Irish writer J Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) has long been a favourite of mine since I first discovered his weird tales in ghost story collections, still the place you’re most likely to find his work. His ghost stories are frequently superior to the more celebrated MR James (who edited a Le Fanu collection), they’re less formulaic and often quite inexplicable. Green Tea, from In a Glass Darkly (1872) chills for its atmosphere of apparently random and unjustified malevolence; it’s also alarming for the directness of its central idea which I won’t spoil if you haven’t read it. Anyone wanting to know why Le Fanu is still read today should start there.

Unlike MR James, Le Fanu has lacked for illustrators so I was surprised to find this edition of his work at Archive.org with illustrations by his son, Brinsley. The artwork isn’t of the highest quality, and it’s debatable whether tales as nebulous and evocative as ghost stories should be illustrated at all, but their singularity makes them worth a look. The Watcher and Other Weird Stories is a small collection which includes A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter, a story memorably adapted for television by Leslie Megahey in 1979.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Chiaroscuro

In Spaces Between from The Great Old Ones (1999).

Some noteworthy pieces of news as the month draws to a rain-sodden and dismal conclusion.

• Frank Woodward was in touch this week to let me know that his excellent HP Lovecraft documentary, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, will at last be appearing on DVD in October. This is a feature-length appraisal of Lovecraft’s life, work and influence, and includes contributions from Neil Gaiman, John Carpenter, Guillermo Del Toro, Caitlin R Kiernan, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell and Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi. A number of my artworks are included throughout and they’ll probably also be featured in a gallery section on the disc. The film was shot in HD so it’s being released on Blu-ray as well as regular DVD.

• Also Lovecraft-related, and also due out shortly, is DM Mitchell’s follow-up to the landmark Starry Wisdom anthology of Lovecraft-inspired texts and graphics. That volume was acclaimed in some quarters and condemned in others; I don’t doubt that this new work, Songs of the Black Wurm Gism, will manage the same. Contributors include David Britton, Grant Morrison and yours truly. The cover is Alan Moore’s splendid portrait of Asmodeus.

• Last but not least, Paul Schütze was also in touch this week with news that two more audio works have been added to his online catalogue. Soundworks 01 is his atmospherics created with with Andrew Hulme from the recent TV drama series Red Riding, while Tokyo/Osaka Live is two pieces of improvisation with Simon Hopkins. Both releases are available through iTunes.

I was a Space Age boy. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in Project Mercury’s Friendship 7 a month before I was born, and growing up in the 1960s it was impossible to be unaware of the NASA missions. The first encyclopaedia I was given in 1967 had a whole chapter about the Mercury and Gemini projects which ran from the late 1950s through to 1966. A subsequent section showed an artist’s impression of how it might look when we were exploring the Moon and the planets. By the time the photo above was taken, in 1968 or ’69, I was obsessed with the Apollo missions and had the names of the astronauts memorised the way others memorised the names of football players. (Everyone knows Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon; I’ve never forgotten that Michael Collins was the third member of the team, waiting for them in the command module.) For a while there was an American boy at school of whom I was deeply jealous; his father was in the USAF and his family had actually been present during the launch of Apollo 8!

Space was everywhere, it became a dominant theme, at least while the Apollo missions lasted. Pop culture of the 1950s had its share of rockets ships and flying saucers but was predominantly filled with Westerns and other Earth-bound adventures. You can see a watershed moment occurring when the hugely popular Gerry Anderson puppet shows went from the cowboy adventure of Four Feather Falls in 1960 to the science fiction of Supercar and, immediately after that, the full-on space adventure of Fireball XL5 in 1961 and ’62. Cowboys couldn’t compete with astronauts; Supercar and subsequent Anderson shows were regularly repeated; Four Feather Falls wasn’t. As well as being enthused by the Anderson shows I enjoyed something called Space Patrol, another science fiction puppet series which few now seem to remember.

A page from a 1977 catalogue for Airfix model kits. I had the lunar module and the Saturn V. I don’t recall ever being interested in the Russian craft.

I wasn’t watching TV when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon—it was 3.39 am here, I was fast asleep—but that didn’t matter, it was the event rather than the moment which counted. And there were five more landings following Apollo 11, each repeating those first moments and all accepted with the same spirit of innocent enthusiasm. What none of us kids realised at the time was that these events weren’t universally seen as a positive thing. Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson later declared that going into space was the next crucial step in human evolution but you wouldn’t know it looking through the underground press of the period. Appraisal of the NASA missions was filtered through the prisms of the Cold War and the cultural war of the 1960s, with the entire Apollo enterprise being seen as a spin-off of the US military—the astronauts were all airforce pilots, after all—encouraged by a despised President Nixon and used as a means of embarrassing the Soviet Union. (That latter point tends to forget that the Russians were playing tit-for-tat, and had earlier embarrassed the US with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin.) No one wanted to support men with crewcuts who prayed in space and enjoyed country & western music. And few were prepared to concede that a President stoking the Vietnam War might have inadvertently done something worthwhile by continuing Kennedy’s space programme.

The cover of International Times for July 18, 1969, the Moon mission seen as an exploding Coke bottle which shatters the sky. An editorial within complains about the hoisting of an American flag on the Earth’s satellite.

There was a similar hostility in the attitudes of some of the younger breed of sf writers of the time who saw the Moon missions being praised and supported by the old guard of sf and, like the counterculture freaks, seemed disappointed by the conservative character of the astronauts. I only know this retrospectively, of course, but the complaints have always seemed rather purposeless; those guys were test pilots, what else were people expecting? Equally dismaying was the amount of times throughout the Seventies and Eighties you’d hear black musicians only referring to the space missions in terms of a waste of money. What happened, I’d want to know, to Sun Ra’s “Space is the place”, to the elegant science fiction of Samuel R Delany, and to Parliament’s Mothership Connection? (For a more positive attitude we now have Afrofuturism.)

My own disappointment came in 1972 when it became evident that the whole show was over. As Tom Wolfe notes, after the Moon landing there was nowhere left to go. I developed a taste for written science fiction which lasted for several years but I’ve wondered sometimes whether that sense of a vaunted interplanetary future being brought to a dead stop isn’t the reason why I’ve since regarded all visions of the future as deeply suspect. Everything in the 1960s told us that by 2009 we’d have bases on the moon and probably Mars; some of us might be living in Gerard K O’Neill’s space colonies. When that future, which for a while seemed not only likely but inevitable, can be so easily short-circuited, why should we believe any others presented to us?

Related links:
• NASA’s pages for the Apollo missions
• Wired: The Moon Landings: Fact, Not Fiction
• Wired: The Science of Apollo 11
• Geeta Dayal on Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks
by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno
• Pink Floyd’s Moon-Landing Jam Session
• Armstrong and Aldrin’s “lost Lunar City”
• Julius Grimm’s map of the Moon from 1888

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Apollo liftoff
• Earthrise
• East of Paracelsus

I said, “Girl, you drank a lot of Drink Me,
But you ain’t in a Wonderland
You know I might-a be there to greet you, child,
When your trippin’ ship touches sand.”

Donovan, The Trip (1966).

Most of the key texts of the psychedelic period tend to be either non-fiction—Huxley’s Doors of Perception, Leary’s Psychedelic Experience—or spiritual works such as The Tibetan Book of the Dead , upon which Leary’s book is based and which provided John Lennon with lines for the lyrics of Tomorrow Never Knows. The key fictional work of the era has to be Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, a fact which would have surprised the book’s legions of enthusiastic Victorian readers, never mind its author. Grace Slick created the definitive Alice song with White Rabbit in 1965, written while she was with the Great Society but only recorded properly in 1967 after she’d joined Jefferson Airplane. Alice’s adventures run a rich seam of Victorian whimsy through the music of 1966 to ’69, especially among the British bands whose lyrics tend to be far more childish and silly than their American counterparts. Donovan probably got there first among the Brits with The Trip on his Sunshine Superman album. Among the subsequent flood of references can be found one-off singles such as Alice in Wonderland (1967) by the Dave Heenan Set (who recorded songs for the Barbarella soundtrack as The Glitterhouse) and Jabberwock/Which Dreamed It? (1968) by Boeing Duveen & The Beautiful Soup, a band whose songwriter is better known today as Hank Wangford.

Which florid preamble brings us to this television film version of the first Alice book by writer/director/doctor Jonathan Miller, first broadcast by the BBC as part of the Wednesday Play strand in December 1966. This was one of Miller’s earliest outings as a film director and his earlier role in the Beyond the Fringe team (with Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) helps explain its extraordinary cast of acting and comedy talent, all of whom portray Carroll’s characters without masks or any kind of animal impersonation: Wilfred Bramble is a rather camp White Rabbit, Finlay Currie plays the Dodo, Michael Redgrave is the Caterpillar, Leo McKern drags up as the ugly Duchess and John Gielgud is the Mock Turtle. Alan Bennett and Peter Cook appear as the Mouse and Mad Hatter respectively which always makes me wonder why Dudley Moore is missing. The most surprising cast member is Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts, Sellers being an international film star by this point and about to appear in a string of Hollywood-goes-psych films with the sprawling Casino Royale, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! and The Magic Christian. In this respect Miller’s Alice acts as a precursor to the burgeoning excesses of the decade, just as Tomorrow Never Knows and Donovan’s Sunshine Superman album (both made the same year as Miller’s film) stand as signposts for the music of the next two years. Miller was certainly paying attention to cultural developments outside the BBC, most strikingly with the musical score which erupts into sitar and tabla at the first appearance of the White Rabbit. The music was specially composed by Ravi Shankar and this alone indelibly links the film to its period. The moody black and white photography was by Dick Bush who also photographed Miller’s stunning BBC adaptation of MR James’ ghost story Whistle and I’ll Come to You two years later.

The only flaw for me in an otherwise excellent production is the rather wooden performance of Anne-Marie Mallik as Alice who not only seems too old for the role (about 14 or so) but, in her one and only performance, can’t possibly compete against such a heavyweight cast. Grumbles aside I love the reimagining of Wonderland as a rambling, semi-deserted mansion and grounds. Given Miller’s medical background and the lack of animal characteristics, one can interpret Alice’s experience as being a journey through a Victorian madhouse. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad,” as the Cheshire Cat says in the book. Close viewing reveals some additional surprises with an uncredited Eric Idle in a couple of scenes and also minuscule Angelo Muscat whose most famous role was the silent butler in The Prisoner TV series. Leo McKern played No. 2 in several episodes of The Prisoner so when we see them here exiting hand-in-hand it’s as though they’re both leaving to search for Patrick McGoohan.

