Archives | Links Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

Nov. 23

This is a Cecily Brown painting. Big and raunchy.

Help. SOS. Fly the flag upside down. My blog is possessed. The Voodoo movie, the first entry for November, has taken over. Someone has stuck pins in it, chanted incantations.

Suddenly, it's out of control. It's bad enough that for the last few weeks it has been acting berserk. You pulled it up on Safari and it was pretty good. You pulled it up on Netscape or Explorer and it needed a chiropractor to straighten out its spine.

But now no matter where you pull it up its gone tall and anorexic. It's become the runway fashion model's version of thin. The column width. That's what I'm talking about. I set it wide when I'm editing the page on Contribute. It shows up skinnier than ever.

I'm tossing my hands up. We're headed for Groton, Mass., to have Thanksgiving with Babbie's brother Pete and his wife Zoa and two dozen assorted members of the family. The last count I heard was 28. We always have a wonderful time.

So the blog and its bewildering problems is just going to be put away for a couple days. Maybe when I open it again, the spell will have been lifted and it will magically restore itself.

Meanwhile, I think I'm going to take the train into Boston Friday and take a look at the Cecily Brown show at the MFA. She says her works are "lush frenetic orgies of potent color, at once vulgar and subtle." From a distance, the tangles of sucking and banging bodies disperse into baroque swells of tumescent lust. That last sentence isn't mine. I can't remember who I lifted it from. But that sums it up pretty well. The only thing is, a lot of times when I'm looking at her stuff, I can't spot the sucking and the banging. I was a witness at the orgy at Gagosian in Manhattan and I didn't see a thing.

And maybe I'll wander out and take a look at the exterior of the new Institute of Contemporary Art on the waterfront. It's going to open Dec. 10. Pretty dramatic. They don't know it yet, but someday I'm going to have a show there.

Nov. 21

Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937

This is Guernica. The picture I showed you on Nov. 5 is not. That's embarrassing and dumb. Obviously I should have know it wasn't Picasso's powerful anti-war painting when I pulled it off Google.

The picture I used apparently was done by a guy named Sioux 23 and posted in a blog by Wizznuttz. The painting depicting the agony of a small Spanish town bombed by the Germans and Italians was doctored as a comment on the infamous brawl at the the Detroit Pistons-Indiana Pacers game two years ago.

You remember the one. The Pacer's bad boy, Ron Artest, after an altercation on the court lay down on the scorer's table mockng another player until a fan tossed a beer on him. Then Artest bounded into the stands, threw some punches and was punched by a fan. All hell broke loose.

To see Sioux 23's version in all its glory, and it was cleverly done, go to http://www.wizznutzz.com/guernica.html. Here's how the Misanthrope on the blog, Toner Mishap, described the transformation of the painting at the time. "The famous painting shows a fleeing woman who is desperately trying to flee the bombing, her body twisted and arms hanging uselessly. The parody replaces the fleeing woman with a fleeing fan. A flying chair replaces Picasso’s light; a wounded horse is now wearing an Indiana Pacers jersey; a figure with a lamp is transformed into a fist slugging the horse in the jersey."

So how did I foul it up? I was oblivious until the mistake was pointed out by my son-in-law, Paul Nichols. Maybe I should be suspended for the rest of the season like Artest was.

Nov. 19

Dresden Mon Amour, 68" x 46", Oil, Copper, Doll

I pulled the painting, which I'm calling Dresden Mon Amour, outside today to see if I could get a better shot than the one I posted November 17. Looking at that one blinds you.

But before I moved it into place to shoot, I decided to repaint the black background and brought some paint outside. After days of highs in the 60s, it was about 40.

"Do you think the paint will freeze?" Babbie quipped as I smeared my paint and wax mixture on with a pallet knife.

"No, but I may," I said. My hands were cold. What a wimp.

Then I wrestled the painting out of the "pit" and up the stairs to the dining room deck. I've got to remember to always build a cross bar into my big stretchers. It makes carrying them around a lot easier, especially when the paint is still wet and you can't handle it from the front. If you do you smear the edges with you hands and run the danger of kneeing the wet paint too. Then you have to rework it.

