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Caravaggio | The Violent Life & Crimes of an Artistic Genius

Julia Soboleva | Haunted Creations

Cruvoir _Digital Apotheosis_ Animation 07.11.2020.mov

Walt Disney's animated film Pinocchio won two Academy Awards.

Carlo Collodi, the author of Pinocchio, was born on 24 November 1826 in Italy. His parents were servants at the house of rich Florentines. They did not want such a life for their son so they sent him to a seminary, however, he did not wish to be a priest. Having completed his studies, Collodi went on to work in a bookshop, then as a journalist, theatre critic, writer, & magazine publisher. Collodi began publishing Pinocchio in a children's magazine in 1881. At first, the tale was short with a tragic ending. The nameless Cat & Fox, disguised as bandits, robbed Pinocchio & then hanged him.

The young readers demanded a sequel with a happy ending. Collodi himself became famous, & in Italy Pinocchio was republished over 500 times!

It may seem surprising, but Collodi gravitated towards his fame as a children's writer & did not like his character. He wrote adult novels, plays, dreamed of becoming an Italian Dickens or Shakespeare.

Carlo Collodi died in 1890. His most famous work was translated into more than one hundred languages. Walt Disney himself produced a full-length animated Pinocchio movie in 1940. In 1956 in Italy, a monument to a mischievous 'son' of Carlo was erected with the inscription, "To the immortal Pinocchio, from the grateful readers, aged from four to seventy years". Carlo Collodi was buried at the Cimitero delle Porte Sante in Florence.

The original text of the tale was affected by Collodi's seminary studies. The failing priest overflowed the tale with morality in the spirit of the 19th century. An echo of this can be seen in the episodes with The Blue-haired Fairy who forced the mischievous Pinocchio to brush his teeth & then guides Pinocchio to his goal. The wooden doll with a long nose dreamt of becoming a living person, his nose grew longer as he lied. After escaping from the clutches of the Cat & Fox, Pinocchio became a donkey, then was in the belly of a giant fish. The adventures lasted many months until the mischievous wooden puppet became a well-mannered boy. A human being.

In the original story, Pinocchio killed Jiminy Cricket, got his feet burnt off, & was hanged & left for dead

Cat & Fox Hanged Pinocchio at the End of the 15th Chapter

Polly Penrose studied Graphic Design at Camberwell College of Arts in London. She went on to work in Fashion Styling & after that worked for the photographer Tim Walker. She has always taken photographs, but started to take the practice seriously when she entered & won a competition held by the London Photographic Association in 2008. She held her first solo show, ‘A Body of Work’, at the Downstairs at Mother Gallery, London, in May 2014, & was part of a group show, Dear Sylvia, at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, March 2015, & her second solo show “10 Seconds” at The Hoxton Gallery, London, May 2016. She was short listed for the D&AD, Next photographer award in 2015. Her work has featured on Dazed Digital, The British Journal of Photography, The Huffington Post, Hunger TV, Feature Shoot, The Guardian, Stern & Another.

Penrose has been taking spontaneous self-portraits on a ten-second timer for over a decade. She explores identity & the opposed notions of vulnerability & empowerment, comedy & tragedy.

Her pictures focus less on sexuality & female allure, but retain the awkward, often beguiling force of the body as an object, pushed into a space, forced into a position whilst feigning a sense of normality & control.

Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, author, film critic & actor. Quentin Tarantino has the Cannes Palme d'Or, two Oscars, & several Oscar nominations. He is on the jury of the most prestigious film festivals of the world, Cannes & Venice. The adjective tarantinoesque is in the Oxford dictionary.

According to Tarantino, he wouldn't be offended at all if one appropriated a sizable portion of his fame. The aesthetic that Tarantino created reflects the spirit of the 90s, powerfully influenced global filmmaking in the early 2000s. Tarantino manages to sit in two chairs. His films are strange & authorial, at the same time, they are very popular & draw full houses. His style can be called art-mainstream.

Tarantino is a cinéphage — a movie eater. He's constantly citing films of his favorite directors. Quick camera pulls & swoops, slow zooming in, shooting from below, shooting from above are among the director's favorite camerawork techniques. 