I don’t much like the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland, and don’t recall having seen the popular 1973 version starring Fiona Fullerton. Film and TV adaptations of Alice are legion, of course, as are illustrated versions; Tim Burton has his own adaptation due next year. That seems promising but for now I’ll stick with Miller’s film and what I imagine is still the strangest version of them all, Jan Svankmajer’s semi-animated Alice from 1988.

Both Miller’s BBC films are available on DVD.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Patrick McGoohan and The Prisoner
• Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films
• The L.S. Bumble Bee
• The Illustrators of Alice

The Chevalier d’Eon wins a fencing bout.

I’ve known of the cross-dressing Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Thimothée d’Eon de Beaumont—or the Chevalier d’Eon (1728–1810) to give him his title—for some time thanks to a typically witty and informative entry by Philip Core in Camp: The Lie that Tells the Truth (1984). The nobleman rubs shoulders there with the equally flamboyant Henry Paget (1875–1905), Fifth Marquess of Anglesey, known as “the Dancing Marquess”, and Romain de Tirtoff, better known as illustrator and designer, Erté, who we see in a photo dressed as “Claire de Lune”. Aside from his status as a historical curio, and a failed attempt by Havelock Ellis to borrow his name to describe transvestism—Eonism, the Chevalier seems less celebrated than he might be. So it’s a pleasure to hear that theatre director Robert Lepage has created a new stage production, Eonnagatta, based on the Chevalier’s colourful life:

For a long time now, the actor and experimental theatre director Robert Lepage has been fascinated by the life of the Chevalier d’Eon, an 18th-century French soldier who had a flamboyant career as a diplomat and secret agent for Louis XV, and spent much of his adult life dressed as a woman. Officially, the Chevalier’s skirts were worn as a professional disguise: his exceptionally fine features allowed him to pass easily for a woman, and thus move around undetected as a spy. But the Chevalier didn’t just do it for the job. He was a genuine cross-dresser, an 18th-century transvestite.

Lepage’s fascination has now led to Eonnagata, a daring collaboration inspired by the life of the Chevalier that gets its British premiere next week. The work has been put together by four very different, and internationally acclaimed, artists: there’s Lepage, the choreographer Russell Maliphant, the dancer Sylvie Guillem and the fashion designer Alexander McQueen. That’s quite a team – and the result is a unique hybrid of their art forms. How would they describe it? Maliphant gives it a go: “It’s not pure dance: it doesn’t have Sylvie doing splits or amazing falls. But it’s not pure theatre, either.” (More.)

Eonnagata.

So, a camp character from a camp era, then, although the Chevalier slightly predates the Regency camp of Beau Brummell and his foppish entourage. D’Eon was renowned for his prowess as a swordsman and despite its lethal nature there’s something camp about the swordfight, especially in its 18th century incarnation when fencing matches reduced the deadly art of the rapier duel to a mannered, rule-bound sport rather like a ballet with weapons. Being a spy for Louis XV, the Chevalier’s swordplay would have been a serious business and there’s something satisfying about the engraving above which shows him besting an opponent in a fencing match for the English Prince Regent; this was a man who was capable of defending his non-conformity to the utmost.

The unusual title of Lepage’s stage production is derived from the onnagata, male actors in Japanese kabuki who perform female roles. This tradition may explain why the Chevalier’s character has also been used as the basis for a recent Japanese anime series, Chevalier: Le Chevalier D’Eon, one of the few fictional manifestations of his life.

D’Eon is a member of the Secret Police, working in the shadows to keep the peace within French society. When his sister suddenly turns up floating down a river in a coffin with ‘Psalms’ written on it, D’Eon is thrown into a deadly struggle with revolutionaries and supernatural forces in order to uncover the truth behind his sister’s death. D’Eon looks remarkably like Lia, which turns to his advantage whenever he needs to meet with a ruler who was once Lia’s friend.

left: The Dancing Marquess relaxes; right: Bridget from Guilty Gear.

Given the way that most anime boys are distinctly androgynous, he wouldn’t have to try too hard to impersonate his sister. And impersonation gives a boy an excuse to drag up, of course, rather than leaving the series writers to tackle (or ignore) the adventure-unfriendly issue of gender confusion or transvestism. Japanese culture seems far more open to this kind of identity play than we’re used to here. The character of Bridget in fighting game Guilty Gear, for example, is actually a boy who was “born in a village where the birth of twins of the same gender was considered bad luck, and hence his family named and raised him as a girl.” Can you imagine American film or TV executives approving a story—for kids, yet—with a cross-dressing central character? Neither can I. I’ve yet to see any anime which can hold my attention for long but Chevalier may be worth seeking out. If anyone has seen it, please leave a comment.

Eonnagata runs from 26 Feb–8 Mar 2009 at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive

Cover painting by Tom Phillips, design by Russell Mills.

A post for a Thursday.

Brian Eno’s ambient music receives a lot of playing time here, especially Music for Airports, On Land, The Shutov Assembly and, when something really minimal is required, Neroli. But it’s Thursday Afternoon which receives the most attention. Recorded at the request of Sony Japan in 1984, Thursday Afternoon is a single piece which originally accompanied seven of Eno’s “video paintings”, each of them showing Christine Alicino warped and blurred by ultra-slow motion and video noise. Like his earlier static views of the New York skyline, Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan, filming vertically means that proper viewing can only be achieved by turning the TV on its side. The soundtrack is a beautifully rendered composition which uses Eno’s customary process of letting a number of looped phrases form a shifting musical moiré.

Compositionally, Thursday Afternoon belongs to the family of works which also includes Discreet Music and Music for Airports. Like them it is an even-textured, spacious and contemplative piece in which several musical events appear and recur more or less regularly. Each event, however, recurs with a different cyclic frequency and thus the whole piece becomes an unfolding display of unique sonic clusters. Eno has characterised this style of composition as “holographic”, by which he means that any brief section of the music is representative of the whole piece, in the same way that any fragment of a hologram shows the whole of the holographic image but with a lower resolution. (From the album notes.)

Daniel Lanois, Roger Eno and Michael Brook were all involved in the creation and production of Thursday Afternoon and the piece works as well played very quietly as it does at louder volume. When played louder more of the background detail becomes apparent, including some very faint birdsong which is most discernible at the end when much of the music has faded away. Perfect for colouring the atmosphere of a room whilst reading, working or talking with friends. It’s also a favourite of mine for playing in the bedroom with someone special.

Thursday Afternoon was released on video cassette then appeared on CD in 1985. As a single track of 61 minutes, this was one of the first original recordings which made specific use of the extended running time of the CD format. The cover painting was by {feuilleton} favourite, artist Tom Phillips, with design by artist and designer Russell Mills. Ten years earlier, Eno had used a detail of Phillips’ painting After Raphael on the cover of Another Green World.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that you can now see the original sound and vision version of Thursday Afternoon at Ubuweb. Not ideal by any means but it gives you an idea of the complete work rather than the trunctated versions on YouTube. Eno’s video paintings, Thursday Afternoon included, are now available on DVD should you require them in higher quality. Just be prepared to turn your TV on its side.

Update: Eno’s ambient processes have now reached the iPhone with the Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers app, Bloom.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tiger Mountain Strategies
• 20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips
• Generative culture
• Exposure by Robert Fripp
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Patrick McGoohan as Number Six.

“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

The Prisoner, which ran for seventeen episodes from 1967 to 1968, was the best original drama series there’s ever been on television. Period, as Harlan Ellison would say. Best because it grabbed the format of the TV adventure series with both hands and subverted the expectations of the audience and the people who were paying for it. Best because it dared to do this at a time when there was little precedent for experiment in a medium that was barely a decade old. Best because it had something important to say while still being entertaining. And best because it had Patrick McGoohan in the central role at the peak of his acting career.

Fiction can be anything but to look at what we’re offered by TV studios you wouldn’t know it. Cop shows, hospital shows, detective shows and soap operas proliferate, ad infinitum. The Prisoner came out of Danger Man, an immensely successful post-James Bond spy series which may have been popular but, McGoohan’s presence aside, has little to recommend it today. It lacked the camp bravura of The Avengers and couldn’t compete with the budgets of the Bond films. But it’s fair to say that without it McGoohan wouldn’t have had the chance to do something radical. ITC’s Lew Grade thought he was getting Danger Man 2 with better production values; what he received—to his eventual dismay—was the kind of television one would expect if the staff of Michael Moorcock’s speculative fiction magazine New Worlds had been given a fat budget and free reign. Like New Worlds, The Prisoner seized familiar genre themes but took them as a means to an end, not an end in themselves. The series borrowed from science fiction and spy thrillers—brainwashing and mind control, Cold War paranoia, the limitless surveillance and duplicity of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—and used a drama format to say something direct and personal to its audience about individual freedom, the limits and excesses of the state and the importance of being able to say “No” when the world insists that you capitulate.

Number Six by Roland Topor.

McGoohan was the driving force as well as the star. His own company, Everyman Films, produced the series for ITC, he planned everything with the writers, wrote three episodes and directed five of them himself. The Prisoner only lasted for a season and a half—cut short after Grade lost his patience—but the form was potentially endless, able to present a familiar Cold War spy story on the one hand, while having an entire episode play as a Western, on the other. In one of the later episodes McGoohan is largely absent when his mind is transferred to another man’s body and he finds himself living a new life, ostensibly a free man. (But freedom in The Prisoner is always circumscribed.) The last three episodes collapse everything that’s preceded them into intense and increasingly surreal psychodrama. Like Moorcock’s fluid character Jerry Cornelius, whose exploits were running in New Worlds while The Prisoner was being broadcast, McGoohan had found a vehicle to say what he wanted about the world using popular culture. It’s a coincidence but I’ve always found it apt that the cover illustration for Moorcock’s novella The Deep Fix (1966) included a figure obviously modelled on McGoohan’s Danger Man. The book’s tagline “Drugs took him into a nightmare world where logic ceased to exist” could be a description of a later Prisoner episode. Apt too that the first novel based on the series in 1969 was by New Worlds regular Thomas M Disch.

(James Colvin was a Moorcock nom-de-plume.)

