 I'm Delia Robinson, tonight is a little talk and for you a terrible experience because you're going to have to rush through seven hundred years of demented weird men that are personifications of death and the women they are dealing with and the women are often they go from being clothed to very quickly having all their clothes taken off and it's amazing how what this tells us about human race so this cranky tonight is death and the lady and we'll get to it okay so when I was falling asleep a few nights ago I really thought that I didn't like the way I planned the opening for this talk a terrible treatise well that's me asleep looking very large and that's Elmer Roosevelt the cat she rules the neighborhood so I planned this long treatise on crankies and I thought that's kind of unfair unless you guys are planning to get PhDs in the subject you didn't need all that information and so on reflection it seemed unkind and I would just be thinking maybe I'll get an idea in my dream and then I woke up in the morning and I didn't get an idea in my dream instead I dreamed that I was at the top of our beloved local library which conveniently had this tall tall tower like city hall tower and you can imagine the view from up there it was great and I noticed that the river which I could see a long green Vermont Valley and there was a roadway coming along the river and the river was mysteriously rising and the cars on the roadway were suddenly being forced to drive through some deep and treacherous looking areas and then in a wake the water reached our town and I ran downstairs to warn the library patrons and the staff that something was happening and so behind us as we fled back up the stairs to the tower the water was laughing at our heels in dreams the absurdities go unnoticed which is very interesting thing but it because it makes the anxiety you feel very pure and indescribable and then when you wake up and say why are you so upset why are you so afraid but in the dream it is that's just how dreams are and in this dream so much was under threat it was beyond my comprehension that the library and all our books and our community and our landscape and this is a painting called Vermont flooding by a man named James the Argonzor and I don't know how to say that but I was worried about my daughters who are suddenly small children out there somewhere and then I had a lot of worries about my cell phone but it was a worry and then the dream luckily at the top of the library there was a room for riverboat captain and things got better then and all come entangled in these sort of mysteries of this dream were the bargains of the sort we all know that if I get out of this I promise I'll be a better person and then I woke up and as you see I am a better at the time I was still caught in my dream because it seemed so strangely real and so I snapped on the news and there was a PBS announcer concerning the Judy Woodruff she was sitting there looking very prim as she does and behind her was a shoreline photograph of whatever she was going to be talking about and on the screen behind her there were very large letters saying rising water and that made me feel like I was in some sort of mystery trap you know where things are answering themselves and so in fact did I dream what needs to be increasingly and in and inconveniently said and that's where the children today were marching about then that dream is exactly what death and the lady the ballot that we're getting is about tonight but that ballot is about it's about the bargains one makes when your world is under threat and the ballot theme was immensely popular from 1300 to 1400 and then again in 1600 to 1700 it was even in operas and operettas this but the theme has dominated a whole bunch of artists for a long time so all from people from all over the world are interested in this theme here's a Hungarian guy who's painting this they're whitewashing the smoke right that's an interesting painting but there people are focusing on this in a lot of ways I think a lot of people have a kind of a permanent sense of discomfort about whatever's going on in our world and and that is something that bothers me and because we know that we're under slow but escalating threats and their threats to our own finite world our own lives plus the larger background concerns and unlike some cultures who have a word for your environment that has changed one word that says how much you miss your changed environment but we don't have that in our language and so we it's hard to express what we're what we feel we just live with a sense of impending loss here's a picture about the fire in California by a artist there named Marion Estes and obviously people who live through that fire last year are permanently in a state of anxiety about what that did to their world one of my daughters lives six miles from that fire and it's changed her in many many ways and the next one is about just general impending loss and it's it's hard to see it's hard to read but they're little soldiers down here so it's about war and change and so all these pictures there are many many of them and they all are about unwelcome changes and with the ballot of this evening one is reminded that people have endured these fears for a long long time their problems were different but they must have felt just as ominous to them all right so when I was in college Paul Erlich's population bomb came out and it was published one 67 or something like that and we got our first hint in print that there's a rough road ahead and we worried and in the case of many young people as my sister Charlotte that's Daisy can you see him there's termite the dog they went everywhere on the car and their