quite some years ago — let’s see, when did romero’s land of the dead come out? 2005? — i knitted a large zombie doll as i waited for the film’s release. it’s all well on record, my love for romero, the way he works, and his under-appreciated non-horror films. and at the time i knit my zombie doll — a large, floppy, primitive rendering of “bub” the zombie from day of the dead — i’d never seen anyone knitting zombies.
but of course, it wasn’t long after that at all that zombies became a THING, the way bacon and pirates and cupcakes suddenly became THINGS, and i saw lots of little knitted zombies with oh-no-mr.-bill mouths. knitted zombies seemed to be quite everywhere. my bub was ok, but he had button eyes and therefore wasn’t even given to the children until rather recently, and they weren’t all that interested. i have to say, i don’t even know where he is now and it’s possible that we’ve gotten rid of him. i wasn’t in love with how bub had turned out — but i also never saw any other knitted zombies that i thought were anything special.
until fiona goble’s knit your own zombie. (that seems to be an american edition; i have the british one.) i already owned goble’s knit your own royal wedding, but never had any intention of making anything out of it. the zombie book, i wanted to work with right away. i loved her construction (although in the long run i never made any of the velcro tear-away limbs for my dolls). and i loved learning to use chain stitch for faces and details. the first dolls i made straight from the book were for the kids for christmas.
the kids liked them, i was happy with them, i had fun with the scale. i wanted to make more, and specifically zombie ones (with body cavities and entrails!) but was waiting for an opportunity to present itself.
then, one of my new pittsburgh pals — gallerist and founder of the pittsburgh 48-hour film project nina gibbs — clued me into the hollywood theater in dormont and it’s “go digital or go dark” fundraising campaign. a number of themed events were popping up to raise money, and a night of the living dead-themed event — with staff, crew, art auction, live music, and screening of a 35mm print — was one of them. i knew then who — what! – i needed to make more zombie dolls for! and i made a pair and sent them to the auction at the festival. i wanted to be there, but my dolls were.
hands down, best zombie dolls in the knit world are the ones fiona goble designed. but i’ll take my end of the deal, happily. here are the dolls i knit, at the festival.
claudia’s oz-love rolls on. we are planning year three of oz-themed halloween costumes, and she and béla both have been learning to use a tarot deck with the wonderful tarot of oz.
while i will not give away the kids’ costume ideas for 2013 at this early date, i was glad that claude did NOT choose to be one of her very favorite characters — scraps, the patchwork girl of oz. scraps is a lot like claudia. she’s loud, boisterous, does not like to follow rules, has an impulse control problem, and thinks certain virtues are overrated.
i was not gonna make that costume. but i could, i realized, make that doll. for claudia’s birthday.
it never crossed my mind to get patchwork-printed fabric. that ten year-old kid was a better planner than me. nope, i bought a whole lotta fabric and pieced the whole freaking thing myself… making a decent-sized section of patchwork and then cutting pattern pieces as i went. fiddly, for sure — and i was aware that i had more patterns, as opposed to solids, than any illustration of the patchwork girl of oz i’d ever seen — but i felt good about my choices (particularly the pink leopard print. i know who i’m sewing for.)
i had started out thinking i would go from baum’s original description:
The Patchwork Girl was taller than he, when she stood upright, and her body was plump and rounded because it had been so neatly stuffed with cotton. Margolotte had first made the girl’s form from the patchwork quilt and then she had dressed it with a patchwork skirt and an apron with pockets in it- using the same gay material throughout. Upon the feet she had sewn a pair of red leather shoes with pointed toes. All the fingers and thumbs of the girl’s hands had been carefully formed and stuffed and stitched at the edges, with gold plates at the ends to serve as finger-nails. The head of the Patchwork Girl was the most curious part of her. While she waited for her husband to finish making his Powder of Life the woman had found ample time to complete the head as her fancy dictated, and she realized that a good servant’s head must be properly constructed. The hair was of brown yarn and hung down on her neck in several neat braids. Her eyes were two silver suspender buttons cut from a pair of the Magician’s old trousers, and they were sewed on with black threads, which formed the pupils of the eyes. Margolotte had puzzled over the ears for some time, for these were important if the servant was to hear distinctly, but finally she had made them out of thin plates of gold and attached them in place by means of stitches through tiny holes bored in the metal. The woman had cut a slit for the Patchwork Girl’s mouth and sewn two rows of white pearls in it for teeth, using a strip of scarlet plush for a tongue. This mouth Ojo considered very artistic and lifelike, and Margolotte was pleased when the boy praised it. There were aslmost too many patches on the face of the girl for her to be considered strictly beautiful, for one cheek was yellow and the other red, her chin, blue, her forehead purple and the center, where her nose had been formed and padded, a bright yellow.
but the more i thought about what that would look like, i thought… that doesn’t sound like a pretty doll at all. and john r. neill’s illustrations never followed baum’s description to the letter.
