I love pretty packaging and as soon as I saw K. Crab’s “Songs of the Lefties,” every fibre of my body wanted to squuueeeeaaaaal!!!! White cardstock and colourful drawings bound by a brilliant grass-green piece of yarn, faded library-card-yellow label encircling the drawings, marked “Issue 10 Jan 2006 4.00 Songs of the lefties.”
Beautiful enough for me to leave it untouched like the pretty old Avon figurines that sat on a shelf high in my aunt’s bathroom … But I am of a generation that rips pretty things to shreds to make more pretty things out of them, and so:
I open the package (without breaking it!)
Beauty. Colourful, pretty, delicate, Murano glass come to life almost too beautiful to touch. “This beauty is killing me,” says a pretty, pretty ferocious character, arms or bleeding wings outstretched.
“Aging shimmer seeks same,” states another one, and I fall in love with the Klimt-inspired drawing.
A mermaid refuses to take sides and Jolene is missing the embarrassment gene … I am charmed. An aging art snob with a guerrilla aesthetic, I flip through card after card and start scheming ways to steal K. Crab’s work. I don’t mind paying for it-but what if there is nothing left, by the time she receives my request?
Let me spell it out: pick up an envelope. Put money in it. Send the envelope to Kathy Crabbe and beg her to keep drawing.
That’s what I am going to do. Right. Now. (Andree Lachapelle)
Art zine, Kathy Crabbe, #10, $4, P.O. Box 1510, Laguna Beach, CA, 92652, U.S.A., [email protected], www.songsofthelefties.com