One of my favorite artists, Bethalynne Bajema, has a new book out! The book is called Bajema’s Web Collection II: Etta Diem and features art and writing by Bajema’s new alter ego, Etta:
My second collection of work introduces my character Etta Diem with new artwork and writing all done in Miss Diem’s somewhat antique and eccentric style.
This collection includes Etta’s encyclopedia of Harmful Sensation, her mostly true stories of the strange and quirky (like the tale of the prostitute popular during the Jack the Ripper times, who was singled out by her chattering teeth… that didn’t happen to be in her mouth) and a variety of other dark humor tales from Victorian times. The collection also includes a new series of steampunk/dark fantasy styled art that had not been seen as of yet.
Bajema also has an Etsy store, where you can buy some gorgeous handmade prints from the book.
A young boy is trapped in an abusive home. As his parents become increasingly detached, demeaning, and violent he finds sanctuary in the attic. There, he plants magic seeds from which a grandmother grows.
David Lynch made Grandmother in 1970 on a total budget of $7,200. This incredible film [David’s third] was shot in Lynch’s house in Philadelphia, where he painted the walls black and the actors white. The lack of dialogue, with everything conveyed through guttural noises, barking, and a score from a local group, Tractor, compliments the stylized, stripped down atmosphere that’s since become the Lynch standard.
This depiction of childhood escapism yanks us away to that special place where everything is very, very WRONG. No one is better than David at evoking that sense of creeping dread, that beautiful paranoia! But there is love here too, unconditional and pure, as the grandmother provides everything the boy’s parents deny him. A dream, a nightmare and a slow attack on the psyche – watch all 5 parts below when you have a quiet hour to spare.
Young German filmmaker Jeff Desom graduated from the Bournemouth Arts Institute in 2007. His senior project featured the experimental pianist Volker Bertelmann, a.k.a. Hauskchka. That partnership has led to this flawless collaboration:
Music video for the song “Morgenrot” off Hauschka’s latest album, Ferndorf. (Via Siege, thanks.)
Painstakingly animated, composited and rendered, “Morgenrot” features a flaming piano falling in slow motion through a series of vintage black and white photographs of NYC. Desom talks about the process:
The finished animation is mostly made from early twentieth century photographs that I found while browsing through the vast collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. I also used old postcards from New York that I purchased at a flea market in Paris. Most of the time I would only zoom into a tiny portion of the picture and utilise that as my frame.
The hardest part was to make it look as if it had been pasted together from a lost reel depicting this curious experiment where they’d [lit] up a piano and thrown it off a building only to see what would happen. The kind of unnecessary crash test executed [for] the sole purpose of drooling over the beauty of slow motion.
Mission accomplished. One can only imagine what Desom is going to come up with next.
Asha Beta is an ongoing multimedia project by Philadelphia-based artist Nicomis (“Nyx”) Blalock. Check out her brand-new website, blog and Flickr stream.
Though Nyx is New York City born and bred, these new sculptures (photographed by the talented Ben Harris) are pure Philly. Everything about them reminds me of my beloved dirty city: exploring condemned houses and finding strange trinkets under the floorboards, admiring a skyline of abandoned factories, chillin’ with the Soap Lady at the Mütter. Indeed, Philadelphia is a very strange place. Lynch cites the city as his biggest creative influence, and calls Eraserhead his “Philadelphia story.” The Brothers Quay spent their formative years there. Edgar Allen Poe started a magazine (ok, he tried to start a magazine) in Philly. It’s definitely the place to be if you like grime, texture and decay (that’s another way of saying “if you like Philly Cheese Steaks,” for all you out-of-towners).
Extant Axis, April 2009
In fact, these scultpures remind me of a very specific Philly/Lynch memory: my first day in the city, which was the first day of 1999. Not only was it my first day in the city, but it was my first time at an art gallery. My friends and I got talking to the gallery owner, and it turned out that David Lynch had worked at that gallery for many years. She started telling us obscure anecdotes about Lynch. For example, we learned that that the old lady in The Grandmother was actually her mom, and that she had a blast filming. She took us to the back room and showed us this early David Lynch fine art etching (or another one exactly like it, I can’t remember). But the best story she told us was about Lynch’s travel habits. Apparently, he had a habit of stuffing his suitcases with absolutely disgusting things: dead rodents, two-week-old, half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, worms, grubs. These were mixed in with his personal items: suits, toothpaste, a comb. He would travel like this through airports. Just ’cause. He sometimes lost his suitcases while traveling. Just… ’cause?
More gorgeous sculptures and my portrait of the artist, after the jump.
Walker’s work reminds me of a Russian children’s story called Snegurochka (“Girl of Snow”). In the version I remember, an old childless couple make a girl out of snow, and suddenly she comes alive. They are overjoyed, and take care of her all winter. When spring comes, she wants to play outside, but they don’t want to let her go out. Finally they give in, and she runs out to play in the sun. As the warm rays hit her skin she melts away, gone forever. Apparently there was also a longer version of this story with more sexual overtones. At any rate, there’s something ethereal about Walker’s work that gives me the same feeling as that story. (Bonus for the Russians in the ‘haüs: Walker’s work also recalls this poem, which I can’t find an English translation for.)
See them all on his site, with some favorites after the jump.
This was a student film made by Sundance filmmaker Madeleine Olnek about Leni Riefenstahl’s 100th birthday. If you take it literally, it could be a little mean-spirited towards the old lady. I mean, Leni wasn’t that obviously smug in the interviews that served as reference. There’s a little more depth to her. I mean, she never said that shit about Helen Keller in real life. Poor little Leni. What an unfair portrayal.
