Hell 101: Prisons of Piranesi

Nobody designs prisons like Giovanni Piranesi. Known for his meticulous etchings of Roman ruins (in which he exaggerates the scale of buildings by a factor of three, the deceptive devil), he surpassed himself with a series of prints of fantastical prison interiors. The Carceri d'Invenzion series consists of 16 prints depicting cyclopean interiors. Soaring vaults, barred windows, gargantuan stone blocks, and torture devices pepper the scenes. The scale itself is oppressive.

There's no sane reason for them to be built in such a manner. It's Gargantuan Aesthetic Dysfunctionalism (GAD) run amok. Just who was being housed in these dark, spacious pits is a mystery. King Kong? Balrogs? You can see the influence of Piranesi on the underground halls of Moria in the Lord of the Rings films.

Roman ruins by Piranesi.

Just the sort of look you'd want for Hell. The initial pieces I did for the book were even more inspired by Piranesi than the ultimate result. The sensibility he brought to the Prison series permeates Hell Lost, and I would have made the buildings even bigger, and the figures smaller, if I weren't concerned about scaling line weights and how they would hold up when printed. I intend to push farther in volume two.

Balthazar rises.

Scale to crush the soul.

Totalitarian states are especially fond of architecture that overwhelms the individual with scale, to make people feel insignificant in face of the might and majesty of the state. Hitler, for example, had Speer design a great hall for Berlin so ridiculously massive, rain clouds would have formed within it. Stalin, too, was fond of gargantuan monuments, as was Ramesses II. Colossal architecture: dictators dig it!

Great Hall, Berlin; planned but never built.

Palace of the Soviets, Moscow; planned but never built. Those are crowds at the bottom, not ants.

Ramses II: the statue that inspired Percy Shelley.

Immortality through architecture. Cow the individual and subordinate the citizen. Can't help but think of Ozymandias by Shelley:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Carceri Plate XI - The Arch

The series of prints was published in 1750. The Inquisition sadly didn't take notice.

Piranesi's designs will remain in the realm of imagination until some mad dictator decides to base his dungeons on them. But you can fly through them. The etchings have been mapped onto 3D geometry, allowing viewers meander through these incredible scenes for the first time, thanks to the Caixa Forum in Madrid.

Flying through Piranesi's Prisons

Check out the animation here.

Emily Allchurch and Nigel Warburton have updated the prisons with modern trappings in a striking series of paintings.

The original Piranesi...

...and Emily Allchurch and Nigel Warburton's contemporary version.

 They quote Aldous Huxley, who had this to say:

"Beyond the real, historical prisons of too much tidiness and those where anarchy engenders the hell of physical and moral chaos there lie yet other prisons, no less terrible for being fantastic and unembodied---the metaphysical prisons, whose seat is within the mind, whose walls are made of nightmare and incomprehension, whose chains are anxiety and their racks a sense of personal and even generic guilt."

Balthazar falls into the prisons of Thermidor

For more on Piranesi's work, particularly his drawings of Rome (and how the sites appear today) see the comparison photos.

Rob Ford Does Not Exist!

In a shocking twist, Rob Ford, ostensibly the mayor of Toronto since 2010, has been revealed as one of the greatest inadvertent media hoaxes of the 21st century.

Television producer and writer Ken Finkleman gave a press conference at the Canadian Broadcasting Building in downtown Toronto earlier today to reveal the truth. Flanked by 'Mayor Ford' and David Miller, he admitted to inventing the character for an unscripted comedy pilot for the CBC.

Chagrined at how everything spiralled out of control, Finkleman said, "We couldn't believe how long we were able to keep it going. It was just a stunt for my new CBC show, The Candidate, exploring the absurdity of municipal politics. Rob Ford, the character, was a Joe Public version of Jim Walcott. I emphasize that we never expected to win the election. We had a joke candidate. But once we had, we found ourselves in a real conundrum, both legally and morally."

Jim Walcott was a character on Finkleman's most successful show, The Newsroom. Played superbly by Peter Keleghan, he was a shallow, manipulative, and appallingly stupid anchorman who later ran for public office.

