{ feuilleton }

Before the Law from The Trial (1962).
I’d wanted to write something about this pair of animators last year but at the time there was none of their work available for online viewing. This situation has now been remedied thanks to the ubiquitous YouTube.
This is Kafka-related once again since most people have seen Alexeieff/Parker’s work—if [...]

Gallery of Book Trade Labels
Marvellous.

The lost boys: Brian Epstein, Joe Orton and Joe Meek
John Savage on three men for whom gay liberation came too late.

Or Lust (1919), Envy (1919) and Pride (1918). Very Beardsley-esque posters by Carlo Nicco for a series of Italian films from the silent era starring Francesca Bertini. Doubtless the prolific Ms. Bertini’s demonstrations of the Seven Deadly Sins inspired similar promotional artwork for the other films in the series but these are the only [...]

East of Paracelsus, a view from Apollo 15 (1971).
One of a number of photographs from the Apollo missions being taken out of cold storage in Arizona and scanned at very high resolution, should you need a 1.3 GB image of the lunar surface. I was totally obsessed with the Apollo missions when I was [...]

Baptism of Dylan, Son of the Wave from The Cauldron of Anwn (c. 1902).
About the artist:
George Sheringham was born in London. He studied art first at the Slade School (1899–1901) before leaving for Paris, where he studied from 1904–1906. Chiefly known as a designer of stage sets and decorative artist he was also illustrator [...]

Cormac wins another prize
The Road is awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

A picture I hadn’t seen before: swimmer Greg Louganis photographed by Herb Ritts in 1987.

Der Golem, first edition (1915) and Dover reprint (1986).
Illustrations by Hugo Steiner-Prag.
Before leaving Prague (for the time being), it’s worth mentioning the lithograph illustrations by Hugo Steiner-Prag (1880–1945) for Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem. These atmospheric drawings always remind me of the production sketches Albin Grau created for Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des [...]

Do you detect a theme this week? The recent Pragueness had me watching this favourite film again. I unfairly dismissed Soderbergh after his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), which I found to be two hours of yuppie tedium despite its winning the Palme D’Or at Cannes. That prize did enable him to make Kafka [...]

Retro MacOS WordPress Theme
Sooo tempted…

And speaking of Kafka, today’s book purchase was this 1979 story collection. The picture on the cover is a coloured aquatint and my favourite work by Czech artist Frantisek Kupka (1871–1957).

Resistance, or The Black Idol (1903).
Kupka is one of the more unique artists of the period, having begun his career in the Symbolist mode [...]

Two short films by Maya Deren’s husband are now available for viewing at Ubuweb. I’ve known about Hammid’s work for years but this is the first time I’ve seen any of it so these additions are very welcome. In a reversal of the usual state of affairs, the works of the wife overshadowed those of [...]

top left: artist unknown (1969); top right: Patrick Woodroffe (1975)
bottom left: Peter Elson (1988); bottom right: artist unknown (1995)
The Men with snakes post at the weekend finished on a note of Freudian melodrama with a picture of Doc Savage battling a giant python. Lester Dent’s brazen hero has appeared a number of times in the [...]

I’m holding off posting anything substantial until a fault is addressed by my webhost. The comments database appears to have become corrupted so for now there are no comments showing at the end of each post despite the comments numbers after the categories list. I have everything backed up, however, so nothing should be lost; [...]

Edmund White: On fire with desire
Imagining Stephen Crane’s lost gay novel.

Laocoön and His Sons attributed to Agesander, Athenodoros
and Polydorus of Rhodes (c. 160–20 BCE).
No jokes about snakes in a frame, please. Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (1986) is a wide-ranging study of the “iconography of misogyny” in 19th century painting. Dijkstra examines the numerous ways that [...]

A Young Prince Went Riding out in the Moonlight.
A Swedish artist whose fairytale illustrations were an influence upon later book illustrators from Arthur Rackham to Brian Froud. More pictures here and yet more at Art Passions.
• Bud Plant’s John Bauer page
• The John Bauer Museum

Dragon.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Further examples of the Flandrin pose from photographer Amat Nimitpark. Not sure what’s going on in the picture above but the scene below finds a use for a nearly-nude male that would no doubt have surprised Jean Hippolyte Flandrin. Needless to say, I can think of a few other uses for this blue-eyed boy…

Elsewhere on [...]

Not to be confused with animated junk that’s long outstayed its welcome, this is a short film based on Jeff VanderMeer’s fantasy novel Shriek: An Afterword. I helped design Jeff’s City of Saints and Madmen, his first book concerning the city of Ambergris. Shriek is set in the same city and is just as sophisticated [...]

