Such dirty business...

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 24: The Londonist's review of Rockabaret's Fairy Tale Ball features the line "Tinkerbell's wings were all in disarray, Alice in Wonderland was not pretty anymore and Captain Hook and Smee were looking very worse for wear."

That's what I'm Tolkien about!

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 23: When attempting to update my album cover collection on AmaroK, one of the covers suggested for Pantera's "Power Metal" was the cover of a DVD from Blind Guardian, entitled "Imaginations Through The Looking Glass".

I'll be finding them in my shoes next...

I seem to be becoming a bit of an "Alice magnet". In preparation for the essay I'm writing for my Digital Cultures module on anonymity and identity on the internet, I picked up a few books from the library. Some of them I picked up randomly by going to the section where another book I wanted was and then looking around to see what else grabbed my attention. I started reading one of those books today. I looked at the contents and flipped to a chapter that seemed relevant and got this from the second paragraph:

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 22: In chapter 7 of Technoromanticism by Richard Coyne; "Schizophrenia and Suspicion", the second paragraph contains this:

"The mirror provides a potent metaphor in the surrealist concept of the image, featuring prominently in the absurd (Alice Through The Looking Glass) and surrealist iconography [...] For IT commentators such as Chaplin, Alice's looking glass is a precursor to cyberspace in which the fundamental laws of physics, logic and language are inverted."

Note: I have previously not included any texts I have read for Digital Cultures in these sightings. This was because those texts were prescribed for me to read, whereas as this book was simply a random one I picked off the shelf because I liked the title.

Alice was a Bond girl

"HUMANS ARE SO INTERESTING THAT THEY HAVE EVEN INVENTED DULLNESS. QUITE ASTONISHING."
-Death, from Hogfather

I started thinking the other day about how awesome things are (and I'm using the original definition of awesome here). About how awesome simple day-to-day things are that we take no notice of, because, if we did, we wouldn't be able to stop. We'd wake up each morning and we'd spend an hour unable to move while we come to terms with our very existence. Even longer if we'd been dreaming.

It's our humanity that takes us to the top of Everest and makes us stand there and go "You know, I could murder a sandwich..."

As technology advances, we're being exposed to more and more awesome things and we're ignoring them more and more. Right now, I'm talking to a friend in Australia. I actually talk to him more than some of my friends who live in the same city as me. Let alone those in the same country. I take no notice of this and I'm more concerned with how my left speaker cuts out when I knock it because there's a wire loose somewhere.

I think we should all take any chance we can get to inject some more awe back into our lives. And who knows what awesome things the future might bring?

"Think about it; the quicktank is given a job most of us would laugh out of town. Build a sophisticated camera capable of full 3-D input and peripheral pickup, using only water and jelly.

Build an eye."
-Spider Jerusalem, from Transmetropolitan

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 21: I stumbled across this website earlier, which makes fun of various ridiculous situations in old comics. It features two issues that have Alice references. The first in a small reference to a back-up story about "The Girl From The Looking Glass!". The second is a full comic about Alice, with the cover featuring a picture of her being spanked by a rag doll.

They're coming thick and fast now

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 20: In Freaky Friday, Tess Coleman's book is called "Through The Looking Glass: Senescence In Retrograde".

Interestingly, putting "Tess Coleman" into Wikipedia gives you this episode of Private Practice as the third result.

I am the girl Anachronism

Kate and Leopold was on television last night. I caught a bit of the beginning, but it wasn't the film that grabbed me. What grabbed me was the main Character: Leopold, Duke of Albany. Having just read Alice in Sunderland, I realised that this was the same Leopold who is rumoured to have once courted Alice Lidell and who one of her sons was named after.

The film isn't exactly very faithful to ridiculous things such as "facts" when it comes to the character of Leopold. Just looking at Wikipedia will tell you this. Interestingly enough, in checking all this out, I found a mistake in Alice in Sunderland. Bryan Talbot says Leopolod died at the age of 28, whereas he was actually 30. It's not even a case of bad wording or him mixing people up, as Alice was a year older than Leopold.

Reading Alice in Sunderland, you begin to realise how much things can be connected in such little ways. I keep listing instances where the Alice books are referenced in popular culture, but I could go crazy and connect everything in popular culture straight back to Alice. As Bryan says near the beginning of AiS: "Alice lives in our collective imagination." You don't wanna know how many connections I could make to that phrase. I'll pick the first one that pops into my head: Jenny Quantum, a member of The Authority. She's the spirit of the 21st century. From here I can go any number of places. To comics again with something I just read in issue 3 of Doktor Sleepless by Warren Ellis (original writer of The Authority) about how there hasn't yet been a big cultural movement in the 21st century. Or I could go to one of my old A-level German textbooks that was called "Zeitgeist" (literally "time spirit").

And suddenly we're in a Rhizome. Everything's branching off and ultimately going nowhere. And now I've gone from part of a film I saw last night, to my Digital Cultures lectures without even trying. I didn't even get here by going straight down the Alice route! I always try to riddle this blog with links. Follow them. Then follow the links those pages give you. Then again. Then realise you've been sat there for five hours reading about Belgian shoes. And now I've just connected us to an xkcd comic.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 19: A Suicide Girl named Quinne has done a photoshoot with herself dressed as Alice. Suddenly I'm wondering if this is high or low art? It's a pornstar (maybe, some people are iffy about the "porn" status of SG) dressed as a character from a piece of nonsense literature. And suddenly I'm thinking of how there's history here, with photos of Alice and of young girls and of the question of what is pornography?

I've got the full set if you want it, by the way...

3000 words or more

Yesterday I bought Bryan Talbot's graphic novel, "Alice in Sunderland". I'm sure I'll have lots to talk about on here when I've read it.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 17: A while ago, my friend Becka got the Cheshire cat from American McGee's Alice tattooed on her left arm.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 18: I went to the Bierkeller last night and there was a girl there dressed as Alice. I think there was another girl dressed as the Queen of hearts, but I wasn't sure and I didn't get a picture of her.

What I did on my holidays

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 15: In Tony Wilson's novelization of 24 Hour Party People, he references Alice in Wonderland twice. First on page 67: "Wilson perched, half-cross-legged, on a bar stool, holding court like the caterpillar on the mushroom", and then on page 78: "He just retreated till there was less even than the smile of a Lewis Carroll cat."

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 16: I've been reading through some of my old comics and found that District X number 12 (written by David Hine and Illustrated by Lan Medina) ends with an epilogue where Ismael Ortega finds Mikhail Smerdyakov reading Alice in Wonderland to his uncle Gregor who has now fully taken root in one of the tunnels underground. Mikhail notes "Uncle Gregor says the proper title is Alice's Adventures Underground." (The title of the original, much shorter, book Carroll wrote for Alice Liddell).