Contemporary Los Angeles via Luther Gerlach’s wet-plate photography. Using antique cameras he restores himself, and a wet-plate photographic process dating from 1851, Luther is completely immersed in this compelling method of vintage process. Gerlach says, “Quite often I feel as if my soul is in the past and my mind is in the future.” His [...]
Ornette Coleman: last of the jazz giants Free radical.
I made the complaint in November last year when writing about James Whitney’s Lapis that few of the classic works of abstract cinema have yet to find their way to YouTube. Happily, things change fast in the online world and you can now see a clip of Lapis here. Another recent addition is the whole [...]
Some of the talented (and sexy) acrobats from Les Farfadais circus troupe. YouTube has several clips of their performances. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The gay artists archive
Archaeological Site (A Sorry-Installation) by Guillaume Bijl. A work for the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07. More views on Flickr.
An eBay auction. All proceeds, after costs, will benefit Arthur Magazine. “What else can I say? William Burroughs & his Gilded Cobra…. it’s actually my cobra ….” Ira Cohen. Previously on { feuilleton } • The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda
People ask me now and then what I prefer working on the most, and the answer is always the same—book design. The Adventures of Little Lou, a short novel by Lucy Swan for Savoy Books turned up today from the printers and it’s a good example of why I find this kind of work so [...]
Takato Yamamoto was born in Akita prefecture (Japan) in 1960. After graduating from the painting department of the Tokyo Zokei University, he experimented with the Ukiyo-e Pop style. He further refined and developed that style to create his “Heisei Esthiticism” style. His first exhibition was held in Tokyo, in 1998. There’s much that’s superficially familiar [...]
40 years of gay freedom in England Coming out of the dark ages.
Séance, 2001 version. Drew Mulholland, aka Mount Vernon Arts Lab (also Mount Vernon Astral Temple and Black Noise…), has joined forces recently with the masterful Ghost Box collective, purveyors of finely-crafted and frequently creepy electronica. MVAL’s 2001 release, The Séance at Hobs Lane, is now Ghost Box release no. 9 and comes repackaged in their [...]
Work on two very different CDs was completed this month, a pair of releases so different they’re almost polar opposites. Chaoticum describe their music as “art for your ears” and the label for this album is HORUS CyclicDaemon, producers of the Aleister Crowley anthology I designed in 2005. The package is a digipak and will [...]
The Barnbrook Bible, out in September. Jonathan Barnbrook at the Design Museum, 19 June–10 October 2007. Jonathan Barnbrook has emerged in the past two decades as one of the UK’s most consistently innovative graphic designers. Pioneering graphic design with a social conscience, Barnbrook makes powerful statements about corporate culture, consumerism, war and international politics. Through [...]
left: Interior Golden Section Series (1988); right: Untitled (1992). Photography by Craig Cowan.
La Danse du Sabbat from Histoire de la Magie (1884) by P. Christian. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The etching and engraving archive
The Temple of Bakong (2001). The temples and ruins of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom are effortlessly photogenic, so much so it seems impossible to take a bad picture of them. John McDermott’s photographs are especially fine, not least because he’s used infra-red film which always gives foliage a peculiar luminous appearance. Simon Marsden is [...]
More pulp revenants come blinking back into the light. The runaway success of The Dangerous Book for Boys among fathers as well as sons has set British publishers casting about for new ways to exploit masculine nostalgia. Repackaging a few old warhorses is Penguin’s solution and a cheap one since most (all?) of these titles [...]
I posted an old James Joyce portrait sketch for Bloomsday a couple of days ago and today decided to rework it as a vector graphic. This is the result. I was producing a lot of sketches like this while working on Reverbstorm a decade ago, most of them post-Picasso/Bauhaus/De Stijl variations. Joyce is particularly easy [...]
Gore Vidal: the Lion in Winter Robert McCrum profile of the writer and polemicist.
That great staple of science fiction and horror stories—the derelict city—turns up again in the trailer for the latest adaptation of Richard Matheson’s pulp classic, I Am Legend. The novel has an obvious appeal for filmmakers since Matheson was an accomplished screenwriter and an expert at crafting taught, high concept storylines. Other notable productions of [...]
