Ed Jansen writes again to notify me that the latest number of his web magazine, Passage, is now online, about which he says:

In Passage nr. 12 there are articles about a 17th century garden in The Hague, about the mysterious visit to The Hague by the Comte De Saint Germain. Was he really a enlightened man or a fraud? If you’re an occultist you’ll tend to believe the first, the historian thinks otherwise. Then there are the photos of the dancer and performer Hiroake Umeda. Strange movements underlined by light-effects. Living in a Capsule is a combination of the paintings by the Dutch artist Tjebbe Beekman and the work of J.G. Ballard. Lastly there is an article about Jan Bastiaans, the doctor who experimented with LSD to ‘free’ the victims of the concentration camps of the nightmares and repressed memories.

Once again the text content is in Dutch but that doesn’t exclude all visitors here. I hadn’t come across the work of Tjebbe Beekman before. His paintings of urban desolation are indeed a good match for one aspect of Ballard’s work, and they make an interesting contrast with Dick French’s earlier views of the author’s Drowned World.

Trust by Tjebbe Beekman (2005).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Drowned Worlds
• Passage 11
• Passage 10

Dragon Skull Ring.

Jewellery by Swedish designer Maria Nilsdotter. Looking at her blog posts I’d guess that her snake bangle is inspired by the serpentine ring and bracelet set designed by Alphonse Mucha and Georges Fouquet for Sarah Bernhardt.

Snake bangle (blackened silver).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Divine Sarah
• Lalique’s dragonflies

No idea how this piece of exploitation from 1968 evaded my attention for so long but going by the IMDB reviews it’s probably safe to say that any obscurity is well-deserved:

this movie is very accurate, as every girl i have met that smokes weed instantly becomes a bisexual nymphomaniac. scientific studies have actual proved this many times over. the accuracy is phenomenal and i think i speak for every man out there when i say i leave my boxers on while having sex. the parties look like any other raging party in the 60’s where people sit together in a well lit room smoking weed and immediate have sex with everyone as soon as they walk in.

The director and writer were evidently embarrassed enough to use pseudonyms (Gertrude Steen…yeah, right) so the poster and title card (below) are probably as good as it gets unless tepid soft porn is something that really turns you on (baby).

Another fabulous Chateau Thombeau tip.

Alice has been in the news again this week with a new trailer turning up for Tim Burton’s forthcoming film and also this lengthy article in New Scientist which looks at the Alice books through an interpretative lens of algebra and geometry. While it’s nice to play with a fresh interpretation of the stories, essays like this are invariably subject to considerable strain as they attempt to wring hidden meanings from every quirk of the text.

The trouble with the Alice books is that their origin is almost as famous as the stories themselves, and it’s well-known that Dodgson wrote down Alice’s Adventures Under Ground as a present for Alice Liddell with no intention of seeing it published. Aside from the addition of extra scenes, the published book doesn’t radically differ from the handwritten original so you have to stretch your credulity to accept that Dodgson managed to improvise an entertaining story for a child whilst simultaneously authoring a critique of developments in contemporary mathematics. As usual in cases such as these it helps to refer to an earlier logician, William of Ockham, whose famous declaration that “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily” is given on this mathematician’s page as “when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.”

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Return to Wonderland
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice

Standing boy pulling ropes (1962).

The chiaroscuro above looks like a photo print but is apparently a painting. I’ve seen Bliss’s name mentioned a few times before but he remains rather difficult to track down online, most of the visible works being on auction sites. What there is consists mostly of young men in swim suits, to a degree which seems like an idée fixe given the lack of nudes or variation in the poses.

left: Standing boy with red trunks (1961); right: Boy with oar (no date).

In a career outline on the Leslie-Lohman site there’s this curious paragraph:

Bliss…after 20 years of alcoholism, discovered LSD. After that he completely stopped drinking. His work then completely shifted to colorful landscapes as well as psychedelic visionary paintings.

I’ve not been able to find any of this psychedelic work at all. If anyone knows of any, please leave a comment.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Further: the second version of Ken Kesey’s Merry Prankster bus.