Tarantino has favorite actors that he constantly shoots, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman. He gave a second life to John Travolta's acting career. Tarantino is an actor. In his youth, Tarantino dreamed of associating his professional career with being an actor in his movies. He appeared mainly in small roles such as Chester Rush in his 1995's Four Rooms. Tarantino chose directing as a career path when he created Reservoir Dogs in 1992 & Pulp Fiction in 1994, the latter made him famous.

Tarantino's films are characterized by a non-linear structure, a division into chapters, ambiguous monologues & dialogues. Tarantino uses a lot of prop blood. The director sees violence as a stylistic device, in life he does not accept violence.

Tarantino is a typical representative of postmodernism. In his movies, he is often quoting other directors' films, uses irony, he depicts the world as chaotic, the structure is complex. Tarantino advertises non-existent brands like Big Kahuna burgers, Red Apple cigarettes. His films are characterized by nonlinear storylines, dark humor, stylized violence, extended dialogue, ensemble casts, references to popular culture, alternate history & neo-noir.

The Tarantino phenomenon is worthy of a dissertation. He is equally adept at writing scripts & directing the camera, is not afraid of humor & taboos, is never boring. How does he do this?

As is usually the case, true events over time have been repeatedly reinterpreted & embellished. It is believed that in the 16th-17th centuries when the legend was written down, it was already perceived as a parable of Satanic inspiration. In this version of the story, a devil in the guise of the Pied Piper led children away from the town, but, according to the Grimm brothers, who recorded this version of the legend, did not manage to kill them. On their way through the mountains, the children founded a town in Transylvania, where they later lived.

Ergotism is defined as poisoning by ergot, a fungus that parasites on rye ears & contains an alkaloid similar to LSD. Indeed, ergotism was widespread in the Middle Ages, especially among the urban & rural poor, who ate rye bread and were forced, especially in famine years, to grind into flour the grain together with the parasite that grew on it. Consumption of ergot causes depression, hallucinations & fear, among other things.

This was the basis for the theory that the "revenge of the Pied Piper" was in fact the result of mass psychosis when one person draws others with him and the crowd which has lost its sanity and sense of self-preservation is quite capable of falling into a dangerous or disastrous situation.

It is assumed that the children were lured away by colorfully dressed gypsies who managed to lead them away from the city with songs and dances. However, this theory does not have many supporters.

Another rather exotic theory is that the Pied Piper was a UFO astronaut, who for some unknown reason became interested in the children of Hamelin. The theory is purely speculative and has no confirmation.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin is the titular character of a legend from the town of Hamelin, Germany. The legend dates back to the Middle Ages, describing a piper, dressed in multicolored (pied) clothing, who was a rat-catcher hired by the town to lure rats away with his magic pipe.

Not Every Creepy Theory on the Pied Piper of Hamelin

Nick DenBoer is a Canadian film and music video director from Toronto, Ontario.

DenBoer was born in Clinton, Ontario on 25 December 1979. He moved to Toronto, Ontario in 1998 and studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design for 2 years before dropping out. He then started a construction company in Toronto while working in video and animation business on the side. In 2009, production work became the focus and he started Generic Versatility Inc., a video production company.

DenBoer has directed and produced three music videos for Canadian electronic music artist deadmau5, including Monophobia in 2018, Drama Free feat. Lights and Pomegranate, a collaboration between deadmau5 & The Neptunes, both in 2020. Nick directed and produced the critically acclaimed short film The Chickening, a visual effects remix of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", where he and co-director Davy Force used visual effects to alter the film's characters and scenery to create a new story. The Chickening was featured in many film festivals most notably the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015 and Sundance Film Festival in 2016. Nick is also credited as a visual effects artist of the feature film Kuso by Flying Lotus and on the music video Fire is Coming By Flying Lotus featuring David Lynch.

