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Dear Puffin,
So Maurice Sendak died. A little bit of light has gone out of the world, and I’m all the sadder because it was a snarky, asinine, mean old light that really understood how freaking weird children can be.
So I’ve rounded up a few cool Sendak bits and pieces. I’m going to miss the old bastard.
Deviantartist AgarthanGuide made a really wonderful Avengers/Where the Wild Things Are mashup. Go here for a desktop sized version. It’s based on the Chertoff Mural, which is also lovely.
This great tshirt from Out of Print clothing features the cover of my favorite Sendak book, In the Night Kitchen.
I don’t know where this quote comes from, but I love it.
Despite being famous for grouchiness, here is an illustrated envelope he sent to a young fan
This was Sendak’s cover of Rolling Stone from 1976
An extraordinary Where the Wile Things Are cake from here
And continuing our theme of edible eulogies, Anna the Red did some great bento boxes based on Sendak’s work.
An amazing cake by Blue Cupcake
I really kind of love these Wild Things wall decals. They’d be so great in a nursery.
I’m sad Puffin
I’m going to go reread The Sign on Rosie’s Door.
Love
MacGuffin
With the recent confirmation of the Good Omens TV series, which is apparently under the care of Terry Jones (yes that Terry Jones, not that Terry Jones), Puffin and I have been wondering how they’ll manage to fuck it up. Which is not to say that I don’t like Terry Jones. I do, very much. And actually I’ve quite liked the SkyOne adaption of Hogfather. But Good Omens……lets just say that there have been some frantic IM conversations between Puffin and myself, fretting about everything from cuts to mismanagement to the ever looming threat of Tim Burton, and worst of all…… casting. If ever there was a story that needed the perfect cast to pull it off, this is it.
The usual Imaginary Casting Couch rules apply:
- The space time continuum does not apply- actors can magically go back in time and star as their younger selves. (This rule was established primarily to allow MacGuffin to keep Leonardo DiCaprio around indefinitely.) Similarly, the dead can come back to life, which allows Alec Guinness to star in everything ever.
- The space time continuum may not apply, but accent rules do apply. MacGuffin and Puffin do not endorse Americans attempting British accents. It never works. In certain cases, however, you can simply let the character have an American accent. I truly believe that the uncanny valley of accents is a real thing that exists. An American can do a technically perfect imitation of a British accent, but it can still just be skin crawlingly awful. Take, for example, Peter Dinklage in Game of Thrones, or Robert Downey Jr in Sherlock Holmes.
- We reserve the right to ignore certain facts about an actors career. The fact that Michael Caine was in The Swarm, for example, will not be held against him.
- Certain movies shall not be meddled with: The original Star Wars, The Man Who Would be King, The Godfather pts I and II, anything by Billy Wilder, Casablanca, Firefly, A Fish Called Wanda, and finally and most importantly, Buckaroo Banzai.
- Tim Burton is banned for life.
- Johnny Depp is banned for life.
- Michael Cera is banned from playing Michael Cera for life.
So here we go, our initial picks for the dream cast of Good Omens:
Further ideas? I’m especially happy about Simon Pegg as Newton Pulsifer. I think he’s perfect. I mean, think of him as a slightly nerdier Sean of the Dead.
What are your thoughts?
Love
MacGuffin
Other Imaginary Casting Couch posts:
Dear Puffin
I know you are a big fan of urban exploration, so I think you’ll get a big kick out of this book, which was written by an urban explorer, as well as the making-of video that the author made. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children incorporates vintage photos, not just as illustration, but as integral elements of the plot. How does this tie into urban exploration, you ask? Well, like all the best children’s books, the story involves a huge ramshackle house on an island on the other side of the world. And the author, being a conscientious sort of fellow, went to Belgium to find just the right house. Incidentally the author’s name is Ransom Riggs, which may just be the perfect name for a children’s book author.
A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. And a strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children who once lived here—one of whom was his own grandfather—were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a desolate island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.
Mr Riggs seems to be quite the urban explorer. There are a bunch of smashing pictures (see them all over at Mental Floss) of his trip to Poveglia in the Venice Lagoon, which has at various times been a quarantine and burial site for victims of the Bubonic Plague, leading to claims that the soil is 50% human ash, and more recently an institution which was either a mental hospital run by a mad butcher who went insane from guilt and threw himself off the roof, or a perfectly nice rest home for the elderly. Stories differ. Here are a few of my favorite shots, but I recommend reading the whole article, the story is worth it.
