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The Blog of the LCSNA

Celebrating Looking-Glass Day in Puerto Rico

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Disney plush dolls I used for the story

In celebration of Looking-Glass Day, we have a heart-warming report from guest blogger and LCSNA member Emily Aguilo-Perez in Puerto Rico.

Today, Friday November 4, 2011 I celebrated Looking-Glass Day with my elementary school students. Now, I am not sure if Looking-Glass Day is an “official Carrollian” holiday, but I like to find any reason to celebrate. This day was no exception.

To honor the day when Alice’s second adventure takes place and the day in which her age is “seven and a half exactly,” I decided to prepare a reading day for my students, who are in first, second, and third grade. For this, I put to use some of my Alice memorabilia and costumes to bring the story to life. Putting on my Mad Hatter’s hat and taking out my collection of Disney Alice in Wonderland plush dolls I began reading a short version of the story to my students.

For time’s sake I had to use a Disney version of the story, since it was shorter and had many pictures in them (and as we all know, Alice likes her books with pictures). So I opened my Little Golden Book titled Alice in Wonderland Meets the White Rabbit and began the adventure through Wonderland. In some of my classrooms I gave students a doll, so when their character was mentioned, they had to act out what was happening. With other groups I read the story and acted out the scenes using the dolls, similar to a puppet show.

Disney plush dolls I used for the story

What I truly enjoyed about reading the book was that students had fun, asked questions, and recognized the story and characters. Of course, this is mainly thanks to the two Disney film adaptations rather than the original books. However, this showed me precisely that through movies, children (and even adults) can develop an interest in reading great literature such as Carroll’s. My students were telling me what was going to happen next, they knew who the characters were, and they even acknowledged the differences between the animated Disney version and Burton’s adaptation. It also reminded me of how I first encountered the Alice stories – through the animated film – and it gave me hope that maybe someday my students will read and come to love the books as much as I do.

It was a frabjous experience sharing my favorite story with my students! I just wish I could’ve had more time to play games, sing, or even have a Mad Tea Party. I hope you had a Wonderful Looking-Glass Day as well!

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New book about Tony Sarg and a video of his “mechanical book”

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Melissa Sweet "Balloons Over Broadway"

There is a new children’s book about Tony Sarg, master puppeteer and inventor of the first balloons for New York’s Macy Day Parade. Sarg was also the creator of Tony Sarg’s Treasure Book – an early “mechanical book” with sliding illustrations and removable pieces. The Alice in Wonderland chapter, demonstrated in the video below, is clearly an important ancestor of last year’s interactive e-book for iPad.

Balloons over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade, written and illustrated by Melissa Sweet, is published by Houghton Mifflin Books for Children and priced at $11.55.

Melissa Sweet "Balloons Over Broadway"

 

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Alice in Wonderland exhibit at Tate Liverpool

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Want to see a lot of the great Alice art all in one place, from Carroll’s drawings to Dalí? Art and Illustrations of Alice make up a new exhibit at the Tate Liverpool, called Alice in Wonderland. Marina Warner has a preview of it in The Guardian:

It’s perhaps surprising that an art gallery, rather than a library, is holding a huge survey exhibition about Alice, but then Carroll’s creation has been and still is the inspiration of artists, photographers, theatrical designers, animators, film-makers. The new Tate Liverpool show explores this territory, from the author’s own rarely seen manuscript illustrations and marvellously evocative biographical materials (Carroll’s perceptive and often lyrical photographs, works of art by his pre-Raphaelite friends) to the Surrealists, for whom Alice became a cherished myth. The Surrealist movement is represented by some of the most potent works in the exhibition: Salvador Dalí’s illustrated edition of Alice, and the finest painting in Dorothea Tanning’s oeuvre, the eerie Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, with sunflowers bursting colossal tentacles around the little girl with her hair on end in spikes of flame. The Surrealist legacy is still very fertile, in the context of a growing return to myth, fairytale and romanticism. Alice is the prototype of wise child and naive innocent – as seen in the vision not only of such artists as Peter Blake and Graham Ovenden, but of their successors in disquiet, Annelies Štrba and Alice Anderson, practitioners of the contemporary uncanny who give a new feminist twist to the heroine. Alice has grown older and more knowing than her original model, and turned into the receptacle of erotic dreams, a femme enfant with whom women artists strongly identify: the knowledge you are Alice as strong as the longing for her.

Dorothea Tanning's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

This is quasi-related, but if you haven’t seen Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Adrien Brody does an amazing Salvador Dalí:

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Madonna Alice and Six Tweedles Living in a Disney World

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You know how it is. You read an email alert which leads to a blog, which leads to a YouTube clip, which leads to you spending 6:31 minutes watching a 1987 spoof of Madonna’s “Material Girl” starring Alice and six men in Tweedle suits, shot entirely on location and out of hours in Disney World, Florida.

It’s brilliantly awful, but if for any reason you can’t quite watch it all, at least skip to the end to read the extensive credits. Prominent thanks are given to the Walt Disney World Character Wardrobe, on the principal that sometimes it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission, I assume.

 

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Steampunk Looking-Glass Haunted House in NYC

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Alice and Steampunk both seem good ingredients to make a perfect Halloween haunted house. If you’re in New York City this week, there’s a spooky new Steampunk Haunted House at Abron’s Art Center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, created by Third Rail Projects.

