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Friday, October 31, 2003
Edward Gorey's Haunting House
Just in time for Halloween, a pictorial peek at the eccentric, ramshackle Cape Cod residence of the late artist and author Edward Gorey, master of the macabre.
washingtonpost.com | 30 October 2003
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, October 31, 2003
So this is what Gorey sounds like
Tiger Lillies, with the Kronos Quartet, bring the artist's macabre mirth to the stage in a brilliant show.
Fire, smoke and ghoulish light provided the atmosphere outside Royce Hall on Tuesday. Fire, smoke and ghoulish light also provided the atmosphere inside the hall Tuesday night. An ashen, grotesque, Victorian-clad singer jabbered, "Fire! Fire! Fire!" in the crowded theater. "I like burning houses down," he sang with sullen cheeriness. "Start a fire," he raved, his voice leaping like falsetto flames, like a heroic Handel countertenor gone mad.
No question, this was in appalling taste. No question, it was also a brilliant performance. And no question, it was funny. A mostly young audience's laughter was nervous at first, but as the song got more outrageous, the laughter loosened up.
Was this catharsis or callousness?
Indeed, the string of no questions generated a string of questions, of moral dilemmas. Gallows humor is always nasty business, so why is it OK sometimes and not others? Isn't it even worse when it is about the other guy rather than about you? Does anybody not love the macabre mirth of Edward Gorey, that master illustrator of children dying horribly? Whither Halloween while Southern California burns?
The sullen singer was Martyn Jacques, mastermind of Tiger Lillies. The creepy three-piece British cabaret cult band — creators of last year's delightfully sordid puppet-show sensation, "Shockheaded Peter" — had returned Tuesday to venerate Gorey in concert as the UCLA Live Halloween offering. And this time, Tiger Lillies had the Kronos Quartet in tow.
In 1999, Gorey heard a Tiger Lillies recording and wrote the musicians to tell them that he thought they were the cat's pajamas and that he would like to collaborate with them. He then sent along a crate full of unpublished stuff.
Gorey died just as Jacques planned to fly to Cape Cod to meet with him. The material in the crate became the basis for "The Gorey End," 13 songs about hapless victims like the Hipdeep family, whose year begins with Cousin Fred found in the attic dead and ends when Amy's luck is rotten, as she loses her voice singing "Die Frau Ohne Schatten."
A master of overstatement, Jacques — accompanied by drummer Adrian Hughes and bassist Adrian Stout — shuffles on stage, his face in white paint, a porkpie hat over his balding head, a long, thin braid of hair in back
reaching his waist. His expressions are a language of grimaces. His voice, spoken and sung, remains in the strained soprano range. His enunciation is clipped and proper. He alternates between listless piano, listless accordion and listless ukulele. He is Queen Victoria's nightmare.
Each Gorey song is a miniature vignette of doom. There is the besotted mother of Florabelle, the girl ripped to pieces by a pack of wild dogs. A chandelier weeps every time a waltz or tango is played. Omletta Sniggles found Jesus on her windshield, made a fortune from the miracle, built a house with a smile, carpeted it in a shaggy pile — and died.
Sung deadpan — the controlled violence usually remaining just under the surface though occasionally breaking out in hilarious hysteria — these songs are simple musically but tell their tales tartly.
The Kronos provided atmosphere, playing a lot of tremolos. The irony here was that this hip quartet acted as musical straight man, one more Victorian ornament in a grotesque entourage.
A 45-minute song cycle, "The Gorey End" was preceded in the first half of the concert by short individual sets from Kronos and Tiger Lillies.
Kronos' four selections began with its delectable arrangement of an old Bollywood number, "Tonight Is the Night," and concluded with a rhapsodic piece, "The Fly Freezer," written for the quartet by the Icelandic pop band Sigur Rós.
Tiger Lillies ended its four numbers with its ecstatic call to burn the
house down, tapping directly into the same troubling fascination that keeps our eyes glued to the extraordinary pictures of raging infernos. We are rotten to the core, the band tells us, and there is nothing to be done about it.
Calendarlive | 30 October 2003
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, October 31, 2003
Sunday, October 19, 2003
Telling tales is a treat for all children of all ages
... Rick Huddle steps up to recite Edward Lear's rhyming story 'The Dong With a Luminous Nose.' The words belong to Lear but the telling is all Huddle, a mix of pantomime, vocal changes and silly faces that make Lear's strange creature seem to appear.
The Oregonian | 18 October 2003
posted by Marco Graziosi Sunday, October 19, 2003
Friday, October 17, 2003
Rose-Red City Carved From the Rock
In 1812 a Swiss-born, Cambridge-educated linguist named Johann Ludwig Burckhardt passed through the city en route from Syria to Egypt. He spent an uneasy three days there, unwelcomed as an outsider by the inhabitants, and published an account of it in his book, 'Travels in Syria and the Holy Land.'
The book sparked new interest in Petra, and more than 2,000 other Westerners found their way there during the rest of the 19th century, drawn in part by its Holy Land location. Among the visitors were the American artist Frederic Edwin Church and the English painter and rhymist Edward Lear."
New York Times | 17 October 2003
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, October 17, 2003
Spike's sad sharp edge
Those who grew up on The Goon Show will see him as later generations saw Monty Python - as the one who made sense by failing to do so, the great anarch who gave form to a sense of all-encompassing absurdity. In fact, it makes more sense to see him as a culminator - the last of the great writers of a style of nonsense produced uniquely by the British, whose provenance died with the empire from which it sprang...
The Goons capped off a tradition that stretched from Lilliput to Edward Lear, and they more or less finished off Milligan as well.
www.theage.com.au | 18 October 2003
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, October 17, 2003
The Limerick Challenge
To mark National Poetry Day, you are formally invited to join the Magazine's Limerick Challenge.
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | 9 October 2003
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, October 17, 2003
Nailing Spike [Milligan]
The combination of Spike, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine, with help from deep-dish subversives emerging from their cocoons in the BBC, created an explosion of verbal anarchy that nevertheless flowed from a tradition, combining music hall with Lewis Carroll and the nonsense prose and poetry of Edward Lear. Carpenter does not make enough of this last influence, and a comparison of Lear's and Milligan's awkward trawl through life could have proved fascinating.
Guardian Unlimited Books | 20 September 2003
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, October 17, 2003
Celebrity voices on charity CD
Les Barker, 59, who lives in Bwlchgwyn near Wrexham, has released a poetry CD entitled Guide Cats for the Blind, to raise funds for the British Computer Association of the Blind.
His style is in the genre of nonsense verse, similar to that of Edward Lear, author of the Owl and the Pussycat.
BBC NEWS | 16 September 2003
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, October 17, 2003
Anyone for Tennyson?
The Queen's residence at Osbourne helped make the Isle of Wight fashionable among the cream of Victorian society: Charles Darwin, William Makepeace Thackeray, C. F. Watts and Julia Margaret Cameron, among others, all moved to Freshwater.
Of these, Tennyson was particularly close to Cameron and made frequent visits to Dimbola Lodge (her home), which is now open to the public. Rumours of an affair remain unquenched; the gate that Cameron had built at the back of her garden so that Tennyson could arrive secretly still stands.
Inside, the lodge is a shrine to the Victorian greats that Cameron photographed. More than 60 images, including pictures of Edward Lear, Henry Taylor, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, Darwin, Thackeray, Watts and Tennyson are displayed.
Telegraph | Travel | 9 September 2003
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, October 17, 2003
Hamiltons sell up
Not much about Lear, but I'm trying to resume updating this blog after a long period and anything will do.
ic Liverpool | 8 September 2003
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, October 17, 2003
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