Hibernation & Guilty Pleasures
It may be the shorter days, but I must nest and go into art-making hibernation.
This means I have an insatiable need to rearrange my home and make another attempt at creating a livable and workable studio space.
Strangely, it also means making playlists of down-tempo and OTR horror and reading comic books(specifically, right now, Fables Volumes 14 and 15).
I need a constant rotation of Portishead, the Twin Peaks Soundtrack, and so on…Spotify has been useful in finding new music in the same vein. Music has usually been a private thing for me. I was never immersed in it the way my friends were as teenagers. Then I discovered downtempo/trip-hop/whatever it’s called. It felt right. It’s more like a soundtrack rather than individual songs.
On my playlist now…
Willow’s Song – The Wicker Man Soundtrack
Small Town Witch – Sneaker Pimps
Pretty When You Cry – Vast (can’t get into any of their other songs)
Galaxies – Laura Veirs
Flame – Crustation
Down By the Water – PJ Harvey
Overcome – Tricky
Stars – Hum
Capsized – Samiam
Ten Cents a Dance – Ruth Etting
Horse and I – Bat For Lashes
Celestica – Crystal Castles
Half Day Closing – Portishead
Audrey’s Dance – Angelo Badalementi
Then…that Vast video makes me think of a fantastic radio play version of The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter, produced by the BBC… This leads me to another witch-themed radio play, The Hairy Hand of Dartmoor, created by the radio horror show Fear on Four. I always thought the girl who played Little Red Riding Hood in the first play sounded like the witch in the second play.
The Hairy Hand is an urban legend from Dartmoor, England. The story goes that on a stretch of road, motorists and bicyclists have had their steering ripped from them by disembodied demonic hairy hands, causing them to have accidents. You can read a bit about it on Wikipedia here.
I’m trying to get my work from this past semester photographed and started on new ones, including a piece for a group show next spring curated by the founder of Creepmachine.com. The group show is called Marvelous Humans. You can read about it on the blog the curator created for it. The show will be about ‘human oddities’ of the past and present and how they made the most out of what life dealt them. I’ve chosen Millie La Marr, the Mind Reader, a Victorian Era Albino woman who traveled with the circus performing mentalist tricks, pretending to be a psychic. You can see photos of her here.
I wish I could find out more about her as a person rather than just a sideshow oddity. I chose her because of her ‘act’. As any reader here can probably tell from my work, I am fascinated by spiritualism and so-called psychic phenomena.
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I was stoked to see that the show Jason and I were in, Multiversal Miami, was profiled on Artattacksonline.com here.