since the year is reaching it’s cessation, i have no use for my edward gorey calendar. so after destroying it and attempting to transform it into some kind of displayable piece, i ended up scanning individual pieces and making this contraption. i don’t believe a poster for the neglected murderesses exists anywhere:

I realize that, like Neville,  negligence has gotten the better of me in the past few months. This blog deserves better, and so do you. I hereby pledge to dedicate much more time to HLWE in 2010, so get ready. As an added bonus, I’ll be moving to Paris and photographing the heck outta it; of course with the eye of an American ex-pat. While the notion of leaving the motherland is disheartening, this quote from The Sun Also Rises is always reassuring: “Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.” Bar Hemingway, here I come!

PS – I’m exhaustively researching fleas/bars/haunts/etc. to visit, but I’d sure appreciate some tips from like-minded folks. Drop a line. Cheers!

Beginning in the 1960s, Polish-born animator Piotr Kamler created 10 films combining techniques of animation, stop-motion, and early CGI.  His work utilizes simplicity and repetition to explore process and abstraction.  This should be academic, yet there is a thread of human emotion running through it all.  It’s interesting that his methods are akin to the combination of musique concrete and sound synthesis techniques employed by the acousmatic composers he collaborated with.

There is a DVD compiling his work, but it is apparently hard to come by.

Le Pas (1975)
music by Bernard Parmegiani
In which a cube transforms, with some difficulty, into an identical cube in a slightly different location.  Le Pas explores process and repetition through the movements of simple objects in an austere, infinite landscape reminiscent of many surrealist paintings.  Kamler’s delicate animation of geometry anthopomorphizes the objects, implying meanings that apply to our human world.  I will never again doubt the erotic potential of 2 animated squares.  As with most of his films, he displays his impeccable taste by working with a master – this time, electronic composer Bernard Parmegiani.

Une Mission Ephemere (1993)
music by Bernard Parmegiani
This is Kamler’s final work, and appears to combine stop-motion animation with computer animation.  For me, this film seems to be about the inner workings of a mind.  From a bowl of undifferentiated cubes (the mind) a figure (“I”) emerges, manipulates the cubes (concepts, memories, etc) in an act of creation, and ultimately is subsumed back into the whole.  Like Le Pas, Une Mission Ephemere ends as it began, implying that we have witnessed one repetition of an infinite process.

Chronopolis (1982)
music by Luc Ferrari
This hour-long work is by far Kamler’s most ambitious, and took about 5 years to complete.  The film was released on VHS (and, as of this writing, Amazon shows a used copy in stock at $66).  Chronopolis seems to be a city in the sky where supernatural beings manipulate white spheres into complex objects.  This is perhaps the most abstract science fiction film that I know of.  Luc Ferrari was a masterful musique concrete composer and his score is, unsurprisingly, fascinating.  To date, I have only seen this clip:

l’Araignelephant (1968)
music by Bernard Parmegiani
I don’t speak Polish, so all I can tell you is that this relates the adventures of an octapedal elephant in Bizarroland.  Along the way, he cheats his way through a maze, discovers that a detached scrotum can be replaced by a quick tap of the trunk, goes on a magic amoeba ride, grows a new set of legs, and finds true love.  This work has a blackboard look which is different from his other films.  Parmegiani’s sound design is beautiful.

Coeur de Secours (1973)
music by Francois Bayle
Visually, this one brings to mind Edward Gorey as well as shadow puppet plays.  The opening suggests that Kamler is exploring the nature of time here, and indeed it’s difficult to imagine anyone better suited to do so than a stop-motion animator.  Note the interesting recursive scalar relationship wherein the men playing chess are themselves inside of a rook on a larger chessboard.  Once again, Kamler works with a genius of electronic music from GRM – this time, composer Francois Bayle.

Shut up, it’s not cheating. We may be days away from the end of 2009 and my aimed-for 52 books, but including these 4 little titles in one post is due to their interconnectedness, not because I’m scrambling to make up numbers. If I really wanted to cheat I would have sat down this morning with my full english and made my way through the Mr Men backlist. Done. 52 books sorted. Re-reading Mr Bump would have been immensely enjoyable. But I am not cheating. Just because they’re short and have pictures, don’t mean they aint books worth talking about.

So there I am plonking away some time in a colleague’s office when I come across our first specimen: The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey. It’s an ABC book. That is each page progresses you through the alphabet by focusing its story on a letter and accompanying it with a divine illustration. The alternative title for this story is After the Outing and we hear of 26 ill-fated children (I like to think of them as orphans) and their awful demises. So we start with ‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs’ and end with ‘Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin’. Roundabouts the middle we have my favourite: ‘N is for Neville who died of ennui’. Ennui! After lounging on my colleague’s desk to gobble up this dark, hilarious tale, and reading out loud from its pages to anyone who dared walk by, it became my mission to read and own everything of Mr Gorey’s that I could get my hands on. And so I started my mission with another alphabetical title called The Glorious Nosebleed and an odd little Christmas fable, The Haunted Tea-cosy. In Nosebleed we sail through illustrations focused on adverbs. Yep, adverbs. That most overused grammatical device (and most incorrectly used?). Thus ‘She knitted mufflers Endlessly’ and ‘He exposed himself Lewdly’ (how else does one expose oneself?). A less connected collection but still a delight in its morbid, clever, adult concoction. And though not my flavour of yuletide, Tea-cosy is, as the subtitle suggests, ’a dispirited and distasteful diversion for Christmas’ and makes me want to be able to shrink like Alice and climb into Mr Gorey’s imagination. I’m abuzz with the discovery of a new author. I’m doing google searches and purchasing backlists on blind faith that I will adore them. Don’t you just love that feeling?

