Ghost Box – Page 16 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 11

Panneaux decoratifs (1900) by Manuel Orazi at NYPL.

• Ghostsigns: “a collaborative national effort to photograph, research and archive the remaining examples of hand painted wall advertising in the UK and Ireland.”

• Golden Age Comic Book Stories posts some Alphonse Mucha.

• Voyage Fantastique – An illustrated guide to the body and mind at A Journey Round My Skull.

• The gallery of the International Exhibition of Calligraphy.

• Trevor Wayne Pin-Up Show, a new photo collection of the tattooed Mr Wayne which includes photos and a foreword by Clive Barker.

• Phallophonies, a gallery exploring the penis in religious art. Related: “Churchgoers are outraged over a crucifix in a Catholic church that they say shows an image of genitalia on Jesus.”

• Hollingsville: “Expect live and unscripted wanderings around voodoo science parks, examinations of cities as battle suits and thoughts on pods, capsules and world expos.”

• Phantom Circuit #33 is a Ghost Box special featuring an interview with Jim Jupp (Belbury Poly) and Julian House (The Focus Group). Related: Ghost Box films at YouTube.

• Eldritchtronica and Wyrd Bliss, a mixtape by Simon Reynolds.

• Avant garde music and cinema meet at The Sound of Eye.

• Make your own newspaper with Newspaper Club.

• Drawdio: A pencil that lets you draw music.

• Yoko Ono collects rare books.

• KittehRoulette.

• Song of the week: The Four Horsemen (1972) by Aphrodite’s Child.

This is a post I’d been intent on writing for the past four years but kept putting off: why go to great lengths to describe another television drama which people can’t see? And how do you easily appraise something which haunted you for twenty years and which remains a significant obsession? My hand has been forced at last by a forthcoming event (detailed below) so this at least has some fleeting relevance, but before getting to that let’s have some facts.

Penda’s Fen was a TV play first screened in March 1974 in the BBC’s Play For Today strand. It was shot entirely on film (many dramas in the 1970s recorded their interiors on video) and runs for about 90 minutes. The writer was David Rudkin and it was directed by Alan Clarke, a director regarded by many (myself included) as one of the great talents to emerge from British television during the 1960s and 70s. The film was commissioned by David Rose, a producer at the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham, as one of a number of regional dramas. Rudkin was, and still is, an acclaimed playwright and screenwriter whose work is marked by recurrent themes which would include the tensions between pagan spirituality and organized religion, and the emergence of unorthodox sexuality. Both these themes are present in Penda’s Fen, and although the sexuality aspect of his work is important—pioneering, even—he’s far from being a one-note proselytiser. Alan Clarke is renowned today for his later television work which included filmed plays such as Scum (banned by the BBC and re-filmed as a feature), Made in Britain (Tim Roth’s debut piece), The Firm (with Gary Oldman), and Elephant whose title and Steadicam technique were swiped by Gus Van Sant. Penda’s Fen was an early piece for Clarke after which his work became (in Rudkin’s words) “fierce and stark”.

The most ambitious of Alan Clarke’s early projects, Penda’s Fen at first seems a strange choice for him. Most scripts that attracted Clarke, no matter how non-naturalistic, had a gritty, urban feel with springy vernacular dialogue (and sometimes almost no dialogue). David Rudkin’s screenplay is different: rooted in a mystical rural English landscape, it is studded with long, self-consciously poetic speeches and dense with sexual/mythical visions and dreams, theological debate and radical polemic—as well as an analysis of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. But though Penda’s Fen is stylistically the odd film out in Clarke’s work, it trumpets many of his favourite themes, in particular what it means to be English in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Howard Schuman, Sight & Sound, September 1998

Spencer Banks is the principal actor in Penda’s Fen, playing Stephen Franklin, an 18-year-old in his final days at school. The BBC’s Radio Times magazine described the film briefly:

Young Stephen, in the last summer of his boyhood, has somehow awakened a buried force in the landscape around him. It is trying to communicate some warning, a peril he is in; some secret knowledge; some choice he must make, some mission for which he is marked down.

The magazine also interviewed Rudkin about the film:

“I think of Penda’s Fen as more a film for television than a TV play—not just because it was shot in real buildings on actual film but because of its visual force…

“It was conceived as a film and written visually. Some people think visual questions are none of the writer’s business—that he should provide the action and leave it to the director to picture it all out. For me, writing for the screen is a business of deciding not only what is to be shown but how it is to be seen…

“Penda’s Fen is a very simple story; it tells of a boy, Stephen, who in the last summer of his boyhood has a series of encounters in the landscape near his home which alter his view of the world…
Continue reading “Penda’s Fen by David Rudkin”

Weekend links 3

It’s a curious feeling when a drawing which is nearly 26 years old makes it out into the world. The image above is the cover of a new 7″ single release, Dominion of Avyaktam by metal band Orator, the picture being something I drew in 1984 entitled Mahakala after the Tibetan deity which it depicts. The inspiration was the cover of another recording, a Nonesuch Explorer album, Tibetan Buddhism – Tantras Of Gyütö: Mahakala, and also the track Mahakala by 23 Skidoo from their 1983 album The Culling is Coming. The skull is drawn from a real one I was given. Looking at this today none of the elements seem to work together—and the landscape stuff looks like a lazy way of filling in space—but it’s nice to see it find a home. Dominion of Avyaktam is out now on the Legion of Death label.