instruments and just making music everywhere and that was their way that they dealt with what was how they felt about the world they just opted out of the lives that had been expected of them and so did I to a lesser extent we made gardens we made art we acted like a seeing my dog for my friends who are stoned all the time I just wasn't a person who'd like to get stoned but I didn't mind leading them around they became very interesting when they were and we sang we sang lots of music and there was a lot of wildness to sooth our spirits and so around then I met this boy a tall handsome boy and we shacked up an actual it was really a shot right there for four years and there we were sort of happy we were both in school and in my spare time I painted I always have been a secret painter site thank you and they're these odd spiders and runner ducks walking through a mystery in the mystery of course is the the mystery of the birth of Christ and then I painted other little things strange things and and that here's a little woman trying to get up the stairway that's going it's a man it's not women aren't allowed at that staircase so she's run a ladder up and she's going to go up there and the paintings were spanish and mostly have by they're all disappeared I don't know where they are but I also made clay whistles which I learned from my mother here's a whole wall of clay whistles that are the story of Noah and then you can you have to get up close and blow in that each one has little whistles sticking out of it but it was a wonderful wonderful thing and did that for Fred and Puppet one one of the circuses were huge and that was in the pine forest here's one part to see but it's a it's a Noah's Ark with two huge dinosaurs that have taken up all the room and one of Noah and his wife are trying to push them off there's no room for anybody else so they I guess they get rid of them because we don't have them now anyway so in addition to doing those sort of things we sang we sang all the time and the music that was played and sung in that little shack was mostly all-time music from the hillbilly countryside that I grew up in there were songs that were learned from all-timers whose ancestors had crossed the Ohio River and they cleared the little for the forested hills and they built log heavens and they farmed on this really thin bad soil and they sang and it as they they come in from Kentucky and the the speech patterns and this music was very very like Kentucky and the same type of music it's still it's part of greater Appalachia in musical terms and two related songs I heard at a singing party in that little house and they've never left me those two songs and they were both conversations between the singer the voices of the invalid and death and their song has conversations which was a very popular form of music in the 1300s the origins of both songs have long been the song still persists but one was O death and it's really grimly phrased and it's unforgettable and the other was death and the lady which is a more refined song or something I could equally start I didn't learn it in the tune that I now sing I the tune I learned was completely forgettable and when I heard normal waterson sing it her tune went into my head and I completely junk the other one so O death which was the first of I see a little bit of so you recognize it okay let's see I'll bind your feet so you can't walk I'll hurt your mouth so you can't talk I'll blind your eyes so you can't see this very outcome go with me O death O death yeah and it goes on like that with these really frightening kind of threats and the person saying please give me another year and that's a real typical conversation with that song okay and O death was claimed to have been written by Lloyd Chambers there he is I don't know what he's doing on that big rock he was an itinerant preacher who said that he wrote that song in 1920 when he was recovering from a bender his family all agreed that it was so they said he'd been drinking white lightning and he woke up singing this song so it was his song we all had that happen that you wake up from a bender on white lightning happened to sing a song that is ancient and no one's ever sung it before the only thing really standing in the way with his from with this claim was other people were already singing this song they just happen to be black people who were singing this song from there's Bessie Jones from the Georgia Sea Islands and she sang that song for Alan Lomax it was called death in the morning but it's essentially the same song it's a conversation of the very similar words and not only were the people from the Georgia Sea Islands singing that song but they were singing it in many many versions and many styles and I think it takes time for that many individual song variants to rise up but Lloyd Chambers still gets the credit in some academic circles and that's how I feel about that his family is still trying to get royalties for anyone singing that song and they haven't been successful as far as I know but they're trying okay so adding to this muddled situation some scholars say that oh death is a various of a much earlier song and that much earlier song happens to be the one other one I learned in that little house and the subject of tonight's talk and that song is dead than the lady and she has very mysterious past and a history which easily extends back to the Middle Ages although there's no any proof particularly of that we just people believe it and I believe it these songs were passed by word of mouth and they changed as they went but when printing became cheap around 1400 paper and printing became cheap enough that people could have buy up printed copies