Weekend links 625

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Hand (1940) by Jindrich Styrsky.

• “I love very much Symbolist painters like Odilon Redon, Ferdinand Knopf or Léon Spilliaert. Or Nordic European painters such as Munch or Gallen-Kallela. I like the way they often mix nature and mythology. Some Surrealist painters are very inspiring too: De Chirico, Tanguy, Toyen, Styrsky, or Dorothea Tanning, for instance.” Lucile Hadzihalilovic talking to Mark Cousins about her new film, Earwig, and her approach to cinema.

• “It was no accident that Mishima chose to experiment with science fiction. It was a genre he had long admired. He adored Arthur C. Clarke, and lavished praise on Godzilla…” Alexander Lee on Yukio Mishima’s sole venture into science fiction, Beautiful Star.

• Old music: Roforofo Fight by Fela Kuti, a great favourite round here, is receiving a 50th anniversary reissue.

Readers of Berlin’s Third Sex were confronted with a whole fête galante of misfits, deviants, and sexual mutineers cavorting on the legal edgelands of society. There’s the “gathering of obviously homosexual princes, counts and barons” discussing Wagner, the women-only ball where a “dark-eyed Carmen sets a jockey aflame”, the drag act burlesquing Isadora Duncan, a café in the city’s north where Jewish lesbians play chess, gaggles of gay labourers meeting up to gossip before tending to their needlework, the Russian baron distributing alms to hustlers in the Tiergarten, a canal-side tavern where soldiers from the nearby barracks find gay men only too willing to pick up their tab, and the encrypted classified ads with which the lonesome and horny sought to make the vast metropolis just a little smaller.

James Conway on the pioneering sexology of Magnus Hirschfeld

• At Aquarium Drunkard: The Miles Davis Septet playing live at Chateau Neuf, Oslo, in 1971.

Industrial Symphony No. 1 by David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti featuring Julee Cruise.

• Mix of the week: Ghosts & Goblins 1 by The Ephemeral Man.

• New music: The Homeland Of Electricity by Scanner.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Pufff.

• Galerie Dennis Cooper presents Ilse Bing.

• RIP Paula Rego and Julee Cruise.

Teacher Of Electricity (1970) by Old Gold | Electricity (1980) by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark | Night Electricity Theme (2017) by Dean Hurley

Weekend links 603

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Weird Tales (Canada), May 1942. Cover art by Edmond Good.

• “…in 1968, seven years after the MOMA retrospective, Orson Welles appreciatively got in touch and suggested that Bogdanovich do a book-length set of interviews with him like the one that Bogdanovich had just done with Ford. The resulting book, This Is Orson Welles (which took a winding path to publication, in 1992, seven years after Welles’s death), is a classic of the literature of movies.” Richard Brody on the late Peter Bogdanovich. The book of Welles interviews is one of my favourite film books, as good in its way as Hitchcock/Truffaut, and like Truffaut’s book you wish it was twice as long.

• At Public Domain Review: Paloma Ruiz and Hunter Dukes on Johann Caspar Lavater’s frog-to-human physiognomies. If you reverse the sequence, as I did for one of the illustrations in Lovecraft’s Monsters, you approach The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

• The week in virtual exploration (via MetaFilter): Mini Tokyo 3D and Explore the Soane Museum, London.

• Submissions are open for the 16th issue of Dada journal Maintenant which will have the theme “Nyet Zero”.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artists and artisans collaborate on exhibition of 144 maekake aprons.

• DJ Food unearths flyers and posters for the Million Volt Light & Sound Rave, 1967.

• Mix of the week: Isolatedmix 116 by Chris SSG.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Stephen Dwoskin Day.

The Little Blue Frog (1970) by Miles Davis | Jail-House Frog (1972) by Amon Düül II | Tree Frog (1995) by Facil

Weekend links 589

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The Three Perfumes (1912) by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh.

• “…we have empowered this monopoly to strike fear into the hearts of authors. And that may be unprecedented in history. Through our own complicity as consumers, their market share only grows.” Dave Eggers talking to Rachel Krantz about the dominance of Amazon, and his new novel, The Every.