• Surprise of the week: two books I’ve worked on were nominated for Nebula Awards, Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch, and Kage Baker’s The Hotel Under the Sand whose interior I designed.

• More music: a recording of Paul Schütze’s Third Site played live in 1999 (with Clive Bell, Raoul Björkenheim, Simon Hopkins & Thomas Köner’s voice) is now available as a free download on his website. More Schütze: Paul Schütze & Simon Hopkins playing a set at the Horbar in Hamburg on December 28, 2009.

• The incredible pinscreen animations of Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker are finally available on DVD. Also new to DVD, Alan Bennett at the BBC, a four-disc set of some of his TV plays including a particular favourite of mine, his Kafkaesque drama The Insurance Man.

• More Ghost Box business: Jon Brooks aka The Advisory Circle has a blog. And Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp was interviewed recently by Peter Bebergal at Mystery Theater. Related (forgot to mention this last week): The ASDA Mix, a great mixtape of spooky retro weirdness by Moon Wiring Club available for free at The Wire.

• The trailer for Mellodrama, a documentary about the Mellotron by Dianna Dillworth.

• The Parajanov Festival will be screening some of the director’s films in London and Bristol.

• Lots of weird and wonderful exhibits at the ~Wunderkammer~.

Strange Attractions

Giant Squid of the Newfoundland Banks. From a painting by Herbert B Judy.

Today’s Giant Squid comes to you courtesy of the University of Washington’s Digital Collection and their Freshwater and Marine Image Bank. This book plate is from Sea-shore Life; The Invertebrates of the New York Coast and the Adjacent Coast Region (1905) by Alfred Goldsborough Mayor, and the Internet Archive happens to have copies of the entire book.

Which facts have nothing whatsoever to do with Ken Hollings’ photos of the Strange Attractor Salon which is in its final week at Viktor Wynd Fine Art, London. I was pleased to see the picture above which shows my pieces on the same wall as work by Julian House whose covers for the Ghost Box CDs I’ve enthused over in the past. Strange Attractor curator Mark Pilkington has posted further photos on his Flickr pages as has artist Ali Hutchinson whose beautiful work is also featured there.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Strange Attractor Salon
• Readouts
• Welcome to Mars
• The Séance at Hobs Lane
• SAJ again
• Strange Attractor Journal Three
• Ghost Box
• The Major Arcana

A playlist for Halloween: Voodoo!

It’s become a tradition here to post a playlist for Halloween so here’s the one for this year, a collection of favourite “voodoo” music. Most are these pieces have as much to do with real voodoo as Bewitched does with real witchcraft but I like the atmospheres of Voodoo Exotica they evoke.

Voodoo Drums in Hi-Fi (1958).
Beginning with some ethnographic authenticity, this is one of many recordings of genuine (so they claim) voodoo drummers from Haiti, and was probably released to cash-in on the Exotica boom of the late Fifties. For the genuine article, the drums here sound less dramatic than the pounding rhythms familiar from Hollywood rituals, but that’s still a great cover. Voodoo Drums in Hi-Fi has been deleted for years but a worn copy of the vinyl release can be found on various mp3 blogs. For a more recent recording of voodoo rhythms, there’s Spirits Of Life: Haitian Vodou on the Soul Jazz label.

Voodoo Dreams (1959) by Martin Denny.
This, meanwhile, is the genuine kitsch from Denny’s Hypnotique album, a slow arrangement of a syrupy Les Baxter tune. More drums and bongos than usual for a Denny piece, and a suitably spectral chorus.

Voodoo (1959) by Robert Drasnin.
When composer Drasnin was asked by the Tops company to get hip to the Exotica craze the result was an album entitled Voodoo (with unconvincingly exotic white people on the cover), from which they released a single, Chant of the Moon, and this track as the B-side, one of the best pieces on the album.

