April 2019 – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Design as virus 19: Akira variations

Continuing an occasional series. Looking for Akira posters at the weekend reminded me of the way this poster in particular has birthed a long (and growing) series of copyists. The film of Akira went through a few poster designs, with the Japanese ones emphasising the futuristic setting and its apocalyptic scenario. The first poster for US audiences somewhat predictably (and tiresomely) simplified one of the Japanese designs showing Kaneda holding a big gun. The motorcycle design was later reworked for the US in a form which has provided the basis for many subsequent copies, and is very effective even if it communicates next to nothing of the complex storyline. Thirty years after the film’s release, Kaneda’s motorcycle is now familiar enough to be recognisable even to people who haven’t yet seen the film, hence the variations. One consequence of the popularity of this design is that it seems to have shunted the big-gun design into the background.

The rules for the variants is to present a familiar character striding towards a similar form of transport, inanimate or otherwise, with a suitable title below the figure (and, where possible, an overlaid title in Japanese). This trend hasn’t been active for very long but the amount of amateur (or professional) artists with time on their hands means there are too many examples to easily feature here. Most of the examples on the pages here and here are characters from computer games or popular films but the Red Bull ad below shows that the poster design is now familiar enough to function as an advert. As for the Kaneda and his bike, they’re subjected to the inevitable Lego treatment here.

Japanese Grand Prix ad by Red Bull

Art by Dominik Figlhuber

Weekend links 459

• “Their graves were covered with cement tiles to block the radiation emanating from their corpses.” Sophie Pinkham reviews three books about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

• At Dangerous Minds: Julius Eastman: The resurrection of the visionary minimalist composer continues; at The Quietus: The Strange World of Julius Eastman.

• Mixes of the week: a Dune-inspired Secret Thirteen Mix 286 by Coeden, and ’94–95 Mirrorverse by The Ephemeral Man.

Nabokov had meanwhile acquired a literary agent in New York. She made no headway placing translations of his Russian novels. His latest, she informed him, was “dazzlingly brilliant” and hence wholly without promise for the American market. She suggested something more topical, an idea that left her client hyperventilating. “Nothing,” he would roar later, “bores me more than political novels and the literature of social unrest.” He was, he enlightened his representative, neither Sinclair Lewis nor Upton Sinclair. (Ultimately he tossed the two over the cliff together, as “Upton Lewis.”) Weeks later, in the bathroom of a Paris studio apartment, he began — “a champion figure skater switching to roller skates,” as he complained, speaking for whole cadres of displaced professionals — to write in English.

Stacy Schiff on Vladimir Nabokov, literary refugee

• Iain Sinclair on Ghosts of a Ghost: William Burroughs, time surgery and the death of the image.

• ST Joshi remembers Lovecraftian writer Wilum Pugmire (RIP).

• The Conspirators: A Borgean Tribute to Jorge Luis Borges.

• Jasper Sharp on where to begin with Japanese cyberpunk.

• Greg Anderson on the new Sunn O))) album, Life Metal.

• Drew Daniel of Matmos picks his Bandcamp favourites.

• The Kraken surfaces for Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

• An interview with Brian Eno by Suite (212).

• Apocalypse Now: Final Cut

• The Book of Weirdo

• Conspiracy Of Silence (1994) by Cypher 7 | The Vodun Conspiracy (1996) by The Sidewinder | Machine Conspiracy (2010) by Conforce

The Witch’s Cradle by Maya Deren

It’s taken a while for Maya Deren’s less familiar films to drift into YouTube’s Sargasso Sea so I hadn’t seen this one until now. The Witch’s Cradle (1943) isn’t really a film like Deren’s other short works, more a collection of fragments for something that was left unfinished. But the Surrealist tenor of the piece means that the diverse shot sequence and unusual imagery can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Pajorita Matta is the woman wandering like a Cocteau heroine through the darkened rooms of one of Peggy Guggenheim’s galleries where we catch glimpses of sculptures and a Max Ernst painting, Blind Swimmers (1934). Prior to this there are brief shots of Marcel Duchamp with this fingers tangled in a cat’s cradle, and later on we see that Pajorita Matta has a pentacle drawn on her forehead, a precursor of Deren’s subsequent occult explorations in Haiti. Disjointed as it is, I prefer this to the solo films that Deren produced after her collaboration with Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), most of which were filmed dance performances. The Witch’s Cradle offers another taste of enmeshed mystery.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alexander Hammid
• Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren