The Making II: Makerer

Even more from the series of Japanese short films about crafts and manufacturing, which was featured yesterday: this time the videos feature the making of clockwork and tin toys, daruma (達磨, the hollow good luck dolls supposedly modelled after Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism), oil pastel crayons, oil paint for artists, and mosquito coils.

The film about daruma shows equally fascinating traditional hand-made techniques, and slightly more industrial manufacturing of them. Even so, they’re all still finished individually just like the other items shown in these videos, the paint and the mosquito coils included. The pastel one is a bit tedious at the start, but if you’re an artist like me or otherwise just get excited about colours, stick with it and the one about paint for some huge, lush blobs of intense, glossy pigment erotica. The film about mosquito coils is initially rather alarming because despite them working with insecticide all day, not a single person is wearing a mask or gloves. A little research, however, showed that pyrethrum and pyrethrins derive from chrysanthemum flowers (as shown in the film) and are so safe to humans and other mammals that a person would have to ingest many grams of the substance to even get ill. The film also does a little introduction to anti-mosquito incense, which was in fact invented by a Japanese gentleman in the 1890s, although it was his wife who came up with the improved coiling version still in use today. Guess who usually gets the credit, though?

And since we’re on the subject of mosquito coils– how often does that happen?– what a great excuse for a link to two of my favourite posts on the site, though they’re among the least favourite with readers: MUSHUDA and Mushuda II: Miscegenation!

(See also Fascinating Repairmen )

(The) Making

Along the same lines as the aforementioned Fascinating Repairmen, more short documentaries from Japan about crafting, which is apparently a genre. There seem to be dozens if not hundreds of these that have been uploaded to YouTube by the Japan Science and Technology Agency. Apart from a few captions– in Japanese, obviously– the videos are all wordless and self-explanatory. The seven embedded here are the ones I’ve found most interesting so far (listed in ascending order of Japanese-ness, possibly): manufacturing marbles from recycled glass, sculpting and moulding shop mannequins, kendo (Japanese bamboo stick-fighting) armour, paper lanterns, dolls for the annual 雛祭りHinamatsuri (Doll Festival), realistic fishing lures, and creating food samples out of PVC and wax.

Think of the children

… but please don’t make them into lamps after poking their eyes out with scissors. Especially on a children’s TV show in Sweden, unless you want to cause a storm in a teacup. Via Metafilter, a Norwegian site reports (do I detect a hint of anti-Swedish glee?) that “Swedish children’s TV channel is forced to remove clip of doll murder.“

Luckily (for them) Sweden is so utopian that some people have nothing better to worry about than dolls being mutilated on a TV show for children, Philofix, complaining vociferously that it was “perverse”, “macabre” and “crazy”, and that the presenter should be dismissed. Clearly these people have never met a real child or they’re a very long way from their own childhoods, because otherwise they’d know that many children adore this kind of business and need no encouragement or instruction whatsoever in play-sadism with any vaguely humanoid figure. Given half a chance they’ll fuck up a doll in ways that make presenter Rakel Wärmländer’s interventions with scissors seem very tame. This project definitely is perverse, macabre and crazy… but guess what? Children are perverse, macabre and crazy too. What’s wrong with being perverse, macabre and crazy anyway?

Not to mention that– old lefty that I am– I think it’s preferable for a child to know that the world is there for them to learn from, tinker with and enjoy in their own private and individual way instead of just passively accepting objects and products as they are given, and never doing anything without permission.

Watch Rakel get medieval on a doll’s ass below. UPDATE: What a shame, the miserable bastards have purged it from YouTube already.

The phonographic doll

That’s phonographic, not pornographic. I know I kind of brought it on myself with posts about James Joyce’s sexual fantasies and squid sex, and due to the fact that I swear a bit too much, but the number of people who land on this blog after searching for terms like “sex doll” is ridiculous. This post is not about sex dolls.

The images and quotes here are from another of my slightly disturbing collection of Victorian and Edwardian books, in this instance the laboriously titled Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography (1898).

“The doll’s body is made of tin, and the interior thereof is filled with a mechanism very much like that of a commercial phonograph, but, of course, much more simple and inexpensive.”

Mushuda II: Miscegenation

A hard-hitting, honest depiction of normal everyday life in Japan, to wit a marriage between a human-sized plastic doll and a hairy-chested doppelgänger of the usual turquoise Mushuda bear, here reduced to an impotent voyeur. Apparently this PVC bride’s dowry consists of an anti-moth product for ladies [sic] called Kaori (“perfumed”), which is also a common Japanese feminine name. Try not to get any Japanese women you meet with that name mixed up with the insecticide product because they certainly won’t thank you for trying to put them in your closet to repel moths.

(Sequel to yesterday’s Mushuda anti-moth SWAT team raid).

And… this. I don’t even know what this is or why it exists, but it does. Nice that she’s still seeing her friends and having a plastic girls’ night in even after her recent nuptials with the bear.

The Adolf Hitler artist playset we’ve all been waiting for

It’s not at all unusual for me to see things on the internet that make me wish they were a brilliant piece of satire instead of an actual thing that really exists. Unfortunately I must report that action figures of Hitler and other leading Nazis are definitely things that really exist. The subtly and charmingly named 3Reich* offers such a wide selection of evil warmongers and architects of genocide that there’s sure to be somebody who takes your fancy: choose from Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Heydrich, Dönitz, Himmler or even Japanese luminaries like Ito Hirobumi because, hey, there were loads of brilliant atrocities perpetrated in Manchuria, Korea and China too you know! The site says “our product is for historic education purposes only, and is not intended to glorify, nor exploit the horrors and atrocities of war.” So make sure you appreciate Hitler for his art and for how much you can learn from him, and not for his atrocities, OK?

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.