and this would be a host she's holding a whole bunch of ballots hung over her arm and you can see how hard it is to be a seller of a singer and seller of ballots on the street he's pretending that he has a wooden leg but he's got his leg tucked up behind and they've got pox on their faces that they seem to have marked on there and so it must have been a rough go but there's they're trying to sell these ballots on the street and with that many old songs were revived and they were taken up and reworked and polished and printed and then ridiculous flowery language got added to many of them and and many final ballots got turned into things that kind of like their hair curl but death and the lady was one of those the later broad sides from the 1700s of death and the lady were very very extreme oh this is another broadside seller he's got broad music here and this is one of the brogles younger older I don't know which and then he saw the wasp paper crowns that you have to cut out that you wear for the feast of the bean cake which is January 6th the old old Christmas and that's a big feast where you somebody gets crowned king and gets to order everybody else around for the rest of the night I recommend reviving that holiday anyway see when the broadside came out death and the lady was written down for the first time at least the first time that is has survived and she was sold as a broadside printed song layers on the street for next to nothing and broadside became the new way to learn a song it used to always be part of the oral tradition now it was a litter of literary thing that you could they could both sing them on the street but they also sold them on the street as a written form and that was a big change in the way the beginning of a big change in the way music was transmitted and so now we have to back up because we have to back up to the days when death and the lady was fresh and new and here's one of from the book of ours of Duke de Barry I guess yes here's winter they're warming themselves in a fire and it's all the aspects of their life and the calendar year and it's a little book like this you can get beautiful reproductions of it and it's a lovely lovely thing to look at and it shows the years after 1300 and those years were very hard in the British Isles they had a mini ice age and that damaged crops and caused famines and it was a time of enormous fear and turbulence of the wars and and unrest of the population and the ultimate horror with the plague the black death hit great Britain in 1348 and up to half the population died in a year and so whole families whole villages just vanished here's some people all around his bed they don't look like they feel so good they've got these big strange lumps on them that says it's probably not the plague they probably have smallpox but we don't have a diet we'll have to die in those seven they were from 700 years ago but it shows sort of how I don't know what this person was doing up there he's being dispelling the evil vapors maybe I don't know but it was a it was a terrible time for people and they it became the topic of a great deal of art then in illuminated manuscripts and in all kinds of forms and in the in this time it was the first time as far as I know that the personification of death became necessary if you're going to draw a picture of people being taken by death what is death look like and so was it was email yes most everybody seemed to think that it was a male was it a cadaver was it a skeleton the grim reaper grim reaper didn't really come until later except except the guy with the size was early but that whole thing you know the hourglass and all that that's later but the this pictures it started off tended to be of death leading everybody you ever cared about taking them by the hand and leading them away in the long line and the plague returned again and again this is a dance of death these pictures are called and it's from a church that was in Germany somewhere and it was bombed during the war but in this church the entire wall was a freeze all the way around you of people from every walk of life dancing of skeletons and and that was that was the motif of the dance of death since the plague returned again and again on its own schedule you never knew there was this helpless terror that you never knew what was going to happen and this collective response of this obsessive art with this dance of death theme allowed cheap prints that ordinary people could afford would be printed up of things like this now these guys look really jolly they're having a great time they're dancing the dance of death hasn't quite gotten so grim as it made me guess later but they music you know what he's doing over there oh he's dancing to he or she but they're just dancing they're really not menacing anybody yet and some of you might recall a very good film the seventh seal I don't know whether but that is the last scene in that movie and it's unforgettable scene where in in the movie the night is a movie about about the plague leaves the years so it's probably from you know 1300s and it the night plays chess with death to hold death off he keeps him busy with the chess game and and so that is that final iconic moment where for death is leading them all away over the hill players facing the wrong way but he's going with them and over time the death art gradually became more skilled with more complex messages here's Bosch it painted a death bed scene it's you can read it this way as a scroll right in the bottom this is what he used to be he was a warrior and he had this armor he was strong and then and here's clothes and he rich stuff and then he collected he became a miser he is these little devils but