King Poseidon here had a beard, and the beard has a story. I was too cheap and annoyed to buy an actual Halloween beard for a baby who probably wouldn't even wear it, so when we were at Value World the other day digging through the piles of sticky, grimy toys, I found an old stuffed goat with mangy hair. It was 80 cents. I bought it thinking I could remove the goat fur and turn it into a beard.
When we got home, I put Gram down for a nap and got a scalpel to remove the fur, placing the goat ceremoniously on the living room floor. Juniper---curious---sat next to me. First I cut a slit across the goat's neck, then cut one long incision down his abdomen. It was exactly how I'd seen a group of Greek peasants butcher a goat in the streets of Arachova at Orthodox Easter. Out poured a gooey concoction of wet yellow foam stuffing and Styrofoam pellets (I had sent the goat through the wash before the surgery). The guts spilled out onto the floor. It was totally Old Testament. Juniper started to cry: "But the goat is still going to be alive, right?" Then she asked me where his head was, and I held up the flopping appendage with some enthusiasm. She cried harder. After much comforting while it took another trip through the washer and dryer, the goatskin was ready to become a coiffure of the gods, the filaments of heaven:
It had a mustache originally, but there was no way he would go for it. Next year he can be Jehovah, because once styled he became an extremely angry god. This was the kind of god Jonathan Edwards used to preach about. Today he was the god that sent Ulysses and his crew tumbling out of the wreckage of their ships and into turbulent, winedark seas.
And a god who liked to poke his sister with his trident.
All I did was make her shell crown. My wife fixed the pathetic shell necklace I originally put together. She also worked several nights on those mermaid tails, trying to figure out a way to keep the fish-look while still allowing her to walk. They are really cool and I'll probably post some shots of the tails alone to flickr later to show how much work she put into them. She made the shirt as well (the color was chosen by you know who).
We went to Belle Isle this morning for these photographs. After three years of doing this, I've learned that trying to take good pictures on Halloween night is nearly impossible.
The beach was covered in goose shit, but all those swans made it kind of magical.
This morning Juniper and I were walking around downtown and I thought it would be fun to stop in Greektown, where the signage contains enough mythology to fill another one of those damn books. She saw Pegasus, and Zeus, and then she sang a song about the matchbox car she was clutching in her grubby little palm. There is a cheesy little souvenir shop across from the casino that sells the exact same wares as the shops in the Plaka or any heavily-touristed part of Greece. We stopped in to look at the shelves and shelves of mass-produced gods and goddesses. The first thing we saw was a life size statue of Athena, and when I pointed to the head of Medusa on her Aegis and said, "Look June: Medusa!" the shopkeeper angrily hurled some words at me in a thick Greek accent. "Pardon me?" I said.
"That's not Medusa! That is goddess Athena!"
"Yeah, I know, but she has Medusa on her breastplate."
"No, No, no, that's not Medusa. That is Athena."
"Yeah, but Perseus gave Medusa's head to Athena. She wore it as part of her armor. See: snakes. Medusa."
"I am sold out of Medusa."
"But. . ." I then decided against disputing it any further. After all, you should never argue with a professional.
* * * * *
I have spent the last six hours trying to get this mythology book on lulu so that I (and anyone else who wants it) can buy one. I added the text as many requested, but it was an incredible pain in the ass to make it all fit in the lulu template. Now that the work is done, I can honestly say I am very excited about this book and I think the end product will be of a much higher quality than the last one. But it may be awhile before I do another one of these.
If you are interested in purchasing a soft cover printed version of the book, click here. Again, I am not making any money on this whatsoever---this project uses artwork that was not created by me, but by generous and anonymous artists who take so many risks to bring beauty to our streets. I will never accept money for any adaptation of their work. If you buy this book, you are only paying for the costs of printing it.
I am also adding the final versions of each individual page, with text, to a flickr set here.
This one is a bit self-indulgent, and reveals more of my nature as a true dork. But as I wrote a few weeks ago, I have been telling Juniper the stories of the Greek myths. And she loves them. Perhaps the greatest thing about staying home with her is that I control what culture she is exposed to. She is not in some daycare watching a Diego video in constant loop or listening to other little girls talk about Disney princesses and all that. There is a limited window where I can tell her what stories I want to tell her, and where she will beg to hear of Icarus, and Medusa, and Athena with her owl. It's not that I believe this will somehow make her smarter than some aficionado of Dora the Explorer, it's that I hate Diego and Dora and I am selfish. And I enjoy these stories myself unencumbered by the pressures of the academy. I don't have to find some deeper meaning, or translate anything. I can just enjoy these stories with her on a purely childlike level, like I did when I was young. That pure enjoyment was the whole reason I went into studying them in the first place (though the truly-geeky classics nerd in me may whip out a version of this book with the original Greek alphabet---finding images for the letters that did not exist then was kind of challenging). This book is designed to be a jumping-off point for the telling of myths.
I went with the graffiti again, not just because I was able to find so many street art images with scenes from classical mythology, but because I liked the idea of seeing myths not only explicitly in the art of modern city streets, but sometimes implied from the context. In ancient Rome, the walls in the city were covered in graffiti, public art, and images from history and mythology. So, it seems, are our cities, if you look for it.
A is for Athena, the goddess of wisdomB is for Bellerophon, who tamed Pegasus
C is for Cassandra of Troy, the seer
D is for Dionysus, the god of pleasure
E is for Echidna of the Snakes, the mother of all monstersF is for the Furies, who tormented Orestes
G is for the Griffins of Scythia, who guarded gold
H is for Helen of Sparta, whose face launched a thousand ships
I is for Icarus, who flew too highJ is for Janus, the god of doorways and change
K is for Kalypso, who kept Ulysses too long
L is for Leda, who loved a swan
M is for Medusa, whose hair was made of snakesN is for Narcissus, who loved his own reflection
O is for Orpheus, the father of songs
P is for Polyphemos, the Cyclops
Q is for Queen Penthesilea of the Amazons, the only match for AchillesR is for Rage, the rage of Achilles that sent so many Greeks do their doom
S is for Sisyphus, pushing his boulder uphill
T is for Theseus, who slew the Minotaur
U is for UlyssesV is for Venus, the goddess of love
W is for the Wiles of Ulysses, who designed the Trojan Horse
X is for Sphinx, who told riddles
If there is any interest, I'll update this later with a link to a lulu site where it will be available at cost just like the last one. I have two more of these graffiti alphabet books (animals and objects) that I am working on, both of which will be far more accessible than this one.
