Continuing a rather psychedelic week, Eyecandy is another of those groovy web toys, this time putting you inside a kaleidoscopic sphere of coloured circles whose parameters you can change with sliding controls. Fun to mess with when the right music is playing.

And while we’re on the subject, my new calendar has been selling very well thanks to some generous linkage from Arthur Magazine, Jeff VanderMeer, Boing Boing, Trendhunter, and others. Thanks to everyone who’s bought one, I’ll definitely be following this with something similar, not least a set of illustrations for Through the Looking-Glass. And Jabberwocky, yes, have to do something special for that…

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Kaleidoplex
• Colorscreen

I’ve not seen Jack Smight’s 1966 caper movie for years, and don’t remember much about it beyond Maurice Binder’s kaleidoscopic title sequence. But I like this collage poster, a suitably frenetic piece for one of Hollywood’s many attempts throughout the 1960s to capitalise on modish fashion. I can’t find a credit for the designer so if anyone knows who was responsible, please leave a comment.

This Polish poster, on the other hand, is the work of Witold Janowski who successfully combines the film’s title with its playing card theme. Too arty and cerebral for Hollywood (No girls!…no guns!) but that’s how it is with all those great Polish poster artists.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Robing of The Birds
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Dallamano’s Dorian Gray
• Czech film posters
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

Kaleidoscopic XXXIII: Shards (2008).

More kaleidoscopes, the sewn variety this time, from New York quilt maker Paula Nadelstern. Amazing work, especially in the detailed views. An exhibition, Kaleidoscope Quilts: The art of Paula Nadelstern, opens at the American Folk Art Museum, NYC, on April 21st.

Via DO.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Deluxe kaleidoscopes
• The Kaleidoplex

top left: Reflections of Friendship by Randy & Shelly Knapp; top right: Ostrich Egg by Frank Cascianni.
bottom left: Double Marble Scope by Stan Griffith; bottom right: Heart of Fire by Jeffrey Balter.

A few of the beautiful and remarkable kaleidoscope artworks at the Scherer Gallery. Most of these appear to be unique creations and as a result they’re very expensive. A shame the web pages don’t show us how they look inside; one presumably has to buy one to find out.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Kaleidoplex

The Kaleidoplex Light Organ, a kaleidoscope projector invented in the early Seventies by Marshall Yaeger to create a visual accompaniment for organ music performances.

The image [the Kaleidoplex] projects can be described most accurately and scientifically as an irregularly pulsating and continuously changing octagonal star or circular rosette centered on a circular field of smaller kaleidoscopic patterns arranged octagonally around — and related in colors and shapes to — the center. Sometimes the image devolves into from three to eight concentric, octagonal rings with alternating orientations to the vertical.

See it in action here. There are DVDs available.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lapis by James Whitney

I’ve never been all that keen on Alan Aldridge’s brand of psychedelic art but it’s worth noting here the (London) Design Museum retrospective which runs from 10 October to 25 January, 2009. Aldridge’s work as a designer and illustrator for Penguin Books in the Sixties impresses me more than his subsequent illustrated Beatles lyrics and The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper Feast (1973), a pair of books which seemed ubiquitous in the 1970s. Flickr has a decent selection of his book covers which included a run of sf paperbacks in 1967. Ballard’s The Wind from Nowhere is the very slight debut novel which the author prefers to forget. Where Ballard in Penguin is concerned, David Pelham’s work a few years later was a far more suitable match.

Seeing Aldridge honoured with a big retrospective make me wonder why Roger Dean hasn’t yet been given the same accolade. Dean for me is by far the better artist in terms of distinctive and memorable imagery; he’s also a better draughtsman and far more imaginative designer (not to mention having always been a speculative architect). I suspect Dean’s reputation is still blighted by his associations with Yes and the general antipathy which that band’s name generates in a certain middle-aged sector of Britain’s cultural commentariat. Ballard’s name was equally blighted in literary circles by his science fiction associations and it was Barcelona, not London, which honoured him with a major exhibition recently. There may be some home-grown reappraisals in the offing but I won’t hold my breath.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballard in Barcelona
• The New Love Poetry
• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal
• Penguin designer David Pelham talks
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

Previous posts about illustrators.