The Prisoner was produced in the era of the social dramas of The Wednesday Play and Play for Today yet it remains relevant in a way its worthier contemporaries could scarcely manage. Social realism dates as quickly as yesterday’s news but allegory stays fresh. And it’s a dismal truth that the world of infinite surveillance has crept closer in a way that few would have imagined possible in 1968. The cameras which follow McGoohan’s Number Six everywhere are a familiar sight on Britain’s streets; a headline in yesterday’s Independent newspaper read: “Big Brother database a ‘terrifying’ assault on traditional freedoms“. McGoohan was raised in Ireland and would have appreciated the adherence of another Irishman, James Joyce, to the Luciferian cry of disobedience in Ulysses, “Non serviam!”—I will not serve. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus defies God and his family; McGoohan’s Number Six defies everything else. That example, of the man who can “make putting on his dressing gown appear as an act of defiance”, is something we need as much now as we did in 1968. Hollywood is currently threatening a big screen version but why wait for more compromised studio product when you can go to the source. Get yourself a deep fix—it’s a masterpiece.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Thomas M Disch, 1940–2008
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt.

2008: the year that keeps on taking.

The Guardian has a copious collection of Pinter pieces including Michael Billington’s lengthy obituary. Eartha Kitt was just as unique in her own way, prompting Orson Welles in the 1950s to call her “the most exciting woman in the world”. For my sister and I a decade later she was the most exciting Catwoman in the world and that’s how I’ll remember her. But let’s not forget those Cha-Cha Heels…

Eartha’s frivolity might seem to jar beside Pinter’s moral and political seriousness but the World Socialist Web Site managed to link the pair with a priceless headline, Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt, artists and opponents of imperialist war. Their article tells you a few things about Eartha that many of the obituaries would have ignored. I’m sure Pinter would have been proud to hear of her speaking her mind at the White House. The world is a smaller place when talents and voices like these are gone.

The Clangers (and a Froglet).

Lots of eulogies for Oliver Postgate doing the rounds just now, somewhat inevitable when his Smallfilms productions for the BBC furnished the imaginations of generations of British children in the Sixties and Seventies. Smallfilms’ films matched their name, being short animations created on minimal budgets by a trio of Postgate (writing, narration), Peter Firmin (artwork and animation) and Vernon Elliot (music). Postgate’s voice was the single constant across the disparate stories. For anyone of a certain age his distinctive tones carry that punch of primal recognition common to all things which make a strong impression during childhood.

Noggin the Nog.

I watched everything Smallfilms produced but being a space-obsessed Space Age kid my favourites were always The Clangers, a family of hooting, pink creatures who shared a moon-like planetoid with a Soup Dragon and (in an orbiting nest) an Iron Chicken. Being equally obsessed with Norse mythology, however, I also enjoyed Noggin the Nog, which never seemed to get repeated very often, probably because the early films were made in black and white. Oliver Postgate seemed to like dragons; as well as the Soup Dragon, Noggin had a very traditional Ice Dragon with a pile of treasure while the otherwise non-fantasy Ivor the Engine—tales of a small Welsh steam train—included a tiny dragon among the cast of characters, perhaps derived from the national emblem of Wales. Postgate and Peter Firmin reworked some of these stories into book form and my favourite books in our school library were the Noggin the Nog ones and Tove Jansson’s tales of the Moomins. The Clangers aren’t as alien as they first appear when you know that their true identity can be found in the 1967 tale of Noggin and the Moon Mouse.

Needless to say, YouTube has numerous opportunities for us to sate curiosity or indulge nostalgia, including BBC 4’s 2005 documentary about Smallfilms. The Guardian gathered a few choice examples as an addendum to their obituary page.

• Lengthy Times obituary
• The homespun genius of Oliver Postgate
• See Emily play | The BBC meets the girl from Bagpuss

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Occultism for kids

More cult stuff from Ubuweb, you lucky people. Being a big Tom Phillips enthusiast I’ve been watching A TV Dante (1989) for years, having taped the one and only broadcast of the series. I also bought the accompanying booklet (below).

This ambitious program, produced by the award-winning film director Peter Greenaway and internationally-known artist Tom Phillips, brings to life the first eight cantos of Dante’s Inferno. Featuring a cast that includes Sir John Gielgud as Virgil, the cantos are not conventionally dramatized. Instead, the feeling of Dante’s poem is conveyed through juxtaposed imagery that conjures up a contemporary vision of hell, and its meaning is deciphered by eminent scholars in visual sidebars who interpret Dante’s metaphors and symbolism. This program makes Dante accessible to the MTV generation. Caution to viewers: program contains nudity. (8 segments, 11 minutes each)

Given the nature of the collaboration, this can’t be compared to many other TV productions. Greenaway wasn’t staging a drama, he was using the TV screen as a flat space like a moving painting, or a series of diagrams and connected symbol systems. The division of the screen has a parallel in some of Phillips’s paintings (and his artist’s book of the Inferno) and makes use of Phillips’s familiar stencil lettering. There are actors: as mentioned above, Sir John Gielgud took the role of Virgil, with Bob Peck as Dante and Joanne Whalley-Kilmer as Beatrice. And there are recurrent motifs: triangle, concentric circles, cardiograph displays, Muybridge animations and so on. “Footnotes” were provided by a company of experts who appear in small inset panels to comment on the text while it’s being read. Phillips himself is one of the principal commentators since it was his translation being used.

Peter Greenaway’s feature films have never interested me very much, I prefer him when he’s doing things like this which probably explains why I like Prospero’s Books, his version of The Tempest; much of that film’s approach seems to have been developed from A TV Dante. It’s a shame that only eight of the Cantos were filmed in this way. There were plans to film all thirty four using other directors (with Greenaway to return at the end) but this endeavour took place at the end of the period when Channel 4 was still a haven for unusual arts projects. Regime change subsequently charted a course for the lowest common denominator. And with the two leading actors now dead it wouldn’t be possible to resume the project. In the end this doesn’t matter too much. What remains is an introduction to a perennially fascinating book and an example of how television could—if someone had the courage—ditch the clichés of drama documentary and try something genuinely new.

• The official Tom Phillips website
• The Tom Phillips blog

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Osborne’s Dorian Gray
• 20 Sites n Years revisited
• The last circle of the Inferno
• 20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips

The enigmatic hibiscus: Le Testament d’Orphée (1960).

Here’s a conundrum for you: what connects Jean Cocteau, Ravi Shankar, Doctor Who and March of the Penguins? Read on and all will become crystal clear….

This latest { feuilleton } examination of the byways of musical culture isn’t concerned so much with an individual artist, more with a particular sound. Timbre is the keyword here, usually defined as “the distinctive property of a complex sound”, and my own interest in unusual timbres goes back to a childhood fascination with those corrugated plastic tubes which produce a variable, high-pitched drone when whirled over the head. The principal characteristic of that sound is the purity of its tone, a quality also found in electronic music, of course, but that purity was known hundreds of years before synthesizers in the music produced by glass instruments. This post isn’t intended as a detailed history of the world of glass instruments and glass music, the subject is bigger than you might imagine. Consider this an aperitif, and an account of the solving of a nagging musical mystery.

The conundrum begins when I returned from Paris two years ago with a DVD of Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphée, a film unavailable on disc at that time in the UK. The French connection here is an appropriate one, as will become evident. One of the many motifs in the film is the recurrent image of a hibiscus flower given to Cocteau by actor Edouard Dermithe. Cocteau carries the flower with him in subsequent scenes and whenever it’s shown in close-up a peculiar musical signature of three short notes is played. I thought at first this might be an electronic sound but there seemed to be no way to find out for sure. It transpires that the answer was hiding in plain sight all the time but the roundabout discovery has taken me into areas I might otherwise have missed. Whatever the solution, I was sufficiently intrigued to sample it and make it the text (SMS) ringtone for my phone.

The next piece of the puzzle was also film-related and came with the acquisition of a Ravi Shankar album, Transmigration Macabre. This short work was recorded in 1967 as the score for a British “art film”, Viola, which is sufficiently obscure to be absent from IMDB’s database. The second track on the album, Fantasy, was a revelation; in place of sitar, the whole piece is played on the same instrument which was used to create the Cocteau sound…but what was it? My copy was missing the necessary credits so I was left guessing. Was it some strange Indian keyboard? Something played through a ring modulator? Mentioning this mystery to my good friend Gav—he of the Metabolist vinyl, Igor Wakhévitch albums, vast Jandek obsession, and the only person I know who might care about this kind of pressing issue, never mind be able to solve it—prompted the suggestion that the instrument might be a glass harmonica (below). Well yes and no; the sound of a glass harmonica (or hydrocrystalophone) is close but has a higher register which lacks the depth of the Cocteau/Shankar instrument. Björk used one for a track on Homogenic and as an instrument it’s certainly unusual and fascinating. Contemporary models are based on Benjamin Franklin’s treadle-operated machine which turned the familiar arrangement of tuned wine glasses or “glass harp” (something Björk has also used) into a proper musical instrument. Franklin’s machine uses a foot-powered treadle to turn an iron spindle holding 37 nested bowls; the bowls are soaked with water and wet fingers applied to the bowl edges to create the sounds. The unique timbres produced by the instrument aren’t so surprising to an audience familiar with electronic sounds but were novel enough in the 18th and 19th century to inspire rumours of the instrument causing madness in players and listeners. Wikipedia has a wonderful example of glass harmonica playing which demonstrates its ethereal quality. There’s something very magical about sounds produced by non-electronic means which yet seem so otherworldly; theremins can sound shrill and graceless in comparison. That Wikipedia page also contains the solution to my musical mystery but the answer for me came via a different source.

left: Structures Sonores No. 4 by Lasry Baschet; right: La Marche de l’Empereur by Emilie Simon.

Discussion of the Cocteau/Shankar question prompted the remembrance of another soundtrack with a similar quality, a theme for a long-running TV programme for British schools called Picture Box. The programme itself was undistinguished (short films from around the world) but Gav and I had always been intrigued by the strange title music which accompanied film of a spinning antique glass case. That title sequence had to be on YouTube, right? Of course it is, together with the reminiscences of people traumatised when they were kids by the “scary” title music. And this was indeed the Cocteau/Shankar instrument! A quick jump to TV Cream supplied the vital details: the theme was Manege from Structures Sonores No. 4 by Lasry Baschet, a 10-inch vinyl release from the 1960s on Disques Bam. So the instrument in question was revealed as—voila!—the Cristal Baschet or Cristal as it’s now known. Sure enough, looking again at the opening credits of the Cocteau film, Lasry Baschet are mentioned for their “Structures Sonores”. Georges Auric is the credited music composer yet having watched the film again recently I noticed brief snatches of Cristal music in two scenes. The Lasry component of Lasry Baschet was Jacques and Yvonne Lasry, two Cristal players and composers, while Baschet was Bernard and François Baschet, a pair of inventors who developed the instrument in 1952. “For 150 years,” François Baschet said in a 1962 TIME interview, “the only instruments that have been invented have been the saxophone, the musical saw and concrete and electronic music. Why?” Why, indeed. The Cristal was one of their answers to that question. Contemporary Cristal player Thomas Bloch describes the instrument:

The Cristal Baschet (sometimes called Crystal Organ and in English, Crystal Baschet) is composed of 54 chromatically tuned glass rods, rubbed with wet fingers. So, it is close to the Glassharmonica. But in the Cristal Baschet, the vibration of the glass is passed on to the heavy block of metal by a metal stem whose variable length determines the frequency (the note). Amplification is obtained by fiberglass cones fixed on wood and by a tall cut out metal part, in the shape of a flame. “Whiskers”, placed under the instrument, to the right, increase the sound power of high-pitched sounds.

