{ feuilleton }

The wonderful and essential Strange Attractor Journal will be with us again next month.
The previous number (now sold out, I think) included my essay about psychedelic artist Wilfried Sätty.
CONTENTS
Contra Genesis—Catherine Eisner
Unusual cases of extra-genital conception, extra-uterine
gestation, and other anomalous exits.
Burmese Daze—Erik Davis
In which the author submits to the pleasures of a transgender spirit possession festival.
Adventures [...]

Layering Buddha on CD and limited vinyl.
The Fm3 Buddha Machine is a low-fi loop playing device containing nine pre-recorded loops which cannot be changed by the user. Due to manufacturing imperfections, individual machines play the loops with a slightly different sound, pitch and duration. The built-in playback circuit, with its low sampling rate and bit [...]

Shinro Ohtake is always on the attack. Whether it’s against misguided art education, against the cold treatment and economic constraints Japan puts on anyone who could dare to live differently, against the contemporary art establishment that can’t be bothered to even disguise its own incomprehension—his fight as an artist continues. Ohtake is prodigious, original, and [...]

The Michelangelo-esque photography of Steven Vaschon.

In which your humble narrator enters a contest…
Speak Up, in collaboration with New York magazine, is proud to announce the first-ever open contest to design the visually acclaimed, graphically exhilarating, by-invitation-only “High Priority” feature illustration in the magazine’s year-end, December 18, 2006 double issue.
High Priority highlights five activities, suggested by New York writers, that are [...]

A very welcome release, these are some of my favourite films (I reviewed Street of Crocodiles for Horror: the Definitive Guide to the Cinema of Fear earlier this year). Most of the early ones can be found on the Region 1 release from Kino International but that collection is poorly transferred and the interface has [...]

French comic artist and illustrator, Philippe Druillet, illustrates British horror novelist William Hope Hodgson. As anyone familiar with Hodgson’s work knows, this kind of imagery predates Pirates of the Caribbean by nearly a century. More pictures here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• War of the Worlds book covers
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• Le horreur cosmique
• [...]

Infinity Mirror Room—Love Forever (1966/1994).
Mirror, light bulbs, stainless steel, wood.

Narcissus Garden (1966/2002).
Watermall, 2000 mirror balls.

Fireflies on the Water (2002).
150 lights, mirrors and water.

Infinity Mirror Room, Rain in Early Spring (2002).
Since the late 1950s, Yayoi Kusama has used painting, performance, sculpture, and installation to develop a highly personal formal vocabulary that combines repetitive elements such as [...]

“According to consumer research conducted on what factors matter to people when they decide whether or not to pick up a book in a bookshop, the cover design comes out as most important. So this might be the stupidest thing we’ve ever done.
“…The covers are art-quality paper, and from internal Penguin efforts we know that [...]

Not the play by Tennessee Williams, rather the glass sculptures of sea creatures by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.
Leopold (1822–1895) and Rudolf (1857–1939) Blaschka were a father and son partnership, originally from Bohemia. Their work making spectacular glass models of natural history objects began in 1857, in Germany. Rudolf joined his father in business in 1876 [...]

Lest we forget…

William Burroughs.
Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986.
For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive
Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts —
thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison —
thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger —
thanks for vast herds [...]

The new masthead designed by Luke Prowse, with a coat of arms
by wood engraver Edwina Ellis.
So, in today’s Neville Brody news (no, I’m not intending on posting about him every day…) it seems the designer has been busy with colleague Luke Prowse making The (London) Times look better. Not before time (so to speak), it [...]

“I’m very fortunate in my career. I’ve never had to direct a film
I didn’t choose or develop. My love for filmmaking has given me
an entrée to the world and to the human condition.”

From Black Dog Publishing. Words by Steve Taylor, design by Neville Brody.
If you pick up a copy of this week’s Heat magazine in 30 years time, think how funny it will seem. Our obsession with D list celebrities’ private lives, weight loss and reality TV shows, will become ridiculous in the light of tomorrow’s trends.
Magazines [...]

Photography by Thorsten Horvath.

The Titan’s Goblet (1833) by Thomas Cole.

Landscape with Grenade (1974) by Cliff McReynolds.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Lucifer (no date).
…I find nothing fantastic in so-called fantastic art, it is an aspect of reality in search of sanity beyond the normal bounds. I believe that fantastic art is related to the protective dream, that it prolongs the healing dream and finds symbols that change dread into wonder, strangeness and beauty.
As in all figurative [...]

In which the lovable moptops get the official mashup treatment courtesy of George Martin’s son, Giles. Very creditable it sounds to these ears although it strains a bit much in places to shoehorn tiny bits of the very familiar songs into other very familiar songs. The added sound effects are pretty superfluous, some of them [...]

Arthur #25, coming soon.

