left: The Soft Machine Turns On (1967); right: UFO Coming (1967).

This was a bitter blow coming at a time when I’ve been working on something inspired in part by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, the 1960s design duo comprised of Michael English and Nigel Waymouth. The two artists, together with associate Martin Sharp, are indelibly associated with the London psychedelic scene of the late Sixties. Whereas Sharp’s posters were often loose and dramatically bold explosions of shape and colour, the Hapshash posters were more carefully controlled in their curating of disparate elements borrowed from Art Nouveau—especially Mucha and Beardsely—comic strips, Op Art, Pop art and fantasy illustration. Their work perfectly complemented the very distinctive atmosphere of the capital’s psychedelic scene which, for a couple of hectic years, saw an explosion of new bands (or old bands in new guises) fervently engaged in a lysergic exploration of Victoriana, childhood memories and frequent silliness. UK psychedelia is generally more frivolous than its US equivalent which had the Vietnam War and civil disorder to deal with; English and Waymouth’s graphics captured the London mood.

top left: Coke (1970); top right: Toothpaste (1974).
bottom left: Leaf Falls (1972); bottom right: Red no. 3 (1978).

In the 1970s English refashioned himself as a hyper-realist painter of foodstuffs and other consumer goods, and his meticulous airbrush style led to work as an advertising artist. Those paintings are beautifully rendered but often leave me feeling slightly queasy. I much prefer his work from later in the decade which depicted equally meticulous close-up views of oil-smeared buses and trains. Paper Tiger published a book collection in 1979, 3D Eye, which gathers the best of his work from the poster art on.

• Obituaries: Guardian | Times
• Hapshash poster galleries here and here

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Look presents Nigel Waymouth
• The New Love Poetry

The death this week of guitar pioneer Les Paul is already receiving considerable attention; less will be given to the passing of drummer Rashied Ali. The latter means more for me as a musician since I’m listening to his work all the time. Ali famously (and to some, controversially) replaced drummer Elvin Jones as John Coltrane’s drummer of choice from 1966 onwards, and Ali’s revolutionary free style enabled Coltrane to voyage even further out with his stream-of-consciousness sax playing. Ali’s playing supports all of Coltrane’s later recordings, including their extraordinary duet album Interstellar Space (recorded in the ’60s but not released until 1974). Following Coltrane’s death in 1967, Ali played on a number of albums by the fantastic Alice Coltrane, and while this period inevitably overshadows any appraisal of his work, his career continued to develop to the present day.

If you’re unused to the “formlessness” of free jazz, Interstellar Space can be a forbidding region until you attune yourself to its rarefied atmospheres. Alice Coltrane’s A Monastic Trio, recorded shortly after her husband’s death, is less challenging and a beautiful tribute to John Coltrane from his wife, friends and collaborators. With Jimmy Garrison on bass, Pharoah Sanders on sax, Alice playing harp and piano, and Ali drumming on five of its six tracks, its a perfect introduction to Ali’s work, and, by extension, to some of the finest music of the last century.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Coltrane’s Giant Steps
• Alice Coltrane, 1937–2007

Robert Helpmann, Moira Shearer and Leonide Massine; The Red Shoes (1948).

Jack Cardiff, who died this week, was one of the great cinematographers from the postwar era, a period when British cinema was raised for a time to world-class level. His three films for the Archers, aka Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, are masterpieces of Technicolor photography. He won an Oscar for one of these, Black Narcissus, while his photography in The Red Shoes includes Moira Shearer’s 18-minute ballet performance, one of the most strikingly surreal sequences in the whole of British film.

Cardiff taught himself about lighting from scrutinising the Old Masters and the Impressionists, and teaching himself to observe colour, shade and reflection in everyday things. “As they say, ‘Love comes by looking’, and I was looking all the time. That’s how you learn.” He picks up one of the dozens of books on Rembrandt that he owns and draws my attention to the exquisitely painted shadow of a nose in one of his favourite portraits. We look at the interiors of other Dutch masters – Pieter De Hooch, Vermeer. It was to the work of Vermeer that the starkly beautiful images of nuns he created for his Oscar-winning movie Black Narcissus (1947) were likened.

Elizabeth Lowenthal, The Independent, 1994.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Deborah Kerr, 1921–2007
• Freddie Francis, 1917–2007

Panther Books paperback edition, 1968; cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst.

If I can’t remember when I first encountered JG Ballard’s work, it’s not because I was reading him at a very early age, more that a childhood enthusiasm for science fiction made his books as omnipresent in my early life as any other writer on the sf, fantasy and horror shelves. I know that when I started to read the New Wave sf writers his work immediately stood out, not only for its originality but also for the numerous references to Surrealist painting which litter his early fiction, references which meant a great deal to this Surrealism-obsessed youth. Ballard was a lifelong and unrepentant enthusiast for the Surrealists, with repaintings by Brigid Marlin of two lost Paul Delvaux pictures prominent in one of his rooms (often featured in photo portraits). I always admired the way he never felt the need to apologise for Salvador Dalí’s excesses, unlike the majority of art critics who dismiss Dalí after he went to America. The paintings of Dalí, Delvaux, Tanguy and Max Ernst became stage sets which Ballard could populate with his affectless characters.

Once I’d encountered the New Worlds writers—Ballard, Michael Moorcock, M John Harrison, Brian Aldiss and company—and their American counterparts, especially Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delany and Norman Spinrad, there was no returning to the meagre thrills of hard sf with its techno-nerdery and bad writing. Ballard and Moorcock were the gateway drug to William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges and countless others, and I thought enough of his work in 1984 to attempt a series of unsuccessful illustrations based on The Atrocity Exhibition. It’s been an axiom during the twenty years I’ve worked at Savoy Books that Ballard, Moorcock and Harrison were (to borrow a phrase from Julian Cope) the Crucial Three of British letters, not Rushdie, Amis and McEwan. One of the books I designed for Savoy, The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, was a Ballard and Moorcock favourite, and included appreciations of Richardson by both writers. I wish Ballard could have seen the new (and still delayed) edition of Engelbrecht but he got a copy of the earlier book. Sometimes once in a lifetime is more than enough.

• Ballardian.com
• Pages of obits and MM comment at Moorock’s Miscellany
• Ballard interview by V Vale at Arthur with an special intro by Moorcock
• Jeff VanderMeer at Omnivoracious
• Guardian | Times | Independent | Telegraph

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballard in Barcelona
• 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• JG Ballard book covers

Like the creations of the late Oliver Postgate, Edward Judd haunts my childhood imagination via the handful of very British science fiction and sf/horror movies he starred in during the 1960s. He did a great deal of acting before and after this—in the Seventies he was a very ubiquitous TV character actor—but it’s his run of genre films which remains notable. In these roles he was always the stalwart Everyman, usually with another older actor as co-star who supplies the requisite scientific explanations.