A modern Cristal from the player’s side.

The original glass rod “keyboard” was vertical which must have made playing difficult. This was changed to a horizontal arrangement in 1970. It’s the combination of metal and glass that gives the instrument its distinctive timbre, with the large metal amplifying cones adding the tonal richness which the glass harmonica lacks. This page notes its use on the Shankar album and, showing again the attraction for those wanting distinctive soundtracks, it transpires that original Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert had been eager in 1963 to commission Lasry Baschet to create a theme for the BBC’s new science fiction series. The idea was dropped when negotiations proved difficult so Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire (the subject of an earlier post) were called in to create their now-famous theme tune.

Thomas Bloch with one of his Cristals.

The Cristal is still in use today, with Thomas Bloch and Michel Deneuve being two of its principal virtuosi. Bloch also plays the glass harmonica and that other fine example of Francophone ethereality, the Ondes Martenot, and has a great set of YouTube performances including this multi-Cristal concert. France is certainly a country which enjoys these kinds of sound and all the main players of the Cristal seem to be French. It’s significant that the sole example of glass instrumentation on Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones: Experimental Musical Instruments, a 1996 book and CD documenting unusual instruments, was by Jean-Claude Chapuis, another glass virtuoso who also plays the Cristal. It’s significant too that the Cristal is most widely-known for its use in soundtracks. This is often the fate of new or experimental instruments; Oskar Sala’s Trautonium is permanently linked to Alfred Hitchcock after it was used to generate some of the sounds for The Birds. And I was reading recently about the Hang, a metal bowl used by Cliff Martinez in his score for Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris. Emilie Simon’s marvellous, award-winning score for the original (French) release of March of the Penguins (2005) featured Thomas Bloch playing his Cristal, glass harmonica and Ondes Martenot. (Simon’s score was deemed by Hollywood to be too weird so the film was re-scored for its American incarnation.)

All this Cristalography leaves little room for an examination of other glass musicians or music, some of whom are considerably more avant garde (and often less harmonious) in their approach. As I said, it’s a big field but mention should at least be made of The Glass World of Anna Lockwood (1970) (later Annea Lockwood), a collection of atonal scrapes, shrieks and clangs produced by various pieces of glass, including wine glasses. Then there’s Angus Maclaurin’s excellent Glass Music (2000), a unique work which Pitchfork called “an album of beautiful claustrophobia”. And Harry Partch, of course, with his Cloud Chamber Bowls. Lastly, minimalist composer Daniel Lentz wrote a stunning wine glass composition, Lascaux, which has recently been reissued on CD. An earlier version of that piece required the glasses to be filled with wine, not water, and for the players to drink the wine at various moments during the perfomance; this would alter the sound of the instruments and affect their playing.

Much of this activity, you’ll note, is lodged firmly at the “serious”, classical end of the musical spectrum, despite the efforts of Björk and Damon Albarn (a Cristal fan apparently) to broaden musical horizons. We’re still awaiting the Joanna Newsom of the Cristal, someone who can take the instrument as their own and lift it away from the classical repertoire and the realm of soundtrack novelty. Throw away your guitars, boys and girls, the crystal world has much more to offer.

Thanks to Gav for his invaluable record collection and assistance with this piece.

Further listening:
• Difference Tone: A Cristal Concert | Streaming audio at Archive.org

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A cluster of Cluster
• Max Eastley’s musical sculptures
• The Avant Garde Project
• White Noise: Electric Storms, Radiophonics and the Delian Mode
• Chrome: Perfumed Metal
• Exuma: Obeah men and the voodoo groove
• Metabolist: Goatmanauts, Drömm-heads and the Zuehl Axis
• The Ondes Martenot
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch

This is worth noting even though it’s nearly over, a short presentation of sound recordings by Chris Watson at the alt.gallery, Newcastle. Watson was a founder member of one of my favourite groups of the post-punk era, Cabaret Voltaire. He left CV in 1981 and shortly thereafter formed The Hafler Trio, an experimental audio outfit with whom I conducted some correspondence for a couple of years. I still have a letter somewhere signed by the group authorising me to act (creatively) on their behalf, a licence I’m sorry to say I never took advantage of beyond sneaking the name of their enigmatic mentor, Robert Spridgeon, into the Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. Watson today is an internationally renowned wildlife sound recordist, responsible for a number of stunning CDs on the Touch label, as well as much work for television documentaries. The alt.gallery exhibition runs to August 6, 2008.

Oceanus Pacificus brings the sounds of the largest ocean, encompassing almost a third of our planet, into one of the UK’s smallest galleries. This unique four channel sound installation is created from nighttime underwater recordings of the Pacific Ocean.

Recorded at the depth of three metres, reflecting the exact physical dimensions of the gallery space, the installation presents underwater voices, rhythms and movements rarely heard by the human ear. The ebb and flow of the Humboldt Current creates a seductive and harmonic rhythm as cold water wells up from the depths, drawing up the sounds of life.

The recordings were made on location around the Galapagos Islands 1000km off the coast of Ecuador, using a pair of Dolphin Ear Pro Hydrophones onto a NAGRA ARES-PII digital audio recorder. The four hydrophones were fixed on a square wooden rig and suspended three metres below the surface at night to capture the voices and rhythms of this hostile environment.

Chris Watson is a sound recordist specialising in natural history with a particular and passionate interest in recording the wildlife sounds of animals, habitats and atmospheres from around the world. He is interested in the quality, depth and diversity of sounds produced by water, from single drops to streams, ice sheets, glaciers, waterfalls and oceans. He has described the sounds of water as “the music of another medium”.

He is one of the most prolific and versatile figures working in sound today. In 1971 he was a founder member of the influential Sheffield-based experimental music group Cabaret Voltaire and in 1981 was a member of The Hafler Trio. His sound recording career began in 1981 when he joined Tyne Tees Television. Since then he has worked with David Attenborough on BBC TV productions such as The Life of Birds and The Blue Planet.  In 1998 he won a BAFTA for Best Factual Recording for The Life of Birds.

He has produced various sound installations, including Whispering in the Leaves commissioned by AV Festival 08 and Forma. From 19 July – 2 November he will be presenting the sound installation Cima Verde as part of Manifesta 7 in Italy.

The 7” record Oceanus Pacificus was released by Touch in 2007 as part of the Touch Sevens series of 7” vinyl only releases. For further information please visit www.touchmusic.org.uk/touchsevens.

www.chriswatson.net

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Max Eastley’s musical sculptures
• The Avant Garde Project

I wrote recently about John Selwyn Gilbert’s television play, Aubrey, an hour-long drama concerning the artist Aubrey Beardsley. That play was only screened once in 1982 and, like most one-off studio works of the period, is unavailable on DVD. John Osborne’s 1976 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray is a welcome exception to this neglect and can be acquired in a box set along with three BBC productions of Wilde’s plays and a more recent Wilde documentary.

The plays are decent enough although the cast in the 1952 film version of The Importance of Being Earnest takes some beating. Dorian Gray is the essential work in this collection for me, even if its 100-minute running time cuts the story to the bone. The principal attraction in an entirely studio-bound work with few actors is the leads, and for this we have two great performances from John Gielgud as Lord Henry and Jeremy Brett as artist Basil Hallward. The tragic Dorian is played by Peter Firth who has difficulty keeping up with these heavyweights, especially in the later scenes when the story concentrates more fully on his predicament. Matters aren’t helped by his Yorkshire accent which frequently rises to the surface in a manner that would surely raise eyebrows in Mayfair drawing rooms.

Lord Henry & Basil Hallward admire the portrait.

Lord Henry’s role in Dorian Gray must be a difficult one for an actor since most of his Lordship’s lines are Wilde’s aphorisms delivered as though they’re natural speech. Gielgud pulls this off very adeptly without seeming as though he’s memorised a book of quotations. Jeremy Brett is suitably intense as the obsessed painter in an adaptation which brings to the surface the homoerotic subtext of Wilde’s novel. Lord Henry and Basil Hallward are besotted with their young discovery while Dorian’s later relationship with Alan Campbell is presented quite obviously as a gay affair with all its potential for scandal and ruined reputation. Rumours of similar affairs dogged John Osborne, partly on account of a long friendship with gay actor Anthony Creighton. An earlier play of Osborne’s, A Patriot for Me, also concerned homosexual scandal but Osborne’s interest in these matters seems to have been purely aesthetic and intellectual.

David Gallagher in Duncan Roy’s 2006 adaptation.

More recent adaptations have made the subtext fully explicit by updating the story, among them Will Self’s Dorian, an Imitation, Duncan Roy’s 2006 film (above) and Matthew Bourne’s dance version which is due its premiere in Edinburgh next month. Doing this seems to miss the point in a rather fundamental way. One of the significant frissons of the novel is the way it’s a gay text without saying so outright. In this respect it fulfils Philip Core’s definition of camp, being “a lie which tells the truth”. When the unsaid can be stated quite openly and all loves are free to speak their name, the tension which Wilde creates between “sin” and propriety collapses. Osborne pushes Wilde’s ambiguity as far as he can without seeming absurd or anachronistic.

Hallward’s painting when we get to see it bears a more than passing resemblance to the portrait of artist W Graham Robertson (below) which John Singer Sargent painted in 1894. Sargent was exactly the kind of portraitist Hallward is supposed to be, as well as being included frequently in lists of gay artists. In the BBC production Peter Firth poses in the same heavy overcoat with a cane in his left hand cane as Robertson does. Robertson was 28 at the time but Sargent painted him looking at least ten years younger in what must be the definitive portrait of a fey young aesthete.

W Graham Robertson by John Singer Sargent (1894).