I don’t use customised folder or desktop icons much these days but this set, entitled Ink, is great, based on tribal tattoo stylings. If there were other designs as good as this in the world of lurid, gum-drop-shaped, drop-shadowed reflectiveness, I might be more inclined to customise my folders now and then. Jamie McCanless is [...]

Secret Dream (2005), giclee print with oil paint, gold and mixed media.
Via Casual In Istanbul.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

After complaining a couple of days ago about the difficulty of seeing works of abstract cinema, it turns out that a collection of Oskar Fischinger’s great animations appeared earlier this year.
Decades before computer graphics, before music videos, even before Fantasia (the 1940 version), there were the abstract animated films of Oskar Fischinger (1900–1967), master of [...]

Two pages of them, and BIG scans as well, which makes a nice change for a web gallery. Strictly speaking, many of these films aren’t what’s usually classed as film noir (a debatable term at the best of times) but we shouldn’t quibble, painted posters are now a lost art.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alida [...]

Andreas Martens, artist of Rork.
A native of Germany, Andreas (Andreas Martens (1951- ) studied at the St. Luc comics school in Belgium, assisting Eddy Paape on Udolfo, before relocating to France. His genre series include Arq, Cromwell Stone, Cyrrus, Rork and its spin-off, Capricorne, as well as a number of single works such as La [...]

Regular readers may have noticed the coming and going of certain features here recently, due to my experimenting with different plugins. One of the great features of the WordPress blogging software is its open source quality which allows anyone to write a plugin to extend the application. Ones I’ve been playing with over the past [...]

Scène d’été (Summer Scene, 1869) by Jean-Frédéric Bazille.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Thomas Eakins, 1844–1916

“I watched a silver swan which had a living grace about his movements and a living intelligence in his eyes.” Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad.
The Silver Swan is perhaps the best known and best loved object in The Bowes Museum. It is musical automaton in the form of a life-size model of a swan, comprising a [...]

Lapis (1966).
Proof of the conservative nature of cinema as an artistic medium can be found in the way its abstract practitioners don’t merit anything like the attention received by Piet Modrian or Jackson Pollock. In cinema narrative is all, and it’s ironic that when artists such as Julian Schnabel or Robert Longo turn to film [...]

Subterranean Cinema has the El Topo screenplay online, taken from the Douglas Book edition from 1971 (above is the cover of my John Calder UK reprint of the same). As well as a screenplay with annotations by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the second half of the book featured a lengthy, fascinating and at times bizarre and hilarious [...]

From the Propaganda Remix Project.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Liberty 2006

Left: Michael Jones.
Irony abounds. In the Protect-me-from-what-I-want Dept, Pastor Ted Haggard gave this sermon four days before his gay liaisons were brought to light: “Heavenly Father give us grace and mercy, help us this next week and a half as we go into national elections and Lord we pray for our country. Father we pray [...]

Spirit of the Night, 1879.
Few people recognise the name of John Atkinson Grimshaw today but anyone who’s bought a birthday or greeting card in Britain will have seen his Spirit of the Night fairy painting, one of a generic series he produced in the 1870s that remains very popular despite the painter’s obscurity. [...]

November 5th is traditionally the time to consider the death of the head of state here, although we’re actually “celebrating” the destruction of the would-be assassins not the near-death of the king. Few people will weep for the wretched Saddam Hussein; how many would would weep for Chimpy these days if the headlines were reversed?

The road to hell
Cormac McCarthy’s vision of a post-apocalyptic America in The Road is terrifying, but also beautiful and tender, says Alan Warner.
Saturday, November 4, 2006
The Guardian
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
256pp, Picador, £16.99
Shorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy’s other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle. This [...]

Well, two of them at least. Okay, so we don’t know for sure that meth-curious Pastor Ted is a bona fide Friend of Dorothy but, you know… Is it at all usual for evangelical gay-bashers to receive massages from gay escorts? I don’t remember the nuns telling me about that part of the Bible so [...]

So, another week, another gay sex scandal in America… Schadenfreude levels are going through the roof with all this happening days before a critical midterm election. Latest culprit is Pastor Ted Haggard, president of the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals who yesterday was denying that he paid for sex with a male escort and bought [...]

Nigel Kneale created reality TV without realising it. Comedian Mark Gatiss recalls his turbulent relationship with the ‘TV colossus’ who died this week.
Mark Gatiss
Thursday, November 2, 2006
The Guardian
When Big Brother began on Channel 4 in 2000, I took a principled stand against it. “Don’t they know what they’re doing?” I screamed at the TV. “It’s [...]

Nigel Kneale, creator of the Quatermass series, The Stone Tape and Beasts, died this week.

Anima Dannata (Damned Soul, 1619) by the incredible Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
From an old Italian postcard (thanks Lorraine!). Here’s a more recent view.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Franz Xavier Messerschmidt, 1736–1783