Monday Miscellany: A collection of odds, ends and personals . . .

Caution: nudity.

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From Thomas:

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I mentioned last week that the baby in an ad for Celestial; Tea looked like one of the kids out of the 60’s flick The Village of the Damned:

I received an email the next day from Kerrie::

I still have nightmares from seeing The Village of the Damned at the drive-in when I was about 11.

For those not familiar with the pic, all of the residents of the Brit town of Midwich pass out for a time, then awake and appear normal. About 2 months later all women able to bear children are discovered to be pregnant, all give birth on the same day and all the babies are pale skinned with almost-white blond hair. They also all have riveting eyes. As they grow, they are cold, aloof, stick together and communicate with each other without speech. Anyone opposing them is destroyed by using mind control. They are killed by a bomb carried into the classroom by the local teacher who keeps imagining a brick wall as the children seek to read his mind. It is discovered that there have been similar colonies in other countries where the locals have succeeded in killing the children.

Some trivia:

• The source novel is called The Midwich Cuckoos, by John Wyndham. The reference to cuckoos is because when cuckoo birds lay eggs, they deposit these eggs in the nests of other birds, who then raise the cuckoo chicks as their own. Compounding the insidious nature of this process, the cuckoo chicks often murder their nestmates in competition for food and parental attention.

• Originally begun in 1957 as an American picture to star Ronald Coleman, MGM shelved the project because it was deemed potentially inflammatory and controversial, specifically due to its sinister depiction of virgin birth.

• Ronald Coleman passed away in 1958 and was replaced by George Sanders, who had married Colman's widow Benita Hume in 1959.

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Byter David sent an email in response to my post on Antony Gormley’s statue The Angel of the North:

Another of Gormley's Tours de Force is his work "Another Place" which is a collection of 100 life size cast-iron statues (all modelled on his own body) spread over two miles of beach in the north west of England. They are on the tidal part of the beach so vanish and reappear with the movement of the waters. Stunning! 

http://www.visitliverpool.com/things-to-do/another-place-by-antony-gormley-p160981

I had planned doing a future Bytes on the varied works of Antony Gormley but, until then, here is some more information and some pics of the work described by David.

Pics:

Just kidding on the last 2, they're stills from the Nic Cage/Meg Ryan pic City of Angels - angels gather on the beach at sunrise each day to hear celestial music.

This is the commentary on Gormley’s Another Place from the website for which David gave the above link:

These spectacular sculptures by Antony Gormley are on Crosby beach. Another Place consists of 100 cast-iron, life-size figures spread out along three kilometres of the foreshore, stretching almost one kilometre out to sea. 

The Another Place figures - each one weighing 650 kilos - are made from casts of the artist's own body standing on the beach, all of them looking out to sea, staring at the horizon in silent expectation.
Having previously been seen in Cuxhaven in Germany, Stavanger in Norway and De Panne in Belgium, 'Another Place' is now a permanent feature in the UK, at Crosby Beach. 

According to Antony Gormley, Another Place harnesses the ebb and flow of the tide to explore man's relationship with nature. He explains: The seaside is a good place to do this. Here time is tested by tide, architecture by the elements and the prevalence of sky seems to question the earth's substance. In this work human life is tested against planetary time. This sculpture exposes to light and time the nakedness of a particular and peculiar body. It is no hero, no ideal, just the industrially reproduced body of a middle-aged man trying to remain standing and trying to breathe, facing a horizon busy with ships moving materials and manufactured things around the planet.

Thanks David.

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