Gone Baby Gone

I'm having a little internet break for a few days. While I'm away, I expect everyone to watch The Piano because it's an excellent film. Or you can just watch this:



Either way = life improved.

le Café de l'Enfer

[Photograph by Eugène Atget. Via]

I stumbled across images of this incredible building recently, and just had to find out more.

According to the National Geographic archive:

"A hot spot called Hell's Café lured 19th-century Parisians to the city's Montmartre neighborhood—like the Marais—on the Right Bank of the Seine. With plaster lost souls writhing on its walls and a bug-eyed devil's head for a front door, le Café de l'Enfer may have been one of the world's first theme restaurants. According to one 1899 visitor, the café's doorman—in a Satan suit—welcomed diners with the greeting, "Enter and be damned!" Hell's waiters also dressed as devils. An order for three black coffees spiked with cognac was shrieked back to the kitchen as: "Three seething bumpers of molten sins, with a dash of brimstone intensifier!""

Both the interior and exterior walls were covered in the twisting bodies of the damned. I love the graphic, textured nature of these surfaces. It reminds me of the 'hallway of hands' motif I have been obsessing over in the last few posts, but taking it to the next level.

[Photograph by H. C. Ellis. Via]

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Even the menu was sinister, outlining its "diabolical attractions" with flare:

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The giant fanged doorway-mouth also reminds me of the entrance to the Tim Burton exhibit I visited last year.

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Walking through those sharp teeth was so exciting. I wish Hell's Cafe was still around.

You can find more pics of the hellish hotspot here, including the 'heaven' cafe some joker set up next door.

All In The Mind

Now that I'm in the twilight months of PhD writing, people often ask "what will you do after you've submitted?" This is precisely where my mind goes in those moments:





...


P.S. The 'hallway of hands' featured in this skit is just like the one in VAST's Pretty When You Cry video. Apparently both are based on scenes from Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), which looks quite amazing:





How have I never seen this film? This travesty must be rectified at once.

See Monsters

I like them...

[Pierre Denys de Montfort. Colossal Octopus (1810). Via]

[Andrea Mantegna. Battle of Two Sea Monsters (1475). Via]

[Bror Anders Wikstrom. New Orleans Mardi Gras: Krewe of Proteus float design (1907). Via]

[Johann Zahn. Mythical Satyrus Marinus (1696). Via]

[Olaus Magnus. The mythical island of Thule. Detail from the Carta Marina (1539). Via]

[Albrecht Dürer. The Sea Monster (1498). Via]

[Jean-Marc Côté. Sea Monster (1899). Via]

Also, this guy:

[Conrad Gesner. Sea Monk (1575). Via]

Beware the spiny sea monk and his prickly high fives.

Now I Can See

I found another interesting music video today. Catchy and unsettling - my favourite kind.





I strongly suspect the inspiration for this came from Lucy McRae's work:



It looks even better in action. I posted about her here if you would like to see more.

Don't Look Now

Hello strangers. I've been obsessing over this music video for a while now, and thought it worth mentioning here.

(Warning: NSFW)




There are just so many things going on.

The video has an arresting Twin Peaks vibe, with the menacing father figure, the forest and the childlike-but-not-really young woman. The gestures towards Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel really build the sense of threatened innocence, while also shifting the scenario further into the realms of the surreal and fantastic.



For me the switching of the young woman with other, older figures evokes Mikhail Bakhtin's "hags" - the most well known example of his concept of the female grotesque:

"In the famous Kerch terracotta collection we find figurines of senile pregnant hags. Moreover, the old hags are laughing. This is a typical and very strongly expressed grotesque. It is ambivalent. It is pregnant death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed. Life is shown in its two-fold contradictory process; it is the epitome of incompleteness. And such is precisely the grotesque concept of the body" (Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Indiana University Press, 1984, pp.25-6).

The passage doesn't entirely suit the video, but those manic faces (and the dead/living girl) keep reminding me of his argument here. Whatever you think of Bakhtin and his opinions, he knows how to generate a strong image.

All that said, it stupidly took me a few more views to realise why this video grabbed me so firmly. The more I watch, the more it reminds me of one of my favourite thrillers: Don't Look Now (1973). There are some very explicit references to the film in the music video, explicit enough for me to think it is a deliberate homage.



If you haven't seen it, and you enjoy Gothic mysteries and Donald Sutherland, I highly recommend this film. (Yes, there is a famously graphic love scene that pops up - so to speak - in the middle of the story, but we can fast-forward that, can't we? Or not, I'm not judging you.)

The trailer isn't super great, but at least it doesn't give the whole thing away like most do these days. (If you are interested in watching Don't Look Now, I would suggest NOT reading reviews/comments or Googling it - once spoiled can never be unspoiled!)

Finally, the scene with the grasping hands reminded me of a much more recent video; one with rather different, yet equally Gothic, connotations. In Dev's 'In the Dark' the red hands, with their suggestions of sexuality and violence, are replaced by black hands:




Some eerie imagery in this one. The play on exoticism, monstrosity, blackness and whiteness is all a bit unsettling, especially when the white singer is walking through a sea of raised black hands (claws/paws?).







Interesting. Disturbing. I guess that's what they were going for?

The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues

I hit another deadline on the voyage towards PhD submission last week, and in celebration bought myself some new bathers from Black Milk. I wouldn't normally mention such matters,* but they are quite monstrous, so it seemed appropriate.


*This is clearly a lie. I talk about my loot all the time.


Front:


And back:

So great. The design is taken from this poster.

The print is really good quality. I especially like the angry little fish:



You can watch the full movie here, if you're interested. The first couple of minutes give you a taste of the action:




So exciting!

I am seriously considering getting the 'Shark vs Mermaid' bathers as well.

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They have a touch of the vagina dentata about them.

The 'Dragon Snot' leggings are also tempting.

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Hm. Is it cheating to buy yourself rewards before you actually achieve your goals? Yeah. I suspected as much.