Lori Meeker and the Lava Lady for DAY 15

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Visit www.gothtober.com and click on Day 15 and watch this dear sweet tribute to one of LA’s historic eccentric personalities who passed away in September of 2016. It’s Lori Meeker’s puppet vignette about Rae Susan Strauss! Sometimes you’d see her in the crosswalk, never in a rush, gliding past, one of the regulars, always a curious human to witness. She lived in a black lava covered house, thus, her nickname was “The Lava Lady.”

Not many of us understood her, but we liked her. We liked her a lot, she wore her hair in a tall spike, wore bellbottom pants and extremely tall platform shoes. She was a poet. She was many things. Find out more about The Lava Lady by reading this LA Weekly article.

Find out more about the wonderful work of Lori Meeker by visiting her website! 

A Glorious Stop Motion Explosion with Gothtober Day 7’s Harold!

screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-6-29-29-pm Visit www.gothtober.com and visit DAY 7 for a remarkably tremendous stop motion love letter to the 1995 film “Sense and Sensibility” from Sony Studios.

Harold has admittedly seen this movie more than 100 times, and decided that it was high time a bit of art should be dedicated to a certain celebrated cinematic moment. If you have seen this movie, you know exactly what we’re talking about, and if you don’t… well, perhaps it’s time you rented it on Netflix!

Upon watching this elegantly gorgeous and grotesque build-up of paper parts animation, enjoy the satisfaction and release accompanied by some finely drawn gore that just makes me give an unfiltered, unfettered hat’s OFF to our animator! Undoubtedly, the young and capable and entirely talented Harold spent way beyond any acceptable amount of hours to build this work, and it’s just breathtaking. As you may or may not know, the theme of this year’s Gothtober Calendar is “Metamorphosis” and I dare say, this theme is quite gallantly on display for day 7, we kid you not.

The spirit of this short film is a perfect visual response to both the literary and filmic concept of repression, the classic real kind from 1795 and perhaps the modern, current repression we’re watching while an orange-faced candidate for the presidency makes brains explode merely by saying things out of his face hole. screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-6-35-07-pm

The age of original, soul-crushing good-old-fasbioned Jane Austen-era repression was so strong, mind you, that Ms. Austen remained the anonymous author of Sense and Sensibility until after her death! This woman wrote in a room that had a squeaking board outside the door so that if anyone approached while she wrote, she could quickly hide her manuscript and disguise what she was doing by twiddling her thumbs or knitting lace or whatever people were doing to get themselves through the Napoleonic war. This was not a time to be getting your social vision on, it would be decades before the ethics, passion and exploratory notions in Sense and Sensibility would be truly appreciated.

In Lettres Philosophiques, Voltaire writes

What we find in books is like the fire in our hearts. We fetch it from our neighbor’s, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

And so we’re seeing some of that deep appreciation here in a multi-level artistic accolade from a dedicated fan to a moment, a moment that encapsulates the synthesis of sense and sensibility, in an outrageous transformation followed by a quiet and faithful heartbeat, a bloody, happy heartbeat.

Thank you, Harold Harold, for the blood, sweat, and tears!

Whose Got the BUGS? Rosalind Helfand’s Gothtober DAY 5!!!

Visit www.gothtober.com and click on day 5!

You’re really going to enjoy this bug puppet show by bug enthusiast, Rosalind Helfand! But also, before we get going on this bug post, Rosalind also included a frog and a crab and a bird. So it’s not JUST bugs… but bugs are a big part of this piece. I asked Roz why she loves bugs so much, she was happy to reply:

Bugs are everywhere! Tons of them. All the time. In and on everything. Including our bodies. Many bug species have been around MUCH longer than humans. They’re survivors and adaptors. They are constructed in all sorts of fascinating ways. Take exoskeletons. How cool are those?! They’re part of an intricate ecosystem and they’re just as important as all the big creatures. But we all need each other — the big and the small. Well, we may need them more than they need us. 

Another fun fact you should know about this piece is that the back of the felt board used for this piece is an actual specimen drawer, see the photo! The other photos above are just a few of Roz’s amazing photos she has taken of insects up close and personal.

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