The first of these, The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), was a Val Guest production which followed the success of Guest’s Quatermass films in visiting another space-born calamity upon the world, this time an unprecedented heatwave caused by nuclear tests which throw the earth off its orbit. The film opens with a Ballardesque view of the River Thames parched to a thin stream, and features some great shots later of Judd stumbling through an abandoned, dust-strewn capital. The location work in the Daily Express building on Fleet Street adds to the realism, as does a strong script and decent performances.

Diving suits on the moon: Edward Judd and Lionel Jeffries.

First Men in the Moon (1964) was my favourite of these when I was younger, unsurprisingly because it was a) an HG Wells story, and I was a Wells fanatic at the age of 11, and b) a Ray Harryhausen film. Judd plays Arnold Bedford who voyages to the moon in 1899 with Joseph Cavor—inventor of the gravity-repelling Cavorite—and a token woman, Kate Callender, who isn’t present in Wells’ novel. There’s a further Quatermass connection with the screenwriting credit for Nigel Kneale. This isn’t necessarily the best Wells adaptation nor the best Harryhausen film although Harryhausen’s animated creatures retain an insectile mystery and I always liked the scenes of their crystalline world. Searching around I see this film has now found its way onto lists of Steampunk-themed films which no doubt guarantees it a continued audience.

Invasion (1965) was a minor sf film with Judd as a doctor at a country hospital which receives as patients the occupants of a crashed alien spacecraft. Once again it’s surprising what emerges when you look at the history of these things; screenwriter Robert Holmes rehashed the idea five years later for the first of the Jon Pertwee Doctor Who stories, Spearhead from Space. The Autons in that series were satisfyingly chilling and I wouldn’t mind watching both these dramas again to see how they compare.

And speaking of chilling, the Silicate creatures in Island of Terror (1966) are distinctly unnerving, being blob-like things which crawl around the island in question sucking the bones out of animals and people. Judd plays a doctor again, as does Peter Cushing. The director was Hammer regular Terence Fisher. Web search revelation with this particular title: you can buy models of the Silicates from a company called Ultratumba Productions. And this film apparently belongs in the sub-genre of “pub invasion movies“, where human schemes to counter an alien invasion are discussed in the local pub.

Of all these films, the one I used to find least-interesting was the first, probably because there was too much solid drama and not enough weirdness. Also no monsters or aliens. From our current perspective of rising temperatures, The Day the Earth Caught Fire looks more unsettlingly prophetic than most other sf films of the period. It came to mind for me in 2006 whilst trudging along the banks of the Seine during that summer’s heatwave, especially the memorable scene of London immersed in fog as the Thames begins to evaporate. We don’t need to worry about the threat of aliens when we’re perfectly capable of destroying the planet on our own.

PS: hello Deborah.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• HG Wells in Classics Illustrated
• The man who saw tomorrow
• War of the Worlds book covers
• Mushrooms on the Moon

Not only Philip José Farmer but Polish poster artist Franciszek Starowieyski also died this week, something I probably wouldn’t have known had it not been for the indefatigable Jahsonic. I mentioned Starowieyski’s stunning work earlier this month since he produced the poster for Hour-Glass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has. There’s a further link to Bruno Schulz with another of his posters appearing very briefly at the beginning of Street of Crocodiles by the Brothers Quay.

• Starowieyski poster galleries I | II

• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Hour-Glass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has
• Czech film posters
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

top left: artist unknown (1969); top right: Patrick Woodroffe (1975)
bottom left: Peter Elson (1988); bottom right: artist unknown (1995)

The great science fiction writer Philip José Farmer died today. I wrote about his more excessive works back in August 2007 and that post is as good an obituary as I could offer now. A Feast Unknown remains a favourite for pushing extreme content to a degree which would give William Burroughs pause whilst still functioning as a rollicking page-turner. Few writers could work on both those levels and do much more besides. Feast seems to be out of print today, which isn’t a surprise. Publishers are still a timid bunch for the most part and Farmer never pulled his punches.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Philip José Farmer book covers

Lux on stage in Glasgow, 1990.

Lux Interior, co-founder of the Cramps and the group’s singer, lyricist, cultural archaeologist and a superb stage performer. Also one of the few people who could successfully enthuse about the delights of female sexuality while wearing nothing more than a pair of high heels and a black G-string.

That exhilarating manifestation of deviant intent and skull-denting impact remains Lux and Ivy’s exclusive domain. Where punk rock was a barrage of refutation that fomented rabid exultation, the Cramps reclaimed the hillbilly power long since flushed down the Mersey. Through a self-stated “disdain for the myth of musical progress,” they melded their mutant propensities to emerge as a guiding voice in the wilderness, a commanding force that redefined the rock & roll spectrum while outgunning almost everyfuckingbody in the game. Jonny Whiteside, LA Weekly.

• The Cramps’ Lux Interior: A life in pictures
• The Cramps on The Tube, 1987: part 1 | part 2 | part 3

John Martyn on stage in 1975 with ubiquitous spliff.

Given a choice, I’d probably pick his 1977 opus, One World, as a favourite although everything he did in the 1970s is worth hearing. Great songs and great collaborators, especially bassist Danny Thompson. His use of echo and volume pedal to extend the range of his guitar gave him a unique sound, closer to Manuel Göttsching’s Inventions for Electric Guitar than anything in the folk world where he started out. The last song on One World is the marvellous nocturnal ballad Small Hours which features a muted drum machine, a Steve Winwood keyboard solo, and flock of Canadian geese. There’s a great live performance of that here.

Patrick McGoohan as Number Six.

“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

The Prisoner, which ran for seventeen episodes from 1967 to 1968, was the best original drama series there’s ever been on television. Period, as Harlan Ellison would say. Best because it grabbed the format of the TV adventure series with both hands and subverted the expectations of the audience and the people who were paying for it. Best because it dared to do this at a time when there was little precedent for experiment in a medium that was barely a decade old. Best because it had something important to say while still being entertaining. And best because it had Patrick McGoohan in the central role at the peak of his acting career.