The word psychedelic, like surreal before it, slipped from its original meaning through appropriation. Humphrey Osmond’s neologism was first coined in drug-related correspondence with Aldous Huxley in 1957 and was specifically intended to describe the “mind-manifesting” quality of the hallucinogenic drug experience. The drug-inspired art and music which came after the experiments of the Fifties quickly assumed a gaudy and chaotic aspect derived from the intense visual abstractions of LSD trips. Huxley in The Doors of Perception (1954) rejected these fractal visions as trivial and distracting—he was more concerned with the deeper spiritual revelations—but a new way of seeing in a new era required a new label. Art and design which is vivid, florid, multi-hued and quite often incoherent is where the term psychedelic is most commonly applied today.

Of the three vehicles here, only Ken Kesey’s bus can be regarded as psychedelic in Osmond’s sense, this being the renovated school bus which travelled the United States in the mid-Sixties dispensing free LSD to those it met along the way. These events were recounted in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) and the creators of last year’s Milk, Gus Van Sant and Dustin Lance Black, have a film in preparation based on Wolfe’s book. Milk was a film about gay rights campaigner Harvey Milk, and Ang Lee (director of Brokeback Mountain) has a new film of his own due shortly, Taking Woodstock, which concerns Elliot Tiber, the gay organiser of the Woodstock Festival of 1969. Both stories bracket the psychedelic era. Is this coincidence or do I detect something in the air? But I digress….

For the chaotic and decorative nature of the psychedelic style, look no further (so to speak) than Janis Joplin’s 1965 Porsche. I saw this in 2005 at Tate Liverpool when it was touring with the Summer of Love exhibition of psychedelic art. One of  Joplin’s very last recordings before her death in 1970 was a birthday song for John Lennon so it’s perhaps fitting that the third vehicle here is Lennon’s lavish Rolls-Royce. His 1965 limousine came originally in black livery but two years later he decided he wanted it painted like a gypsy caravan. There’s a great page about the car here including details of its decoration, created in consultation with Marijke Koger of Dutch design group The Fool.

In a small way these three vehicles encapsulate the psychedelic period, from optimistic, proselytising origins following the revelations of hallucinogenic drugs to decline into a mannered, highly-commercialised graphic style. Ken Kesey died in 2001 but his second bus is still active while the cars are now museum pieces. Perhaps the real psychedelic spirit prevails after all.

See also: George Harrison’s Mini Cooper

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dutch psychedelia
• The art of LSD

It’s perhaps fitting that in the same week (almost the same day) that the Large Hadron Collider was finally switched on, Apple should release iTunes v. 8.0. The improved Visualizer for this application generates patterns not so far removed from the graphics created to explain quantum interactions or cosmic motion. (And while we’re discussing quantum events, let’s not forget this.)

I enthused last year about the Jelly setting of the Visualizer but these new graphics are a step—a quantum leap, even—beyond that, with a variety of spinning orbs and glowing lights which shoot out streams of sparks and flares of colour. Variations can be had by pressing the M key which cycles through the settings. The abstract fish and/or spermatozoa are especially impressive the way they charge around the screen while their world revolves in three dimensions. If Jelly makes you feel like you’re on drugs, watching these new effects reacting in time to some suitably contemporary music—Aerial by 2562, for instance—makes me feel for once that I’m living in the future I expected to find this side of the year 2000.

• Nature explains what the LHC has actually been built for.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aerial by 2562
• From LSD to OSX
• iTunes 7

Albert Hofmann by Alex Grey.

Albert Hofmann, discoverer of LSD, 102 years old today. Last month Scientific American reported that hallucinogenic drugs are once again being considered as a way to treat psychiatric disorders.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of LSD
• The trip goes on
• Albert Hofmann
• Hep cats

A few servings of iTunes jelly.

I’ve spent the past week or so enjoying the delights of Leopard, the 10.5 iteration of Apple’s OS X operating system, but have only just noticed the new Visualizer patterns in the latest version of iTunes. I don’t use the Visualizer much, especially since the introduction of Front Row, Apple’s home media management system, but it’s always nice to know it’s there. The original Visualizer isn’t so far removed from the graphic tricks I used to laboriously program into my old Spectrum computer in the 1980s, simple repeated shapes with coloured lines, albeit a lot faster and with far more detail and animation than a 48k Spectrum could ever manage. The latest Visualizer has been significantly supercharged, however, and the new “Jelly” setting creates some really beautiful (and it should be noted, trippy) patterns, reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters UFOs or James Cameron’s Abyss inhabitants.

