I’ve been threatening to do this for a good long while, but now it seems to be actually happening. By “this”, I mean my blog of unpopular opinions. The first post will explain the commenting policy, which I’m certain everyone will loathe. I will also be making a call for submissions very, very soon.
I’m really excited about this, and others seem to be too, which fills me with pretty much equal parts dread and delight. I’m an opinionated monster, but don’t much like conflict which I realize is a fairly toxic combination. So be it. My contrary odes to culture, art and society are imminent. More, of course, to follow.
Firstly, I would like to apologize for my unscheduled but long mulled-over absence. The short explanation is that blogging became all-together Too Much. To post as much as seemed necessary to keep this blog viable, mostly prevented me from doing other things, most importantly, of course, the drawing of pictures.
The longer explanation is more difficult. For a while I assumed if I wrote diligently and well and consistently, my readership would increase as a matter of course, and possibly there would be someone somewhere who might consider paying me money for my labors. Unfortunately, neither of these things really came to pass and showed no signs of doing so any time in the future. I've thought a great deal about why this might be, and I assume it's mostly because my interests tend to be both obscure and diffuse. But I'm not precisely scholarly as I have very little formal education by modern standards. So, I think I might fall through some kind of crack in the blogosphere. I don't know, and at this point the question is pretty much moot.
It just became too heartbreaking to continue putting so much effort into something that gave so little in return. Not that I don't appreciate those of you who read consistently, and commented and posed hard questions, it's just that it became, as I wrote above, Too Much. I'm not a trust fund kid and I hate working for free. It became achingly clear that this wasn't leading anywhere, and I've never been interested in being any kind of hobbyist, so I just... stopped.
Life's a funny thing, isn't it? I've always been a little stupid about figuring out what I should be doing with myself. The most confusing thing being that although I write well, I'm in no way a writer. I'm a picture person. I've only ever bothered to write plays so that I might direct them. Writing something and not directing it holds exactly zero interest for me. Similarly, the thought of writing something that has no pictures attached makes no sense to me. I think everything should be illustrated. I'm with Alice, a book with no pictures or conversations is likely not for me. So, yeah. I've never worked or thought very quickly, so it's taken me a while to figure all this out. I draw pictures and tell stories, I've always known that. I'm not any kind of critic though I'm full of crackpot ideas, I don't know that they're organized enough to be called "criticism". I draw pictures and tell stories.
So, that's what I'm doing. About a week after I stopped working on this infernal blog and started posting pictures elsewhere, I got a commission of sorts. It all feels so much easier. I mean, I'm not a writer at all really, this is something I know top to bottom: I am not a writer. I draw pictures and make pictures. I like narrative. The writing part is entirely incidental.
This space will still be here, and I may write or post something now and again, but any sort of regular blogging is pretty much done.
My God, what a liberating thing to write. And again, I must emphasize: Thank you! Thank you all for reading these past couple of years.
As has been briefly mentioned here, and as everyone is both buzzing and complaining and celebrating about: this June is madness. Theater abounds. Nearly everyone I know is involved in something. People are having birthdays, Same Sex marriage is now legal in Gotham. I'm at work on various projects, some involving pictures, some involving words, some involving both. And then there's the constant business of keeping it all afloat, AKA paying the bills. So there's been little time to spare to write it all up and I'm vaguely overwhelmed with the task, truth be told. But, never on to shrug off a challenge, here I go!
The following posts are a much boozier, artier, gorier version of the typical "What I did with my summer vacation" essay. At left is a picture I drew at Jazz & Sketch last Thursday at the Society of Illustrators (two minute pose, lovely model). Here at The Cabinet, we refuse to be either bored or idle in this City of our Dreams!
Longtime Cabinet readers may remember a post way back in 2009 about artist Greg Stones, and his paintings of penguins and zombies and monsters and such. I love them.
Well, he now has two books, both available on his site and (bonus!) has YouTube clips previewing them.
The first is Goodbye, Penguin, which is a Ten Little Indians style story in which a group of fifteen penguins go for a walk, and about their various (mostly tragic) fates. I have watched this an embarrassing number of times. The one who is flattened by a snow man and the one who was abducted (which you can see at above) are my favorites. Watch it below:
His second book, is the aptly titled Zombies Hate Stuff, which is all about stuff zombies hate. Some of these things include hippies, cavemen, war reenactors and sharing.
Both of his books (and the rest of his art and prints) can be purchased here. Apropos of nothing in particular, I would like to point out that my birthday is one scant month away. In case you happened to be wondering.