The corrupt condition of the portrait in the final scene doesn’t bear comparison with Ivan Albright’s chilling vision in the 1945 Hollywood version but then few paintings could. As with Aubrey, this play comes from a time when the BBC was happy to commission cheap, small-scale productions and let the actors carry the thing. The attitude today is to try and compete with the film world which means that any period production costs a small fortune and needs inflated values (lots of stars, over-emphatic music and script) in order to justify its cost with foreign sales. Jeremy Brett was fortunate to catch the tail end of this era with his role as Sherlock Holmes in the Granada TV productions. A year after Dorian Gray, Judi Bowker, who plays the doomed actress Sybil Vane, took the part of Mina Harker in the BBC’s Count Dracula. Louis Jordan was the Count in that adaptation which, for its fidelity to the novel, still hasn’t been bettered. Count Dracula is also available on DVD which is some consolation if the corporation refuses to treat these works the way they used to. Dramas don’t need hidden portraits to fight the march of time, all they need is a new life on a silver disc.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert
• Because Wilde’s worth it
• Dorian Gray revisited
• “The game is afoot!”
• The Poet and the Pope
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

Aubrey Beardsley photographed by Frederick Evans (1894).

I’ve been going through the Coulthart VHS library recently, transferring to DVD recordings which can’t be purchased or found online. Among these is a drama from the BBC’s Playhouse strand, Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert, broadcast in 1982. This follows the life of artist Aubrey Beardsley from the time of Oscar Wilde’s arrest in April 1895—which event resulted in Beardsley losing his position at The Yellow Book—through the foundation of The Savoy magazine, to his tubercular death in March 1898.

John Dicks as Aubrey.

Playhouse was a BBC 2 equivalent of Play for Today (which usually ran on BBC 1) and Aubrey like many other dramas of the period was shot on video in the studio. This was done for convenience as well as being cheaper than shooting on film, since scenes could be filmed using several cameras simultaneously. The drawback is that the image looks very harsh, and historical works such as this often seem unreal and artificial as a result. That aside, this was an excellent production with some great performances, especially Ronald Lacey as Leonard Smithers and Rula Lenska as Aubrey’s sister, Mabel. The details of Beardsley’s life are very accurate, down to his beloved Mantegna prints on the walls, and many of the scenes are arranged to correspond with his drawings, the production design being largely monochrome.

Rula Lenska and John Dicks.

Despite the limited production, the mise-en-scene presents carefully framed shots like the one above which create Beardsley-like compositions. Geoff Powell was the production designer and Peter Hammond the director. Hammond later directed several of the Sherlock Holmes adaptations for Granada TV. Producer Rosemary Hill had previously produced some of the BBC’s ghost story adaptations which have acquired a cult reputation in recent years.

Rula Lenska is ideal as Mabel Beardsley, John Dicks less so as Aubrey although his aquiline profile certainly matches that of the artist. In many scenes he seems simply too robust and healthy and he’s also conspicuously too old (he was 35 at the time) to be playing a man of 22. Gilbert agrees with a number of Beardsley’s biographers that there was an incestuous component to Aubrey and Mabel’s relationship and this is dramatically demonstrated in a later scene.

One of the many visual quotes. Just before Aubrey arrives at a theatre to see a Wagner performance we see this moment based on Lady Gold’s Escort.

Lady Gold’s Escort from The Yellow Book (1894).

Turned away from the theatre for his perceived association with the now disreputable Wilde, Aubrey goes to visit André Raffalovich and John Gray. Raffalovich and Gray were no friends of Wilde (nor he of they) but the wealthy Raffalovich supported Beardsley through some lean times. Raffalovich is played here by Sandor Elès (left) and when he turns around at the end of the scene he reveals the design of Beardsley’s Peacock Skirt on his dressing gown.

The Mirror of Love (1895).

Beardsley produced a frontispiece, The Mirror of Love, for The Thread and the Path, a collection of Raffalovich’s poems but the drawing was rejected by the publisher for its allegedly “hermaphrodite” figure.

Raffalovich and Gray were a gay couple, of course, and their scene has Simon Shepherd as John Gray doing a great deal of lusciously languid posing on the black sheets.

In a later bedroom scene Beardsley and Leonard Smithers meet for the first time, with the bed modelled on the (imaginary) one seen in Portrait of Himself.

Portrait of Himself from The Yellow Book (1894).

Another quote: Arthur Symons and Beardsley planning The Savoy magazine in France with a trio of waiters borrowed from Garçons de Café.

Garçons de Café from The Yellow Book (1894).

Ronald Lacey again as Smithers, the pornographer publisher about whom Oscar Wilde said:

His face, clean shaven as befits a priest who serves at the altar whose God is Literature, is wasted and pale—not with poetry, but with poets, who, he says, have wrecked his life by insisting on publishing with him. He loves first editions, especially of women: little girls are his passion. He is the most learned erotomaniac in Europe. He is also a delightful companion and a dear fellow…

In this scene we see the publisher and contributors of The Savoy celebrating the appearance of the first number at the New Lyric Club. The magazine ran for eight issues and was banned by WH Smith’s. Part of the reason for the magazine’s failure was that this embargo prevented it being sold at railway station stands owned by Smith’s.

Christopher Strauli as Arthur Symons, The Savoy’s literary editor, and an actor I always associate with Bunny Manders, the role he played in earlier TV adaptations of Raffles.

Mark Tandy as WB Yeats.

Alex Norton (right) as Max Beerbohm, showing Aubrey a caricature he’s just drawn of Yeats. Beerbohm caricatured Beardsley on several occasions, and later satirised the “Yellow Nineties” in his wonderful short story Enoch Soames, so it’s perhaps fitting to end with one of Beerbohm’s drawings.

Aubrey Beardsley by Max Beerbohm (1894).

NB: I’ve no idea where or how you’d be able to see Aubrey for yourself and I certainly won’t be distributing copies so please don’t ask for one. Thanks. Anyone desperate to see it is advised to petition the BBC.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• “The game is afoot!”
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé

Retroactive I (1964).

My youthful enthusiasm for art acquainted me with the name of Robert Rauschenberg (who died two days ago) earlier than most. Surrealism and Pop Art held an appeal that was immediate, if rather superficially appreciated at the time, and it was seeing works from both those movements which were the most memorable aspect of my first visit to the Tate Gallery when I was 13. Later on when I was reading JG Ballard’s stories and essays in back numbers of New Worlds, Rauschenberg was one of a handful of artists who seemed to depict in visual terms what Ballard was describing in words. In this respect Robert Hughes’s discussion of the “landscape of media” (Ballard’s common phrase would be “media landscape”) below is coincidental but significant. Retroactive I was painted a couple of years before Ballard began the stories that would later become The Atrocity Exhibition and it could easily serve as an illustration for that book.

There are and will be plenty of words written elsewhere about Rauschenberg’s work and influence. I’ll note here his inclusion in the list of gay artists at GLBTQ for his creative and personal partnership with another great Pop artist, Jasper Johns.

One of the artists (television) most affected in the Sixties was Rauschenberg. In 1962, he began to apply printed images to canvas with silkscreen—the found image, not the found object, was incorporated into the work. “I was bombarded with TV sets and magazines,” he recalls, “by the refuse, by the excess of the world … I thought that if I could paint or make an honest work, it should incorporate all of these elements, which were and are a reality. Collage is a way of getting an additional piece of information that’s impersonal. I’ve always tried to work impersonally.” With access to anything printed, Rauschenberg could draw on an unlimited bank of images for his new paintings, and he set them together with a casual narrative style. In heightening the documentary flavour of his work, he strove to give canvas the accumulative flicker of a colour TV set. The bawling pressure of images—rocket, eagle, Kennedy, crowd, street sign, dancer, oranges, box, mosquito—creates an inventory of modern life, the lyrical outpourings of a mind jammed to satiation with the rapid, the quotidian, the real. In its peacock-hued, electron-sweetbox tints, this was an art that Marinetti and the Berlin Dadaists would have recognized at once: an agglomeration of memorable signs, capable of facing the breadth of the street. Their subject was glut.

Rauschenberg’s view of this landscape of media was both affectionate and ironic. He liked excavating whole histories within an image—histories of the media themselves. A perfect example is the red patch at the bottom right corner of Retroactive I. It is a silkscreen enlargement of a photo by Gjon Mili, which he found in Life magazine. Mili’s photograph was a carefully set-up parody, with the aid of a stroboscopic flash, of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912. Duchamp’s painting was in turn based on Marey’s photos of a moving body. So the image goes back through seventy years of technological time, through allusion after allusion; and a further irony is that, in its Rauschenbergian form, it ends up looking precisely like the figures of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden in Masaccio’s fresco for the Carmine in Florence. This in turn converts the image of John Kennedy, who was dead by then and rapidly approaching apotheosis as the centre of a mawkish cult, into a sort of vengeful god with a pointing finger, so fulfilling the prophecy Edmond de Goncourt confided to his journal in 1861:

“The day will come when all the modern nations will adore a sort of American god, about whom much will have been written in the popular press; and images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy him, but fixed, once and for all, by photography. On that day civilization will have reached its peak, and there will be steam-propelled gondolas in Venice.”

Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (1980).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Transfer drawings by Robert Rauschenberg
• Jasper Johns
• Michael Petry’s flag
• JG Ballard book covers

Mouse Heaven: Minnie and Mickey.

Kenneth Anger’s paean to Disney rodent memorabilia, and one of his most recent works, turns up at the Grey Lodge. Mouse Heaven is a distinctly minor piece, an awkward mix of film and video which juxtaposes shots of mouse figurines with a song-based soundtrack. Scorpio Rising this isn’t but the editing is up to his usual standard and it has a curious, if rather grotesque, charm.

Rabbit heaven: Bugs drags up again.

I suspect I’m not the ideal audience for a film such as this, never having been very taken with Mickey and the rest of the Disney crew. This seems to be a generational thing. My parents are about Anger’s age and they watched Disney shorts regularly at the cinema while older Americans would have seen the Mickey Mouse Club on TV in the Fifties; by the time my sisters and I were watching cartoons on television, Disney had retreated into the pop culture background. There were comics and merchandise available, of course, but the animations that gave birth to these characters were rarely seen on British TV since Disney was worried about over-exposure of their precious assets.