I can’t help but see a direct line of continuity here from Apple’s origin in the head culture of Sixties and Seventies’ California to the present. Writer John Markoff examined some of the connections between psychedelic culture and the nascent computer scene in What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry where we find Apple CEO Steve Jobs saying that “taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.” Given this, the glowing, pulsating mandalas in the new iTunes can be seen as a vestigial remnant of that era, and it seems fitting that those patterns are integrated into a music player; it was upon the Sixties’ music scene, after all, that LSD originally had its greatest cultural impact.

Update: For anyone wanting to play with iTunes Jelly, there’s a couple of undisclosed features (this is for Macs but I imagine they’d be the same in the PC version). Pressing M tells you the name of the pattern currently being displayed, pressing 1 shrinks part of the pattern, 2 zooms it out and 8, 9 and 0 cause different colours to over-saturate. It’s a full-on psychedelic light-show, in other words.

Update 2: If you press M so it shows the pattern name then press the Up or Down arrow, you can flick through the various pattern settings.

• Watch Jelly in action
• Steve Jobs drops acid in Pirates of Silicon Valley

Previously on { feuilleton }
• iTunes 7

“Mirage in time—image of long-vanish’d pre-human city.”

A couple pieces of news to catch up with here, both Lovecraft-related which is very apt for the month of Halloween. The first is the work I gave a teaser view of in August, a commission for Maison d’Ailleurs, the Museum of Science Fiction, Utopia and Extraordinary Journeys in Yverdon-Les-Bains, Switzerland. The brief for An Exhibition of Unspeakable Things: Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book was to choose an entry from HP Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, his source of story ideas. The entry I chose implies some of the alien architecture which is a feature of At the Mountains of Madness although I’ll admit that the final result is debatable as architecture.

The exhibition details are as follows:

An Exhibition of Unspeakable Things: Works inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book
Opening on Saturday, October 27, 2007, 6 PM at Maison d’Ailleurs
Pl. Pestalozzi 14, 1400 Yverdon-les-Bains, Suisse
Ph: +41 24 425 64 38, www.ailleurs.ch

Original art by:
Albertine / Albin / Aeron Alfrey / Sylvain Amacher / Fred Bastide / Jose Antonio Bautista / Bénédicte / Noah Berlatsky / Stephan Bersier / Bertschy / Christian Bili / Enrique Bonet / Eric Braün / Benjamin Bron / Gabriel Br. / Giacomo Carmagnola / Paul Carrick / Caza / Daniel Ceni / Jean-Michel Cholette / Gilles Christinat / Cosey / John Coulthart / Marc Da Cunha Lopes / Brendan Danielsson / Guy Davis / Antoine Déprez / René Donais / Randy DuBurke / Antoine Duplan / Kevin Evans / Léonard Felix / Deak Ferrand / Grégoire Fontana / Mathias Forbach / Fufu Frauenwahl / Fritz & Ángel Olivera / Hugues Lapaire / Stephan Gaudin / Gess / H. R. Giger / Thomas Gilbert / Goomi / Gnot Guedin / Antoine Guex / Alban Guillemois / Gwabryel / Karen Ichters / Anna-Maria Jung / Julien Kaeser / Jean-Philippe Kalonji / Thomas Koenig / Körner Union / Krum / Muriel Liénard / Guillaume Long / Denis Martin / Guillaume Mayor / Laurent Mettraux / Berivan Meyer / Yves Milet-Desfougères / Monsieur Mishimoto / Mix & Remix / Fabian Moreillon / Sebastián Mulero / Jason Murphy / Julien Noirel / Johan Nowasad / Noyau / David Paleo / Fernando Pascual / Nancy Peña / Yann Perrelet / Stéphane Pichot / Nicolas Pitz / Plonk et Replonk / Alexandre Pointet / Mark Prent / Björn Quiring / Richard Raaphorst / Nadia Raviscioni / Jeff Remmer / Émile Roduit / François Rouiller / Jérémie Royer / David Saavedra / Patrick Saradar / Rick Sardinha / Irène Schoch / Andrés Soria / Laurence Suhner / Erwann Surcouf / Olivier Texier / Jason Thompson / Tom Tirabosco / Tito / Régis Tosetti / Walder / Anne Wilsdorf /