(i also love this leigh boweryesque film version of scraps from 1914)
and so, i felt my way through it, with a nice rag doll pattern i bought online, making my fabric as i went. i gave scraps gloved hands, as seems traditional; i turned the gloves inside out and stitched them so they were slightly less regular and slightly smaller than they would have been otherwise.
the shoes where a huge pain.
it was all worth it.
i finished the doll three or four days before claude’s birthday, and thought in my usual dark humor way, “all we have to do is make it a few more days and i can give it to her!”
that evening she fell backwards down an entire staircase while i watched. four full rotations. she was fine.
within a few more hours, i had a full blown case of norovirus and for twelve hours spent no more than fifteen minutes outside of a bathroom. my brain checked out totally. i couldn’t regulate my body temperature. sadly, i remember every minute of it.
so fuck the calendar. i gave claudia her patchwork girl of oz the night BEFORE her birthday, since she had already made a case for an “early” present (citing béla getting an early present in september… which had been an iron man apron, which was NECESSARY to making his avengers cupcakes for school, obviously.)
i left the doll on her bed with a note that read HAPPY BIRTHDAY CLAUDIA. LOVE SCRAPS. and i went to fold some laundry. according to ben, she walked past the doll without noticing, and when she headed back that direction the next time, she almost jumped out of her skin. i heard her yell “SCRAPS IS IN MY BEDROOM!” and so i went to check.
she’s a big kid now. this was, absolutely, the first time i’ve ever made her something where she clearly made the cognitive connection between the thing i made — and my impulse to do it, related to her. it wasn’t just that she liked the thing… she understood what ME making the thing for her meant. this shot here is not a random fleeting expression. she was looking at me and really, really getting it. why people who make, make the things they make for people they love. she GOT it.
then she had the nerve to go consult the oz poster in the hallway to see how accurately i had rendered scraps. luckily, i passed.
she has a few more very nice presents coming to her tomorrow. i am excited about those too. but if she wants to thank me, or ben, or béla, for any of them, i will take the absence of falls down staircases and norovirus as a perfectly good thank you.
i’m a big believer in making the empty space — even though empty space can be scary — for new things to come into your life. i think filling up life with so-so activities and so-so projects leads to a so-so creative life. still, sometimes there is work that is worth doing in the short term, and when the time comes to end it, digging the roots out, even though they may not be as deep as others, is a pain in the ass. 2012 was a lot about that for me.
naturally, one of the biggest things in me is writing. i’ve been doing more non-writing than i ever thought i would, but writing is still a primary impulse for me. however, much of the writing i have been doing in the last few years– much of it nonfiction and for parenting or cultural publications — has not been meaningful to me the way it had been when i was feeling out being a parent. my kids will turn five in 2013. they are not babies. they are not people i need to write about — at least not in articles, columns, not even much in blog posts. in fact, the world of parenting-writing, and adoptive parenting-writing-blogging-social-networking, wore me thin pretty fast. it’s just not my world. i’m a mother, but “being” a “mommy” is just not one of my “hats” (and i really smirk at that whole hat-wearing analogy).
i had tried it before, but i knew it was finally time — for real — to stop writing regularly for korean quarterly. all the columns i wrote there — a series entitled “creation myth” — used to be on this site as a separate page, but i have taken that page down as well. it’s not part of where my head is now and i don’t think of it as having much to do with my creative body of work, although it was certainly important to my early parenting process. the pieces themselves are still available through korean quarterly’s back issues, and anyone who wants to read them should buy the back issues through KQ directly. i am grateful that they were as well-received as they were. i’m grateful for my continued relationship with the KQ family.
ceasing to report, in print, about my kids and my family and how i felt about parenting — in a balanced, nonfictional way — had immediate benefits. it got me writing about a lot of other things in a deeper way. a scarier way. a more savage way. and to be honest, a more truthful way. this does not mean that i have no plans to write some nonfiction work in relation to parenting, ever again. there are irons in the fire where that is concerned. but they are fewer, and much heftier, irons than the work i’ve done so far. and i’m glad i’m on the handle-side of them.
and although it only began in 2012, i petered out before the year was over as a crafts editor for InCultureParent magazine. i knew i was stretching it thin. i knew i’d want to use that craft-ingenuity (such as it is) for krampus stuff, just as i knew i wanted to use all my writing mind for fiction. i did what i could. and then i stopped. and not having to come up with crafts on the calendar has allowed me the freedom to stew for the festival that i use to work through my own monsters, and and i am gratified when it does something for others. i hope it continues to.
here’s our krampuslauf family, by the amazing len peralta.
except it got me drumming. and things are moving ahead in a new way. i can’t make this a new year’s post if i wait to write about that until i’m ready to do so, but i’m very satisfied. there will be more to come.
