But I think that there is a strong possibility that the woodcarvers of Woolpit did see lions and monkeys in real life.

In Catholic Southern Europe there are many remote small towns which, by virtue of being so very far from each other, take on a rich and complex life of their own. Even small villages have their shops, their craftsmen, their tradespeople; they replicate a situation that existed in Suffolk until well into the 19th century, and in some cases beyond, before the great industrialisation and easy transport swept it away. Further, there are traditions here still that we have lost. Whenever I come to rural southern Europe I am fascinated by the itinerant entertainers, who move from village to village, giving a single performance before moving on. This must also once have been true of England. The thing that fascinates me most is the multitude of small family circuses.

Many of them seem to be of Italian or Romany origin; all family members have multiple roles, from the oldest grandparent to the youngest child, selling tickets, doing acrobatics, being the straight men to the clown (who is typically Grandpa). They all put up the tent before the performance, and take it down afterwards. They move on, through the remote hills of Provence and the Languedoc, performing on village greens, wastegrounds, the corners of fields, even traffic islands.

Performing animals are still often chosen for their curiosity value, if you can call running around in a circle to the crack of a whip 'performing', poor things. The choices are strange indeed; camels and zebras often feature; I have seen an old bear on a chain, and at one circus in remote Languedoc a hippopotamus of all things - it caught bread thrown by the crowd. There was no safety fence between the seats and the ring, no Health and Safety Executive to penetrate these lost valleys. I do not know if such circuses existed in medieval Suffolk. But I think that they probably did. Suffolk is a maritime county, and exotic animals were widely known and exhibited in medieval Europe. Before the Protestant Reformation cut us of from the mainland, clerics and merchants thought of themselves as European, and travelled widely - English sovereignty was a hazy concept at best, and 'Britishness' was still centuries away from being formulated as an idea. People owed allegiance to their husband or wife, their village, their parish, and their lord, not to the Crown and Parliament in London.

Were the woodcarvers of Woolpit and Tostock remembering this? A circus visit, perhaps back in their childhood? Exotic animals rendered inaccurately, to be sure, but with an enthusiastic nostalgia for that exciting moment in their lives? Was there a lion? A monkey, or a bear? How much more powerful if they also knew the fabulous legends about the beasts - and had seen them in real life!

Some of the carvings at Woolpit are allegorical. One shows a monkey dressed in monk's robes. This, I think, is a joke at the expense of the itinerant friars who went from parish to parish, preaching repentance in the streets. They were sanctioned by the Pope, but were beyond the jurisdiction of the local Bishop. They didn't always go down well with the local Priest and congregation, who considered the Friars nosey and hypocritical. A monkey is often a symbol of foolish vanity - hence, a Friar thinking he was better than anyone else. What better way to make the point than to slip him in as one of the creatures praising the Lord?

How did they survive? But why should they have been destroyed? We make the mistake of thinking of the Puritans as vandals. But the more you read about William Dowsing, the more he emerges as being a principled, conservative kind of chap, despite his fundamentalist theological opinions. He had no reason to destroy animal bench ends. They weren't superstitious - even Dowsing didn't think Catholics worshipped animals. If he didn't think they were meant to represent the canticles, he wouldn't even have considered them religious. Amen to that.

So much for the 17th century. What about the 19th? St Mary is one of the most enthusiastically restored of Suffolk's churches, despite its surviving medieval detail. But it was done well. Mortlock thought that the 19th century pulpit was the work of Ringham - but the brass lectern is pre-Reformation, a fine example. The rood screen dado panels have sentimental 19th century Saints on them, that may or may not duplicate what was there before. They are actually very good, particularly the gorgeous Mary of Magdala. They have their names painted on the cross beams for the less hagiologically articulate Victorians - from left to right across the aisle they are Saints Barbara, Felix, Mary of Magdala, Peter, Paul, Mary, Edmund and Etheldreda. It is unlikely that Saint Felix would have been on a medieval roodscreen, and Mary almost certainly wasn't - it would have relegated her to a position of no more importance than the others. If it reflects anything of what was there before, it was probably St Anne with the infant Virgin.

The top part of the screen was renewed in 1750, and dated so. The gates are probably a Laudian imposition of 120 years earlier, as at Kedington. This may suggest that, by the time of Dowsing's visit, the chancel was being used for some other practical purpose. Above, high above, set in the east nave wall over the chancel arch, is one of the weirdest objects I've seen in a medieval church. It was installed in the 1870s, and is clearly meant to echo the coving of a rood loft. Goodness knows what it actually is, but it is painted in garish colours, and inscribed with texts. In one of those moments where Cautley and credibility part company, he describes anyone who doesn't think it is a genuine medieval canopy of honour as 'stupid'. I suppose that it has a certain curiosity value.

The three-light window above it would have given light to the rood. The east window contains one of Suffolk's best modern Madonna and child images which was made by the artist Ian Keen for the King workshop in the early 1960s. Ian Keen was also responsible for the beautiful St Margaret in St Margaret's church in Norwich, and for the memorable window of St Francis with a labrador at Somerleyton near Lowestoft.

I turned back westwards, past a superb medieval bench end of the three Marys. This is a delight, and you'd travel to London to see it if it was in the V&A. Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James and Mary of Magdala huddle together, perhaps on the morning of the Resurrection. One of them has a lily of the Annunciation. One head is destroyed - but was it vandalised? Or is it the result of carelessness, the wear and tear of the centuries? Would 17th century puritans have destroyed it if they'd seen it?

Dowsing rarely mentions bench ends, so perhaps few were left by then anyway. So how could it possibly have survived the violent zeal of the 16th century Protestants, battering the Church of England into existence with their axes, pikes and bonfires? How, even after the 1547 edict which ordered the destruction of all statues and images of Saints, especially those of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is it still there at all?

Meet Mark Robinson. A black gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina who has stated that he thinks slavery should be brought back, Hitler was better than Obama, and seems to have a penchant for really kinky porn. Oh, and he can often be found in the pulpits of North Carolina churches railing against perversion, the devil and Democrats. He has been lavishly praised by Donald Trump.

“Now people are dying we’ve got nothing else to live for. What needs to happen is for the killing to stop. But that won’t happen until he [Gaddafi] is out. We just want to be able to live like human beings. Nothing will happen until protests really kick off in Tripoli, the capital. It’s like a pressure cooker. People are boiling up inside. I’m not even afraid any more. Once I wouldn’t have spoken at all by phone. Now I don’t care. Now enough is enough.”

These are the words of a young woman in Libya — a student , a blogger and a member of the youth protest movement in Libya that is part of a growing uprising against the tyrannical 41-year reign of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Speaking to the Guardian by phone from her home on the outskirts of Benghazi, the eastern city where the revolution in Libya began just six days ago, and where hundreds of protestors have been killed by Gaddafi’s security forces, she said, “I’ve seen violent movies and video games that are nothing compared to this. I can hear gunshots, helicopters circling overhead, then I hear the voices screaming. I can hear the screeching of four-by-fours in the street. No one has that type of car except his [Gaddafi's] people. My brother went to get bread, he’s not back; we don’t know if he’ll get back. The family is up all night every night, keeping watch, no one can sleep.”

www.andyworthington.co.uk/2011/02/21/revolution-in-libya-...

Feb. 25: NYC Rally in Solidarity with the people of Bahrain, Libya, & Yemen

al-awdany.org/wp/2011/02/feb-25-nyc-rally-in-solidarity-w...

Libya Protest Salute

vimeo.com/19615325

english.aljazeera.net/

Newport Beach, Calif.

I see Sir Richard Branson made the media yesterday. Never shy of an opportunity, Branson weighed in on the idea that the sale of new petrol and diesel cars should be outlawed by 2040. He'd like it to go further, by banning the sale of diesel cars by 2025.

