Rick Wayne's Blog, page 44
June 24, 2019
(Art) The Brilliant Chromatic Space of Peter Elson
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Peter Elson (1947 – 1998) was an English science fiction illustrator whose work appeared on the covers of numerous science fiction paperback novels, as well as in the Terran Trade Authority series of illustrated books. Elson, whose illustrations often placed detailed, brightly liveried spacecraft against vividly colored backgrounds, influenced an entire generation of science fiction illustrators and concept artists.
June 23, 2019
(Art) The Brilliant Chromatic Space of Peter Elson
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Peter Elson (1947 – 1998) was an English science fiction illustrator whose work appeared on the covers of numerous science fiction paperback novels, as well as in the Terran Trade Authority series of illustrated books. Elson, whose illustrations often placed detailed, brightly liveried spacecraft against vividly colored backgrounds, influenced an entire generation of science fiction illustrators and concept artists.
June 22, 2019
(Art) The Bondage Queens of Eric Stanton (NSFW)
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Eric Stanton (1926 – 1999; born Ernest Stanzoni Jr.) was an American underground cartoonist and fetish art pioneer. While Stanton began his career as a bondage fantasy artist for Irving Klaw, the majority of his later work depicted gender role reversal and proto-feminist female dominance scenarios.
Commissioned by Irving Klaw starting in the late 1940s, his bondage fantasy chapter serials earned him underground fame. Stanton also worked with several other pioneering underground fetish art publishers, and later magazine publisher George W. Mavety. For a decade, Stanton also shared a working studio with Marvel Comics legend Steve Ditko.
Past the soft-core era of the 1960s, his art became more transgressive. Creating a mail-order business in the 1970s named the “Stanton Archives,” Stanton sold his work directly to fans and, starting in 1982, issued offset staple-bound fan-inspired books known as “Stantoons,” producing more than a hundred before his death.
In 1984, Stanton had the only art exhibit in his lifetime at the New York City nightclub, Danceteria. [Wikipedia]
June 21, 2019
(Art) Night Images, A Nocturnal Fancy
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We tend to associate the night with menace, but a world where so much goes unseen can also be a magical one. I keep a gallery of night images, united only by a common aesthetic.
I share some of my collection today, on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, when the power of light breaks and night begins its eternal return…
June 20, 2019
Ariel Perez, “Vulture Knight,” a nearly perfect dark fan...
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Ariel Perez, “Vulture Knight,” a nearly perfect dark fantasy character.
June 19, 2019
(News) The Countdown Has Begun!
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Part 1 of my occult mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, is immediately available for pre-order. The book will be released in 30 days, on July 19th.
It’s safe to say there’s nothing like it on the market. Told in five pulp-length mysteries, each with a different narrator, FEAST OF SHADOWS is two parts magical detective story to one part urban fantasy, with a pinch of sinister fairy tale. The blurb is below.
Free review copies are available to anyone willing to leave an honest review. You can submit your request electronically by clicking here.
One part mystery.
One part savagery.
Three parts magic.
Years ago, [image error]driven by greed, men penetrated the last soft places on earth. Out of the clear-cut jungle–out of nowhere–a man appeared, eyes rimmed in blue. The last shaman. A man who could make magic.
Now a recluse, known to modern society only as an eccentric chef, he is locked in an occult battle with an unseen nemesis. Their prize: a most unusual book, penned before the fall of Babylon, said to contain the recipe for eternal night.
Across five stories, five victims of inexplicable events narrate their encounters with an enigmatic titan of magic, a man without a past, whose tattooed palms hold the power to alter human history–or to end it.
Agony in Violet
As his marriage crumbles around him, a brilliant medical scientist searches for the source of a horrific illness that leaves its victims ashen and wasted. With no apparent connections between them, his only clues are the strange symbols that appear near the bodies after death. When a child is stricken, old traumas resurface and the good doctor turns in desperation to a curious consultant, who reveals that not every labyrinth has walls, and that the horrors you face there are always your own.
Curse of the Red Dagger
A troubled young woman, pregnant with a billionaire’s baby, disappears without a trace. Determined to save his child, he offers her best friend one million dollars to find her. But following in her friend’s footsteps proves more difficult than she expected. Everyone connected to the disappearance seems desperate to hide the truth. As they each fall to mysterious circumstances, death closes around her, and her only chance to save her friend is to sacrifice herself to an ancient power.
To the White of the Bone
A mangled body floats to the surface of a reservoir with nothing to distinguish the victim save for a binding knot branded under her tongue. The case is routed to the NYPD’s resident occultist, an uncompromising homicide detective whose history of unusual and uncertain results has left her career in shambles. Dodging an inquiry into a fatal shooting and pursued by a homicidal witch, she contemplates a devil’s bargain to stop the killer, who just may be the Lord of Shadows.
The Song on the Green
One by one, the children of an upscale Pennsylvania neighborhood are found crippled and catatonic, their minds seemingly vanished. As the panicked community searches in vain for a human predator, they neglect the only witness, an eight-year-old boy with a menagerie of strays, who is left to stand alone against the very creature that hunts him.
Bright Black
After carelessly killing an innocent, a beautiful aristocrat is cursed with eternal youth. Forced to endure as waves of friends and loved ones wither and fade around her, she wanders the ages in search of meaning–from the wars of Napoleon to the Victorians in India, from the Great Depression to the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Recruited as a spy in an occult war, she soon tires of blood and loss and retreats to a small village in the mountains, where an accident reveals missing memories and an unfortunate truth: that the mistakes of five lifetimes are not so easily fled.
Part urban fantasy, part hard-boiled whodunit, FEAST OF SHADOWS is a five-course occult mystery and the most devilish meal you’ll ever read.