Who was Edward Gorey? These folk can tell you.

And amongst the insanity of Christmas preparation I found the perfect little book for a friend and decided it was also a perfect little book for me. After all, Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice are two of my favourite movies, why wouldn’t I like a book of illustrated ’stories’ by Tim Burton? Although in this case it was the illustrations and ‘concepts’ I enjoyed rather than the tales – odd rhymes not totally realised and perhaps felt needed to ‘fill out’ the pics – but maybe that’s why Mr Burton is a filmmaker and not an author.

Still, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and other stories is a fun, thought-provoking diversion and it sits well and happily with the Gorey creations. Macabre and fascinating, imaginative, childlike yet completely adult, funny in their awesome moroseness and creepiness. There is something concurrently delightful and ‘off’ about the images on all these pages. It’s like you have been let in on a secret, like you have been acknowledged as one who will understand this odd world we live in and the even odder world in many of our heads. The Burton stories may be slightly squeamier than Gorey’s though they lack a certain subtlety infused in his predecessor’s work. Mind you, if Mr Gorey had tried to make movies, perhaps they wouldn’t have been as perfect as his books?

“Hector was the first of the gang
with a gun in his hand
and the first to do time
the first of the gang to die“

.first of the gang to die by morrissey.

.the original edward gorey illustration from the gashlycrumb tinies reads

h is for hector done in by a thug

.yours truly has here marred it for arts sake.

Now that I’ve finished reading Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, Interviews selected and edited by Karen Wilkin. I thought I would pull together my favorite quotes to try and capture some of the pieces that best capture why I love this man.

The first piece is an excerpt from an interview he did with Lisa Solod, “Edward Gorey” Boston Magazine, September 1980

So back then you had lots of girlfriends. But now the press makes a point of the fact that you have never married. What are your sexual preferences?

Well, I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly.

Why not?

I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something. I know people who lead really outrageous lives.

I’ve never said that I was gay and I’ve never said that I wasn’t. A lot of people would say that I wasn’t because I never do anything about it. What I’m trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else. Now people come up to you and say, “I’m a press agent” or I’m a writer.” I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist.

You are a person who happens to do those things?

I am a person who does those things. –I correspond with a museum curator in New York and he told me he was going to be on a TV program about homosexuals speaking out. I asked him, “Are you doing this reluctantly?” And he said, “Oh, no! I am very much into this.” He’s very militant.

You don’t approve?
The curator was quoted as saying that his creative life and his homosexuality were one and the same. All I could think was, “Hogwash, dear, hogwash!” Which is unfair, I suppose, because maybe for him the two are linked.

I realize that homosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is– but then, of course, heterosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is, too. And being a man is a serious problem and being a woman is, too. Lots of things are problems.

Is the sexlessness of your books a product of your asexuality?
I would say so. Although every now and then someone will say my books are seething with repressed sexuality.

You don’t believe that?
I don’t really know. I don’t know what I’m writing about. I never sat down and tried to figure it out. It’s not about sex, or at least not obviously, right?

Sometimes it’s about sex. There are those who say that your book The Curious Sofa is a pornographic novel; in fact, it’s even subtitled “a pornographic work.” And it’s full of couples having odd sexual encounters.
But it’s not pornographic in the standard sense. It’s all in the style.

Why does it end with a man starting up some mechanical device inside of a sofa? Why is the woman frightened? Why a sofa?
I have absolutely no idea.

That book is minimalist and unexpected– a good example of your work. You leave a lot to the imagination.
Well, no one has any sex organs.

I appreciate that he speaks so candidly about his sexuality. He is a good example of someone demonstrating a departure from stereotypes and social expectations. The rest are just quotes of his that I thought both well stated and a reflection of my own thoughts on the subject.

“I look like  a real person, but underneath I am not real at all. It’s just a fake persona.”

“It’s my favorite Sentence. [Many too many alternatives, but no choices. . . Patrick White]”

“For some reason, my mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that’s what the world is like.”

“I admire work that is neither one thing nor the other, really. All the things you can talk about in anyone’s work are the things that are least important. It’s like the ballet. You can describe the externals of a performance– everything, in fact, but what really constituted it’s core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what’s important is left after you have explained everything else. Ideally, if anything were any good, it would be indescribable.”

“Oh, the of it all”

“I’d like to come up with something really outrageous, but what, these days, would be considered really outrageous?”

“More and more, I think you should have no expectations and do everything for its own sake. That way you won’t be hit in the head quite so frequently. I firmly believe what someone said–that life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”

“I do think it’s stupidity that makes the world go round. And if you’re doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there’d be no point.”

“I’m not making them into fettuccine or anything. But I do like rocks.”