Catalogue (128 pages, 90 illustrations) with original fiction by:
Terry Bisson / David Collin / Paul Di Filippo / Eugène / Valerio Evangelisti /
Jacques Finné / Jeffrey Ford / Philippe Forêt / Pierre-Yves Lador / H. H. Løyche / James Morrow / Christopher Priest / Lucius Shepard / Norman Spinrad / Ian Watson

The exhibit will also present The Call of Cthulhu, a film by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, Le cas Lovecraft, a documentary by Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic, a radio listening station organized by Sonar/Espace 2, and a series of interactive fictions imagined by Jon Ingold (Dead Cities), Peter Nepstad (Ecdysis), David Whyld (The Cellar), Eric Forgeot, Hugo Labrande, JB, Samuel Verschelde and Jean-Luc Pontico (Lieux Communs), as well as Ruben Nieto, Juan Saldalgo, Santiago Eximeno, Javier Carrascosa and Pablo Martínez Merino (El Museo de las Consciencias).

Naturally I’m very pleased to be involved with this. My contribution is a lot larger than usual, the final work being a digital file (which has been printed and framed) measuring 116.79cm x 52.5cm (45.98ins x 20.67ins) at 300dpi. The process of creation involved doing a drawing on a large sheet of paper which was then scanned and “painted” over using Photoshop’s airbrush tool. I made screen grabs during each stage of this and I’m intending on putting together a page showing how the work developed from start to finish. For now you can see a couple of examples.

This was the finished drawing on an A2 sheet of paper. In the past I would have done this on board then painting over the outline with acrylics. The new working method is fairly similar but has a number of advantages and I much prefer doing this kind of very detailed work with Photoshop. It’s far less of a strain on my weak eyes, since you can zoom in on the area you happen to be working on; mistakes are easier to rectify (paint brushes don’t have an “undo” feature), there are more options for changing colours and contrast and—best of all—you can collage in bits of photographic or other material, which is something I did here. Much of the overall texture is created by using layers of my favourite photograph of a rusty bridge support and there’s some judicious use of organic weirdness from Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature. I’m of the opinion now that Photoshop is superior to paints for the creation of this kind of art. Paints have other advantages, of course, but the surface texture of the material isn’t a concern for work intended to be a window on another world.

This was the final stage of the painting. Here’s a closer view of the detail at about 50% of the actual size:

What I did next was horizontally mirror the completed picture twice, dropping one of the versions into the background. I hadn’t planned on doing this originally but when I tried it the result was so impressive I realised it would look great for the final piece. Another advantage of digital art is that I still have a high-res copy of the pre-mirrored version. All that was required then was to fill out the central area a bit and the picture was done. Total work time was about five weeks which isn’t bad considering I was doing other work during the day then spending a couple of hours each evening on this.

Once the exhibition is over I’ll be making some prints of the picture and yet more CafePress products available for sale, details of which will be announced here.

The other news is that some of my Lovecraft illustrations from The Haunter of the Dark are to be featured in a new Lovecraft documentary by Frank Woodward. This looks like it’s going to be the best HPL documentary to date given the quality of the contributors—Ramsey Campbell, John Carpenter, Guillermo Del Toro, Neil Gaiman, Stuart Gordon, S.T. Joshi, Caitlin Kiernan, Robert Price, and Peter Straub—and with the whole thing being filmed in HD. Also among the contributors is Christian Matzke whose short film Dunwich used my adaptation of The Dunwich Horror as an inspiration. There’s an initial trailer for Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown here which gives a taste of what’s in store. A DVD release is also planned; once again, any further details about that will be announced here.

The Digger issue, August 1968.