All very laudable, I've never owned a diesel car, probably never will.

But Sir Richard, three things mate. Firstly, you need to understand that the vast majority of us don't have the disposable income that you do, chucking our cars in the bin on New Years Eve 2024, may not be a viable position for all.

Secondly, turn it down a bit! You don't half come over as a preachy twat these days, Brexit, Labour, diesel. Yawn.

And thirdly, and most importantly, you are a hypocrite. When you cease to use diesel trains under the wires for the entirety of their journey, like you do on the Euston-Birmingham-Scotland trains, I'll be a lot more inclined to support your cause.

Until that glorious day dawns...

Winwick Junction, 14 August 2011.

ALL THESE HIT AND RUN AND DESTROY JUST TO REVENGE ONE PERSON....UNBELIEVABLE...........

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It is a personal loss for us. We had excellent relationship with many businessmen, friends and families in Tripoli, Benghazi. when I use to make frequent visit during 1970-80s.

I used to stay in one of these sea front tower you see here . Atmosphere was tense for a long time,but people were friendly, enterprising and entertaining. I recall those days, we had tea, dinner and family gathering in palatial homes as well as farms.

I remember the day, I was one of the few passengers willingly boarded the Libyan Airlines Last flight from Zurich Airport immediately after announcing the UN Sanctions and USA and Europe boycot.

I vividly remember those days when The Seventh Fleet War ships blockaded the Libyan coast.

Sadly, I remember the day, the Naval Bombers dropped a bomb right on the house of the President Colonel Qadhafi and few of his family members perished.

I still cherish the gifts I received from the President Muammar Quadhafi. A Green Book and a Set of Gilt edged Holy Quarran I know him as a dynamic youngman and a patriot. .....not a dynamite....It's all Power Politics, and Oil Politics. Greed and cover up for trouble at home. All in one .

I remember the Tea and Evenings we spent at the pool side along with the Famous Yasser Arafat.

I sincerely wish the country returns to Peaceful Normal Life Soon, share the vast wealth equitably, shout at the football ground, barbique the goat and worship their wives and live happily thereafter.

view LARGE

TRUMP didn't invent Mexico fences. The Liberal Hypocrite have been erecting fences a long time ago! Under Obama administration several fences have secretly been built, but he was not honest enough to say it…

A woman talks to her relatives across a fence separating Mexico and the United States, in Tijuana, Mexico, November 12, 2016.

Courtesy REUTERS/Jorge Duenes - more fences

www.reuters.com/news/picture/the-us-mexico-border-now?art...

Popular graffiti stencil found all about Buenos Aires.

Le sens du devoir sans amour rend irritable, mécontent. La responsabilité sans amour rend Inflexible, sans égard envers autrui. La justice sans amour rend sévère, impitoyable, moraliste. La vérité sans amour rend critique, légaliste L’éducation sans amour rend insensible, contradictoire et présomptueux L’intelligence sans amour rend rusé. L’amabilité sans amour rend hypocrite L’expérience sans amour rend orgueilleux, insociable. Le savoir sans amour rend prétentieux, stupide. La richesse sans amour rend avare, spéculateur. La sagesse sans amour rend irritable, pénible. L’activité sans amour rend stérile, vide. Le dévouement sans amour rend injuste. Le devoir sans amour rend insatisfait. La foi sans amour rend fanatique. L’ordre sans amour rend tatillon. La compétence sans amour suscite la volonté d’avoir toujours raison. La force sans amour rend violent, querelleur. L’honneur sans amour rend hautain, suffisant. La vie sans amour est vide, absente Les paroles sans amour sont comme un vent violent et détruisent. Les bonnes œuvres sans amour ne servent qu’à nous glorifier. L’amour ne périt jamais. (Auteur inconnu)

The sense of duty without love makes irritable, angry. Responsibility without love makes Inflexible, without regard to others. Justice without love is harsh, unforgiving moralist. Truth without love is critical, legalistic Education without love makes insensitive, arrogant and contradictory intelligence without love makes it tricky. The friendliness without love makes hypocritical experience without love makes arrogant, unsociable. Knowledge without love makes arrogant, stupid. Wealth without love makes avaricious, speculator. Wisdom without love is irritable, painful. The activity without love is sterile and empty. Devotion without love makes unfair. The duty without love makes dissatisfied. Faith without love makes fanatic. The order without love makes fussy. Competence without love arouses the desire to always be right. Strength without love makes people violent, quarrelsome. Honor without love makes arrogant, enough. Life without love is empty, absent Words without love is like a violent wind and destroy. Good works without love are only glorify us. Love never fails. (Author unknown)

This is a serious metaphor for my life right now.

Sometimes there is negativity surrounding us, sometimes there are toxic people amongst us, and sometimes we turn a blind eye to them.

I can't do that anymore. Yesterday something happened that made me realize i have put up with some of this for far to long, and it is time to be rid of it/them.

It is eating at me, and bugging me, even though i know it is for the best. But that will pass in time. Like it always does.

This is a very good thing, for that i am happy and proud of myself.

That is all.

Oh and i have wantedto do a shot like this for ages, there is this photographer who has a model who is FANFUCKINGTASTIC at doing these motion with scarves and fabric shots, i am about to find a link for all. www.ibarraphoto.com/

i've heard bigger is better ;)

You're not going to believe this but at first I walked past Leon - he was walking along with someone and I'm not great at interrupting ... obviously I turned and watched him disappear up the street - another one gets away. No more than a few seconds of deliberation though and I was off.

When I popped the question his immediate response was "why?" so I explained about the project to which his response was "but why?". Hmm! He then suggested course work or something so I simply explained that I was a hobbyist photographer trying to improve my skills and he seemed content with that.

Then the lady he was with (his mother I later discovered) chipped in asking him "are you sure?" and me "do you have any proof that's your purpose?" ... but then she broke into a broad friendly smile and we were good to go.

Having really stumped a few strangers recently with my "maddest thing" question I asked him to give it some thought whilst I took my photos to give him a bit more thinking time. I then proceeded to take a couple of shots but he had the brim of his hat quite low over his eyes and there was little light getting in there so for only the second time I dug out a small reflector and for the first time I asked someone to help hold it. His mother, Francesca, obliged and even put up with me almost hitting her in the face with it as I flipped it over from the gold side to the white side.

So, what IS the maddest thing that Leon has ever done ... spent 3 months living up a tree!

Leon was part of a movement ranging from a couple of hundred to over a thousand protesters making a stand against La ZAD, a new proposed airport outside Nantes. Reading up about this later it seemed to be quite a fraught struggle but ultimately successful. At the time I did not know the location for La ZAD but Leon did inform me that the city already had a functioning airport operating below capacity.

In his spare time Leon likes to draw, mostly line drawings of geometric shapes and in his mother's words he is an "incredible artist".

Having learned a little more about Leon and mostly based on his La ZAD exploits I tried another standard question ... not mine but it has featured in this project many times ... Leon's biggest hope for the future is quite simple: the fall of capitalism.

I would be a hypocrite to wholeheartedly agree with that and intimated as much to Leon (I'm a web developer but right now I happen to work in a sector many would see as the personification of evil), nonetheless I did concede that I could see where he was coming from - it would undoubtedly solve many problems.

Leon (and Francesca) thank you very much for sparing a little of your time to help me with my project today - it's not often that I cannot hand on heart wish my "strangers" well with their hopes and dreams but we can undoubtedly agree to wish for a better world!

_____________________________

Please feel free to provide constructive critique on the technical aspects of this photograph.

This photo is #12 in my 2nd round of the 100 Strangers project. My 1st round lives here ... 100 Strangers (Round 1).