"Politics is a vein of humour too good to ignore. It's like professional wrestling: if you're going to do it, go all the way. So we made it as real as possible," says Finkleman. "Best of all, we didn't need sets. The city provided them. There are only two professional actors on the show. TV has never been cheaper or more legally actionable."

Consultations with civic authorities led to former mayor David Miller taking over behind the scenes, in order to keep the city running. In the meantime, Dick Fulbrow (Rob Ford), continued to improvise comedy routines in front of the cameras. Footage includes 'Mayor Ford' unsuccessfully trying to throw a football, and walking into a camera with his face. Finkleman has rarely explored the pain of slapstick, and this represented a change of pace. Like his other shows, it focuses on unsympathetic lead character who's hypocritical and frequently acts without thinking.

"Now that the cat's out of the bag," exults Finkleman, "I have no doubt we'll be able to get funding for the series. The key was in the casting. Dick's a comedy genius. A new Chris Farley. Honestly, the crack smoking was pure genius. Dick will go to any length for a laugh. No matter how painful. He personifies the struggle for truth through the celebration of ignorance."

The Mayor will be hitting the small screen in 2015 on CBC.

It's a satire.

Catastrophic Hollywood Implosion?

Steven Spielberg's predicting major shifts in the film industry.

"That's the big danger, and there's eventually going to be an implosion — or a big meltdown… Three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that's going to change the paradigm."

He says it is already in a state of major upheaval. He had to co-own his own studio to get Lincoln into theaters. Incredible. This is Speilberg!

Definitely worth a read.

What is Koan TV?

Ongoing television stories can present us with delightful mysteries, enthrall us with fully realized characters, and whisk us away on thrilling journeys of discovery that barrel towards emotionally meaningful finish.

Except that doesn’t happen very often. Not on TV. Not over multiple seasons.

They say no plan survives contact with the enemy; same thing goes for television series with multi-season story arcs.

TV series are all about the beginning, and that's the problem.

Film scripts begin with the ending. The ending is king. Everything builds to a carefully crafted climax, which is why they’re worked out backwards, from the crescendo to plausible beginning. Every thread, every character’s journey, is carefully crafted and plotted for maximum emotional impact.

The end state determines the starting position.

Ongoing series are the reverse. They have a beginning, but no end. Titillating confections sprung on audiences before they’re finished, they need a spectacular start to be green lit. A great, intriguing concept that will hook viewers is a necessity. But that’s it. Endings are out of scope.

Indeed, show runners hope the end will never arrive, because then they’ll have to look for a new job. And job searching sucks. Try it.

True, there may be a glimmer of a conclusion in the writer’s mind, roughly if poignantly imagined. Yet as the show responds to the audience, the series changes and as it does so, the original concept becomes less and less relevant. It morphs into something new, shaped by ratings and feedback.

Sometimes series are often affected for the better by audience. Ingenious minor characters can be dialed up, bad ideas dumped.

But this cuts both ways, especially with ambitious shows that pose a central question or mystery.

Everything in TV is subordinated to ratings, particularly ambitious, big budget ones: to justify their cost, shows have to keep a certain number of eyeballs glued to the screen. If necessary, plot, character, and logic will be thrown under the bus, so long as it keeps the Storytelling Express going. For television, the end is an afterthought, rather than climax. Something that the writers never wanted to write, something that the cast never wanted to play.

Which is why Great Television Show Mysteries often go MIA.

What was The Plan of the Cylons in BSG? Why, the sound of one hand clapping.

Who needs a plan when you can have the illusion of one? It’s a lot less work and a lot more malleable. Let the rubes read into it. The pretense of meaning’s more flexible than the real thing. The suggestion of depth easier to rewrite. Who wants to get locked in?

Battlestar Galactica and Lost presented us with genuine Koan TV: mysteries without solutions, plots without endings, content without real depth.

Losing ratings?

No problem: throw in something nonsensical.

Faeries, for example. In business suits. How’d they get there? Madness? Magic? Why are they wearing Armani?