• Frans De Geetere’s illustrated Maldoror

• Jugend, 1897

• The art of Melchior Lechter, 1865–1937

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration

• Jugend, 1896

• Keim & Czeschka’s Nibelungen

• Les Papillons, métamorphoses terrestres des peuples de l’air

• Jugend Magazine revisited

• Heinrich Vogeler’s illustrated Wilde

• Peter Edwards times two

• Sinister silhouettes

• More science fiction covers

• The art of Ivan Bilibin, 1876–1942

• Ronald Balfour’s Rubáiyát

• Dalí in Wonderland

• The Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest

• Der Orchideengarten illustrated

• Equus and the Executionist

• Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs

• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

• The art of Raphaël Freida

• The art of Bertha Lum, 1869–1954

• The art of George Barbier, 1882–1932

• The art of Warwick Goble, 1862–1943

• Steinlen’s cats

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• Willy Pogàny’s Lohengrin

• Charles Ricketts’ Hero and Leander

• The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951

• Der Orchideengarten

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• Harry Clarke’s stained glass

• Henry Keen’s Dorian Gray

• Peake’s Pan

• Pite’s West End folly

• Gandharva by Beaver & Krause

• The White Peacock

• Einar Nerman

• More Arabian Nights

• Edward William Lane’s Arabian Nights Entertainments

• John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems

• Butterfly women

• Jugend Magazine

• The art of Maxwell Armfield, 1881–1972

• Buccaneers #1

• The art of Claude Fayette Bragdon, 1866–1946

• The art of Dugald Stewart Walker, 1883–1937

• Jim Cawthorn, 1929–2008

• December and Vernon Hill

• Guy Peellaert, 1934–2008

• Last in Line by Light Syndicate

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Peacocks

• The art of John Hurford

• La belle sans nom

• Alan Aldridge: The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes

• The art of Pierre Clayette, 1930–2005

• Ronald Searle book covers

• Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein

• Aubrey Beardsley’s musical afterlife

• The faces of Parsifal

• Willy Pogàny’s Parsifal

• The art of Mahlon Blaine, 1894–1969

• Pauline Baynes, 1922–2008

• Arthur Zaidenberg’s À Rebours

• San Francisco angels

• Maldoror illustrated

• The monstrous tome

• Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert

• The art of Virginia Frances Sterrett, 1900–1933

• The art of Ian Miller

• Dorothy Lathrop’s Three Mulla-mulgars

• Franklin Booth’s Flying Islands

• The art of Boris Artzybasheff, 1899–1965

• Meggendorfer’s Blatter

• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal

• Sidney Sime and Lord Dunsany

• Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers

• The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937

• William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

• Austin Spare’s Behind the Veil

• Jessie M King’s Grey City of the North

• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring

• The art of Sascha Schneider, 1870–1927

• Dorian Gray revisited

• William Blake in Manchester

• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput

• Beardsley’s Salomé

• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

• Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow

• Petrucelli’s Christmas

• The art of Stella Langdale, 1880–1976

• The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and their Contemporaries

• The poster art of Richard Amsel

• Family Dog postcards

• Cain’s son: the incarnations of Grendel

• “Weirdsley Daubery”: Beardsley and Punch

• Winsor McCay’s Hippodrome souvenirs

• The art of Jessie M King, 1875–1949

• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia

• The art of George Sheringham, 1884–1937

• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem

• The art of John Bauer, 1882–1918

• Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward

• The art of Bob Pepper

• Architectural renderings by HW Brewer

• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949

• Howard Pyle’s pirates

• The art of John Austen, 1886–1948

• The art of Patten Wilson, 1868–1928

• Fantastic art from Pan Books

• The poster art of Bob Peak

• The Illustrators of Alice

• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

• Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil

• HP Lovecraft’s favourite artists

• The Decorative Age

• The art of Erik Desmazières

• Images of Nijinsky

• The World in 2030

• Wladyslaw Benda

• The art of Virgil Finlay, 1914–1971

• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

More archive pages:
• The archive page archive

Previous posts about book covers or cover design.