Here’s something of major importance, The Realist Archive Project. Four complete issues online so far, with a promise of all 146 issues to be uploaded eventually. The Realist started out as a satirical magazine in the late Fifties and moved into the slipstream of the counter-culture as the Sixties progressed. Editor Paul Krassner is introduced in the RE/Search Pranks (1987) book thus:

Paul Krassner is famous for doing The Realist (1958-1974; now revived), described by OUI magazine as “the most satirical and irreverent journal to appear in America since the days of HL Mencken.” The Realist published explicit photos, outrageous cartoons, vicious satire, and extreme paranoid conspiracy theories on topics ranging from the Kennedy assassinations to Jonestown. When Mike Wallace asked him on a 60 Minutes interview about the difference between the underground press and mainstream media, he told him that Spiro Agnew was an anagram for Grow A Penis, adding, “The difference is that I could print that in the Realist, but it’ll be edited out of this program.” That prediction came true. Harry Reasoner said of Krassner that he “not only attacks establishment values; he attacks decency in general.”

During his lifetime of weird experiences and friendships with notables like Lenny Bruce and Timothy Leary, Krassner claims (among other things) to have taken LSD when he testified at the Chicago 8 trial, on the Johnny Carson show, with Groucho Marx, and with Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Good. In 1977 he became publisher of Hustler magazine for six months.

I first encountered the Realist from mentions in Robert Anton Wilson’s books (RAW was one of its writers) but, unlike UK undergrounds which often turned up secondhand, there was no way to ever see a copy over here. Hence the value of this archive. If you want an idea of Krassner’s outrageousness—which makes much of the political sniping of Private Eye seem very tame indeed—look no further than the May 1967 issue with its lead story describing Lyndon B Johnson fucking the dead John F Kennedy’s neck wound shortly before his being sworn in as president. And in the same issue there’s the notorious cartoon spread by Wally Wood depicting a host of Disney characters doing all the things that recently-deceased Uncle Walt wouldn’t allow them to do in the cartoons. That drawing was so scurrilous that it’s generally supposed Disney preferred not to sue for fear of giving it greater publicity.

The issue edited by the anarchist Diggers was altogether more serious, and the list of names involved shows a lineage connecting the Beats to the hippies:

Memo to the Reader

When Time magazine decided to do a cover story on the hippies last year, a cable to their San Francisco bureau instructed researchers to “go at the description and delineation of the subculture as if you were studying the Samoans or the Trobriand Islanders.”

Thus were they supposed to remain—a frozen fad for posterity.

But a few months ago, police rioted on Haight St. Next day, at a town hall meeting in the Straight Theater, the spectrum of reaction ranged from “Let’s have another be-in” to “We gotta get guns!” A compromise was reached: bottles painted Love were thrown at the cops.

And yet, the question remains—What is being defended?

This issue of the Realist, therefore, has been created entirely by The Diggers, in an attempt to convey the flavor and feeling-tone of a revolutionary community.

An inadequate list of the brothers and sisters whose work is represented in this document:

Antonin Artaud, Richard Avedon, Billy Batman, Peter Berg, Wally Berman, Richard Brautigan, Bryden, William Burroughs, Martin Carey, Neil Cassidy, Fidel Castro, Don Cochran, Peter Cohon, Gregory Corso, Dangerfield, Kirby Doyle, Bill Fritsch, Allen Ginsberg, Emmett Grogan, Dave Haselwood, George Hermes, Linn House, Lenore Kandel, Billy Landout, Norman Mailer, Don Martin, Michael McClure, George Metesky, George Montana, Malcolm X, Natural Suzanne, Huey Newton, Pam Parker, Rose-a-Lee, David Simpson, Gary Snyder, Ron Thelin, Rip Torn, Time Inc., Lew Welch, Thomas Weir, Gerard Winstanley, and Anonymous.

The contents herein are not copyrighted. Anyone may reprint anything without permission. Additional copies are available at the rate of 5 for $1. The Diggers have been given 40,000 copies to spread their word: free.

Many of those writers are no longer around but happily Paul Krassner is and he’s been writing regularly for The Huffington Post, the Arthur magazine weblog and other sites.