2013 could be a very interesting year. my meditation:
“If you go back to the beginning, part of my whole plan was to create this universal family of disenfranchised people…. It wasn’t just about sexuality, it was about anyone who felt odd.”
having kids spreads you thin. it — or people — can make you believe that, to do it right, you need to lose some of your edge. i’ve seen folks lose themselves entirely, and i’ve seen people scramble to get that edge back, or pretend that losing it hasn’t happened. i had to make the changes i made, when i made them, to accommodate for my own evolution. but the shape of things has changed again. there is a lot i’ve taken back. and the ground is very fertile.
as per last year, i worked on costuming and props that were both within my scope of confidence (knitting, some minor sewing) and out of it (giant backpack puppet-making). there were things from last year that i needed to remake for easier use, and things that just didn’t get finished for 2012 but probably will for 2013. and, even among this year’s successful works, i plan to do some amending and embellishing.
no real credit to be taken for originality, but we moved up a few steps from last year’s cardboard shadow puppets this year and went with krampus handpuppets.
while my frau perchta ensemble from last year had many elements that pleased me, mask-and-hat were a practical disaster. this year, i made a mask/headpiece with the tin-foil-and-masking-tape method, covered the face in white crepe and then some very loosely knitted green mohair stockinette, and a babushka i’d made of mitered squares. i hot-glued in some yarn hair and had a frau who could walk, talk, see, and spin with a drop spindle. i had sewn (rather poorly) a flowing black cape last year; i’m sure we’ll get some halloween use out of it in the future, but earlier this year i was gifted a blue wool yves saint laurent cape which belonged to a friend’s mother. that was a better, warmer frau cape this year.
the frau also wore a tabard, which was made of square, double-knit “swatches”, representing the handwork of the children whom frau perchta comes to check on. remember, this is why i love the frau — she comes to check on kids’ knitting, and if it’s no good… well, that’s why they call her “the belly-slitter”. i double-knit the swatches and tied them all together with i-cord pieces. on some of the swatches, i snipped through one layer and machine stitched around the hole so that the frayed stitches would not fray further. This gave a peek-a-boo color effect and looked to me something like an advent calendar. within one of these “windows”, i stitched a piece of pokeberry-dyed, screenprinted fabric from arun in portland, as part of our lauf gift exchange. (i sent portland’s lauf a handpuppet.)
overall i was happier with my ensemble this year — it was much more wearable — but i gave up the elements of the mirror chips and the edelweiss which were parts of the frau folklore that i have to get back in there. i will work on this for next year! also, this summer i began a krampus mask that i’m calling the “leigh bowery krampus” but hit a wall with it and it did not make it to this year’s lauf. it will be at next year’s!
and i hope to improve my mask and backpack puppet-making abilities as well.
this post is for for the birkensnake 6: wild conformations project gang, with whom i am so happy to be working. i’ve been making notes for this post, though, since long before the WC was a gleam in liz hahn’s eye.
even though i am not a genre writer, when i think about my writing, and myself as a writer, i identify most with… character actors. i’m not sure i’ve got it all worked out as to why. but it’s these “lesser” folks whose careers, and bodies of work, always inspire me. they’re never in vanity fair. they’re barely remembered, and when they are, least of all for their own names. but they matter to me above all others. one hopes that they were satisfied, proud-of-their-art people, with real lives, not phony media-run ones, and that they were never bitter that they weren’t daniel day lewis or gwyneth paltrow. (because seriously.)
here, i would simply like to share some of my very favorite character actors. i am considering this a special dia de los muertos post for those of the actors below who have passed on, and a thanksgiving post to all of them.
bryant haliday
“wealthy enough to look on acting as a hobby”, bryant haliday is easiest to find in a few films butchered by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 team (specifically Devil Doll and The Projected Man). His performances may be easy to make fun of, but what did he have to prove? Bryant Haliday is the founder of Cambridge Mass’ Brattle Theatre, and also co-founder of a little enterprise called Janus Films.
anna massey
continued proof that some people are just their most gorgeous at seventysomething. daughter of actor raymond massey, anna massey is amazing in the creepy-ass Peeping Tom as well as hitchcock’s Frenzy and is also in the “portemantau horror” film (portemantau horror is a lovely genre term, yes? — an anthology film, like Creepshow) The Vault Of Horror. actually, she was in a shitload of stuff. and just got prettier and prettier.