Find out more about the project and see pictures taken by other photographers at the 100 Strangers Flickr Group page.

Follow my blog on 99% Digital.

Press L to view larger and on black!

Oh yay look more photos of the gear I own, surprise surprise. Really makes me look like quite the show off and hypocrite doesn't it especially when I preach about how all this is pretty unnecessary but hell everyone needs a hobby. And I for one have this bad habit of collecting things. Use to have a collection of high quality knives, zippo lighters, games, posters, certain books and now that I'm a little older its cameras and lenses. If I had a firearm license I'd probably go with firearms as well so who knows what'd be wasting what little money I earn on next. So like I said its not like I make a lot of money, I make very little actually, just above minimum wage really, I just waste it on unnecessary things. Though I still manage to put away enough to pay for all my necessities and live a decent life. Hell I finished school with no debt and pretty much paid for almost everything out of my own pocket.

Enough babbling about myself cause who really cares, funny things you talk about when you treat your public photo sharing site as a journal. So today's photo stemmed from me just looking back at all the lenses I've owned and wondering why I never really did anything like this specifically before. especially when I had even more Minolta/Sony lenses laying around. Well to late now its still a lot and this little collection here is worth one pretty penny but I always had this idea in the back of my mind and just never got around to doing it until today. Took me awhile trying to figure out now to arrange it, at first I wanted the 135mm F1.8 in the centre but than the 5 lenses just didn't look right so I needed another centre piece and I just went with the Minolta front cap I have for my 85mm F1.4 lens. The Minolta front cap is much nicer looking than the plain old Sony one so I used that instead plus only one lens here is Sony branded the others are Minolta. Also all the lenses were raised to get around the same height as the 135mm F1.8 in order to make it easer to get them all in focus plus to give them all a more equal sense of scale. I shot with my brothers Canon 5D MKII and 50mm F1.2 for this shot and I had to get a little close to frame it like this. So if I didn't raise some of them, the 50mm and 28mm in particular would most likely be out of focus and a little smaller. Also sadly I'm not completely centred off like I hoped but this was as good as I was able to get by eye, think I would have needed to spend another hour of testing and adjusting to get it perfect.

Strobist Info (A little more complex than normal)

Nikon SB-800 (Main) on axis with the camera firing through a DIY ringflash at 1/4 power

Nikon SB-800 (Fill) directly behind the camera (actually sitting on its rear LCD [I was shooting straight down]) aimed at the ceiling firing at 1/2 power, was used manly to improve the catchlights.

3x Nikon SB-28 + Nikon SB-80DX (Rim) directly top, bottom, left and right of the frame pointed in towards the lenses all at 24mm at 1/16 power. Trick behind this was that the surface the lenses were sitting on was higher than the ground these flashes were laying on. So the 2 inch rise off the ground acted as a sort of gobo preventing the light from spilling on the surface and only rimming the top of the lenses.

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BOX DATE: None

APPROXIMATE RELEASE DATE: 2000

MANUFACTURER: Kid Kore

MISSING ITEMS: Shoes, horse, bridle, saddle

PERSONAL FUN FACT written by my sister: We have photographic proof that this was sold as a Shenandoah Riding Club doll outfit, but, for some reason, when I originally wrote my fun fact, I seemed in fierce denial of that point--still sure that I got it with a Katie school set and that it must surely have been packaged as that too. I have no fact based reason to believe this was sold as anything but Shenandoah Riding Club--and I did get several Shenandoah Riding Club outfits circa 2004/2005. I really like this outfit. I like how the dark pink top looks with the black "leather pants" and how the zebra vest looks over it. With the zebra print and the "leather," it surely went against Katie's "vegan" or "vegetarian" image she was cultivating circa 2005. i made Katie claim to be "vegetarian" or "vegan" as her way of thinking she was hip and as an excuse to refuse to eat specific foods. The fact that these pants could easily pass for leather in the doll world just made Katie look more hypocritical. It reminds me of the "snakeskin" pants outfit I have for Skipper--very loud outfit that looks like animals (unwillingly) helped to make it. I feel like part of why I was so adamant that this wasn't Shenandoah Riding Club, when I'm now certain that it indeed was packaged as such, was because I felt like I had this longer than I had Shenandoah Riding Club sets--like this was an older piece in my collection. I'm guessing I felt that way because Katie wore this SO much, even though, based on how it was packaged, I must have gotten it later on. I made Katie wear this to school, to the mall, to the movies, to restaurants--it was an outfit for any occasion.

I wonder can I restrict myself to one image a day, and otherwise set to the sorting out of 'The Story'.

It's all about essential truthiness, I guess.

I feel very much in need of a good editor (the story of one's life, or everybody’s life perhaps).

In New York, in the eighties, there seemed to be three sizes of everything, Medium, Large and Jumbo, like 'small' was no longer a thing. I suspect that 'medium' might have gone the way of all flesh too, by now, replaced by mega, or Maga-preposterous, gargantuan even.

I miss 'small'.

Falstaff calls me a hypocrite, disclaiming that he never asked to be a 'Giant Silverfish', capitalised too. I guess he has a point. He protests that he was quite happy eating my library before I started to fixate on his 'playing possum', and thrust him onto the "world stage", as he calls it, masquerading as a prime 'Vitalist'. And then for me to have the effrontery to sell off said library, disregarding a growing population of Silverfish raised on the best of Western and Chinese art and literature.

Mea culpa, Falstaff, and sorry about that. I will attempt to reel myself in from now on.

Enter stage-right, a would-be laughing editor swishing a long scythe, looking somewhat threatening (again?).

Have we met before?

Pass that elixir, Rack.

youtu.be/KcPcJ9ycEu4?t=2m22s Full Feature

Curse of the Demon / Night of the Demon

Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment

1957/58 / B&W / 1:78 anamorphic 16:9 / 82, 95 min. / Street Date August 13, 2002 / $24.95

Starring Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins, Niall MacGinnis, Maurice Denham, Athene Seyler

Cinematography Ted Scaife

Production Designer Ken Adam

Special Effects George Blackwell, S.D. Onions, Wally Veevers

Film Editor Michael Gordon

Original Music Clifton Parker

Written by Charles Bennett and Hal E. Chester from the story Casting the Runes by Montague R. James

Produced by Frank Bevis, Hal E. Chester

Directed by Jacques Tourneur

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Savant champions a lot of genre movies but only infrequently does one appear like Jacques Tourneur's superlative Curse of the Demon. It's simply better than the rest -- an intelligent horror film with some very good scares. It occupies a stylistic space that sums up what's best in ghost stories and can hold its own with most any supernatural film ever made. Oh, it's also a great entertainment that never fails to put audiences at the edge of their seats.

What's more, Columbia TriStar has shown uncommon respect for their genre output by including both versions of Curse of the Demon on one disc. Savant has full coverage on the versions and their restoration below, following his thorough and analytical (read: long-winded and anal) coverage of the film itself.

Synopsis:

Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), a scientist and professional debunker of superstitious charlatans, arrives in England to help Professor Henry Harrington (Maurice Denham) assault the phony cult surrounding Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall McGinnis). But Harrington has mysteriously died and Holden becomes involved with his niece Joanna (Peggy Cummins), who thinks Karswell had something to do with it. Karswell's 'tricks' confuse the skeptical Holden, but he stubbornly holds on to his conviction that he's " ... not a sucker, like 90% of the human race." That is, until the evidence mounts that Harrington was indeed killed by a demon summoned from Hell, and that Holden is the next intended victim!

