C.S.E. Cooney

WICKED NAKED PUPPETS!

Okay. I told you I’d do it, so I did it.
Some things to bear in mind:

1.) THIS YOUTUBE VIDEO IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK. They may be puppets, but they are WICKED NAKED PUPPETS doing WICKED NAKED THINGS.

1a.) This YouTube Video is probably not safe for your grandparents either. At least, I won’t be showing it to MY grandmothers. Although, come to think of it, my own mother is a grandmother (to my nieces) and she cackled. So use your discretion.

1b.) NO, REALLY! USE YOUR DISCRETION! Don’t watch it if you are sensitive to this sort of thing. The LAST thing I want to do is offend you. I’m here only to AMUSE you.

1c.) To that end, maybe don’t show your YOUNG CHILDREN either. (Unless you want to have that conversation.) Because, again, though they are puppets… THEY ARE WICKED NAKED PUPPETS.

2. I wrote this for my beautiful actor friend Eric. He sometimes does Voices. One of his Voices is named “Ivan.” Eric makes astonishing metaphors out of coffee mugs and broken lightbulbs. He also sometimes jumps out of airplanes. (Hence the “Icarus.”) I wrote this song to make him laugh. I never thought it would have puppet theatre put to it. But life is, at its most exciting, TOTES UNPREDICTABLE, YO. Kind of like this FRIKKIN CAMPAIGN.

3. I got to sing “Ivan Icarus” for a few mixed audiences last summer, when my Apocalypse Girls (Amal El-Mohtar and Caitlyn Paxson from The Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours), my brother Jeremy Cooney (AKA “The Celtic Musketeer”) and I all went on a mini-tour.

4. My magical Canadian wizard friend Magill Foote of Rule2 Productions took my ridiculous phone footage of last week’s dining-room-table-puppet show and made it all purty, with red curtains and and a bouncy sing-along-ball and all. ALL THE KUDOS TO MAGILL THE MAGICIAN!!!

5. I recently gave this song (and all its silliness) over to a project called “Angels of the Meanwhile,” a chapbook spearheaded by writer Alexandra Erin. Proceeds will go to benefit Elizabeth R. McClellan’s shoulder surgery. Now, our Elizabeth, you may or may not remember, is the gal who inspired the entire ALECTO! ALECTO! album to begin with. She is important to me. An important woman, an important poet, and one who helps whoever she can whenever she can. To read more about her shoulder surgery and how YOU might be able to help, follow this link!

Without further ado, allow me to give you…

IVAN ICARUS!

This is, of course, all the fault of BRIMSTONE RHINE! 

Dear everyone,

There is a happy squirmy squidmonster in my brain and I don’t quite know what to do with it. In 3.5 days we’ve raised $3325 of the $5000 goal.

People are starting to hint that I might want stretch goals. And I’m like, “I can’t think about that right now, gotta focus, focus, focus on the TASK AT HAND!”

This task being the initial goal, $5000. Which, 3.5 days ago seemed AS FAR AWAY AS NEPTUNE!!!

Right now we’ve funded my collaborator and sound engineer, we’ve funded the album art and artist, and we’ve funded ALL THE LOVELY SESSION MUSICIANS I’ll be hiring for the studio. I LOVE PAYING MUSICIANS YIPPEEEE!!!

Right now we’re in the first third of funding the physical CDs, distribution, promotion, and a couple of concerts. CONCERTS YIPPEEEE!!!

(We have a concert coming up. March 20th. Arts Café Mystic. EEP!!! Glenn Kendzia on keyboard and guitar, Jack Hanlon on BULL FIDDLE, baby.)

And my squidmonsterbabybrain is sort of sparking and fireworking and sending off little SOS flares. Like this:

But the truth is… Squidmonster has IDEAS. For stretch goals.

More on that later.

Right now I just wanted to tell you that if we hit $3500, I totally have ANOTHER SURPRISE for you.

This time with NAUGHTY PUPPETS!!!

Just sayin’.

So. Whatchoo waitin’ for anyway?

BRIMSTONE RHINE CAMPAIGN

Last night, to celebrate the passing of our HALFWAY TO THE GOAL mark, my friend (unholy amazing) (writer) (not enough SUPERLATIVES!) (general expediter of awesome) (famulus) Carlos Hernandez and I put this DEMO REEL together for you.

It’s just four or five songs. It’s scratch vocals and instruments. BUT! It is here. For YOU. As you’re listening, PLEASE remember it is the ROUGHEST of rough demo reels.

Think of it like… Like cake. Now, cake and cake batter are NOT the same thing. This is cake batter. We’re working to bring you the cake. And you’re helping.

But I wanted to give you a spoon to lick. Because you have been SUCH BRILLIANT HELPERS ALREADY.

BRIMSTONE RHINE CAMPAIGN!

(Art by Bek Huston of Heathen Ink)
(Isn’t she the most adorable 3-eyed gorgon EVER??!!)