In 2020, DenBoer directed and executive produced an ad campaign called Virtual Influencer Colonel Sanders for Kentucky Fried Chicken through the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, which won a Webby Award for best use of social media. The campaign featured a lifelike, computer-generated incarnation of Colonel Sanders and portrayed him as a virtual influencer on social media in a series of images. He has directed and produced many other advertising projects for the companies and brands such as KFC, Old Spice, DC Shoes, BBC, Adult Swim and Red Bull. among others. Prior to his advertising work and music video directing debut, Nick worked as a bit creator on Conan O'Brien, and worked for Team Coco from 2012 to 2015, producing political satire and pop culture clips for the show. Nick is responsible for creating the series Alex Trebek has Gone Insane which was a recurring bit on Conan's monologue where he took clips from the show Jeopardy! and cut up Alex Trebek's words and rearranged them through editing to make Alex say absurd sentences. Nick also created the recurring Conan monologue series If they Melded where he took celebrities' faces and swapped them onto other celebrities.

DenBoer's done work for Conan O'Brien including a series of supercuts, but he's probably best known for a parody of The Shining that he and a buddy produced called The Chickening.

Nick Denboer: Just Another Day at the Office

I am an individual, resident & business owner of California's 28th congressional district. My business CRUVOIR (2015-2020) a California corporation conducting business as a high-end designer clothing store on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, California.

I owned the store for five years prior to the looting that occurred on May 30th, 2020 when the Mayor of California ordered the LAPD a stand down mandate during the BLM riots. Scores of opportunists & masked armed looters took advantage, damaging commercial & personal property & engaging in open theft, vandalism, & violent destruction of my property. The total damages were over 1.5 million dollars of designer clothing, sneakers, jewelry, & rare vintage pieces.

The protesters were honoring Melina Abdullah, the lead organizer of Black Lives Matter LA chapter, who led call & response chants of “Disrupt White Capitalism.”

Before the event ended, she shouted into a megaphone: ‘fuck the police! fuck white capitalism! fuck the grove! fuck 3rd & fairfax! fuck beverly hills!’ Melina Abdullah was deliberately stoking a very large crowd into destructive action. By nightfall, stores at every shopping district she mentioned was been vandalized & looted, & several LAPD cruisers in the Fairfax District were set on fire. She knew exactly what she was doing. Can Melina Abdullah, individually, Black Lives Matter Foundation, aka BLM be held responsible? The lead organizer of the BLM LA chapter participated & acted with or in furtherance of the masked armed looters, damaging commercial & personal property & engaging in open theft, vandalism, & violent destruction of my property on the counts of Property Damage, Vandalism & Loss of Business Income.

Surveillance footage is published on our YouTube channel of the looting that on occurred during the BLM riots on May 30, 2020:

My neighbors, either escaped or didn't take action. One of my neighbors showed some courage to defend my business amidst the chaos while hoards of people were running out of my store with handfuls of merchandise. He was knocked unconscious with a skateboard & suffered trauma to the back of his head.

Unfortunately due to the stay-at-home mandate, I wasn't able to protect my property until it was too late. I called the police & they told me to stay home. Special scorn should be given to LAPD Chief Michel Moore and Mayor Garcetti for serving up the entire heart of the city to thieves and arsonists. By the time I got there, I witnessed the break-ins around me that were bonkers in their scale & frequency that went on into late hours of the night, by the same criminals that looted my store and took everything—pure crime. Standing in front of my store, which was already mostly destroyed & robbed, I filmed Police driving by a live crime scene as the jewelry store across the street was broken into (see Cruvoir youtube). Police Chief Michael Moore kept hundreds of police in clustered units, doing nothing under Mayor Garcetti's 'stand-down order'— Cops were antagonizing protestors, while businesses in the vicinity were looted and burned two blocks away. I witnessed police squad vehicles driving past live crime scenes, ignoring looting. Why didn't the police go after the looters and leave the protests? Both sides, every time. The police aren't there for you. 'Protect and serve' is a lie. 

How it went down: A city permit was given to Black Lives Matter to hold an event at Pan Pacific Park on May 30th in the afternoon—a small park, not an event park—it looks crowded with 200 people in it. Whoever gave the permit should be fired—this was the first mistake that led to violence, theft, and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage for many miles. The protesters were honoring Dr. Melina Abdullah, lead organizer of Black Lives Matter’s L.A. chapter, who is also a college professor, who went on to drop a string of expletives that foreshadowed what was to come after the rally would end.  

