Gorgeous Eggs for Easter

 Spring Hare on the postcard of Andrews's Thinkspace show.

Easter's just over a week away, so here are some lovely eggs you can admire and - if your involvement with Easter and eggs goes beyond plowing through Cadbury - be inspired by for your own crafting.

Faberge

Bouquet of Lilies Egg, 1899

Fabergé eggs are THE eggs. What started out with a fairly simple white enameled egg containing a golden hen Alexander III commissioned for his wife turned into a family tradition of increasingly elaborate jeweled eggs from the Fabergé workshop.

Alexander III Egg, 1910. He's trampling the soul of the proletariat.

Of course, these intricate trinkets were being accumulated by the Russian royal family at the same time as many other Russians were living in poverty, and we know how that turned out. Most of the Imperial Eggs survived (Unlike Anastasia. Sorry, Dimitri.) and can be viewed in various museums. In 2009, they even went on tour in the Artistic Luxury: Fabergé, Tiffany, Lalique exhibit.

Pysanka

Anyone who dyed blown Easter eggs as a kid knows that getting an egg hollow while keeping the shell mostly intact sucks. Or blows. Anyway, it involves pin-sized holes, hyperventilation, and mouth-to-raw-egg contact. Imagine doing all that and then foregoing the tablet/cup dye process for the painstaking, multi-tiered process of pysanka, the Ukrainian method of creating vividly patterned eggs. The designs are made by covering different areas of the egg with wax while immersing the egg in different dyes. Traditionally, these were made with whole, not hollowed, eggs, so your masterpiece had a shelf life.

 Sharon Beals

I want to snuggle in feathers now.

If you'd like to experience the beauty of unadorned, natural eggs, the photography of San Francisco photographer Sharon Beals is the place to look. Although she photographs many subjects, her clear images of museums' nests specimens are the most well known and are the subject of her book Nests. The diversity in the eggs themselves and the nests built for them is fascinating. There are camouflaged tern eggs resting on seashells, tiny white finch eggs in woven trash, and lovely blue thrush eggs in a more classic nest. I first saw her photographs in an exhibit at the San Francisco Botanical Garden's library, and I've been enthralled ever since.


Image Credits:
Bouquet of Lilies Egg: Wikimedia Commons/shakko
Alexander III Egg: Wikimedia Commons/shakko
Pysanka: Wikimedia Commons/Luba Petrusha

9 Months More!

Best Week Ever blogger/Les Miz superfan Michelle Collins made a few critical notes on Hugh Jackman's Jean Valjean get-up, but she missed one important detail.

That isn't facial hair on that beard.

But questionable beard aside, how exciting to have a photo at last, tweeted by Hugh Jackman himself! The movie's coming out December of this year, which seemed much closer until I counted it out on my fingers. At least we're almost down to only eight months. I hope we get more photos soon, especially of the particularly attractive, scene-stealing, and British Thenardier clan they've assembled.

Like the Sopranos, but with petty crime and more singing.

Minus poor Gavroche, who gets the Thenardier name rescinded in the musical (to be fair, he had already moved out at, like, age eight). And minus the younger Thenardier daughter, Azelma, who doesn't make the musical. And then the two youngest kids who don't even get names in the book let alone a musical appearance, whom the Thenardiers sell to a woman for her inheritance scam but then the woman gets arrested and the kids are left homeless. It's a happy family.

Fun fact/spoiler: in the novel, Madame Thenardier also dies, and Thenardier finally ends up taking his one known surviving family member, Azelma, with him to New York, where he invests in the slave trade.

If I wanted to hop on the novel-sized cutesy fanfiction of classic novels bandwagon, I would totally write about Azelma's new life in New York City as the wealthy daughter of a blood-monied tycoon. Obviously she would wear fancy dresses, worry about her family's dark past being discovered, and have to decide between an old-money New Yorker douche and a penniless but passionate abolitionist. Actually, that sounds like $$$. Don't steal Hugo's my idea, Darcy-does-such-and-such people. I'll get to that right after I finish the pilot for my Vautrin and Javert buddy cop series.

