Come to Mama...

A few years back, when I first heard the phrase "Too on the nose" on Six Feet Under (voiced by the Claire character played so magnificently by Lauren Ambrose) I felt as if I had found an old friend. It's that when things are too literally laid out, there is no room for an intimate approach to an idea, image or word - no dialogue, just dictation.

My sister declared her intention of seeing the Tim Burton Alice as soon as possible - me, I'm a little put off by its stylish Pop decadence. There is a mystery in the original story and its sequel articulated beautifully in Jan Svankmajer's Alice, which I suspect will be lacking in Burton's.

Otasenek

Hommage to Jan Svanmajer's Little Otik. 

Once upon a time, there was a woman who wanted very much to have a baby. To cheer her up, her husband carved one from a tree root, and was horrified when his wife treated the bit of wood as if it were a real infant...

Imposing our desires and the words and structures that come with them on things can turn those things into monsters. We always do this for safety, though, these attempts  at mastering the world that surrounds us with our limited expectations and understanding.  All of our cerebral tools can separate us from the pure apprehension of the thing itself, at a certain point they must be left behind.

Part Two (of sorts) later today.

Alice in Wonderland/The Little Key

When she got to the door, she found she had forgotten the little golden key, and when she went back for it, she found she could not possibly reach it.

More variations, the last one being the most complete. If you like this sort of thing, by the way, you might want to rent Jan Svankmajer's Alice which someone has, with perverse appropriateness, paired with a Tom Waits song on youtube. An interval tomorrow for an announcement from Australia and another in my series of scary little creatures.

The image on the bottom is the one for March in the Wonderland Revisited 2010 calendar.