Heres another collection, this time of Bombay Beach in California:
Bombay Beach may be the most famously depressing place in California; the poster child for the post-apocalypse. On the edge of the dying Salton Sea, an enormous body of water half the size of Rhode Island and so salty and polluted that by 2030 no fish will be able to survive in it, there is a town. There are several towns, actually, along the Salton’s 70+ miles of rancid coastline, but the most intact, the most iconically awful, is Bombay Beach.
He even made a video about it, which Roger Ebert gave a thumbs up to. It’s freaking creepy.
Here are some pictures of the Mojave Air and Spaceport. (It’s a spaceport! A real spaceport!!!)
The Mojave Air and Spaceport, as it’s officially known, isn’t just a graveyard for inactive planes. It’s an active airport, home to one of the nation’s only civilian test pilot schools, and most famously the place where Space Ship One was developed and performed the first privately-funded human spaceflight in 2004. But it also functions as a giant parking lot for hundreds of jets owned by dozens of different entities, from major airlines to private individuals. If an airline doesn’t anticipate needing some of its planes for an extended period of time, it’s much cheaper for them to park those planes in the desert and have maintenance crews check them out once every few weeks than to keep them active.
I hope these will tide you over till we can launch an adventure of our own.
Love
MacGuffin
Dear Puffin
Wonderful news! I have located Bill Mudron‘s artistic doppleganger! Remember the incredible art nouveau Doctor Who posters? (How could you forget them, since I bring them up every 3 minutes?) Well Deviant Adam Hughes has done an art nouveau Slave Leia and my goodness Puffin, it’s hot enough to fry bacon on!
These look like a pair, right? But no! Slave Leia is by Adam Hughes (see above for fangirl gushing). But the La Dauphine aux Alderaan is by artist Karen Hallion. Why is this important? Because it means that there are two separate artists mucking about with this style!! Plus Bill Mudron! This is fantastic!
Karen Hallion also did a great illustration of Voldemort. I would like to nominate Karen Hallion as the cover illustrator for some fancy cloth bound edition of the Harry Potter series. Something with the same kind of productions values as Charles Van Sandwyk’s Wind in the Willows.
Soooo…. this started as a post about the Slave Leia picture, but then it sort of ballooned as I found more and more awesome art nouveau stuff.
Like this amazing Batman poster by Deviant Iamacoyfish, aka Karen Wang. Also Wonderwoman, who I’m not a huge fan of, but damn she looks lovely here.
Or this neat art nouveau Iron Man by John Tyler Christopher
For the Sherlock fans out there Nero749 has been hard at work on your behalf:
I’m not a huge fan of Disney princesses (that may be the understatement of the century), but I do like these 7 deadly sins (the 7 Disney sins? The 7 deadly Disney sins?) illustrations by Deviant Chill07, aka Chris. I really like how snarky they are!
(Psst: who the heck is that princess for wrath? I realize that I’m displaying ym ignorance of Disney princess mythology here, but I’ve never seen that girl)
Chris also did this wonderfully sinister drawing of the evil queen from Sleeping Beauty, a movie which scared the ever-loving crap out of me when I was 8 or 9.
This is a lovely Padme, found on Miss Chanou’s blog, but done by…… ? UPDATE: found it! She’s by Hriviel on deviantart.
And these two of Padme and Slave Leia are by deviant r4design.
Enjoy Puffin. I hope these fill you with some sort of artistic glee. They sure do for me.
Love
MacGuffin
Other posts about art
Vintage poster obsession strikes again!
Vintage Star Wars posters (it’s a compulsion, ok?)
Poster art roundup: Ghostbusters, Tron, The Chronicles of Narnia etc
Dalek propaganda posters and Doctor Who miscellany
Star Wars propaganda posters (Volume I)
An Implausibility of Gnus: Animal collective posters
Late breaking Doctor Who art news
Star Wars propaganda posters (Volume II)
Hogwarts travel posters and Star Wars propaganda (Volume III)
Dear Puffin,
I know you have a bad case of cold war nostalgia, so I thought you might get a kick out of these new office posters from the much-perviously-fawned-over Steve Thomas. They’re also available in blue on his blog.
