Extraordinary Machines And Flying Carpets

Regular Threshold readers may recall that a while back I wrote an entry about how Fiona Apple’s unreleased third album, “Extraordinary Machine,” had been leaked out onto the Internet in its entirety.
Along with creating a flurry of downloads, the leaking of the unreleased album also inspired many Apple fans to begin producing their own album cover art. Many of them opted to apply the album’s title to Apple herself, resulting in several covers featuring images of a borg-like Fiona.
Some of them were very well-done, but I didn’t see anything that I felt was really evocative of the content of the album, and somewhere in the back of my mind an idea formed, so I decided to throw in my two cents’ worth and create my own album cover.
Actually, it’s not really my intent to have it serve as a cover for the album. It’s basically just a piece of art inspired by the album (though I probably will throw it into the ID3 tags of my copy to display as the album art so that it can serve some sort of useful purpose), and was really something of an exercise in creating something other than my usual images of scantily-clad young female singers and actresses or unrealistically proportioned fantasy women.
As I considered possible approaches to creating an image inspired by the album, I found my mind going back to the idea of the whole turn of the (previous) century snake-oil salesmen, Sears-Roebuck catalog ads, and, because the title seemed like a good name for one of them, the sort of weird and impractical inventions of the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
This is what I ultimately came up with.
I think it’s kind of cool, and it has all of the elements that I mentioned. I mean, I can imagine finding something like this being advertised in the back of some antique magazine or something, which is part of the effect I was going for with the sepia tones and the graininess of the image.
The end result is also, I think, somewhat reminiscent of the work of “Sandman” cover artist Dave McKean, though in his case he would have actually constructed the device, tracked down a hard copy of the old steam engine schematics (from 1849) that I used in the background, put it all together, photographed it using old film and an antique camera, then used actual dark room techniques to achieve the desired effect.
My way is faster.
Besides, McKean would likely be receiving payment for his work, whereas I was just doing it for the sheer hell of it.
In any case, while it is pointless, I do think it’s at least kind of cool, so I thought I’d share it with you.
In preparation for a new tenant, there’s someone in the apartment above mine right now replacing the carpeting. A bit ago I looked out the window and saw big pieces of the old carpet, and remnants of the new, hurtling toward the ground from above. Even though I had figured out that it was carpet work that was causing all of the commotion above me, it was still fairly unexpected to look out my window and see flying carpets.
Speaking of Dave McKean and “Sandman,” though, between the flying carpets and the extraordinary machines, today is kind of reminiscent of the “Sandman” story “Ramadan,” which, in telling a story that contrasted the Bagdhad of “Arabian Nights” with the bombed-out Baghdad with which we are more familiar, contained its own share of extraordinary machines and flying carpets, so that much, at least, makes today a little bit interesting.