raymond laine
omg i love me some raymond laine. and not just because of my severe romanticism of pittsburgh. it’s because he’s a sexy sinister fucker in two very underwatched george romero movies (and i think we all know how i feel about george romero), Season of the Witch and There’s Always Vanilla (which tend to come bundled on the same DVD).
this requires video. watch ray start owning this fucking thing at 1:50. also, jan white as joan is smoldering, and ann muffly, another beautiful pittsburgher, as shirley… oh just heartbreaking. why do more people not love this film?!?!?!?!
frank finlay
frank finlay is an actor in another of my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, The Deadly Bees, and that is where i came to know him by name. later, i was thrilled to find that i had known him since my childhood — as marley’s ghost in THE best (don’t argue) version of A Christmas Carol, the george c. scott version.
frank finlay can also bring the sexy. i am super into the 70+ set. a little frank finlay, a little lance henriksen, and i am good to go.
finlay can be seen in ever so many films, including the unusual 1977 Count Dracula with Louis Jourdan as the count, and finlay as van helsing.
clu gulager (with a nod to rory calhoun)
i have been moving this quote by clu gulager around from place to place on my laptop for some years now, and finally put it on my tumblr:
like rory calhoun, gulager was a cowboy actor who transitioned to horror in his later years. rory calhoun in Motel Hell is a fine thing but clu gulager was in the amazing non-romero Return of the Living Dead. this movie is STUPENDOUS, i saw it in its first run and bought the poster at spencers gifts immediately afterward. that’s in 1985, people.
but it’s clu gulager performance in the portemantau horror film (we learned a term today!) From a Whisper to a Scream that i love most. so icky, clu. you are so icky.
a sweet little bonus: when researching for this post a month or so ago, i realized that an image search for clu brought up thumbnails showing him sitting around with the (soon-to-be deceased) sage stallone. what in the world could that be about?
i’ve no real conclusions to draw here, just wanted to share the inspiration, and thank these people whose work has endured — with me!– throughout the years, and whose work, honestly, keeps me writing.
as you may recall, last year was an oz halloween as well. the kids were, at that time, very interested in the old MGM film, which, while i think it’s fine, has never really fostered much in my imagination.
but the kids received all the oz novels for christmas last year (as well as an oz-themed tarot deck) and they have spent all year having these read to them. what trippy books these are! i think they are on the tenth out of fourteen.
by may of this year, béla was sure he wanted to be jack pumpkinhead. claudia initially wanted to be general jinjur (a girl who commands an army of other little girls armed with knitting needles; i had started to work out a kind of janet jackson “rhythm nation”-inspired costume) but then switched to princess ozma, a princess who began her journey in the oz novels as a little boy named tip. yes. a transgender character of childrens’ literature. (sort of. and not all that self-directed. but still.)
here’s ozma as per one of the books’ original illustrations.
and here’s claudiozma.
i made the dress, which was a real skill-builder for me. godets (which almost got hemmed out of existence.) box pleats. lots of ruffles. a lot of being hunched over on the studio floor listening to steely dan, that’s what ozma’s gown is for me.
ben made the scepter and the crown, and did an amazing job.
here’s the original jack pumpkinhead and his friend the sawhorse.
and here’s jack, being a little crunk at FDR park. with sawhorse behind him.
we had to make a sock/shoe color switch. seriously, no turquoise chucks in kids’ sizes? i made the jack head, and ben made the harness that keeps it on (which is pretty ingenious, although this is still not the most carefree béla’s ever been in a costume. now that i think of it, he’s never really very thrilled to have anything on his face or head, but that’s kind of the name of the game). ben also made the sawhorse, who obviously cannot be dragged along trick or treating. but he’s great for photos and is probably going to be in béla’s room for a good long time.
now that the pictures are taken, the kids can put their costumes on for trick or treating with their classmates on wednesday, and i don’t really have to care what happens to them now (the costumes, that is).
i’m certainly very happy with these and so are my boy and girl.
here is the most terrifying thing that ever happened to me:
i remember the first time i saw this on prime-time tv, at home one evening with my dad. i was, i guess, eight. i remember watching it in actual horror, and then looking immediately to my dad, who looked — well, impressed, i guess is one way to put it.
at that point, i had watched a lot of things that kids younger than me would not have tolerated. i had been a big fan of kolshak: the night stalker and loved the spookiest halloween things, never going for princess, clown, or hobo (can you imagine kids today dressed as hobos or clowns for halloween? my god, i think kids were still dressing as COWBOYS sometimes when i was a kid!).
