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, cialis my, they speak volumes.
If anything Henrik Sønniksen’s Vegeterrible enforces my hatred for and distrust of the Avacado. With skin like pleather and innards the color and texture of fetid library paste, they are a Horrid and Awful produce. Deep down they are all rotten. Deep down, they are all monsters.
via DRAWN!
Photo by Sean Williams, 2005 production.
Why don’t ALL puppeteers wear monocles and do acrobatics while performing? That was my first thought while watching Redmoon Theater’s latest marvel, The Cabinet. As the show begins, the audience is faced with a wall sized wooden cabinet, its face riddled with oddly shaped drawers and compartments. Suddenly, a door slams open and gloved hands slide a gramophone out from behind a curtain. More doors open to reveal a darkened stage. Then, as if through the hissing and static of an ancient recording, the voice of the protagonist begins to tell his tale, the story of an unwittingly murderous somnambulist.
Photo by Ryan Bourque, 2010 production.
Coilhouse being what it is, I have the feeling that at least a few of you are already familiar with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the 1919 silent film that inspired Redmoon’s production. It is a story with as many layers as a matryoshka doll, but on the surface, it tells the tale of a hapless somnambulist (Cesare) who falls into the clutches of a nefarious doctor (Dr. Caligari) who uses the young man as a pawn in his murderous schemes. Ultimately, we discover that the story we have just been told was the delusion of a man in an asylum, trapped within his own mind– a dream within a dream.
Photo by Sean Williams, 2005 production.
Here at Coilhouse, we spend a lot of time discussing our joint paper fetish. Ink this, paper stock that – we’ve found ourselves having many of these conversations well into the wee morning hours. At least two of us have been escorted out of book stores after hours of illicitly sniffing some shiny new release to a pulp. These things happen. And now, my newest object of forbidden love is It Books’ new edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated by Camille Rose Garcia.
If you’re not familiar with Garcia’s work, she does things like this. Though the brilliance of a Camille + Alice fusion had never occurred to me before, having now personally seen [and smelled] the book has me wondering why. Everything about this is perfect. PERFECT! From a wobbly, swan-necked, and overgrown Alice crying strings of ruby tears through mascara-caked lashes on page 20, to a rabbit that would make Freyagushi proud tea-dipping a defenseless Dormouse, these character designs are a macabre delight. Camille’s swirly psychedelic style allows the imagination run free, as Carroll, presumably, intended.
Let us go back to that paper fetish for a moment. As if the beautiful illustrations weren’t enough, this edition is Decked. Out. The dustcover has spot gloss, the capital “A” on hard cover is debossed and outfitted with pink foil, and there is gold ink throughout the book. Oh, and the pages are made to look aged. Mmyep, adoration in full effect. Just don’t ask me to replicate the sounds I made while leafing through the thing for the first time and we can stay friends.
Now for the really fun part! To commemorate this release, and because we love you, we’ve teamed up with It Books to give away three copies of this book, three Alice tote bags, and three limited edition signed and numbered lithographs by Camille Rose Garcia. All you have to do is comment, and be a resident of US or Canada. Though this will be a totally random drawing of numbers from hats, I encourage you to share your own Alice art and stories. This book has been a part of so many childhoods and we want to know how it warped your pliant kid-brains.
EDIT: The raffle is over and we are confirming winners’ locations before announcing their names
Click the jump to see the tote and lithograph artwork.
The 1935 edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) by the Italian illustrator Carlo Farneti. There’s nothing that says crazed fever dream like a dejected figure facing a gauntlet of monstrous, crimson-eyed owls or a crowd, their faces twisted in fear, gathered around a towering casket.
“Alien Faced People of the World Unite!” by Suzanne Gerber.
The marvelous, nurse oft-mentioned curator/creator/writer Suzanne Gerber recently posted something on her main site, Wurzeltod.ch, that should catch the attention of artistic East Londoners:
I recently came to the conclusion that it’s about time for me to get my own little space for art and exhibitions. I know this is not going to happen from one day to another and I’m also fully aware of all the competition around and the dire economic times, but heck, this is as good or bad as any time to start a business when you put a mind as determined as mine to it and if I never try, I will never know.
I have been wanting to get a shop/show room for a long time now and I know that I’m not the only one with such grand hopes but zero cash. So here I am, asking you, fellow (preferably East) London creative/artist/designer/utopian to join forces with me and share a space for creative endeavours with me. I’m looking particularly (but not exclusively) for:
- An artist in need of a studio
- A (fashion) designer in need of a shop space
- A creative hairdresser in need of a salon
- An (art) book/mag/graphic novel nerd/collector in need of a book shop
- A restaurateur in need of a small café
- A combination of the above
- Someone who already owns a space with a creative direction and wants to rent parts of it out
So if you’re any of the above or know of someone who is and if you have been wanting to have a space of your own for a while and are committed, trustworthy, hardworking and willing to make human sacrifices, please do get in touch so that we can discuss everything over a few cups of hazelnut soy latte.
Best of luck, lovely lady. Break limbs and hearts and piggy banks, whatever it takes! Hoping to hear a lot more about this in the coming months.