“I think there should be a little bit of uneasiness in everything, because I do think we’re all really in a sense living on the edge. So much of life is inexplicable. Inexplicable things happen to me, things that are so inexplicable that I’m not even sure that something happened. And you suddenly think, ‘Well, if that could happen, anything could happen.’ One moment, something is there, and then, the next, it is not there. One minute, both of my feet are perfectly all right, and then, a minute later, somebody has dropped a fifty-pound weight on one of them, and now suddenly I’ve got an injured foot and I have to do something about this injured-foot thing. The things that happen to you are usually the things that you haven’t though of or that come absolutely out of nowhere. And all you can do is cope with them when they turn up”

“Well, you’re probably not doing it because it’s not right. Why worry about it? God knows, there’s enough to worry about without worrying about worrying about things.”

“For some reason, I do like making people feel faintly uneasy about the whole thing. I suppose because I think life is more than faintly unsettling.”

“Whenever someone asks me about the people I’ve known, I don’t want to talk about it. The more I think about it, I think that if I tried to put it into words it would become so completely distorted that it might as well not exist at all. So I refuse to try and talk about it. Basically, I distrust language.”

And with that, Thank you Edward for engaging with the world in such a beautiful way.

I don’t want to get too heavy and personal on here because that sort of thing tends to make for bad writing, but here’s a compromise.

I finished my painting for my friend, C. We went to Antioch College together and were first year roommates, It turned out that we got along great and were pretty much inseperable for the first three years there. While life has taken us in different directions, I still feel like she is one of my closest friends. The painting was inspired by the phrase “Catch as Catch Can”  which holds a special place in our heart because she used it once in passing and it just seemed to be an uncanny fit for a way to sum up our experience of College and our friendship.  We both got a tattoo of the phrase (I hope you’re body hair positive, because my legs are pretty hairy!)

“Catch as Catch Can” adj.
Using or making do with whatever means are available; irregular: made a catch-as-catch-can living doing odd jobs.

legs The rest of the painting was inspired because of C’s family history that includes a lot of beautiful things like farming, knitting, and raising bees. I think our kindred art spirit made it especially fun to work on this painting and I hope she enjoys it. She challenged me to muted earth tones. . . 

I’ve been reading “Ascending Peculiarity” which is a collection of interviews that Edward Gorey granted various writers and fans. It’s really amazing. I went through a phase where I was reading a lot of biographies of writers and it made me feel like it’s more possible that I might succeed as an artist. Gorey is really inspiring to me because he was radical from the beginning in a genuine way that’s hard to find these days. I think post modernism has ruined us all and no one can be so honest in their quirkiness. But Gorey was the original androgynous bear! I don’t know how I missed it, but of COURSE I would be a fan.  I’ll compile the quotes that I love at a later time, but right now I’m trying to see if he might influence my own illustration. Not in the way that I’m going to lift his crosshatching AND his victorian tones.  I think there’s just something freeing about his brevity and simplicity. I think it makes it feel possible where I think I’ve been psyching myself out before I give it a real try. So- To Edward Gorey, Thanks for being an inspiration.

And as for my alter ego, the not-for-profit/health educator/jack.of.all.trades, I am tired. And hopefully this is the moment where it pushes me to step up as a leader, delegator, and truth teller. We’ll see. For now I need to pull myself away from the new Bravo TV show “Chef Academy.” It’s an absolute train-wreck reality cooking show where it’s a school and if they fail cooking tests they get kicked out. It’s amazing because you get to learn culinary tips, watch the human drama of being humbled by learning new things and having to reproduce the techniques. The chef has a bitchy quality like Simon Cowell, but instead of it being motivated out of catiness, it’s motivated by his love of cooking and his expectations of excellence. He’s honest and at times break hearts, and at other times makes folks feel like they’re better chefs than him. It’s beautiful.  .  . Ok, on second thought they make him out to be a douche by tongue in cheek making fun of him being french. He went on and on about how much he loved Columbo (which makes him seem both simple minded and out of date), and just now they focused on his temper tantrum about a broken juicer.

Decide for yourself.

]]>

Ever since I discovered the work of Edward Gorey about ten years ago I have been an addict.  His gothic, sometimes macabre, drawings, accompanied by humour so dry it is dessicated, is exactly the kind of thing guaranteed to make me laugh.

Last year there was a buzz on the Internet concerning the publication of a lost book of Gorey drawings called “The Recently Deflowered Girl: The Right Thing To Say On Every Dubious Occasion”.  The book is an etiquette manual which gives advice on such topics as what to say when you have been seduced at a seance, and other such unlikely scenarios.  It seems the book will not be released here until 2010 but it is available to pre-order on Amazon.

If you’d like to get your Gorey on before then I recommend The Gashlycrumb Tinies or the seasonally appropriate The Haunted Tea-Cosy. 

Cover of The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey

So how do you review an Edward Gorey book?

The Iron Tonic doesn’t have a plot as such. It has twenty-eight lines of poetry. But of course the thing about Gorey is the artwork; the illustrations are wonderful, bizarre, Gothic and worth paying attention to. And the subtitle probably tells you all you need to know: a winter afternoon in Lonely Valley.

