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top left: David Pelham’s classic design (1972); top right: photography
by Lionel F Williams (Eye) and SOA / Photonica (Cogs) (1996).
bottom left and right: photography by Véronique Rolland (2000 & 2008).
In April this year I wrote about James Pardey’s excellent site devoted to book covers from the Penguin science fiction range. I’m often pointing to various [...]

Taking a break from the psychedelic overload today with a return to (what else?) black and white photographs of naked men. The subjects this time are from Mobilario Humano, fanciful suggestions for furniture designs by David Blázquez which use the photographer himself as the subject, collaged into a series of pliable clones. Allen Jones produced [...]

Autobahn by Kraftwerk; Vertigo #6360 620.
Colin Buttimer was in touch last week to let me know he’d copied my Barney Bubbles post (with my permission) to his excellent new site, Hard Format, which is devoted to the art of music design. In the intro to that piece he repeats something he’d mentioned to me earlier, [...]

The HAL Project.
January flew by in a blizzard of work so posting here tended to rely more on pictures than words. As usual the things I’ve been designing will be unveiled when they’re closer to being published or released but for now here’s some new or not-so-new items worthy of note.
• The HAL Project screensaver. [...]

Before speech synthesis became a standard feature of home computing there was this crude device for teaching children spelling, now emulated in Flash by Kevin St. Onge. Kraftwerk fans will immediately recognise the tones generated by the top row of buttons which Ralf and Florian used on the track Home Computer for the Computer World [...]

Clearing junk today turned up some obsolete artefacts one of which (the Kraftwerk) has been kept for purely sentimental reasons. It’s been amusing the past few years watching the vinyl disc refuse to crawl onto the scrapheap of history despite its death having been announced many times over by journalists who—as usual—should know better. Several [...]

CBS 73059; construction by Karenlee Grant, photo by David Vine (1972).
A1 Timesteps (13:50)
A2 March From A Clockwork Orange (7:00)
B1 Title Music From A Clockwork Orange (2:21)
B2 La Gazza Ladra (5:50)
B3 Theme From A Clockwork Orange (1:44)
B4 Ninth Symphony: Second Movement (4:52)
B5 William Tell Overture (1:17)
B6 Country Lane (4:43)
Viddy well the stuff of obsessions, O [...]

Dr. Strangelove titles (1964).
There’s less of his work around than there should be, unfortunately. Saul Bass is justly celebrated for his title sequences and poster designs yet Pablo Ferro—whose titles were equally innovative and memorable—is rarely heard of even though you’ll have seen a lot of his work.

Bullitt titles (1968).
Ferro’s advertising films brought [...]

Impressions de la Haute Mongolie – Hommage á Raymond Roussel (1974-75).
When I wrote a short reminiscence about Impressions de la Haute Mongolie last March I really didn’t expect I’d be watching it again just over a year later having waited thirty years for the opportunity. But now we can all see José Montes-Baquer’s collaboration [...]

Lindsay Anderson’s masterpiece, If…., is finally given a DVD release in the UK in June. Anderson’s film—about the dramatic resistance to authority of three boys at an unnamed British school—was made in 1968 but I didn’t get to see it until (as I recall) 1977. I was 15 at the time and feeling increasingly desperate [...]

Philip Castle’s poster design. Castle also created the artwork for Full Metal Jacket.
Searching through old magazines whilst researching the epic Barney Bubbles post turned up this, a short reaction by Anthony Burgess to the success of Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange. Burgess became increasingly ambivalent about the attention brought about by Kubrick’s adaptation, not least because [...]

Subterranean Cinema has the El Topo screenplay online, taken from the Douglas Book edition from 1971 (above is the cover of my John Calder UK reprint of the same). As well as a screenplay with annotations by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the second half of the book featured a lengthy, fascinating and at times bizarre and hilarious [...]

Nice collection of old covers for Penguin Books on Joe Kral’s Flickr pages. Looking over these, many of which are very familiar even though I’ve never owned them, makes me aware of how many hours of my life must have been spent in secondhand bookshops. The David Pelham cover for A Clockwork Orange has always [...]

Welles: Among those whom I would call “younger generation” Kubrick appears to me to be a giant.
Interviewer: But, for example, The Killing was more or less a copy of The Ashphalt Jungle?
Welles: Yes, but The Killing was better. The problem of imitation leaves me indifferent, above all if the imitator succeeds in surpassing the model… [...]

Oh, if only…
From Bubblegumfink who specialises in creations like these. Via Boing Boing.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alex in the Chelsea Drugstore

“I went down to the Chelsea Drug Store,”
“To get your prescription filled…”
The Rolling Stones, You Can’t always Get What You Want, 1969
How much Stanley Kubrick trivia can you stand? One of the delights of DVD over VHS tape is the ability to step frame by perfect frame through any given film sequence without the picture [...]