Fiction can be anything but to look at what we’re offered by TV studios you wouldn’t know it. Cop shows, hospital shows, detective shows and soap operas proliferate, ad infinitum. The Prisoner came out of Danger Man, an immensely successful post-James Bond spy series which may have been popular but, McGoohan’s presence aside, has little to recommend it today. It lacked the camp bravura of The Avengers and couldn’t compete with the budgets of the Bond films. But it’s fair to say that without it McGoohan wouldn’t have had the chance to do something radical. ITC’s Lew Grade thought he was getting Danger Man 2 with better production values; what he received—to his eventual dismay—was the kind of television one would expect if the staff of Michael Moorcock’s speculative fiction magazine New Worlds had been given a fat budget and free reign. Like New Worlds, The Prisoner seized familiar genre themes but took them as a means to an end, not an end in themselves. The series borrowed from science fiction and spy thrillers—brainwashing and mind control, Cold War paranoia, the limitless surveillance and duplicity of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—and used a drama format to say something direct and personal to its audience about individual freedom, the limits and excesses of the state and the importance of being able to say “No” when the world insists that you capitulate.

Number Six by Roland Topor.

McGoohan was the driving force as well as the star. His own company, Everyman Films, produced the series for ITC, he planned everything with the writers, wrote three episodes and directed five of them himself. The Prisoner only lasted for a season and a half—cut short after Grade lost his patience—but the form was potentially endless, able to present a familiar Cold War spy story on the one hand, while having an entire episode play as a Western, on the other. In one of the later episodes McGoohan is largely absent when his mind is transferred to another man’s body and he finds himself living a new life, ostensibly a free man. (But freedom in The Prisoner is always circumscribed.) The last three episodes collapse everything that’s preceded them into intense and increasingly surreal psychodrama. Like Moorcock’s fluid character Jerry Cornelius, whose exploits were running in New Worlds while The Prisoner was being broadcast, McGoohan had found a vehicle to say what he wanted about the world using popular culture. It’s a coincidence but I’ve always found it apt that the cover illustration for Moorcock’s novella The Deep Fix (1966) included a figure obviously modelled on McGoohan’s Danger Man. The book’s tagline “Drugs took him into a nightmare world where logic ceased to exist” could be a description of a later Prisoner episode. Apt too that the first novel based on the series in 1969 was by New Worlds regular Thomas M Disch.

(James Colvin was a Moorcock nom-de-plume.)

The Prisoner was produced in the era of the social dramas of The Wednesday Play and Play for Today yet it remains relevant in a way its worthier contemporaries could scarcely manage. Social realism dates as quickly as yesterday’s news but allegory stays fresh. And it’s a dismal truth that the world of infinite surveillance has crept closer in a way that few would have imagined possible in 1968. The cameras which follow McGoohan’s Number Six everywhere are a familiar sight on Britain’s streets; a headline in yesterday’s Independent newspaper read: “Big Brother database a ‘terrifying’ assault on traditional freedoms“. McGoohan was raised in Ireland and would have appreciated the adherence of another Irishman, James Joyce, to the Luciferian cry of disobedience in Ulysses, “Non serviam!”—I will not serve. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus defies God and his family; McGoohan’s Number Six defies everything else. That example, of the man who can “make putting on his dressing gown appear as an act of defiance”, is something we need as much now as we did in 1968. Hollywood is currently threatening a big screen version but why wait for more compromised studio product when you can go to the source. Get yourself a deep fix—it’s a masterpiece.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Thomas M Disch, 1940–2008
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

I was going to post something about jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard who died this week (yes, another one). But enough people have been doing that elsewhere and I wrote about the album of his that I know best, Sing Me a Song of Songmy, back in April. Better, then, to leave a gloomy year with a smile, even if it’s only a piece of cosmic anthropomorphism. The rare trifecta of Venus, Jupiter, and the moon earlier this month was one of National Geographic’s most viewed space photos of 2008.

Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt.

2008: the year that keeps on taking.

The Guardian has a copious collection of Pinter pieces including Michael Billington’s lengthy obituary. Eartha Kitt was just as unique in her own way, prompting Orson Welles in the 1950s to call her “the most exciting woman in the world”. For my sister and I a decade later she was the most exciting Catwoman in the world and that’s how I’ll remember her. But let’s not forget those Cha-Cha Heels…

Eartha’s frivolity might seem to jar beside Pinter’s moral and political seriousness but the World Socialist Web Site managed to link the pair with a priceless headline, Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt, artists and opponents of imperialist war. Their article tells you a few things about Eartha that many of the obituaries would have ignored. I’m sure Pinter would have been proud to hear of her speaking her mind at the White House. The world is a smaller place when talents and voices like these are gone.

The Clangers (and a Froglet).

Lots of eulogies for Oliver Postgate doing the rounds just now, somewhat inevitable when his Smallfilms productions for the BBC furnished the imaginations of generations of British children in the Sixties and Seventies. Smallfilms’ films matched their name, being short animations created on minimal budgets by a trio of Postgate (writing, narration), Peter Firmin (artwork and animation) and Vernon Elliot (music). Postgate’s voice was the single constant across the disparate stories. For anyone of a certain age his distinctive tones carry that punch of primal recognition common to all things which make a strong impression during childhood.

Noggin the Nog.

I watched everything Smallfilms produced but being a space-obsessed Space Age kid my favourites were always The Clangers, a family of hooting, pink creatures who shared a moon-like planetoid with a Soup Dragon and (in an orbiting nest) an Iron Chicken. Being equally obsessed with Norse mythology, however, I also enjoyed Noggin the Nog, which never seemed to get repeated very often, probably because the early films were made in black and white. Oliver Postgate seemed to like dragons; as well as the Soup Dragon, Noggin had a very traditional Ice Dragon with a pile of treasure while the otherwise non-fantasy Ivor the Engine—tales of a small Welsh steam train—included a tiny dragon among the cast of characters, perhaps derived from the national emblem of Wales. Postgate and Peter Firmin reworked some of these stories into book form and my favourite books in our school library were the Noggin the Nog ones and Tove Jansson’s tales of the Moomins. The Clangers aren’t as alien as they first appear when you know that their true identity can be found in the 1967 tale of Noggin and the Moon Mouse.

Needless to say, YouTube has numerous opportunities for us to sate curiosity or indulge nostalgia, including BBC 4’s 2005 documentary about Smallfilms. The Guardian gathered a few choice examples as an addendum to their obituary page.