Yesterday! YESTERDAY! What a day was YESTERDAY! We funded almost 40% of our BRIMSTONE RHINE GOAL! I told the Facebook, I said to it, sez I:

You know what today did? Today paid for the work of my BRILLIANT composer/collaborator/recording engineer friend Glenn Kendzia in TOTAL!

And has begun paying towards the cover art by GENIUS ARTIST FRIEND Grant Jeffery! You know what that makes me?

THAT MAKES ME HAPPY! THAT MAKES ME HAPPY! Do you know how much I LONG TO PAY MY COLLEAGUES AND FRIENDS???

 

You wanna see Grant Jeffery’s work??? Well! Lemme show you. He did this issue of Goblin Fruit.

And he and my other WONDERFUL WIZARD FRIEND Magill Foote did the art and design for a trailer of my book MISCELLANEOUS STONES: ASSASSIN (currently in its in FOURTH $#%&ing DRAFT REVISION, but going strong).

Miscellaneous Stones: Assassin from Magill Foote on Vimeo.

And so… The next set of monies we make for Brimstone Rhine goes RIGHT TO GRANT! I am so excited to finally be able to pay him for his GORGEOUS ARTWORK, because heretofore he’s always just… somehow… just… GIVEN it to me. For fun? Because, because… I guess that’s what FRIKKIN WIZARDS DO???

But enough of that nonsense! It’s time to GIVE BACK! That’s what I say. Well, give back AND make MIRACULOUS AND TERRIFYING ALBUM ART for the GLORY OF BRIMSTONE RHINE!

Maybe go check it out, eh?

BRIMSTONE RHINE CAMPAIGN! 

Dear Everybody,

So I’ve been working on a Project this past year called BRIMSTONE RHINE.

It all started with this cool dream I had about a rockstar of the same name. She was a highly eccentric individual, who, when performing, wore only a black net veil and a pair of bright pink Superman underwear.

Her stagehands called her “The Headless Bride” for the way her blonde bun stuck up out of her black veil like a neck stump. So she wrote an EP called The Headless Bride to spite them.

I woke up from the dream, wrote most of The Headless Bride EP that day while I was at work, then wrote another EP called Alecto! Alecto! a few months later.

Then I talked to a REAL musician about album-making. And then I made a plan.

This Indiegogo campaign is my plan. Please check it out!

Please watch the video! Please share! I’d be SO SUPER GRATEFUL!!! I love this music. I think it’s cool. I think it’s worth sharing.

(My goofy awesome brother Joel made that pic for me. Isn’t it great?)

There is this thing going around on Facebook. It’s about eco-urns, and the possibility of turning into a tree when you die. I’d posted it before, but late last week I posted it again in the event of my untimely demise on icy roads mandated by Winter Storm Juno, or a meteor falling or something.

Writer Carlos Hernandez made a crack about wanting an urn that will turn him into a dragon.

I said we should write a story.

This sort of scenario isn’t as rare as one might think.

There are so many interesting articles on Facebook, so much fodder to create from. I’ve had Facebook threads full of 2-sentence micro-horror stories, threads of on-the-spot poetry about “night witches,” the women pilots of WW2, private messages bursting with timed drabble challenges, links to blogs responding to some dare or another. Author/Editor/Poet Mike Allen wrote a whole series of “Claire-dare” poems at one point–this was years ago–the last of which, he recently announced, was just published.

But though response is not as rare as you might think, it is by no means abundant. It is always astonishing when someone shrugs and says, “Sure, I’ll do it. Why not?” Even more astonishing when someone leaps through the door you’ve flung open in invitation, and douses you in glitter confetti and gasoline and sets fire to your amygdala (to steal the phrase).

That’s what Carlos did.

Carlos said, yes, in fact, we should write a story. And we exchanged emails. And then the most AMAZING few days of epistolary email fiction happened. (Like, they just happened.) (Just these last few days.) The last email was sent late this morning. I won’t tell you how many times I restlessly checked my phone waiting for it.

*refresh*

*refresh*

*refresh*

Just to see what happened NEXT. What happened last. It was totally cool.

What’s more, it was totally joyful. Writing is great, it’s exquisite, it’s faboosh, but you know what? It’s also getting harder every year. I think and hope that’s because I’m getting better, and getting better takes WORK, but on the other hand… HARD. Wahhhh. Cutting-cement-with-my-teeth hard.

But this? This was surprising, molten, malleable. It moved in unpredictable patterns. It was like wrestling with Colossus. Part of me wrote on, unperturbed by the awesome fact of this thing actually happening. Another part sat back, bug-eyed, learning as fast as it could as we went along, hoping to keep up.

Upon the final email, we both expressed relief that we were multi-drafters, because we weren’t quite ready for the adventure to end.

Collaboration, dude. Phew.

What will happen next? Like Valmont says to Tourvelle, “It’s beyond my control.” Only this time I mean it in the nicest way possible.