And I for one agree that the careful stroller should beware of objects falling from the air….

nurse j. rosebeetle
tilted her employer
out of a wheelchair
and over a cliff at
sludgermouth in 1898

• Gawker asks journalists to just quit it already with their show-offy Raymond Carver-inspired What We Talk About When We Talk About X headlines. The New York Times was the worst offender (and Gawker was next).

• Good news for fans of creepy/cute pen drawings: a “lost” Edward Gorey-illustrated book is back in print. Anything with the word “Deflowered” in the title has stocking stuffer written all over it.  

• Random House Canada hooks up with a boozy new bed partner – Stoneleigh wine bottles will get neck tags recommending book club titles. Very crafty. How do you say no to a nice merlot telling you to stay home and read books? 

• The Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries has a major hate-on for Waterstones and Waterstone returns the favour. I need a Brit to fully explain the stormy relationship between book people and the chain. I can’t peek at TheBookseller.com without getting hit with some serious anti-Waterstones vitriol in the comments. 

• How well do you remember your Judy Blume? A quiz for anyone who ever wanted to write “I GOT IT!!!” on the back of a postcard.

This terrifying picture is from the GQ piece on Ayn Rand called “The Bitch is Back“. If you like Ayn Rand, enjoy reading about “2009’s most influential author”.  Otherwise, if you are like me, continue shielding your eyes.

Lit.

• L Magazine wonders who will take the helm at the Paris Review with Philip Gourevitch leaving?

• One of the names tossed around in the comments of the L Mag. conversation for a possible new Paris Review editor is Geoff Dyer.  Oh, and lookie here, he quotes Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy to report on a fashion show. 1 point for Dyer.

• Over at The Bumpidee Reader, Sara Jaffe discusses the novel Frost, by Austrian author Thomas Bernhard.

• Williamsburg bookstore Spoonbill and Sugartown turns ten years old.

• How a lost Edward Gorey book was found.

• Some reflections on a Literary Death Match in Seattle.

• 92nd Street Y is having a night of Nabokov, and The Millions gives us a little preview.

The wild world of sports.

• Over at The Lawn Chair Boys, they are previewing the NBA season through the eyes of realist painter Edward Hopper.  Most recently, the Sacramento Kings.

• Salon on Sammy Sosa bleaching his skin.

Tonight

• On the Facebook invite, it simply says, “Tsai Ming-Liang is the greatest living filmmaker”, does that make you even more interested in going to see the directors new film Face tonight?

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more news.

“Horrible” Haunted by Shoddy Script

Hobo Junction presents:

Horrible

by Josh Zagoren
directed by Breahan Eve Pautsch
thru December 19th (tickets: 773-935-6100)

Reviewed by Keith Ecker

Either the criteria of what constitutes a dark comedy expanded and no one bothered to tell us, or Hobo Junction Productions is misinformed. The theater company’s recent aptly named piece Horrible is being touted as a macabre comedy, but really the scariest element of the production is the script (written by ensemble member Josh Zagoren), which has more holes in it than a victim of an icepick attack.

This isn’t to say the play lacks ghoulish elements. It features quaint depictions of cannibalism, ghostly hauntings and murder. But it lacks the two most critical elements of a dark comedy: cynicism and comedy. In fact, by the end of the play, you will feel as if you just watched an adaptation of a Hallmark card illustrated by Edward Gorey. Sure it might elicit a chuckle, but really it’s just trite, hokey material that scratches the shallowest surface of the human condition.

The play focuses on two families, the Garrishes and the Goodlys, both of whom begin with a dead parent and a dying parent. Malcolm Garrish (Mike Tepeli) is a workaholic doctor. His transvestite brother (Kaelan Strouse) is his assistant, and both are haunted by their father (Elliott Fredland) who is awaiting the death of the Garrish matriarch (Judi Schindler).

Meanwhile, on the other side of town—or the stage rather—lives Holly Goodly (Madeline Chilese), a poor young woman who does anything she can to support herself and her blind sister (Cyra K. Polizzi), even if that means feasting on human flesh to ward off starvation. The Goodly sisters are haunted by their mother (Tara Generalovich) who is awaiting the death of her drunkard husband (Bob Pries).

Soon into the play, the sickly elders from both families kick the bucket, and the lifelines of Malcolm and Holly collide at the town cemetery. Of course, they immediately fall for each other and a courtship begins. Meanwhile, their respective parents, having nothing better to do, pester them about their love lives from beyond the grave. As Malcolm and Holly carry on, the question of how she will hide her horrible secret looms.

There is also a narrator (Keith Redmond), onstage musical accompanists and news of a serial killer about town, a plot point that not only makes the production an overstuffed mess, but also derails the play into eye-rolling territory by the end.

Simply put, the biggest weakness of this play is its script. The story feels very much like a first draft and can benefit greatly from some additional table reads and multiple rewrites. For example, superfluous characters abound, such as Holly’s blind sister and Malcolm’s transvestite brother, who served no real purpose and received minimal characterization. (Blindness and transvestitism is about as deep as it gets.)

Characterization was also nonexistent for the protagonists. Malcolm and Holly’s love feels contrived and cliché, something we’ve seen countless times before in any teenage romantic comedy. There is also no effort to make either multi-dimensional. One’s a workaholic and one’s a cannibal, but there really isn’t a whole lot else to go on. The parental ghosts add a little comic fancy, but they could have been a riot if they weren’t written as North Shore cardboard cutouts.