my girls used to say he has devils in this toy box but that's not his toy box that says money box and here he was looking at counting his money with all these little devils encouraging this fan fixation on cash and here he is now at his death bed and he has an angel trying to get him to look up there's a crucifix sending a tiny beam of light to him and then a little devil coming over here and here is death coming in the door so death now he's he's got a little he's got a little arrow I think to get him with but and and it's suggesting that perhaps the sin of greed isn't worth the price and all these pictures that were painted about the dance of death and the whole death theme all have a sub you know a text it that you're supposed to be reading tell warning you don't do that this is a good idea and over time the dance of death sort of fizzled out and the focus narrowed down to death's ideal victim who would that be a solitary woman it's the lady and she became more luscious and increasingly erotic down the centuries and death the skeleton or cadaver fully changed into upon living attributes he's never exactly a man but he's not he's he's male usually and but he's still what has something about him that tells you not human and but he's not a devil this picture I was really pleased with this picture I thought oh look it's showing her vanity and he's come together but no that's a devil that's a devil that's not death that's not how they would have thrown it so well but she's very very she's way to push up bra and he's he's very keenly interested but he's not touching her he's just standing there trying to be admiring her perhaps who knows so now we're gonna watch this progress he's not touching her it's very early 13th you know 1350 kind of time he's menacing her with a bagpipe but she doesn't you know he's not touching her then next is he's grabbed her he's grabbed her but he's still having a lot of fun it's like do you want to dance he's got a nice hat or something he's got some sort of snake jewelry and it's really scary guitar it is scary and she's saying oh my god what's happening but it's more like it's not really frightening it's just sort of comic this guy is grabbing her he's become enormously scary he now has male genitalia he's he's menacing her in a way that the dancing guys aren't and so things are changing he's become he's become kind of brutal and and more primitive and not cute there's nothing cute about him and so this next one is Hans Holbein who made a living out of doing these little things of who you know he has a woman being carried away by death a baby has a farmer every you know the the the priest he just drew all and they were sold to get more tell people don't do don't do this but this has death also very flamboyant in his hairdo but he's grabbed her clothing and it's not dragging her and that is new that's new they didn't do that in the earlier ones he's getting too familiar and the hourglass time is running out oh yes he got a hourglass oh down here yes later he picks it up but yeah that's that's the Greek chronos idea that he times up and and later that becomes one of death's major accessories yeah so then they get weirder and weirder here this notice how lovingly her curves now have been painted so that you can see in the real picture of not thrown up here but i don't know how well you can see this but he's all she's just thrown in this loving way but he's tying her up which is a little bit weird i think and is he a man or is he a cadaver he's he's both all of the skeletons have serious problems with their bones particularly around the pelvis there seemed to be a very poor understanding of what a no this was sometimes it just looks like you know two chamber pots or you know whatever it's just odd stuff but this this kind of different this is a another thing where he's really getting starting to get too familiar and around the time that this was there are other pictures of there's one from a German manuscript with that with his arms rung woman stuck inside of her dress um and now next one he's got his hands up her skirt this is the pussy grab that we're all familiar with now there he's and she is kind of she's really not objecting but it becomes the the sort of subtext of weird eroticism is getting right up there in the open now what kind of year is this one that one is it is 1520 so next one okay this one all her clothes up now she just has that little bit of drain she's been put you know really stripped down this guy painted the same guy he must have known a really ugly guy because he painted this over and over in different poses terrible things happening to these poor women and it's always the same guy who's sort of a rotting mess and but he's a kind of a sexualized cadet yeah so next is here this really what what an odd picture this is you couldn't sleep like that she couldn't possibly be asleep like that it's death now he's got the hourglass again and uh he's got the getting wings now so it's getting they're getting fancier about what in the world is this and uh that picture is is really making it clear that these pictures have become an excuse to paint naked ladies and that was what the Renaissance was all about as far as I'm concerned and uh and the death is starting to get get duded up there okay so in the following decades of increasingly less convincing art for me the message became more and more complicated and some artists sentimentalize the woman so they make her real kind of oh you feel sorry for her and or they make her body very tempting so you can't look at anything but that but sometimes women just very often just kind of a callant victim with death as the main focus and there were some attempt to