Dream works: Jan Svankmajer Marina Warner on the great Surrealist.
It’s not every day you get to post graphic demon porn but this is such a day so consider yourself duly warned about the content. I’ve no idea who NoBeast is since no one seems to know. Given what’s being depicted here—among other things, a rare gay take on the unique Japanese tentacle rape fetish—the [...]
A sketch of James Joyce from 1994.
Historia Naturae, Suita (1967). Another very welcome DVD release from the BFI. Svankmajer’s shorts have always been my favourites of his film work. I love his Alice feature film (for me, the best screen adaptation of Alice in Wonderland), and Faust (although the jabbering devils get annoying) but on the whole his longer films don’t [...]
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The new folk festivals Reclaiming the F-word.
Mario photographed by Karim Konrad.
New album from the ever-groovy White Stripes is released next week. And it’ll also be available as a limited set of Jack & Meg-styled USB drives containing lossless audio files. I love the style of these. Someone ought to make a set of matryoshka dolls based on them.
Cormac McCarthy’s appearance on Oprah’s Book Club—his first television appearance ever—was screened last week. You can watch it online for free on her site although you need to register first. The interview is presented in chunks and only lasts for about twenty minutes but it was worthwhile for all that, even if it is chopped [...]
Vicissitudes, depth: 4.5 m. The Underwater Sculpture Gallery in Grenada, West Indies is a project started in May 2006 by sculptor Jason Taylor, with the support of the Grenadian Ministry of Tourism and Culture. This is a unique artistic enterprise, celebrating Caribbean culture and highlighting environmental processes, such as coral reef re-generation. An underwater gallery [...]
Bromantics: straight men with gay best friends Another week, another neologism…
An article discovered whilst flicking through a collected edition of Cassell’s Magazine for the months June to November 1903. Cassell’s ran light fiction, often in serial form, and articles of general interest to the Victorian and Edwardian reader, of which this is an example. The discussion of art produced in insane asylums is presented in [...]
Jekyll and Hyde: the queer reading Not a new idea—Elaine Showalter explored this in her 1991 book Sexual Anarchy—but it’s a compelling interpretation.
Maiden-hair fern. Photogravures by Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932). More here. Tendrils of a pumpkin. Previously on { feuilleton } • The Dawn of the Autochrome • Fred Holland Day • The Door in the Wall • Edward Steichen • Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla
Man Emerging from a Tree Stump (no date). Yet another artist I’d be unlikely to have come across had it not been for the web. Andrey Avinoff’s art manages to be both mystical and homoerotic in equal measure and there’s a good selection of his paintings and drawings to be found in a collection at [...]
One of the posters for the new Coen Brothers’ film has finally surfaced and the design is pretty similar to the original book jacket by Chip Kidd (later spoiled with poor type layout in the UK edition). The book cover looks better but we’ll probably see some variations on the poster design anyway. I’m reading [...]
The Digger issue, August 1968. Here’s something of major importance, The Realist Archive Project. Four complete issues online so far, with a promise of all 146 issues to be uploaded eventually. The Realist started out as a satirical magazine in the late Fifties and moved into the slipstream of the counter-culture as the Sixties progressed. [...]
No-go logos: The story of unpopular branding The 2012 Olympics logo gets another kicking.
Les Astronautes (1959). A nice collection of shorts by Walerian Borowczyk (1923–2006) at Ubuweb including this animated piece from 1959 which was co-directed by Chris Marker. The style is immediately reminiscent of that employed by Raoul Servais in Harpya and other films; it’s also not far removed from Terry Gilliam’s animation but it predates both. [...]
New and not-so-new work-related arrivals include The Mindscape of Alan Moore DVD which finally arrived after the usual postal delays caused by bank holidays and other trivia. Those interested can order this from the Shadowsnake Films site. And copies of the CD from metal band Azathoth turned up a few weeks ago but I’d neglected [...]
Alternative London Olympics logos Good, bad and ugly.
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