October 2011 – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 80

Niels Klim’s descent to the planet Nazar from the 1845 edition of Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (Niels Klim’s Underground Travels) (1741) by Ludvig Holberg.

BibliOdyssey posts illustrations from different editions of Ludvig Holberg’s satirical fantasy, appends the usual informative links and draws our attention Stories of a Hollow Earth at The Public Domain Review. I’d not come across the latter site before but it’s now bookmarked.

• While the economy of Europe continues to circle the toilet bowl it’s good to know that our Prime Minister is focusing on the important issues such as…limiting access to internet pornography. “Look at the implementation, and no matter where you stand on porn, I think you’ll see this plan is going to cause a lot of problems on its way to the eventual fail bin,” says Violet Blue. I was wondering how the four targeted ISPs would feel about a filtering plan that would drive many new customers elsewhere. The Register reports their response which comes down to offering guidelines rather than attempting the difficult and contentious task of filtering millions of websites.

• Related: Won’t you fuck off, Reg Bailey, in which the report by the small Christian pressure group that started all the fuss is eviscerated. | Elsewhere: Porn is good for society says Anna Arrowsmith, while Tristan Taormino asserts that “writing and publishing erotica, especially for minorities, is a political act.” Then there’s Pornsaints, “an artistic approach to porn, a pornographic approach to art, a pornartistic approach to religion.”

• In the music world: Richard H Kirk and Peter Care discuss Cabaret Voltaire and Johnny YesNo, Roy Harper talks to Alexis Petridis, and soundtrack composer Cliff Martinez is interviewed (and pictured playing a Cristal).

• Witch’s Cradle at Strange Flowers (Maya Deren, Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim), The Ghosts of Senate House, London, and Aleister Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema as it is today.

• RIP Frank Kameny, co-founder of the Mattachine Society, and a tireless gay rights advocate from the early 1960s on.

• Bruce Weber photographs some of the dancers from Matthew Bourne’s Dance Company.

• Terry Gilliam says “I used to think I could will things into existence. Not any more.”

• Charts at Business Insider: What the Wall Street protesters are so angry about.

• Five From…: assorted wit and wisdom in the Tumblr labyrinth.

• Glass art by Jasmine Targett.

• Ballard Geocoded.

• Porno Base (1982) by 23 Skidoo | Kylie Minogue (2003) by Satanicpornocultshop | Tantric Porno (live) (2009) by Bardo Pond.

The art of Jacopo Ligozzi, 1547–1627

Cartouche with Macabre Symbols and a Hairy Skull (no date).

Some macabre things for a macabre month. Jacopo Ligozzi was a Mannerist artist, and the date of his birth here is the most commonly cited one, some sources give later years. The excesses of Mannerism—distorted figures, sensational subject matter, grotesquery in general—used to be regarded with suspicion if not downright hostility by the guardians of good taste who write art history books. Peter & Linda Murray’s frequently snotty Dictionary of Art and Artists (1959) describes the style as being “best adapted to neurotic artists”, then goes on to list a few allegedly neurotic types, none of whom are Ligozzi. Judging by these examples, the artist had a thing for memento mori since many of the examples of his work online are grotesque cartouches or scenes of a rampaging Death. The last picture here showing a curious peacock boat is credited to Remigio Cantagallina and was discovered at the rather wonderful Frequent Peacock (now relocated here), another site which saves me the trouble of searching out further peacock pictures.

Thanks to Wunderkammer for the Ligozzi tip!

Continue reading “The art of Jacopo Ligozzi, 1547–1627”

Virgil Finlay’s Salomé

While chasing down Virgil Finlay’s illustration for Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space earlier this week I came across another Finlay drawing I’d not noticed before in a book I’ve owned for years. Makes me wonder what else is lurking on the shelves. Finlay’s depiction of Salomé was an illustration for Waxworks, a story by Robert Bloch published in Weird Tales for January 1939. I’ve never read much of Bloch’s fiction, this story included, so can’t say anything about it, but Finlay’s drawing impresses for the solid black night sky, and the peculiar flaming headdress, the kind of unique detail he often added to his pictures.

