Sdtrk: ‘Didascalies’ by Luc Ferrari

Hey! How are you doing? You’re looking taut, fit, and svelte! Good on ya.

Currently I am in the midst of attempting to type up a brief (‘brief’, he said, his fingers agonisingly carving inverted commas into the very air) summary of What I’ve Been Up To Since Roughly Early 2017, so until that’s done and dusted, my gorgeous RealDoll wife Sidore suggested that I go ahead and write the official announcement post regarding a new feature on ‘Shouting etc etc’: Galerie ECHO.

‘New what??’ you splutter, your tumbler of scotch crashing to the floor and startling your cat. Yes, new! And go calm your cat! Galerie ECHO — the spelling convention helps give it a European flavour — is a special page on this blog that collects all of the artwork we’ve received, commissioned and gratis, of the residents of Deafening silence Plus. Unofficially it’s been up since September of last year; astute readers have spotted it in the lefthand sidebar, I’m sure, but I simply never got round to making a public announcement concerning it. Which is what you’re reading now, so there’s that issue sorted.

Additional illustrations will be posted there as we get them, displayed from newest to oldest, so maybe scroll to the bottom and start from there, if this is your first visit. And hey! You good at drawing? You’ll find details about proceedings in the Galerie, but feel free to send me an Email if you have any artistic ideas, as we would love to hear ’em!

That being said, please enjoy Galerie ECHO! I should warn you that some of the illos posted there are NSFW, but throughout history, you’ll find scores of examples of artwork that’s not safe for work. Unless, of course, you work in a gallery or a place that makes Synthetik partners; in which case, it’s just another Friday!
…That being said, please enjoy Galerie ECHO!

Sdtrk: ‘À demi nu’ by Black to comm

In perusing the photos I’d taken on my memorable and awesome trip to DolLApalooza 2013, seeing this one reminded me of one leg of the journey. You’ll recall from my report for that event that our crowd had gotten round to Santee Alley on Thursday, and we’d spotted this tucked away into one of the few shops that didn’t sell clothes. Actually, I think that particular one sold shoes, but nevertheless.
There isn’t a single thing that isn’t confusingly hilarious about this photo.

Let’s run down the list of remarkable aspects, shall we?

+ It’s a kitchen playset for kids, right? Is it, though? Is it really? If you look closely at the word ‘Kitchen’ at the top, note that it actually reads ‘Kirchen’. That R ain’t a T, but the art department at Xiong Cheng simply wasn’t bothered enough to correct it. So if you consider that the box contains a town and climatic spa in the district of Altenkirchen in the north of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, that’s pretty good value.

+ The text continues: ‘The thing of the kitchen’. What thing? What kitchen? I’m trying to see if this box of Kirchen also contains Freusburg castle, as it’s one of the town’s notable features! That would indeed be a thing of the Kirchen.

+ More lysergic text: ‘Let the children play happily and feel assured!’ Does the little girl on the box look like she’s playing happily?? She has a look on her face that says I have a kitchen, and yet no physical home in which to put it in. My house is a concept, as it resides within the confines of my parents’ house, the boundaries existing solely in my mind. I feel assured that she’s having an existential crisis, to be honest. But it’s keeping her occupied, so there’s that.

+ Or maybe she’s thinking about how badly scaled the playset is, cos if she were an adult and the set was scaled up, she’d have backache in a fortnight. Look how low to the floor everything is! One of her arms is extended and the hob’s still several inches below her reach! It hurts my back just looking at that shit. And I guess that footrest below is actually a shelf maybe?? ‘Users of the Xiong Cheng Kirchen have found that the easiest way to access the bottom shelf is to simply lie on the floor.’ Was this playset built for cats?
I like how the company had the audacity to put a window into that set. A cheery, prison-style window. I mean, wow, people.

+ Quote: ‘all the fittings!!’ Except, of course, a refrigerator. How ya gonna keep your plastic food properly chilled, little missy? Just eat everything now! Life is short, so stop staring into the middle distance, and cook up a banana-grape-apple-orange stir-fry stew sandwich before it all spoils!
Also missing: a freezer, a microwave, a coffee maker, a disposal unit, a pepper grinder, a Thermomix, a wine rack, &c.

+ ‘High quality’. Compared to a drawing of a kitchen playset instead of an actual kitchen playset, then sure!

Xiong Cheng’s Kirchen Kitchen. Would I recommend this product? Hell no! I can’t recall what the price was on that pink-and-purple example of design failure, but I’m fairly certain any money spent on that would be too much. I’m led to believe that IKEA have some nice kitchens for sale, though! Why don’t you invest in one of those instead, Nameless Disconsolate Little Girl?

‘All civilisation will end as ashes’