José Guadalupe Posada: Día de los Muertos

American's aren't terribly comfortable with the concept of aging or death. Wealthy women pump chemicals into their faces in attempts to preserve the dewy skin of youth, but the practice backfires more often than not, lending these unhappy, deluded souls the look of well preserved corpses laid out for burial. Old people are encouraged to live in ghettos called "retirement communities", where the only people required to deal with them are paid care givers, and each other.

Americans do, however, enjoy the pageantry of death. We celebrate Halloween, that ancient rite of death and rebirth and harvest. We love horror movies full of bloody corpses and basic cable is full of shows that consist mainly of men with recording devices shouting "Are you there?" and freaking themselves out, hoping and fearing that an actual ghost will appear. We're pretty good at talking about tragedy. But dealing with death as a part of life and the idea that all of us are one day going to shake off this mortal coil, well, that's pretty much unAmerican. We like optimism.

Our neighbors to the south celebrate death with great and storied pageantry. Día de los Muertos celebrates those one has loved and lost to the aether, one prays and eats and celebrates. It is a fitting holiday for the world's most popular death cult, Catholicism. It is this holiday that Mexican illustrator and artist, José Guadalupe Posada, is most deeply associated. His images of skeletons are justly iconic, but they really were a tiny fragment of his work. Born in 1852, he spent the bulk of his working life in Mexico City, drawing political broadsides and illustrating an amazing array of chapbooks. Interestingly, his drawings of skeletons weren't really intended to celebrate Día de los Muertos at all. The iconic La Calavera Catrina (the skinny lady in the hat pictured above) was drawn to mock the rich, saying that no matter how lovely and expensive your clothes, you too, will one day be dust and ashes like the rest of us.

A few years ago, I was smart enough to pick up a copy of Posada: Illustrator of Chapbooks. In it, are dozens of his penny chapbook illustrations. It's remarkable that so many have survived as they were considered to be pretty much disposable at the time of their publication, and the quality of the paper is terrible. Luckily, the company that produced them kept excellent archives which were lovingly cared for by the owner's descendants. Also, Posada was a wonderful artist and people aren't completely stupid. Many people held on to them. Like any jobbing illustrator, he drew many, many subjects, but they are all identifiable as his work.

I love fine art, but in some ways the applied arts: illustration, cartooning, graphic design, fashion tell us more about the texture of times past then anything else. This was the stuff that people looked at every day, what they had in their homes, and what they saw on the streets on their way to work. These were the images that lived in people's heads.

Posada died, like many illustrators of the past century, penniless and nearly forgotten. Unsurprisingly, Diego Rivera was one of the people who called attention his work long after Posada's death. His satirical edge, which is palpable in all his work, even in his illustrations for children's stories, fits in so well with the modern sensibility. Unlike with many contemporaries in England and America whose work seems cloying or dated, his does not. Posada is more akin to near contemporary, Thomas Nast, whose work was even more overtly political, but was protected by the First Amendment, a luxury Posada did not possess.

It was Mondo and his final runway collection wearing its Day of the Dead and Mexican folk art influences on its sleeve that made me want to revisit Posada. Art talks to each other, and it talks to us. Give Posada a look.

Halloween (the movie. the book. the weekend. the horror. )

This post is officially completely tardy.

Back in 6th grade, my somewhat extraordinary teacher Mr. Harrison took our whole class to see a double feature of horror movies one Saturday in October, 1980. The first feature was The Legacy (I think), as all I remember was a big fancy house, and the scene where someone got trapped and killed in an indoor swimming pool, as I found that really chilling. The second film was John Carpenter's Halloween. Let's leave aside discussion of the appropriateness of taking a bunch of little kids to a slasher movie with added bonus toplessness. What matters is the movie terrified me. After seeing it, I would lay awake in bed, thinking if I made the slightest move, something would see, and then kill me.

I've always been a big fan of exposition spewing Brits in Horror movies, from Lionel Atwill in Doctor X to Rupert Giles in Buffy, they never fail to delight me, and I think Donald Pleasance does a bang up job as the expositing shrink who runs around trying to lock up blank faced, scary, unstoppable Michael Myers. But he's not the point, the scary killer is. And there's something about the real world setting and the seeming plausibility of it (not to mention the proximity to where I grew up of the wonderfully named Creedmore Hospital - home to the local criminally insane), made this film particularly horrifying. But, I loved it.

I've already blogged about the excellent spook walk in Sleepy Hollow, and that was pretty much as scary as it got this Halloween (unless you include the truly frightening amount of gin the bartender at The Player's Club poured into our cocktails). My Major Domo and I hit as many events as we reasonably could this weekend, and you can read about our adventures here. We watched a Phantasmagorical magic lantern show, and then because seemingly me and my Major Domo control the world, three days later we saw Terry Borton, the magic lanternist we had just seen perform, on TCM's excellent documentary Moguls & Movie Stars! We are total outliers! On actual Halloween we inadvertently walked right into the Williamsburg Halloween parade as we were on our way to DM Theatrics production of Plan 9 From Outer Space. All delightful, but not exactly scary.