The majority of horror films are fantasies in which we accept supernatural ghosts, demons and monsters as part of a deal we've made with the authors: they dress the fantasy in an attractive guise and arrange the variables into an interesting pattern, and we agree to play along for the sake of enjoyment. When it works the movies can resonate with personal meaning. Even though Dracula and Frankenstein are unreal, they are relevant because they're aligned with ideas and themes in our subconscious.

Horror films that seriously confront the no-man's land between rational reality and supernatural belief have a tough time of it. Everyone who believes in God knows that the tug o' war between rationality and faith in our culture has become so clogged with insane belief systems it's considered impolite to dismiss people who believe in flying saucers or the powers of crystals or little glass pyramids. One of Dana Andrews' key lines in Curse of the Demon, defending his dogged skepticism against those urging him to have an open mind, is his retort, "If the world is a dark place ruled by Devils and Demons, we all might as well give up right now." Curse of the Demon balances itself between skepticism and belief with polite English manners, letting us have our fun as it lays its trap. We watch Andrews roll his eyes and scoff at the feeble séance hucksters and the dire warnings of a foolish-looking necromancer. Meanwhile, a whole dark world of horror sneaks up on him. The film's intelligent is such that we're not offended by its advocacy of dark forces or even its literal, in-your-face demon.

The remarkable Curse of the Demon was made in England for Columbia but is gloriously unaffected by that company's zero-zero track record with horror films. Producer Hal E. Chester would seem an odd choice to make a horror classic after producing Joe Palooka films and acting as a criminal punk in dozens of teen crime movies. The obvious strong cards are writer Charles Bennett, the brains behind several classic English Hitchcock pictures (who 'retired' into meaningless bliss writing for schlockmeister Irwin Allen) and Jacques Tourneur, a master stylist who put Val Lewton on the map with Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie. Tourneur made interesting Westerns (Canyon Passage, Great Day in the Morning) and perhaps the most romantic film noir, Out of the Past. By the late '50s he was on what Andrew Sarris in his American Film called 'a commercial downgrade'. The critic lumped Curse of the Demon with low budget American turkeys like The Fearmakers. 1

Put Tourneur with an intelligent script, a decent cameraman and more than a minimal budget and great things could happen. We're used to watching Corman Poe films, English Hammer films and Italian Bavas and Fredas, all the while making excuses for the shortcomings that keep them in the genre ghetto (where they all do quite well, thank you). There's even a veiled resentment against upscale shockers like The Innocents that have resources (money, time, great actors) denied our favorite toilers in the genre realm. Curse of the Demon is above all those considerations. It has name actors past their prime and reasonable production values. Its own studio (at least in America) released it like a genre quickie, double-billed with dreck like The Night the World Exploded and The Giant Claw. They cut it by 13 minutes, changed its title (to ape The Curse of Frankenstein?) and released a poster featuring a huge, slavering demon monster that some believe was originally meant to be barely glimpsed in the film itself. 2

Horror movies can work on more than one level but Curse of the Demon handles several levels and then some. The narrative sets up John Holden as a professional skeptic who raises a smirking eyebrow to the open minds of his colleagues. Unlike most second-banana scientists in horror films, they express divergent points of view. Holden just sees himself as having common sense but his peers are impressed by the consistency of demonological beliefs through history. Maybe they all saw Christensen's Witchcraft through the Ages, which might have served as a primer for author Charles Bennett. Smart dialogue allows Holden to score points by scoffing at the then-current "regression to past lives" scam popularized by the Bridey Murphy craze. 3 While Holden stays firmly rooted to his position, coining smart phrases and sarcastic put-downs of believers, the other scientists are at least willing to consider alternate possibilities. Indian colleague K.T. Kumar (Peter Elliott) keeps his opinion to himself. But when asked, he politely states that he believes entirely in the world of demons! 4

Holden may think he has the truth by the tail but it takes Kindergarten teacher Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins of Gun Crazy fame) to show him that being a skeptic doesn't mean ignoring facts in front of one's face. Always ready for a drink (a detail added to tailor the part to Andrews?), Holden spends the first couple of reels as interested in pursuing Miss Harrington, as he is the devil-worshippers. The details and coincidences pile up with alarming speed -- the disappearing ink untraceable by the lab, the visual distortions that might be induced by hypnosis, the pages torn from his date book and the parchment of runic symbols. Holden believes them to be props in a conspiracy to draw him into a vortex of doubt and fear. Is he being set up the way a Voodoo master cons his victim, by being told he will die, with fabricated clues to make it all appear real? Holden even gets a bar of sinister music stuck in his head. It's the title theme -- is this a wicked joke on movie soundtracks?

Speak of the Devil...

This brings us to the wonderful character of Julian Karswell, the kiddie-clown turned multi-millionaire cult leader. The man who launched Alfred Hitchcock as a maker of sophisticated thrillers here creates one of the most interesting villains ever written, one surely as good as any of Hitchcock's. In the short American cut Karswell is a shrewd games-player who shows Holden too many of his cards and finally outsmarts himself. The longer UK cut retains the full depth of his character.

Karswell has tapped into the secrets of demonology to gain riches and power, yet he tragically recognizes that he is as vulnerable to the forces of Hell as are the cowering minions he controls through fear. Karswell's coven means business. It's an entirely different conception from the aesthetic salon coffee klatch of The Seventh Victim, where nothing really supernatural happens and the only menace comes from a secret society committing new crimes to hide old ones.

Karswell keeps his vast following living in fear, and supporting his extravagant lifestyle under the idea that Evil is Good, and Good Evil. At first the Hobart Farm seems to harbor religious Christian fundamentalists who have turned their backs on their son. Then we find out that they're Karswell followers, living blighted lives on cursed acreage and bled dry by their cultist "leader." Karswell's mum (Athene Seyler) is an inversion of the usual insane Hitchcock mother. She lovingly resists her son's philosophy and actively tries to help the heroes. That's in the Night version, of course. In the shorter American cut she only makes silly attempts to interest Joanna in her available son and arranges for a séance. Concerned by his "negativity", Mother confronts Julian on the stairs. He has no friends, no wife, no family. He may be a mass extortionist but he's still her baby. Karswell explains that by exploiting his occult knowledge, he's immersed himself forever in Evil. "You get nothing for nothing"

Karswell is like the Devil on Earth, a force with very limited powers that he can't always control. By definition he cannot trust any of his own minions. They're unreliable, weak and prone to double-cross each other, and they attract publicity that makes a secret society difficult to conceal. He can't just kill Holden, as he hasn't a single henchman on the payroll. He instead summons the demon, a magic trick he's only recently mastered. When Karswell turns Harrington away in the first scene we can sense his loneliness. The only person who can possibly understand is right before him, finally willing to admit his power and perhaps even tolerate him. Karswell has no choice but to surrender Harrington over to the un-recallable Demon. In his dealings with the cult-debunker Holden, Karswell defends his turf but is also attempting to justify himself to a peer, another man who might be a potential equal. It's more than a duel of egos between a James Bond and a Goldfinger, with arrogance and aggression masking a mutual respect; Karswell knows he's taken Lewton's "wrong turning in life," and will have to pay for it eventually.

Karswell eventually earns Holden's respect, especially after the fearful testimony of Rand Hobart. It's taken an extreme demonstration to do it, but Holden budges from his smug position. He may not buy all of the demonology hocus-pocus but it's plain enough that Karswell or his "demon" is going to somehow rub him out. Seeking to sneak the parchment back into Karswell's possession, Holden becomes a worthy hero because he's found the maturity to question his own preconceptions. Armed with his rational, cool head, he's a force that makes Karswell -- without his demon, of course -- a relative weakling. Curse of the Demon ends in a classic ghost story twist, with just desserts dished out and balance recovered. The good characters are less sure of their world than when they started, but they're still able to cope. Evil has been defeated not by love or faith, but by intellect.

