The covers of Marcus Sedgwick's back catalogue have, over the years, featured the likes of a crow perched on barbed wire; a bleak, misty forest; a pallid girl; a black pistol resting on snow – so it's surprising that his latest offering, She Is Not Invisible is significantly brighter, decorated with a sun-drenched New York.
"When I met him, JAB's vocalist Bohdan [Kubiakowski] was a tall, striking figure with short silver hair, and a pallid complexion complemented by black lipstick and nails, wearing platform shoes, playing acoustic guitar.
You're scared of, like, a single hand grasping your ankle urgently from beneath a bed, or a door slamming shut without you touching it, or the pallid dead skin and black eyes of a hissing vampire.
You sit and stare at your pallid reflection in the black bit around the screen of your work laptop every day, dreaming about getting away from these awful fucking people and going back to bed.
The comparison shows the opposite choices often made by Mr. Joost and Mr. Lipes: their color scheme is more pallid than Robbins's black-and-white; their investigative camerawork is distanced from the dance in a cool way, whereas Robbins filled the screen with intensity; and their central idea of actual New York locations reduces the ballet's idea of abstraction.
But raw amberjack, laid over baba ghanouj, was a lame attempt at fusion ("It's Japanese-Lebanese," the waiter explained), and the black cod was pallid and fishy.
Ravaged, ill, bundled in her customary modest black dress, her pallid little moon face set in its sad, nocturnal smile, she tottered — her thin legs supporting her in faltering obedience to her courage — across the stage to the microphone, to which she clung, and then her voice, that great remnant of her life, burst forth.
Today, her all-black outfit highlights that pallid, Victorian beauty.
He stood on stage arhythmically strumming an untuned guitar, his hair bedraggled, black eyeliner running down his pallid cheeks, confronting his fans with a sullen thousand-yard stare.
He explains that every component of the poem is based on logic: the raven enters the chamber to avoid a storm (the "midnight dreary" in the "bleak December"), and its perch on a pallid white bust was to create visual contrast against the dark black bird.