By nightfall, stores at every shopping district Abdullah mentioned had been vandalized and looted. Abdullah’s 16-year-old daughter, Thandiwe, also addressed rallygoers. She co-founded the Black Lives Matter Youth Vanguard and has been speaking at local protests for several years. In 2018, she was honored by Time Magazine as one of the most influential teens in the country. “I know you want to cry, I know you want to tear some shit up,” Thandiwe said. “If you want to set some corporations on fire, you know what? I don’t care about Target burning. I don’t care that capitalism burns. I don’t care that white people in their f***ing office buildings are upset. I don’t care that you can’t go nowhere because you’re stuck in f***ing traffic. I don’t care that you can’t get to your job or your doctor’s appointment or to wherever the f*** you want to go.”

At Pan Pacific Park, Dr. Melina Abdullah, lead organizer of Black Lives Matter's LA chapter, led call and response chants of "disrupt white capitalism." Before the event ended, Abdullah shouted into a megaphone: "Fuck thew police! Fuck white capitalism! Fuck The Grove! Fuck 3rd and Fairfax! Fuck Beverly Hills! (Daily Wire)

The following interview has been abbreviated and edited for clarity.

Warren Olney: Talk about the looting and violence that took place at the protests in LA over the weekend. 

Melina Abdullah: “We were very deliberate in deciding to disrupt spaces of white affluence. We want to make sure that it's not just black people who are suffering at the hands of white supremacy, that if we can bring a little bit of the pain that we feel to white communities, then maybe they'll have a vested interest in  ... & disrupting these systems that kill our people. They can't simply turn their heads & retreat from what we're experiencing. I think it's a huge mistake for people to be equating what happens to property with what happens to the lives of black people. We need to shift that. We also need to remember that in these demonstrations, the first acts of violence are the police assaulting protesters. & it's important that the media examines that.”

Melina Abdullah was deliberately stoking a very large crowd into destructive action in the middle of the day as the event was ending. She knew exactly what she was doing. Organizers ended the rally while it was still peaceful, acknowledging the situation could potentially become 'unsafe' for some people in attendance. A Black Lives Matter leader said over the bullhorn. "The action is officially closed," he announced. "Whatever y'all do from here on out ain't my business." Tensions began to rise after the protesters began moving toward Beverly Hills & other areas. They were met by LAPD, which issued an 'unlawful assembly' order & instructed participants & onlookers to leave. The LA Times described the scene that developed as 'a tense standoff' with police shooting rubber bullets & striking demonstrators with batons. (CBS2)

At this point, putting too many people in too small an area, firing them up with angry rhetoric, then telling them to leave the park in the middle of the day left the police in an untenable position. Should they direct the large crowd one way or another? This crowd was amped. A total mess ensued. Many were driven North, to Melrose Avenue, only five blocks away, where the police would not go for four hours. Who's fault? The next mistake was LAPD's strategy of handling what was inevitable. There would be parts of this crowd spreading out to tag, rob, & burn for many square miles—after everything was looted, someone would start a fire inside.

One of my neighbors roamed a mile of Melrose with her camera. Over four hours, she saw zero police crackdown —one big candy store! The Shoe Palace was looted for a full hour before someone started fires inside. Urban Outfitters was continuously looted for two hours before fires were started inside. My Store, Cruvoir at 8211 Melrose Avenue, was looted for hours until I got there, & nearly everything was gone & destroyed.

The Los Angeles Police Department deliberately abandoned Melrose & other major streets, deciding not to 'risk' department 'lives' & 'reputations' for property damage—better to let the looters loot & burn? All LAPD had to do was criss-cross & block critical streets with squad cars & bullhorns. It would have scattered the crowd. Wherever there were broken windows, put a car in front of it with police standing guard. It would have stopped all the fires & continuous looting that went on for hours.

Law enforcement officials, current & retired, criticized the LAPD response, saying it was riddled with flaws—from acquiescing to protesters gathering in huge numbers in a business district like Fairfax, to delaying two moves that would have increased manpower sooner— mobilizing the entire police force into action by canceling off-days & vacations, & calling in the National Guard—as they were given warning well-ahead of time. 