Curse of the Demon has the Val Lewton sensibility as has often been cited in Tourneur's frequent (and very effective) use of the device called the Lewton "Bus" -- a wholly artificial jolt of fast motion and noise interrupting a tense scene. There's an ultimate "bus" at the end when a train blasts in and sets us up for the end title. It "erases" the embracing actors behind it and I've always thought it had to be an inspiration for the last shot of North by NorthWest. The ever-playful Hitchcock was reportedly a big viewer of fantastic films, from which he seems to have gotten many ideas. He's said to have dined with Lewton on more than one occasion (makes sense, they were at one time both Selznick contractees) and carried on a covert competition with William Castle, of all people.

Visually, Tourneur's film is marvelous, effortlessly conjuring menacing forests lit in the fantastic Mario Bava mode by Ted Scaife, who was not known as a genre stylist. There are more than a few perfunctory sets, with some unflattering mattes used for airport interiors, etc.. Elsewhere we see beautiful designs by Ken Adam in one of his earliest outings. Karswell's ornate floor and central staircase evoke an Escher print, especially when visible/invisible hands appear on the banister. A hypnotic, maze-like set for a hotel corridor is also tainted by Escher and evokes a sense of the uncanny even better than the horrid sounds Holden hears. The build-up of terror is so effective that one rather unconvincing episode (a fight with a Cat People - like transforming cat) does no harm. Other effects, such as the demon footprints appearing in the forest, work beautifully.

In his Encyclopedia of Horror Movies Phil Hardy very rightly relates Curse of the Demon's emphasis on the visual to the then just-beginning Euro-horror subgenre. The works of Bava, Margheriti and Freda would make the photographic texture of the screen the prime element of their films, sometimes above acting and story logic.

Columbia TriStar's DVD of Curse of the Demon / Night of the Demon presents both versions of this classic in one package. American viewers saw an effective but abbreviated cut-down. If you've seen Curse of the Demon on cable TV or rented a VHS or a laser anytime after 1987, you're not going to see anything different in the film. In 1987 Columbia happened to pull out the English cut when it went to re-master. When the title came up as Night of the Demon, they just slugged in the Curse main title card and let it go.

From such a happy accident (believe me, nobody in charge at Columbia at the time would have purposely given a film like this a second glance) came a restoration at least as wonderful as the earlier reversion of The Fearless Vampire Killers to its original form. Genre fans were taken by surprise and the Laserdisc became a hot item that often traded for hundreds of dollars. 6

Back in film school Savant had been convinced that ever seeing the long, original Night cut was a lost cause. An excellent article in the old Photon magazine in the early '70s 5, before such analytical work was common, accurately laid out the differences between the two versions, something Savant needs to do sometime with The Damned and These Are the Damned. The Photon article very accurately describes the cut scenes and what the film lost without them, and certainly inspired many of the ideas here.

Being able to see the two versions back-to-back shows exactly how they differ. Curse omits some scenes and rearranges others. Gone is some narration from the title sequence, most of the airplane ride, some dialogue on the ground with the newsmen and several scenes with Karswell talking to his mother. Most crucially missing are Karswell's mother showing Joanna the cabalistic book everyone talks so much about and Holden's entire visit to the Hobart farm to secure a release for his examination of Rand Hobart. Of course the cut film still works (we loved the cut Curse at UCLA screenings and there are people who actually think it's better) but it's nowhere near as involving as the complete UK version. Curse also reshuffles some events, moving Holden's phantom encounter in the hallway nearer the beginning, which may have been to get a spooky scene in the middle section or to better disguise the loss of whole scenes later. The chop-job should have been obvious. The newly imposed fades and dissolves look awkward. One cut very sloppily happens right in the middle of a previous dissolve.

Night places both Andrews and Cummins' credits above the title and gives McGinnis an "also starring" credit immediately afterwards. Oddly, Curse sticks Cummins afterwards and relegates McGinnis to the top of the "also with" cast list. Maybe with his role chopped down, some Columbia executive thought he didn't deserve the billing?

Technically, both versions look just fine, very sharp and free of digital funk that would spoil the film's spooky visual texture. Night of the Demon is the version to watch for both content and quality. It's not perfect but has better contrast and less dirt than the American version. Curse has more emulsion scratches and flecking white dandruff in its dark scenes, yet looks fine until one sees the improvement of Night. Both shows are widescreen enhanced (hosanna), framing the action at its original tighter aspect ratio.

It's terrific that Columbia TriStar has brought out this film so thoughtfully, even though some viewers are going to be confused when their "double feature" disc appears to be two copies of the same movie. Let 'em stew. This is Savant's favorite release so far this year.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Curse of the Demon / Night of the Demon rates:

Movie: Excellent

Footnotes:

Made very close to Curse of the Demon and starring Dana Andrews, The Fearmakers (great title) was a Savant must-see until he caught up with it in the UA collection at MGM. It's a pitiful no-budgeter that claims Madison Avenue was providing public relations for foreign subversives, and is negligible even in the lists of '50s anti-Commie films.

Return

Curse of the Demon's Demon has been the subject of debate ever since the heyday of Famous Monsters of Filmland. From what's on record it's clear that producer Chester added or maximized the shots of the creature, a literal visualization of a fiery, brimstone-smoking classical woodcut demon that some viewers think looks ridiculous. Bennett and Tourneur's original idea was to never show a demon but the producer changed that. Tourneur probably directed most of the shots, only to have Chester over-use them. To Savant's thinking, the demon looks great. It is first perceived as an ominous sound, a less strident version of the disturbing noise made by Them! Then it manifests itself visually as a strange disturbance in the sky (bubbles? sparks? early slit-scan?) followed by a billowing cloud of sulphurous smoke (a dandy effect not exploited again until Close Encounters of the Third Kind). The long-shot demon is sometimes called the bicycle demon because he's a rod puppet with legs that move on a wheel-rig. Smoke belches from all over his scaly body. Close-ups are provided by a wonderfully sculpted head 'n' shoulders demon with articulated eyes and lips, a full decade or so before Carlo Rambaldi started engineering such devices.

Most of the debate centers on how much Demon should have been shown with the general consensus that less would have been better. People who dote on Lewton-esque ambivalence say that the film's slow buildup of rationality-versus demonology is destroyed by the very real Demon's appearance in the first scene, and that's where they'd like it removed or radically reduced. The Demon is so nicely integrated into the cutting (the giant foot in the first scene is a real jolt) that it's likely that Tourneur himself filmed it all, perhaps expecting the shots to be shorter or more obscured. It is also possible that the giant head was a post-Tourneur addition - it doesn't tie in with the other shots as well (especially when it rolls forward rather stiffly) and is rather blunt. Detractors lump it in with the gawd-awful head of The Black Scorpion, which is filmed the same way and almost certainly was an afterthought - and also became a key poster image. This demon head matches the surrounding action a lot better than did the drooling Scorpion.

Savant wouldn't change Curse of the Demon but if you put a gun to my head I'd shorten most of the shots in its first appearance, perhaps eliminating all close-ups except for the final, superb shot of the the giant claw reaching for Harrington / us.

Kumar, played (I assume) by an Anglo actor, immediately evokes all those Indian and other Third World characters in Hammer films whose indigenous cultures invariably hold all manner of black magic and insidious horror. When Hammer films are repetitious it's because they take eighty minutes or so to convince the imagination-challenged English heroes to even consider the premise of the film as being real. In Curse of the Demon, Holden's smart-tongued dismissal of outside viewpoints seems much more pigheaded now than it did in 1957, when heroes confidently defended conformist values without being challenged. Kumar is a scientist but also probably a Hindu or a Sikh. He has no difficulty reconciling his faith with his scientific detachment. Holden is far too tactful to call Kumar a crazy third-world guru but that's probably what he's thinking. He instead politely ignores him. Good old Kumar then saves Holden's hide with some timely information. I hope Holden remembered to thank him.