make death super scary but oftentimes that backfires next here's one where they're supposed to be super scary she's at the dressing table all so vey and so fancy and that is so he's so duded up that you can't even tell what he's doing and when you really look at it closely it's an etching and you can look at it very closely you see all the beautiful fine lines but he just isn't scary it's like silly almost and um by 1500 the plague had died down there was dying down it still was happening but tv was on the rise and this gave that whole depthy theme a whole new lift and new look it the dance of death is gone but this death and the lady got a new chance and the tv had hit europe and it was highly contagious it was called the fight plague because it referred to how pale people seemed to get when they had tuberculosis and tv prefers young bodies and it prefers crowded conditions and bad conditions of all sorts and mortality rates with tuberculosis are incredibly shockingly high and if it's not treated and even with that it's still a very difficult disease to manage and as the industrial revolution came in it drove rural people who might have lived in pubs but at least they had fresh air and sunshine and but it drove them into the cities to seek jobs and the urban housing conditions were the most gruesome of slums and they became death traps for people and the new arrivals were poor and they had no opportunity for or no understanding of hygiene and practices by spitting on the street were commonplace and that hand washing and covering your mouth and coughing as public health adjuncts that were a new ideas and nobody really understood you did it except for a couple of doctors who were talking about this and those kind of simple precautions are still the first preventative step even in our culture of washing your hands and covering your mouth and your cough and they're important step in trying to eliminate tuberculosis but they certainly weren't in common practice yet and the high death rates among the young inspired this a huge resurgence of death in the maiden art forms and in in one year's time in great britain there were so many four million deaths most of them are young people from tuberculosis during the worst year and so it really did damage the kind of cultural fabric in the same way the plague had although the plague took any age but this young people were are always tv's favorites um anyway death in the maiden got dominated theater and poetry and music and here's a modern thing but it's showing that all in the 1700s 1800s this became a popular theme there's tons of wonderful music written about it their operas their operettas the song itself that we sing tonight is sung or at least the words are sung in some of these pieces of theater and uh this is i don't know that's it's a picture of this by clinton who is always exciting to look at i think but um it shows that the the lady really did she left flat art and went into everything and ladies were really gracefully and language languidly kind of dying and that became a socially popular and really romanticized concept if you had a one palette big eyed look that was considered angelic and romantic and very attractive so women powdered their faces so they would have this unearthly power and it would look like they were dying of tv2 even though they weren't they would powder themselves up so they really looked like they were dying because it was such a romantic thing too really wasn't it and death and the lady art from these years focused on very slender action-looking women and death was often weirdly gentle at this time and the women also started getting more clothes on again because there was we were coming pushing into a later a later way of looking at a later kind of concepts about how women should be presented but death was also even with the ladies clothes death is presented as a seducer or a rapist or some sort of murderous sneaking killer and uh the lady always pale in language even when she was personified as death sometimes the in a couple of paintings the death becomes a lady and she's dressed up and now the black kind of things but she always looks like she's got tb yourself so here's good habits yeah that's my fusilli is allegory and um in this sort of language yes she's completely melted there and she's this is a friend of blakes and uh and i don't know what the horse is doing or here's a little monster but she's really she's really just right for what we're talking about the next one this one look what it is it's a shower curtain it wasn't painted as a shower curtain but you can buy it online you're going to death in the ladies shower curtain yeah i just think that's a great issue my son's name core is vernet and it's from 1851 and you can also buy it as a yoga mat okay now we're really doing a lightning dash forward now we're getting more modern this is emsor from 1893 and he makes death you can't tell if you're looking at death he's pretty rotted still and the lady is looking like oh my god but you can't tell it just carnival stuff or an actual allegory and i think for him it was both uh party costumes and and really scary um there's morke uh and he has he was a man whose tuberculosis touched his life very sadly yet sister who died his mother died of tb and a number of female relatives who died of tuberculosis and uh and so he has a lot of pictures of of death getting the lady in the grip and they're sort of dancing and the lady is now going along with it she's returning that kiss and um it's a change she's reciprocating so the next one the woman sits up in bed she's surprised this is by a woman named mariam stokes in 1900 and death is a woman and she's standing there by the bed