The jokes are reminiscent of a bad Henny Youngman routine, with one-liners and puns comprising the majority of what is supposed to be the comedy. Whereas the dialogue could inform character or plot, it just sits there as a cheap laugh that stops the action of the play. There should have been more focus on building comedic situations, but then again that would have required creating well-rounded characters to create situations around.

There are some nice things to say about Horrible. For one, the musical accompaniment (composed by company member Dan Pearce), is entertaining and does more to set the tone than any part of the actual play. With only a guitar and a baritone sax, the two musicians create gritty tunes, evoking the spirit of Tom Waits. In addition, Strouse as the transvestite brother stole many scenes, not because he was donning a dress, but because his inflection and facial expressions breathed much life into an otherwise figuratively dead character.

At best, Horrible is a half-baked play that was prematurely produced before the writer could fix the script’s shortcomings. At its worst, it’s a frightening example of a directionless piece whose banality will haunt you.

Rating: ★½

Cast:

Bryan Campbell as Mr. Hunt
Madeline Chilese as Holly Goodly
Elliott Fredland as Humphrey Garrish
Tara Generalovich as Hildabrand Goodly
Christopher Rex Jacobs as Herman Manners
Cyra K. Polizzi as Meredith Goodly
Bob Pries as Tom Goodly
Keith Redmond as Gill
Judi Schindler as Claudia Garrish
Kaelan Strouse as Gordon Garrish
Mike Tepeli as Malcolm Garrish

Crew:

Playwright – Josh Zagoren
Director – Breahan Eve Pautsch
Producer – Luke Harmon
Stage Manager – Amy Hopkins
Set and Lighting Designer – Andrew Marchetti
Music Director – Dan Pearce
Properties Designer – Josh Zagoren
Costume Designer – Janna Weddle
Costume Construction – Ashely Bagot
Marketing Director: Christopher Rex Jacobs

Pre and post Halloween or Samhain always seems to be a settling in time with longer nights that are highlighted by the music of leaves dancing across the roads and laughter indoors where it’s warm and things that go bump in the night are selectively welcomed in. Usually it’s via annual viewings of Charlie Brown and Garfield specials (candy, candy, candy, candy…), a fun movie romp or maybe something more psychologically scary, and of course books of a certain genre that can run the spectrum from charming to nightmare rewarding. I lean towards historical, cozy, and British mysteries. Also childhood sleuth series. You’re never too old to enjoy red leather bound books inherited from your grandfather’s library when you were ten. Or randomly coming across more in a beloved series and then some at completely random used book stores. The bulk of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novels were bought in this way. A couple of weeks ago while traveling it took Resolve to not to leave here in Mariposa, California with an armload of used treasures. Damn baggage limits!

Recently I came upon this Mystery intro and it was like entering a time warp to the mid eighties on Thursday nights. I associate that night with PBS Mystery, As Time Goes By, Keeping Up Appearances, and my mom. I grew up in a home without cable so PBS was never buried among 125 flashy channels of… crap. Edward Gorey is why I’m very fond of pen and ink drawings no matter how macabre. There are a few Gorey inspired intros but that’s the favourite. It’s disturbingly amusing, especially with the two legs slipping into the pond at the end. Love it. And St. Louis native, Vincent Price, always had that intrigue of wicked eyebrows and a magnetic voice that draws the viewer in whether he was himself or a sinister character.

As a bonus to this post I’m including Mystery Wallpaper gleaned from an old computer before an upgrade. The past month my computer has been creaking and eerie footstep falling with every move in this almost forgotten, favourite theme. This is 400 x 300 but I’ve a 800 x 600 plus the full deal for sharing if anyone comes across this in search. The wallpaper is almost impossible to find, let alone the full theme. It’s a definite keeper.

Source: Microsoft Windows ‘98

My six-year-old daughter recently discovered my Edward Gorey collection.  She’s fascinated with the art work and morbid tales.  At story time, she’ll thumb through my books before selecting something particularly gruesome.

She’ll ask, “Mommy, does this one have a bad ending?”

“They’re all pretty grim, sweetie.”

“Good.  I want this one!”

Much is often said about guitarists, drummers, singers–about who the “greatest of all time” is or was, about who the “greatest” of the moment might be. But pianists are frequently overlooked, perhaps in part because there aren’t many truly excellent ones in popular music. It’s arguably easier and definitely less painful to pick out a melody on a piano than it is to master even the most basic chords on a guitar. Anyone who has strained to reach an F major chord on a guitar can appreciate the simplicity of the same chord on the piano. And anyone who has spent any amount of time at a piano can admire the dexterity involved in crafting a terrific solo, unexpected chord progression, signature style, etc., on the piano.

OH thinks it’s important to recognize the most skilled piano-playing artists of the moment. So here they are. This is not a list of all-time greats; it’s the movers and shakers of the present. Or, as Jerry Lee Lewis might say, the shake-rattle-and-rollers.