A couple of things worth noting this month. I’d already done a poster design for The Mindscape of Alan Moore but Dez asked for some variations. This one uses the John Dee pentacle which was featured throughout the DVD package and interface design. Alan has referred to Dee and his works on many occasions, and [...]

Monsieur Wiley in yesterday’s comments reminded me of George Franju’s seldom seen Judex, a 1963 film based on the Feuillade serials of the same name. Louis Feuillade (1873–1925), as you really ought to know by now, was the director of the original Fantômas serials (1913–14) and also Les Vampires (1915–16), obvious forerunners of Diabolik with [...]

Biologists Helping Bookstores
“My mission: To correctly shelve pseudo-scientific junk to the appropriate parts of bookstores.”

More pulp madness as Mario Bava’s 1968 crime caper finally appears on DVD in the UK this week, a camp confection from an already very camp decade, although it pales beside the lurid excesses of Barbarella which was released in the same year. Both films were based on popular European comic strips, and both are [...]

Pulps and octopuses! Octopuses and pulps! Not sure how this has evaded my attention until now but better late than never, especially when the contents are this er, pulpy. Francesca Myman, self-proclaimed Mistress of the Tentacled Oblivion (there’s a title to conjure with), has accumulated a stunning collection of octopoidal pulp madness. More goggle-eyed cephalopods [...]

Paul Morley remembers Tony Wilson in The Observer.

I’ve never tried woodcut engaving—the closest was scraperboard and some linocuts when I was a teenager—but I’ve always admired the form and Lynd Ward (1905–1985) was one of its masters. Ward’s wordless “novels” were inspired by the similar work of Frans Masereel and you can see pages from two of these, Gods’ Man (1930) and [...]

Animal Instinct: Raging Bull
David Thomson revisits Scorsese’s masterpiece.

Dancer by Felix D’Eon at his Flickr pages. His artwork based on the photos, including some gay erotica, can be seen at his website.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dancers by John Andresen
• Youssef Nabil
• Images of Nijinsky
• The art of Hubert Stowitts, 1892–1953

Portrait of Mephisto #1 (2006).

Portrait of Mephisto #5 (2006).
The carefully-constructed and coloured tableaux of Shanghai-based art Maleonn Ma remind me of Joel-Peter Witkin’s grainier and nastier works only without the body parts or dead babies. The repeated use of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in contemporary culture is a whole subject in itself.
Via [...]

One of my works graces the cover of an American institution this month with the appearance of my HP Lovecraft portrait on the August issue of FATE magazine (volume 60, number 8, issue 688, if you must know). This is for an article about Lovecraft’s occult connections and I believe they’ve also used one of [...]

Difficult Loves (1985).
Today’s book purchase was another in the Picador run of Italo Calvino titles with covers by the Brothers Quay, this particular volume being a collection of the author’s early short stories. I wrote about the Quay’s contribution to book design back in February and their covers remain one of many reasons to [...]

left: Andre Deutsch (1958); right: Penguin (1972).
In a year filled with cultural anniversaries, here’s another. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is fifty years old next month and to celebrate this Penguin is publishing the book in its original form for the first time. Although the cover of the first edition described the text as [...]

There aren’t many directors whose next films I await with impatience but Wes Anderson is one of them. I still haven’t seen his debut, Bottle Rocket (1996), but Rushmore (1998) was good, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) was great and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) was a masterpiece. The Darjeeling Limited will be out [...]

Classic British cinema isn’t worthy of the name
Because it’s dull, reactionary and sexless; John Patterson plays my tune.

This is what we want—an airline that matches my monochrome wardrobe. Star Flyer is Japanese, unfortunately, and I’m guessing that black doesn’t have the same funereal associations in Japan; that livery wouldn’t, er “fly” here. Makes a change from the sky blue monotony that’s the usual colour scheme in aircraft, anyway. PingMag looks at the [...]

Most people today know Julian Beck, if at all, for a small but unforgettable film role at the end of his career. In Poltergeist 2 (1986) Beck plays the nightmarishly sinister Reverend Henry Kane and his one full scene in that film is far more unnerving than the rest of its rubber monsters and special [...]

An unmade high-concept from Hammer Films’ early Seventies dalliance with pulp adventure, if you must know. Via Boing Boing via Jess Nevins via Airminded where we learn:
The story was along the lines of THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, with a German Zeppelin being blown off-course during a bombing raid on London and winding up at [...]

Another one bites the dust… What are the odds against two of the last surviving big names of cinema expiring in the same week? I could never get fully behind Antonioni the way I could with Bergman, I didn’t think much of the Neo-Realist school that Antonioni began as a part of and his later [...]