I leaned it against the French doors, tied it to the door handle and set up the tripod. After I shot a couple frames, the sun came out and I shot some more. At one point the camera was casting a shadow across the painting so I had to move the tripod down the steps. To compensate for the lower camera angle, I tilted the top of the painting forward. That worked.

While I was processing the shots in the computer, a thin cloud crossed the sun, toning down the light. I went out and shot some more. The sun was low and would set in a half hour. But I got the best shots of the day and these are from that last bunch. For the first time, the camera was picking up the variations in the black background.

I didn't get any more work done on painting No. 5 in the series today. I did print out some pictures of World War II incendiary bombs. Haven't decided whether to add a bomb to No. 5 or not. And I haven't even started painting No. 6 or decided which old painting to sacrifice for No. 7.

This evening Babbie and I drove to North Adams to look at shows at the Eclipse Mill and the Windsor Mill. For a Christmas present, I bought a photo of a cat that made her smile. It was shot by Kelly Lee, who has an Eclipse studio. He had a lot of nice shots. One of a restaurant on the brink of a precipice in Italy invited you to eat and invited vertigo as well.

Nov. 17, 2006

Dresden, Mon Amour 68" x 46", Oil on Canvas , Copper, Doll

Here's the full painting from which the Nov. 15 detail was taken. Sorry there's so much glare. Makes it hard to look at.

I always seem to have problems lighting the large paintings to photograph them. This one may have to be reshot in natural light. The rectangles each consist of two layers of canvas gessoed to a sheet of cardboard. I riveted these panels to the main canvas.

I dripped on the hieroglyphics and then painted the rectangles. Then I mixed paint and wax medium together to do the rest of the canvas.

You've probably noticed the rectangles are a little cockeyed. That wasn't intentional with the bottom one, which I riveted first. But since that had set the tone, the top one was on purpose.

This is another painted-over piece, as is the whole Dresden series so far. Originally it was an acrylic portrait done with a sponge. I did it at Berkshire Community College about 1998. I used that painting as the basis for another painting in 2002, adding some collaged elements. This time I started out painting a moderately accurate map of Dresden over the head. After fooling around with that for a while, I decided to change course and put in the rectangles.

I cut the hole out of the top rectangle to frame the model's closed eye. But that didn't look too good so I put in the doll head.

I've been working on another of the Dresden paintings at the same time. It's been so warm here I was able to drag it outside to work on it in what we call the "pit" yesterday.

It helped because I was using pours in which the paint was mixed with a medium composed of turpentine, Dammar varnish and stand oil.

It is pretty potent smelling stuff. It makes me woozy sometimes. Once when I used it in the studio, the fumes seeped upstairs. It was so bad Babbie and I had to abandon ship and go out for dinner.

Nov. 15, 2006

This is one of the doll heads I bought last year from Cara. For the first time I am using one in a painting.

What you're looking at is a detail of one of the Dresden firebombing paintings I'm working on. I had been thinking of doing a Dresden series ever since Cara, who owns Twin Hearts on North Street, showed me the heads more then a year ago. She told me they had been excavated from a bombed-out doll factory in Germany. And on the neck it says "Made in Germany." And as you can see, the doll has been through some trauma. She is discolored in places and is cracked in two locations. I bought nine of them.

Yesterday cut a hole in the canvas, built a crude copper container to fit in the hole and suspended the head inside. Although she has teeth, there are no eyes. They hadn't been installed yet. The back of her head is open. I guess this hole was to allow works to put the eyes in. There are small holes on the sides and at the top of her head. I assume they were for attaching her hair. I used the top hole to suspend her in the copper container. Look at the way the light bouncing off the copper reflects on the side of her head in this photo. It's quite beautiful. Copper is great stuff. Her porcelain head is much tougher than I would have imagined. While I was working on installing the head, it fell from its place almost four feet up on the painting and hit the floor. I was afraid to look. But there was no damage.

I thought this World War II artifact was appropriate for the painting because it can stand in for the victims of the firebombing. Many of them were children. And the doll itself may be a survivor of Dresden, a city famous for its porcelain.