and she holds her hand up in a kind of comforting way to this woman who's frightened and she's not touching her and the everybody's clothes so this is a very different thing but it has to do with the sort of the victim is different than those early medieval ones she's she's a real actual person and death is now a person in this particular painting this one's super creepy uh death is a handsome young boy he's an angel he's got angelic wings and he's really good at job on her the this is a detail of the painting where all of his helpers are sort of tearing her away and it's super embarrassing to look at if with a moderate sensibility i'm glad i found a detail i'm not the whole thing um the next one is okay for dead ladies this is the ideal pose of i use this in my cranky you will see what she is at the end there's nothing to beat this pose for dead ladies i think it's great uh death is so shrouded up you can't tell what the hell he is or but she's losing her flowers she's losing it all and uh who knows what that means flowers usually had to do with virginity and stuff so that's a weird statement that's not Persephone it's not Persephone it might be but it's not Pluto it's it's it's called death and the and the maiden so it could be whatever you know these these pictures if you don't get but they're it's about you just have to read the title and then it tells you they're on it still and uh the next one is by the Daimosa in 1906 he was a poster artist did a lot of beautiful sort of art nouveau posters and he became a big fashion trend so death is kissing her but the colors he used and all the things the way he did women's hair became high fashion and the new yorker just had a article about him not long talking about a long ago talking about what a fashion setter he was and the next one is the first time when you really see death as the whole grim reaper but now he's a he's a ghost it's a specter but he's got he's got promises um hourglass and she's just who she's limp maybe she's already dead who could tell but he's got his side he's got all the paraphernalia except that he's not black and scary anymore he's just like i don't know and everybody's pretty languid so along came world war one it's it's right on the night of world war one and death is wearing very fancy shoes like dance shoes shiny dance shoes that look like they might have caps and he's really got her tangoing so we're back to that sort of idea that maybe this is going to be fun um and he's that's kind of becoming cool for a little while the next one is a favorite painting of mine that's so weird despite agon she she was on the eve of his world war one conscription and his girlfriend he was breaking up with her and he goes off and marry somebody else and goes off to the war and here's this weird thing she says very her arm is caught in his clothing but it doesn't you have to look closely to see that it just looks very weird and they're on the sheet outside and they're sort of faces in the rocks over here and he's it looks despairing and it's called death and the lady but death is now a man but not exactly a man you know and she's nobody's getting any pleasure out of this particular event it was just a a sad sort of role one thing okay then we have the 20s coming in and these sort of pictures you know sort of i think in the world 20s people were desperate to be unusual and so this guy his name what's his name france fieldwork 1921 he painted photographs lots of photographs of women and rather compromising poses was with a skeleton and they get pretty tiresome after looking at a few dozen of them and then the last one kathy colwood colwood and that's called young girl and the young girl was in the arms of death and she was drawing at the time of the great depression when there really was major hunger and lots of disease and problems in in in germany and her part of the world and all over europe and so post world war who comes along and rush through and this is australian donald friend done in 1949 and he has death gripping these nice buns he was a man who's gotten a lot of trouble for his own sexual proclivities but he was a good painter and got a lot of awards for his paintings but ultimately his own behavior was undidded okay the next one is a very strange and sad thing out by joseph voice and it's painted on it's called death and the lady or death and the maintenance and it's painted on an envelope which has the seal of an organization of auschwitz survivors and so now the focus of death is what he could do in those camps and the lady this is death this is the lady she's almost mushed away to being no more than what he is and it's a it's a strange and powerfully painful picture mainly because of that envelope and then there's a knife from india he was the first post independence indian artist who achieved high recognition in the west and his name's francis newton susa and his death and the lady is pretty standard it's being always it's it's very much painted in the style of the times but it's the same sort of same sort of feeling of something going on and the next one is a british painter and here we have he was very skilled and popular painter as critics didn't like him his behavior was terrible he had some of my 12 children by all of his models and it was his behavior was he had lots and lots of curls and hair dressed up like the 60s kind of look he paints death always as a seducer and a rapist and very menacing he often makes it as repulsive as possible and the woman is always this lip form kind of lip and then death is hanging over her kind of that of course he's sort of like that and the next one is also by him and this is just death the woman i don't know if she's in this picture