There's an unstated conclusion in Curse of the Demon: Holden's rigid disbelief of the supernatural means he also does not believe in a Christian God with its fundamentally spiritual faith system of Good and Evil, saints and devils, angels and demons. Horror movies that deal directly with religious symbolism and "real faith" can be hypocritical in their exploitation and brutal in their cheap toying with what are for many people sacred personal concepts. I'm thinking of course of The Exorcist here. That movie has all the grace of a reporter who shows a serial killer's atrocity photos to a mother whose child has just been kidnapped. Curse of the Demon hasn't The Exorcist's ruthless commercial instincts but instead has the modesty not to pretend to be profound, or even "real." Yet it expresses our basic human conflict between rationality and faith very nicely.

Savant called Jim Wyrnoski, who was associated with Photon, in an effort to find out more about the article, namely who wrote it. It was very well done and I've never forgotten it; I unfortunately loaned my copy out to good old Jim Ursini and it disappeared. Obviously, a lot of the ideas here, I first read there. Perhaps a reader who knows better how to take care of their belongings can help me with the info? Ursini and Alain Silvers' More Things than are Dreamt Of Limelight, 1994, analyzes Curse of the Demon (and many other horror movies) in the context of its source story.

This is a true story: Cut to 2000. Columbia goes to re-master Curse of the Demon and finds that the fine-grain original of the English version is missing. The original long version of the movie may be lost forever. A few months later a collector appears who says he bought it from another unnamed collector and offers to trade it for a print copy of the American version, which he prefers. Luckily, an intermediary helps the collector follow up on his offer and the authorities are not contacted about what some would certainly call stolen property. The long version is now once again safe. Studios clearly need to defend their property but many collectors have "items" they personally have acquired legally. More often than you might think, such finds come about because studios throw away important elements. If the studios threaten prosecution, they will find that collectors will never approach them. They'd probably prefer to destroy irreplaceable film to avoid being criminalized.

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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please note that any Invitations from groups which are running Sweepers and have hypocritic admins that are hiding behind them, are ΝΟΤ welcome and will not be accepted.

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Sweepers are insulting for photographers.

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>>> Also note that any Invitations from groups with admins who are MORE

Photographers and LESS counters are happily accepted <<<

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God's jewels!

(Thomas Watson, "Religion Our True Interest")

"They will be Mine!" says the Lord Almighty, "in the day when I make up My jewels!" Malachi 3:17

God's people are His jewels — His own special treasure!

In what sense are the saints, God's jewels?

Jewels are precious things; the Hebrew word for jewels signifies a treasure. A treasure is made up of costly things — gold, and diamonds and rubies. Such a precious treasure, are the saints to God.

They are jewels for their sparkling quality. Their holiness shines and sparkles in God's eyes! (Song of Solomon 4:9), "You have ravished My heart, with one glance of your eyes!" That is, with one of your graces.

The godly are jewels for their scarcity. Diamonds are not common. Just so, the godly are scarce and rare. There are but few of these to be found. There are many false professors (as there are many plastic diamonds) — but few true Christians. Among the millions in Rome, there were but few senators. Just so, among the swarms of people in the world — there are but few true believers.

The godly are jewels for their price. Queen Cleopatra had two jewels which were worth half the price of a kingdom. Thus the saints are jewels, for their value. God esteems them at a high rate; He parted with His best jewel for them — Christ's precious blood was shed to ransom these jewels!

The saints are jewels for their adorning quality. Jewels adorn those who wear them. The saints are jewels which adorn the world. Their piety mixed with prudence honors the gospel. Hypocrites eclipse true religion and make it badly spoken of. The saints as jewels, render it illustrious by their sanctity.

God the Father has chosen these jewels, and set them apart for Himself!

Christ has bought these jewels with His blood!

The Holy Spirit has sanctified them. When they were a lump of sin — He made them into His jewels! He will string these pearls together — and put them into His celestial cabinet!

Bless God who has wrought such a change in you! From lumps of dirt and sin — He has made you into His jewels!

Proverbs by number

[1] While a buffoon craps on the World, is our World turned upside down (To despise everything/Everything is the opposite of what it should be)

[2] Fools get the best cards (Luck can overcome intelligence)

[3] To lead each other by the nose (To fool each other)

[4] There hangs the knife (To issue a challenge)

[5] To stick out the broom (To have fun while the master is away)

[6] To have the roof tiled with tarts (To be very wealthy)

[7] To shoot a second bolt to find the first (To repeat a foolish action)

[8] An old roof needs a lot of patching up (Old things need more maintenance)

[9] The roof has lathes (There could be eavesdroppers)

[10] To have toothache behind the ears (To be malingerer)

[11] To be pissing against the moon (To waste one's time on a futile endeavour)

[12] To shave the fool without lather/Two fools under one hood (To trick somebody/Stupidity loves company)

[13] To play on the pillory (To attract attention to one's shameful acts)

[14] To hang one's cloak according to the wind (To adapt one's viewpoint to the current opinion)

[15] To toss feathers in the wind (To work fruitlessly)

[16] To gaze at the stork (To waste one’s time)

[17] To try to kill two flies with one stroke (To try to be efficiënt)

[18] To not care whose house is on fire as long as one can warm oneself at the blaze (To take every opportunity regardless of the consequences to others)

[19] To fall from the ox onto the rear end of an ass (To fall on hard times)

[20] One beggar pities the other standing in front of the door (Being afraid for competition)

[21] To wipe one's backside on the door (To treat something lightly)

[22] They both crap through the same hole (They are inseparable comrades)

[23] To throw one's money into the water (To waste one’s money)

[24] To fish behind the net (To miss an opportunity)

[25] Big fisch eat little fisch (The stronger has advantage over the weak)

[26] To be unable to see the sun shine on the water (To be jealous of another’s success)

[27] To hold an eel by the tail (To undertake a difficult task)

[28] The broadest straps are cut from someone else’s leather (One is quick to another’s money)

[29] It is ill to swim against the current (It is difficult to oppose the general opinion)

[30] To throw one's cowl over the fence (To discard something without knowing whether it will be required later)

[31] To see bears dancing (To be starving)

[32] To fry the whole herring for the sake of the roe (To do too much to achieve a little)

[33] Never believe someone who carries fire in one hand and water in the other (To be two-faced and to stir up trouble)

[34] To be a pillar-biter (To be a religious hypocrite)

[35] To be able to tie even the devil to a pillow (Obstinacy overcomes everything)

[36] The sow pulls the bung (Negligence will be rewarded with disaster)

[37] To bang one's head against a brick wall (To try to achieve the impossible)

[38] To bell the cat (To carry out a dangerous or impractical plan)

[39] To put your armor on (To be angry)

[40] The henfeeler is worried about still unhatched chickens (To depend on an uncertain outcome)

[41] One shears sheep, the other shears pigs (One has all the advantages, the other none)

[42] One winds on the distaff what the other spins (Both spread gossip)

[43] To carry the day out in baskets (To waste one’s time)

[44] To hold a candle to the Devil (To flatter and make friends indiscriminately)

[45] To confess to the Devil (To reveal secrets to one’s enemy)

[46] She puts the blue cloak on her husband (She deceives him)

[47] To fill the well after the calf has already drowned (To take action only after a disaster)

[48] To have to stoop to get on in the world (To succeed one must be willing to make sacrifices)

[49] To cast roses before swine (To waste effort on the unworthy)

[50] The pig is stabbed through the belly (What is done can not be undone)