While this is the first time I have actually used one of the heads in a painting, I have used casts I made of one of the heads in my first firebombing painting. (See the Nov. 7 entry.)

I'll show you the current painting as soon as I'm finished with it, which should be any day now.

Nov. 13, 2006

Is the police chief, Anthony Riello, about to arrest the county planner, Nat Karns, who is on the right? At the left, in profile, is another portrait of the artist as an old man.

A walk on the wild side. Well not really. While there have been shootings, drug deals and prostitution in this neighborhood, things have gotten a lot better. The neighborhood? The upper reaches of the North Street business district and environs. The area between Berkshire Medical Center and the Senior Center.

This photo was taken by Jonathan Levine and appeared in his paper, the Pittsfield Gazette, last week. It may look like Police Chief Anthony Riello is about to arrest Nat Karns. But we were having good natured exchanges about the neighborhood, nocturnal safety there and how the new Master Plan we are working on might make things better.

When we were on Maplewood, we were reminded that the police have been cracking down on prostitution there by arresting Johns. The police chief, Anthony Riello, called the streetwalkers crack whores. It's a street where an old historic building has been converted into very nice condos. There's a little culture clash between the new inhabitants and the old, but it may be more theoretical than actual.

I think the developer, Beth Pearson, was really brave to undertake the conversion. The building, across from St. Joseph's High, is on the edge of the drug zone. Nearby one kid killed another kid outside the A-Mart a couple years ago. Something happened a few years ago on Kent Avenue, also nearby. I can't remember if it was a big drug raid or a murder. Maybe both

But this is all in the past, the chief said. This part of the downtown is now one of the safest neighborhoods in the city. That's good to know.

Ms. Pearson cut her redevelopment teeth by fixing up an old apartment building on the new Center Street extension. The chief said before she stepped in it was a teaming crack house that his force had raided.

The neighborhood is transforming. On North Street, another building is being converted to condos. The Barrington Stage, the respected summer theater company, moved into the old Paris Cinema. And a classy restaurant, Spice, opened.

On Friday I called Spice to make reservations for four for Saturday evening. They were booked. I called my favorite restaurant, Tratoria Rustica. They couldn't take us either. At the other end of the street, Audra McDonald was singing at the Colonial, the beautifully restored theater on South Street. We went to Lenox to eat. No trouble getting a reservation at one of its best restaurants.

Pittsfield, down so long down was starting to look like up to me, is getting hot.

Anyway, Barbara showed the photo in the Gazette to Riley, our granddaughter.

"Look, Riley, you're grandfather's underwear is showing in the picture," Babbie said, pointing to the white line below my jacket.

Riley, who just turned 7, thought that was hysterically funny.

Made me think of the ditty: "I see London, I see France, I see someone's underpants."

Actually, it was my sweater peaking out from underneath the coat. You won't sell that to Riley and Babbie. Underwear makes a much better story.

(For some mysterious reason, my blog is looking different ways on different browsers. It's pretty much as it's supposed to be on Safari. But on Internet Explorer and Netscape, it looks like I was drunk when I laid it out. At least that's the way it looks when I call it up on them. Let me know what's happening on your computer. Thanks. Grier)

Nov. 11, 2006

Gustave Klimt paintings have been selling like mad at art world-gone-insane prices. Five Klimts stolen by the Nazis were returned to the original owner's niece this year and put up for sale.

This 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer sold in June for $135 million - more than anyone had ever paid for a painting before. The buyer was the cosmetics magnate, Ronald Lauder.

The price eclipsed the previous record, $104.1 million paid for Picasso's 1905 "Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice)" in 2004.

Klimt didn't hold the record price long. Last week David Geffen sold Jackson Pollock's "No. 5, 1948" for $140 million.

Klimts were on the auction block again this week. Another portrait of Ms. Block-Bauer sold for $87.9 million. Three other Klimts also brought multi-million prices at auction at Christie's.

I emailed Joe Goodwin, a Pittsfield artist, about the transaction.

"Too bad he's dead and can't get that for the next one!," Joe said.

All the Klimts were originally in the collection of the turn-of-the century sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and his wife, Adele, a prominent hostess. In January, an arbitration court ruled that the paintings had been improperly seized when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938.