• Lengthy Times obituary
• The homespun genius of Oliver Postgate
• See Emily play | The BBC meets the girl from Bagpuss

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Occultism for kids

“Jim Cawthorn and I have been inseparable for over twenty-five years, sometimes to the point where I can’t remember which came first—the drawing or the story. It is his drawings of my characters which remain for me the most accurate, both in detail and in atmosphere. His interpretations in strip form will always be, for me, the best.” Michael Moorcock.

Jim Cawthorn—illustrator, comic artist and fantasy historian—died this week. Cawthorn was the first illustrator employed by Savoy Books and one of the key factors in drawing me to their doors in the early 1980s. His illustrations made their books special and his comics adaptation of Moorcock’s The Jewel in the Skull was a big influence on my early black and white work.

Mike Moorcock, Dave Britton and I seem to be in a minority in regarding Cawthorn as one of the finest fantasy illustrators of his generation. His carefully stipled drawings of the late Fifties and early Sixties are all miniature masterpieces and I don’t care how many artists attempt lavish paintings of Moorcock’s Elric character, for me the definitive representation remains the drawing used on the cover of the first edition of Stormbringer in 1965. Cawthorn was Moorcock’s illustrator of choice for many years and was involved with the Moorcock-edited run of New Worlds right from the start with his cover illustrating Ballard’s Equinox story. He also provided reviews for New Worlds, and his critical faculties were demonstrated to the full in 1987 with Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, an overview of the genre credited to Cawthorn and Moorcock for which Cawthorn himself wrote most of the entries.

I wrote in more detail about Cawthorn’s work for the Savoy site several years ago. For an overview of his career and influences, there’s Dave Britton’s interview from 1979.

Update: some extra pictures added.

Jagreen Lern and Elric (1963).

The Metal Monster (1962).

The Jewel in the Skull (1978).

Moorcock portrait 1: The Apocalyptic (1979).

Moorcock portrait 2: The Aesthetic (1979).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

Diamond Dogs (1974).

Many people know this classic album sleeve even if they don’t recognise the name of the Belgian artist who painted it. Guy Peellaert died this week and this is easily his most famous picture. I remember being very struck by its appearance in the local record shop window which always displayed gatefold album sleeves opened out as above. By then the notorious dog’s genitals would have been removed from the picture to protect the delicate sensibilities of Bowie’s fans; the copy here is from a later CD reissue.

Taxi Driver (1976).

Peellaert’s work was very visible in the 1970s, especially his book of rock star portraits, Rock Dreams, a ubiquitous pop culture item along with Roger Dean’s Views and Alan Aldridge’s psychedelic whimsy. I always liked the Bowie cover, it hinted at weirder music than the rather mundane post-Velvets/Mott the Hoople rock which the album contained, but much of the work in Rock Dreams seemed garish and awkward. Far more successful was Peellaert’s painting for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, undoubtedly commissioned on the strength of his earlier work but superior to nearly everything in his book.

Peellaert’s official site has several galleries of his paintings.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Paul Newman often said that his best films began with the letter H, among them The Hustler (1961) and Hud (1963). Two of the H films were directed by Martin Ritt, including my favourite, Hombre (1967), a tough and unsentimental western based on a novel by the tough and unsentimental Elmore Leonard. Hombre is one of the few decent American westerns of the Sixties, with a great script and a first class cast. Newman plays John Russell, a white man raised by Apaches who has to save a group of stagecoach passengers from Richard Boone’s murderous bandits. His performance is a study in emotionless determination, the polar opposite of his far more popular roles as Butch Cassidy and Cool Hand Luke. One of many memorable lines of dialogue comes when Diane Cilento’s character asks Russell why they should trust him to lead them to safety. “’Cause I can cut it, lady,” he says. Paul Newman could always cut it.

Rick Wright in 1971.

As has been noted nearly everywhere by now, Pink Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright went to the Great Gig in the Sky earlier this week, and I’m sure the inevitability of using the title of his most famous composition in this way wouldn’t have surprised him. I may as well note here that he was always credited as Rick on the albums following Piper at the Gates of Dawn, not Richard. I saw Pink Floyd perform The Wall in the cavernous bounds of Earl’s Court, London in August 1980 so I suppose I can claim to have seen him play, if watching a speck on a distant stage counts as seeing anyone. Wright’s falling out with the increasingly fractious Roger Waters saw him treated as a session musician by that point and while the show was impressively bombastic I can’t bear to hear that dreary and hysterical album any more. (Unless it’s Scissor Sisters covering Comfortably Numb.) Far better to remember Wright for his psychedelic songs such as Remember A Day from A Saucerful of Secrets.

Update: Thom reminds me that French musician Hector Zazou also died earlier this month.

Pauline Baynes, who died earlier this week, was for a long while the only Tolkien illustrator of note. Her work was approved by Tolkien himself but faded from view as the JRRT spin-off industry began to expand in the late Seventies and other artists quickly crowded the field, many of whom lacked her subtlety and sympathy for the material. It was her artwork which Allen & Unwin used on their single-volume edition of Lord of the Rings and in the late Sixties they also produced a poster of her Middle Earth map (above; complete version here). That poster hung on my bedroom wall and fascinated me with its view of the now over-familiar characters and the vignette details of various locations.

Those vignettes, such as her tiny rendering of Sauron’s Dark Tower, seemed at the time a perfect summation of Tolkien’s world and I still prefer her hulking Barad-dûr to the spiny monolith seen in Peter Jackson’s films. Her friendship with Tolkien led to a similar commission for maps and illustrations from CS Lewis and it’s as the illustrator of the Narnia books that she’s most celebrated. I never read Lewis’s work, and came to Lord of the Rings late, so the infatuation with this brand of heroic fantasy swiftly gave way to the ambivalent moralities of Michael Moorcock’s Elric, Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Her work wouldn’t have suited those writers but for Tolkien and Lewis she was ideal.

The Fellowship of the Ring from the Middle Earth map.

One of the newspaper obituaries notes:

It was somewhat to her chagrin that she developed a reputation over the years as an illustrator of mostly Christian works and, to redress the balance, one of her last creations (her “children” as she called them) was a series of designs for selections from the Qur’an, scheduled for publication in 2009.

These days Charles Williams is the writer who interests me still from the Oxford group known as “the Inklings”, of whom Tolkien and Lewis were the most famous members. Williams was also a Christian propagandist but his use of fantasy was more sophisticated and, in the extraordinary Many Dimensions (1931), he too managed to depart from the Christian sphere by blending HG Wells-style science fantasy with Islamic mysticism.

