Icons

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“Iconic” is a much abused word these days but this book from UK publisher Counter-Print can claim the term with some justification:

Icon contains over 200 examples of social media icons from many well-known, as well as up-and-coming, graphic designers and illustrators. This limited and concise canvas for self-expression is represented within this book through a host of examples collected from around the world, chosen for their creativity, intelligence and beauty.

My own icon/monogram/whatever is one of those featured in the “Shapes” section. It’s strange seeing this symbol subjected to any kind of attention even though it’s at the top of this web page and can also be found in much of my work. It appeared in drawings when I was about 15 or 16 and eventually became a personal identifier some time in the early 1980s. One reason I like it and continue to use it is because I don’t know what it is; it doesn’t originate out of any conscious expression, and doesn’t refer to any specific symbolic history even though it resembles other symbols. I always liked Whistler’s habit of using a peacock as his signature so he didn’t have to spoil his paintings with a scrawl; Aubrey Beardsley imitated his example for a while using three vertical lines as his signature. This icon has served a similar purpose for me although these days I’m as likely to use my surname and some Roman numerals.

Icon is a great little book, smartly designed by Leterme Dowling and brimming with equally smart content. Some page samples follow.

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7362, a film by Pat O’Neill

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This week is a psychedelic one for Londoners: on Monday Britain’s first Psychedelic Society was launched at Conway Hall (the Society uses my Psychedelic Alice artwork in some of its graphics); today (the 4th) there’s an evening of short psychedelic films at BFI Southbank: Jet Propelled Cinema: How Psychedelia Infected Hollywood Sci-Fi. A couple of these—James Whitney’s Yantra and Scott Bartlett’s OffOn—have featured here already but Pat O’Neill’s 7362 (1967) was one I’d not seen before. O’Neill’s film is a 10-minute exploration of vertical symmetry, solarisation and rapid strobing of a kind that no doubt carries an epilepsy warning when it’s screened in public. An electronic soundtrack by Joseph Byrd and Michael Moore connects the film to the psychedelic music scene via Joe Byrd whose cult band The United States of America recorded one of the best albums of the period a year later. 7362 is currently available on DVD together with 25 other shorts in Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947–1986.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The abstract cinema archive

Jon Hassell, live 1989

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Jon Hassell’s 1990 album City: Works Of Fiction was reissued by All Saints recently in a smartly packaged three-CD/double-vinyl set. The highlight of the additional material was an hour-long concert by Hassell and his ensemble—Gregg Arreguin, Jeff Rona, Adam Rudolph and Daniel Schwartz—recorded at the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center in New York City on 17th September, 1989. It’s a great performance that sees the group running through some of the pieces that would later be recorded for the City album. Brian Eno was offstage mixing the sounds of rain forest creatures into the music.

Having listened to this concert regularly since the summer it’s been a surprise to find a video recording of what appears to be the very same performance. The tape has the date as the 16th but the music is an exact match for the CD; according to the NYT the group played three nights in all. The reduced lighting makes for gloomy visuals, and the musicians are much more concerned with playing than leaping around the stage. For me the attraction is simply seeing Hassell and company working their magic with such authority; some of Hassell’s pauses show his use of digital loops, something that’s never been so obvious on record. These performances, and the album that followed, saw a shift in the evolution of the “fourth world” concept, Hassell’s term for a “coffee-coloured classical music of the future” that would blend the first world and the third world, the past and the future, into new hybrids. The sleeve-notes for the City album began: “Spirit: not only in the forest but in the carwash, too.” Bringing palm trees and jungle sounds into the heart of Manhattan develops that idea. Hassell talked to The Wire about the album in 1990.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Power Spot by Michael Scroggins

Weekend links 232

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Forget Me Not (no date) by Caitlin Hackett.

• Halloween brings out the articles about weird fiction: “No one would now write of [HP Lovecraft] as the critic Edmund Wilson did, in the New Yorker in 1945: ‘The only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.’ The true horror was in fact that of judging Lovecraft by the standards of a defunct literary culture,” says John Gray. At The Atlantic there’s Jeff VanderMeer on the uncanny power of weird fiction, while Matt Seidel at The Millions explores the mysteries and attractions of Robert Aickman’s “strange stories”.

The Witching Hour is a video essay by Pam Grossman “examining the many different faces of witches in film”. Pam’s video opens with a scene from Suspiria; over at FACT, Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti talks about the creation of Suspiria‘s peerless soundtrack.

• David Rudkin and Alan Clarke’s uncanny television film, Penda’s Fen, is given a 40th anniversary screening later this month at the Horse Hospital, London. For those who can’t attend (and those who haven’t already read it) there’s my post from 2010.

Nabokov sees each day’s weather as a palette: “The weather this morning was soso: dullish, but warm, a boiled milk sky, with skin – but if you pushed it aside with a teaspoon, the sun was really nice, so I wore my white trousers”. He listens carefully to the sound of the rain, which his letters brilliantly orchestrate. He provides fantastic descriptions of puddles, some of which contain shifts in perspective reminiscent of the nearly cinematic transitions found in the novel he would write shortly afterwards, King, Queen, Knave:

“I looked out of the window and saw: a red-haired housepainter caught a mouse in his wheelbarrow and killed it with the stroke of a brush, then he tossed it in a puddle. The puddle reflected the dark-blue sky, quick black upsilons (reflections of swallows flying high) and the knees of a squatting child, who was attentively studying the little grey round corpse.”

Eric Naiman on Vladimir Nabokov’s Letters to Véra

• Occult rock: Peter Bebergal talks to Expanding Minds about his new book, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll. There’s an hour-long film of Black Sabbath saving rock and roll in Paris, 1970, here.

• Mixes of the week: Burning The Existence, “a three-hour sonic exploration of the outer fringes of Goth”, and a horror soundtrack mix by Death Waltz.

• “‘Capital loathes the old,’ [Gareth] Evans said, ‘for anchoring us in the reality of the lived.'” Iain Sinclair on London’s lost cinemas.

Desirina Boskovich, co-editor of the Steampunk Users Manual, offers “7 Reasons Why Steampunk Is Totally ‘Now'”.

• Penguin has new collage covers by Julian House for The Cut-Up Trilogy by William Burroughs.

Hear a homemade synthesizer turn weather into music.

• Grotesque doodles by William Makepeace Thackeray.

full fathom five is Thom’s new blog.

Weird Dream (1976) by Harmonia 76 | Weird Caravan (1980) by Klaus Schulze | Weird Gear (1991) by Ultramarine

Meyer’s Todtengessängen

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The traditional post for Día de los Muertos is a selection of illustrations by Conrad Meyer (1618–1689) for a Dance of Death from 1650. Unlike some earlier examples this book has a specific religious moral, opening with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and ending with the triumph of Christ over Death. Given that, it’s surprising the degree of struggle in some of the illustrations, whether in the determination of the skeletal intruders to drag away the mortals they meet, or the reluctance and horror displayed by those mortals. Towards the end there are some details worthy of William Hogarth with revellers puking on unfortunate dogs. Browse the rest of the book here or download it here.

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