• Contemporary bookbindings

• Sherbert and Sodomy

• Margaret Armstrong book designs

• Bradley does Beardsley

• Peter Edwards times two

• More science fiction covers

• The Art of Fontana Modern Masters

• Nabokov book covers

• Netherlands decorated books

• March of the Penguins

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• The King in Yellow

• Samuel Beckett and Russell Mills

• Penguin science fiction

• Ma Petite Ville

• Groovy book covers

• Bugger Boy

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Alan Aldridge: The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes

• Ronald Searle book covers

• The faces of Parsifal

• The monstrous tome

• Reynard the Fox

• The New Love Poetry

• Phallic worship

• The art of Ian Miller

• Recovering Bond

• Old book covers

• Pasticheur’s Addiction

• Arthur Machen book covers

• Repackaging Cormac

• Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers

• The World’s Greatest Detective

• Dorian Gray revisited

• Beardsley’s Salomé

• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

• James Bond postage stamps

• Stevenson and the dynamiters

• Decorated Russian book covers

• Russian book jackets, 1917–1942

• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal

• Kafka and Kupka

• Philip José Farmer book covers

• Crossed destinies revisted

• Jack Kerouac book covers

• Wanna see something really scary?

• The art of Bob Pepper

• Philip K Dick book covers

• Masonic fonts and the designer’s dark materials

• Boys Own Books

• Penguin designer David Pelham talks

• Fantastic art from Pan Books

• Penguin Surrealism

• Hospital by Toby Litt

• Cormac McCarthy book covers

• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino

• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

• Thomas Allen’s paperback art

• Perfume: the art of scent

• City of Spades

• DIY aesthetics

• Penguin book covers

• Dorothy Parker

• War of the Worlds book covers

• JG Ballard book covers

• William Burroughs book covers

• Czech book covers

• The Absolute Elsewhere

• The Hetzel editions of Jules Verne

• Gay book covers

More archive pages:
• The archive page archive

Vicissitudes, depth: 4.5 m.

The Underwater Sculpture Gallery in Grenada, West Indies is a project started in May 2006 by sculptor Jason Taylor, with the support of the Grenadian Ministry of Tourism and Culture. This is a unique artistic enterprise, celebrating Caribbean culture and highlighting environmental processes, such as coral reef re-generation.

An underwater gallery creates a whole new perspective on the world. Submerged objects are affected by different conditions both physical and emotional. Objects appear 25% larger and closer, colours are changed as light is absorbed differently by the water. The surface of the sea creates an ever-changing kaleidoscope of light, whilst its turbidity acts as a filter. The aquatic medium affords the viewer a multitude of angles and perspectives and thus transforms the traditional role of passive observer into an active process of discovery and engagement.

The ocean provides a setting imbued with mystery. Observers are invited to appreciate the works of art whilst questioning their circumstances and history. The viewer is immediately committed and involved to the environment and becomes part of the work itself. The sculptures will be an ever changing exhibition as nature colonizes the surface and the sea and tidal movement shapes the texture.

The uniqueness of the setting challenges traditional views of ourselves and our environment, transcending the boundaries separating land and water, and decompartmentalising social preconceptions. The constant flux of the marine environment on the sculptures mirrors the vicissitudes of our own lives.

Via Arthur.

Lucky Grenadians, the closest we get is Anthony Gormley’s Another Place, a series of his usual figure sculptures on Crosby beach, Merseyside.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dead monuments

Lapis (1966).

Proof of the conservative nature of cinema as an artistic medium can be found in the way its abstract practitioners don’t merit anything like the attention received by Piet Modrian or Jackson Pollock. In cinema narrative is all, and it’s ironic that when artists such as Julian Schnabel or Robert Longo turn to film they end up telling stories.

James Whitney’s Lapis (1966) is a classic work in this field, a 10-minute animation that took three years to create using primitive computer equipment:

In this piece smaller circles oscillate in and out in an array of colors resembling a kaleidoscope while being accompanied with Indian sitar music. The patterns become hypnotic and trance inducing. This work clearly correlates the auditory and the visual and is a wonderful example of the concept of synaesthesia.

James and his brother John were pioneers of the use of computers in animation. Looking around for stills from Lapis turned up this fascinating page of early computer graphics:

In the early 1960s digital computers became available to artists for the first time (although they cost from $100,000 to several millions, required air conditioning, and therefore located in separate computer rooms, uninhabitable ’studios’; programs and data had to be prepared with the keypunch, punch cards then fed into the computer; systems were not interactive and could produce only still images). The output medium was usually a pen plotter, microfilm plotter (hybrid bwn vector CRT and a raster image device), line printer or an alphanumeric printout, which was then manually transferred into a visual medium.

It’s difficult to see these films outside a special screening at a gallery or arts cinema. The Keith Griffiths documentary Abstract Cinema is an excellent introduction, including both Lapis and James Whitney’s Yantra among many other short works. However, this isn’t available to buy so viewing it means scouring TV schedules or waiting for some of these neglected works to turn up on YouTube. Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book Expanded Cinema discusses abstraction and the Whitneys and is available as a free PDF download here.

Update: Lapis on YouTube again, in full this time!

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Harry Smith, 1923–1991
• Cronenberg curates Warhol
• Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood

As mentioned earlier, I designed the jacket for this excellent biography of Donald Cammell some time ago. The book is reviewed in today’s (London) Times by Barry Miles.

Quite a performance
review by Barry Miles

DONALD CAMMELL: A Life on the Wild Side
by Rebecca and Sam Umland
FAB Press, £24.95 hardback, £16.95 paperback; 304pp

THERE IS A PERSISTENT rumour that after shooting himself in the head the filmmaker Donald Cammell lived on in a delirious, euphoric state for 45 minutes. The story is that he asked his wife China to place a mirror so that he could watch himself die and said: “Do you see the picture of Borges”? This is a reference to the death scene in Performance, his best known film, when the gangster Chas (played by James Fox) shoots the rock star Turner (played by Mick Jagger).

In a profoundly shocking sequence, the camera follows the bullet into his brain, only to find there a photograph of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges who is much quoted in the film. This is but one of the many myths surrounding Cammell that these authors debunk — he died the instant the .38 bullet entered his skull.

Performance, filmed in 1968 but not released until 1970, is his masterpiece: the original sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll movie.

He wrote the screenplay and co-directed with Nicolas Roeg, who was brought in to look after the cinematography, leaving Cammell free to deal with the actors and the partly improvised storyline. It has become a cult classic, the subject of two books, scores of essays, a poster magazine and a novelisation. Many now regard it as the greatest British film yet made.

Another myth claimed Cammell as the notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley’s godson. He was not, but Crowley was a family friend and did bounce the young Cammell on his knee. Cammell, born in 1934, was a member of the shipbuilding family. His father was editor of The Connoisseur and Donald was raised in an atmosphere of bourgeois bohemianism. He was sent, at the age of 8 to the Catholic Abbey School at Fort Augustus, where his “hysterical reaction” was so extreme that his parents had to withdraw him after two terms. The authors argue convincingly that Cammell’s later self-destructive behaviour was shaped by sexual abuse at school.

He attended art college, then studied with the painter Pietro Annigoni. As the authors put it: “It goes without saying that he was attractive, talented, charming and charismatic.”

He developed a clientele among the Chelsea set and gained a reputation as a ladies’ man, seducing many of his sitters, disrupting marriages and having affairs with well-known actresses. In 1954 he renounced portraiture and enrolled in the Royal Academy School.

Such abrupt life-changes became a feature of his life. They were often caused by days of bleak depression—the family had a history of manic depression—when he brooded about suicide and death. Almost always they were ill-advised and self- destructive, particularly during his career as a film-maker. He sabotaged so many projects that he completed only four films in his life.

While at the RA he married the Greek actress Maria Andipa, but as his favourite sexual relationship was a ménage à trois with a few male friends, it was a rocky ride, and ended in October 1959 when Maria had a baby.

Emotionally immature, he could not handle the responsibility, walked out the day after she came home from hospital and rejected all efforts by his son to see him.

His unorthodox views on sexuality and heavy drug use marked him as a precursor of the hippie movement. His friend David Litvinoff said that “by 1960 Donald had tried every drug and every known combination of drugs known to man”.

From 1960–67 he lived in Paris with the model Deborah Roberts. He became one of the beautiful people, flitting from Paris to London and Rome in his sports car, but the black moods and talk of suicide were ever present, like the underlying menace throughout Performance.

Cammell drifted into film-making, first as an actor, then a screenwriter. Performance was the first film he directed. It has a multitude of influences, from Joseph Losey’s 1963 film The Servant, which made James Fox a star, to John Boorman’s Point Blank, which he insisted that the whole cast and crew see. He claimed the film-maker Kenneth Anger as “the major influence at the time I made Performance“, much of which is “directly attributable to him”.