Brian Sibley wrote a Pauline Baynes obituary for The Independent and his blog features an excellent overview of her life and work.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput

“What sort of criticism is it to say that a writer is pessimistic? One can name any number of admirable writers who indeed were pessimistic and whose writing one cherishes. It’s mindless to offer that as a criticism. Usually all it means is that I am stating a moral position that is uncongenial to the person reading the story. It means that I have a view of existence which raises serious questions that they’re not prepared to discuss; such as the fact that man is mortal, or that love dies. I think the very fact that my imagination goes a greater distance than they’re prepared to travel suggests that the limited view of life is on their part rather than on mine.”

Thomas Disch castigating a science fiction readership which often regarded his work with a disdain born of narrow expectations. Disch (left), who took his own life a few days ago, was one of the New Worlds group of writers who frequently caused consternation among the kind of readers who only ever want to read about future technology. He was also much more than that, of course, and he wrote a lot more widely than most genre writers but it’s for his sf novels that he’ll be remembered. Rather than attempt another encomium I thought it far better to post a Charles Platt interview from 1979 which gives an insight into Disch’s character as a man as well as a writer. This was one of a number of interviews Platt conducted with leading sf writers during the late Seventies, published as Who Writes Science Fiction? in the UK (by Savoy Books) and Dream Makers: The Uncommon People who Write Science Fiction in the US.

Thomas M Disch by Charles Platt

New York, April 1979

NEW YORK, city of contrasts! Here we are on Fourteenth Street, walking past The New School Graduate Faculty, a clean modern building. Inside it today there is a fine museum exhibit of surreal landscape photography, but the drapes are permanently closed across the windows because, out here on the stained sidewalk, just the other side of the plate-glass, it’s Filth City, peopled by the usual cast of winos, monte dealers. shopping-bag ladies festooned in rags and mumbling obscenities, addicts nodding out and falling off fire hydrants. Fourteenth Street, clientele from Puerto Rico, merchandise from Taiwan. And what merchandise! In stores as garish and impermanent as sideshows at a cheap carnival, here are plastic dinner-plates and vases, plastic toys, plastic flowers and fruit, plastic statues of Jesus, plastic furniture, plastic pants and jackets-all in Day-Glo colors, naturally. And outside the stores are dark dudes in pimp-hats and shades, peddling leather belts, pink and orange wigs, and afro-combs… itinerant vendors of kebabs cooked over flaming charcoal in aluminium handcarts… crazy old men selling giant balloons.., hustlers of every description. And further on, through the perpetual fanfare of disco music and car horns, past the Banco Populare, here is Union Square, under the shadow of the Klein Sign. Klein’s, a semi-respectable old department store, was driven out of business by the local traders and has lain empty for years. But its falling apart facade still looms over the square, confirming the bankrupt status of the area. While in the square itself—over here, brother, here, my man, I got ’em, loose joints, angel dust, hash, coke. THC, smack, acid, speed, Valium, ludes. Seconal. Elavil!

Union Square wasn’t always like this. Michael Moorcock once told me that it acquired its name by being the last major battlefield of the American Civil War. Foolishly, I believed him. In truth there are ties here with the American labor movement; many trades unions are still headquartered in the old, dignified buildings, outside of which stand old, dignified union men, in defensive lunch-hour cliques, glaring at the panhandlers and hustlers toting pint bottles of wine in paper bags and giant, 20-watt ten-band Panasonic stereo portables blaring more disco! disco! disco!

Oddly enough we are looking for an address, here, of a writer who is known in the science fiction field for his almost elitist, civilized sensibilities. He has moved into an ex-office building that has been converted from commercial to residential status. Union Square is on the edge of “Chelsea”, which is supposed to be the new Soho, a zone where, theoretically, artists and writers are moving in and fixing up old buildings until, when renovations are complete, advertising execs and gallery owners will “discover” the area and turn it into a rich, fashionable part of town.

Theoretically, but not yet. In the meantime this turn-of-the-century, 16-storey, ex-office building is one of the brave pioneer outposts. We are admitted by a uniformed guard at the street entrance, and take the elevator to the 11th floor. Here we emerge into a corridor recently fabricated from unpainted sheets of plaster-board, now defaced with graffiti, but high-class graffiti, messages from the socially-enlightened tenants criticising the owner of the building for his alleged failure to provide services (“Mr. Ellis Sucks!” “Rent Strike Now!”) and here, we have reached a steel door provisionally painted in grubby Latex White, the kind of paint that picks up every fingermark and can’t be washed easily. There’s no bell, so one has to thump the door panels, but this is the place, all right, this is where Thomas M. Disch lives.

Mr Disch opens the door. He is extremely tall, genial and urbane, very welcoming. He ushers us in, and here, inside, it really is civilized. A thick, new carpet and a new couch and drapes and a fine old mahogany rolltop desk-and a view over Union Square, which is so far below that the dope-dealers dwindle to insignificance. It’s charming! So is Mr Disch, hospitably offering a wide variety of edible and drinkable refreshments. Not such an imaginative variety as is available from the natives in the square, but he offers them with considerably more graciousness and finesse.

New York, city of contrasts, also is city of high rents, so that even a relatively well-to-do quite-successful writer nearing forty has to resort to unlikely neighbourhoods to beat the accommodation problem. But the point is, Thomas Disch has travelled so widely and is so adept at living almost anywhere, he makes the outside environment seem immaterial. It is Disch’s nature to make himself at home by sheer willpower, never ill-at-ease or out-of-place, regardless of circumstances. Perhaps it is his tallness, perhaps it is his implacable control and elegant manners; he always seems to be both part of the environment and at the same time distanced from it, managing it with casual competence.

Similarly, in his writing: he has travelled widely, through almost every genre and technique: poetry, science fiction, nonfiction, movie scripts, mysteries, historical romances. And in each field he has made himself at home, never ill-at-ease or out-of-place, writing with the same implacable control and elegant manners.

Take, for example, his ventures into the science fiction field. He has logged quite a few years in this literary ghetto. Yet he has always remained a visitor rather than an inmate, part of the environment and at the same time distanced from it, with his own ironic perspective. This has not always gone down too well with the ghetto-dwellers themselves—the long-term, permanent-resident science fiction writers and fans. Some of them have been unhappy about an elegant aesthete like Disch “discovering” their neighbourhood and using the cheap accommodation for his own questionable ends.

Disch’s first novel illustrates the point. Science fiction readers recognized it immediately as an aliens-invade-the-Earth story, in the tradition of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and a thousand others. There was only one snag: in all the other novels of this type, Earth wins and the aliens are vanquished. In Disch’s novel (cheerily titled The Genocides) Earth loses and the aliens kill everybody. It almost seemed as if Disch were deliberately making fun of the traditional ways in which stories had always been told in the science fiction field.

