The Rite of Spring (Onions)

ベジタリズム , Beijitarizumu (= something like “Vegeta-rhythm”) is a video from- of course- Japan and it extols the virtue of eating vegetables through the medium of J-pop, dancing and Japlish word play. I can’t stop watching it, so you could interpret this post as some kind of cry for help. The cuteness of the children, the infanto-trad-pop music and the demented earnestness of an enthusiasm for vegetables that comes across even if you don’t understand a word they’re saying: the combination of all these things in one video is, I warn you, likely to result in the audiovisual equivalent of a pure white sugar diabetic coma. I’d love to know how they kept those hats on, and how painful a procedure it was.

On the positive side, I’ve seen this video so many times now that if you want I could probably do the dance for you. Oh, you’d like me to wear the white unitard, the wig, and the tutu as well? You’re very kinky, but we may be able to work something out.

Once (or if) you’ve recovered from your first viewing, I suggest that you mute the sound on Beijitarizumu, play it again and simultaneously play the video below it, which is- appropriately- the NHK Symphony Orchestra’s rendition of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. You will note that this combination completely works and highlights precisely how amazing, insane and weirdly primal the choreography is. It’s fierce in both the true sense of the word and in the played-out, annoying, drag-queeny usage of the word. It really could be some archaic pagan rite, not least because it wouldn’t be at all the same if the dancers weren’t children.

Anyone want to collaborate on my new J-pop/Wicker Man interpretation of The Rite of Spring with a cast of children? I’m aiming for an audience riot like the one that happened at the first performance.

PS: A further warning that the related videos feature on Youtube is likely to send you down the dayglo kawaii rabbit hole where Kyary Pamyu Pamyu lives. Go,  because her first video in particular is a lowbrow masterpiece I’d be exceedingly proud to have directed myself… but remember to come back again.

WAY WAY PONPONPON, WAY WAY PON PON WAYWAYWAY.

PPS: Unsettling Youtube revelation of the day: Apparently girls “cutely” firing candy-toned AK47s or similar heavy-duty firearms is a definite thing in J-pop and K-pop PVs now.

He’s a rainbow: Dorian Gray as a Japanese flying squirrel

I would simply like to draw attention to the fact that the obligatory kawaii character representing Tokyo Rainbow Pride is a rainbow flying squirrel with an expression of dot-eyed opiated glee, apparently cruising- pun intended- at an altitude of at least a mile since there are cumulus clouds below, wearing formal Western evening wear from the 19th century but no trousers.

The event itself took place last week and I hope it was fun, but I venture to suggest that a world in which a normal night out clubbing really involved gay, rainbow flying squirrels would surpass by far anything our current, mundane world has to offer. We should all occasionally stop and ask ourselves: is there anything I can do to bring about a world in which a normal night out clubbing involves gay, rainbow flying squirrels?

That is all, carry on.

“Your bobo is ripe and full, how wonderful”

Or: What the captions say on Hokusai’s ‘Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’

Warning: sexiness. Well, in my view totally hilarious rather than sexy. The two things can of course coexist, but in this case I’m declaring my personal preference for the hilarious interpretation. I think James Joyce’s letters to his Mrs are also lurking somewhere in that particular no (wo)man’s land. My article regarding old Jim’s fat mickey and what he’d like to do with it is still one of the most popular posts I’ve ever done here, along with the one about Japanese manga onomatopoeia, so when I was inspired to research the book that this famous print comes from it immediately became clear that I should share my findings with the perverts who visit this site. Edo sex onomatopeia! Bizarre erotic material! Japanese stuff! It hits all the blogging G spots.

The print generally known in English as The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife is in Japanese simply 蛸と海女, Tako no ama (Octopus and Shell Diver). I’m a long way from being Mr Politically Correct, but right there we’ve got glaring piece of casual Western imperialist sexism, since she might well be somebody’s wife but the most salient fact is that she’s actually a fisherwoman in her own right. It’s not even an accurate description because the fisherman isn’t part of this scenario. Presumably his presence would impede this young lady’s hook ups with such fine specimens of cephalopod manhood as are shown here. It’s the kind of a work-related fling that happens when your colleagues are mainly molluscs.

