Lenin Rising

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More monumental relics from the former Soviet Union. In March last year I posted some pictures from a film by Takehiko Nagakura who used CGI to show how St Petersburg would look if Vladimir Tatlin’s enormous Monument to the Third International had been built. Architectural megalomania didn’t abate with the collapse of that project and Stalin had his own plans for a number of vast buildings and monuments, including this colossal statue (or is it a building?) of Lenin intended to tower over Moscow.

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These pictures come courtesy of Englishrussia.com. You can also see there a collection of (uncredited) pictures like the one above which follow Nagakura’s example and show how the Moscow of today would look had this structure been built. There’s also this strangely antique design for another vast Lenin memorial, which looks like Hugh Ferriss by way of ancient Egypt, and dizzying pictures from the top of the very large (62m tall) and very real ‘Mother Motherland’ monument in Kiev.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Dead Monuments
Enormous structures II: Tatlin’s Tower

Scott Walker on film

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Scott Walker: 30 Century Man is a long-overdue look at one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in rock history. The film will explore his music and career, from his early days as a jobbing bass player on the Sunset Strip, to mega-stardom in Britain’s swinging 60s pop scene as lead singer of The Walker Brothers, to his evolution into one of the most astonishing soundmakers of the last few decades.

He’s 63 years old and has just released his first album in over 10 years, The Drift on 4 AD Records. The film features exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the album as well as interviews with friends, collaborators, and fans including, among others:

David Bowie, Radiohead, Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), Brian Eno, Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz), Neil Hannon (The Divine Comedy), Marc Almond, Alison Goldfrapp, Sting, Dot Allison, Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins), Richard Hawley, Rob Ellis, Johnny Marr, Gavin Friday, Lulu, Peter Olliff, Angela Morley, Ute Lemper, Ed Bicknell, Evan Parker, Benjamin Biolay, Hector Zazou, Mo Foster, Phil Sheppard, Pete Walsh, and more.

Directed by Stephen Kijak, who brought you the delightfully deranged documentary CINEMANIA (a profile of 5 of NYC’s most manic film buffs), this is a different form of obsession altogether. Inspiring god-like devotion from fans, Scott Walker’s has a cult that has grown considerably since his 1995 release Tilt, a dark and difficult masterwork. His new album takes that sound further than anyone could have imagined?

Collaborators include acclaimed DP/Director Grant Gee (Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy) and Graham Wood, formerly of legendary design collective Tomato.

Produced by Mia Bays, Liz Rose and Stephen Kijak

Associate Producer: Gale Harold

Executive Producer: David Bowie

On release in the UK from April 27th. Details here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Exodus art and Plague Songs
The Drift by Scott Walker

Tim Buckley on DVD

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Not before time. Thanks to Jay for the tip.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
TIM BUCKLEY
My Fleeting House
Documentary featuring rare performance and interview footage spanning his entire career

My Fleeting House is first-ever DVD collection of performances of Tim Buckley. This essential DVD features rare live performances from various television shows and interview footage spanning his entire career.

The DVD has eleven full-length songs, and three partial performances. This DVD also features insightful interviews with Larry Beckett (co-writer of many songs with Buckley), Lee Underwood (Buckley’s guitarist) and David Browne (author of Dream Brother: The Lives of Jeff and Tim Buckley).

The footage spans his entire career, from 1967 to 1974, and includes unreleased video of interaction with Buckley on The Steve Allen Show (1969) and on WITF’s The Show (1970). The footage is taken from various television programs from 1967 to 1974 right up to the time of his death in 1975. All but two of the musical clips are unreleased. As an additional oddity, the clip of Buckley being interviewed on The Steve Allen Show includes Jayne Meadows complimenting Buckley on his hair.

Despite having produced nine studio albums, three live albums, and many “best of” compilations—My Fleeting House is the first-ever authorized collection of Buckley’s visual performances. Several segments on this new collection have not been seen for over thirty years. MVD Visual has secured the best possible, first-generation video sources for the compilation, including footage from American, British, and Dutch television, and also a forgotten feature film. This DVD has the full approval of the Estate of Tim Buckley.

Buckley was an experimental vocalist and performer who incorporated jazz, psychedelia, funk, soul, and avant-garde rock in a short career spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s. He often regarded his voice as an instrument, a talent most exploited on his albums Goodbye and Hello, Lorca, and Starsailor. He was the father of musician and singer Jeff Buckley, also known for his three-and-a-half octave voice, who died in 1997. Buckley released his debut album Tim Buckley on Elektra in 1966. A folk-rock album, it contained psychedelic melodies written with input from Beckett. He went on to release Goodbye and Hello (1967), Happy Sad (1969), Blue Afternoon (1969), Lorca (1970), Starsailor (1970), Greetings from L.A. (1972), Sefronia (1973), and Look at the Fool (1974).

