NorsePlay.

  " ... ladies beware the stickies in our hair. " As I recently went out for buffalo wings, only to wayyyyy later look in the mirror to notice tiger splotches of orange and some blue cheese dressing in my goatee, I thought of this behind-the-scenes photo of Harald & Halfdan unable to eat ice cream without their beards catching an unfair share of it by unavoidable default. The English would complain about the fastidious Vikings' dress horse & silver-clad ways out-gaming them with their own ladies, characterized by this quote credited to the Abbot of St. Albans: "[...]  thanks to their habit of combing their hair every day, of bathing every Saturday and regularly changing their clothes, were able to undermine the virtue of married women and even seduce the daughters of nobles to be their mistresses. " And yet the above photo's some proof of looking less than A-game when feasting despite how careful groomed a Freyrsman you are. (This also might've m...

While at The Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures in Tucson, I ran across some curious Barbie Doll scale mythology-based creations by maker George S. Stuart : Taking more inspiration from Wagner's Ring Cycle , there's something uncanny & overexpressed about how the figures are depicted, which is performatively operatic , and this interpretation has alot to say about the endurance of Germanic Romanticism & Victorian ideas , and their specific reception with this artist. One could say the level of immodest reveal here (and hey, they're The Gods, no shame in their game) has more on-loan from Classical  statuary , also hearkens to the cloth-clad illustrations of Lorenz Frølich. Sure, you can't help but look at the Freyr's legs, but also note his vest designs! This might be the very moment his gives his sword away for the love of  Gerðr . And Odin brings new meaning to the term "skyclad". Oddly NorsePlay has featured this cosmic garb on the All-Fath...

This week Netflix premieres this promising looking animated Norse Mythology inspired show, Twilight Of The Gods . From creator/director Jay Oliva & co-director Zack Snyder, with the voice talent of Sylvia Hoeks (replicant fatale Luv in Blade Runner 2049 ), there's an intense revenge on the Gods story in the offing. Much like Sony's God Of War games, or Brin's The Life Eaters , the narrative flips the Norse Gods into the role of antagonists. While the Gods in the Norse Lore aren't beholden to the post-Conversion ideas of "good", the needle within entertainment sometime swings quite past a justifiable/explicable grey in turning them into straight-out villains that they certainly aren't, but I love both the aforementioned properties, and given how stirring the above preview looks I want to totally give this new NorsePlay a watch. #     #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'...

    In the some cosmological depictions of Yggdrasil, there's an awkward stretching weirdness in order to make the World Tree's roots reach up or around to get to Asgard , Jotunheim , and Niflheim. Franz Stassen's 1920 CE illustration of Yggdrasil from Hans von Wolzogen's Die Edda  has instead turned Yggdrasil into a monumental straddler, majestically arching over and into its three foundational worlds. This places those worlds level & below the axial trunk, here with Niflheim in the right foreground (with destructive Níðhöggr camped on that root), Jotunheim's tall mountains at left, and the last root reaching into Asgard at the back, though we maybe can see its gargantuan godly halls rising through the branches above. This makes for a more tree-centric & structurally elegant arrangement in some respects. Stassen was also noted for his illustrations in Wagner's Ring. If we stop to consider Yggdrasil being organic, subject to external forces, and change...

I recently saw an episode of Buck Rogers with the winsome Jamie Lee Curtis & the flyting-winning Gil Gerard being hunted down by a deadly android after a prison escape. I brought it up to an expert cinephile friend to ask if just maybe James Cameron might've seen this 1979 CE BR episode before making The Terminator 1984 CE. He then tells me Harlan Ellison got a settlement from Orion Pictures for The Terminator 's alleged plagiarism of his script on the Soldier 1964 CE episode of The Outer Limits , which Ellison adapted from his own short story  Soldier From Tomorrow (1957 CE). In The Tale Of Thorleif The Earl's Poet  ( Þorleifs þáttr jarlsskálds ), events which happen ~990 CE and written down ~1300 CE, the earl constructs a magical driftwood robot assassin named Thorgard who goes relentlessly from Norway all the way to Iceland to kill a guy at the crowded national meeting in Thingvellir. Thorgard strikes his fatal blow, but not before his mark hits Thorgard...