I Walk on Gilded Splinters (1968) by Dr John.
Mac Rebennack was working as a session musician in Los Angeles when he recorded his debut album in an atmosphere far removed from the swampy New Orleans miasma which the music conjures. Gris-Gris owes a great deal to Robert Tallant’s book, Voodoo in New Orleans (1946), a popular recounting of the city’s occult legends from which Rebennack borrowed not only his new persona (chapter 5 concerns the history of the real Dr John, a 19th century voodoo practitioner) but also many of the transcribed chants which he set to music. In chapter 3 we read this:

A song given to a reporter of the New Orleans Times-Picayune was printed in that newspaper on March 16, 1924. Probably a very old one, it reflects the dominance of the queens in New Orleans Voodoo and boasts of their tremendous power. Originally sung in the patois known as Creole, it is given here in English:

They think they frighten me,
Those people must be crazy.
They don’t see their misfortune
Or else they must be drunk.

I—the Voodoo Queen,
With my lovely headkerchief
Am not afraid of tomcat shrieks,
I drink serpent venom!

I walk on pins
I walk on needles,
I walk on gilded splinters,
I want to see what they can do!

They think they have pride
With their big malice,
But when they see a coffin
They’re as frightened as prairie birds.

I’m going to put gris-gris
All over their front steps
And make them shake
Until they stutter!

Anyone familiar with Gris-Gris will recognise the lyrics of I Walk on Gilded Splinters (misspelled “Guilded” on the sleeve) which Dr John did a great job of fashioning into a classic voodoo song. The entire album might be ersatz, then, but it remains one of my favourites by anyone, and for me it’s still the best Dr John album.

Mama Loi, Papa Loi (1970) by Exuma.
Gris-Gris was too weird to be a success when it first appeared but Dr John’s music and extravagant stage presence were very distinctive and helped Blues Magoos manager Bob Wyld recast singer Tony McKay as “Obeah man” Exuma for Mercury Records. Exuma’s self-titled debut album is ersatz stuff again but manages to sound even more deliriously swampy and sorcerous than Gris-Gris, with jungle sounds, zombie gurgles and a clutch of enthusiastic voodoo-inflected songs. “Mama Loi, Papa Loi / I see fire in the dead man’s eye” he sings here, and for the duration of the album Tony McKay is Exuma.

Zu Zu Mamou (1971) by Dr. John.
After Gris-Gris Dr John gradually pared away the voodoo songs but saved one of the best until his final occult outing, The Sun, Moon & Herbs, which includes contributions from Eric Clapton and, somewhere in the bayou distance, Mick Jagger and PP Arnold on backing vocals. Zu Zu Mamou is the spooky highlight which made a fleeting appearance in Alan Parker’s 1987 Satanic noir, Angel Heart.

Voo Doo (1989) by the Neville Brothers.
Of all the songs I’ve heard which equate falling in love with a voodoo spell, this one from New Orleans’ Neville Brothers is the most evocative, a track from their marvellous Yellow Moon album.

Invocation To Papa Legba (1989) by Deborah Harry.
Yes, it’s Blondie’s Debbie Harry singing a very authentic-sounding voodoo chant, arranged by Chris Stein. This was a one-off which appeared on a Giorno Poetry Systems collection, Like A Girl, I Want You To Keep Coming, along with a William Burroughs reading (a staple of GPS albums), New Order playing Sister Ray live, and other pieces.

Litanie Des Saints (1992) by Dr. John.
Goin’ Back to New Orleans, like Gumbo before it, saw Dr John revisiting the musical history of his native city. Most of the songs are old jazz and blues covers with the notable exception of this opening number, another voodoo invocation. A great string arrangement and vocals from the Neville Brothers; I’d love to hear a whole album like this.

Zombie’ites (1993) by Transglobal Underground.
Zombies are a voodoo staple despite their current degraded status as the cuddly monster du jour, a development which has made me tire of seeing the word “zombie” in almost any context. A shame because I used to have a lot of time for films such as White Zombie (1932), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), and the later George Romero movies. White Zombie was the first zombie film and stars Bela Lugosi in a weirder and more effective piece of horror cinema than the stagey Dracula which made his name; I Walked With a Zombie was one of Val Lewton’s superb noirish collaborations with Jacques Tourneur; both films have their voodoo chants sampled on this track by Transglobal Underground from Dream of 100 Nations, with the opening chant from White Zombie forming the pulse that drives the piece. Along the way there’s another invocation from Voodoo in New Orleans—”L’Appé vini, le Grand Zombi / L’Appé vini, pou fe gris-gris!”—samples of Criswell from Plan 9 from Outer Space, and a moment of pure bliss at the midpoint when singer Natacha Atlas rides in on a magic carpet made of Bollywood strings.

Happy Halloween! And don’t forget to feed the loas…

• Vampire-hunting in New Orleans

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Voo-doo: Hoochie Coochie and the Creative Spirit
• Dead on the Dancefloor
• Another playlist for Halloween
• Exotica!
• White Noise: Electric Storms, Radiophonics and the Delian Mode
• The Séance at Hobs Lane
• Exuma: Obeah men and the voodoo groove
• A playlist for Halloween
• Ghost Box
• Voodoo Macbeth