Scarlett Take Manhattan, Molly Crabapple‘s first foray into a full-fledged graphic novel, is out in just two days and is sure to make readers giggle with delight. It’s an audacious prequel to Backstage – a webcomic about seedy vaudevillian adventures set in Victorian New York. And what better way to get the party started than with a bang. A most literal bang, at that – we enter Scarlett’s world as she’s whispering her life story into a beau’s ear while making love. Entirely appropriate for a tale of a woman making her way to the top in a brutal city known for eating its residents alive.
Scarlett Takes Manhattan is a visual delicacy, with detail bursting from every page like yet another fresh-popped bottle of champagne. Molly’s florid style blends with John Leavitt’s writing to reveal 1880s New York’s fleshy underbelly. We peek behind closed doors, over corrupt politician’s shoulders and under ruffled skirts as Leavitt and Crabapple show an uninhibited girl of humble beginnings traipse through manual labor and sex work to become queen of Vaudeville. Sex is celebrated, morality is, surprisingly, maintained and show business gets a new star when the smoke clears.
And now, a special treat our readers! Scarlett Takes Manhattan is peppered with charming Victorian slang. Post your favorite Victorian euphemism in the comments – the sauciest will win a copy of Scarlett autographed by Molly Crabapple.
[Note from the editor: we have a winner! Random Tangent’s reply caught miss Molly’s eye, here it is:
I find ‘buttered bun’ to be much more preferable to ’sloppy seconds’ or ‘cream pie’.
But what kind of brute would refer to a woman’s commodity as ‘crinkum krankum’? That’s messed up.
So if you’re putting Nebuchadnezzar out to grass with a real dirty puzzle, you best mind that you don’t end up having a buttered bun. That dollymop will give you a nasty flap dragon. Once you’ve got a nasty shanker you’d better spend some time in the lock hospital before you knock another botail. It’s not good to go spreading the French disease.
Congratulations and enjoy your signed copy of Scarlett Takes Manhattan!]
Click the jump for two previews of pages from the book, one of them decidedly NOT Safe For Work.
Jimi Hendrix performs “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York, 1969. You can hear the bombs, screams and ear-splitting jetfire of Vietnam in that guitar.
At first, I just figured I’d take a minute to mark the occasion of this country’s birth with the above clip of Hendrix’s string/mind/soul-bending rendition of the U.S. National Anthem. It’s been almost exactly 40 years since the footage was shot at Woodstock, during late summer, in the astoundingly eventful year of 1969.
Then I got to thinking a bit more about 1969. Egads, what a dense historical American nerve cluster! Over the course of those twelve months, one seriously heavy, snaking cultural current swept humanity in some exhilarating and alarming directions. Countless aspects of life as we now know it were irrevocably changed, and it all happened overnight.
In a piece written recently for USA Today, cultural anthropologist Jeremy Wallach called 1969 “the apotheosis and decline of the counterculture” and Rob Kirkpatrick, author of 1969: The Year Everything Changedsaid: “I don’t think it’s even debatable. There’s an America before ’69, and an America after ’69.”
To give me and mah feller ‘Merkins something to chew on today besides corn on the cob, here’s a list of just a few of the country’s more momentous occurrences, circa 1969:
The whole world watched, breathless, as the lunar module Eagle landed and Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the Moon. Dr. Denton Cooley successfully implanted the first temporary artificial heart in Texas. Four months after Woodstock, the infamously violent, miserable Altamont Free Concert was held at the Altamont Speedway in northern California, ostensibly bringing an end to the idealistic sixties. In NYC, the Stonewall riots kicked off the modern gay rights movement in the U.S. Members of the Manson Family cult committed the Tate/LaBianca murders, horrifying Los Angeles and goading a prurient media circus. The first message was sent over ARPANET between UCLA and Stanford. L. Ron Hubbard had his organization’s name officially changed to The Church of Scientology, and they started litigating. Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography and the Thoth Tarot Deck were both republished, and Kenneth Anger shot his lesser known –but deeply resonant– film Invocation of My Demon Brother. Barred from reentering the states to hold their planned New York City “Bed-In”, John Lennon and Yoko Ono relocated the event to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Quebec, where they recorded “Give Peace a Chance”. Everybody got nekkid in the Broadway muscial production, Hair…
Miniatures have always fascinated me. When I was younger I would save up my weekly allowance in order to purchase detailed plastic models of airplanes and cars which I would wantonly assemble and paint into twisted caricatures of the images featured on the boxes; my desire far outreaching my ability. I remained diligent, however, and eventually I got to the point where I got a job and discovered other things to occupy my time, like crack cocaine and back alley craps games.