anyway — i don’t think anyone would have guessed that evening how wretchedly all-encompassing that clip would become to me over the next few months. i had never known fear like that before. the poster for the movie was at the mall; i had to work to avoid it. the new editions of the paperback novel with the movie tie-in covers were in bookstores; i had to avoid those. every evening i had to sit in front of the TV with an afghan at the ready, and any time a show went to commercial, i had to get the afghan over my head AND get my ears plugged.
my charlie mc carthy doll, whom i had had for years and for whom i had never felt anything but affection, was put away indefinitely.
eventually, i got over it all. i reclaimed charlie with the hopes of passing him on to my children (check!). in my late teens, while babysitting, i rented magic and watched it on my own. it’s a good movie; i’d call it underrated. vent figures are fertile territory for terror, but i haven’t seen it done any better than this.
so a few weekends ago we were in asbury park for the zombie walk. and there were literally thousands of terrifying, live beings all around us. béla had one brief dance with terror during this day — very brief, but loud — when his own fudge-fueled tantrum coincided with the appearance of a very elaborately costumed glow-eyed skeleton thing, and i suggested that it was a constable of sorts, checking out misbehaving children. whoever was inside the costume went along with this idea more than béla would have liked him to. but really, it was a blip in the day.
so who would have guessed, that an innocent — and APPROVED, at the time, by béla — purchase of an asbury park tillie shirt:
would turn into the scariest thing about a day when we were literally surrounded by fifteen thousand of the undead?
who would have guessed? — well, why wasn’t it ME who guessed?
i tried to put the tillie tee out for b.’s clothes the day we got back from asbury park. he balked, asking to instead wear his bloodspattered monroeville mall shirt. i said he couldn’t wear that to school — tillie was nice, and school-friendly, didn’t he want to just wear tillie?
nope.
he continued to sulk about tillie, but only when i asked why he hadn’t worn it yet. offering to buy him a packet of snickers pumpkins IF he wore the shirt almost worked. but he continued to hold his ground. i’d take it out; he’d say no; i’d put it back.
until this morning, when he wouldn’t even open his drawer to get ANY shirt out, for fear of seeing tillie.
now i knew where we were. i just couldn’t believe i had so unwittingly bought us the ticket.
when b. got home from school i told him i had hidden the tillie shirt and that he wouldn’t have to see it anymore. he was happy that i had tried to save him from the shirt, but this “hidden” thing… he had to know exactly where it was. so i told him. he wanted it further away than that.
claudia, with a cheery machiavellian equanimity, suggested that SHE just take ownership of the tillie t-shirt. it was all too easy to picture claudia, at two in the morning, wearing the tillie shirt and squatting at the foot of béla’s bed, willing him to awaken just so she could terrify the shit out of him. no claudia. you don’t get the tillie shirt.
we talked, at dinner, and i told them the story of the movie commercial that i had seen when i was little, and how afraid i had been of that puppet, and how much that puppet had reminded me of tillie. i told this story by way of apology, but neither of them were interested in my apology. they wanted details. WHAT did this puppet look like? show us. what was this VOICE you speak of? do the voice. is this on the computer?
obviously — or maybe not so obviously, since i AM the mother who sicced a skeleton on my son and bought him a terrifying grinning silkscreened rictus that made him unable to open his own bureau — i was not going to show them the clip from magic. and i did not show them the clip from magic.
there are a very limited number of things that have terrified me over the years. a surprising number of them were made in 1978 though. here is a clip from the tv movie “the mud monster”, which also nearly destroyed me (this is sometimes credited as being released in ’77). neither this film, nor this clip, have been retained very distinctly in my memory, but for the sake of history we should get this down.
1978 was also the year that this scared the shit out of me:
i still have a hard time watching that.
and although trilogy of terror was made in 1975, i didn’t see it until i was in my twenties and NEVER made it with my face uncovered to the end of this final scene until i was, well, forty. (if you want to skip to the meat of the thing, start at about nine minutes.)
that’s about it for film. and after all our talk about film at dinner, as we prepared to go to all hallow’s read at woodland cemetery tomorrow, béla scrutinized our offering — arthur machen’s the great god pan — and wanted to “see the pictures”.
but he still doesn’t want to see tillie.
and now i have this premonition of a thirty year-old béla, driving his luxury car to my house in the dead of night and trying to get in bed with ben and me, because he’s just finished reading the great god pan.
"Eventually I discovered for myself the utterly simple prescription for creativity: Be intensely yourself. Don’t try to be outstanding; don’t try to be a success; don’t try to do pictures for others to look at – just please yourself.” ~Ralph Steiner
