It is time for my annual whine about the upcoming holiday season and why no one wants to launch a show geared specifically at America’s Number 2 favorite holiday, Halloween.
Oh I know, you want to claim that it just can’t be, a silly day devoted to wearing masks and costumes just can’t have slipped by Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day. But pause and think about things for a minute.
Thanksgiving has lost its meaning for a lot of folks. There are people who have been out of work for months, truth be told years, and houses have been lost, and retirement funds raided, and there just isn’t so much to be thankful about.
Nope, not me, I am terribly grateful, especially this year cause it looked for a while back in August like I wasn’t going to be around for Thanksgiving. So for me the holiday will be great, bring on the tofu turkey and the dressing made of cabbage. Diabetes isn’t a disease that lends itself to big dinners, but I’ll manage.
And Valentine’s Day? Well, that’s kinda up in a hub-bub right now. There are folks who just don’t want anybody except the right-thinking-red-white and blue-blooded-God-fearing-wage-earning normal American folks to be married. And history knows we’ve made such a mess of marriage that it probably is a good thing to keep anyone else from having a go at it cause they’re almost certain to do better, but that’s a whole political issue and has nothing to do with art so we’ll skip right over it and go to the next item…Relationships. Yeah, to celebrate Valentine’s Day you almost have to be in or have a relationship. We’re not doing so good there either. The Hook Up is the current expression for loveless mating. Sounds wonderful to me, you dip into the sea of love and stick a hook in something likely and see if you have the right car, income, shoes, clothes, house, grooming and BS to keep them on the line. Boy that should make for a joyful noise.
Can’t blame the Gen X’ers and Y’ers, they can’t help it. Previous generations had all the right stuff. How could you not love when there’s a war on and we were on the RIGHT side and the whole world was at stake and there was Dooley Wilson singing As Time Goes By while Bogie and Bergman say their farewell on that runway in Casablanca. Hoagie Carmichael didn’t do any harm to the mood when he changed his little syncopated ditty to a slow, romantic ballad and created Stardust, simply the most romantic song of all time. What have these kids got? The two most romantic songs they know were sung by a frog and a mouse.
So the likely challengers have to admit defeat. The winner is Halloween.
Not everyone is so jaundiced about Halloween. Take Miss Cassandra Peterson. You know her as Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, (And Money). Miss Peterson owns Halloween. She has with little fanfare bought up candy companies, costume makers, makeup; you know the black lipstick kind, wig companies and foundation companies. No Silly, not the kind that’s under your house, take a look at her show, Elvira’s Movie Macabre and then get your spouse or girlfriend to explain how without levitation, anti-gravity or hidden strings Miss Peterson has managed that dress for all of these years. Miss Peterson loves Halloween.
And let’s not forget the most grave robbing, spooktacular, thrilling, chilling, crypt kicking guys of all, movie monsters. No, not Jason or Freddy, the old guys, the Universal monsters, created my master makeup artist Jack Pierce and brought to life by Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., Warner Oland, Glenn Strange, John Caradine and Dear Boris, the great Karloff himself. (The ’31 Frankenstein was the single greatest mime performance ever filmed and it is high time you twits at the Academy woke up and voted him the honorary Oscar he so richly deserves.) The Shock Theater package was where most of us met the real stars of Halloween, back in the dim days before the Sixties when TV had a twelve inch screen and came in black and white. They love Halloween.
So why don’t artists?
There’s a segment of our lot that does. The Comic/Fantasy/Horror artists, some brilliantly gifted like Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta. Just try doing what they do with the human body and see how fast your eyes cross. They love Halloween. And why not? The nature of art is to dream on canvas and share that dream with the rest of the world and if you can see things that never were and make them come alive, why isn’t that just as worthy as painting boats or flowers?
The Comic Cons, those fantastic gatherings of the young and young at heart bring out the dreamers in droves. They come as Kilingons, Elvira, Frankenstein, Count Dracula and yes, Freddy and Jason. And they enjoy comic based art. Hmmmmmmmm? Something with an arty nature that attracts thousands of young people and exposes them to works by other artists? Could that be a painless way to bring the next generations into the art-loving, Leonardo craving, Picasso collecting, Van Gogh studying, Rembrandt magic of Fine Art. Could be.
But so far it’s the comic book crowd that’s doing all of the heavy lifting. They get out and mount the shows, flack the event, collect the art, display the works and what are we in the fine art world doing? Not a thing. If anything maybe sneering.
That’s a shame. We should be leading the charge. And this is the season of the witch. So who out there will find a venue and send out a call, bring in the art and promote the show and have it ready by All Hallow’s Eve?
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