[51] The fox and the crane dine together (Two deceivers always keep their own advantage in mind)

[52] To catch fish without a net (To profit from the work of others)

[53] To sit on hot coals (To be impatient)

[54] Two dogs over one bone seldom agree (To argue fiercely over a single point)

[55] To tie a flaxen beard to the face of Christ (To hide deceit under a veneer of Christian piety)

[56] To pull to get the longest end (To attempt to get the advantage)

[57] To have the world spinning on one’s thumb (To have so much control, that people do whatever you want to be done)

[58] To put a spoke in someone’s wheel (To put up an obstacle, to destroy someone’s plans)

[59] He who has spilt his porridge cannot scrape it all up again (Once something is done it cannot be undone)

[60] To look for the hatchet (To try to find an excuse)

[61] To be barely able to reach from one loaf to another (To have difficulty living within budget)

[62] Love is on the side where the money bag hangs (Love can be bought)

[63] To yawn against the oven (To attempt more than one can manage)

[64] To keep the hen's egg and let the goose's egg go (To make a bad decision)

[65] To fall through the basket (To have your deception uncovered)

My high school was too small to have a sixth form, and I chose my sixth form college based on the Classics department. My friend Matt and I used to have a riot in that class. By the end of the first year, we'd concluded that Calypso was Odysseus' pet name for his right hand (the cave he supposedly stayed in with her definitely isn't big enough for two people), that Agamemnon had it coming, and that Menelaus was a wimp. We decided that Penelope was a wimp, too, and that she should have taken her husband's great bow and shot him right in his arrogant, presumptuous and hypocritical face. I can't lie, I don't think there was a single character in 'The Odyssey' that we decided we could side with.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-28JBTLhToQ

My temper got the best of me

And when I said that I mean I know every single thing that I said was true

And I know that you're mad at me

But if you’re thinking like that, I think you’ll see that you're mad at you too

And I know the feeling's strong

Strong enough to forget about all that I've been through

And it sounds obscene, but

Loud words never bothered me like they do to you

You're the boy that talks but says nuthin'

A big game to the ones that you think will believe you

But you don't know how to read

The look on my face when it says, "Yeah I've read that book too"

And who the hell's impressed by you?

I want a names of the people that we know that are fallin' for this

You would sell your own mother out

And then betray your dead brother with another hypocritical kiss

This strange pledge that a girl is giving is typical of my Pakistani society. It might be irrelevant to Europe and USA where the surveys have found rates of wife-to-husband violence "remarkably similar" to those of husband-to-wife violence. This is a pledge of a Pakistani woman and we call it Nikah in our religion’s language.

I accept!

Yes I accept Maulvi Sahab, in return to the mentioned amount of cash and gold, I accept to be in control of this man for the rest of my life. I surrender my self-esteem, my goals, further education and my career choices. I totally agree that God’s angels would curse on me all night long if I ever refuse to give him pleasure whenever he wants. I accept the sweet ropes around my neck and sweet dreams of black birds throughout my life. I accept to shut my eyes to the things I don’t want to see and make my ears deaf to all kinds of abuse because dear parents I understand that divorce is something worse than death for me. I will be clever enough and devise tactics to survive in the new environment, even if I have to target other men and women and live as a hypocrite, I will, for the best suited interests of myself and for you my dear parents. I accept everything so please now decorate me with gems and flowers, paint my face well so that I am not recognized at all for what I really look like and buy me every luxury to be placed in my new house and say goodbye to me. I am the fortunate one as the major goal of my life is being achieved this day. Congratulations to myself.

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WEEK 8 – Batesville Kroger, Set II

Here’s a close-up of the dairy department sign, because I love the interaction of the light “woodgrain” basket sign and the yellow wall paint :) For that matter, the tree stencils and “dairy” letters are integral parts of this scene, too. I just like the whole department’s presentation in this décor package, haha! Dairy and the “garden” circle… my two favorite parts of 2012 décor. Hard to believe this package has been retired :(

That sad face might be interpreted as hypocritical, given that back in my early days of flickr I harassed and maligned this décor with no mercy, lol! But I did try to also make clear that I always liked the look of this décor… I just simply grew tired of seeing it in every. dang. Kroger. (I was also taking out some anger on the décor that would have been more appropriately directed at Kroger itself, for remodeling away lots of cool older décor packages [coughBauhauscough].)

Nowadays, Kroger’s new décor package – as we've seen – is fresh and local, but both here in the Delta Division and in other places around the country, it seems that Kroger is using that décor less prevalently than other “new” packages in the past, instead opting to push the Marketplace décor package into a significant number of non-Marketplace stores. My past criticisms are coming back to bite me, on that front: to be honest, I like 2012 better than Marketplace, and would prefer to see it in more remodels than the latter :/

(c) 2019 Retail Retell

These places are public so these photos are too, but just as I tell where they came from, I'd appreciate if you'd say who :)

Not just the internet is for porn.

"A rich man had a garden and two gardeners. One of these gardeners was very lazy and did not work; but when the owner came to the garden, the lazy man would get up and fold his arms and say, "How beautiful is the face of my master", and dance before him. The other gardener would not talk much, but would work hard, and produce all sorts of fruits and vegetables which he would carry on his head to his master who lived a long way off. Of these two gardeners, which would be the more beloved of his master? Shiva is that master, and this world is His garden, and there are two sorts of gardeners here; the one who is lazy, hypocritical, and does nothing, only talking about Shiva's beautiful eyes and nose and other features; and the other, who is taking care of Shiva's children, all those that are poor and weak, all animals, and all His creation. Which of these would be the more beloved of Shiva? Certainly he that serves His children. He who wants to serve the father must serve the children first. He who wants to serve Shiva must serve His children — must serve all creatures in this world first. It is said in the Shâstra that those who serve the servants of God are His greatest servants. So you will bear this in mind."

– Swami Vivekananda, in "Address at the Rameswaram Temple on Real Worship".

Look here then read...

So here's the thing. I've been receiving a lot of secrets having to do with something I'm pretty ashamed of. People are saying they're closeted Christians simply because if they went out and said they love God and such they would be judged for not fitting the normal Christian figure. I have people saying that they wish they could go to church but because they're known to dress a certain way or wear their hair a certain way that they won't be accepted. And one person even told me he's afraid to go out and say he's Christian because people already know he's gay.

I love God. Heck, I love everyone. But yes, I am judgmental on levels as well. But, literally, for God's sake, why must we be so terribly hypocritical?

Romans 14:1-8

One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord. He who eats meat, eats to the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who abstains, does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.

Sure, you may believe it is your duty as a Christian to convert one who is gay to a straight life, but the opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality, but holiness. It is not about converting them to the other desire, but helping them find Christ. Because what is the most important relationship? It's not between you and another human being, whether that being is the same or opposite sex, but it's about your relationship with God. God WILL take care of the rest. I'm not saying this would change their desires, but this isn't the only situation. The same is with people who are addicted to drugs, of stealing, or lying. The answer isn't to make them change that aspect of their life, it's to change their life completely, SIMPLY by the grace of God. God is the one who takes care of that.

1 Corinthians 10:13 – “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And god is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.”

The bottom line is Christians, stop judging. God doesn't discriminate or judge because he made EVERYONE. He is the creator of that person you are judging, just as He's the creator of you. Please remember that next time you look at someone in a negative way. Remember that God created us all equal.

____________________________________________________________________________________________ If you have a secret you would like me to use, send me an anonymous message here.

If you want a personal response you can email me at thesecretsproject@gmail.com

I will be completely prejudice free. I promise.

textures from here and here.

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'Those who say "I love you," by word of mouth are hypocrites because love has to do with the heart, not the tongue.' - Lord Ra Riaz

Hypocrites!