Naturally, he sees it differently. “To me, it was always aesthetically unsatisfying to see some giant juggernaut alien force finally take a quiet pitfall at the end of an alien-invasion novel. It seemed to me to be perfectly natural to say, let’s be honest, the real interest in this kind of story is to see some devastating cataclysm wipe mankind out. There’s a grandeur in that idea that all the other people threw away, and trivialized. My point was simply to write a book where you don’t spoil that beauty and pleasure at the end.”

To the science fiction community, Disch’s ideas about “beauty and pleasure” seemed a bit depressing, and they accused him, and have continued to accuse him, of being a pessimistic author. He responds:

“What sort of criticism is it to say that a writer is pessimistic? One can name any number of admirable writers who indeed were pessimistic and whose writing one cherishes. It’s mindless to offer that as a criticism. Usually all it means is that I am stating a moral position that is uncongenial to the person reading the story. It means that I have a view of existence which raises serious questions that they’re not prepared to discuss; such as the fact that man is mortal, or that love dies. I think the very fact that my imagination goes a greater distance than they’re prepared to travel suggests that the limited view of life is on their part rather than on mine.”

Comments like this lead, in turn, to other criticisms—for instance, that Disch is setting himself up as an intellectual.

“Oh, but I’ve always taken it for granted that I’m an intellectual,” he replies ingenuously. “I don’t think of it as being a matter of setting myself up.

“My purpose in writing is never to establish myself as a member of a club. I don’t feel hostile to my audience, indeed I’m fond of it, but to write other than what delights me would be to condescend to my audience, and I think that would be reprehensible. I think any writer who reins in his muse for the sake of some supposed lack of intelligence or sophistication on the part of his readers is… well, that’s deplorable behaviour.”

So Disch has consistently written at a level which pleases himself, and has consistently been misunderstood by science fiction readers as a result. His novel 334, a gloomy vision of America in the future, was if anything less well-received by such readers than The Genocides, and was condemned as being even more depressing—even nihilistic.

“Well, nihilism is a pejorative that people throw out by way of dismissing an outlook,” he replies. “It was one of Agnew’s words. Agnew loved it because it means that someone believes in nothing and, of course, we know we don’t approve of people like that. But it also throws up the problem of what do you believe in. God? Is he a living god? Have you seen him? Do you talk to him? If someone calls me a nihilist I want the transcripts of his conversation with Jesus, till I’m convinced that we’re not brothers under the skin.”

And about the book 334 itself:

I think what distressed some people is that it presents a world in which the macroproblems of life, such as death and taxes, are considered to be unsolveable, and the welfare system is not seen as some totalitarian monster that must call forth a revolt of the oppressed masses. The radical solution shouldn’t be easier to achieve in fiction than in real life. Almost all science fiction presents worlds in which social reform can be accomplished by the hero of the tale in some symbolic act of rebellion, but that’s not what the world is like, so there’s no reason the future should be like that.”

Is this an argument that all fiction should be relentlessly tied to present-day realities?

“I’m not saying that every writer has to be a realist, but in terms of the ethical sensibility brought to bear in a work of imagination, there has to be some complex moral understanding of the world. In the art that I like, I require irony, for instance, or simply some sense that the writer isn’t telling egregious lies about the lives we lead.”

I reply that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing if readers look for some simplification of the eternal problems of real life, or at least a little escape from them now and again.

“People who want that are certainly supplied with it often enough. Of course there’s no reason that artistry can’t he brought to bear upon such morally simplistic material, but it remains morally simplistic, and to me it will always be a lesser pleasure than the same artistry brought to bear on morally complex material. The escapist reader wants a book that ends with a triumph of the hero and not with an ambiguous accommodation; I suppose I’m inclined to think that you can’t have it that way. I don’t know people who have moral triumphs in their lives. I just know people who lead more, or less, good lives.

“A literature that doesn’t try to mirror these realities of human existence, as honestly and as thoroughly and as passionately as it can, is being smaller than life. Who needs it?”

TOM DISCH was born in Iowa in 1940 and grew up in Minnesota, first in Minneapolis-St Paul (”Always my growing-up image of the big city”) and then in a variety of small towns. “I went to a two-room country school for half of fourth grade… finished fourth grade in the next town we moved to in Fairmont, Minnesota, which is in the corn belt…”

At the age of nine he had already started writing: “I filled up nickel tablets with science fiction plots derived from one of Isaac Asimov’s robot mystery stories. If we could find those nickel tablets I’m certain that the resemblance would be astonishing. But I think my stories were livelier even then.” He laughs happily.

“I remember a moment in tenth grade in high school, talking to my English teacher—I was always the pet of my English teachers and made them my confidants—and I envisioned two alternatives. One of them would have kept me in the twin cities on the paths of righteousness and duty (I can’t remember what that would have been, exactly), the other was to come to New York and be an Artist.

“My first job after high school, after taking some kind of test at the state employment center, was with U.S. Steel as a trainee structural steel draftsman. I stuck it out through that summer till I’d saved enough money to come to New York. Then in New York I got the lowest type of clerical jobs.

“I wanted to get into Cooper Union, to the architectural school. My idea was to be Frank Lloyd Wright. Cooper Union did accept me. Even though the tuition was free, I still had to work as well, and in the end l just collapsed from overwork and possibly from lack of real ambition to be an architect. Architects have to study a lot of dull things for a very long time and I probably wasn’t up to it.”

Disch returned to university later, but: “The only purpose I had in mind, then, for any degree I might have acquired, would have been to become an academic, and I thought it would be better to be a writer, so as soon as I sold my first story I dropped out of college.”

Supposedly, a major factor that influences people to read a lot of science fiction, and then write it, is a sense of childhood alienation. I ask Disch if he had that experience. He is skeptical:

“All young people are prone to feel alienated, because that’s their situation in life. Very often they haven’t found a career, don’t have a social circle they feel is theirs, and they feel sorry for themselves, accordingly. Certainly it’s something real that happens to you, but with luck you work your way out of it and soon your social calendar will be filled and you won’t complain about alienation any more. You’ll get married. Very few married men with children complain about alienation.”

Disch himself seems unusually gregarious, for a writer, and many of his projects have been written in collaboration with various other authors. His first collaborator was John Sladek. “We started writing together in New York in the summer of 1965, just short japes at first, and then two novels. One was
gothic which is best forgotten. The other was Black Alice.” (A contemporary mystery/suspense novel.)