Who cares? Let the audience wonder. String the gullible fools along just long enough to reach the end of the season. Then you can hit them with something else: flying, sentient potatoes from the far future! They’ll forget all about the faeries, no explanation necessary.

The showrunners don’t believe the audience have any critical thinking skills anyway.

BSG started out strong. It expanded the horizon of sci-fi on TV. Then it began a long, slow descent into irrelevance and luddite loving fantasy. Faux meaning was slathered on top of illogical plot twists, forcing retroactive character changes.

You can just hear Ron Moore cackling, “No one will notice!”

Sense was thrown out the window. Themes of the show, such as the diversity of human views and the impossibility of complete unity were jettisoned. Complexity vanished. Depth evaporated.

These ongoing, multi-million dollar Koans are filled with mighty sound and fury signifying only the imminent arrival of a commercial break.

That’s been true all along for network shows. Yet at least their less ambitious programming brethren had a beginning, middle, and end. They reached a destination, provided the audience with answers. Fulfilled the compact between storyteller and audience. It can be done. Buffy, for example, wrapped up quite nicely.

Perhaps there is a Buddhist agenda here, and it’s all an insidious attempt to get us to clear our minds for meditation.

God knows there’s no point in trying to answer a TV show’s central mystery. 

It’s like the secret of the spoon in the Matrix films:

There isn’t one.

History of Hell Part I

John Martin's rendition of Pandemonium.

After the completion of their kick-ass capital Pandemonium, the swaggering Princes and Kings of Hell spread out across the blasted wastes of the Infernal Realm to establish their own fiefdoms, building holdfasts over thermal vents for warmth. Contrary to popular belief, much of Hell will freeze your balls off.

Although seemingly indestructible (they could reconstitute themselves from information wave alone-- structure that organizes matter), without God's aura, they became lethargic and damn hard to get off the couch.

So for a quick mana boost, they turned to eating their neighbours. Cannibalism became de rigueur and dinner invitations took on an added meaning. Finally a primitive agricultural system was established, and everyone chilled out. Importing human souls to feed upon began with the giant and ornery Nephilim, offspring of Watchers and human females.

Angels wallow in the Lake of Fire

Hell stretches out from the balmy shores of the Lake of Fire into the frozen continent of Sobor. Populated by choleric chimeras, scheming gorgons, bad-ass basilisks, scyllas, and uber-territorial dragons, it was a dangerous hood for individual demons. It had to be tamed like an unruly head of hair. Mowed. Paved.

Fallen angels survey the wastes of Hell; drawing by Dore

Satan, being preoccupied with Eden and screwing God over, sent his trusted lieutenant Beelzebub 'Fly-Face' to pacify it. In his absence the First Magisterium was formed, consisting of 12 of the most powerful demons: Moloch, Dagon, Chemos, Rimmon, Thammuz, Baalim, Ashtoreth, Astarte, Izooze, Ozeroth, Orut, and Belial; Satan was the unofficial thirteenth member. These were the biggest, baddest, scenery-eating demons, and Satan wanted them were he could see 'em. Each founded a Royal House and began begating at a frightening pace; the little hellions sired then set about expanding the fief of their progenitor.

The Magisterium rashly adopted the Animus Creed, which affirmed evil as Hell's good ('Evil be Thou My Good'). This made cooperation impossible: it became screw or be screwed and all order collapsed. Servants stopped serving. Guards made off with the silverware. Thinking better of it, the decree was rescinded and the more restrained Pandemonium Creed, advocating opposition to God 'The Fascist Father', was adopted in its place.

Satan addresses Hell's Parliament

Next time: Demons stir the shizz!

Discover the Ceilings of the Louvre

There are 35,000 objects in the Louvre, most of which are thoroughly awesome. So awesome, in fact, that the magnificent ceilings of the Louvre are often overlooked. Take a look at the decoratian orgy you may have missed.

 

So remember, next time you're at the Louvre, look up. From time to time.

Jett Lagrange: Grumpy Space Hero!

Hero Jett Lagrange has saved an ungrateful galaxy a thousand thousand times. He's asked for, and gotten, nothing in return; except lawsuits for property damage and noise complaints.