Katsushika Hokusai, he of the iconic The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, also worked openly and to equal acclaim, popularity and prestige on erotic prints (春画 shunga) like the one under discussion here. This particular print is from the novel Kinoe no Komatsu (Young Pines, 1814), a title which is probably as euphemistic as calling the whole thing a novel; I should imagine if it has any novelistic qualities at all it would still be the kind of novel you’d read with one hand. For those who don’t know already, the print depicts a naked woman in a consensual sexual encounter with sea creatures. If you’re on the front page, clicking READ MORE will show it to you. Don’t click the link if you or your employer are not inclined towards enjoying things like that. It’s visible on the wall in the background of my current profile picture on Twitter, among other places, to the outrage and disgust of absolutely nobody. You’ll probably see worse by accident when you Google something you’d previously thought was innocent (I know I have), but whatever, those who need warning should consider yourselves warned.

“Numskull Stories”

Photomontage by Alistair Gentry, 2011.

I’m writing a book set in the Nineteenth century, so I’m delving into lots of obscure stuff while researching it. Not that I don’t read obscure (and frankly sometimes stupid and ridiculous) books under normal circumstances, but sometimes a man in my current position just has to avoid actually writing anything because he’s wasting a lot of time finding out what those excessively huge candelabra in the middle of an upper class dinner table were called… it’s an epergne, by the way. You’re welcome.

And so at last to the point, via the houses: in Folkloristics: An Introduction (a textbook published by Indiana University Press, written by Robert A. Georges and Michael Owen Jones) the authors quote in turn Stith Thompson’s The Types of the Folk-Tale (2nd revision, Helsinki 1961) and provide a seemingly complete but not really complete taxonomy of traditional story categories. Now you know that when I say obscure I mean it.

I’m interested in taxonomies, whether they’re sensible and help our understanding of things, or completely nuts and actually make matters more confusing. I think the following list lies somewhere between the two in some kind of quasi-academic, Borgesian territory; that’s why I liked it. It starts sensibly and logically (“Fish”), veers off into the insanely specific (“Stupid Ogre”), then just gives up and shrugs with “2400-2499 Unclassified Tales.”

I note also that “Numskull Stories” is probably more of a thriving sub-genre than it’s ever been thanks to the proliferation of the media, paparazzi, scumbag phone-tapping so-called journalists, and the internet in general. What are Hello! magazine, tabloid gotchas and sites like Gawker or FAIL Tumblrs if not an endless torrent of Numskull Stories? In the case of Hello! and its ilk, however, the new and distinctively 21st century development is that we’re presumably meant to approve of the numskulls and aspire towards being numskulls ourselves… as many people quite evidently do.

The New Mother

Some dreadful automata.

“And still the new mother stays in the little cottage, but the windows are closed and the doors are shut, and no one knows what the inside looks like. Now and then, when the darkness has fallen and the night is still, hand in hand Blue-Eyes and the Turkey creep up near to the home in which they once were so happy, and with beating hearts they watch and listen; sometimes a blinding flash comes through the window, and they know it is the light from the new mother’s glass eyes, or they hear a strange muffled noise, and they know it is the sound of her wooden tail as she drags it along the floor.”

The New Mother, from Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise by Lucy Clifford, 1882.

On my other blog I was speculating recently about the apparent reversal there has been in popular culture’s view of automata, mannequins and puppets over the past century or so: from jolly good fun to more or less guaranteed nightmare fuel. One-hundred and twenty years on from Clifford’s Anyhow Stories, it’s hard to comprehend that these were stories she once told to her own children at bedtime. They’re absolutely bloody terrifying to me as an adult. The last few pages of The New Mother chill me and almost make me want to cry every single time I read them. The only person who I can imagine reading these to a child nowadays is Josef Fritzl. You can read the whole book here if you don’t feel much like sleeping soundly tonight.