My love of miniatures has endured, and I still salivate over the minute details of a well executed model. It is a love that is shared, it seems, considering the rise in popularity of tilt-shift photography, which allows one to turn the entirety of reality into a lilliputian version of itself; and while they are sometimes beautiful, they never quite grab me the same way the real thing does. I think that’s why I like these photos by Slinkachu so much, featuring as they do vignettes comprised of diminutive figures; tiny stories transpiring in a land of giants.
Pina Bausch died on Tuesday, aged 68, less than a week after being diagnosed with cancer. Dozens of eloquent and heartfelt obituaries honoring the Queen of Tantztheater and her incalculable influence on modern dance are going up all over the web. Mark Brown’s eulogy over at The Scotsman contains some especially incisive remarks:
She was one of a select few modern artists – such as James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Ingmar Bergman and Samuel Beckett – whose work can be truly described, in the most profound sense, as transcendental.
Bausch’s immense influence extended – and will continue to extend – far beyond her fellow dance and theatre makers, into film making and the visual arts. She was described so often as a “revolutionary artist” that the term became almost a platitude. Yet there is no other phrase which quite captures the impact of her deeply intelligent, humane, fearless and iconoclastic aesthetic.
Hell to the yes. It’s very rare to find an artist (in any medium) who strikes such a perfect balance of craft, grit, and grace; laughter, tears and squirminess. That “Pornography of Pain” label bestowed derisively upon Bausch by the New Yorker years ago may have stuck, but considering the emotional commitment and complexity of her work, it just doesn’t ring true.
Photo via the AFP.
Obviously, I’m no expert, but based purely off my own intuitive response to her stage and screen work, I’d call Bausch’s vision one of compassionate absurdity. Life and death, male and female, joy and grief, discipline and abandon are all presented with courageous honesty. She didn’t just break down boundaries between the mediums of theater, dance and film; she challenged our perceptions of performance itself. Stanford lecturer Janice Ross nails it:
In a Pina Bausch dance, the invisible divide between the real person and the stage character seems to collapse so that one often has the sense of watching barely mediated real life events. This isn’t art rendered as life so much as living rendered as art.
I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a shame that Bausch died when she was still so actively, splendidly creative. What a tremendous gift that she was ever here at all. In her honor, I’ve added “Revolutionary” to the list of Coilhouse category tags. Long may her dance live on.
Funereal excerpt from Wuppertal’s Die Klage der Kaiserin.
There’s something that I can’t help but love about the strange story of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783). Messerschmidt was a technically brilliant and accomplished court sculptor in Vienna. He spent his early years creating masterful, but rather dull, portrait busts of wealthy and powerful patrons. However (and this is where is gets interesting!) during the 1770’s his work underwent a mysterious transformation. He began to create his infamous character heads, a series of grotesque, humorous (and IMHO absolutely marvelous) portrait busts. At the time, it was whispered that an undiagnosed mental illness had prompted the drastic transformation of his work. Shortly thereafter, he was expelled from teaching at the academy, lost many of his patrons, and went into isolation in Bratislava, where he spent the rest of his life working on his character head series. It has always remained unclear whether he was indeed insane, or merely pissed off the wrong people. I prefer to think that he had merely grown tired of the pompous stuffed shirts of the academy and that his later works were a brilliantly articulated and eloquent thumbing of the nose…