Hi, My Name Is Satan 2

What does humanity think of the concept of "the devil," and how do artists and writers use Satan as a character? Last time we checked out South Park's Satan, The Master and Margarita's Woland, The Powerpuff Girls' Him, and the titular Southern tourist in "Devil Went Down to Georgia." In this entry, we meet four more Princes of Darkness.

Hi.

God, the Devil, and Bob - Matthew Carlson
This tragically short-lived series of (unlucky!) thirteen episodes featured a dream voice cast: along with veterans Nancy Cartwright, Laurie Metcalf, and French Stewart, James Garner voiced God and Alan Cumming voiced the Devil. The premise is that God, discouraged with humanity, decides to give Earth one last chance. One person will be chosen to see if humankind is worth saving...and the Devil gets to choose that person. After the Devil selects Detroit autoworker Bob Alman (Really? Not a Koch brother or DRC warlord?), the battle for Bob's soul is on! Not that it's a terribly harrowing battle. Sporting bleached hair and a leather trench coat, this Devil has vague plans of taking over the world someday, but his villainy is mostly limited to keeping God waiting at a car show and popping children's balloons. The show has been taken on by Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.










The Sandman: Season of Mists - Neil Gaiman
You guys, Lucifer is so done with this Hell thing. It was okay for a while, he did it, whatever, but it's been long enough. In volume four of Neil Gaiman's classic Vertigo Sandman graphic novels, a cheeky-but-jaded Lucifer Morningstar decides he's quitting. Doubting he ever had free will at all and disillusioned about the very concept of Hell, Lucifer shuts the place down. After locking the gates and sacrificing his wings, he foists Hell onto protagonist Morpheus, "dream" personified. While various deities vie for ownership of the realm and Morpheus's sister Death deals with Hell's newly released inhabitants, Lucifer decompresses by camping out on the beaches of Perth, Australia. Despite only making a few appearances in the story, Lucifer proved popular and got his own spin-off written by Mike Carey.

Lucifer is befriended by a local at the beach.

The Sandman: Seasons of Mists panel - penciller: Mike Dringenberg; inker: George Pratt; colorist: Daniel Vozzo 





The Garden of Earthly Delights - Hieronymus Bosch
OMGWTF. Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch painter who lived from 1450-1516, is known most for his extremely detailed, bizarre paintings. The most well known of these is his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, and the most well known panel of that triptych is the one depicting Hell. Basically anywhere you look on a Bosch is going to have some crazy stuff going on, often something scatological or otherwise ass-related, and nowhere is that more true than this piece. In all the insanity, it's easy to miss the figure in the foreground, generally thought to be the devil/Satan/Prince of Hell. This figure is a scrawny bird-creature with a cauldron for a crown, eating humans and pooping them out. Meanwhile, other crazy shit, like a woman being forced to watch herself being groped by a demon in a mirror implanted in another demon's ass, happens around him. Yes, this is a classic painting and not a porn video Santorum is promising to ban. What's interesting about this portrayal of Satan is that while many artists and writers bestow upon him some power and semblance of his former angelic beauty, Bosch condemns him to the same humiliations and tortures as his subjects. This devil has no wry, bad-boy appeal, only misery.

It's a shame Bosch never got to see Human Centipede.

"Sympathy for the Devil" - The Rolling Stones
In this 1968 Rolling Stones masterpiece, Lucifer is stylish, over-scheduled, and thinks you suck at guessing games. Rather than engaging in fiddle competitions like his "Devil Went Down to Georgia" bumpkin counterpart, this devil involves himself in major political events. Despite the pretty tame "everyone is both good and bad" message, the song fueled late 60s/early 70s "omg rock music is satanism!!!" hysteria.