The Enchantment Of Dolls Part One; Gabrielle, Justin & Jacelyn Nicole

Perhaps like me you're persistently single and emphatically childless.

Perhaps like me, you think with misty fondness of the completely inaccurately recalled innocence and unbridled happiness of your increasingly distant childhood days; of the time when you blinked at the world through wide, dewy eyes and didn't have to worry about the stresses and anxieties of adulthood like taxes, conversation or deodorant.

Perhaps like me you're single, don't get out much and have a cat.

Perhaps like my cat your owner sometimes dresses you in a bonnet and bib and encourages you to spend time in a rickety old crib by hiding cat-biscuits under the blanket.

Perhaps like me, you read Doll Reader magazine.

This magical publication celebrates the achievements of artisan dollsmiths, whose subtle and nuanced craft distills the essence of early youth in beautiful, cold, dead, brittle porcelain.

In a new, occasional feature we'll be highlighting some of the finest achievements of the great doll artists of our time. We begin the series with these enchanting little creepy static bastards. Click to enlarge.
Felix Adds:

I particularly like the second doll here, Jacyln Nicole. The blurb claims that the doll has the 'look and feel of the old composition of the 30's and 40's'. I would counter that by suggesting that the doll has the look and feel of a terrifying succubus which is depicted just as it has emerged from its larvae, poised to leap onto an unsuspecting face and suck out the brain.

'Justin and Gabrielle' meanwhile look like a couple of murdered kids that an enterprising psychopath has stuffed rather amateurishly and preserved as garden ornaments. The eyes are truly haunting.

The Man With The Gold Part Three: I'm Reaching Them

We present part three of our series of excerpts from the terrible, terrible autobiography of Mr T. If you've yet to enjoy the first two parts, just click the Mr T tab at the foot of the post. 

In this episode, the violence fixated Christian summarizes his life and achievements with the quiet modesty and articulacy we've come to expect from the scowling man/toy."If I didn't have God in my life, yes, I would get a very big head and success would spoil me. Because I am very successful, I am a millionaire and the money keeps coming in and adding up. Everything I touch turns to gold. My Mr. T dolls have been breaking sales records everywhere. When the dolls first came out three million were sold in three months. My dolls outsold the Cabbage Patch dolls by ten million. I was invited to the White House, where I met the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, and his wife, Nancy - what an honour. I went to Hawaii and did the hula dance with Bob Hope. I was interviewed by Barbera Walters on a special. I was toasted by Dean Martin and his friends in Las Vegas. I was voted Male Star of the Year by the fans at the People's Choice awards. I was give the key to the city of New York by its mayor, Ed koch. I was given the key to my own city of Chicago by Mayor Harold Washington. I was invited to Amsterdam, Holland, where the members of the A-Team were met at the airport by 15,000 screaming fans - what a feeling!
You see what i mean. It would be easy for me to trip out on the success and think I am so great. All I want to do is keep my feet on the ground and my head towards Heaven. Success to me is helping someone, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and visiting the sick... ...I'm not interested in being a 'movie star', some kind of media celebrity. I don't take that serious. I know I'm just a piece of meat here in Tinsel Town. I know soon they'll be tired of Mr. T and looking for someone else... ...I plan to go into the ministry in four or five years, so when people come up to me and say 'Mr. T, how long you think this is going to last?' I say, 'You forget that I'm doing God's work, so I'll be occupied for a long time.' I'm not just about making lots of money. That would be short-changing myself and God. Money can't bring total happiness. I see that every day on Sunset and Wiltshire and everywhere else. This is a platform for me to reach people, to reach kids, these rich folk's kids, strung out on drugs. Mr. T is reaching them. These poor kids who don't have any hope. Mr. T is reaching them. These middle-class kids all confused about everything, I'm reaching them.""So the answer to your question, 'Will Success Spoil Mr. T?' is a big fat NO! But I am not here to try and convince you because I know how the human brain works, and you are going to believe what you want to believe. Now I will say this: if you stop worrying about Mr. T and concentrate on your own life you will be a much better person, and success might just come your way if you live right and treat other people right."

Escape From Triden 15: Incredibly High Winds

Welcome to part two of my teenage Sci-Fi Action opus 'Escape From Triden 15' (abridged). If you missed part one - that's here.

This is essentially an ongoing celebration of How Awful I Was At Writing When I Was 14. This might not seem much to celebrate - but as a 28 year old who fervently wishes he were actually a good writer I can certainly celebrate that I'm not as bad as once I was.