Born in Washington DC, Tim Buckley lived for 10 years in New York before moving to southern California. During his childhood, he was a fan of Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Nat King Cole, and Miles Davis, although country music was his foremost passion. He left school at 18 with twenty songs written with Larry Beckett under his belt—many of which later featured on his debut album. Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black introduced Buckley to Herb Cohen, and he quickly got him signed to Elektra record company. He also met guitarist Lee Underwood around this time, who became a big part of nearly all of Buckley’s artistic endeavors.

On June 28, 1975 after returning from the last show of a tour in Dallas, Buckley snorted heroin at a friend’s house. Having diligently controlled his habit while on the road, his tolerance was lowered, and the combination of a small amount of drugs mixed with the amount of alcohol he’d been consuming all day to celebrate the tour’s end was too much. His friend took him home thinking he was merely drunk. He was put to bed by his friends, who told his wife that he’d also used some barbiturates. As she watched TV in bed beside him, Buckley turned blue. Attempts by friends and paramedics to revive him were unsuccessful. Reportedly, Buckley’s last words were “Bye Bye Baby,” delivered in a way reminiscent of the line in Ray Charles’ Driftin’ Blues. Buckley was just 28 years of age.

Arranged in chronological order, My Fleeting House traces the evolution of Buckley’s music, voice, songwriting, and backup bands.

DVD extras:
A 12-page booklet of unreleased Buckley photos
An album-by-album review by Underwood, Beckett, and Browne
Beckett (also a poet) reciting ‘Song to the Siren’

Tracklist:
Inside Pop—’No Man Can Find the War’
Late Night Line Up—’Happy Time’
Late Night Line Up—’Morning Glory’
Old Grey Whistle Test—’The Dolphins’
The Monkees Show—’Song to the Siren’
Greenwich Village—’Who Do You Love’
Dutch TV—’Happy Time’
Dutch TV—’Sing a Song for You’
Music Video Live—’Sally Go Round the Roses’
Boboquivari—’Blue Melody’
Boboquivari—’Venice Beach (Music Boats by the Bay)’
The Show—’I Woke Up’
The Show—’Come Here Woman’
The Christian Licorice Store—’Pleasant Street’

• Official Website: http://www.timbuckleydvd.com/
• Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHCccGEUMr0

Selection #: DR-4566
UPC: 022891456698
Street Date: 5/15/2007
List Price: $19.95
Running Time: 105 minutes

The sculpture of Christopher Conte

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Mid-Sagital Skull Bisection (2007).
Hand casted acrylic resin with vintage watch parts.

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Articulated Singer Insect (2005).
Antique mechanical parts and vintage Singer sewing attachment.

Lots of other great creations at the artist’s site. Via Boing Boing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Pierre Matter’s cyborg sculpture
Insect Lab
The art of Jessica Joslin

Coming soon: Sea Monsters and Cannibals!

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No, not Pirates of the Caribbean III although that film will be with us soon and is certain to contain at least one of the above ingredients. The dubious delights of exploitation cinema have been put back on the map recently by Grindhouse, the double feature from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, but garish melodrama is nothing new in the film world. Silent films had more than their share of sex, violence, monsters and maniacs, and many featured a degree of nudity that wouldn’t be seen again until the late Sixties, thanks to the Hays Code. “Everything in life is exploitation,” Barbara Stanwyck was told in Baby Face (1933) and she went on to prove it by sleeping her way to the top in a film considered by moral guardians of the time to be so scurrilous that its uncensored print remained buried until 2005.

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These wonderful hand-tinted plates from the George Eastman archive are lantern slides used to display information about coming attractions, and would have been screened between features as a kind of motionless trailer. The movie trailer as we know it today had been around since about 1910 but it wasn’t until the late Twenties that the regular production and screening of trailers took off. Lantern slides were a cheap way of keeping audiences attentive while the next feature was being prepared.

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Cannibals of the South Seas was a 1912 documentary by Osa and Martin E. Johnson and it’s a good bet it was a lot more prosaic than this slide implies. The Isle of Lost Ships seems from the picture to be a sea-faring horror tale but turns out to be a 1923 adventure story based on a novel by one Crittenden Marriott and directed by Maurice Tourneur, father of the great horror and noir director, Jacques Tourneur (Cat People [1942], Out of the Past [1947], Night of the Demon [1957]). This first film is now as lost as the becalmed ships of its title but it was remade as an early talkie in 1929 and that film still exists somewhere. Film remakes are also nothing new. The tentacles and Sargasso setting made me suspect Mr Marriott had purloined an idea or two from William Hope Hodgson, writer of a series of excellent horror stories concerning the Sargasso Sea and (in his fiction) its population of tentacled abominations; Dennis Wheatley certainly stole from Hodgson, as I’ve mentioned before. But Marriott’s novel, The Isle of Dead Ships, and the films based upon it, prove to be less interesting than the slide promises. And so we learn a primary rule of exploitation cinema that was well-established even then: promise much but don’t always deliver.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Seamen in great distress eat one another
Druillet meets Hodgson
Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys
Davy Jones