Mr. Harrison was an awfully unusual teacher. He was a former police officer who won the lottery and became a grade school teacher, just because he wanted to. He loved horror and magic and history and dressing up. I think, unlike my brother, I was often pretty lucky in the teachers I wound up with. He used to dress up as a wizard and perform magic tricks. He let our class hang out in our classroom during lunch and play poker. He let me write a paper on Queen Elizabeth I from the POV of a fly on her wall (literally). Sadly, he died of a heart attack two thirds of the way through the school year. To be honest, I have no memory of who replaced him (this was when all my teachers were dying of heart attacks - something like three in one year).

I also decided to celebrate this Halloween season by reading the wonderful Octavia E. Butler's last novel, Fledgling. It was an interesting take on the vampire mythos, as unconventional as possible. The terror in it came from the deep malignancy of racism and hatred, not from blood sucking fiends. She also brings up a bunch of disquieting questions about relationships and free will that are never resolved - as they shouldn't be, as with any real question, there are no satisfying answers. The vampires in her book live in voluntary symbiotic relationships with humans, from whom they must feed, in order to live. The vampires have some kind of venom which, over time, binds the human to the vampire. So, if the human is separated from his (or her) vampire they will die. If something happens to the vampire's human, they experience terrible, crippling grief. Each vampire needs several humans in order to survive, so they form little de facto families. Reading this book in conjunction with Butler's earlier book, Kindred, is fascinating, as it's the best novel about slavery in America I've ever read. He writing about this strange, unequal symbiotic relationship is riveting.

Now, as the season of horror ends, I'm moving on and reading Helter Skelter. It never ends.

Sleepy Hollow is Still Clearly Haunted

We humans have been artificially scaring ourselves since we were tiny little people who sat crouched in caves telling each other stories waiting for Woolly Mammoth season to begin. The human psyche differs from the animal one most in its ability to comprehend abstractions, which leads to the ability to be both frightened and to know (or at least reasonably assume) that no actual harm will befall one. That's the theory, anyway.


This is the season of plastic masks and candy and slutty vampire nurse costumes all doing service to celebrate what started off as the Celtic celebration of the end of summer, Samhain and the Christian All Saints Day. In other words, it's all about death. Leaves fall, it grows cold and the long winter months begin. Even if you don't find the idea of ghosts and vampires particularly scary, the thought of a rural 16th century winter should scare the bejesus out of you. Like I said, it's all about death.



But back to this, the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. My dashing inamorato and I have been feeding ourselves a steady diet of monster movies, spook houses (well, two) and have an action packed Halloween weekend ahead of us. But mostly I want to talk about the town of Sleepy Hollow and the Horseman's Hollow haunted spook walk. As all of us know, Sleepy Hollow is the small town in the Hudson Valley that was the site of Washington Irving's famous tale of cowardice, bullying and - most importantly! - headlessness. Sleepy Hollow, just north of Tarrytown, is a forty-five minute rain ride from Grand Central Station. There is a 17th century church with vast and beautiful cemetery in which both Washington Irving and Katrina Van Tassel are buried. Across the road is Philipsburg Manor, a 17th century estate. Which is, from what I saw, inhabited by all sorts of spooks and ghosts and devils and tortured souls. And, of course, a horseman without a head.



The Horseman's Hollow "haunted experience" is both spooky, scary and period perfect. The production design, whether it was accomplished by supernatural means, or otherwise is impressive. The walk is also nicely paced. Trav and I went fairly early in the evening and we saw very few of the other people walking through, until there was a slight bottleneck after a (very scary to this easily startled clausterphobe) maze. All the spooks and monsters were a creepy assortment of dead Red Coats, eviscerated farmers, blacksmiths, schoolmasters and 18th century devil worshippers. And things that have no name. Sometimes they are right in front of you cackling with the hollow laughter of the damned. And sometimes they sneak up quietly behind you. I don't think I need to tell you which is scarier.



As you can see above, Trav was nearly eaten by evil Jack Pumpkinhead. The whole thing was absolutely loads of spooky fun and more than worth the $20 admission. I don't want to say too much as half the fun was being constantly surprised. One thing that particularly impressed me is that there weren't any dead (see what I did here?) spots. When one was walking between the major installations, there was always something to look at. You never had the feeling of "waiting for the next thing". And though I felt I spent most of the time walking in the open, I could never see what was ahead. And then, I saw a fleeting glimpse of a mounted figure on a large white charger, and yes, that figure had no head.



For a delightful recounting of the rest of our day in the village of Sleepy Hollow, as told by Mr. S.D., click here.

For information and tickets to Horseman's Hollow in Sleepy Hollow, click here.

For train schedules to Sleepy Hollow (the Philipse Manor stop on the Hudson River Line) click here.