Blog this: tits out for the future

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left: tits t-shirt by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren.
right: the Hipp Chronoscope via io9.

A new year brings new blogs which is perhaps just as well seeing as the old year drew a line under some regular reads.

The Look, “Adventures in pop and rock fashion”, began posting a couple of weeks ago, spinning off from Paul Gorman’s book of the same name. Pieces there which immediately catch my eye are a skate through Billy Bowers’ outrageous clothing designs and a nice potted-history of the “tits tee”. I’d not realised before that the history of this latter creation goes back beyond punk to the early Seventies, another example of the evolution from post-psychedelic freakery to punk being a process of gradual elision, not the clean break that lazy commentary often suggests.

Also arriving (and noted everywhere by now) is io9, a new addition to the Gawker network, which looks at sf-related culture. I’ve already had a traffic spike from there after they linked to my Hugh Ferriss post and it’s good to see that Bldg Blog‘s Geoff Manaugh is among their contributors.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Ave Atque Vale!

Joe Orton Online

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Joe Orton by John Haynes.

Last April I wrote that pioneering gay playwright Joe Orton was poorly represented on the web, unaware at the time that an official Orton site was being planned. Now web designer Alison Forsythe has written to say that the site was launched yesterday on what would have been Orton’s 75th birthday.

Joe Orton Online is exactly the resource I’d been looking for, with detailed information about the writer and a wealth of biographical material, reminiscences from collaborators and enthusiasts and a collection of ephemera. It’s especially good to be able to see the library books which Orton and his partner Kenneth Halliwell defaced (I’d say improved) for their own amusement, and which led to them receiving short prison sentences for vandalism.

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Two of the defaced library books.

Also present are a number of manuscript extracts, including samples of his very early works, and some of the “Edna Welthorpe” letters, another Joe and Ken wheeze which adopted the persona of a priggish middle-aged woman to poke fun at the Welthorpes of the world by agreeing with their petty outrages.

For those impatient with the written word, there’s a fair amount of Orton-related material on YouTube, including what appears to be all of Prick Up Your Ears. (Buy the DVD you cheapskates!) Most fascinating and valuable for Ortonites is a section of a documentary about Kenneth Williams which discusses the actor’s association with Orton and features a rare TV appearance by the man himself.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The lost boys: Brian Epstein, Joe Orton and Joe Meek
Joe Orton

James Bond postage stamps

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Proving once again the centrality of James Bond to contemporary British identity, the Royal Mail releases these stamps on January 8th, 2008, the 100th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s birth. If a sexist state assassin seems an awkward choice of cultural ambassador, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill present a more iconoclastic view of the super spy in the Black Dossier, the latest volume in their unfolding history of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Good to see that the stamp designs above include the Pan paperback covers from 1963. (The other examples are the first editions from Jonathan Cape, the 2006 Penguin reprints and what appear to be a set of Seventies reissues.) A friend of mine at school had a collection of the Pan books and they remain my favourite Bond book designs, not least because they were some of the first book covers to strike me as being well-designed rather than well-illustrated. What the Flickr link doesn’t show is the die-cut holes in the Thunderball jacket which made the cover seem as though it was pierced by bullets, the kind of expensive production detail you rarely see on anything other than a bestseller.

And while we’re on the subject of Bond design, Daniel Kleinman’s superb Casino Royale title sequence is on YouTube.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Please Mr. Postman