Pop Culture

Super Milk Baby Japanese Monster Mash-Up

WHEN: Friday, February 1st, 2008 from 6:00-9:00 pm Eastern. WHERE: Sanctuary Tattoo Gallery, 31 Forest Avenue, Portland, Maine (right next to Portland Stage Co.) WHAT: Artwork inspired by Japanese monsters, made by 8 artists in 8 different ways! SUPER MILK BABY JAPANESE MONSTER MASH-UP! The title really says it all! This terrific group show at Sanctuary Tattoo pits eight of the Portland area’s scariest artists against each other in a battle of wits and skill over Tokyo! School girls will scream, bones will crack, the sushi will bite back, and buildings will crumble like old matzah balls… or something like [...]

10,000 B.C.: Cryptofiction?

You have got to love the mammoths! And sabertoothed tigers! What elements of narrative cryptofiction, in which these animals, as well as the hominids, are shown as surviving late into protohistorical times in 10,000 B.C. overlap with our interests? Frankly, I always find it intriguing and instructive to see how artists, filmmakers, and scientists recreate Pleistocene animals, so as to give us a clue of what might be behind some cryptids. I look forward to this movie, therefore, for just such images. I guess there are other things to watch in this film too, with regard to our ancestors. However, [...]

Classic Yeti Images

With the death of Sir Edmund Hillary and Yeti images of the photographs from that era (1950s and 1960s), insights into the evolution of how the Abominable Snowmen were viewed can be considered through the lenses of time and distance. The first image shared here (click on Perkins Yeti) is the 1960 lifesize drawing shown by then-Lincoln Park Zoo director Marlin Perkins before the World Book expedition to the Himalayas with Sir Edmund Hillary. (This may be different than the large cutout Perkins showed on “Wild Kingdom” in 1963, or it may be the same one.) Below is the slightly [...]

My Favorite Hillary & Yeti Photo

The tributes to Sir Edmund Hillary continue to roll in from afar, a fact acknowledged in today’s New York Times. The man’s reach was far indeed. In Portland, Maine, the local newspaper recalled Sir Edmund visited here in 1962, and gave a lecture for teachers and school children at the-then-grand Lafayette Hotel on his Abominable Snowman expedition. As a final goodbye to Sir Edmund Hillary, I want to share my favorite photograph of him. It is Hillary with an unknown artist’s drawing of the Abominable Snowman that Hillary loved to show to the media before his 1960 expedition. To prepare [...]