Now he saves planets for cash. No credit. And he's backed up by a fleet of Space Lawyers and sponsors.

Next planet he saves?

He's plans to keep it...

The Geography of Hell: Resources

You can find Inferno online at World of Dante, your one-stop-source for everything Dante, including extensive galleries of artwork that tackle The Divine Comedy, from Dore to Dali.

Dante's World includes art, audio, and notes on the text.

Dante Today tracks mentions of his work in contemporary culture. It's still influential.

Concept art for video game version of Dante's Hell

For Milton, see the website Paradise Lost. There's annotated text and even a sample of the great poem in plain english, for people like me who are easily confused.

William Blake's take on the big bad

William Blake, John Martin, and Dore's work can be found here. Considering the fun you can have with the visuals, it's amazing more artists don't tackle the material. It's not just for goths and video game developers.

John Martin's vision of Pandemonium, capital of Hell

John Martin's pieces are particularly magnificent. A 19th Century Roland Emmerich, he owned epic disaster scenes.

Best of all, there is Lego Hell by Romanian artist Mihai Marius Mihu, who created scenes from every circle of Dante's Hell. Just what you want for Christmas! I'd buy a set. More on the project here.

The bottom of Hell: Satan embedded in the ice.

IV Ledge: Greed

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 1976 novel Inferno throws a sci-fi writer into Dante's Hell, but updates the Infernal Realm to incorporate our latest sin innovations. Rather than meeting Italians from the 14th Century, he meets contemporary Americans. Fabulous book. The sequel's not as interesting, but still worth a read.

Some insightful commentary on Inferno can be found here.

Bartolomeo's Inferno

Airport!

The illustration, not the film. For EnRoute magazine.

Hell 101: The Iconoclasm of the Chapman Brothers

This macabre diorama, central piece of The End of Fun exhibit and created by the Chapman brothers, is disturbing despite itself. It's highly evocative of Bruegels' The Triumph of Death, only with a modern twist: Holocaust meets Fucking Hell.

Bruegel's The Triumph of Death

It's WTF Art. This is dark, twisted stuff.

Recently displayed at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, it managed to offend just about everyone. The exhibit was NC-18: no one under 18 permitted. How often do you see that rating at a major international level art gallery?

More interesting than your neighbour's model train set, Fucking Hell uses 30,000 tiny plastic figures to recreate the Holocaust in 28 square feet.

Fucking Hell: The whole enchilada.

 It sold for half a million pounds. Not too shabby for a diorama.

According to Jake Chapman, "This is an event that's beyond representation. Using toy soldiers is a way of emphasizing the impossibility of that. Here are these little figures that are totally incompatible with the pathos they're supposed to support."

Or is the piece a McHolocaust? Ronald McDonald appears on a crucifix in the midst of it all.

In fact, there's a whole field of Ronald McDonalds, not to mention his buddy the police burger.

In one scene, poor Ronald sits atop a raft with a clutch of hamburgers while swastika branded sharks circle. Honestly, what drugs are these guys doing?

Fresh meat!

I used to think they were a happy marketing family, yet below they prepare Ronald for the cross.

Oh, what a cruel world.

Is no commercial icon sacred?

The diorama has been built twice; the first version, entitled Hell, burned down in 2004 in a warehouse fire. Undeterred, they took out three years and built it again, only this time called it Fucking Hell.

Zombie Nazi Astronauts torment Hitler. Hitler pets one on the head (far right).

Hitler naturally makes multiple appearances. Sometimes he's painting a hot babe, other times he's imprisoned by Nazi astronaut zombies. The scene is awesome in its lunacy.

Not likely to get his own cable TV painting show.

Is it puerile or profoundly provocative? Whatever you may think of their work, it's never boring. Editor and critic David Lee likens it to watching a car crash, and others have referred to them as 'court dwarves'. Mayor Giuliani of New York branded them perverts.

This is the very definition of macabre.

Connoisseurs of the bizarre, twisted, macabre, provocative, darkly funny, and offensive, this pair of devout iconoclasts consistently push the boundaries of good taste. In 2003 they were nominated for the prestigious and infamous Turner Prize.

