Alec McCowen in Frenzy

Frenzy by Alfred Hitchcock & Anthony Shaffer 
London UK 1972

Alec McCowen (26 May 1925 – 6 February 2017) plays the chief inspector in the necktie strangler case, Inspector Oxford, a reluctant gourmand, with Vivien Merchant as his gourmet wife, Mrs Oxford.  It is essentially the wife who cracks the case through her dinnertime conversations with her husband as he chokes down her startling meals, and it is her overwhelming conviction of Richard Blaney’s innocence that keeps the Inspector investigating long past the wrongful imprisonment of Jon Finch’s belligerent hero.  Through his toil Chief Inspector Oxford earns the right to deliver the final line of the film:  Mr Rusk, you’re not wearing your tie.

Nun and Zebra

16mm color movie, 9.5  min 
Jack Smith 
Lower East Side NYC 
1969 - 1971                                                                        

This short film contains some imagery that Smith would use again in Boiled Lobster of Lucky Landlady Lagoon. It stars Mario Montez as a lady with a zebra striped cigarette holder in need of a light and Irving Rosenthal as an admirer with a match.  As Jerry Tartaglia pointed out: the troublesome hair caught in the camera’s pressure plate is reminiscent of the cellophane tape in Scotch Tape. 

Prince Jetter

Pinoy Cameraboy 
2011
Manila Filipinas

You could usually hear children chattering or crying in the next room to where he had his camera set up for his posing and jack off sessions, and sometimes a young woman’s voice, which I assumed belongs to a very lovely wife.  I fondly remember one session where some fool was trying to bully him into exposing himself for free and Prince Jetter appeared to be a bit drunk.  He responded to the obnoxious clown with a story of how one of his tricks promised to take him to Hollywood and he let him blather on, though he knew the whole time it was bullshit.  You can imagine the sort of shit people promise when they’re desperate to have a perfectly handsome lad like this narcissist rip all his clothes off and put on a show.

Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio

(1467 - 1516) 
Milan, Lombardia

While discussing the restoration and reattribution of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi with a distinguished art restorer (married to an equally admired painter and critic,) I was asked by her friend, a well known film maker (married to an even better known director and screenwriter,) who (or what) Boltraffio was. I was able to tell her that he was Leonardo da Vinci’s student, arguably his finest, and a toiler in his studio, to whom works that were sometimes attributed to Leonardo were more often than not assigned to him.  Such was the fate of the Salvator Mundi before its recent cleaning and restoration, after which it was definitively placed among the canonical works of the Master.  One can not say with complete certainty that all of the paintings above were done by Boltraffio, but they are most likely all his, though many of them suffer from the poor restoration practices of earlier generations of preservationists, repainted and varnished so that they may look like the products of various hands; but these are all displayed with his name beneath or to the side, and with good reason.  As should be clear, he was capable of some truly great work that doesn’t owe too much to his most distinguished teacher. 

Altars and Flowers

Dale Wittig 
San Francisco CA 
Glover VT & Coventry CT 
June 2015 - December 2016

1 White Phlox, Hydrangeas and Sun Wukong  

2 White Fragrant Lilies on Thin Mar Oo’s Altar  

3 Hydrangeas, Lilies, Baby Bananas and Mangos for Buddha 

4 Tamar’s Red Phlox 

5 Chinese Restaurant Altar in Coventry 

6 White and Pink Canterbury Bells 

7 Tamar’s Red Gladiolas 

8 Marigolds and Mums 

9 Red and Pink Peonies 

10 Peonies and Paisley Shawl