Weekend links 415

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The Creation of the Birds (1957) by Remedios Varo.

• “I think my music is very modern and very old. Together.” Sandy Robertson interviewed Popol Vuh’s Florian Fricke for Sounds in 1981. The Fricke-directed Sei Still Wisse ICH BIN referred to in the feature may be viewed here. Further Vuh-ing: Popol Vuh on Beat Club, 1971; a news clip of the group from the same year; a filmed improvisation from around the same time (Florian still had his Moog); and the group miming to recorded music from a year or two later.

• More Rammellzee (see last week): Gothic Futurism, a video collage based on Rammellzee’s treatise of the same name. Probably the only place you’ll ever see Rammellzee, the late Glenn Branca and art historian Kenneth Clark thrown together.

• After releasing 5 albums, Disjointed Oddities And Other Such Things is the first EP of “odd strange electronics, psych, Radiophonics, drone and quirky folk” by Keith Seatman.

Alina Cohen on Remedios Varo, a Spanish Surrealist painter whose work has been receiving increased attention in recent years but whose life remains under-examined.

• More German music: “I grew up in total ruins”—Irmin Schmidt of Can on LSD, mourning and musical adventures.

• Mixes of the week: FACT mix 655 by Matthewdavid, and The Monday Is Okay mix by JQ.

Olivia Laing, Sarah Wood and Philip Hoare discuss Modern Nature by Derek Jarman.

National Geographic has digitized its collection of 6,000+ vintage maps.

• At Bandcamp: The Transcendental Sound of Moroccan Gnawa Music.

Joe Fletcher on the nightmarish dream logic of Bruno Schulz.

Levi Stahl on the mind of Donald E. Westlake.

Affenstunde (1970) by Popol Vuh | Toy Planet (1981) by Irmin Schmidt & Bruno Spoerri | Adithaim (2005) by The Cracow Klezmer Band

Unmistaken Hands: Ex Voto F.H., a film by the Brothers Quay

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More from the Quays, and one of their most recent animated films. Unmistaken Hands: Ex Voto F.H. is a 25-minute piece made in 2013 for a commission from the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. The film is subtitled Fragments and Motifs from the Writings of Felisberto Hernández, the “F.H.” of the title. Hernández was a Uruguayan writer whose fabulist fiction has been praised by Italo Calvino and Gabriel García Márquez, and as with the Quays’ films based on the work of Bruno Schulz and Robert Walser it probably helps to be acquainted with the source. In this case I’m not, although reading a description of Hernández’s Piano Stories—the only (?) collection in English—I ought to remedy that.

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The content may be South American but the Hernández’s fictional world is explored using the same accumulation of hints and allusions as in the films based on the work of European writers. The Quays’ recent shorts have favoured HD video and anamorphic distortion, and that’s the technique adopted here. I can’t fault their animation or their mise-en-scène but I keep hoping they might find a way to use video that has more of the grain and texture of their earlier films. I’m also hoping we might see these recent works gathered together in a disc collection in the near future. Unmistaken Hands: Ex Voto F.H. is a recent arrival at YouTube, and may not be there for long so watch it while you can.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Quay Brothers archive

Weekend links 163

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Le Cadavre Exquis by Yukio Michishita. As featured in The Purple Book: Sensuality & Symbolism in Contemporary Art & Illustration by Angus Hyland & Angharad Lewis.

• ” Like Polo’s magic cities, which in the end all turn out to be Venice, fantasy finally refers us back to reality and the challenge of everyday social engagement.” Jonathan Galassi on The Dreams of Italo Calvino. In the same edition of the NYRB, Anna Somers Cocks on The Coming Death of Venice?

• Mix of the week: Solid Steel Radio Show 7/6/2013 Part 3 + 4: Peter “Look Around You” Serafinowicz compiles 70 minutes of Boards of Canada-inflected ambience.

• “Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring.” Alan Moore talks to Peter Bebergal.

The gay rights movement around the world has promoted a basic idea: we want to show society that we are human beings like everyone else. The problem is that the train driver at the Kashirskaya train station doesn’t necessarily think that those few dozen passengers in whose face he closes the doors are a priori inferior and deserve such treatment. He feels that he becomes superior to them by means of using his power over them. This sense of superiority can be trumped only by some higher superiority.

