Just in case you may have thought my fixations with Citroën 2CVs was a recent affectation, I promise you this is not the case, and I realized I had a bit of visual evidence to back this up. In painting form! And, sort of silly, faux-midieval painting form! It’s a painting I made, damn, about 20 years ago for a little art show in LA, and it’s been hanging in my basement. I kind of forgot about it until it caught my eye the other day and I realized oh yeah, I painted a 2CV in this thing!
So, since I need a Cold Start every single weekday morning until the sun finally fizzles out and we have to set the moon on fire, I figured why not talk about this weird Citroën-including painting? We can also branch out into medieval art and Sam Kinison. It’ll make sense.
First, I guess I should show the whole painting, and give it a bit of explanation. I can’t remember the theme of the show, but for whatever reason I decided I wanted to mimic the form of a middle-ages annunciation painting, only in this case, instead of an angel announcing the birth of Christ to Mary, it’s the ghost of Sam Kinison warning a drunk driver:
Are you familiar with the whole annunciation painting concept? Basically, they’re paintings (or illustrations or whatever) that show the moment when the angel Gabriel takes a business trip down to Earth to let Mary, as in the Virgin, know that, incredibly, she’s been knocked up. And will have a child who will become the Christ! It’s a pretty intense moment.
And yet, in a lot of these paintings and drawings from between, say, 1100 and 1400 or so, the participants in this incredibly important moment always look so … bored? For example, here’s one from the 1200s:
Everyone is so calm. Mary has her hand politely on her chest, all like “oh, me? The child of God is in my womb? How about that.” Even the angel’s announcement scroll is laying there all flaccid.
Speaking of scrolls, I do like how sometimes the scroll becomes a sort of floating proto-speech balloon, something I replicated in my silly painting. The painting above, from Silesia (an area around Southwestern Poland, with bits of Germany and the Czech Republic), from an anonymous painter around 1500, uses this scroll-as-speech balloon thing. It’s rendered in a much more naturalistic style (though the perspective is still medieval-wonky), but everyone is equally and strangely expressionless.
Also, note that these annunciation paintings are all anachronistic in setting; there’s no attempt to make the annunciation scene look like it took place when it did, sometime just around nine months prior to, let’s see, zero BCE. The clothes and interiors and objects just look like whatever was around when the painter was around. It’d be like if there was an annunciation painting now that showed Mary wearing athlesiure, scrolling on her iPhone outside a Starbucks as the Angel Gabriel rolls up in a Toyota RAV4 to let her know that, hey, you’re gonna be a mom.
There’s another scroll-text balloon!
So, I can’t remember exactly why I wanted to do some interpretation of an annunciation painting, and I can’t remember why I decided to translate it into the ghost of Sam Kinison, who was killed by a drunk driver, warning some 2CV owner not to drive drunk themselves? Maybe it had something to do with the theme of the show?
I do know I wanted to try and mimic the crude medieval sort of look and feel, like illuminated-manuscript-style. There’s a certain way faces and hands looked, the way trees and plant life would get stylized, the decorative border elements, all that. I wanted to play with all that, for some reason.
I wanted to include a caption to make it have that illuminated manuscript-ish feeling, and while Latin would be ideal, I thought Pig Latin would be funnier. In case you can’t read Porcinelatin, that caption, “ethay ohstgay ofay SAM KINISON arningway ethay unkdray iverdray” translates to “the ghost of Sam Kinison warning the drunk driver.”
Why did I pick Sam Kinison? I mean, he was killed by a drunk driver, so there’s that. And he had a background as a preacher, so there’s the sort of religious element. In case you don’t remember him, he was a very shouty comedian who had a surge of popularity in the early 1980s. Here’s a clip of him from his appearance in Rodney Dangerfield’s 1986 banger of a movie, Back to School:
Kinison was known for that raw, feral screaming more than anything else. Honestly, I never thought he was all that good as a comic; he absolutely had stage presence and a powerful hook and passion, which is great, but his jokes themselves weren’t particularly funny, really, and he was just kind of a, well, dick.
