HOW I GOT INTO THE OBELISK
One of you, fair readers, wrote: “Odalisque, your obelisk is very tall, and you say it is made of obsidian–a glass-like volcanic rock–with ‘no chinks for the intrepid to grip‘. So how did you get into it?”
I rested my chin in my palm and got all misty-eyed, gazing towards an empty sea.
Why do I hate the ocean? What good are bird friends? Why does every odalisque need a fantastic coat? I, The Odalisque, reveal all (even my head) in my first very low-budget movie (shot entirely on scrapbook paper): everything I remember about HOW I GOT INTO THE OBELISK.
Rated X for cerebral exposure and unexpected violence.
Links to:
See the movie poster
See the publicity photos
Read about my heads
Read about my coat
My feelings about the ocean
How I avoid type-casting
BONUS FEATURE: my SWIM-SUIT
Thank you for looking. Thank you.
–The Odalisque
movie poster
Hot off the press! The publicity poster for my home-made movie, which will soon be released.
COMING SOON TO A GLOWING SCREEN VERY NEAR YOU
HOW I GOT INTO THE OBELISK
a movie shot entirely on paper
my first movie poster
FEATURING (in order of appearance)
The Odalisque
A Fish
A Coat
Crow
Phoenix
Starlings
Black Swan
Hawk
and a minor, unmemorable appearance by a typical siren.
Henriette
I’ve had terrible news. Owl breezed in with all-the-news-fit-to-print, in which I found an article about an old friend, Henriette. (read the article Odalisque in Red Pants here.)
me & Henriette back in the day
Henriette has, for the past decade or so, led an austere, artistic life in the southwest desert, as the article states. She was an example to me, The Odalisque, when I came to my obelisk. I have these snapshots from Henriette …it’s hard to even look at them now….
snapshots from Henriette in the desert
Henriette has been captured! Packed in a red tube (don’t let that industry double-speak fool you…she was bound in red harem pants, then rolled up in a sumptuous Turkish rug) and handed off to authorities who will return her to a dank basement where, the article says, no one will appreciate her!
Can you imagine what it means for an odalisque to be amongst people who do not appreciate her? It is one thing to be a solitary odalisque as I am, but to be in the public eye but dismissed?! Even worse, the article says she will be spited as a bourgeois. Henriette? A bourgeois? Long, long ago poor odalisques ASPIRED to the bourgeoisie. No more! Henriette and I are beyond your conventions oh wretched outer-world. Leave us alone!
I want to help Henriette if only with kind words and assurance that she has a friend. I blush with shame at my hesitation. For I, The Odalisque, am afraid. If “they” know about me, will they snatch me, too? Where would they take me, these authorities?
I comfort myself with the thought that I have birds for friends…far more useful than the company of bones, which Henriette preferred. Birds can fly and spy and deflect and bring warnings.
What should I do for pauvre Henriette?
Here is the picture that keeps appearing in the newspapers. What no one but I notice–because I, also, am an odalisque– is that Henriette still has her COAT. As I said in an earlier post…every odalisque needs a fantastic coat for dark times…
coat
Lovers! Do not fling your carefully embroidered coat beneath the feet of your beloved! His beauty is appallingly evident but
you’ve pretty plumage, too. Keep the coat. There is a field littered with the stones that struck the sky’s tarnished mirror. The cracks in its mirror are trees. When you walk that field, wrap your coat close. It will startle the landscape with a mis-stroke of color. Tenderly, tenderly it will open (like an undergarment) for whomever watches, waits (tending what sure fire?) for you to come home.
I am the odalisque who lives in an obelisk. I converse with birds.
