January, 2012
Dolls by Lena and Katya Popova
Lena and Katya Popova are sisters who make the most amazing art dolls. These are from their “Fashion Moon” doll lamp series.
Tags: dolls, geisha-inspired, victorian
Black Swan/Poisoned Apple
Artwork by Keith Eric Williams
Snow White’s Happy Ending by Melissa CampaTags: keith eric williams, modern fairy tales, snow white, surreal, swan
Site Redesign: From Disposable Darling to Synesthesia Garden
If you used to follow DisposableDarling.com, you may have noticed that the blog has undergone a total makeover. The redesign had been brewing in my mind for months, and I and N. (the Webmaster) finally got down to it this past week or two.
Here’s a screencap of the old blog:
Click for a larger viewI conceptualized/visualized the new design, down to the last detail (or rather, I imagined it pretty much all at once, in a complete image), and N. worked reeeallly hard to get everything right and the way I wanted it, as I’m really OCD and picky with details and was literally going, “Can you shift this two spaces to the right?” every five minutes.
I wanted to take the site in another aesthetic direction. I have about a million directions in me, but I settled on this one and had a vision of it inside my head that I would tweak and bring different parts of into focus at random times during the day. While Disposable Darling was white with red as the accompanying color, minimal, and rather precious-looking, I wanted the new one to be a little bit grungier, edgier, and more cluttered (a very orderly clutter). It’s basically a sort of visual negative of Disposable Darling – an inversion. The colors are black (the base color), white, and pink. Fonts are bigger, bolder, more graphic, and more integrated with the whole layout. Everything is enwrapped in boxes to satisfy my lust for visual order and integrity.
Instead of a baroque design with lots of flourishes and an old-timey vibe (which I love also), I opted for a starker, sleek, modern layout. But I always wanted a kind of elaborate crest in the header image, so we used a vector graphic from Chadlonius (he’s amazing) and modified it and added the twin hearts, which are vintage medical textbook illustrations. Those two hearts represent the idea of the “second heart,” which comes from a poem I really like that goes, “the second heart murmurs/its beatific perversions/to the first” (see poetry post below). That can mean a lot of things, obviously; but part of it, for me, is that my vision of the future incarnations of the blog would keep whispering to me and making my fingers itch, it wouldn’t let me rest. We are inspired to change by that restlessness.
{Another part of it is that I don’t think that we’re always guided by our most obvious motivations or goals, five-year plans or whatever; like, with me, all my actions can sort of be traced to an emotional origin that lies in a deeper, more buried, and more embedded sort of “second heart,” maybe, that lives alongside the first, or encloses the first within it. This has nothing to do with the subconscious or intuition, but everything to do with the primary, underlying motivations of our personalities and the broad themes that shape and describe our lives. And our complexity has to do with modernity; it’s as if we grow a second heart over time, as we evolve.}
Anyway, thanks to everyone who ever glanced at the blog and liked what they saw. And thanks especially to those 300 or so of you who’ve read it on at least a semi-regular basis. You guys are all wonderful! I hope you still enjoy it. I’m going to try to make things a little more organized from now on. I’m currently going through the 200+ posts I made on Disposable Darling and editing each one of them, which is a pain in the ass. God, I write poorly sometimes. A lot of them probably won’t be put up. I’m trying to be more disciplined – let’s see how long that lasts.
Goodbye, Disposable Darling.
Hello, Synesthesia Garden.
- L.
Alice: Madness Returns
American McGee’s Alice from 2000 is one of my favorite video games, because it’s just so stylish. A short teaser trailer for the sequel, titled Alice: Madness Returns, which is set to be released sometime in 2011, has surfaced.
Tags: alice in wonderland, american mcgee, horror video games, madness, victorian
Doll Parts – The Art of Lost Fish
“Doll Parts” is the aptly named latest exhibition of Elodie/Lost Fish. Lost Fish mixes innocence with sexuality and evil in her precious, delightful illustrations. Uber-cute, teary-eyed tiny girls with a melancholy expression, bud mouths, hyperrealistic porcelain-white faces and rouged cheeks are the subjects of her painstakingly rendered digital art. Baby faces and symbols of childhood abound. There are murderous-seeming aristocrats, darling deformities of children, lovelorn cyborgs, and all the accoutrements of such precious beings, including teacups, cakes, ribbons, flowers, and pet creatures. They seem yearning, hurt, vulnerable, and wicked by turns. There are Lolita, fetish, and cyberpunk overtones. The resultant imagery is almost too cute for words: the epitome of innocent and corrupted dollflesh.
Tags: animals, babies, cute little girls, dolls, fetish, lost fish, pop surrealism, sweet/melancholy, victorian
Sil van der Woerd’s Music Videos
Dutch filmmaker Sil Van Der Woerd makes beautiful, surreal, and extremely impressive music videos on unbelievably tiny budgets. These videos contrast industrial, futuristic, black and sterile environments with the soft beauty and grace of the subjects, and historically inspired fashions.