• “People will readily flock to yoga and Pilates classes, but how many show up for soundscape therapy or take a sound-walk?” Bernie Krause on the healing powers of quietude, the Ba’Aka tribe, and Japanese forest bathing.

• “Difficulty is my drug of choice, I guess.” Dennis Cooper (again) talking to Troy James Weaver about his new novel, I Wished.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine reviews Shadows of London by Jonathan Wood.

• Robert Fripp’s drive to 1981: Joe Banks on Discipline and the return of King Crimson.

• End times and rapture: Ken Hollings remembers Richard H. Kirk.

• Daniel Spicer on The Strange (Parallel) World of Miles Davis.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 715 by Uffe.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Oposta.

Perfumed Metal (1981) by Chrome | Ode To Perfume (1982) by Holger Czukay | Perfume (2006) by Sparks

Eiko Ishioka album covers

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Eastward (1970) by Gary Peacock Trio. Photography by Hiroshi Asada, Tadayuki Naitoh.

Continuing an occasional series about artists or designers whose work has appeared on record sleeves. Also another jazz-related post which includes Herbie Hancock via the V.S.O.P. album.

Eiko Ishioka is best known outside Japan for the costume designs she created for feature films, especially those in Francis Coppola’s Dracula, but she also had a parallel career as a graphic designer and art director, working with photographers and other designers on a large number of album covers. The examples here are a partial selection, many of which were created for East Wind, a label established by Nippon Phonogram to promote Japanese artists overseas.

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Circle 2: Gathering (1971) by Circle. Design by Eiko Ishioka, Seiya Sawayama, Yoshio Nakanishi.

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Weather Report Live In Tokyo (1972) by Weather Report. Design by Eiko Ishioka, Yoshio Nakanishi.

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Miles Davis Story Vol. 2 (1972) by Miles Davis. Design by Eiko Ishioka, Yoshio Nakanishi. Photography by Columbia Records Photo Studio, Tadayuki Naitoh.

Black ink on silver foil, something that always looks impressive but doesn’t wear very well. This cover may have led to Ishioka’s work on Tutu (see below).

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Winter Love, April Joy (1975) by David Friedman. Design by Eiko Ishioka, Motoko Naruse.

Continue reading “Eiko Ishioka album covers”

Weekend links 554

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Tadanori Yokoo Emphasizes Deliberate Misalignment in Contemporary Woodblock Series.

• Another week, another Paris Review essay on Leonora Carrington. This time it’s Olga Tokarczuk exploring eccentricity as feminism. At the same publication there’s more eccentricity in Lucy Scholes‘ feature about the neglected novels of Irene Handl, a woman best known for the characters she played in many British films and TV dramas. I’ve long been curious about Handl’s writing career so this was good to see.

• “The denial of our participation in the world, [Fisher] implies—the disavowal of our desire for iPhones even as we diligently think anti-capitalist thoughts—is incapacitating. It leads to a regressive utopianism that cannot envision going through capitalism, but only retreating or escaping from it, into a primitive past or fictional future.” Lola Seaton on the ghosts of Mark Fisher.

• More ghosts: Paranormal is the latest collection of spooky, atmospheric electronica from Grey Frequency, “an audio document exploring extraordinary phenomena which have challenged orthodox science, but which have also grown and evolved as part of contemporary culture and a wider folkloric landscape.”

• “Items billed as THE BEST EVER can stop us cold, and even cause us to take them for granted, never reassessing them, as we instead gesture, often without thought, to where they sit in the corner, under a halo and backdrop of blue ribbons.” Colin Fleming on Miles Davis and Kind Of Blue.

• “Diaboliques and Psycho both achieve something very rare: a perfect plot twist but an unspoilable movie,” says Milan Terlunen.

• Richard Kirk returns once more as “Cabaret Voltaire” with a new recording, Billion Dollar.

• Even more Leonora Carrington: some of the cards from her Tarot deck.

DJ Food on Zodiac Posters by Simboli Design, 1969.

Kodak Ghosts (1970) by Michael Chapman | Plight (The Spiralling Of Winter Ghosts) (1988) by David Sylvian & Holger Czukay | The Ghosts Of Animals (1995) by Paul Schütze