Being a dick is absolutely an effective way to be a comic, but in hindsight, looking at some of his bits about starving people, for example, and making the joke on them just doesn’t feel especially funny. I guess at the time we laughed from the shock value, but beyond that? I’m not sure. There are comics who can back up being a dick by being really fucking funny, I’m just not sure Kinison ever quite got there.
Anyway, his death was still tragic, of course, and for some reason he seemed like a good angelic agent to get people to not drink and drive. I’m sure if Sam Kinison appeared, hovering six feet off the ground, screaming at me to drop the keys while I drunkenly fumbled with the lock, I’d probably reconsider all sorts of decisions.
As far as my rendering of the 2CV goes, I think I chubbied it up a little too much. And those tires are way too chonky for a 2CV. I think my Beetle-drawing habits are also kind of evident there, as it has sort of more Beetle-like proportions.
But still, I was going for a sort of stilted, monk-in-an-abbey kind of stylized look, and I think it has that?
No one bought the painting at the show, as you probably guessed, seeing as how I still have it after all these years. I guess archaic-looking paintings of floating dead comedians and Citroëns on cut wood just weren’t what the market wanted back then?
Top graphic image: Jason Torchinsky, obviously
You can’t just tease us with the description, I expect a follow-up article with this painting.
If the wood panel was properly pretreated with the stapling of black velvet, Then we’d be looking at a true masterpiece.
I was hoping the guy standing by the car was the comedian and that you had some delightful news about the world’s lack of Adam Sandler.
I thought the same thing…
“Adam Sandler was still alive last time I looked!”
And now a portion of our Netflix subscription goes directly to his even less talented daughter.
She’s still young. She has time to find a handicap to mock and build a career on.
Surely being related to Adam Sandler counts as a handicap?
My only critique of your wonderful artwork is that to make it more medieval in its appearance you should, apparently, provide your people with GIGANTIC foreheads.
Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads.
I just want a rock to wind a piece of string around
sometime just around nine months prior to, let’s see, zero BCE.
Weirdly enough, there is no zero BCE. 1 BCE is immediately followed by 1 AD. The calendar system was put together by people using Roman numerals, which had no concept of zero, so we’re left with this bizarre quirk for historical reasons.
Life in Rome was always an X-X sum game.
Jason, it sounds like it’s time to get your paintbrushes out again…
So glad you remembered, Torch.
Scene: ANTIQUES ROADSHOW – Charlotte, NC
[Appraiser examines the piece, turning it over carefully]
“Well, this is quite something. What we have here is a mixed-media panel painting, acrylic on wood, it appears executed in a deliberately archaizing style. The artist, signed here as ‘Torch,’ has done something genuinely clever. This is a modern annunciation painting, a genre with roots going back to the 13th century, but rendered in a thoroughly contemporary vernacular.
The iconographic program is immediately legible to anyone familiar with the tradition, your angelic messenger descending in divine light, your scroll-as-speech-balloon, your decorative border work mimicking manuscript illumination. Technically, the artist has done their homework. The stylized trees, the flattened perspective, the stiff expressionless faces, that’s not incompetence, that’s intentional medievalism.
Now, the twist, and this is where it gets fun, the Angel Gabriel has been replaced by the ghost of comedian Sam Kinison, who was tragically killed by a drunk driver in 1992, warning a man beside a Citroën 2CV not to drive drunk. The caption is rendered in Pig Latin rather than Church Latin, which I think shows a real wit.
Is it worth anything? In the current folk art and outsider art market, a piece this conceptually layered and technically accomplished – honestly, I’d put this somewhere between $800 and $1,400. But I suspect you’re not selling it.”
Bravo. I appreciate it when the comment section turns to fan fiction.
GOLD
If this isn’t COTD I’ll eat my acrylic paints.