Charles Sid Heal, a retired Los Angeles County sheriff's commander, said the LAPD decision to allow protesters access to an area like the Grove & Farmers Market was a miscalculation. Keeping crowds away from vulnerable areas is a vital part of crowd control, he said. "That means place sentries where you don't want them to go in advance." (LA Times)

Can I be subverted to ‘free speech’? No. but this is hardly to say that my property is not vulnerable. My business Cruvoir was looted during the BLM riots in may 2020 for a loss of $1.5 million dollars. None of my property was covered by insurance, so I've shuttered my doors & dissolved my company. 

My property was accessible, cases were ripped, displays pulled down, all in honor of a very deliberate call & response to loot & destroy 'white spaces of affluence', but the problem cannot be reduced to such politics alone.

The protesters were honoring Melina Abdullah, the lead organizer of Black Lives Matter LA chapter, who led call & response chants of “Disrupt White Capitalism.” a concept she believes is the root cause of police violence in America

Lawsuit vs Melina Abdullah, individually, Black Lives Matter Foundation, aka BLM

Lars Elling's paintings should be seen as the beginning of a story with many paths to follow. Lars Elling is a Norwegian artist, illustrator & writer. He was born on the 30th of July 1966 in Oslo. In 192б Lars Elling graduated from the Bergen Art Academy, graphic arts department. He made his debut as an artist in 1997 with an exhibition of monkey portraits.

Lars Elling has long worked as an illustrator for various newspaper & book publishers. In collaboration with Björn Sortland, he published three picture books, several picture books with Tor Edvin Dahl, a couple adult picture books, & two small romance books with pictures & his own text. Elling has won a number of awards for these books, including two gold medals in the most beautiful book of the year category.

Around 2003, Elling switched entirely to egg-oil-based tempera painting & has held a number of solo exhibitions in Oslo, New York, and Trondheim. Elling's images often incorporate photographic & cinematic elements combined with dramatic action. Elling's paintings should be seen as the beginning of history with many ways of developing it.

His imagery evokes childhood recollections, with the possibility of disturbance & pain inscribed between the lines. In Elling's art, family is a recurring motif; familiar situations are penetrated by unexpected or unpleasant elements

My personal disgust threshold was always pretty low. All these benighted people needed to have their complacencies rattled — I was meant to take up that risk — defy the censors — search out & assault social norms —as an artist — I eventually came to see a ‘heroic transgressor ‘ mythology— which had its own assorted vanities & occlusions.

Aggression was inseparable from my personality —also  its attendant idiocies embedded within my unknowing of which lines not to cross. Treating the boundaries of less powerful people as minor annoyances made me feel like a creative genius. I measured my success in outrage generated. I was no one’s victim. Bottled-up traumatic memories had to be manumitted — sublimating aggression into art was what made me feel alive — potentially transcendent. Sometimes it was painful — so I prescribed myself curatives — looking for backdoors to a release — however — it was still possible to offend people — because offended people were generally regarded as morons. I was the rebellious, anti-establishment one — gleefully offending, extolling the virtues of everyone — disrupting the status quo.

I was overly self-aware but I didn’t at the time think about my innumerable routines, real-life episodes & experiences. It just wasn’t clear — what force caused such feelings of self-consciousness. Sometimes I felt fulfilled & stimulated by the interaction — at other times — my extra-sensory perception exacerbated personal feelings of shock, confusion, panic, euphoria, anxiety … However I draw my casualty arrows — there is no doubt — the more fun I started having — the more earnestly humorless I could speak on pedagogy of discomfort. I positioned myself always on the wrong side of exchange in the electromagnetic fields — the result — an instinctive antipathy to the world.

What’s left out of this anti-transgression story are the rewards of feeling affronted — all in good cause of course! Witness the new gatekeeper & moral entrepreneur — wielding not insignificant amounts of social power while decrying my own powerlessness. I used to know what ‘transgression’ was — but that’s not plausible anymore — maybe ‘violating boundaries’ is a more valuable enterprise!

I was angry at the world’s timid rule-followers & counted myself among the anti-prissy

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