Provocative? I don't know what you're talking about. 

Graduates of the Royal College of Art, they started collaborating together in 1991, mashing plastic models together into unholy creations. If little bits of epoxy, paint, and plastic can be unholy, that is.

Their art work frequently touches on topics such as war, torture, disaster, and commercialism. A strong (obsessive?) anti-fascist element runs through it.

The Rape of Creativity show at Modern Art Oxford displayed a mint collection of Goya's etchings that the Chapman brothers had defaced with funny faces. They titled the piece Insult to Injury.

It stuck a thumb into the eye of art criticism, and the brothers didn't stop there.

They've gone on to add 'hippie motifs' to Adolf Hitler's watercolours.

You get the impression they're trying to be provocative.

It's not all about McDonalds

They've created sculptures of children with genitalia instead of facial features. Death shows two blow up sex dolls (made of bronze but painted to look like plastic) in obscene, inverted embrace.

Their imagination is twisted in ways I cannot even imagine; no other contemporary artists are as fit as this pair is to do Hell's interior decorating. These guys were born for the task. Hell Lost is not even a tenth as disturbing. I could do with some of their choice narcotics.

Visit their website and sear your eyeballs.

Rock concert of horror

Jake Chapman had this to say to the Independent: "We've never pretended that our art is anything other than extremely elitist. It's not for Sunday afternoon gallery goers... We're not interested in the idea that museums or galleries are redemptible spaces for bourgeois people to come and pay their dues to culture. Just because looking at a work involves your eyes, there's this dumb notion that anyone with eyes can have a justified opinion about it."

Collector Coins from the Year of the Four Emperors

Otho

Snapped a quick pic of these in the British Museum. They're coins from the year of the four emperors: Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian.

I'm shocked they had time to mint them all. I have more vacation days than three did sitting on the throne. The Roman mint worked fast. And I mean fast. With emperors playing muscial chairs, they had to.

How'd The Game of Chairs get started?

Opportunism!

Nero, the original Elvis, was driven out (along with his fiddle) by the prefect of the Imperial Guard, Nymphidus Sabinus. On the run and without friends, he eventually committed suicide.

Back in Rome, Senator Galba saw an opportunity too good to pass up, bought off the Imperial Guard, and took the throne for himself.

This didn't sit well with ol' Otho, who wanted to be emperor too. He just happened to have enough petty cash on hand to bribe the Praetorians. Again. They double-crossed Galba, stabbed the old senator a few dozen times, and declared for ol' Otho. If the Roman Empire hadn't fallen, today the Praetorian Guard would have their own TV game show: Who Wants to be Emperor?

In the meantime, two governors in the provinces (Vitellius in Germany and Vespasian in Israel) both declared themselves emperor and marched on Rome.

Vitellius arrived first. Backed by the Rhine legions, he defeated Otho's forces at the battle of Bedriacum. The Praetorian Guard was much better at stabbing emperors and parades than actual fighting.

Once safely ensconced in Rome, Vitellius proceeded to party down, throwing lavish feasts, toga parties, wild banquets, and festivals so massive and bad ass they bankrupted the treasury. This emperor lived by the motto 'live fast and die hard'.

Nero and Galba

Vitellius and Vespasian

This turned out to be a very wise policy, for a few months later Vitellius' army was defeated by Vespasian, who'd finally arrived with his legions from the Middle East. Vespasian was the Roman dude who led the siege of Masada.

He knew how to fight.

And he stuck around for awhile and founded the Flavian dynasty.

Remember Nero? He wasn't done. Not by a long shot. After his supposed 'death', he popped up all over the Mediterranean world. Or people pretending to be him. Unlike Elvis, he wasn't content to be a fast fry cook. He wanted his throne back. Or at least to rule an island of pirates. This didn't sit too well with Vespaian, and the Nero impersonators all came to a sad end.

The Histories by Tacitus make modern politics sound boring. Then again, boring politics is one of the things that makes Canada such a great place to live.

Happiness writes white on the page.

Demon Design 101: Hieronymus Bosch!

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Centre Panel.

