So I blandly turned on Netflix in order to find something innocuous to use as background noise while I did some work. Looking at the “newly added” category, I saw a documentary titled: “Struggle: the Life and Lost Art of Szulkalski.” What the hell, I turned it on… and didn’t get much work done. It was a surprisingly engrossing documentary about an artist I’d never heard of, a Polish-American painter and sculptor active from the 1920’s into the 1980’s. His art style is odd, very definitely pre-War (a lot of would have really fit in well in Fritz Langs “Metropolis”), not for everyone… and he was most assuredly bugnuts. Before WWII he was an anti-Semitic Polish nationalist, but the war seemed to cure him of his antisemitism and his strident nationalism; by the 80’s he was exploring a whacko pseudoscientific notion of his own that all of mankind descended from a pre-Deluge civilization centered on Easter Island, and that humanity is threatened by the offspring of Yetis or some such thing. But with the whackadoodlism came a *substantial* artistic talent. Like his art or not, there’s no denying he was damn good at it.
So if you have Netflix and an hour and three quarters to spare, you might find this of interest.