The final edit was based to an extent on the random cutting-up in Antony Balch and William Burroughs’s 1962 film The Cut Ups. Although credited entirely to Cammell, Performance’s screenplay was written on the beach at St Tropez by Cammell, Roberts and Anita Pallenberg. (At one point, a gust of wind blew the whole script into the sea and Anita had to iron each page to dry it out.) Collaboration was a strong part of the Sixties ethos and was Cammell’s favoured method of working; it was a way of avoiding his self-destructive tendency to sabotage whatever he was doing.

Even so he managed to delay the film for a year by being obdurate with Warner Brothers about editing: they wanted another Hard Day’s Night, with Jagger appearing early on. In Cammell’s version, he did not appear for an hour. The solution was to create Cammell’s signature style: Performance became a montage of rapid intercuts and flashbacks, a kaleidoscope of images, the precursor of today’ s rock videos.

Cammell was invited to Hollywood but nothing he did later could match the artistic and critical success of Performance and, still gripped by black depressions, he killed himself in 1996 at the age of 62.

A heavily illustrated labour of love, this book is in great need of an editor, but it goes a long way towards explaining Cammell’s tortured genius.

A NOTICE TO OUR PUBLIC…………
It’s now a shade over twenty years since Rolling Stone was launched, complete with a brave new broadside on its interests and purposes.

So we too now announce our aims and prejudices and strive to clear a path laying bare our hopes and inspirations. Strange Things will deal from the heart and feature items that we would wish to find on offer. Music, from whatever era, will always be the core, with in-depth studies of a sound or an individual, or a laugh and a picture whenever the situation arises. There will be discographies, reviews, rare photographs; there will be threads or themes across several issues or even, instead, a one off appreciation.

That aside, there will be literature, film and television; cult curiosities or mainstream geniuses. In short, the boundaries are limitless. Over the next few issues the tale of Greenwich Village will unfold; so too the life and work of Richard Brautigan. Frantic new pop will sit beside English folk-rock, the Silver Surfer will meet the San Franciscan scene and white Chicago Blues will rock with Thunderbirds. “Whatever Fits” is our new motto – we’re there wherever strange things are happening.

Volume 1, Number 1: March 1988
The Kinks; Horror At The Party Beach; The James Taylor Quartet; Krazy Kat; Syd Barrett; Robyn Hitchcock; Greenwich Village; Psychic TV; Los Angeles & The Dukes Of Stratosphear.

Volume 1, Number 2: May/June 1988
Iggy Pop & The Stooges; Giant Sand; Richard Brautigan; Alan Moore; Wire; Man In A Suitcase; The Creation Label; Krazy Kat; American Country Rock; The Shamen; Smoke & The Silver Surfer.

Volume 1, Number 3: July/August 1988
Little Feat; Sgt. Bilko; Nirvana; Country Rock, part two; International Artists; Barbarella; Krazy Kat; The Insect Trust; Tiny Tim; Bruce Lee; Autosalvage & Kathy Acker.

Volume 1, Number 4: September/October 1988
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.; Fierce Recordings; Van Morrison and Them; Syd Barrett : The Making of Opel; Deutsch Nepal; Sid Griffin’s Guide To Los Angeles; Green On Red; The Go-Betweens; Krazy Kat; Merrell Fankhauser & John Fahey.

Volume 1, Number 5: April/May 1989
Frank Zappa and The Mothers Investigation/Straight Records; Clive Barker; Track Records; Josefus; Merrell Fankhauser; Krazy Kat; Crosstown Traffic; Paula Paradaema; EC Comix & Roy Orbison.

Volume 1, Number 6: Summer 1989
Dr. Who & The Daleks; The Soft Machine; The Daevid Allen Interview; Q65; Terry Riley; Harvest Records; Bevis Frond Plucks; Just William; Krazy Kat & The Grateful Dead.

Volume 1, Number 7: Spring 1990
Nick Drake; The Carousel; Bleecker & MacDougal; Kenneth Patchen; LA Rock Guide; Moondog; Krazy Kat; Kaleidoscope/Fairfield Parlour; Heyday Records & Detective Fiction (Free 7″ single given away with issue seven contained the following tracks : Clover—Ice Cream Man; Johnny Burton—Polevault Man; The Eggy—You’re Still Mine & Rhubarb Rhubarb—Rainmaker).