Hypothetically…

If there is indeed a heaven, and Hasil Adkins and Lux Interior are hanging out together on some leopard-print porch swing up there, how much do you want to bet they play “rock, paper, shotgun” every morning to decide who gets the honor of guardian angel duty for this fella?

At the risk of offending the Soviets in the audience I present this gentleman to you with limited commentary; instead allowing his melodious singing voice and terrifying rictus to speak for themselves.

And, my, they speak volumes.

Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.
–Andrei Tarkovsky

Stalker (1979)

This is a heads up for the Andrei-lovin’ Zobotron as much as anyone else in SoCal: starting today (Jan 23), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art begins a complete retrospective of Tarkovsky’s films, with supplementary material. They will be screening Solaris, Ivan’s Childhood, Stalker, The Mirror, Nostalghia, Andrei Rublev, The Sacrifice, and two documentaries about Tarkovsky and his apocalyptic, mesmerizing work. Not to be missed.

The Mirror (1974)

Happy birthday, comrade Nadya. Can you believe it’s already been a whole year?! So much has happened in that time. You endured intense hardship and celebrated huge victories, moving from LA to London to San Francisco. You collaborated with remarkable people and accomplished admirable feats. Hell, you even manged to stop biting your nails! Congratulations.

Every single day, your efforts and encouragement continue to hold Coilhouse together. You really are our tiny, sexy tube of superglue. We’re stuck on you like clock gears hot-gunned to a cosplayer’s cotton poly-blended bloomers.

Now, we realize it’s not much (certainly not a $53K Lady Yu porcelain action figure), but still, we wanted to  make a concerted effort to celebrate your birth properly this year, with vaguely unsettling Russian animation…

Plenty of cake…

…and of course, party hats.

Now blow out the candles! (Hint: they’re under the shar peis.)

Love on ya, Lev. Many happy returns.

This Sunday night is a special “late to the party” edition of Coilhouse, wherein I’ll blog some items that have already been immortalized elsewhere on the web – in this case, BoingBoing, IO9 and EnglishRussia – but that still deserve a place here in the ‘haus.

The first of these is The Matrix, starring Charlie Chaplin. This was created by the team that produces “Big Difference” (Bolshaya Raznitsa), a Russian show that parodies other Russian television shows. Neo’s incredible kung-fu maneuver at 4:45 takes the cake figuratively, and Agent Smith takes the cake literally one minute after that happens. Enjoy!

Some excellent detective work by Ghoul Next Door has uncovered the origins of this 101-year-old photo. The stunning image was brought to our attention by guest blogger Angeliska, who writes, “I’ve become totally obsessed with this carte de visite depicting Maria Germanova of the Moscow Arts Theatre, costumed for her role [as the fairy] in Blue Bird. She is my perfect style icon, now and forever.”

Unfortunately, the photographs of the actors are all that remain of this 1908 premiere of Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, produced by Stanislavsky. A descriptive play-by-play of the performance can be found in the 1920 book The Russian Theater Under the Revolution by Oliver Sayler (thanks, Google book search!), but all other images of this art noveau-inspired production have been lost to time, despite Sayler’s valiant attempts to preserve more for posterity, recounted in the book:

I asked Stanislavsky eagerly for photographs of scenes from “The Blue Bird” or else for the original designs of the scenic artist so that I might have them copied… the photographs, I was told, were not available – except those of the players themselves – for the originals had been made by Fischer, a German, and had been destroyed in the pogrom at the beginning of the war in 1914. And in the difficult times Russia has undergone since then, no others have been made. When I pressed my point and asked about the orignal designs, the firm, square but kindly face of my host carried a passing glance of embarassed modesty and then admitted that there were no designs. He had conceived them himself and had personally directed the artist, V. E. Yevgenoff, in the execution of the settings.

Yep, 1908 is definitely going to the top of my “If I Had a Time Machine” list. Craving more images after discovering Germanova’s fairy, I did a bit of searching on the Russian web and uncovered the images below (from an Ogonyok article about Blue Bird). After the jump, a full-body shot of Germanova looking like a pre-Raphaelite sorceress.

It’s been a long week hasn’t it? Busy too. It seems that your inbox is always full no matter how much work you do, like everyone is clearing their desks by simply transporting everything over to you. Shit just doesn’t end. You wonder how you came to be here at this desk, writing this inter-office email, using words like “actionable” and “synergy”. How did this come to pass? No one makes their mark on this world by using “actionable”. No one. What had Murakami done by the time he was your age? Or DaVinci? Or Batman? I bet Batman wasn’t responding to emails, that’s for sure; because he’s the goddamn Batman and he doesn’t need a motherfucking desk job, Jim. His job is kicking ass, period. For real. Of course, he was also rich, which gave him the financial independence required to become the scourge of Gotham’s underworld. It’s an unfair comparison really.