10. Trent Reznor
Surprised? Although Reznor is best known for grinding, distorted industrial rock and pissed off lyrics, he started out as a pianist. A prodigiously good one, so the story goes. For the most part, the world has yet to hear first hand these impressive piano skills that Reznor is rumored to have. Sure, he’ll tease us with a little keyboard melody here (Ghosts I, track 1), a handful of chords there (“March of the Pigs”), but we’ll have to keep waiting for the day when he unveils his more advanced abilities.

9. Alicia Keys
Classically trained (at least until she graduated high school at 16), Alicia Keys has an undeniably unique style of songwriting. Her songs mix blues with pop and hip-hop sensibilities, a combo that made her a chart-topping artist at age 20. Oh–and she sings well, too. Each of Keys’s tunes, if a bit repetitive in an R&B loop kind of way, reveal a soulfulness that has always sounded wise beyond the youthful years of their composer. (Embedding of this song was disabled. Otherwise, it would be posted here.)

8. Patrick Wolf
Precocious, a bit egotistical, and incredibly prolific, 26-year-old Wolf has released four albums in the past six years and has a fifth one slated for 2010. Stylistically, he’s all over the map; you could probably describe his songs in terms of music from just about any other era and not be too far off the mark. Roxy Music, Bowie, and even The Killers seem present and accounted for. If hearing The Killers in Wolf’s music implies he’s as heavily influenced as they are by better and more important bands of that past, so be it. At least Wolf is a better keyboardist than Brandon Flowers.

(For Patrick at the piano, go here. For cooler stuff, see below.)

7. Amanda Palmer
AFP (that’s “Amanda Fucking Palmer,” as she refers to herself) is nothing if not original. She has developed to perfection her trademark Kurt Weill-meets-Black Flag-meets-The Smiths aesthetic, turning her artistic identity into a sort of indie brand with an undyingly devoted cult following. As a musician, Palmer has progressed since The Dresden Dolls debuted in 2001 and continues to find odd ways of putting chords in succession while still somehow making musical sense. It’s unfortunate that she and drummer Brian Viglione have disbanded the Dolls: separately, they are interesting; together–live–they are extraordinary.

6. Matt Bellamy
He sings in a dramatic falsetto. He rips on the guitar. He composes orchestral arrangements on the recent The Resistance. He sings in a dramatic falsetto with a guitar slung over his shoulder while playing the piano in an orchestrally arranged song–live. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Matt Bellamy of Muse. Enough said.

5. Casey Dienel
At 24 years old, Dienel is the youngest musician on this list. After studying classical vocals and classical composition at the New England Conservatory of Music, Dienel dropped out–but her music hasn’t suffered for it. She released a solo album in 2006 and subsequently formed a band, White Hinterland, whose 2008 debut was grossly overlooked and under-reviewed. On Phylactory Factory, Dienel flirts in her high-pitched, girly voice with jazz piano riffs and deceptively light-hearted lyrics. Deceptive because this is seriously well-crafted music by a relative newcomer who clearly knows what she is doing. (Fun fact: White Hinterland released a more experimental EP, Lumiculaire, later in 2008. The lyrics are mostly in French. And it’s one of the best stoner albums of the year. Don’t quote me on that.)

Go here for “Dreaming of the Plum Trees”.

4. Tori Amos
Ok, I’ll be honest: I’m writing this from the point of view of someone who doesn’t listen much to Tori Amos but who respects her songwriting abilities, based mostly on hearsay and limited personal encounters. (Personal encounters with the music, that is. Not with Amos herself. For instance, I think “Spark” is a badass song. And Amos saw the beauty in “Smells Like Teen Spirit” before a lot of other people did.) I’ve heard concert accounts of her playing more than one piano simultaneously. I can’t deny that she’s a pianist force to be reckoned with, even if her lyrics are a bit overly serious for my tastes.

3. Regina Spektor
Regina Spektor’s music is quirky, anti-folk, unpretentious catchiness. And then she throws in something serious (like “Laughing With” from Far or a fantastic cover of Lennon’s “Real Love”) and punches you right in the gut. Her lyrics are playful and mysterious, creating Edward Gorey-like worlds with recurring themes. (The name “Mary Ann,” literary allusions, and multiple languages continually appear). See her live, and hear a rare phenomenon: a singer who sounds better in person than on a recording. And, as a pianist, she’s capable of more than her simple arrangements allow us to hear–she began playing the piano as a child and eventually studied at the Manhattan School of Music. Perhaps someday she’ll throw a little Rachmaninoff into her concert repertoire.

2. Rufus Wainwright
As if it’s not enough that he’s of a fine musical pedigree (son of Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle), as though it’s not enough that most of his songs are glistening gems of lyrical and instrumental (and, yes, sometimes excessively theatrical) artisanship, Rufus Wainwright has now written an opera. In 2008, the Metropolitan Opera allegedly revoked Wainwright’s commission when the artist insisted on writing the libretto of Prima Donna in French instead of English. The Palace Theater of Manchester debuted the opera in July 2009. Prima Donna received mixed reviews at the Manchester International Festival, but nevertheless, OH is looking forward to seeing Rufus perform selections from the work at the New York City Opera on Thursday.