They were then handed over to Mrs. Bloch-Bauer's niece, Maria Altmann of Los Angeles. The 90-year-old woman watched this week's sale from a sky box at Christie’s.

The painting will be a centerpiece in Ronald Lauder’s collection for his Neue Gallerie, a small New York museum. For years he has been working to recover Jewish-owned art, mostly from Germany and Austria, that had been confiscated or looted by the Nazi government. Lauder worked towards this goal as the US ambassador to Austria, as a member of the “World Jewish Restitution Organization", and as a member of a Clinton commission to examine cases of Nazi looting. (The portrait embedded in this paragraph is Adele Bloch=Bauer II, the one that sold this week.)

For most of the last 60 years the portrait, has hung in the Austrian Gallery in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna near "The Kiss," another gold-flecked Klimt masterpiece of the Art Nouveau era.

Mrs. Bloch-Bauer died of meningitis in 1925 at 43. In her will she requested that the painting and the four other Klimts be left to Austria upon her husband's death. But when Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, Mr. Bloch-Bauer fled, leaving all of his possessions behind. The Nazi government confiscated his property, placed three of the paintings in the Austrian Gallery and sold the rest.

Lauder, who had also bid unsuccessfully on the other portrait of Adele, said the one he did obtain is his museum’s "Mona Lisa”.

Nov. 9, 2006

Grier Horner, Dresden 3, 61"x49", 2006

This is the third in the firebombing series. I haven't named it yet. Like the second it is collage. But this time the cutout material , which is in shades of gold, is canvas instead of paper. Again there are hieroglyphics, but this time only on the gold pieces.

One of the terrible images of Dresden after the firebombing was the corpses piled in mounds, and of streets littered with bodies before they were stacked up. Ironically, these people killed by fire were disposed of by fire. The mounds were simply burned.

At first the sky in the painting was blue. Then I made it gray, thinking that the city would be in a shroud of smoke. And then I changed it to this more ominous color. The poet William Butler Yeats wrote:

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"

 

Certainly in Dresden innocence was drowned.

A man named Lothar Metzger (shown here with his older sister during WWII) wrote in 1999 how he, his mother, and four sisters - 13, 5 and 5-month-old twins - frantically sought refuge from the firestorm:

"We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from."

People assisting refuges from a burning cellar handed out the basket in which the twins were being carried. In the mayhem the twins were lost and the family never saw them again.

Lothar turned 10 during the disaster. His gift was a piece of sausage his mother begged from the Red Cross.

Nov. 7, 2006

Map of Dresden 80"x44"

This is the second Dresden firebombing painting. Again, it is over an old painting, this time from 1998. It was the bottom half of a two-piece portrait of Anita in a red velvet gown.

Originally it was pastel on paper. Then I glued the paper to stretched canvas and coated the pastel with Damar varnish. This section carried her shoulders, outstretched arms and chest. She was in the Kate Winslet pose at the bow on the Titanic.

Her head and neck were on the second panel. I like that picture but it's going to get painted over too.

Nov. 5 I told you something about the horror of the incendiary bombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1945 by the British and United States. An estimated 40,000 were killed, mainly women, children and old men. There were no real military targets there. The idea was to strike terror and demoralize the enemy to end the war.

Two days ago I wrote about the horror of Dresden. The following is part of an account the Associate Press wrote on the 60th anniversary of the bombing:

"Nazi authorities failed to provide adequate air raid shelters for the city, which was crowded with refugees. That left people cowering in basements where many were asphyxiated or buried by collapsing buildings. The town's anti-aircraft guns had been removed for use against the approaching Soviets, letting the bomber crews take undisturbed and deadly aim, at just past 10 p.m.

"The fire made superheated air rise rapidly, creating a vacuum at ground level that produced winds strong enough to uproot trees and suck people into the flames. Some who managed to get through the blinding sparks and fiery debris staggered into the Grosser Garden park, where many were killed by a second bomber wave at 1:30 a.m. on Feb. 14, Ash Wednesday.

