Ok, I think I finally got the history of the evolution of Tarot as we know it. In order to do so we have to understand how the word evolved and what the decks were intended to do with each name. This was no easy task and required quite a bit of reading to untangle […]
My research on kabbalah in the 19th and early-20th centuries as it relates to a culture of the occult is turning me into a verifiable Jewitch and its subversive. I should not be reading these texts, I should not be privy to kabbalistic spells, amulets, and seals, BUT I am and, you know, it’s fun […]
Not surprisingly, the thing with the skeptic didn’t work out. Not that that really matters for the purposes of this medium, but maybe it does. I don’t know. But I’m now on a Pamela Colman Smith kick. Yes, she was an artist and occultist who was commissioned by Arthur Waite to decision the cards […]
Let’s start with this 35mm transparency of a fringed Elizabeth in a mod orange dress with a signature broach. These transient images change in contrast and sharpness based on the angle of light to the point that one singular view of the image is impossible. When viewing this progression of the differences in the images […]
Just felt the need to post a celebratory post in honor of winning the auction of this rare 8×10 transparency from the set of Cleopatra. I was in a bidding war on this and fucking got it. Happy birthday month to me! I can’t wait until it arrives.
I’ve briefly mentioned the photonovel I am working on, and the collection of Liz paraphernalia I’ve amassed over the course of almost a year. The piles of stuff just keep on growing. A rare original photograph and Liz and Richard here, a gossip magazine from 1962 with Liz on the cover, or positive transparencies that […]
I haven’t talked about my photo-novel project here. Let’s hope that if I start blogging about it on here, I’ll inspire myself. My work is, after all, about inspiration. Call it the divine, a muse, or whatever, but the project is inspired by Liz’s remnants in films and paraphernalia that remain from about 1962 to […]
The National Portrait Gallery contains portraits of other kinds–of hands and heads. It houses casts taken of the head and hands of a living Lincoln. Are portraits the right words for them? They are included in the National Portrait Gallery after all. Well, let us start with the head, notably the asymmetrical squint of those […]
The crack. It goes directly through his temple, the last photograph ever taken of him before his assassination, when he was later shot in the head. Curious. I am mesmerized by the crack, it seems to become the picture itself. I stare at it, tracing it’s line, from the collodion on the right to the […]
I’ve found the Houdini to my Doyle. I’m seeing someone–he’s a magician, and, like most modern magicians, is a skeptic of Houdini proportions. I, on the other hand, am a Kabalistic mystic of sorts. Or perhaps it is not not so simple as “on the other hand?” in which I construct this duality. I often […]
Dr. Cheryl Spinner received a PhD from Duke University in English and a certificate in Feminist Studies. Her interests include visual culture, early photography, 19th-century and early 20th-century American literature, and the digital humanities. Electric Ladies Zap is where she writes about things. 
Electric Ladies Zap 