Via Boing Boing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ginsberg’s Howl and the view from the street
• Simplicissimus
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• Underground history
• Wallace Burman and Semina
• Robert Anton Wilson, 1932–2007
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
• 100 Years of Magazine Covers
• Oz magazine, 1967-73

Not art inspired by LSD but drawings done whilst under its influence.

These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD—part of a test conducted by the US government during its dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950s. The artist was given a dose of LSD-25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him.

Then there’s the whole world of blotter art, like this fairly recent Penguin logo example. Lots more blotter designs here and here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The trip goes on
• Albert Hofmann
• Hep cats

Poster by Arik Roper.

Radical Living Papers
A history of the free, alternative, counter-culture and underground press, 1965–75

Gavin Brown’s enterprise at PASSERBY
436 W. 15th Street,
New York, NY 10011
February 2–March 7, 2007

Opening reception: Friday, February 2, 2007, 6pm.

The Council for the Fortieth Anniversary of The Summer of Love with Gavin Brown’s enterprise opens and invites you to an exhibition of the world’s most radical living papers from a time when the press took risks and voiced opinions.

Celebrating the heyday of alternative magazine publishing in Europe and America, Gavin Brown’s enterprise at Passerby opens an exhibition of more than two hundred original copies, as well as reproductions of these seminal and obscure publications, whose influence reverberates through culture, politics, and society.

Covering politics, revolutions, evolutions of the planets, freak-outs, love-ins, support of green politics, gay liberation, power to the people, the peace parties, protests, the Panthers, peyote, LSD, pot, fiction, music, poetry, prose, prayers and more. Publications include: Actuel, Avatar, Berkeley Barb, Berkeley Tribe, Black Panther Papers, Digger Papers, Door, East Village Other [EVO], The Fifth Estate, Freep, Grabuge, Hobo-Québec, International Times [it], Los Angeles Free Press, The Oracle, The Organ, Other Scenes, OZ, Rat, The Realist, Re Nudo, Rolling Stone, The Seed, Ann Arbor Sun and more.

Please note: A press conference to the unified, positive forces actively involved in the community will be held at 6pm on Friday, February 2, 2007, with active members of today’s free press.

Curated by Eva Prinz, Dan Donahue, and Thurston Moore.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Wallace Burman and Semina
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
• 100 Years of Magazine Covers
• Oz magazine, 1967-73

Dr Hofmann by Dean Chamberlain.

Happy birthday to the discoverer of LSD, 101 today.

A San Francisco mathematician takes a trip on LSD with his cat,
who is on the drug too. He does this every other week.

From ‘LSD: The Exploding Threat of the Mind Drug that Got Out of Control‘,
Life magazine, March 25, 1966.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• German opium smokers, 1900

America’s most vital cultural bulletin. Free PDF download.

How nature droners GROWING found their flow. By Peter Relic. Photography by Eden Batki.

Swiss anthropologist-author JEREMY NARBY talks with Jay Babcock about what hallucinogens like LSD and the Amazonian drink ayahuasca have to teach us in the 21st century. Introduction by author Erik Davis, with a full-color illustration by Arik Moonhawk Roper.

How columnist DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF learned to stop worrying about current events.

Why power duo Al Cisneros and Chris Haikus reunited to make the meditation-suitable
heavy metal sound of OM.

‘Do the Math’ columnist David Reeves on the main reason why the USA should seal its border with Mexico.

The life, work and astounding impact of North Indian vocalist PANDIT PRAN NATH, guru
to Western minimalists La Monte Young and Terry Riley. By Peter Lavezzoli.

‘New Herbalist’ columnist Molly Frances on Lord Byron’s secret elixir and the Prophet Muhammed’s top condiment: VINEGAR.

How to recognize—and use—OCCULT FORCES, by the Center for Tactical Magic.

Notes from Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 2006 by the intrepid Gabe Soria.

Comics by Vanessa Davis, Chris Wright and PShaw.

Scenes from ArthurBall 2006, featuring Joanna Newsom, The 5:15ers (Joshua Homme & Chris Goss) and Moris Tepper and Polly Harvey.

