Puppet Passage of the Day...

"Just before the bus shelter, she passed a shop window already scarred with white flakes. Behind the glass, the dummies held awkward postures, waiting to be dressed. They were bald and naked. Chris walked on before she could compare the figures with what the lamplight had shown her: her own thin reflection, whose staring eyes held a greater darkness than they could see."

-- Tell the Difference by Joel Lane
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Cathy Wilkes, Untitled (detail), 2011
 
“In the beginning was The Swazzle, and the Swazzle was with Punch.”
- Charles Schneider (The Show That Must Never Die)
 
"Staring down from every shelf and alcove were hundereds of puppets, some yellow with the age of centuries. They had been modelled in the changing styles of lost generations - the forgotten pantomime favourites, the murderers and heroines only recalled now in folk stories and nursery rhymes."

Colin Insole: The Premonition
 
"'[H]e had automatonophobia.'
'What's that?'
'Fear of ventriloquist dummies. Anything with a waxy face. He went to see Avatar and had to be hospitalized.'"

Marisha Pessl, Night Film
 
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... a 1908 [book]plate for Pickford Waller features a seated man with statuettes on the surface around him: the man--who bears some relation to Spare, through his distinctive frizzy hair--is leaning off-centre in his chair with a doll-like inertia, as if he is a puppet with loose strings. The effect is slightly uncanny, like a mannikin blurring the line between the living and the dead.

-- Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist (2012)
 
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"With music, especially classical music (new and old), the optimum way of listening, I maintain, is to imagine the vision of (or become in empathy with) a hand-puppet or marionette or mannequin (or all of these in different shapes and colours and 'personalities') moving ‘in tune’ with what you hear. You simply need to try this once and you will discover that the music becomes as special as that painting on your 'bedroom wall'. A figurative dance of soul with art."

-- The Way to Read by D. F. Lewis​
 
yellowish haze said:
"With music, especially classical music (new and old), the optimum way of listening, I maintain, is to imagine the vision of (or become in empathy with) a hand-puppet or marionette or mannequin (or all of these in different shapes and colours and 'personalities') moving ‘in tune’ with what you hear. You simply need to try this once and you will discover that the music becomes as special as that painting on your 'bedroom wall'. A figurative dance of soul with art."

-- The Way to Read by D. F. Lewis​
Click to expand...

Apropos of classical music and marionettes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH7nXgzKpM0
 
I'm sure that this will have been posted somewhere on this forum previously and it's link to this particular thread is slightly tenuous given that it's a pop song and all but here's Abba's 'I'm a Marionette'. I've plumped for the live Abba the Movie version from Australia in 1977 as it has the added visual appeal of Agnetha looking suitably tortured and various endearing uses of back/forward/back/forward video technology to 'supermarionate' the band (with particularly camp effect on Bjorn and Benny at points).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTLyRki-VI

Youtube autoplayed onto Tiger from the same concert. Possibly Abba's peak of 'urban glam paranoia' it's just too good not to post. I'll be good though and put it in the current favourite song thread. :)
 
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