Bloch and Finlay had a memorable encounter a couple of years years before when Finlay illustrated The Faceless God, another Weird Tales piece which so impressed HP Lovecraft that it inspired a poem, To Mr. Finlay, Upon His Drawing for Mr. Bloch’s Tale, ‘The Faceless God’. Lovecraft’s handwritten draft can be seen (but not necessarily read) here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive

Malicious Damage

I was going to title this post “Fucked by Monty” but thought that might give the wrong impression. The phrase was one of several titles added to the cover of The Collected Plays of Emelyn Williams by Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell when they were happily defacing the books of Islington Library, London, in the early 1960s. Despite the outrage of the librarians at the vandalism most of the defaced books were put aside and are now prized items in Islington’s collection. This week the library announced an exhibition of the books, Malicious Damage: The crimes of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. The Guardian has a gallery of the covers here (and there’s more at Joe Orton central), rare examples of what might be called “guerilla collage”.

In addition to tarting up boring cover designs, Orton and Halliwell also typed their own descriptions of some the books’ contents. Gollancz volumes were apparently good for this since the publisher left the inside of their famous yellow dust jackets blank. John Lahr in Prick Up Your Ears gives an example from a Dorothy L Sayers novel which is also read out in the 1987 film adaptation:

When little Betty Macdree says that she has been interfered with, her mother at first laughs. It is only something the kiddy has picked up off television. But when sorting through the laundry, Mrs. Macdree discovers that a new pair of knickers are missing she thinks again. On being questioned, Betty bursts into tears. Mrs. Macdree takes her to the police station and to everyone’s surprise the little girl identifies P.C. Brenda Coolidge as her attacker. Brenda, a new recruit, denies the charge. A search is made of the Women’s Police Barracks. What is found there is a seven inch phallus and a pair of knickers of the kind used by Betty. All looks black for kindly P.C. Coolidge…. What can she do? This is one of the most enthralling stories ever written by Miss Sayers.

It is the only one in which the murder weapon is concealed, not for reasons of fear but for reasons of decency!

READ THIS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS. And have a good shit while you are reading!

Alan Bennett wrote the screenplay of Prick Up Your Ears and that line about “It is only something the kiddy has picked up off television” could well have been one of his own. Orton said that when the pair ended up in court the greatest outrage was shown not towards their obscene amendments but to simple bits of Surrealism such as the adding of a monkey’s face to the cover of Collins Guide to Roses. Schoolboy humour is understandable but don’t dare do something that makes no apparent sense.

Malicious Damage is a free exhibition and runs until January, 2012.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Joe Orton Online
• Joe Orton

Die Farbe and The Colour Out of Space

Die Farbe (2010).

The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness.

The Colour Out of Space (1927).

Die Farbe (The Colour) is a German feature film by Huan Vu based on HP Lovecraft’s tremendous short story The Colour Out of Space. Vu’s film was completed last year, and has been well-received at film festivals and by Lovecraft aficionados but I’ve been rather tardy in hearing about it. Better late than never.

Having adapted two-and-a-half stories, I tend to take a more than cursory interest in works based on Lovecraft’s fiction. One of the reasons I tackled his works in the first place was out of frustration at the apparent inability of film producers and comic artists to treat the stories as they’d been written. The Colour Out of Space is one of the masterpieces of Lovecraft’s mature period, and was the favourite of his own stories, a skilful blending of horror and science fiction in the tale of a fallen meteorite infecting a farm with an inexplicable process of decay and physical mutation. The mysterious colour is the product of some unearthly substance inside the meteorite which corresponds to no known part of the visible spectrum. This wasn’t the first story of Lovecraft’s that I read—I’d earlier found The Moon-Bog in a ghost story anthology—but it was the first that made a serious impression when I came across it in another anthology at age 12 or 13. Since then, whenever people ask me which Lovecraft stories to read first The Colour Out of Space is always one I recommend.

Continue reading “Die Farbe and The Colour Out of Space”