“Here we have a person’s esophagus and stomach that was recently painted with acrylic paints. We can’t show you what this looks like, but you have to trust us that it likely looks like a Jackson Pollock piece.
For the true connoisseur of this piece, they would obviously need to wait for the person’s passing for them to acquire this.
Is it worth anything? In pristine state, maybe $500 to $1500. But after years of reading The Autopian and drinking, probably $50.”
It probably won’t be a long wait if he continues noshing on acrylic paint.
US or Canadian?
So much potential for more of these… Bill Hicks warning me not to smoke, Mitch Hedberg telling me I should do drugs even though he still does them in heaven, Andy Kaufman telling me something he totally made up to get me to stop doing something I should still be able to do, Ralphie May telling me to watch my diet, Milton Berle telling me not to get old…
None of that beats the horror of Vincent Price just showing up out of nowhere, pointing at you, and laughing his laugh from the end of Thriller.
Welp, no afternoon nap for me today!!
Speaking of 2CVs and dead comedians, my mother told me once that she nearly ran over Jimmy Durante in her 2CV back in the day.
Is that how he…kicked the bucket?
Alas, no 2CVs to be seen, AFAIK, but Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney did drive a circa 1954 VW Beetle convertible so there’s that…
I dunno, Jason, I’m seeing Randall Graves.
Occurs to me that the thing about the dick school of comedy is that, most of the time, the dickers is so scattershot that it eventually hits a target that you dislike, so you laugh along in a way that brings you into the act.
I remember Sam Kinison being a fairly big thing, and every time I saw him on whatever TV show I couldn’t understand why.
At around the same time period was Steven Wright, who did left-field crooked but deadpan observational comedy, who I thought was hilarious.
Yeah, with Steven around one had no excuse to find Sam funny.
I liked them both at the time, but only Wright holds up for me today – I still listen to his albums. I recently saw a clip of Kinison on Letterman and I found myself laughing at his behavior and the reactions of the audience rather than the humor.
Was Gallagher then or was he earlier? If he was at the same time, then you could make a parallel between comedians of the time and Thomas Hundal’s article on now being the era of odd cars.
Gallagher was well-known in the 80’s but I think he peaked the decade earlier. I remember renting a copy of Pet Semetary and thanking the stars above that we had a Gallagher video to watch right after!
I met Gallagher when he came to my college in 2002(?) He was definitely a has-been at that point but still drew a big crowd. I worked back stage and helped him with his set-up. He hit the local grocery store for watermelons, giant jars of mayo, and the like. I rebuilt one of his sledge-o-matic tables and got him to sign my own sledge-o-matic wood mallet. It hangs from the ceiling in my shop.
Despite applying plastic sheeting to every surface we could, our auditorium was a nasty, stinking mess after his show. Food yuck worked its way into every gap and crevice.
I didn’t learn about him until the 90’s. The moderately-sized theater where I saw him was sold out.
My favorite Steven Wright bit was about him accidentally putting his car key in his house lock. The house started up, so he drove it around for a bit before he parked it in the middle of the freeway and yelled at everyone to get out of his driveway.
He was beyond deadpan observation. He was dipping into the surreal.
I really should look up some videos, it has been a long time. The surreal stuff was also a major, I had forgotten. I remembered the joke about not paying his electric bill because he looked in the outlet and didn’t see any electricity there.
He was also the DJ in Reservoir Dogs.
Wright was the GOAT. I probably watched that special 10x before I stopped losing it at every single joke. After that, I only laughed heartily at every single joke.
Virtuálly no one can do what Wright did.
He is claimed to have written all his material, so incredibly prolific.
I remember Sam Kinison and his version of Wild Thing in his inimitable style.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wAm2HAx7i0
I could’ve happily lived all these years without having ever seen that.
Didn’t Michelangelo also have a mechanical aptitude?
This may be the most Torch thing that has ever happened.
Always so much forehead in those paintings.