Bull Tongue columnists BYRON COLEY & THURSTON MOORE review Richard Youngs, Pink Mountaintops, Parts & Labor, Oneida/Plastic Crimewave, Ex Models, Mouthus, The Bummer Road, Idea Fire Company, Taurpis Tula, Spykes, Ong Ong, Carson Cistulli, Starbird, 2673, Ladderwoe, Tovah Olson, Pan Dolphinic Dawn, Gastric Female Reflex, ANP Quarterly, Matt Chambers, The Colonial, Mineshaft, Little Claw, Black Lips, Zaat, Mystical Footprints of Asia, Whysp, The Story, Skarerkauradio, Jerusalem & the Starbaskets, Noise Nomads, The Nightjar Review, Shannon Ketch, Jeremy Rendina, Carousel, Quantum Noise, Lambsbread, Carlos Batts, Trenton Doyle Hancock, S.M.S.R., Tchernoblyad, Narrowmind, Sudanstrain, Blod, Sharon’s Last Part, Mnem, Edwidge, The Rita, Mania, Ashtray Navigations, Evenings, Septic Sores, Bottom Dweller, Paul Metzger, Tombi and Glass organ.

C & D riff into the dawn on Marvin Gaye’s The Real Thing: In Performance, 1964-1981 dvd plus new albums from Gnarls Barkley, Rufus Harley, The Black Keys, The Raconteurs, Eagles of Death Metal, The Cuts, Future Pigeon, The Aggrolites, The Fiery Furnaces, Espers, Josephine Foster, Scott Walker, Fred Neil, Belong, Boris and Howlin Rain. Plus: Peter Relic’s Book Corner spotlights new poetry collections by Alex Mitchell and John Tottenham.

And more…

Metamorphosis of Hitler’s Face into a Moonlit Landscape with Accompaniment (1958).

Impressions de la Haute Mongolie (1976/Salvador Dali/José Montes-Baquer/Germany)

In any list of films I’d currently most like to see but can’t due to lack of availability, this bizarre “documentary” collaboration between Salvador Dalí and José Montes-Baquer would be near the top of the list. I saw it once, probably shortly after it had been made, when the BBC screened it as part of their Omnibus arts series in the late seventies. By this time I was already very familiar with the Surrealists, Dalí, Magritte and Max Ernst especially, so it was great to see Dalí himself declaring a supposed mission to explore Upper Mongolia in a search for giant hallucinogenic mushrooms. This premise aside, I remember few other details, the whole film was as delightfully confusing as might be expected. The most distinct memory was of the painting above being shown, then the camera pulling back some distance to reveal the full extent of Hitler’s face which is only hinted at in the original. Happily, a web review now provides us with some more details:

Homage to Impressions d’Afrique (1909), is a free-associative poem written by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), even though he never visited Africa. The film is dedicated to this French author, forefather of the Surrealists, who developed a formal constraint system to generate inspiration from dislocative puns.

Dalí does the very same thing with this chimerical pseudocumentary leading us to the mysterious realm of High Mongolia where a gigantic white soft mushroom grows, many times more hallucinogenic than LSD! From his studio-museum in Cadacès (Spain), he proceeds to report on the alleged scientific expedition sent out by himself to retrieve this precious treasure, with newspaper clips and newsreel. Childhood memories (like the picture above) are the opportunity to explain more thoroughly the source of his inspiration. This bucolic landscape is in fact a close up of Hitler’s portrait (his nose and moustache) turned to the side!

Wholly Dalíesque, this film experiment pieces together astonishing combinations of superimposed images, fading in and out, switching scale with odd perspectives. Dalí invents a filmmaking process and applies his very language to cinematic purposes, bending the rules to serve his desperate need for originality. Travelling through a microscopic close up of paintings or rough surfaces, his voiceover commentary gives sense to the landscapes taking form under his eyes.

Impressions of Africa was also the title of a Dalí painting from 1938, of course:

It’s probably too much to hope that this will turn up on TV again, so for now I suppose I’ll have to look forward to it appearing on DVD at some point in the future. How about it José?

Update: Ubuweb has a copy!