The equally traumatising and borderline psychologically child-abusing Struwwelpeter likewise comes unashamedly replete with children committing minor acts of disobedience and receiving in return overkill burnings, drownings and visits from the great, long red-legged Scissorman who breaks in to cut off their thumbs. It’s from the same period and it was also devised by an apparently loving and normal parent for his children, and it was marketed as a book for the very young to great success.

In short: a century ago coulrophobia was apparently an alien concept, but tacitly or directly threatening children with dismemberment, cruel abandonment and vastly disproportionate retribution was an accepted part of responsible parenthood. Now it’s the other way around:  we all recognise the joke when Bart Simpson says he can’t sleep because the clown will get him; porcelain dolls are a horror film trope. Meanwhile even films for adults come with prissy, spinsterish warnings that they “contain scenes of mild peril.”

This train of thought reminded me of yet another odd and out of print book I have- Automata & Mechanical Toys by Mary Hillier (1976). The scans I’m posting here struck me as particularly illustrative of the shift in consensus perception of these kinds of toys, from good clean fun to props on the set of John Doe’s apartment in Se7en. Clifford’s book doesn’t disprove this thesis either, since the horror is not really about the visual uncanny. Indeed we as readers  don’t “see” The New Mother ourselves, only disturbing signs that she has taken up residence; the light from her eyes, the scraping of her tail. The children in the story never lay eyes upon her either, having fled in terror while she was forcing her way into their home.

Let’s start with this little beauty, shall we? This is somewhere in the neighbourhood of what I conceive of The New Mother looking like, only worse, and six feet tall, and dressed like a Victorian governess in a black poke bonnet. Imagine it walking. Towards you. And it wants to be your mother. “Celluloid head, glass eyes, human hair” is an evocative and disturbing triad, isn’t it? Although not as bad as “human head, celluloid eyes, glass hair.”

It also reminds me of the Quay Brothers’ Street of Crocodiles, an animation that has haunted me ever since I saw it in the late Eighties or early Nineties. I saw it again recently, and it’s still brilliant.

Some frightful, eldritch poetry by EP Dickcraft

A PS to yesterday’s post about Emily Dickinson and some noxious jelly that came out of a meteorite at Amherst, Massachusetts in 1819. I mentioned HP Lovecraft and Emily Dickinson: I have now mashed up HP Lovecraft and Emily Dickinson. I also mentioned Morrissey. PRAY I DO NOT MASH UP HP LOVECRAFT AND MORRISSEY.

I started Late – Killed my Dog

And visited Arkham -

The Shoggoths in the Cellars

Oozed out – To my alarm -

And in the Upper Floors

Folk with mien of Frog

Extended Rugose Hands -

Presuming me to be their Dinner

Sent over – to be devoured

Delivered – in Butcher’s paper

To a Color out of Space -

Frightful messenger

From Unformed Realms -

Of Infinity beyond all Nature -

Whose mere existence

Stuns the Brain -

Numbs us with the Black Gulfs

It throws open

Before our Frenzied eyes.

No Figment of the Thing That dazzled, Yesterday

I made this picture of Emily Dickinson. I can only apologise.

In which I manage to discuss the poetry of Emily Dickinson, cosmic horror, Superman, Morrissey and Steve McQueen without exerting myself unduly.

Recently I was perusing a laughable book about- well, it’s hard to say exactly. Just sort of general things that might be called inexplicable or mysteries if anybody actually gave a shit about them or they weren’t clearly the result of somebody suffering from a bout of delirious, drunken stupidity or mental illness. Like Fortean Times, but even more random. Is there a turkey in the Bayeux Tapestry? It’s not really a mystery if nobody cares about the solution.