“My experience of collaborating with other writers is just mutual delight. One person has a good idea and the other says, that’s great, and then what-if… It builds. Writing in collaboration with a person whose work you admire, miraculously sections of the book are done for you, it’s like having dreamed that you wrote something, it eliminates all the real work of writing.

“I’ve planned other collaborations. I’ve worked with composers on a small musical and an opera, and I just like the process of it. I would like to write for movies. Other writers complain about the horrors of dealing with directors, but if it’s a director one admires I would think that it would be exciting and if it’s not a director you admire then you shouldn’t be doing it. It would be difficult to share my own most earnest novels, but for comic writing, for instance, I should think it would be so much more exciting to write for Saturday Night Live than just to write humorous pieces for magazines however great your inspiration.”

The range of people whom Disch has worked with reflects the range of different forms of writing that he is interested in. “Part of my notion of a proper ambition is that one should excel at a wide range of tasks. I want to write opera libretti; want to write every kind of novel and story; I’ve written a lot of poetry and I will continue to do so. I foresee a pattern of alternating between science fiction novels, and novels of historical or contemporary-realistic character.”

I ask if he isn’t worried that this will give him too diffuse an image in the minds of publishers, who are generally happier if a writer can be given a single genre-label.

“Publishers do feel more comfortable with you if you are, in a sense, at their mercy. They prefer you to be limited as a writer. If you’re a science fiction writer who begins to write a kind of science fiction that isn’t to the taste of a publisher whom you’ve been working with, they will in effect say, stick to what you know best, go back and write the kind of book that has made you successful. If you are a genre writer then genre editors can dictate to you the terms of the genre. In the long term they’re asking for the death of the imagination, and a dreary sameness of invention, plots, and characters is the result.”

Since Disch has managed to avoid being typecast in this way. I ask him which matters more to him—success and recognition in the science fiction field, or outside of it.

“I would suppose that any science fiction writer would rather be successful in the big world than in the small world. The rewards are greater. Not simply financially, but the rewards of public acclaim. If the approval of your peers means anything, then the approval of more of your peers must mean more. And not all of the palates that you want to tickle, the critics you hope to please, are within the science fiction field. In fact the big judgement seat is outside of it.”

I ask if Disch’s best-known novel, Camp Concentration, was an attempt to achieve recognition outside of the science fiction field.

“Camp Concentration was a science fiction novel, I think it was probably not strong enough to stand on its own outside the genre. Not as a work of literature. It might have been marketed as a middle-brow suspense novel—some science fiction is smuggled out to the real world in that disguise—but I think the audience outside of science fiction is even more resentful of intellectual showing-off, while within science fiction there’s been a kind of tradition of it. Witness something like Bester’s The Demolished Man, which was in its day proclaimed to be pyrotechnical. Pyrotechnics are part of the science fiction aesthetic, and that’s what Camp Concentration was aiming at.

“In America the novel didn’t receive very much attention and it became the focus of resentment for some of the fuddy-duddy elements in science fiction to carp about. I never had enough success with the book to make me seem a threat and I’m not much of a self-promoter, so the book just vanished in the way that some books do. And that’s not entirely a bad thing. The kind of success that generates a lot of attention can be unsettling to the ego, and the people who have that kind of success are often encouraged to repeat it. It would have been a very bad thing if I had bowed to pressure to write another book like Camp Concentration, which was the expectation, to a degree, even in myself. For a while I wanted to write things that were even more full of anguish, and even more serious.”

Camp Concentration is, as Disch says, very serious and full of anguish. It is the diary of a character who is locked up and given a drug to heighten his intelligence; an unfortunate side-effect of the drug is that it induces death within a matter of months. The book thus presented a double challenge to Disch: he had to write the diary of a man who knows he is going to die, and he had to write the diary of a man whose intelligence is steadily increasing to superhuman levels. In a way it was a self-indulgence—a conscious piece of self-analysis—in that Disch himself is aware of his intelligence to the extent that it is something of a fetish.

While he was working on Camp Concentration, he confided to Michael Moorcock, (as Moorcock tells it), “I’m writing a book about what everyone wants most.”

To which Moorcock replied: “Really? Is it about elephants?”

“Elephants? No, it’s about becoming more intelligent.”

“Oh,” said Moorcock, “what I’ve always wanted most is to be an elephant.”

Talking to Tom Disch, I recount this anecdote, if only to check on its accuracy. Disch laughs and comments, “Well, I guess Mike Moorcock and I have both realized our secret dreams.”

© Charles Platt, 1980. Old paperback covers taken from Jovike’s great Flickr set.

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• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

So long, Road Runner. Lots of clips of the great man on YouTube, my favourite being this TV appearance with the amazing Bo-ettes. Without him punishing his guitar that way, you wouldn’t have (among other things) the MC5 doing this. And without them you wouldn’t have Sonic Youth doing this…

Pygar the angel, Barbarella (1968).

John Phillip Law, who died on Tuesday, was featured here last year in a look at Mario Bava’s crazy live action fumetti, Danger Diabolik (below). Law made that film the same year as he played a blind angel in an equally crazy slab of Sixties’ decadence, Barbarella. In a more serious role, he played opposite the very formidable Rod Steiger in The Sergeant which was released the same year; together with Victim, this was one of the first films I remember watching that dealt with same-sex attraction (albeit in the usual angst-ridden mode), with Law’s character being the understandable object of Steiger’s doomed affection.

After those heights, things tended to be more down than up but I do have an affection for Ray Harryhausen’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974). Law’s Sinbad was pretty good even if he spends much of the time fighting monsters while Tom Baker was great as the villainous Koura. And I always appreciated that screenwriter Brian Clemens made Lemuria the destination of the voyage, a lost continent mentioned by Madame Blavatsky and many of the Weird Tales writers, including HP Lovecraft in The Haunter of the Dark.

Danger Diabolik (1968).

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• CQ
• Danger Diabolik

Retroactive I (1964).

My youthful enthusiasm for art acquainted me with the name of Robert Rauschenberg (who died two days ago) earlier than most. Surrealism and Pop Art held an appeal that was immediate, if rather superficially appreciated at the time, and it was seeing works from both those movements which were the most memorable aspect of my first visit to the Tate Gallery when I was 13. Later on when I was reading JG Ballard’s stories and essays in back numbers of New Worlds, Rauschenberg was one of a handful of artists who seemed to depict in visual terms what Ballard was describing in words. In this respect Robert Hughes’s discussion of the “landscape of media” (Ballard’s common phrase would be “media landscape”) below is coincidental but significant. Retroactive I was painted a couple of years before Ballard began the stories that would later become The Atrocity Exhibition and it could easily serve as an illustration for that book.