The complete epic conundrum will be released in two parts beginning summer 2019.
June 18, 2019
(Art) The Bondage Queens of Eric Stanton (NSFW)
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Eric Stanton (1926 – 1999; born Ernest Stanzoni Jr.) was an American underground cartoonist and fetish art pioneer. While Stanton began his career as a bondage fantasy artist for Irving Klaw, the majority of his later work depicted gender role reversal and proto-feminist female dominance scenarios.
Commissioned by Irving Klaw starting in the late 1940s, his bondage fantasy chapter serials earned him underground fame. Stanton also worked with several other pioneering underground fetish art publishers, and later magazine publisher George W. Mavety. For a decade, Stanton also shared a working studio with Marvel Comics legend Steve Ditko.
Past the soft-core era of the 1960s, his art became more transgressive. Creating a mail-order business in the 1970s named the “Stanton Archives,” Stanton sold his work directly to fans and, starting in 1982, issued offset staple-bound fan-inspired books known as “Stantoons,” producing more than a hundred before his death.
In 1984, Stanton had the only art exhibit in his lifetime at the New York City nightclub, Danceteria. [Wikipedia]
(Culture) The Sound of Piping-hot Ramen
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Japanese employs onomatopoeia more artfully than any language I’ve encountered.
We have a number of words in English that phonetically resemble the thing they represent: sizzle, murmur, cuckoo. We’ve even inherited some from other languages. Our word barbarian derives from the ancient Greek impression of their uncivilized neighbors, the peoples who spoke like “ba-ba-bar-bar-ba-bar.”
I’m no linguist, but I suspect that’s true of all languages. The neuroscientist Vilyanur Ramachandran argued that human beings are natural synesthetes. Synesthesia is the association of sensory experience from one mode with an entirely different mode: hearing numbers or tasting color.
Ramachandran gave a simple experiment. He showed his audience two shapes, one like the rounded trace of an amoeba and one like a multi-pointed star. He would then ask which was a “kiki” and which a “buba.” Most people associated the amoeba-like shape with the word “buba” and the hard points of the star with “kiki,” which of course has hard consonants to match.
Japanese turns such small spoken sounds into tiny musings on life. The first I encountered was どきどき (doki-doki), which refers to a light thumping or pitter-patter sound. One of Orine’s friends, when talking about starting a new job, turned to me and said “doki-doki.” It was a reference the palpitations of her heart. In common usage, doki-doki doesn’t refer to a sound at all but to an associated feeling: nervousness or anxiety.
On another occasion, Orine ran her fingers over a pillow in a home goods store and said ふわふわ (fuwa-fuwa), which means a fluffy kind of soft — versus, say, pillow foam, which is not hard but which may be coarse to the touch. I asked how many words like that there were — two syllables repeated. After some thought, she wrote out a list of 40. There may be more.
You have to remember, the words we associate with particular sounds are relative. Bees buzz in English, but in German they “sum” and in Korean they “boong.” In English, dogs bark. In Russian, they “gav.” In Japanese, they “wan.” A puppy or small dog (or any dog the speaker thinks is cute, regardless of size) is “wan-chan.”
さらさら (sara-sara), then, is a murmuring or gentle rustling and may also refer to textures reminiscent of that. ボキボキ (boki-boki) is a crackling or crunching sound, such as when one pops one’s knuckles. すべすべ (sube-sube, pronounced subay-subay) means velvety or smooth and may refer to, for example, a young woman’s freshly moisturized skin.
Many of these words, like doki-doki, have extended meanings based on these physical sounds and sensations. くるくる (kuru-kuru) refers to whirling, spinning, revolving, or coiling around, but in casual speech, when an adult says kuru-kuru, they mean that they are working tirelessly, perhaps getting nowhere, or that the circumstances of their life keep changing.
あつあつ (atsu-atsu) is like the sound you make when you sip something piping hot, and that’s exactly what it means — piping hot, such as how ramen should be served, but it can also mean passionately in love, almost unreasonably so. ピカピカ (pika-pika) is a twinkling or sparkling. Hence the name of everyone’s favorite Pokemon, Pikachu.
ギリギリ (giri-giri) is a grinding sound, like metal on metal — car brakes, for example, as the vehicle grinds to a halt. Poetically, it also means “at the last moment” or “just barely,” such as showing up to one’s wedding right before the bell or barely passing a test.
The Japanese language, then, is rich with the feelings of sounds and textures. My favorite is のびのび (nobi-nobi), because it applies to me. It refers to a kind of stretching out, a carefree ease, but also to the repeated slipping of a schedule, a pushing-out of responsibilities, procrastination.
Speaking of, I best get back to work…
June 17, 2019
(Art) The Bondage Queens of Eric Stanton (NSFW)
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Eric Stanton (1926 – 1999; born Ernest Stanzoni Jr.) was an American underground cartoonist and fetish art pioneer. While Stanton began his career as a bondage fantasy artist for Irving Klaw, the majority of his later work depicted gender role reversal and proto-feminist female dominance scenarios.
Commissioned by Irving Klaw starting in the late 1940s, his bondage fantasy chapter serials earned him underground fame. Stanton also worked with several other pioneering underground fetish art publishers, and later magazine publisher George W. Mavety. For a decade, Stanton also shared a working studio with Marvel Comics legend Steve Ditko.
Past the soft-core era of the 1960s, his art became more transgressive. Creating a mail-order business in the 1970s named the “Stanton Archives,” Stanton sold his work directly to fans and, starting in 1982, issued offset staple-bound fan-inspired books known as “Stantoons,” producing more than a hundred before his death.
In 1984, Stanton had the only art exhibit in his lifetime at the New York City nightclub, Danceteria. [Wikipedia]