On the Moscow Metro and Being Gay by Dmitry Kuzmin.

• “I went from being a very promising young writer to being completely ignored in two novels.” Madeleine Monson-Rosen on Angela Carter.

Sequence6, another excellent sampler from Future Sequence: 40 new pieces of music as a free download.

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The Arrival on Mars, an illustration from The Ship That Sailed to Mars (1923) by William Timlin.

• At PingMag: An Icon for Everyone: Shoryu Hatoba, Japanese Crest Artist.

• More Japanese weirdness at Sardines Bizarres.

• Larry Nolen on Bruno Schulz.

Magic Ritual (1976) by Black Renaissance | Magic Fly (1977) by Space | Magic Vox (1981) by Ippu-Do

Witkinesque

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Arriving in the post this week, a Christmas gift from Supervert, a chapbook featuring a new piece of writing that purports to be the unauthorised biography of American artist/photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. The premise is that the facts of the real Witkin’s life are far too mundane to account for his extraordinary photo tableaux so Supervert supplies details such as “Mary Witkin [his mother] worked as a bookkeeper in a DDT plant, slowly saving to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the absurd.” A metaphysical portrait of the artist, then, with echoes of David Lynch or Bruno Schulz. Inside the chapbook was a promo postcard bearing pictures of the delightful Ms. Stoya whose reading of Necrophilia Variations has now gained over four million YouTube views.

The Witkin book isn’t for sale but copies are available to those who enter the Supervert contest which is running throughout December. All you need do is enter an email address here then keep your fingers crossed.

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Sanitarium, New Mexico (1983) by Joel-Peter Witkin.

Witkin’s tableaux made an immediate impression circa 1993 when I bought a copy of PhotoVision, a Spanish photography journal which had devoted an entire issue to his work. This arrived at a point when I was halfway through drawing the Reverbstorm comic series, and Witkin’s parade of unorthodox humanity, crucified apes and sundry body parts seemed an ideal complement for the parade of similar grotesqueries (and sundry body parts) we were putting into the comic pages. I also liked the way Witkin worked his own variation on familiar scenes from art history, something we were doing throughout Reverbstorm (Witkin’s Vase: Study For the Base of the Crucifix just happens to combine a partly dissected human skull with Picasso’s Guernica, a recurrent motif throughout the series).

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Above and below, some of the more Witkinesque details from part seven of Reverbstorm. The main figure above was a direct reference to Witkin’s Sanitarium, New Mexico. Many figures in other drawings are given Witkin-like blindfolds.

Continue reading “Witkinesque”

Covering Viriconium

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The Pastel City (New English Library, 1971). Illustration by Bruce Pennington.

There are writers’ writers, of course, and M. John Harrison is one of those. He moves elegantly, passionately, from genre to genre, his prose lucent and wise, his stories published as sf or as fantasy, as horror or as mainstream fiction. […] His prose is deceptively simple, each word considered and placed where it can sink deepest and do the most damage.

Neil Gaiman in the introduction to the Bantam/Spectra edition of Viriconium (2005)

This is a lengthy post of potentially minority interest for which I make no apologies. It’s often been a function of the writing here to think aloud while communicating an enthusiasm; as enthusiasms go this one runs deeper than usual. I love these books indecently. If they were people I’d want to sleep with them even though doing so might mean contracting some debilitating illness. When you’re employed as a book designer and illustrator it’s impossible to avoid taking a professional interest in the packaging of your favourite books. M. John Harrison‘s Viriconium books—three novels and a collection of short stories—present challenges that the illustrators and art directors of the past have invariably failed to meet. This post looks at prior cover designs while a subsequent post will suggest some solutions to the challenges. But first it’s necessary to say something about Viriconium itself.