at all but he's or she's moving he's moving toward her it's just a detail but death is a sponge of slime and yucky yucky yucky yucky icky and it's just it's repulsive to look at and you're very lucky this is such poor poor quality here but you know i kind of see all that shine and get nine meters united states fritz shoulder he was a native american postmodernist did pop art and stuff the indian guy and wrapped in the flag you probably remember these he was very popular and won a lot of acclaim in the 1980s and here's death is the it's called death and the lady but there's just the lady and then this strange sort of push here which and i i really like that picture because it's it's i'm so grateful that it doesn't show any gripping and then with the next one is a serbian performance artist and she did the same thing the field of it in the 20s she has her that's her dancing and her performance but she had herself being tumbled around the floor with the skeleton and um that was very very light the fiddler fiddler work of the 20s and that was from 2007 and then another american nicole eisenman she this is her death and the lady death and the maiden and so you have this they're drinking together and she won a macarthur because she's returned to painting images when everybody else was doing abstract work and nobody painted representational work and she did and this was it and it's sort of strangely expressionistic portraits and that's the that's death and the lady and and um and then the other there's a very desperate man named uh philip lynch he is an artist and he also illustrates children books and the children's books are lovely little villages and you know sweet little towns and then you have this really scary very detailed pictures of death sort of and then the last one is this is by a guy named victor giraffes your hot case and it's just from 2016 and he does a lot of political art he's also considered a serious artist even with his photo and uh it's very respected and that was mine from years ago i just couldn't decide because obviously i wasn't thinking much about anything she's hanging on to him but she's also hanging on to the boyfriend over here who's alive so she clearly hasn't made up her mind which is going to go but she's got sexual titties anyway and um so um that was my political effort and now it's time to see the cranky and the ballot about making bargains to avoid seemingly unavoidable situations magic laundry basket on top of the table so you can all see it because a cranky really this is a pre-industrial device viewing a long scroll that's been campaigned by me and i chose to make these about ballots because it's been a lifelong interest and because maybe pictures and narratives have been a stories have been a lifelong interest and i wanted to see at last you could have a workmark that was a whole story not just a little moment not just not just the wolf talking to a little red riding hood in this one little moment you have the whole story so that's very intriguing to me and um how are the lights they looking okay i have to stand up here it's paper and so it has many baggy flaws it also makes a crinkly noise which i like very much she walked down why should i give you give you yes you fair lady you must come along with me oh you fair lady must come along with me higher time but now that i'll give you gold i'll give you a man oh no i'll not give life to a man but sir there's many with snowy head and spare my life but no i'll not spare your day fair lane works aside must away your tip was that lady died on my tombstone she cried for clothing is made for questions if not then they don't refresh me if i think for you cookies i think i smell cookies what is your interested death well i don't have specifically an interest in death except both one on halloween which does give me the product but this ballot is about death and right so i'm interested in medieval in medieval songs and this one particularly interested me because it's beautiful to me because i think it's a beautiful song and it's really interesting to sing and it happens to be about death so what if i can't change that other ballots i've done i all of the ballots that i know practically involved yeah that's some sort of catastrophe they didn't weren't interested in the ballots but that weren't about disasters or catastrophes or boat sinking or something and uh and i don't know my life and so i'm interested in them yeah and you talked about bargains the bargains that we mean and the bar and so the bargains aren't worth anything death comes up for us when death counts for us yeah but we still work yeah and sometimes yes i i i did have a friend who had a cancer and was dying and she made the bargain she wanted to see her kids into high school and that she lived that long that she got to see her kids into high school and that bargain when it was fulfilled that was enough for her and she died very peacefully but she wasn't peaceful for that she fought to see this come true and so it's not everybody who gets the bargain that they want but it is interesting that we do that yeah and um and that it just seems to be our way of dealing with it otherwise impossible situations yeah yeah and i like these guys i mean they are very deathy but oh they're beautiful dancers yeah some of them this one has very long finger bones but i got carried away that's where you spent time looking at um mexican day of the dead art yes i have yeah how would you say different or similar it's very different in the sort of sensibility of it there there's are are they're more exuberant in a lot of what they're strong in a way that often these little a lot of these are blow-ups from tiny drawings and