All this brain power being used for introspection would be so much better spent elsewhere, don’t you think? And I don’t mean the email you’re writing. Just wrap it up. That’s it. Now hit “send”. Very good. As I was saying, your mental faculties should be applied to something worthwhile something like the Friday Afternoon Movie. Today’s FAM is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, based on the novel Roadside Picnic written by brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, who also wrote the film’s screenplay. Like all Tarkovsky, Stalker is a slow burn. It’s two and a half hours for a reason, partly because Andrei has a whole lot of pretty and haunting things he wants to show you and partly because the characters have Something To Say. Tarkovsky is of the “love him or hate him” variety of director so your mileage may vary, but Stalker is near the top for my favorite films. Just watch the movie and try not to think about what Tarkovsky was doing when he was thirty.

Caption: “The Germans weren’t very afraid of the mechanical bears.”

There’s a great column at Russia! magazine titled Live From LJ. Every week, intrepid blogger Marina Galperina wades through the radioactive cesspool of the Russian blogosphere (which “conveniently, if bafflingly, revolves around LJ.”) This week, Marina discovers this incredible gem:

Ru-Lj community fail_art apologizes for their legacy of humorous-to-obscene scribbles left in textbooks by former students (or possibly, modern day forgeries), adding some “context” to the dull old pastorial and wartime pictures with ridiculous nudity, blood, peasants with nun-chucks and various insults to the Russian army. Response: “My eyes and stomach hurt.” Ditto. [Link, NSWF]

A selection of hand-picked personal favorites, after the jump!

Inspiration is where you find it, and everyone’s gotta start somewhere. Before Enki Bilal’s blue-haired future-hotties and Peter Chung’s Aeon Flux, I had Gennady Kalinovsky and his black-bobbed, fishnet-stockinged, high-heeled no-nonsense powerhouse, Mary Poppins. From the moment I opened the book in 1988 I perceived Miss Poppins as a polished badass, with a collection of dubious acquaintances and a seedy past. Her lipstick was always perfect, she wore well-fitting suits and kept many secrets. Sure, she was sardonic and vain, but she was the best.

The original Mary Poppins stories are kid brain-candy, with magic, adventures, talking animals and going behind parents’ backs, but what really made me love the now-tattered book I’ve kept my whole life is the artwork. One might call Gennady Kalinovsky a Russian Edward Gorey, but I’d rather not. His line-art universe is looser and more psychedelic, with warped perspective and spindly figures you’d sooner expect in an eerie Jean-Pierre Jeunet flick than on the pages of kids’ classic. The twins drawing below the cut gave me nightmares and I’m forever grateful – I only wish more illustrators exercised this kind of freedom in children’s books.

After a bit of research I found that Gennady actually had quite a penchant for the surreal – check out the art he created for Alice in Wonderland , Behind the Looking Glass, and Master and Margarita – my top all-time favorites.

I remember the first and only time I watched the 1964 film about the character I grew up loving, and how disturbed I was by my Mary parading about in ugly pseudo-Edwardian garb, dancing, and, perhaps worst of all, singing. It’s not the first terrible thing Disney has done to a childhood favorite, but for me it was certainly the most jarring.

Looking over the Mary Poppins books’ Wikipedia page it becomes even more apparent just how much my view of the stories and the character has been colored by a Russian translation and the accompanying illustrations. I almost want to give Disney credit for matching their Poppins costumes to the original Mary Sheppard illustrations! Instead, I wish I could shake late Kalinovskiy’s hand and thank him for the introduction to my very first female ideal. Short dark hair, perfect makeup, stockinged legs and an arsenal of experience is how I pictured every modern fictional heroine for years after reading Mary Poppins. I remember when Margarita looked just like her.

A few more of Kalinovsky’s Mary Poppins illustrations after the jump, and the rest of them here on Flickr just for you!

The profile for Lena and Katya reads, in part, thus:

Lena & Katsya Popova, beautiful sisters, are new wave in Russian doll scene. Their early creations were proportional figures as shown this album, but their recent series as ‘Fashion MOON’ and ‘SKIN’ are quite unique and aggressive in deformed body.

My ignorance of a “Russian doll scene” should come as no surprise. That is, while I am aware of Russian dolls in the form of matryoshkas, I was unaware that there was a scene. Of course, this may have more to do with the connotations that I attach to the word “scene”, meaning that “Russian doll scene” makes me think of imposing, babushka-wearing Barbies looking disinterested at a trendy dance party. This would be wrong.

Looking beyond my own linguistic hang-ups we have the sisters’s actual work, and I can’t help but be drawn to it. The more traditional lamps are beautiful, their voluminous dresses lit up from within, belying their spindly frames topped by ivory faces. However, SKIN is a completely different animal all together. These are stunning, foregoing the traditional doll trimmings in favor of displaying fully that alien body-type, elongated just beyond the point of believability, clad in Westernized tribal chic.

It’s some impressive work, retaining the cuteness of a child’s toy while simultaneously functioning as modern sculpture. Plus, I can easily imagine them looking bored while listening to, say, Lady Gaga.