I had a lot of fun with April’s Month of Softies theme, recycled monsters; thanks, Claire. Firstly, please meet Patrick, who is channelling Patrick White:
And now Esmé (‘don’t mess with me… I play bowls’):
They were made from an old bag and belt apiece, and Esmé has half an old cricket ball for a nose. There are more detailed pictures below. And thanks to Belinda for helping me see some extra dimensions to their characters!
These cool recycled monsters were made by my friend, Belinda, for April’s Month of Softies. I’ll let her introduce them to you:
Gronk: “I couldn’t think how to make him until I saw Hilary’s bag-monsters. Then I
found these things in various junk drawers around the house. His nose is
made from a rubber finger-stall pinned to a cork; his teeth are
toe-separators. His facial hair is chicken feathers sewn into a band – I
found this ‘braid’ in a local haberdashery and bought some so I’d have
feathers to add to my cat patchworks. I think he looks rather like Alan
Ginsberg, although as yet he hasn’t written any beat poetry. I posed him
with a cigar (my last home-grown tomato of the season) because I like his
raffish air.”
Doris: “This is my first recycled monster. She started life as a tea-cosy. My
daughter’s drawer of “special things” was invaluable in providing the hat
(which used to contain lavender), the bangle for her mouth, the plait and
the flowers. I used polished stones and two star anise for her eyes. Doris
is demure, fragrant and very ladylike. She represents my long-lost
daintiness.”
My friend Amy has launched Who Said?, a cool audio literature trivia game. It’s delivered as a podcast if you want to receive it that way; or you can listen on the web site. Two or three times a week, she will make an audio recording from a novel. It will be a short passage, always something a character says. Your task will be to guess the character, book and author.
Amy has been involved with online discussion since the mid nineties (she founded the premiere Jane Austen discussion site, The Republic of Pemberley in 1996, for example) so its no surprise there is an attractive discussion forum at Who Said? where you can brainstorm your hunches, make suggestions about the game and talk about the books that the audio passages are taken from.
Meggiecat is a constant source of interesting art-craft-image-related notes. Her link to Japanese Free Clip Art the other day provided this lovely swallowtail butterfly image, for instance.
The designs reminded me of a book called ‘Snow, Wave, Pine:Traditional patterns in Japanese Design’ by Motoji Niwa and Sadao Hibi, which I sometimes page through in the bookshop. Its a beautiful collection of photographs of classic decorative patterns on a wide variety of objects (for example robes, laquerware, swords and ceramics), and many drawings of family crests and stylized motifs.
Penguin Books in the UK is having its 70th anniversary this year. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, that wonderful museum of arts and design, is marking the anniversary with a display of about 500 of Penguin’s iconic book covers. It runs from 8th June to 13th November.
I have been drooling over this range of mugs that feature 31 of the classic Penguin book designs. I supposethey give me pleasure because they are familiar to me from my mother’s bookshelves when I was growing up. There are tea-towels, too. Is it deeply ironic or intentionally funny to have a Virginia Woolf ‘A Room of One’s Own
This green parrot is one of the many lovely animal illustrations catalogued on The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages. Its a nicely organized site, with alphabetical ordering and cross-referencing, and information about the beasts from manuscripts. For each beast there is usually a gallery of different images from different sources.
Did you know, for example, that a dragon’s strength is found in its tail, not in its teeth? And that ‘it is the enemy of the elephant, and hides near paths where elephants walk so that it can catch them with its tail and kill them by suffocation’? Or that ‘it is because of the threat of the dragon that elephants give birth in the water’?
By all accounts the two-part 6 hour stage adaptation of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials is absolutely stunning. I think it has had two seasons at the National Theatre in London: one in 2003, and a second that finished earlier this month.
The daemons, physical manifestations of the human soul in the shape of animals that reflect a person’s character, are puppets. They were designed by Michael Curry, who is perhaps best known for the puppets in The Lion King. Stagework has an extensive website on the adaptation, and its possible to see a few of the initial designs there, and glimpses of the puppetry in some of the video clips:
Operating the golden monkey
Lyra meets Mrs Coulter
Cittagazee performance
Captured by bears
Lyra and Iorek (scene in rehearsal)
In both these and the puppets in ‘The Lion King’, I think the magic lies in how the overall shape and actions of the creatures are suggested. Often the puppeteers are built into the shape in unexpected ways, and they use their whole bodies to make the animal move. In ‘The Lion King’, for instance, the puppeteers playing the hyenas held the hyena heads low down and at arms length, while their own heads provided the high shoulder line that is so distinctive in a hyena’s overall shape. Likewise, the polar bears in ‘His Dark Materials’, are defined by a puppeteer holding a head mask in one hand and a great clawed paw in the other, with just the suggestion of great shoulders in what looks like a flexible curved line between the two, and a powerful lumbering gait.
Bridge to the stars, which looks as if its the natural online home for ‘His Dark Materials’ fans, has a section on the stage adaptation, including a guide to the Stagework site, images and reviews.
Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster is adopting a healthier diet, according to an article on CNN:
“Even Cookie Monster is learning to control his cookie cravings…. His sage advice opened our eyes to the simple joys of a tasty cookie and now reminds us that moderation is the key to healthy living.”
Sesame Street has always had an educational impetus, but there is surely more fun and value in Cookie Monster being the antitheses to other characters doing the right thing.
Canberra has been convulsed over the naughtiness of one of the local government’s staffers who was caught doing a spot of anti-Howard stencil graffiti. You have to hand it to local politics for making mountains out of mole hills!
If you are interested in street art, take a look at The Wooster Collective: A Celebration of Street Art. They have some very cool images. For example, here is a Salvador Dali mural in Lima, Peru. They had an exclusive report on Banksy‘s activities in mid March, showing the works that he installed in four of the prestigious museums in New York.
There is also Wooster Mobile, ‘a Wooster curated art gallery of images which you can download onto your mobile phones in cities around the world’. The aim is to provide artists with a new revenue stream and at the same time generate funds for a non-profit organization called Keep A Child Alive, which provides life-saving drugs for AIDS sufferers in Africa.