Looking at it again, I can see that my book is dreadful literally from the 3rd word of the title. I called my fictional dystopian future hell-planet "Triden". Because it's 'Trident' - without the T! You see? No, nor do I.

Teenagers usually try to emulate - or straightforwardly copy - the work of artists they themselves admire, and this is generally embarrassing for two reasons. One is that in our culture, the artists teenagers admire are transparently dot-eyed waxwork bastards with all the tangible humanity and warmth of a monochrome hologramatic businessman. The second reason is that as a feverishly stupid teenager you're not only unhealthily obsessed with picking through the gaudy diarreah sluicing from the collective cultural asshole of the celebrity pod-people, you're fundamentally intellectually and linguistically under-equipped to recreate it.

But pretentious teenagers with delusions of artistry have little inkling of their own millimeterish short-comings and I was no exception to this rule. When I was a teenager I was convinced not simply that I was going to be a best-selling novelist - but that I already was one. I was really trying to write a hard-hitting gripper, something a bit like BladeRunner. Let's see how I'm getting along in Chapter 2 - "Meet Saphire". I should say - I'm going to paraphrase a hell of a lot of this. My adolescent writing generates a lot of heat but not much light. And not much heat actually, either.

Saphire was 14, and homeless. She lived on the roughest streets of Reeana...

- sorry, can I just cut in - "Reeana"? What the hell is that?

...and in her short life had been raped twice and mugged or otherwise attacked more times than she could remember. She never reported these incidents to the police - for one thing it wouldn't do any good, and for another thing she suspected it was the police who did it. She had been living on the steet all her life, having been born of a homeless prostitute. At the age of 10 she had been given up by her mother and since then had lived alone. She had no friends, only acquaintances, other street kids she had shared an empty warehouse with.

To look at, Saphire was stunning. Her face consisted of wide blue eyes, high distinct cheekbones and naturally deep red lips were topped by waves of long blonde hair.

So I guess that means she had long blonde hair growing out of her top lip. And 'her face consisted of'? How about 'She had'? Sheesh. But I'm not finished yet. Oh no, not even close -

A long neck...

How long?

...led to wide shoulders...

How wide? And what the hell else would her long neck lead to?

Well I guess if she had long blonde hair growing out of her top lip then her long neck might have led to almost anything. So what was beneath those wide shoulders?

...and large breasts...

Ah, yes. I was definitely 14.

...then a slim waist and perfect legs. She could have modeled if they didn't have androids that did that already.

OK, so blah blah, Saphire's a babe but she's on hard times. This description drones on for a bit - her clothes are ragged, she carries a gun tucked into her jeans, and she's got a knife her mother gave her in her boot. Kick ass.

At that moment she had even less money than usual, hardly enough to buy a sandwich and a cup of coffee. Previously when things had been this bad she had sold her body, but she had decided that if at all possible, that was something she never wanted to do again. The wind started to blow hard...

That's... not the only thing that was blowing hard. I'm fairly sure that I was sweatily getting off on writing about this gorgeous, punky girl who sometimes had to submit herself to the lascivious desires of brutish males. But that's like 90% of straight male writers who've ever written about a beautiful prostitute. Otherwise all these "golden-hearted hookers" wouldn't be so damned attractive! Who's writing about ugly hookers with hearts of gold? Not too many people. Still, I was 14 - what's the excuse of the guy who wrote 'Pretty Woman'? 

Anyway, Saphire hides from the wind in a warehouse, falls asleep, wakes up to find she's being robbed, gets shot, passes out, but then wakes up and seems remarkably chipper about everything.

Pulling open the heavy door, she was blinded for a moment by the bright light. Both of Triden's suns were up, and stepping outside everything was hot after being in the cool damp building. Feeling suddenly uplifted, Saphire walked to a nearby main street in search of something to fill her stomach. Looking up and down the crowded road her sharp eyes spotted a coffee machine.

She spotted a coffee machine? Damn, those eyes of hers are sure sharp!

...Right now there was a traffic jam down the middle of the road, cars inching their way along a two mile stretch. It should have been a metallic nightmare full of irate drivers, but Saphire could see through the open windows that everybody was too hot to be upset.

Oh, it should have been! It really should have been "a metallic nightmare full of irate drivers"! Oh, well. Anyway, Saphire gets herself coffee and a donut, but the shop keeper thinks she's stealing from the machine. She does a bunk and ends up in a fancy park near a government building. She finally looks at her GUNSHOT WOUND but decides it's not too serious. So she eats her donut.