1. Ben Folds
His dork-rock style has lost some of its novelty, and his most recent solo album Way to Normal (and the fake pre-release version) and tour were disasters. But, you have only to listen to Ben Folds Five’s debut album from 1995 to understand why Folds tops this list. In a word: showmanship. Folds’s jazz/rock skillz are par excellence, but they’re also some of the most abusive in the biz. Fists, elbows, and feet are all fair game when it comes to body parts with which he’s willing to beat the piano. Folds is at his best best by himself or with a small band; the number of musicians and goofy visual distractions onstage made his last tour a ridiculous pseudo-hippie/college-pop hybrid. Strip away this camp and newfound psychedelia, and what you have is still the most impressive, improvisationally free pianist in rock right now.

Now that October’s Gashlycrumb Tinies-esque experiment is over, I can return to normal blogging, which is a relief. I’m not the most topical of bloggers, but I do like to be able to react to current events.

On the apparently sandwich-eating-featuring twitter, Patroclus and myself discussed there being a possibility of there being a Pulitzer Prize for citizen journalism, with a potential prize made out of sweet wrappers. To avoid getting sued and to make the name more intertubey, it has been changed slightly to that above.

What with me supposedly doing the old National Novel Writing Month, blogging should be lighter this month, so what I’d like is your suggestions of your favourite bits of citizen journalism.

It can be anything you like really, just something interesting off a blog really.

Who knows, this may become a regular feature, if I can be bothered and I get enough suggestions (hint hint)

Woooooooooo! It’s Hallowe’ene’en, everybody. I don’t know about you, but Hallowe’ene’en puts me in the mood for scary creatures, and words about scary creatures. Actually, today’s words aren’t really about scary creatures, but they sure do sound like they are.

and

Mulligrubs and fantods? I hope you locked the doors, Benny. Now, I don’t know where I got the idea that mulligrubs were monsters rather than a depressed state, but I do know that the fantod confusion came from Edward Gorey, noted chronicler of the humorously macabre. A mysterious taxidermied creature featured in his story “The Unstrung Harp” is identified as a fantod, and I always just assumed that he had just coined the term to describe the creature, even when I read another story by another writer that frequently referenced “the howling fantods.”

The Estate of Edward Gorey happens to be quite protective of its copyrights, so I’m not going to be able to provide you with Edward Gorey’s depiction of a fantod without fear of receiving a takedown notice. Being pretty well-versed in intellectual property law, however, I am quite sure that I can provide you with a drawing that I myself made of Edward Gorey’s depiction of a fantod:

Benny, are you sure you locked the doors? I don’t want any fantods creeping in. Wait. What? Fantods aren’t creatures either? When you have a case of the fantods it simply means that you’re in an agitated and restless state? Well, what do you know? I still hope you locked the doors, Benny.

Every good work of children’s literature is a little bit scary. Kids learn pretty quickly that the world is a tough place and they like to see that reflected in the books they read and the movies they watch. I am appalled when I am sitting in a movie theater watching an R-rated flick and some idiot parent has a five year old with him (sorry, but it’s usually Dad’s on their kid weekend), but a little bit of scary is good. Every kid knows that. I was no exception when I was a kid and my taste in children’s lit reflected that. I, like many of us, was a “Where the Wild Things Are” fan (I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I will although I’m a little scared I might hate it–Chris did, he said it was “emo” which really made me laugh, we’ll see), but the Maurice Sendak book I was REALLY obsessed with was Higglity Pigglity Pop. I don’t have a copy of it now although I really should get one (I’ve always dreamed of putting together a classic children’s book library so I should probably start now). Higglity Pigglity Pop is a story about a dog who wanders off and it’s terrifying (check out that lion ready to eat her and the loneliness–both resonating deeply with me as a child).

Eventually I graduated into harder stuff (Edward Gorey became a particular obsession). This is my bedroom wall I painted as a kid (my parents were cool that way–I also painted a giant pair of lips and the words “Don’t dream it, be it” but that’s a different blog). I do remember my mother becoming a bit concerned with my sisters and my obsession with Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies (you have to remember Gorey wasn’t mainstream at all back then which made it that much more rare and forbidden). “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears.” Great stuff when you’re a kid.His books were in the library and we would check them out week after week. Always gothic at heart, one of my favorites was a well-read copy of the original Adam’s family illustrated book as well (much cooler and scarier than the TV show).

But before any of that there were the Lonely Doll books by Dare Wright. Dare Wright was beautiful, chic and her life story reads like a gothic novel (no happy ending here). Her artist mother Edith (something about that name) was a controlling monster who kept her daughter constantly by her side, literally (her biography describes how her mother died in her 90’s clinging to her daughter with whom she shared a bed in one final death grip–the horror!) Dare was a model, photographer, and artist with a unique vision. Her series of books with their signature gingham fabric covers were a fascinating and disturbing experience for me as a child. Every little girl knows that it’s fun to dress up and look pretty, and every little girl learns pretty quickly that if she misbehaves she gets spanked, in one way or the other.