There are and will be plenty of words written elsewhere about Rauschenberg’s work and influence. I’ll note here his inclusion in the list of gay artists at GLBTQ for his creative and personal partnership with another great Pop artist, Jasper Johns.

One of the artists (television) most affected in the Sixties was Rauschenberg. In 1962, he began to apply printed images to canvas with silkscreen—the found image, not the found object, was incorporated into the work. “I was bombarded with TV sets and magazines,” he recalls, “by the refuse, by the excess of the world … I thought that if I could paint or make an honest work, it should incorporate all of these elements, which were and are a reality. Collage is a way of getting an additional piece of information that’s impersonal. I’ve always tried to work impersonally.” With access to anything printed, Rauschenberg could draw on an unlimited bank of images for his new paintings, and he set them together with a casual narrative style. In heightening the documentary flavour of his work, he strove to give canvas the accumulative flicker of a colour TV set. The bawling pressure of images—rocket, eagle, Kennedy, crowd, street sign, dancer, oranges, box, mosquito—creates an inventory of modern life, the lyrical outpourings of a mind jammed to satiation with the rapid, the quotidian, the real. In its peacock-hued, electron-sweetbox tints, this was an art that Marinetti and the Berlin Dadaists would have recognized at once: an agglomeration of memorable signs, capable of facing the breadth of the street. Their subject was glut.

Rauschenberg’s view of this landscape of media was both affectionate and ironic. He liked excavating whole histories within an image—histories of the media themselves. A perfect example is the red patch at the bottom right corner of Retroactive I. It is a silkscreen enlargement of a photo by Gjon Mili, which he found in Life magazine. Mili’s photograph was a carefully set-up parody, with the aid of a stroboscopic flash, of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912. Duchamp’s painting was in turn based on Marey’s photos of a moving body. So the image goes back through seventy years of technological time, through allusion after allusion; and a further irony is that, in its Rauschenbergian form, it ends up looking precisely like the figures of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden in Masaccio’s fresco for the Carmine in Florence. This in turn converts the image of John Kennedy, who was dead by then and rapidly approaching apotheosis as the centre of a mawkish cult, into a sort of vengeful god with a pointing finger, so fulfilling the prophecy Edmond de Goncourt confided to his journal in 1861:

“The day will come when all the modern nations will adore a sort of American god, about whom much will have been written in the popular press; and images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy him, but fixed, once and for all, by photography. On that day civilization will have reached its peak, and there will be steam-propelled gondolas in Venice.”

Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (1980).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Transfer drawings by Robert Rauschenberg
• Jasper Johns
• Michael Petry’s flag
• JG Ballard book covers

Klaus Dinger (right) with brother Thomas, circa 1978. From the sleeve of Viva by La Düsseldorf.

“There were three great beats in the ’70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk and Klaus Dinger’s Neu! beat.” Brian Eno

Klaus Dinger, the great drummer for Neu! and La Düsseldorf (and briefly Kraftwerk in 1971) died back in March but news of this has taken a while to emerge. Everything he did in the Seventies is essential, the Neu! albums especially. YouTube has a few choice examples such as this clip of someone playing Neu!’s finest (and oft-imitated) moment, Hallogallo, slightly too fast. Then there’s Isi from Neu! 75 and the crazy glam-punk of Hero (a tremendous period performance) shortly before guitarist Michael Rother left and the band transmuted into La Düsseldorf. For a blast of the latter, there’s the majestic Rheinita from Viva. Happily, Michael Rother is still with us and was interviewed in the most recent issue of The Wire.

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• Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk
• Metabolist: Goatmanauts, Drömm-heads and the Zuehl Axis
• The genius of Kraftwerk

Miles Davis & Teo Macero, 1969.

Teo Macero, composer and visionary producer of one of the greatest albums ever recorded, Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, died last week.

• NYT obituary
• Teo talks about working with Miles Davis
• Jon Hassell explains why Bitches Brew is the best

Untitled from The Black Series by Derek Jarman.

The Serpentine Gallery hosts an exhibition of Derek Jarman’s work selected by filmmaker Isaac Julian from 23 February to 13 April, 2008.

The Derek Jarman exhibition will present a selection of work by the leading British filmmaker of his generation. Curated by the celebrated artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, it will highlight Jarman’s work in film and painting, including his pioneering presentation of the moving image within the gallery context. Jarman was arguably the single most crucial figure of British independent cinema in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. He struggled for Gay Liberation and with the impact of AIDS and lived as a participant observer, recording all that passed before him, from punk to Thatcher, Hampstead Heath to film premiere.

This exhibition is a timely reappraisal of Jarman’s work, conceived as an immersive environment by Julien, featuring rarely seen films from the Derek Jarman Super-8 archive, an installation of his film Blue, 1993, as well as a selection of his paintings. Julien has also created a series of photographic lightboxes documenting Jarman’s cottage and garden in Dungeness.

The exhibition will mark the premiere of Julien’s new film about Jarman, Derek, the centre of which is a day-long interview Jarman recorded in 1990. The film includes a narration by Tilda Swinton and clips of Jarman’s films, juxtaposed with news and footage of the current affairs from the times that this life illuminated. It is a film of Jarman’s life as well as the story of England from the 1960s to the 1980s.

• The Serpentine salutes the unique genius of Derek Jarman
• Derek Jarman the painter

And another piece of Jarman-related news, cinematographer David Watkin died earlier this week. Watkin photographed The Devils for Ken Russell (among many other great films of the Sixties and Seventies), a film which also featured Jarman’s striking production design. Watkin was also gay, something I wasn’t aware of until I read the Guardian’s obituary.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

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• The Angelic Conversation
• The life and work of Derek Jarman

The Innocents.

A great British actress died this week. She was also something of a movie star in the Fifties, rolling in the surf with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity (1953) and standing up to Yul Brynner in The King and I (1956). Prior to that she starred in two films for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) (where she played three roles) and Black Narcissus (1947). But for me she’ll always be the (literally) haunted Miss Giddens in The Innocents (1961), Jack Clayton’s superb adaptation of The Turn of the Screw. Still one of the most effective screen ghost stories; try and see it this Halloween.

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• Freddie Francis, 1917–2007