When that’s the only skin you’re allowed to show…
Followed by Renaissance, when everyone forgot what clothing was and were nekkid but for a few wisps of cloth that were floating mysteriously in just the right places…
The painting was likely inspired by the DMT trip that Torch took just an hour before deciding to paint it. He was torn by painting machine elves or Sam Kinison. The screamer won out.
Here’s a vote for Torch to redo the painting, with a machine elf Kinison, and his psychic horror homonculus car.
I’m impressed! Confused, but impressed!
I saw Sam in concert about 6 months before he died. Had a cassette or two, I forget. At the time I remember laughing. Guess I grew up.
(And he joked about drunk driving not being a big deal, karma can be a bitch.)
Caught him in concert in ’88 at University of Florida. I was “out-of-body-experience” stoned with a bunch of friends and don’t honestly remember much about it other than the bit he used to do with the phone.
This absolutely belongs in a MOBA exposition.
I’m sure when the Sam Kinison revival (not literally, I hope) eventually happens and everyone starts wearing berets and screaming at each other, your painting will become a priceless artifact. Heck, we’re already screaming at each other, can berets be far behind?
Didn’t Kevin James attempt to bring back the beret, without the screaming?
Yeah, doesn’t work without the screaming … or ever for Kevin James.
I applaud him for his Paul Blart Mall Cop movies however as my kids love them!
I’m loving your obsession with 2CV’s! As a Citroen enthusiast and former GSA, CX, ZX owner I like to read about these extremely unusual and well engineered cars. I would like to request that you do some investigative journalism into the myth of Emile Leray who allegedly cut up his disabled Citroën 2CV into a makeshift motorcycle to escape the Moroccan Sahara. What I find so odd about this story is he was only 20 miles from town and it took 12 days to build the motorcycle. He could have walked in a mater of hours to go get help. Does nobody else find this strange?
I’ve heard that was actually a hoax, but it’s worth looking into!
Mythbusters did an episode about the bipedal (or maybe more accurately…bicycle) 2CV and while I didn’t actually catch that particular episode I’m given to understand they deemed it plausible if highly improbable.
If being hit by a drunk driver is on the schedule, then I’ll take my chances with a 2CV.
“I guess archaic-looking paintings of floating dead comedians and Citroëns on cut wood just weren’t what the market wanted back then?”
Do you want a bidding war in the comments? Because that’s how you get a bidding war in the comments.
$10.
I mean, if the offer is right…
Just don’t ship it to Michigan first.
one quadrillion femto pico bitcoin!
$11
$9.50
I’m still in trouble for the last bidding war I got into, but $15.
I’ll give you $17.90 and throw in a spider ring that came on a cupcake
$19.50 and the stray bump-stop that took out my AC condenser on I-95 in Baltimore.
I have a small gallery of bizarre art I’ve found at thrift and antique stores over the years. This would fit proudly in between the expressionistic painting of a woman with a large afro dancing on what appears to be a burning city and the truly batshit surrealist canvas I rescued from a Goodwill featuring, among other things, Father Time, some rainbow-colored aliens and a naked man in a trucker cap hugging what is either a female form or a giant penis.
$25.00.
He’s not technically naked if he’s wearing trucker hat.
“It’s cool, Officer. I’m wearing a hat.” (Pointing at head with one, not yet cuffed hand.)
Yeah, I’m guessing the judge won’t be all that understanding either.
I’m currently moving into a new, smaller apartment, with a girl whose art collection is in the process of taking up nearly all the available wall space. But I shall insist upon a place of prominence for this piece in a true test of the relationship.
$27.95
It needs to go right next to the leg lamp.
You joke, but I actually have a string of christmas lights that are mini leg lamps. Each about three inches tall. Nothing beats the soft glow of electric sex streaming from the christmas tree.
I used to drive my daughters nuts with my leg lamp gift tags every Christmas.
$30 and a photo of the old Crosley manufacturing building that housed the car assembly line and radio studio.
Torch, you are a national and global treasure. Never change.