But if you take this short film as satirical commentary on artists who contribute to certain regimes and then try to pull that “I didn’t know there were politics going on!” shit later, which is how I think this film is meant to be taken, it’s fucking hilarious. My favorite real-life moment on par with the absurdity in this clip comes from a famous 1979 interview with (utterly homoerotic) Nazi sculptor Arno Breker, whose work was hailed by Hitler as the antithesis to all so-called degenerate art. Journalist Andre Müller, considered one of the hardest interviewers of his generation, described the scene thus:
When he mentioned the tragic consequences of his professional activities under Hitler, his isolation and desperation, his wife trembled with laughter. When I asked her what she found so amusing, she replied that normally her husband spoke in a completely different way. During a stroll around the garden, where several sculptures dating from the National Socialist period were on display, she told me: “I don’t listen when he tries to discuss politics, it bores me.”
A macabre incident occurred when I asked the sculptor about his attitude toward the gassing of the Jews. Precisely at that moment, [Breker’s art dealer] inserted a new tape into his recorder and mistakenly pressed the play button, so that my words were accompanied by a few bars of dance music.
And no. I can’t read the words “Nazi” and “dance music” in such close proximity to each other without bopping my head to this song. It’s funny. It’s not funny.
1950s Vogue meets Zombie in these inspiring paintings by Fernando Vicente. The textured cyan background works beautifully with the fleshy yellows and reds. I love the Hepburn-like aristocracy of the women in these portraits.
For many more images from this series, go to Fernando Vicente’s website, click NOVEDADES, and then click VANITAS. His website’s in Flash, so I can’t link directly to the images here. Some more favorites, after the jump.
Gutted by this news. Artist, activist, teacher, prankster Tom Kennedy drowned at Ocean Beach in San Francisco last Sunday, April 12th. John Law has written him a beautiful memorial over at Laughing Squid, and everyone’s telling tales in the comment thread of the big, strong, tender-hearted man who inspired them to live more fully, more bravely, more creatively.
The single most cherished moment of my time at the annual Burning Man festival: one perfect evening in 2003, singing sea shanties at the prow of La Contessa with some of the best friends I’ll ever have in this life. A member of the Extra Action Marching Band leaned halfway out of the crow’s nest, shouting “PORT BOW, THAR SHE BLOWS” and we all looked… Tom’s glowing white whale, her belly full of whooping passengers, her blowhole spouting propane fire, was on a collision course with us.
At the last moment she gave way, and the chase was on! We sped after each other across the playa, weaving and dancing, hollering and cheering and going much too fast –sometimes missing one another by mere yards– until finally the Black Rock Rangers pulled over both vessels and gave everyone a stern talking-to.
It was an exhilarating dream. No one who was there will ever forget that night as long as they live.
Thank you, Tom. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Tom Kennedy (1960-2009). Photographed by Leo Nash.
No, not that Nick Cave. This is the work of a Chicago-based Nick Cave, whose soundsuits, seen here, focus on the fusion between fiber textile art and modern dance to create manifestations of the wearer’s physical energy. Cave’s shamanistic soundsuits have been described in the Boston Phoenix as “lavish, strange, beautifully-crafted outfits resembling mash-ups of African tribal ceremonial dress, Ku Klux Klan robes, Roman Catholic clergy vestments, yetis, Star Wars aliens, plumed and sequined carnival costumes, and fabulous drag queen gowns.” In an interview with Greg Cook, Cave poignantly describes the moment he created his first soundsuit:
When the Rodney King incident happened. I was reading in the paper about how the police sort of brought description to him. You know they were talking about, I can’t remember exactly what it said, but they were talking about this big, black, male figure that was bigger than life, that was mammoth-like. And I just started thinking about these words that were describing this human being, and I was like, “This is just fucking insane to me.” And I realized at that point I needed to take a different responsibility, I need to recognize that this is the platform that I need to be delivering, to work on.
And my first “Soundsuit” was a twig-suit. Which I didn’t even know it was a “Soundsuit.” I was just sort of making a piece in response to that situation. So I gathered all these twigs in the park and made this suit. I wasn’t even thinking that I could get into it. That wasn’t even on my brain. And then I made it and then I put it on. And I was just like, “Oh. My. God.” And at that point I knew that I had, you know you just know when you’ve found it. And I just knew. And I thought, “Oh, God, am I ready to take on all of this right now.” Because I just knew that it was a sculpture, it was again this suit of armor, it was this sort very unfamiliar sort of territory that I wasn’t really quite sure what it meant. Still don’t know really. Then there was performance. So it’s all of these sort of things. In order to be heard, to have a voice, you need to be an activist.
Note: I don’t know why our last post had commenting turned off. Whoops! Must’ve clicked something by accident. Fixed it, so that comments are possible.
Comics illustrator Renee French has a blog where she posts doodles on a daily basis. Some are as detailed as the image above, others are simple line drawings. The subjects of her drawings can be completely unexpected, but the themes that come up consistently include creatures, houses, animal traps and kids dressed in very warm winter clothing. The more pages you go through on her blog, the more you feel like you’re being sucked into the universe of these pictures, questioning what you see less and less.
Renee’s blog is updated every day, but she also has an old website where you can see the books and comics that she’s published, including Grit Bath on Fantagraphics and a book called The Soap Lady.My favorite comic on this site. My favorites short comic stories on the site are Duck and ZZZ.