I’ve been walking through this forest for some time now. I came here after I left work. I shut my oyster off, placed my paperwork in my squid and got on the elevator. It brought me down to the forest, and now I’m walking home. It seems like it’s taking a lot longer than usual. I begin to worry that it may be taking too long. If I’m not home in time for dinner, the terrorists will kill my girlfriend. This cannot happen. I begin to run, but it’s no use. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. I frantically look around, trying to regain my bearings. To my left, I hear a noise. Whipping around, I notice that the brush is rustling. Suddenly, a nyala with a man’s face emerges from the brush. We stand there for a moment, staring at each other. Or maybe we stare at each other for a long time, I’m not sure. I am sure, though, that we stare at each other. Then the man-nyala slowly opens its mouth and in a deep, lugubrious voice says, “The mother’s milk is poisoned by the quiche.” Then it begins to scream. And then I wake up.
Just in case you missed this announcement elsewhere, Zo is selling these gorgeous contoured vinyl stickers of her original artwork over at her site, Biorequiem! There are two designs: Cumulus Confection, which appeared as one of the Coilhouse section headers in Issue 02, and Poke, an artwork that Zo released as fine-art print some time ago. The stickers are coated with a UV finish, making them resistant to discoloration over time. Get ’em before they’re gone!
They’re dropping like flies this week, dear readers. Yesterday it was reported that both actress Zelda Rubinstein and author/historian Howard Zinn had died and today word comes that J.D. Salinger, famed author of Catcher in the Rye is also gone, at the ripe old age of 91. A recluse for most of his life, besides the occasional lawsuit to stop seemingly anyone from publishing any details about his life, one could be forgiven for thinking him already dead which, I suppose, might have pleased him immensely.
What we are left with is a blurry portrait, taken from accounts by a former lover and his daughter. The man who emerges is a narcissist with a penchant for Eastern philosophy, homeopathy, and drinking his own urine. It is, perhaps, not the most flattering of biographies.
Still, in the end, none of this really matters. Those who will mourn the loss of Salinger do not mourn him, so much as they mourn the man who gave us Holden Caulfield. In that sense, the frustration with Salinger’s reticence has less to do with the words from his mouth than those from his typewriter. All we are left with is a set of four, slim volumes and a handful of short stories, taking up precious little in the way of shelf space. And yet his most famous creation, the young Mr. Caulfield, endures in just about every aspect of adolescence in this country. One may dispute Salinger’s ability with the written word and it would be a far easier proposition than disputing his influence. In many ways, J.D. Salinger created the teenager we know today. The sullen, disenchanted, angry and, ultimately, sensitive young person was set in stone in Catcher in the Rye, the model for countless (if not all) counterculture icons since.
It may be that such effusive words are unwarranted when describing a book or its protagonist, but a book so widely read, so deeply entrenched in our culture, deserves nothing less. Ultimately it is a case of the work having far outgrown its creator; a creator who quickly came to despise both it and the fame it brought him. In that regard the loss of Salinger is already decades old.
Hey you, over there. Yeah you, with the Garfield plushy and the pictures of your cat, Garfield, dotting your cubicle walls. That’s right, you. You know what your problem is? You’re too damn cheerful. You say you hate Mondays in a way that tells me you really don’t and you’re always the first one to suggest ideas for weekend long team building exercises. You should stop that. What you need is a good, harsh dose of reality, delivered with an animated veneer. Here, sit yourself down and let me show you something.
Today, the Friday Afternoon Movie presents Grave of the Fireflies directed by Isao Takahata and adapted from the book of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka. Released in 1988 by Shinchosha, who wisely hired the renowned Studio Ghibli to animate it, Grave of the Fireflies tells the story of Seita and his sister Setsuko. Orphaned near the end of World War II — losing their mother in the firebombing of Kobe and their father in the line of duty in the Japanese Imperial Navy — we follow the two through a desolate and famine ravished Japan as they attempt to survive, enduring the cruel indifference of both their relatives and fellow countrymen.
The antithesis of what many people expect from an animated feature it must have been even more puzzling upon its release in Japan, paired as a double feature with Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro. Grave of the Fireflies is a look at the aftermath of an event that Japan continues to come to grips with and it is nearly unflinching in its gaze refusing to gloss over the cruelty and desperation it falls upon without ever becoming gratuitous. Roger Ebert, in his review, said that he felt the choice to animate the story was the correct one as “live action would have been burdened by the weight of special effects, violence and action” and I could not agree more (thought it should be noted that there have been two live action versions released in Japan since, in 2005 and 2008). The impressionistic nature of animation only helps to let this tragic tale emerge on its own terms. Scenes like Setsuko, dying of starvation and hallucinating, offering her brother a “dinner” she cooked for him, in reality clumps of mud and stones, are some of the most heart-wrenching things I have seen a movie.
It’s proof of the power of animation that something like Grave of the Fireflies work’s so well; and a shame then that, in this country at least, the majority of animated feature films decline to deal with this kind of subject matter, opting instead to tackle stories deemed too strange (or costly) for traditional live action films or the saccharine, princess fantasies of Walt Disney. In fact, it seems disingenuous to limit that statement to the U.S. There are few animated features that dare to approach this kind of subject matter and perhaps none that have plumbed the same emotional depth, period. It’s a testament to Takahata and Studio Ghibli’s skill and courage — and the power of Nosaka’s story — that even movies from some of my favorite directors, writers, and producers don’t affect me the way Grave of the Fireflies does. If you haven’t seen it you owe it to yourself to experience this profound study of war and its effects on the human condition.