In the distant future of the Earth, when the human race has flourished then lapsed into a state of terminal decay, only one city of note remains: Viriconium, the Pastel City, surrounded by the wastes and fens of a ruined world. Or so we’re told in the first book of a series which begins as outright fantasy and moves by an astonishing feat of authorial dexterity closer to our world and our time. (A shorthand description might describe a series that starts out reading like Jack Vance and ends up closer to Bruno Schulz.) It becomes apparent that Viriconium stands for all the cities that have ever been, and with its avenues, rues and strasses often seems to be a composite of them all. Aside from the unspecified future its fixture in time is indeterminate: one story may concern events which are in the distant past of another while the streets and quarters never remain anchored enough for any kind of map to be drawn. Areas of continuity rise like towers from a sea of vapour. Even the city’s name slips its mooring: the origin is Viroconium Cornoviorum, a Roman town in Shropshire, and Viroconium, a poem by Mary Webb. In the later books we’re told the city is also called Uriconium or Vriko but whether these variants lie in the past or future of Viriconium is unclear. The indeterminacy was deliberate, a riposte to what Harrison calls “fauxthenticity”, and the tendency of genre readers to reduce the subtleties of fiction to the schematics of role-playing games, spaceship diagrams and books with titles like The Science of Middle-Earth. It’s this indeterminacy and a refusal to offer neat resolutions (or that awful term “closure”) that no doubt explains why Harrison’s books often seem to attract more praise than actual readers.

The most remarkable aspect of the books presents the greatest problems in design terms. In the fourteen years that Harrison worked on his series he used its mutable qualities to pull the entire project to pieces without actually destroying it or turning the whole thing into a self-regarding postmodern game. The early books critique the lazy assumptions of the fantasy genre while the later books recast the earlier stories as myths or half-remembered dreams. The first two books may use the apparatus of the fantasy genre but that doesn’t mean the tired imagery of fantasy illustration necessarily suits their covers. The very last story, A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, is set in the north of England in our own time. Changing the name Viriconium to London throughout the text, which Harrison has done when the story has been published elsewhere, dissolves the remaining genre trappings. The process is akin to watching those Buddhist monks who construct elaborate mandalas of coloured sand only to sweep them away when the work is finished. All this makes the Viriconium books unique, it’s one of many reasons why I hold them in such high regard and it’s also why they frequently irritate those who want simpler fare. The problem of appealing to a reactionary readership may explain why many of the following covers have failed to honour the content of the books.

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The Pastel City (Doubleday, 1972) Illustration by Wendell Minor.

Dustjacket summaries do none of the books any favours but for the unacquainted they help give a flavour of each volume. They also show how the presentation gradually shifts emphasis. Here’s the Doubleday edition:

An intriguing fantasy in which past and future blend uniquely on an Earth far different from any known to man.

There, in the Empire of Viriconium, a world of chivalry, of magic and strange powers, two Queens clash in bloody warfare for control of the Pastel City and all of its domains. The armies of the defender, Queen Methvet, are led by Lord tegeus-Cromis and the rest of a legendary band of knights, while their attackers are the vicious and cunning Northmen who serve the rival Queen Moidart.

More is involved than a struggle for a throne however, for in their lust for victory the forces of Queen Moidart have unleashed creatures from Earth’s dim past whose terrible potential they little realize until too late. And as Lord Cromis and the rest of his band seek to meet the challenge of these nightmare apparitions, their quest leads them on a perilous journey across many weird lands to a deadly climax in a buried city where a solution is revealed that is as old as time itself.

It’s apposite that a series about an indeterminate city begins with some confusion evident from the outset. The Pastel City in its first UK printing was described on the cover as a fantasy yet compared to Dune which is generally regarded as science fiction; the Doubleday edition is labelled science fiction yet the cover illustration shows a mailed and armoured warrior; the narrative is situated somewhere between the genres in what used to be called science fantasy. While the story concerns the distant future many of the props are the familiar material of heroic fantasy: horses, swords, feuding queens, an axe-wielding dwarf. What technology remains is either defunct or barely functioning. The ruin and decay of Harrison’s world is part of the pleasure, as is the vacillating and ambivalent nature of the characters, a quality which increases as the series develops. None of the publishers dare to reflect this ambivalence in the cover art. Unaware readers would be led to believe from subsequent editions that these books contain the determined and super-efficient heroes they’d find in other books. Compared to what follows the first two covers aren’t so bad; Bruce Pennington gives us one of his flying saucer apocalypses while Wendell Minor’s avoidance of a genre scene is an approach that might have been deployed a lot more often later on.

Continue reading “Covering Viriconium”