Post by kesher on Jan 10, 2012 21:23:52 GMT -6
I was just having an email discussion with a friend of mine who is not only ridiculously intelligent, but also an ardent Frazetta and REH fan. I just had to post his entire last response to me:
Amen.
You know what's funny about Frazetta? Regardless of the composition in any picture, you pretty much never got a "cheesy" feeling from it (or a genteel, patrician one).
In that way I figure it meshed perfectly with REH, in line with what I've said about most S&S suffering from childish "wish fulfillment fantasy" hypocrisies. (Hand in hand with SF intellectually rejecting it while absolving itself from gobbling it up like candy--"junk food" that they justified as "mere dessert.")
That is, in REH's stories they were like being in a war zone: bloody exciting, yet not something you would "volunteer" to experience.
Same with Frazetta. You looked at most of his pieces and got a thrill, but didn't especially "wish" to be in them. They rather told you, "yeah, odds are if you were in the picture you'd be dead." Even the protagonist of the picture looked like he might not necessarily survive the entire story.
"Barbarism" being "the natural state of mankind," not because barbarism is better. Nor worse, if in it's own way "honest." But simply, with neither barbarism or civilization being preferable, just because of the way of things.
Similar to what Nietzsche said about "master morality" and "slave morality." (And why, yes, Stone & Milius's take on Conan might have been different than REH's but in a way that fit.) Nietzsche did not exalt "master morality." He gave it a grudging respect for it's lack of passive-aggressiveness, and thus a type of honesty; but Nietzsche found both types or "morality" lacking. The "superman" needed to transcend both, and in doing so stood alone.
Stood alone, but eventually would fall alone. With nothing to grasp but a life-affirming rebellion against that inevitability. That's what REH wrote about; that's what most Frazetta images convey.
Not wish-fulfillment fantasy, not Vallejo's metrosexuals. But raw passion and living in the moment in the face of doom.
Unique in the genre, most definitely.
In that way I figure it meshed perfectly with REH, in line with what I've said about most S&S suffering from childish "wish fulfillment fantasy" hypocrisies. (Hand in hand with SF intellectually rejecting it while absolving itself from gobbling it up like candy--"junk food" that they justified as "mere dessert.")
That is, in REH's stories they were like being in a war zone: bloody exciting, yet not something you would "volunteer" to experience.
Same with Frazetta. You looked at most of his pieces and got a thrill, but didn't especially "wish" to be in them. They rather told you, "yeah, odds are if you were in the picture you'd be dead." Even the protagonist of the picture looked like he might not necessarily survive the entire story.
"Barbarism" being "the natural state of mankind," not because barbarism is better. Nor worse, if in it's own way "honest." But simply, with neither barbarism or civilization being preferable, just because of the way of things.
Similar to what Nietzsche said about "master morality" and "slave morality." (And why, yes, Stone & Milius's take on Conan might have been different than REH's but in a way that fit.) Nietzsche did not exalt "master morality." He gave it a grudging respect for it's lack of passive-aggressiveness, and thus a type of honesty; but Nietzsche found both types or "morality" lacking. The "superman" needed to transcend both, and in doing so stood alone.
Stood alone, but eventually would fall alone. With nothing to grasp but a life-affirming rebellion against that inevitability. That's what REH wrote about; that's what most Frazetta images convey.
Not wish-fulfillment fantasy, not Vallejo's metrosexuals. But raw passion and living in the moment in the face of doom.
Unique in the genre, most definitely.
Amen.