"A third wave - this time of U.S. bombers - came just after noon. Thirteen square miles were turned into smoking rubble.

For days afterward, cleanup workers burned bodies in heaps on the Altmarkt square."

Rudi Warnatsch, who was 13 at the time, told the AP of taking refuge with his mother and 12-year-old sister in the cellar of their building. When the building started shaking, they escaped through a window. But it was hell on the street.

"The firestorm blocked everything. Suddenly, an entire building collapsed. I hoped that my mother had managed to make it past," Warnatsch said.

Unable to find her or his sister, he crawled into a cellar and collapsed from exhaustion. Hours later, rescuers pulled him out of the rubble.

His mother's body was found two weeks afterward. His sister's was never found, even though he said his mother "never let go of her hand." His brother, 16, was killed by falling debris as he went to report for duty at an air-raid warning station.

After the fires died out many were found unscathed in their cellars, dead of asphyxiation. Others died of the heat. It was not pretty.

The first picture inserted in the body text is a detail of the painting. It rectangle in the center represents Grosser Garden park. Many took refuge there only to be killed by the next wave of aircraft dropping incendiary bombs. The photo shows German soldier among the corpses in the street in the aftermath of the bombing.

 

Nov.5, 2006

Feuersturm, 76" x 50", oil on canvas, 2006, Detail below.

This is the first of the Dresden firebombing paintings. It is painted over an older piece. I have three more in various stages of completion and will be starting more. I'll show them to you as the series progresses.

The firebombing of Dresden, Germany, was one of a series of raids by America and British forces late in the World War II targeting civilians. The object was to scare the hell out of the enemy and break its morale to hasten the end of the war, reducing Allied casualties in the process. The same thinking went into dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The shock and awe of the atomic blasts were so great that they largely overshadowed the horror of burning vast numbers of humans to death - most of the women, children and old men.

The route to these Dresden paintings was circuitous. A year ago I had been thinking of using doll heads in the Scarlet Letter series. I was telling Mary Lou at Miller Supply about it and she told me that Cara up at Twin Hearts Hand Works on North Street had some heads from a bombed-out German factory.

Cara, the owner, showed me the porcelin heads. She said they in fact had been extracted from the ruins of a factory. She did not know from which city. But in my mind it was Dresden.

I bought nine of the heads last year. I kept trying to figure out how to use them. I knew it had to be in some anti-war way. I started looking up stuff on the internet this year about the Dresden firebombing. And in the last six weeks started on the paintings. At the bottom of this one, the first in the series, I built a small copper box, inserted it in a hole in the painting and filled it with copies I had made of one of the doll's heads. The picture here is one of the originals.

Britain and America weren't the first nations to bomb civilian populations on purpose. The three-hour German raid on Guernica, a Basque village in Spain in 1937, set the stage. Generalisimo Franco, who led the right-wing rebellion against the left-wing government of Spain, invited Germany and Italy to aide his side.

Waves of German bombers dropped high explosive and incendiary bombs. Townspeople were straffed as they fled. The town burned for three days and 1,600 civilians were killed or wounded. Picasso commemorated the attrocity in his famous anti-war painting, Guernica.

Not long after the Spanish Civil War ended with Franco's victory, WWII broke out. Eventually, both sides in that conflict would bomb civilians, starting with the German Blitz against England and the heavy bombing of Rotterdam.

Dresden was the culmination of years of bombing raids on German cities by British and American bombers. Cities such as Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin, Pforzheim, Kassel and dozens more had already been destroyed.

But it was the dawn of an incendiary phase that would rain death on Germany and Japan. By 1943, the US government had decided fire would be more effective against cities than traditional bombs alone. So a German imigrant architect was hired to build exact duplicates of German houses in the Dugway Proving Ground in the Utah desert.

The technique developed was used against Dresden. First highly explosive bombs were dropped to blow out windows, break open roofs and topple walls. Next, tens of thousands of small incendiaries and phosphorous bombs were scattered over the city, thus starting hundreds of small fires that caught quickly due to the drafts blowing through the openings created by the explosives.