The consequence of this (which I doubt they realised) was that a new generation of kids could happily and eagerly watch all the Warner Brothers Merry Melodies, and MGM’s Tom & Jerry and Tex Avery cartoons whereas I’ve still seen hardly any Mickey Mouse cartoons. When they did turn up they were either primitive (Steamboat Willie) or presented a Mouse character that was actually a suburban middle class American. The contrast between Donald Duck’s irritating petulance and Daffy’s wisecracks, or between the Mouse in a house and a bisexual rabbit, could hardly be more striking. The last shred of any potential Disney charm was dispelled when I read the priceless demolition of the Magic Kingdom and its contents, Mickey Rodent!, by Harvey Kurtzmann and Bill Elder in a reprint of MAD magazine:

Strolling in the foreground of the opening panel is Mickey himself, with a four-day stubble on his face and a snapped mouse trap on his snout; his left arm has a TV screen, smashed in the middle, with “Howdy Dooit” sunrays visible. (That’s an inside joke: in a previous issue, parodying “Howdy Doody,” Mickey was seen at the edge of the opening panel, grasping and shouting, “That’s MY sunray from MY movies behind his head and I wannit back!”) Around him a melodrama unfolds: Horace Horszneck is being dragged off to jail “for appearing without his white gloves.” The animal chorus behind him clucks, moos and barks their annoyance with “Walt Dizzy’s” rule about wearing white gloves at all times… “In this hot weather too!” “And it’s so hard to buy those furshlugginer three-fingered kinds!” (Read the rest of the description here and try and see the comic for yourself; it’s a masterpiece.)

There was no going back after that and Wally Wood’s Disneyland Memorial Orgy was merely the icing on an already mouldering cake. So, sorry Kenneth, but I’m an apostate; Bugs Bunny rules my blue heaven.

• The Look traces the history of Wally Wood’s scurrilous poster from hippie to punk to Alison Goldfrapp

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• The Realist
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

The paranoiac-critical gaze: Dirty Dalí.

I finally managed to see this fascinating documentary this week. Since my TV broke down some time ago I refused to waste money buying another, partly for the reason that films such as this are increasingly rare and most of them have been shunted to minority channel BBC 4 which I can’t receive. Thanks to BitTorrent you can still find the worthwhile stuff, of course, but this often requires patience.

The Wines of Gala and of God (1977).

Dirty Dalí: A Private View was a reminiscence by art critic Brian Sewell about his encounters with Dalí and wife Gala at their home in Port Lligat in the late Sixties and early Seventies. What’s interesting about it is the first-hand light it throws on Dalí’s complicated sexuality which has been the source of speculation in biographies (notably Ian Gibson’s The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí) but which is confused by the artist’s simultaneous revealing of his obsessions in his art and the veiling of his interests in public statements, not least the frequent declarations of impotence. Sewell confirms that Dalí was interested in both men and women although purely as a voyeur, and recounts how his first encounter with the artist led to his having to lie naked in the armpit of a giant Christ sculpture in Dalí’s garden, masturbating while Dalí took photographs. Sewell also examines Dalí’s affair with Federico García Lorca, the closest the artist came to a gay romance, and his subsequent relationship with Gala, which became one where the pair used the artist’s celebrity to attract delectable people of both sexes, like a pair of art world super-swingers. According to Sewell, Dalí’s physical ideal was the hermaphrodite which would possibly explain his attraction to (alleged) transsexual Amanda Lear during this time.

The Great Masturbator (1929).

As a piece of television the film struggles to fill out its running time by resorting to animating photographs, a persistent hazard for documentaries that lack the relevant raw material. All the footage of Dalí is lifted from previous documentary films including a large chunk of Russell Harty’s Aquarius interview, Hello Dali! (that camp double-entendre now seems very apt), from 1973. The overall effect of Sewell’s narrative is to add to Dalí’s already considerable feet of clay but that’s the inevitable outcome of nearly any biography; real lives are always messy. Sewell nonetheless ends by reaffirming Dalí’s principal importance as one of the great painters of the 20th century and, in an interesting side note, declares him to be the last great painter of a religious work with his Christ of St John of the Cross. A great religious artist and also one who produced hundreds of pornographic drawings, some of which are seen in the film. In art, as in the life, the contradictions are everywhere.

• Dirty Dalí at Grey Lodge
• Homage to Catalonia: Robert Hughes on Dalí

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Dalí and Film
• Ballard on Dalí
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• Penguin Surrealism
• The Surrealist Revolution
• The persistence of DNA
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• Dalí Atomicus
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie

Harlan Ellison.

“You have somebody who is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.”

Neil Gaiman on Harlan Ellison, and so say all of us. The quote comes from a trailer for Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a new documentary about Ellison’s life and work which, as far as I can tell, has yet to acquire any distribution. Given Ellison’s reputation you have to wonder why it’s taken this long for someone to make a substantial film about such a great artist and natural performer.

“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman, from a 1978 portfolio by Jim Steranko.

But it doesn’t arrive a moment too soon given the quantity of recent web discussion which seems to have forgotten his huge body of work and sees him solely as a person who gets into arguments all the time. He’s always been argumentative, of course, splendidly so, and his take-no-prisoners attitude did much to shake up the conservative world of American science fiction in the late Sixties and early Seventies. As a political commentator he’s always been at the Hunter S Thompson level with a great line in witty vituperation. The filmmakers seem to have caught both sides of Ellison, the writer who doesn’t so much read as perform his texts from memory, and the tightly-wound ball of fury who won’t take shit from anyone. The film site has nearly an hour of clips to watch, including a tremendous speed-reading of Prince Myshkin, and Hold the Relish.

And while we’re on the subject, I’ll give another plug to the landmark collection of HP Lovecraft-derived art due to appear soon from Centipede Press. This features a number of my Lovecraftian works and an introduction from Mr Ellison himself.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Bradbury Building: Looking Backward from the Future
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

Jeremy Brett in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.

A few words of praise for Jeremy Brett is his role as the world’s greatest detective, for my money the definitive screen Sherlock Holmes. I’ve spent the past few weeks working my way through the complete run of TV adaptations that Granada Television produced from 1984 to 1993, being bowled over again by Brett’s mastery of the role. It took me a while to notice these when they were first screened, British television was churning out a lot of costume drama at the time and the sight of more Hansom cabs and gas lamps paled beside the audacity and excitement of contemporary thrillers such as the BBC’s Edge of Darkness. I think I caught on during the second season that Brett’s performance was something special, and that these adaptations were treating the Holmes stories with a veracity rarely seen before.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle by original Holmes illustrator Sidney Paget.

Brett was a dependable but not necessarily distinguished actor prior to Sherlock Holmes. Having been passed over for James Bond in favour of Roger Moore in the Seventies, he seemed determined to make an impression with a role that’s become a challenge over the years given the weight of precedent attached to it. He pored over the books obsessively and even argued with directors over minor story points if he felt that Conan Doyle’s intentions were being lost. I remember finding his performance a bit eccentric at first but his unorthodox portrayal of a gentleman—vaulting over a couch to answer the door—helped separate him from the stock of solid Victorian types around him and acted as a visual signifier of the detective’s genius. Brett was very energetic in the first few seasons and always great in the close-ups, with a furious intensity that believably portrayed a man possessed of a brain working several orders of magnitude above the ordinary. We know now that some of that intensity was a result of his manic depression which worsened following his wife’s death in 1985.

But a great performance wouldn’t have shone without a suitable setting and it’s to Granada’s credit that they went to so much trouble over period detail. A Victorian-era Baker Street was built outdoors at the Granada studios complete with fully-stocked shop interiors. One of the pleasures for this Manchester citizen is seeing how many familiar locations our local TV company used. I recall walking past Manchester Town Hall circa 1988 when filming was taking place there, with vans along the street and a horse and carriage waiting to be called. They used the Town Hall courtyard a great deal, over-much if you recognise Alfred Waterhouse’s Venetian Gothic architecture. Splendid use is made of some of England’s country houses and there are some stunning shots later of genuine London streets which—with judicious camera placement and a few costumed extras—still looked as they did in 1900.

Eric Porter as Professor Moriarty.

Most crucially, the stories were taken seriously on their own terms, without any of the cliché that’s become a feature of so many screen representations of Holmes. Some liberties are taken now and then with the adaptations but for the most part the stories (and the audience) are treated with respect. (It’s a surprise now to see a primetime TV drama have its main character quote Flaubert in French and offer no translation.) The deerstalker hat appears occasionally but only when Holmes and Watson are in the country; in the city Holmes wears a silk topper. And the character of Watson is always portrayed sympathetically by David Burke (who left after series two) and Edward Hardwicke, both worlds away from the bumbling Nigel Bruce in the Basil Rathbone films. Guest support in each episode came from a range of great British acting talent—Charles Gray (as Mycroft), Eric Porter (as Moriarty), John Thaw, Dennis Quilley, Harry Andrews, Ronald Lacey, Rosalie Crutchley—so many of whom have died in recent years that the series now has a strangely melancholy atmosphere, like watching a procession of ghosts.

Holmes obsessives can and do quibble over the merits of these adaptations but we’re unlikely to see the (nearly) entire run of stories filmed so faithfully any time soon. The Granada films were all shot on 16mm, a relatively cheap format no longer used in television. To repeat this effort would be ruinously expensive, even if they could find actors to match Brett and company. For that reason it’s unfortunate that the company didn’t manage to fulfil its intention of filming all the stories but Jeremy Brett’s health grew increasingly worse from 1990 onwards. The really sad thing about watching the films from start to finish is seeing his deterioration in the final episodes from the energetic actor that began the series. He died of a heart attack in 1995. But it’s the energetic actor that we remember and celebrate, and the performance that remains his monument.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• Boys Own Books

Hardly a week passes without the religious right in America getting their knickers in a twist over some new iniquity, a condition so commonplace that new outbreaks are barely worth acknowledging. However, this week’s storm in a teacup caught my attention for being art-related.

If there’s one thing certain American Christians have in common with Muslim fundamentalists, it’s the habit of reacting to anything remotely gay with all the composure of caged baboons being prodded with sharp sticks. The pointed implement on this occasion has been the poster for the Folsom Street Fair, an annual Leather Pride/BDSM event held in San Francisco. The photograph by FredAlert (site NSFW) continues what’s become a minor tradition in artistic parody by working a variation on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1498), with leather girls and guys for the disciples and a black man in the place of Leonardo’s Jesus. The flag on the table is a Leather Pride flag. The intent behind the poster was explained by Andy Cooper, one of the event’s organisers:

There is no intention to be particularly pro-religion or anti-religion with this poster; the image is intended only to be reminiscent of the Last Supper painting. It is a distinctive representation of diversity with women and men, people of all colors and sexual orientations.