Check out his videos for Lolly Jane Blue’s “Worms” and “White Swan”:
Tags: industrial landscapes, music videos, queens, sil van der woerd, surreal, swan
Velveteen Darling
You’ll be a Hollywood star, a hero of the Elysian Fields,
utterly redeemed and reclaimed
to glory, beauty, splendor
The lands of milk and honey –
– the neon and strobe lights that melt your eyes in tears
Many will adore you, others scorch you immortal
with the flame of their hate (envy)
Your gestures are white and lovely –
You’ll be like a model, long and thin,
gazing off into space like the earth’s not good enough for you,
distant, abstract, with a geometrical sort of beauty
With a perfectly crystalline face, cheekbones to die for,
a perfectly notched long spine that curls inward with pride
You’ll be beautiful and – untouchable; yes.
It has been decided.
No more worrying, doubting,
no more crying
No more thinking of your limitations
Nothing now but the sky, that burst of blue
that hurts your brain to conceive of
You will be someone, not who you were before
All you have to do is obliterate yourself to make room
for the persona, that image, that deathless song –
this will be the Viking funeral of your essence –
to make room for something short of your current agony,
something definite, different, and easy,
that you can live with.
You look ethereal as you walk across a room in a scene –
feeling some furtive feeling in darkness
That kind of sentiment, that movement of the heart
could heave and break the chest.
They’ll drop at your feet in waves at the drop of a hat –
love you if you say to
You’ll be beyond your poor gods and devils then,
at the mercy only
of the whims of a capricious, malicious,
and sanguine audience –
Finally –
Beyond salvation.Poetry: Apocrypha
“Envy tastes like copper filings.
It settles into the stomach wall and plies
its sinuous trade, hawking green-eyed girls
at the tented market of the womb — thin-mattresses
waifs with syringe-scored ribs.
Under fallopian awnings
they turn their chlorinated eyes inward,
lashes slice into the flesh as they blink slowly,
once, twice.Envy sidles into the blood, jangling metals and plastics,
is yearn-swollen fingers all ringed in agates and amethyst–
so fat that knuckles bulge tumescent out of the gold bands.Eel-headed, it stretches and pants, breath filled
with rotted diamonds.
It claws and adores and kisses the edge
without guessing the center, cobbling a
hermetic path, yellow and grey,
down into the rickety basement door
of the second heart–
the secret heart, shut as a reliquary
that whispers sulfuric villanelles into the dark
while storm shutters screen against glass
threatening expulsion from the apple-bled
rooms of the interior.This other heart is a city of wan-faced slattern-beasts,
snouts pressed against frozen windows, bones
howling for hot bread. But it is beautiful there, in the black
aorta, blood pure as grain alcohol.
In these jealous walls the self instructs the self–
the second heart murmurs
its beatific perversions
to the first.”from Apocrypha by Catherynne M. Valente
Tags: apocrypha, catherynne m valente, poetry
Dream Machine [001]
I had this weird dream one night last week where there was something wrong with my chest — I felt it, and so my teacher said, “Go to the hospital, a doctor,” and when I went to the hospital I saw a group of doctors standing in front of me, and I went forward, bent sightly over, with my hand over my chest, holding it carefully, with a wounded look on my face, and I felt a slight pain, no more than a papercut or a dull tiny cut, though, really. It was like I was tenderly holding my wound like an injured sparrow held cupped in my hands against my chest. I was afraid of showing it to the doctors, like you’re afraid of opening your mouth for the dentist when you’re a child. I imagined, from outside me, I saw an image of myself with a big hole in my chest, punched right through the rib cage, right in the center, with my heart missing and only destroyed tissue there. (In true dream fashion, it was right in the center, not slightly off to the left, because I don’t think my subconscious takes note of these details.) But when I pulled my hands away and finally showed the doctors, it transformed into, or turned out to be, only a small wound near my collarbone, on my right side, that was thick and dark with blood already like a clotted rope.
Kouichi Kimura’s “House of Vision”
I love this house designed by Kouichi Kimura in 2008, located near Shiga, Japan. It’s so elegant, and I wish I could live in a house just like this. Someone pointed out that it’s a bit “aseptic”-feeling, but in a good way, like they’d feel safe there, and I totally understand their meaning. I think it’s partly due to how sparingly furnished the house is in the pictures, but it really does give an impression of just spacious emptiness. I think it’s beautiful, though. Minimalist yet luxurious at the same time, utterly modern and sleek, interesting all around. It’s one of my dream homes.
Tags: black and white, contemporary architecture, dream houses, kouichi kimura, minimalist
