Edvard 'my whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm' Munch worked on this painting for three years (1932-1935) without ever finishing it.
It's called Uninvited Guests and in it he makes a fairly unequivocal statement: alcohol has been consumed, the wallpaper is weird, and I have a firearm, so don't come around here ad hoc with your smiley balloon heads and expect your shrift to be anything but short.
Threshold Of The Void, d. Jean-Francois Davy (1972)
Young artist Wanda Leibovitz (Dominique Erlanger) travels from Strasbourg to Paris to escape an unhappy love affair, and moves into a large but antiquated room in an old apartment. Within the room is a locked door, and beyond the door is The Void - a formless, soundless, limitless black space which she is initially wary of, but eventually becomes addicted to. She finds that she paints better when working in the hallucinatory darkness of The Void, and although she becomes successful, things begin to fray within her.
All Voids are inherently sinister, even the metaphorical ones, and they often want things: things to fill them, things that will stave off heartache and loneliness and existential dread, something to counter the depthless darkness. And this Void? This Void wants Wanda.
Julie Christie flits between dimensional barriers in the underrated Memoirs Of A Survivor, a 1981 film based on Doris Lessing's dystopian sci fi novel.
Glenn Falkenstein (1932-2010) was an American educator, a speech pathologist, a magician, and a mentalist. Here, in a clip from the documentary Age Of The Psychics, he covers his eyes with eight pieces of two inch adhesive tape which help hold in place two half dollar coins pressed over his closed eyes. The dark visor completes the sensory deprivation.
Glenn doesn't need anything as basic as eyes to pick up on the vibrations of the audience, of course, and he's able to provide names, birth dates and even social security numbers astonishingly quickly and at will. I don't know how he does it, and neither do the people whose auras he's reading, so I'm going to stick my neck out and say that it's magic.
I haven't updated this blog since the end of 2020. There were lots of reasons it fell into disuse, but I'm over most of them now so, if just for my own satisfaction, I'm going to ease my way back in. It will be gradual, organic, gentle. You can't reheat a souffle, I know, but most leftover meat pies are okay with a quick blast in the microwave.
See you shortly.