After reading her biography, I surmised that Dare was the Lonely Doll and her mother Edith the alternatively loving and sadistic big bear. The little bear, often observing the violence from afar, her estranged and worshiped brother Blaine. The unhealthy mother/daughter bond is fascinating as well as frightening. The mother who alternatively loves and criticizes her daughter keeps her on a very tight leash, and it’s all to serve the mother (usually abandoned by the father) who is afraid to be alone. The daughter becomes crippled. Dare’s mother, a highly successful artist, controlled every move she made. Dare used art as a way to cope with it all. An innocent beauty (she remained a virgin until she was raped by a homeless man she invited into her New York apartment during a misguided 1960’s free love gesture), Dare fell apart when her old mother finally gave up the ghost. Her descent was a tragic decline into old age. But her art lives on! It seems like there are new Lonely Doll books. I haven’t seen them, but somehow I imagine they don’t quite capture the violence, and the truth, of the original books.

A little scare is good for children. When it comes from an honest place within the artist it is a comforting truth about a pretty frightening world.

Music: “Hell Is Chrome” by Wilco

Artwork: Edward Gorey

“Ghosts” by Emily Dickinson
One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.

Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one’s own self encounter
In lonesome place.

Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assassin, hid in our apartment,
Be horror’s least.

The prudent carries a revolver,
He bolts the door,
O’erlooking a superior spectre
More near.

——————–

Leaving the train, I heard a whisper in my head: “I don’t have demons, only ghosts.” And I wondered if it might be more worthwhile to be terrorized than simply passed through.

Ghosts have been on my mind a lot since writing “Unring the Bell.” It seems Annabelle, Isabelle and Belle play with death as if it’s a board game. I am attempting to communicate this not only with how I’m shooting it (experimenting with wide angle lenses and lots of dolly moves), but with production design.

Some people asked me if it’s a period piece and it is not although the way I see them is in no period at all; they have created their world and time isn’t included.

Every year at the All Saints festival, there’s a group of “Meet the Author” tables; my godfather has written a book, and a few other people have published some things as well. This year, presumably because of a shortage of participants, having heard that I’d written some magazine articles, the organizer of the tables asked if I wanted to be involved. My initial impulse was to say no; since all I’ve published have been magazine articles, and to the best of my knowledge nobody outside of my immediate circle of friends at the parish has read any of them (or at least mentioned to me that they’ve read any of them), it seemed as though it would be rather pretentious on my part to lay claim to the title of “author”. Yes, fine, I’ve written a book, but it isn’t published yet, and I’m still waiting for John to finish his sketches before I start trying to market it…

Oh, right. I’m still waiting for John to finish his sketches.

I dropped John an e-mail, asking if there would be any possibility of any of the images being done by the day of the Festival. If so, let’s have them up at the table — it might potentially be a good way to generate interest.

Good idea, John replied. I’ll have some done by then.

So, this last Saturday, I showed up at All Saints, an hour and a half before the start of the Festival, with my portfolio of contributor’s copies of magazine articles and a fresh copy of the typescript of Pascha at the Singing School. A small crowd was gathered around my table.

Here’s why:

To describe this as far above and beyond any expectation I may have had doesn’t even really begin to cover it. Among other things, there’s a bit of an Edward Gorey vibe, which reminded me that The House With a Clock In Its Walls was a huge influence on me which I had all but forgotten. I mentioned that to John in the midst of my inarticulate slobbering over his works of beauty, who instantly nodded and said, “Yes, actually, you’re right, come to think of it. That’s definitely there.”

Anyway, the trick was definitely done of stirring up some interest. Once John has his illustrations done, there will be another pass on the text itself while I make sure that it lives up to the artwork (and I can already tell you that these two examples alone have sparked some thoughts about things I should tweak), and then we’ll go from there. I’m not certain exactly what that will mean, since I haven’t done this before; I don’t want to go the route of vanity presses or self-publishing; that seems to be a one-way path to making sure nobody ever, anywhere sees the book. On the other hand, I don’t know that there’s a “real” publisher out there that’s just falling all over itself to publish a short book with black and white illustrations, text and pictures by total unknowns, set at a choir school at the very end of Holy Week. We’ll see what happens.

(By the way — illustrations are copyright 2009 John Berry, and Pascha at the Singing School is copyright 2009 Richard Barrett. Come to think of it, the whole contents of this blog are copyright Richard Barrett except where otherwise indicated.)

I’m shooting a 16mm B&W silent short film for grad school on Oct. 29 & 30. It’s a highly stylized dark comedy about two sisters who have concocted a wicked plan to poison their incapacitated mother on her birthday. 

I have asked each actor to prepare a thorough character sketch and family history and everyone is coming up with extremely creative, thoughtful ideas. Reminds me of why I wanted to make films in the first place. Here’s the cast in order of appearance:

Karen McIntyre (Annabelle)

Maggie Balistreri (Isabelle)

Rutanya Alda (Belle)

Nicholas Gurewitch is arguably the greatest artist to rise out of the present wave of web comics.  The man is a stylistic chameleon, ranging from blissfully simple line work to dead on impressions of legends like Edward Gorey and R. Crumb.  No two strips look alike, but all are absolutely gorgeous, particularly in this oversized edition.

Once you get past the art the Perry Bible Fellowship is a somewhat formulaic gag strip.  With few exceptions each comic consists of two panels of set up and one for the punchline.  A few fall flat, but by and large they manage to be brilliant.  The bunny pit strip alone wound up as part of four different conversations I had this past weekend.  If that doesn’t leave you howling with laughter than this isn’t the book for you, but if it did then you absolutely must read the rest!