The hundreds of fires would eventually join to form one raging inferno, a so-called "Feuersturm" (firestorm). "Quite literally a tornado of fire, this phenomenon created a huge outdoor blast furnace, containing winds of up to 240 km/h (150 mph) and reaching temperatures of 800°C (1,500°F)..." according to Wicipedia, the online encyclopedia.

The German publication Der Spiegel recently estimated 40,000 people died in the Dresden firebombing. The city had been untouched until that point in the war. Because the teenagers and men were off fighting, most of the victims were women, children and old men. The city of 650,000, called Florence on the Elbe, had few targets of traditional military significance. Because it was unscathed, Germany had many hospitals there. Refugees had spilled into the city. Kurt Vonnegut was among the captured American soldiers held there. His novel Slaughterhouse-Five sprung from that experience.

Another eyewitness, Margaret Freyer, said, "To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire."

British Air Chief Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris famously said of the Germans "They have sowed the wind and so shall they reap the whirlwind."

They did. And so did the Japanese. In the firebombing of Tokyo alone an estimated 100,000 died. And as Vonnegut would intone every time he mentioned death in Slaughterhouse-Five, "And so it goes."

Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937

 

Nov. 1 , 2006

The night before Halloween, Babbie and I watched "I Walked with a Zombie" on Turner Classic Movies. For me it brought back a lot of memories.

I saw it in 1943 when we were living in Parkchester, a large apartment complex in the Bronx. My father was with the Army Air Corps (it was during World War II) and my sister Britt were holding down the home front with our mother.

My mother was a piece of work. And I say that with a great love and respect. I'll have to write about her sometime. Anyway, she gave me a lot of freedom. At seven, I was allowed to go to a neighborhood movie house by myself on Saturday afternoons. I would sit through the double features and sometimes stay for the replay of the first movie.

One of those wonderful Saturday's in the movies, I saw "I Walked with a Zombie." My mother must not have checked what was playing. The movie scarred me. I had nightmares for a long time after that.

Anyway, there it was on TV. Babbie had picked it because of its appropriateness for Halloween. I told her about seeing it and how frightening it was. What we saw was rather elegant, rather beautiful.

"This isn't very scary," Babbie told me. "I don't see why you were so scared."

"You would've been if you were a second grader sitting in the movie all by yourself," I said.

Afterwards, I went to Google and looked it up. It's something of a cult film. Frances Dee, the star, made more than 54 movies. She was very good in this thing, gave it a grounding it wouldn't have had otherwise.

In 2003, a year before her death at 94, she told The Boston Globe during a showing of the film. "I would turn away every time I said it. The reason I did the movie was that they offered me a sum that could buy my mother a new car. We got her the car - and it turned out to be a cult kind of picture."

"Zombie" has been described as director Jacques Tourneur's stylized, low-budget thriller. It's final draft was written by the producer, Val Lewton, who told the crew one day they were going to make a West Indies version of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It turned out to be a very classy movie. The Bronx wasn't the only place I went to the movies alone. My mother let me go in to Niagara Falls once on the bus. At that point we were living with her sister Clarinda in Lewiston about 10 miles away. This time the movie was more appropriate, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," I think.

When the show was over, I was supposed to catch the Lewiston bus from the stop close to the theater. I waited a long time. Bus after bus pulled up. But none seemed to be the right one. By that time it was getting dark. So I decided I better walk home. (A typical male, even then I couldn't ask for directions.) I walked for what must have been an hour or two - it seemed forever - and I was scared this time too as I moved through the city into suburban streets and out into the farm fields. Then a man stopped and gave me a ride. He drove me to Lewiston. What a kind guy. Everyone was pretty relieved when I showed up.

How old was I then? I think I was still seven. We lived with Clarinda twice - once for the second half of second grade and once for part of fifth grade. So it was one or the other. But my mother wasn't with us in the fifth grade visit. And Clarinda wouldn't have let me do it on my own. That's why I think it was the same year as "Zombie."

(The top photo shows Christine Gordon as the Zombie-like woman who Frances Dee, center, takes to a voodoo ritual in hopes of curing. Here they encounter the zombie gatekeeper, Darby Jones. The other shot is Dee, an extraordinarily handsome actor.)