(…)

We hope that people will enjoy the artistry for what it is—nothing more or less. Many people choose to speculate on deeper meanings. This is one artist’s imagining of the Last Supper, and we have made it our own. The irony is that da Vinci was widely considered to be homosexual. In truth, we are going to produce a series of inspired poster images over the next few years. Next year’s poster ad may take inspiration from American Gothic by Grant Wood or Edvard Munch’s The Scream or even The Sound of Music! I guess it wouldn’t be Folsom Street Fair without offending some extreme members of the global community, though.

To judge by the splenetic frothing of groups such as the Concerned Women for America, it seems they managed a double helping of offence this year. The CWA see a deliberate attack on their religion, something I can’t see at all. While the reaction may seem to be harmless bluster, it should be noted that groups such as CWA and the more substantial American Family Association receive a lot of money via donations from supporters. Moral panics and perennial threats to civilisation have become a means to drum up additional support (ie: cash) to safeguard what they claim are Christian values. And gay people/rights/events have become a convenient whipping boy (so to speak) for fund-raising. As Joe Murray, ex-staff attorney for the American Family Association writes, this is now a multi-million dollar business:

It is not coincidental that the road to Hell is paved with the best of intentions, thus while one hopes that conservative leaders, such as Don Wildmon, began their crusade motivated by morality, it appears that a number of them have been hypnotized by the siren song of the almighty dollar.

Christian activism has become a lucrative business. According to its 990 form, the AFA took in millions. Arguably, such revenue was made possible by sending out “Action Alerts” warning homosexuals will throw Christians in jail under the hate crimes bill. Such rhetoric is misleading at best, dishonest at worse.

How does one protect Christianity? Send money. Call it cash-back Christianity…

Public complaints about blasphemy or other slights are always double-edged. Without the outrage I probably wouldn’t have noticed the Folsom poster, despite reading gay news blogs every day. But thanks to the CWA this isn’t the only blog now replicating the picture or showing similar examples of alleged Leonardo abuse. It hardly needs pointing out that the two other paintings mentioned in the Folsom Street Fair statement are also very popular as parody subjects and parody doesn’t work at all if the original reference isn’t well-known. Leonardo’s two most famous works are the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and the latter proves attractive for parodists by being a group scene presented in tableaux form. The Last Supper, American Gothic and Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam must be the three most-parodied paintings in art history; many of the Last Supper variations?including versions by Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol?are very well-known and have been around for years.

Viridiana, directed by Luis Buñuel (1961).

If it’s provocation you’re after, look no further than Buñuel, a lifelong atheist who delighted in playful blasphemy. This moment in Viridiana is one of the earliest significant modern parodies and caused considerable outrage at the time since the re-staging is done using a crowd of beggars. This is one of the few examples where honest offence was a specific intention.

M*A*S*H, directed by Robert Altman (1972).

Jesus the mobster: Tony Soprano and family by Annie Leibovitz (1999).

The inevitable Simpsons version from Thank God It’s Doomsday (2005).

Tribute to Women, a fashion ad from Marithé et François Girbaud (2005).

The Girbaud photograph above caused concern in France and Italy not for its female Christ but for the presence of a shirtless man. (No, I don’t understand that either.) These are just a small percentage of the many parodies to be found online; there are a lot more.

There’s a degree of hypocrisy at work here since Christians themselves aren’t above using the painting for their own advertising purposes (although it seems that CAN now omit that particular campaign from their history). What’s evident is that reaction towards a given parody seems directly proportional to the identity of its creators, the people acting out the scene and the amount of prejudice at work. From the current reaction it seems that a shirtless and (possibly) gay black man is far worse than a murderous Italian-American or a feckless drunk like Homer Simpson. The Sopranos photo appeared in Vanity Fair (and I expect it’s now in several books) so would have had far greater circulation than the Folsom Street poster which will only be used for a few weeks this year. Furthermore, none of the images shown above are remotely religious, none bear any indication that the central figure is supposed to be Jesus, the only factor for comparison is the pose which replicates a famous painting. Leonardo’s picture is a representation of Jesus and his disciples; the parodies are a representation of a representation. In most instances the religious dimension is completely incidental, all that counts is having a group sitting at a table with the central and/or dominant character in the centre of the picture. If the painting was just as well-known but represented a secular scene, as American Gothic does, the parody would still be valid only there would be no room for outrage.

St. John the Baptist by Leonardo da Vinci (1513?1516).

I’ve always been surprised by Christians rushing so quickly to the defence of Leonardo, his sexuality aside, he was easily the least pious of all the great names of the Renaissance. Michelangelo’s faith is well-documented but Leonardo’s seems ambivalent at best. He famously ignored the church prohibition against dissecting cadavers and a number of the figures in his later works are very curious, such as the strangely demonic St. Anne in the sketch for Madonna and Child with St Anne and the Young St John (1507–1508). This thoroughly androgynous figure is shown raising a phallic forefinger to heaven, a gesture that still provokes debate as to its meaning. The same androgyny and brandished finger can be seen in other paintings (a raised finger also appears in The Last Supper), especially the smirking and distinctly feminine St. John the Baptist (above). A similar St. John in the Wilderness (1510–1515) is also known as Bacchus on account of his animal-skin loincloth and crown of vine leaves. It’s a very lax piety that allows a religious portrayal to slip so easily into outright paganism.

But lessons in art history are academic, really. People who routinely dismiss evolutionary science are unlikely to be swayed by any argument however reasonable, while others may have less-than-sincere motives for their bluster. The moral, if we need to look for one, might be “Don’t prod the baboons”. But the baboons would shriek anyway—it’s what they do.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of ejaculation
• The last circle of the Inferno
• Behold the (naked) man
• Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus
• The Poet and the Pope
• Angels 1: The Angel of History and sensual metaphysics
• Gay for God
• Michelangelo revisited

Mitch Hewer, aka gay character Maxxie in the Channel 4 TV series Skins, as photographed by Kai Z Feng. Almost the Flandrin pose; maybe he can lose his jeans next time…

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

My battered 1973 Gollancz hardback. Cover illustration by David Smee.

It may be all Harry Potter starter homes crowding the imaginative landscape these days but the lush fields of the early Seventies bred a peculiar brand of wizardry and wild romance, something I was reminded of recently by reviews of a new compilation of psychedelic singles (yes, another one), Real Life—Permanent Dreams on the Castle Communication label. Mention of a curio from the heady days of 1970, Tarot by Andrew Bown, summoned vague memories of a childrens’ television series, Ace of Wands, for which Tarot was the theme song. You can see the title sequence here and this clip compilation features the whole song plus trippy lyrics (“Velvet roofs, tattooed skies, patterns made from words…”). The wonderfully facetious TV Cream describes the series thus:

ACE OF WANDS (1970–72), THAMES TELEVISION. Jim-Morrison-alike boy magician Tarot (MICHAEL MACKENZIE) has adventures through history, for which read cheap studio set representing pyramid, cheap studio set representing Stonehenge and so on. DR WHO-style menace on a budget. Fought enemies such as Madame Midnight, Mr Stabs and Mama Doc, aided by an owl called Ozymandias (played by FRED THE OWL). Tarot cards and tarot phenomena abounded, much worthy roustabouts ensued. Prog-heavy title theme babbling – “Jet white dove/Snow black snake/Time has turned his face/From the edge of mystery” – singularly failed to assault the charts.

I’ve mentioned before how magic and occultism were more popular at this time than they’ve probably ever been, and this flush of popularity, much of it coming from underground culture, managed to work its way into children’s television in a diluted form. Ace of Wands is easily the most baroque example of this, mixing the bell-bottom trendiness of Jason King with pulp plots given a psychedelic twist (hallucinogenic gases anyone?). Also from 1970 and far more down-to-earth (and, it should be said, more fun for kids) was Catweazle, written by Richard Carpenter and starring Geoffrey Bayldon. TV Cream has the details again:

CATWEAZLE (1970–71), LWT. Hairy tinker who can’t speak but who’s really an 11th Century magician (and who’s really GEOFFREY BAYLDON) tries to escape from some pissed off Norman soliders, jumps in a pond to hide and finds himself transported to Children’s Film Foundation-era Britain. Luckily there’s a posh (as always) boy on hand to explain all our modern day shit to him.

Catweazle quickly became the most popular kids’ progamme of its day and part of its attraction was the way in which Bayldon’s Norman time-traveller mistranslated modern technology as magic. So the telephone became a device called the “telling bone”, electricity was “electrickery” and so on. I had the first Catweazle annual which was an odd mixture of comic strips, text stories and articles about stage magicians with a smattering of genuine occult history.

Best of all for this Seventies kid was my favourite reading on the frequently dull Jackanory (“Ramshackle reading-is-fun relic wherein a Famous Person would sit on a chair with a pretend book and ponderously recount the contents of your local mobile library” says TV Cream) which one week had Ursula K Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea as its featured book. Try as I might, I’ve been unable to find the name of the actor who read this (black clothes, medieval chair) but I was knocked out by it. Years later the Earthsea cycle is still the only work of Le Guin’s I’ve been able to read, her science fiction seemed boring by comparison.

The inflated success of Harry Potter has had people casting about for JK Rowling’s influences over the past few years. A Wizard of Earthsea was first published in 1968 and also concerns a school of wizards, as do several other pre-HP novels. Rowling has acknowledged this although that acknowledgement hasn’t been loud or regular enough to appease a grouchy Le Guin. The Earthsea books are a lot shorter than the Potter door-stops and the first book at least is rather more sophisticated, reading equally well as a fantasy adventure for children and as a Jungian fable for adults with hints of Buddhist or Taoist philosophy. The characters are also notable for not being the Caucasians that most fantasy characters usually are, one of many details a recent TV adaptation (which Le Guin condemned) managed to ignore. It’s worth noting that JK Rowling is part of my generation (I’m 45, she’s 42) so she would have watched all this Seventies stuff herself. One of the reasons fantasy readers and writers (as opposed to snooty broadsheet critics) are often disappointed by the Potter juggernaut is that it could have been so much more considering the wealth of precedent that it draws upon. But then books rarely achieve this scale of popularity without being conservative and undemanding, Rowling’s work is merely the most recent example of this.