We also have two new Star Wars propaganda posters from Deviant Comixmill.
And finally, to address one of my own obsessions, we have some Harry Potter travel posters by Caroline Hadilaksono, via Superpunch:
Thats all for now Puffin. I hope you had a merry 4th of July, wherever you are.
Love
MacGuffin
PS: for those who haven’t noticed, Puffin has not been around much lately. Rumor has it that he’s on assignment in the Upper Volta, but the government doesn’t tell me these things. Someday he will return, and until then all we can do is pray for his safety, and pray for mercy for his enemies.
Dear Puffin
I’ve had a love affair with the work of Charles Van Sandwyk for a long, long time. Ever since I found one of his postcards at Courtyards in Tiverton. It was an eerily perfect illustration of Toad, from the Wind in the Willows, and I was in love pretty much immediately. The shop had a pile of his books, most of which come out in limited editions. Like, seriously limited. Like a couple of hundred ever. And Van Sandwyk was sort of obviously going to be a hit with me, given my well-known obsession with books as works of art, and my less well-known obsessions with art nouveau, letterpress, illustration art (Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice in Wonderland are my favorite thing ever) and fairies (not Disney fairies, I might add, the sinister Arthur Rackam type. Think the Wee Free men). So when I ran across Van Sandwyk it was like cold fusion of all my interests. These are some of my favorite books:
You can also get the two frogs as a card and I may or may not have a copy framed. I meant to give it to my parents as an anniversary card, but I couldn’t bear to part with it. But Van Sandwyk’s crowing glory, according to both him and me, is his fantastic edition of the Wind in the Willows, which is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
Van Sandwyk describes pitching his idea for the Folio Society’s edition of The Wind in the Willows: “I sat down in his (the editor’s) office and he said, ‘Right, we’d like another fairly modest version, because we’d like children to be able to buy it, maybe eight or 10 paintings.’ I thought to myself, Oh dear, I want to do so many things here. I said, ‘Please listen.’ He looked at the door, and then at me, and said, ‘Right, what do you want?’ And in a great rush I said, ‘I want two-colour gold blocking on the cover. I want lots of green cloth that looks like willow leaves. Inside, the flyleaf paper should smell and taste completely different than what’s in the middle, and there should be the smell of very expensive glue. And there should be at least 100 paintings or drawings—one for every year I’ve missed doing The Willows, which is almost 100 years. And I think we should have a little engraved tipped-on label for the cover.’ He agreed to take it to the board, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so relieved when I left their office.” From an interview here.
Those are the endpapers. It’s an architectural plan of Toad Hall. I mean come on, could you get more perfecter? And look at this. This is what those Penguin classics editions wish they looked like. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Penguins, in fact I kind of love them. But this…. this is the real deal.
The Centenary Edition goes for $1800 Canadian. And you know why? This is why. “In my mind’s eye, I saw each illustration already finished in the medium it was going to be in, and I think that also comes from having thought this book through for 30 years. Etchings are certainly more work, but they’re a lot more fun. I think my favourite images are the ones I decided to do as etchings, because etching is one of my favourite mediums” (Via.)
Is that or is that not lovely? Anyway, this is all an elaborate ruse to write something with tons of Van Sandwyk illustrations all over it.
Love
MacGuffin
PS: look at Toad Hall!
Dear Puffin
Your infographic interests me. Having recently see Shaun of the Dead, (at your insistence), my zombie senses are already tingling. Clearly we need to spend some time planning for the Zapocalypse. In the film the brave heroes hide out in a pub. I think this was an extremely wise choice, indicative of the cool decision making we saw from Shaun at every turn. I would like to nominate The Wellsbourne as our go-to fortress, in the event of a zombie apocalypse.
I would say that we should check this place out regardless, but unfortunately, it’s located on entirely the wrong coast. It’s in LA and nothing short of the Zombie apocalypse will get me to LA. I can’t imagine what it’s doing there, since I don’t think of it as a literary hotspot, aside from Hank Moody. Maybe I’m wrong. This place seems like it would be more at home in Boston, but perhaps that’s just my prejudice. Anyhow, should the zombie apocalypse come we will obviously have to have a Zombieland-esque road trip to the west coast so that we can hide out here.
Yours in readiness and armed with a cricket bat,
MacGuffin