manuscripts and but yeah there's i don't know how they're just different they are different they look like they're from a different a different sensibility and it's certainly the day of the dead is a of really still a strong way to see how that culture they have songs that go with that celebration and uh i remember once in mexico when i was young being taken to a graveyard on day of the dead and people had they were they just boards on the graves that they lifted off and they had huge picnics and huge family members and then they were putting food on the grave and someone was pouring fanta onto the ground and shouting well grandfather this wasn't invented when you were here but i think you'll like it it was it was astonishing to me but not really not you know i thought it was kind of a nice way of of dealing with with your with your dad because we don't really have a satisfactory way of doing of doing that i think you know they're they're gone and forgotten for us or not forgotten but they're you know my mother used to live in southern indiana now she lives in my head so yeah it's a it's a different sort of thing you learned the songs mostly from your mother i i didn't learn this one from my lover my lover i learned it from my lover i love it for my mother and there's a lot of song from my mother and many many more from my sister charlotte who's two and a half years older and got out of the house early and talked to music events and we grew up in a very richly musical part of the country in those days everywhere was richly musical i mean as i went into high school you didn't go to a party without an instrument going along you'd carry everyone carrying their instruments everywhere and everything was it was all about singing and all about music because i learned a lot of songs during those years but i learned a lot from my sister charlotte and uh yeah i still sing with her with margaret so we she we said i was singing with her on the telephone you know she who were doing harmonies on the phone only she's making lots of strange musical sounds too but i don't know what she was playing but it sounded like a didgeridoo going on that it wasn't because she was singing but yeah that's been a hugely important part of of our lives and so this for me even though i you know i don't it's i don't think the voice my voice doesn't matter to me how i sound or how i sing it's a song that i want that song to have another chance to be heard i mean it's been a fun for 700 years probably and um and that that to me is really touching yeah thank you for taking us through the art um yes off of this subject thanking us through the art and showing us all the things wasn't that grim i did it though we did it yeah yeah that was a dash but but yeah it's an interesting way of for me it was a surprisingly interesting way of looking i never had thought about that before you know if i were going to draw a death i don't think i would do any of those things but they certainly would be in my head as being acceptable ways of throwing death because i because we've all seen these pictures i don't think that when i die i will have that experience but i think those people didn't think they would is there a cheerful note we can have a talk about your evolution of the cranky have you painted the the front of it again in a different manner i saw your first one a show that was down at the art gallery the wood in art gallery and stuff did you redo that i know it just the lighting in here is stronger and you want to see it it's really more um how many how many reels have you done well i did some in the old days that were painted on tieback the nobody should ever do that it paints paint and it all flaked off and really ugly looking and i liked it a lot but i've never got they that those never got shown there's their um well that's not true they don't have i put them around i had an art show and once i put them around the top like a freeze around the gallery but they were they um i never had a cranky box until andy and carolin built me a cranky box and then somebody gave me that monster downstairs that's in that little room and it weighs a ton you can't you have to burrow back in there to get it it's very uncomfortable to work with it doesn't behave and this is just a simple and lovely lovely piece of work this cranky box and yeah i i appreciate your your singing this because you know for most of the history of people and music the only way you've heard music was if somebody sang or played it yeah and now we're so used to getting everything out of a box and out of a speaker and even when it's live through an amplification and we we've so lost that it's just wonderful to catch a piece of this event was and and not a movie star or not a real singer but just a person a person a person is a real singer a person is a real singer well we're all real singers everyone i'm not a professional musician by a long shot but in the old days the persons who sang this wouldn't have either this was this kind of singing was the evening's entertainment there was no tv and this kind of songs they liked these awful ballads because they were like so all right they sat around and they never seemed to get tired of hearing them although i remember when i was a kid with barbara allen did i ever get tired of hearing that never i never got tired of it it was always uniquely beautiful and interesting to me well that's the thing there is a fascination with death and if you go to the hell and heart this lander's collection at middlebury college so many of those ballads have to do with death people loved it people still love it's a big mystery isn't it yeah yeah yeah and very personal yeah i guess to each yeah thank you thank you