Saphire was only fourteen, and yet in her life she had lost her mother, had been attacked and raped and shot. She was completely homeless and didn't have enough money for a chocolate bar right now. But Saphire was still filled with hope and was sure something would turn up. And it was a fair enough thing to think because when it came to Saphire something always did.

And scene.

So, a quick recap - In Chapter One, President Drake Harwood has been killed in a particularly fiery explosion of death on his way home from checking out some multi-million dollar prototype law enforcement androids which he was going to nix because he couldn't trust his shady bastard government colleagues not to use the terrifying robots for ruthless purposes. But he's dead, dead, dead so we can definitely expect some androids on the scene at some point. Drake Harwoods kids - Tems (wha-?) and Al saw it all happen on TV and they're really upset about it, but Al would probably get over it pretty quickly if he happened to meet - oh, I don't know, a large breasted street punk with a radical attitude. But that sounds like a chapter 4 kind of occurrence to me.

If I know my 14 year old self - and I think I do - Chapter 3 is the perfect place to be introduced to the ruthless scheming bastard bad guy. He's probably really rich and arrogant. And he's probably got an alliterative name so you know what a badass he is. Something like... Mathew [sic] Myways.

Myways? Myways? As in 'But more, much more than this, I did it [Mathew] Myways'? Again, sheesh.

Coming up next! Chapter Three - 'The New President Arrives'. It features the line "Bullets pinged all around her". Don't miss it.

A Night Walk

In January this year I had cause to spend an hour or two walking the Brighton beach front by night and alone. (No, not cruising.)

A gale was blowing cold hard squalls in off the ocean and the pebble beach was deserted. I was invigorated by the weather; it felt good to be buffeted and stung by the exultant storm so I walked down close to the waterline and turned my face to meet the spray. It was very dark away from the streetlights, gloomy underfoot but sheer black out to sea. I walked past the derelict West Pier, though could make out nothing beyond twenty feet or so. But I could hear the water slapping and slopping around some sleeping hulk not far out there. The waves crashed in, bullying and pushing one another and then rushing out again, rattling the pebbles.Outside a boarded cafeteria, a sign reading 'Popcorn; Ice Cream; Candy Floss' agitated against its hinges. Where the boats were moored, ropes slapped aluminum masts frenziedly, sounding an urgent ring like an emergency bell. Here and there I came across ornate Victorian architectural follies - pavilions standing sad and stoic in their weary uniform of peeling, faded paint. They must have weathered thousands of gales like that one, alone in the elements, unlit and unloved.At length I reached the East Pier which was lit up in full watted resplendence, despite being nearly deserted as the beach had been. A handful of boys had congregated in the arcade at the bulbous point of the pier half way along, but on the slippery wooden deck without I was a solitary figure with my collar turned up. Despite flashing and winking their inducements the rides were unmanned and static. Their light shows played out dumbly, undulating and strobing at the empty deck and impassive night sky above like one of those florescent creatures in the very deep sea, signaling for a mate. I was mesmerized in particular by the merry-go-round which positively blazed with hundreds of bright white bulbs. They made the golden and red paint shine like the centre of a stove-fire. With expressions fixed the wooden animals stood impaled upon their poles, devils inured to the furnaces.The next morning was calm, still and cold. I went to the beach again in the flat shadowless light. There I revisited the remains of the West Pier. Everybody calls it skeletal and indeed it is - like an animal collapsed, spine exposed, picked bare by the biting sea, bones shifted by scavenging currents. Where once hundreds and thousands of holiday makers, Edwardians and Victorians, Dandies, Greasers, and Teddy Boys hurried beneath the arch onto the boards it's now fenced up - with smart red signs declaring 'Danger, Unsafe Structure, No Entry, No Swimming, Submerged Debris'. The fence is unrusted, a stout steel cage. A Tourist Information board details the pier's history in three or four bland paragraphs. It's been reduced to a sad museum piece, something to look at for 30 seconds, or 20, to snap a picture of and then keep walking to somewhere more populous.Yet even so long after abandonment, derelication and immolation, there the old pier still stands right where it has for 150 years. Now naked and embarrassed, it sullenly wallows in the low water and awaits the final kindness of dismantling. It seems to brood, perhaps contemplating the hardships and terror of these past thirty years...Or maybe thinking of much longer ago than that.

Ian Fleming's Swiss Arithmetic Franchise

Hello, friends.