Le Guin spoiled the impact of her excellent first Earthsea book with several sequels of diminishing interest. A new animated film from Japan, Gedo Senki or Tales from Earthsea, based on the later works is released in the UK this month. The great British director Michael Powell had plans for an Earthsea adaptation scripted by Le Guin when he was director in residence at Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios in 1980. Powell was great with fantasy (watch his Thief of Bagdad) so it’s a shame that nothing came of this. Ace of Wands is on DVD now and so is Catweazle. I can’t vouch for the former having much value beyond pure nostalgia but there’s plenty of clips from the latter at YouTube. Proceed with caution.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Bob Pepper
• Of Moons and Serpents
• Austin Osman Spare

Heavenly Love and Earthly Love by Giovanni Baglione (1602–1603).

Chiaroscuro\, Chia`ro*scu”ro\, Chiaro-oscuro\, Chi*a”ro-os*cu”ro\, n. [It., clear dark.] (a) The arrangement of light and dark parts in a work of art, such as a drawing or painting, whether in monochrome or in colour. (b) The art or practice of so arranging the light and dark parts as to produce a harmonious effect.

Following from the earlier post about shadows in art, some favourite examples by masters of chiaroscuro. Another artist not represented here will be the subject of a post of his own in the next couple of days. The Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken (below) was the subject of the horror tale Schalcken the Painter by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, a story memorably filmed by Leslie Megahey for BBC television in 1979. Horror and the chiaroscuro effect belong together, as Fuseli’s Nightmare demonstrates, and many of Schalcken’s paintings seem even more curious and sinister after you’ve read Le Fanu’s story.

Update: John Klima points us to Hal Duncan’s excellent story, The Chiaroscurist, which you can read at Electric Velocipede.

David by Caravaggio (1600).

Two men examining a statue by candlelight by Godfried Schalcken (no date).

The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli (1791).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Shadows at Compton Verney
• Vanitas paintings
• HP Lovecraft’s favourite artists
• Angels 1: The Angel of History and sensual metaphysics

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 to pieces in that manner typical of American daytime TV.

Most of the discussion skated on the surface but I was surprised (and pleased) when Oprah mentioned having read several of his books, including his ferocious masterwork, Blood Meridian. Main topic was The Road, of course, but we also got to hear something about Cormac’s dedicating himself to a life of precarious unemployment in order to have the freedom to write. He’s playing my tune but I imagine many of Oprah’s viewers would have struggled to comprehend that decision. Faulkner’s name was mentioned, and James Joyce when they talked about the lack of punctuation in his prose. In the end it was enough to simply see the man as a human being sat in a chair. And kudos again to Oprah for championing his work.

Meanwhile, The Sopranos screened its final episode on Sunday night. I watched the last couple of seasons via BitTorrent so I’m privy to the controversial ending which I won’t reveal here even though plenty of news sites have done so already. All I’ll say is I approve of the ending and regard the naysayers as foolish in complaining about a series which throughout its run tried to be different, challenging and better than the half-baked fare which is usually offered as television drama. For those who know the ending (or aren’t so concerned about it), series creator David Chase discussed his intentions and the audience reaction with the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

Update: A David Chase comment from 2001 turned up via the NYT. I’m sure these are sentiments Cormac McCarthy would also agree with.

What’s the difference between what’s art and what isn’t art? That’s the hard question to answer. The only thing that I guess I believe is that a lot of what I see on the air and in other places is giving answers, and I don’t think art should give answers. I think art should only pose questions. And art should not fill in blanks for people, or I think that’s what’s called propaganda. I think art should only raise questions, a lot of which may be even dissonant and you don’t even know you’re being asked a question, but that it creates some kind of tension inside you.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• In praise of Cormac
• Cormac McCarthy book covers

Non-Brits may not be aware that The South Bank Show is a long-running arts programme (or “show”, as Americans prefer) and the last bastion of cultural broadcasting on the otherwise completely moribund ITV channel. Over the years the SBS has produced some great documentaries and this one from 1985 is particularly good, capturing artist Francis Bacon in fine form, both as combative critic and sozzled pisshead when he and presenter Melvyn Bragg drink too much wine in a restaurant. Highlights include his funny dismissal of Mark Rothko whilst viewing paintings at the Tate, their tour of his cramped studio, and his drunken pronunciation of the word “voluptuous” when describing Michelangelo’s male figures.

I taped this programme when it was repeated after Bacon’s death in 1992 but you lucky people can now see and download it from Ubuweb. (Their note says the SBS is a BBC production but this is incorrect.)

Part of The South Bank Show series, David Hinton directs this documentary about British painter Francis Bacon, known for his horrifying portraits of humanity. The program consists of a series of conversations between Bacon and interviewer Melvyn Bragg, starting with commentary during a side-show presentation at the Tate Gallery in London. Later in the evening, Bacon is followed through various bars hanging out, drinking, and gambling. In another segment, Bacon provides a tour of his painting studio and a glimpse at his reference photographs of distorted humans. The artist discusses his theories, influences, and obsessions. This title won an International Emmy Award in 1985.

This isn’t necessarily the best Bacon interview, that accolade would probably have to go to the 1984 Arena documentary (which was a BBC production) Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact where FB is interviewed by art critic and long-time supporter David Sylvester. Sylvester interviewed Bacon many times over twenty years or so and Thames & Hudson printed the Arena interview along with several of their other talks in Sylvester’s book of the same name. Essential reading for anyone interested in the artist’s work.

Bacon’s work has affected my own on a number of occasions. The cover to Reverbstorm #4 borrowed the carcass from his Painting (1946); some of the paintings I was doing in 1997 (like this one and this one) are distinctly Bacon-esque and we used two of his paintings on the cover design for Savoy’s edition of The Killer (Dave Britton’s idea on that occasion).

His work remains popular for the over-inflated art market. Sketches and unfinished paintings that he was throwing out, and detritus like discarded cheque books, sold for nearly a million pounds last month. And earlier this week his Study from Innocent X (1960) went for $52.6m in a New York auction. Bacon once said that “some artists leave remarkable things which, a hundred years later, don’t work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar—you never know.” I think we can assume this won’t be happening for a while yet.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• T&H: At the Sign of the Dolphin
• 20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips

The Bradbury Building, 304 South Broadway, Los Angeles.

This looks like an old photograph but it actually dates from 1989 and comprises part of the Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990 archive that the UCLA Library has recently made public.

The Bradbury Building (constructed in 1893) was one of the few places I insisted on searching out when I was visiting the city in 2005. That enthusiasm dates from first seeing the building’s interior in Blade Runner where Ridley Scott turned its carefully-preserved atrium into JF Sebastian’s run-down apartment building. All that wrought-iron and polished terracotta (and those elevators!) would be compelling enough on their own but their history as a setting for a several film and TV productions only adds to their enchantment. That a building from the 1890s should be known primarily for its role in a science fiction film perhaps isn’t so surprising when it transpires that the Bradbury’s architect, George Wyman, had been inspired by a passage in a contemporary novel of futurist fantasy, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887:

It was the first interior of a twentieth-century public building that I had ever beheld, and the spectacle naturally impressed me deeply. I was in a vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above. Beneath it, in the centre of the hall, a magnificent fountain played, cooling the atmosphere to a delicious freshness with its spray. The walls and ceiling were frescoed in mellow tints, calculated to soften without absorbing the light which flooded the interior.

Wyman’s exterior is fairly nondescript even beside the younger buildings which now surround it, a fairly ordinary office building of the period. It’s the Bellamy-inspired atrium which captures the imagination and one can only wonder what the result might have been had Bellamy been a bit more liberal with his descriptions of America in the year 2000.

The building exterior and South Broadway entrance.

Blade Runner wasn’t the first film to make use of the Bradbury’s interior, Billy Wilder’s film noir Double Indemnity used the building’s offices as a location in 1944 and six years later Edmond O’Brien found his way there in the climax to another noir thriller D.O.A., directed by Rudolph Maté. This is the film that famously begins with O’Brien’s character staggering into a police station to report a murder—his own. He’s been dosed with a slow-acting poison, something possibly radioactive, as was the fashion of the time. He has a few hours in which to find his killer and his breathless chase leads him to an empty Bradbury building at night, all spider-webbed with shadows.

D.O.A. (1950).

The atrium roof, circa 1961.

Robert Culp: ‘Demon With A Glass Hand’ (1964).

“I was born ten days ago. A full grown man…born ten days ago. I woke on the streets of this city. I don’t know who I am, where I’ve been, or where I’m going. Someone wiped my memories clean. And they tracked me down and they tried to kill me. Why? Who are you? I ran. I managed to escape them the first time. The hand…my hand…told me what to do….”

The splendid atrium was put to even better use in 1964 for what’s often regarded as the best episode of The Outer Limits, the award-winning ‘Demon With a Glass Hand‘ written by Harlan Ellison. In that TV play the mysterious, amnesiac Trent (a great performance by Robert Culp) finds himself trapped inside the Bradbury after the building is besieged by the Kyben, alien invaders who chased him from the future and who who want both him and the computer he has fitted into his artificial hand. The building proves to be the location of a “time mirror” which enables Trent to return to the future after he’s defeated the Kyben and saved the future human race.

Blade Runner (1982).

We had been searching for locations for a building. We wanted to go on location to an old, decrepit building and take a suite of rooms and use that as Sebastian’s apartment. One day we were downtown Los Angeles looking at a possible location, and I took a stroll across the street with Ridley and a few other people and Ridley took a look inside the beautiful Bradbury building. What we did to that building you wouldn’t believe. On a superficial level we trashed it with high-tech, then filled it with smoke on the inside and shot at night. We also added a canopy with big columns to make it look like it was an old apartment building. All of a sudden we had a very gothic, eerie environment.

Lawrence G. Paull, Blade Runner production designer in Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul M. Sammon.

One of my photographs from 2005.

It’s tempting to see Blade Runner’s vision of Los Angeles as a movie mash-up of the Bradbury’s noir thriller heritage with Bellamy and Ellison’s science fiction scenarios. In Britain such an elegant interior would only ever be used for Victorian costume dramas. The Bradbury’s movie life has mostly been a result of expediency and its convenience as a cheap, ready-made set, but this hasn’t prevented talented filmmakers from showing what can be done with a decent storyline and some photogenic architecture.

D.O.A. is now available as a free download after its copyright lapsed. And you can read Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (if you must) here. ‘Demon With A Glass Hand’ is available on DVD along with the rest of the Outer Limits episodes. Blade Runner was finally released in a better DVD edition last year but we’re still awaiting the multi-disc edition of Ridley’s masterpiece.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Raw Deal
• Film noir posters
• Kiss Me Deadly
• The future is now
• Blade Runner DVD
• Downtown LA by Ansel Adams