Following up on last year’s “Waking Nightmare,” this year, the critically acclaimed Third Rail Projects behind Steampunk borrows from author Lewis Carroll’s dark side for a show called “Through the Looking Glass.” But make no mistake; it’s not for children, and no one under 8 is admitted. The disclaimer warns that it’s “a frightening, immersive experience that winds through the theater and catacombs of the Abrons Playhouse … There will be fog effects, intense flashes of light, loud noises, lots of dust, soot, dripping pipes, churning gears, rusty metal, and other things that will hurt you if you touch them.”

The show starts on Saturday; tickets, which are available online, are $10 for students and $20 to $25 for adults, depending on the day of the week. There’s also a special Halloween party fundraiser for Third Rail on Oct. 26 that includes a cocktail reception and behind-the-scenes look at the project; those tickets are $50.

-from The Lo-Down.

Steampunk Haunted House: Through the Looking Glass from Third Rail Projects on Vimeo.

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Disney’s Mary Blair featured in Google Doodle

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If you went to google.com on Friday, you probably noticed a girl in an Alice-blue dress doodling on their logo. Their daily Google doodle honored classic stylish Disney artist Mary Blair, on her 100th birthday. (Google often replaces its logo on their home page with topical art spelling the name Google.) From the L.A. Times blog Nation Now:

Mary Blair in her home studio. Credit: Courtesy of the nieces of Mary Blair (LA Times, Nation Now.)

Mary Blair, honored Friday with a Google Doodle, is the woman to thank for the Disneyland boat ride It’s a Small World.

Blair’s doodle coincides with a Los Angeles tribute to the longtime Disney artist. Thursday night, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hosted “Mary Blair’s World of Color — A Centennial Tribute” to celebrate the woman, born a century ago, who made a place for herself among Disney’s famous founding animators, the Nine Old Men.

The Los Angeles Times’ Susan King, a writer and expert on classic Hollywood, reported Monday on the tribute and says Blair is best known for her contributions to the 1950 animated “Cinderella,” 1951’s “Alice in Wonderland” and 1953’s “Peter Pan” — as well as the aforementioned design for It’s a Small World.

 

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Full Schedule Posted of LCSNA Fall 2011 Meeting!

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Barry Moser's Hatter

Our Fall 2011 meeting will again be at the marvelous Manhattan campus of the New York Institute of Technology, on Saturday, November 12.

Speakers include Morton Cohen on Carroll’s epiphanies; Adriana Peliano, founder of the Lewis Carroll Society of Brazil, on the metamorphosis of Alice in illustrations and art; Alison Gopnik on her discovery of the Iffley Yew and how Dodgson’s real life affected his works; Emily R. Aguilo-Perez on film adaptations; Jeff Menges, editor of Alice Illustrated (coming from Dover in October), on illustrators; and James Fotopoulos, an artist and film-maker who made an avant-garde film called Alice in Wonderland and will also display related art.

The full program is available here.

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New Snark choral piece charms with smiles and soap.

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Naxos has released composer Maurice Saylor’s “magnum opus” The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits, on CD and where all fine digital music files can be downloaded. You can hear the excellent Cantate Singers toss lines from Carroll’s poem around in a choral whirlwind, accompanied by Saylor’s Snark Pit-Band. The other tracks on the album, music Saylor wrote for silent films and played by The Snark Ensemble, are also really fun. Listen to excerpts of Amazon’s mp3s (individual tracks for $0.89, or the whole album for $11.68), or buy from iTunes here. The Snark Ensemble pictured below, Maurice Saylor second from right:
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Behind Shattered Glass – help fund a new indie Wonderland film

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The website indiegogo.com is a good place to raise money for an independent art project. Some filmmakers in San Francisco – Chandra Reyes (Writer/Director), Laura Chenault (Director of Photography), and Jorna Tolosa-Chung (Co-Producer) – are campaigning there for a future Carroll-derived indie movie, Behind Shattered Glass. Their creative vision is written for their campaign:

The film is about a young woman who, with the sudden loss of her love, takes sanctuary in a new strange world. Deep in this wonderland she discovers an elusive Man in White who tempts her to follow him down a dark path. There she encounters many other frightening characters who threaten to keep her in Wonderland. Will she break free from his hypnotic trance or is history destined to repeat itself even deep within her own imagination?

I believe that every filmmaker that grew up reading or watching Lewis Carroll’s fairy tale has an Alice in Wonderland story within them that needs to be told. Carroll’s story is about a girl who’s curiosity leads her into strange and new places that she’s not all that ready to be led into. It’s a story we all can identify with. In my reimagining Alice is no longer a young naive girl, but a woman who is stuck making the same mistakes over and over again. Wonderland isn’t just her sanctuary, its her opportunity to break free. [continue reading]

As of today, they’re only $266 out of a proposed $2k. There’s perks to investing in this project, besides feeling good about helping someone enter another looking-glass. For $25 you get a poster of the film, for $50 you get that and a copy of the film, and yet greater thank-you prizes as the donations increase – ($500 gets you an illustrated version of the script.)  Follow progress of the movie on twitter at @bshatteredglass and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/behindshatteredglass.

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