My delightful inamorato is posting a series of pieces on modern vaudevillians he has featured on the stage of his American Vaudeville Theatre in honor of its 15th anniversary and the attendant FringeNYC show celebrating this occasion.
Today's post is all about the lovely Miss Saturn, so I decided to pull a sketch I did a few years ago out of the archives.
This is nowhere near finished, I'll post it when it is. I'm snatching time to paint when I can amidst a ridiculously busy June. The first drawing is from life.
I was raised Catholic and though not such a part of the modern church, saints reliquaries have always interested me.
(side note: honestly, at this point, I'm not entirely sure what it's all about these days now that it no longer seems to rule Europe or commission great art or give the younger sons of nobility something to do with themselves)
Back to reliquaries. If you don't know, they are containers of objects, often pertaining to saints. Maybe a finger bone, maybe a cup, perhaps a bell, oftentimes a hunk of the true cross, occasionally a skull. These items were (and by some, are) deemed holy. But, they are mostly a remnant of a culture that has long turned to dust, and other objects are of far greater interest to the public.
Which brings me to the sale of Debbie Reynolds's movie memorabilia this past weekend. Oftentimes when such sales are announced, and I look at the list of pieces to be sold, there's usually one or two truly exciting things, and the rest is far more ordinary. But this sale was the move equivalent of opening up the storerooms of the Vatican and selling off all the high Renaissance masterpieces. Looking at the list of items it seemed as if all of movie history was being sold off at once.
We're a strange species with a bent for mysticism and talismans. The biggest news from the sale was that Marilyn's iconic subway dress sold for approximately 5 million dollars. Of course, there are soulless rich people who snatch things up for investment purposes, but the level of excitement the sale of these dresses and objects has caused feels like religion. These pieces engender an ache, a longing, and remind us of feelings that might be something akin to holiness, or at least love.
It's a big cynical world, so oftentimes lacking in joy. Old movies whose stars are mostly gone from this earth, need to be preserved. Something like 90% of silent movies are lost to us forever. But, on a more positive note, the wonders of the internet have brought old and seemingly forgotten movies and stars to more delighted people than since they were first released. There are entire Tumblrs devoted to Howard Lloyd. Teenagers happily rave over pictures of Gloria Swanson and Myrna Loy.
It's not just me, is it? Wouldn't having Chaplin's bowler in one's living room seem magical? And, yes. That was one of the items for sale. And, no. I wasn't the buyer.
Above left is a dress Claudette Colbert wore in Cecil B. deMille's Cleopatra.
Laurel and Hardy's Model-T Ford
Cagney's costumes from Yankee Doodle Dandy
Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes coat (via Flickr)
Seemingly all the costumes from Singing in the Rain.
Also included: costumes from the 1938 Marie Antoinette, a 1922 Valentino matador costume, a box of jokes hand written by W.C. Fields, Planet of the Apes costumes, Elizabeth Taylor's costumes from Cleopatra and Raintree County, Mary Pickford's dress from Taming of the Shrew, Marilyn's "Little Rock" dress from Gentlemen prefer Blondes, the Santa suit from Miracle on 34th Street, an on and on and on. Sigh.
I've been reading a great deal of young adult fantasy recently, as it's the kind of work I enjoyed when I was a girl, and I've been curious to see what's out there. Overall, I've found my reading enjoyable, but nothing has really captured my imagination or really rented out space in my consciousness. With the exception of Carrie Ryan's intelligently and beautifully written zombie novels, I've been left a little cold. Don't get me wrong - I did love The Hunger Game books, but I began to feel a little emotionally beaten up by them, and I know if I had read them when I was, say, twelve, they might have been too much. But perhaps I'm projecting. I think I might be more sensitive now, than when I was actually in middle school.
Which brings me to Sarah Porter's Lost Voices. As always, my disclaimer: Sarah is a friend. But the rave you are about to read is genuine.
In this first book of what I happily understand is a trilogy, she tells the story of a girl named Luce who lives in a coastal fishing community in Alaska. Her parents are dead, her mother died years before and her father was lost at sea. After a peripatetic life with her beloved vagabond father, she lives with a drunken, brutal uncle and life is grim indeed. After a possible death (or something like it), Luce finds herself in the sea, a mermaid, along with a tribe of other young girls, all of whom have had ugly lives and even uglier deaths. They do what mermaids traditionally have always done: they sing, and they lure ships to their doom. Luce finds a place for herself with her fellow mermaids, whose queen Catarina becomes her friend, mentor and, subsequently, inadvertent rival.