About five years ago I was working for the National Union of Journalists in their membership department. I worked the database, mostly processing applications and pursuing feckless bastard journos who'd let their membership dues lapse (they're exactly as bad to deal with as you imagine. Particularly Daily Mail'ers).

I never really understood that damn database. I just clicked around, altered names and numbers and hoped for the best. Luckily everybody in the building used it and so I had reasonable deniability whenever a colossal fuck-up was uncovered - like a Daily Mail hack paying £850p/a instead of £600. Ooooops!

Anyway, one day at about 3 the post got brought in and amongst the usual application forms and complaints about mysterious payment fuck-ups that day was a rather unusual letter. It was in a dirty, wrinkled envelope. On that was written, 'To The Clerk, NUJ' - meaning it had been delivered by hand. Inside was stuffed one of those daily-headline posters for the Evening Standard.

Scrawled in slanting biro on the back of this was a rambling anonymous letter which detailed some kind of plot against humanity involving the royal family, the government, Swiss banks, a fat person, a person outside Planet Hollywood with horns growing out of their head, and Ian Fleming (the writer of James Bond).

I held in my hands the 100% genuine ravings of a madman.

Which, dear reader, I present below. We should perhaps pause a moment to reflect that this is a window into somebody's decidedly scrambled thoughts and I'm sure you'll join me in wishing the best for whichever poor soul wrote this. God knows what their internal monologue must be like but possibly it's something like this -Madness is not, of course, to be mocked. Nevertheless, it's interesting to consider how exactly this extraordinary paranoid jigsaw was assembled:It's incoherent and addled but still quite a piece of writing. My favourite line is - 'He is believed to have the habit of standing upon stilts'.

Of course it's always possible that the author is onto something. If I suddenly disappear - beware the fat man.

Cold Feet

You see? The man is afraid of the baby.

The Man With The Gold: Part Two

Here's part two of our serialization of the dreadful autobiography of Mr T. If you want to start with part one, click here.

We're reading once more from the third, hopeless chapter. We join the human toy as he dishes up pain shaped justice to ne'er do wells (oh, all right, 'fools') who've interfered with the Family 'T'.

Again."My mother was robbed on Tuesday, and I found the guys who did it a week later on a Thursday. I would like to add, up until that point I had never killed anyone before. I will not say what I did to those two niggers who robbed and threatened to kill my mother, but I will say this: 'No one will ever see them again and I don't have no hurt in my heart anymore'. I am at peace once again because I did what had to be done. And I pity the fool who don't protect his mother. In the process of finding those two guys, fourteen people got beaten up pretty badly, three women got slapped around for interfering with us, and a lot of property was damaged.""Ain't that some shit? Here's two punks trying to rob my father that brought me into this world and they have the nerve to call me brother! Damn! I ran back and grabbed my .357 Magnum and returned to the window and saw the two guys running. I fired three shots from the window. Then I jumped from my window on the first floor to the ground with nothing on but my underwear (a pair of white shorts) and my .357 Magnum in my hand. I jumped out of the window instead of running down the stairs because it was faster... ...when I hit the ground I landed on my feet and immediately started to run. I was running in my underwear with a big gun in my hand chasing two black guys down the street.
Every three or four steps, I would take a shot at them. This was the time of day when everyone would be returning home from work. The streets were crowded with cars, buses and people. I chased these two guys five blocks, shooting and running. We ran across 55th and Garfield. I jumped over one car, stepped on the hood of another, and ran around a bus full of people. Three cars crashed into each other because the drivers were watching me run in my underwear with this big gun in my hand. I chased and shot at these guys until they got out of sight and I ran out of bullets. On my fourth or fifth shot I could have sworn that I shot one of them in the back near his shoulder. When I got to the area where one of them had fallen from the shot, there was some blood but not enough for me to be satisfied with., so I can't take credit for something I'm not sure of. In chasing them, I had two goals: (1) to capture them or kill them, and (2) not to shoot an innocent bystander, which I didn't.

One Pure Thought / Martin & Youle

The excellent video for Hot Chip's 'One Pure Thought' by the artists / designers/ photographers / videographers/ overachievers Bevis Martin & Charlie Youle. They get up to all kinds of interesting things and you can visit them here.


Some sample images from their website to confound your senses and trouble your dreams.

Are You Mature? Find out with this easy test.

If, you like me, you found all these pictures funny then no, you're not mature.

And I can cheerfully recommend Photobasement! (I found it via Why, That's Delightful!)