My favorite bumper sticker!

Diego: “I only did that when you were sniveling over things that’d happened to me, too—like having the daylights beat outta you or having someone you shoulda been able to trust betray you over and over again. You didn’t see me whining about it, and you’re tougher than me, so it wasn’t gonna do you any favors for me to coddle you.”

Charley: *odd expression* “Wait…*holds up a finger* One: you think I’m tougher than you, since when? *holds up a second finger* Two: is that why you were uncharacteristically sweet whenever I’d have breakdowns about the sexual abuse?”

Diego: *holds up one finger* “You’ve always been tougher than me: fact. I’m not saying you’re physically stronger—which is why I train you so hard—but your spirit’s like an empty pop bottle in the river, no matter the turbulence, it always floats back to the top.”

Charley: *face solemn, body still, as she absorbs Diego’s words*

Diego: *holds up a second finger* Hell, yes, I’m nice when you freak about the sex stuff. You effin’ deserve a little compassion there. I’ve never had it happen to me. If I had, I doubt I’d’ve survived it or been able to function in a meaningful way afterwards, so I’m not gonna tell you to suck it up. I’m an asshole, not a hypocrite.”

Charley: *silent for several moments, staring at Diego as if she’s seeing him for the first time*

Diego (earnestly): “Look, Bug, I know you think I’m only warning you off this guy out of self-interest, and I won’t deny that’s part of it, but mostly I just don’t want you to get hurt. I’m afraid he’ll disappoint you in such spectacular way that you’ll slide back into some…bad habits.”

Charley (loyally): “He won’t. You don’t know him like I do.”

Diego: “But I know you, and I know deep down you’ll always be worried he’s disgusted by you—or worse, pities you—for what you’ve been through, but is hiding it because he’s too, your words…*air quotes* ‘nice’ and ‘decent’ to say it out loud.”

Charley (vehemently): “Wrong. You’re wrong.”

Diego: “Then why haven’t you told him more about yourself? You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. You wavered there for a little bit, but you found your footing again and came back even stronger. Strength is power, so stop thinking like what you survived diminishes you. It doesn’t. You’re effin’ almighty.”

Charley: *blinks in surprise* “Did you just compliment me…again?”

Diego: “Yeah.”

Charley: *pushes up her glasses* “That’s new.”

Diego: “And overdue, apparently. Molly makes me watch Dr. Phil with her now. Says it’ll help me be more sympathetic and less ‘ass-y.’”

Charley: “There’s not enough Dr. Phil in the world to ever make that happen, Diego…in the world.”

Diego (agreeably): “See, that’s what I keep telling her.”

Fashion Credits

**Any doll enhancements (i.e. freckles, piercings, eye color changes) were done by me unless otherwise stated.**

Diego

Pants: Mattel – BFMC – Fashion Insider Ken

Shirt: IT – Dynamite Boys – Back to Brooklyn Remi

Vest: IT – Homme – High and Mighty Darius

Shoes: IT – Poppy Parker – Baby, It’s You Chip

Belt: Kimberlee of Hazel Street Dezigns

Hat: Mattel – Barbie Collector – Frank Sinatra: The Recording Years

Necklaces & Watch Chain: Me

Doll is a Rock Steady Romain, eyes, brows, facial hair, and shading by me.

To smoke, as an act of rebellion, while being a teenager, does not seem rebellious to me at all. It is ignorantly giving in to indoctrination from both the immediate circle of friends and the huge, aggressive cigarette manufacturers assisted by the media.

I have often reasoned with myself that if our teenagers want to rebel against society, if they strive to become independent and think for themselves, so why on earth do they fall like flies into the vicious nets of nicotine advertising pushers? Indoctrinators who don't give a damn about anything at all but their greed for money and power?

If our children achieve the understanding and grasp the fact that they are being utterly manipulated-- played smoothly like the play-dough they used themselves not too long ago-- in the hands of those guilt-free companies & fancy executives, would they let themselves be used without a fight?

These companies, who despite the hypocritical label "hazardous to your health" on their products, become more sophisticated in masking their bloody claws into trendy, polished palavers, all in order to get our children as fast as they possibly can and turn them into addicts for life, would our children then so easily fall into these well calculated traps? If they saw the catch in time?

Wouldn't our beloved children rebel against this despicable wickedness which robs them of their freedom, and in the long run of their heath as well, wouldn't they then boycott all those damned cigarettes? After all our children see us, their role models, adults who try numerous times to quit smoking, yet fail again and again and jeopardize our health. If only they would see the plot when there is still time.

My beloved Aunt started to smoke as a joke when she was only 16 y/o. Like everybody else she wanted to appear tougher than she was, she wanted to be popular. Throughout her life she inhaled large amounts of the addictive drug until her lungs were totally pierced and black with tar. She tried to quit smoking time after time, succeeded only for a week or so, went on smoking and continued to struggled for nearly 60 years. All in vain, she was doomed from her very first "supposedly innocent" cigarette.

I saw her agony, I saw her terrible suffering. I saw her die in horrible pain, totally in the merciless arms of the cruel lung cancer caused by nicotine.

If only our children could see in time the traps that are put out for them disguised as freedom of choice.

I still remember that cigarette which I deliberately took in order to aggravate my mom-- I was only 15 or 16 y/o at the time, it was my job to rebel against her, right?

It all started a few days earlier. Two of my high-school mates called me to have a cigarette with them in a hidden corner of the school yard. One of the girls, Yona was her name-- beautiful, thick long blond braid hanging heavily on her back, smart girl, bright in class-- was my idol, someone I looked up to and wanted to be as good as she, especially in mathematics, a subject I had always difficulties with. The other girl, Devorah, was already a smoker, as far as I can recall. Yona had always enough pocket money to buy cigarettes and so she offered me one. I took it and sucked on it, not really knowing what to do, but i didn't want to appear childish so I went on blowing some smoke. After a few minutes my mouth had a disgusting taste in it and I felt nauseated, however, I still didn't stop, all I wanted was to be like Yona, popular and at the top of our class. If she did it it was an act of boldness and daring which I admired.

I decided to buy a packet of mint flavored cigarettes, called Polaris at the time, mid 60's, and waited for the moment to confront my mother. The opportunity didn't take long to show up.

That Friday afternoon, after school was done for the week, Mom and I were sitting and discussing something which I can't remember now what it was. I opened my little brown leather purse, took out the unopened package of cigarettes, tore up the cellophane wrapping, pulled out a long, white cigarette, elegantly, so I thought, putting it in my mouth, waiting excitedly for the reaction of my strict disciplinary mother. I was ready for a wild fight and about to lit my liberating cigarette, my act of rebellion, when Mommy said very calmly:

"Alors, Poupetta, tu fumes maintenant?"... So I see that you have taken up smoking, huh..."

"Yes!" I said triumphantly, provocatively, anticipating the big revolution I had in mind, imagining my mother's fuming outburst and uncontrollable anger.

Well, come on, give it to me, Mom, my 15-16 years old energy boiled in me.

Well... I sat there, still holding onto that famous cigarette, but the spark from that friction I was delivering so eagerly didn't get on fire. Neither did my cigarette for that matter. It was simply dull. Mom said no more, so unlike her, I thought, she always lectured me, always. Why, only the other day she was praising Yona, who came for a visit, urging me to take after her studious nature, I who had nothing but the Beatles on my mind!

It was a total flat disappointment, no reaction was boring and so I didn't see why I should go on pretending I liked smoking when I actually despised the smell and taste of it. And if I couldn't even get Mom aggravated so why on earth bother at all.

"Here, Mommy, take it," I said handing her the brand new package of Polaris mint cigarettes.