YOSHITOSHI

Lu Chi Shen in a Drunken Rage Smashing the Guardian Figure at the Temple of the Five-Crested Mountain

"The military captain Lu Ta took the vows of a Buddhist priest to escape retribution for his murder of a man during a drunken rage. His violent, destructive nature however [...]. Yoshitoshi illustrated the night that Lu returned to the temple on a drunken rampage and decided to prove his strength by smashing the gate flanked by nio, the sculptured dieties who guard the entrances of all Buddhist temples. After demolishing the gate and column, he then attacked the wooden sculptures that he imagined to be mocking him."
-Williams, Japanese Prints: Realities of the Floating World, 22.

The Fever of Taira no Kiyomori

"With the exertion of Taira power and wealth and Kiyomori's new monopoly on authority, many of his allies, most of the provincial samurai, and even members of his own clan turned against him. Prince Mochihito, brother of Emperor Takakura, called on Kiyomori's old rivals of the Minamoto clan to rise against the Taira beginning the Genpei War in the middle of 1180. Kiyomori died early in the next year from sickness, leaving his son Munemori to preside over the downfall and destruction of the Taira at the hands of the Minamoto in 1185. Legend has it that at the time of his death, Kiyomori's fever was so high that anyone who attempted to even get near him would be burned by the heat & his corpse had to be left to cool for several hours before it could be removed." (source)

Inada Kyuzo Shinsuke
from Eimei nijûhasshûku (Twenty-eight famous murders with verse, 1867).

From Fuzoku Sanjuniso (1888)

also, check out this site for more. And here. Also, check out prints by his teacher.

I CHOOSE YOU, JOROGOMU

I have been reading a book about yokai (Japanese spirit other animal monster) and yokaigaku (the study of ... Japanese monsters). Evidently, books were made cataloging these creatures. Like this one.

I really like the presentation. Most of the monsters (and books) are pretty creepy. Sort of like how I was hoping Fantagraphics Beasts books would be ... such was not the case. They were super cartoony. Very lame.



However, Matt Brinkman (of Fort Thunder, Mindflayer, Forcefield, Paper Rodeo) has a book of Monsters from Le Dernier Cri that looks like it's on par ... I ordered a copy from Buenaventura before they ran out. And I am waiting. I think Domy has some of his prints.

"They are on the fringes of the ordinary, at the outer edges of the uncanny zone, but unlike strange animals such as the orangutan [they] cannot be captured, caged, ad made, after a fashion, banal. [...] Monsters are ideal subjects for psychoanalysis, which 'furnishes us with useful models of sublimation, projection, and displacement as tools for approaching the construction of monstrous images from human experiences. [...]

They are images of the archetype of fear that lies deep in the unconscious and symbolize the struggle that confronts the psyche as it emerges segmented into consciousness, split down the middle by the contradictory elements of its evolutionary history. While such approaches may be thought-provoking, they are inevitably based on subjective assumptions of real versus imaginary, assumptions that monsters are objects of fantasy rather than embodiments of ambiguous belief, which effectively excludes so many of the manifestations that fall under the rubric of yokai."

(Michael Dylan Foster, Pandemonium and Parade 22)

Also, I read a book of poems by Francis Picabia, a Parisian Surrealist/Dadaist painter-poet type who moved to New York. I note it because, well, look...

Baccarat
I am a beautiful monster
who shares his secrets with the wind.
What I love most in others
is myself.

I am a beautiful monster;
I have the sin of virtue for support.
My pollen stains the roses
from New York to Paris.

I am a beautiful monster
whose face conceals his countenance
My senses have only one thought:
a frame without a picture!

I am a beautiful monster
with a velodrome for a bed;
transparent cards
populate my dreams.

I am a beautiful monster
who sleeps with himself.
There are only seven in the world
and I want to be the biggest.

It made me laugh.