There were so many things in this book that really hit me at a deep level, and I'll likely go into some of them in embarrassing detail in this post. Here's the thing: Sarah is a poet. She just is. Her prose is evocative and gorgeous, and emotionally this story just cut me to the bone. I think she pretty much did everything right. Luce felt very much like a real girl to me. In so many books for young people, the protagonist is portrayed as "loner" or an "outsider", as this is the way so many young people feel even if this wasn't so much the case. It's a little bit of a pet peeve of mine that fictional characters recover from outsiderhood with such apparent ease, their former loneliness not leaving any scars or behavior patterns. They change circumstance, suddenly find friends and they actually, like, know how. Luce is so much more herself than many fictional characters.
In school, Luce is quiet and finds herself nearly paralyzed with social awkwardness. Upon becoming a mermaid this doesn't precisely change. She is thrilled to find herself accepted and embraced by a tribe of other girls. She also finds she has a particular talent for singing: the beautiful, alluring and deeply treacherous voice of the siren. But Luce isn't particularly used to playing with others - she's a good person, just used to being alone, which as I've so often learned to my chagrin, is much, much simpler. But that's not the way the world works: there are so many complicated social nuances, and among the teenage, social rules are strict and harsh - and these mermaids are perpetually teenaged, a horror movie concept if I've ever heard one.
There are so many interesting facets to this story, and Sarah has them all covered. So many of them have to do with the very nature of both mermaidhood and femaleness and the places in which these things overlap. Essentially, mermaids are killers, mass murderers. This is monstrous and horrifying from a human point of view, but mermaids are out of the world, it doesn't mean the same thing to them. But, still. And this forms a large part of Luce's impossible dilemma. She also asks, "Why only girls?". There's also the question of outsiderhood, and damage which lies at the heart of the story. When the terrifying mermaid Anais joins the tribe, Luce's fragile place within her new family is snatched from her. Anais is an amazing creation. She might be the most realistic mean girl I've ever encountered in fiction. Just reading about her sent bolts of anxiety through me in a very deep place I didn't think even existed within me anymore.
There's a very long history of monstrous females in myth and fairy tales. Baba Yaga, Lamia, Medusa, all the wicked mothers and witches and scheming servant girls in stories like The Juniper Tree and The Goose Girl, and, of course, the sirens themselves. And there's Anderson's The Little Mermaid, a story that as a child I found so sad it was almost unbearable. This book knows all of this, and is informed and enriched by these universal tales that form so much of who we are as a people. All these strange and sometimes evil and outsider women beginning with Eve. Luce is essentially a gentle soul who is thrust into the role of siren which is heady and confusing and upsetting and, all things considered, maybe not all it's been cracked up to be.
Sarah Porter also blogs at YA Outside the Lines, and a while ago she posted a great piece about dark subject matter in young adult fiction in which she writes:
Why would I feel the need to protect kids from an awareness of that human darkness with which they are perfectly familiar already, which haunts their imaginations and in some cases their lives?
Instead I felt responsible to be as honest as I could about the ways of getting through the darkness. Young teens are often in the process of confronting the worst aspects of humanity, and of struggling to come to terms with what it means to be a part of a species that perpetrates cruelty so routinely. Only by regarding that horror directly can they begin to withstand it.
I think she answers a certain kind of critic very well. I've started to write a bit about how I've gotten tired of dystopia, but maybe what I'm tired of is how manipulated into feeling awful I am by cheap narrative tricks. I'm totally okay with the darkness, but I want it to be earned. Lost Voices isn't a dystopian novel, but it is very dark, but it feels achingly and wonderfully real, I swear I could taste the salt water as I read.
Lost Voices's official release date is July 4th. BREAKING: Lost Voices is apparently available NOW.
Mermaids of New York is a new short film making the rounds which features the legendary and lovely Bambi the Mermaid, Dame Darcy (who will have an entire post devoted all to her, soon!) and other glitterey, finned cohorts. See a clip, below, featuring Bambi:
Dame Darcy sings a sea chanty, of which she has an entire album, which you can purchase here:
As an added bonus, Dame Darcy's lovely illustration, "Dolls plunder and pillage the ship. Then drown the pretty sailor lad." From her book Dollerium which can be purchased (totally worth it) here.
I am a writer, director & illustrator living in Brooklyn. I have drawn many pictures, written many plays, one of which, Antarctica, has been published as a part of the Plays & Playwrights 2008 anthology. Much of my illustration and art can be viewed here: http://cavigliascabinet.tumblr.com
The vast majority of the images in this blog have been created by and are owned by me. If you would like post any of them on your site or for any other purpose, please contact me via the comments or via facebook (link to my profile is above). Thanks and enjoy.
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