It’s the sort of book that usually costs a few pounds in a remainder shop, or is for sale in what my esteemed colleague Kid Carpet calls Mystical Shit shops (Seriously, I am a huge fan of Kid Carpet. Download his song Mystical Shit for a start), alongside dream catchers, rag rugs and crystals to unbung your chakras. My local library has loads of these books, for some reason. And a very comprehensive  but never used section on things like irritable bowel syndrome, drug induced psychosis, anorexia and whatnot. For obvious reasons I’ve never made any effort to befriend the librarians.

Anyway, there was one interesting thing in the aforementioned book: an account of some strange jelly that apparently fell out of space in 1819 and landed in Amherst, Massachusetts. It seems not to have occurred to the author that this (at the time very small) place was the lifelong home of the poet Emily Dickinson and her family, although she wasn’t born for another 11 years.

Danger Men

Scans of weird pictures from old Ladybird books for children, Part III: the last of them for now. See Part I for background information and the first set of images, and part II with a pair of huge bastards. This picture is posted apropos of nothing in particular except that it evidences a Ballardian relish at the prospect of getting totally fucked up in a horrific car crash and- like the burning guy picture- I would love to own the original painting.

Sadly, nowadays one is unlikely to encounter an image like this in a book intended to help young children learn to read. Never did me any harm. <Watches David Cronenberg’s film version of Crash and laughs uncontrollably/masturbates furiously.> This picture comes from a book most excitingly entitled Danger Men, although many of the masculine activities described therein suggest an alternate title might be more appropriate, perhaps something like Bloody Idiots.

'Danger Men': yes, evidently. Illustration by Frank Humphris, 1970.

Do you know?

More scans of nostalgic strangeness from old Ladybird books for children. See Part I for background information and the first set of images. These ones are from A First ‘Do You Know’ Book, 1971, and it will become obvious that they deal with the concept of largeness. Yes, there were Second and Third ‘Do You Know’ Books as well.

Illustration by Frank Humphris from 'A First Do You Know Book', 1971.

I could explain this image, but I think I’m just going to leave it here for you all to contemplate. All I’ll say is that this gentleman looks very dignified for somebody who’s probably not been able to see his own penis for the past ten years, not even in a mirror. Of course there’s also Mr Creosote.

Adventures From History

This week I’m posting some strange, lovely scans from old Ladybird books for children. For most British people who started school at any time between the 1940s and the beginning of the 1980s these will need little introduction, because they’ll be familiar and fondly remembered either from their own homes or from the school library. For all those people who didn’t grow up on this weird little island between the end of World War II and the murder by Thatcherite politics and Reaganomics of what one might call Ladybird values, Ladybird was a publisher of slim hardbacked books intended to help children learn to read, and in a more general sense to instil a peculiarly British (and sometimes just plain peculiar) sense of the world having invariable rules of order, decency, progress and rationalism, of everything being OK and under control and British.

As time went on parents were sometimes depicted changing with the times. Mummy began to step out of the house without wearing a hat, eventually (my goodness!) even leaving the house to work at her job; new occupations and possibilities in general were acknowledged; in a stoic, stiff upper lip and fuss-free way British children of immigrants slipped in unannounced to play happily with the default white children. But otherwise the Ladybird design, typography, ethos and aesthetic remained remarkably unaltered through all the decades they were published, especially considering that their temporal range encompassed the Blitz, the Swinging Sixties, disco, punk and the silicon chip. Even the paper these books were printed on seemed to be unlike any other and never seemed to change.

While this may all seem very nostalgic, I must also admit that I only recall a peripheral engagement with these books when I was a child, mainly via my younger brothers rather than on my own behalf. I myself was a freakish Midwich Cuckoo of a child who was already far too advanced a reader at Ladybird’s target age to have any need of such simplified and overtly didactic texts. Not a brag really because pretty much all of my peers hated me for it and unlike my fictional counterparts I couldn’t even make dimwitted, barely literate classmates die just by thinking about it.

From 'James I and the Gunpowder Plot' 1967, illustration by John Kenney.