When it comes to demons, Bosch is the best. Bar none. Hands down. Game over, man. QED. The biggest, the baddest, the best!

Bosch's imagination is rich and endlessly inventive, his combination and juxtaposition of incongruous elements ingenious.

Hours of eyeball enjoyment for the whole family!

His demons are, quite simply, the embodiment of sin. They hover over sinners like alcoholics at a bar, and guide their prey's spirtiual path to the pit. One beguiles the vain with a mirror on its ass.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Giant strawberries, bizarre animal hybrids, cherry head gear, man-eating oysters, pig nuns, scrotum ears armed with phallic knives, and man-trees (with Bosch's own face) pepper the landscape. Egg shells and fruit recur frequently. You can spend hours looking at The Garden of Earthly Delights and not notice everything.

Symbolism is everywhere: bagpipes stand in for penis and scrotum, animal hybrids for sin and demons, arrows for sexual intercourse, games and cards for gambling.

Music butt. I am so getting this tattoo.

The demon above seems to have written a music piece on the man's ass (Sex was described at the time as 'music of the flesh'). Everything, absolutely everything, is loaded with meaning.  

Dude! Don't sign that contract! It's eeeeeevil!

Above, a pig nun (an indictment of the clergy's corruption) fondles an uncomfortable looking fellow, while a horrifying (yet impossibly cute) helmeted demon looks on. The little bird headed critter has an arrow stuck in its leg, a human foot dangling from its helmet, and an ink pot in its beak, into which the nun dips her pen. She seems to be compelling the man to sign a contract for his immortal soul. The horrible fate of the wounded bird beast will soon be his. At least the bird fellow has been immortalized in a resin statue.

Bosch demon (in)action figures!

This demon deserves a statue, or perhaps a comic book, of his own:

I don't want to even know what his sin was.

A blue, bird headed man wearing an inverted cauldron crown consumes and shits out sinners (below). I've brought this demon into the comic, still with his mouth full.

Demon either eating or smoking a man who has black birds flying out his ass. Not even the Chapman Brothers are so bold. Yet something seems amiss with the demon's digestive tract as he's shitting out sinners whole. Beside them a vain woman looks at herself in a mirror mounted on a fallen angel's ass. Delightful!

Admittedly no birds flying out his butt. And it isn't on fire. I'm working up to it.

Not much is known about Bosch. His personal life is a mystery, filled in with conjecture; not much more is known about his paintings, many of which are only tentatively attributed to him.
His iconography is so rich and deep that much is still argued over. Bosch left no essays to be pegged beside his work, leaving future generations to ponder idly and speculate over his possible heresy.

His paintings are so dense, so populated with symbolism and meaning, they're like a complete graphic novel in only three panels. Each painting contains the essay, if only we knew how to read.

The Garden of Earthly Delights was first reviewed in 1605 by Jose De Siguenza, and described as "a satirical comment on the same and sinfulness of mankind." That's understatement. It's one of the most remarkable paintings in history.

Bosch was the first to really let loose. He created such a vibrant, no holds barred playground of moralizing absurdity it's never been surpassed. Bat shit insane falls short of describing it. This is lunacy on speed, moralism powered by crack, propelled by irrepressible creative genius and channeled by pitch black medieval symbolism. This is originality. Dreamscape surrealism five hundred years ahead of its time. He'd have made one hell of a comix book artist. Better than even Batman comics.

With the graphic novel Hell Lost I tried to harness at least a small fraction of his visual innovation. It's a satirical look at the infernal realm, revealing the terrible, absurd truth about hell.

Can you spot the Bosch character?

Surreal landscape in Hell Lost. A bit Dali, a bit Bosch.

Pieter Brueghel was heavily influenced by Bosch, and took up the mantel of moralizing phantasmagoria after Bosch's death.

How can you not love such wildly impressive work? He even has demon bunnies!

I knew bunnies were evil.

Bogleech has a fabulous look at the characters in Bosch's The Temptation of Saint Anthony.

So does Melissa Huang.

And Wikipedia is no slouch on the subject, either.

Temptation of Saint Anthony

Next up: Everything you need to know about Hell and more!