John – Page 547 – { feuilleton }

Dalí in New York

Another Dalínean gem surfaces at Ubuweb. Dalí in New York is a fascinating 50-minute account of the artist’s antics in New York City at the end of 1965. Unlike the reverential documentaries of the 1970s this film isn’t out to flatter its subject: scenes of the usual Dalí happenings are intercut with some combative verbal sparring from the equally remarkable Jane Arden who does her best to try and make sense of the painter’s pronouncements. The director was Arden’s collaborator, Jack Bond, most of whose work was for television although he’s also notable for having directed the Pet Shop Boys’ It Couldn’t Happen Here (1988), a film with some not entirely successful “surrealist” moments of its own.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Secret Life of Edward James
• René Magritte by David Wheatley
• Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí
• Mongolian impressions
• Hello Dali!
• Dirty Dalí
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited

Green Pipes: Poems and Pictures

This is a strange book. Green Pipes: Poems and Pictures (1929) was written and illustrated by Joseph Rous Paget-Fredericks (1903–1963), a man better known these days for a substantial collection of memorabilia and archive material related to 20th-century dance. Paget-Fredericks studied with Léon Bakst then went on to create his own costume designs as well as producing some books for children of which this is an example. In style the poems aim at AA Milne’s When We Were Very Young but succumb to tweeness with a superfluity of fairies and pixies. At first glance the illustrations seem just as twee until you notice remarkable details such as costumes and foliage created from a wealth of disconnected lines and squiggles. The drawing of a Smoke Sprite is closer to something by Alastair than EH Shepard, while the Snow Fairy is the vaguest outline in a dress composed of circles, lines and dots. The Green Pipes of the title are the pipes of Pan, and so we get a late eruption of that peculiar flourishing of Pan Mania that extends from the 1890s to the 1930s. A book of children’s poetry isn’t the place you’d expect to encounter flower children kneeling before a piping faun but after the openly Pantheist chapter of The Wind in the Willows anything is possible. Far more out of place among all the fairies is a painting of a pirate brandishing a bloody cutlass. And what are we to make of the lines at the end of Elfin Children?

Then from the windowed heights we stream
By silent starlit mire…

The Starlit Mire (1911) was a book of epigrams by James Bertram & F. Russell illustrated by Austin Osman Spare (with a head of Pan blocked onto the cover). It’s not at all a book for children so the occurrence of that phrase in Paget-Fredericks’ poem is very surprising. Is “starlit mire” a quote that precedes the Bertram & Russell book? Please leave a comment if you know.

Read Green Pipes online here or download it here.

Continue reading “Green Pipes: Poems and Pictures”

O (Omicron)

Is projection mapping becoming a lot more common or am I simply noticing it more often? O (Omicron) is a particularly stunning example, a permanent installation by Romain Tardy & Thomas Vaquié at the Hala Stulecia in Wroclaw, Poland. It helps that the building has such a distinctive shape, a concrete dome with a ribbed interior that suits being traced in glowing lines. Another link from Dressing the Air‘s weekly bulletin.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• KraftWork
• Lumiere at Durham
• Tetragram for Enlargement

Weekend links 114

David Bowie’s cigaretted fingers and bulging silver crotch point the way to the future. This summer sees the fortieth anniversary of the Ziggy Stardust album’s release. The Melody Maker ad above can be found with a wealth of other Ziggy-related material at the very thorough Ziggy Stardust Companion site. For me the definitive artefact isn’t the album itself but DA Pennebaker’s film of the final concert from the 1973 tour; the songs really come alive and Bowie’s performance is overwhelmingly electric. Related: Cracked Actor, the BBC documentary from 1975 about Bowie’s post-Ziggy life on and off the stage.

• The week in books: Amanda Katz described the remarkable history of a single copy of The War of the Worlds by HG Wells then asked “Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books?” | Bosnian novelist Aleksandar Hemon in The Browser’s FiveBooks interview put Blood Meridian on his list. | “Call me the greatest American novel”: Christopher Buckley on Moby-Dick. | The Brit Lit Map.

• For another anniversary, the Alan Turing centenary, there’s The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing (part two here) and Breaking the Code (1996), Derek Jacobi playing the tragic genius in a biographical drama.

• Commissioner of Sewers (1991) a William Burroughs documentary by Klaus Maeck in which the author reads some of his work and endures a Q&A session with surprising equanimity.

• Music, flesh and fantasy: When Mati Klarwein’s hyperactive paintings stole the psychedelic show.

• Move Over Casio: Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 Portable Synth Looks Cool, Does Everything.

• A retrospective of art by Madge Gill (1882–1961) at The Nunnery, London.

• “Art is unavoidably work”: Terre Thaemlitz interviewed.

• A trailer for Document: Keiji Haino.

• WB Yeats, Magus

• Pathétique 1 (1994) by Fushitsusha | Pathétique 2 (1994) by Fushitsusha.

Avebury panoramas

The Avenue, Avebury. Photo by Sophie Morse.

I’ve been a little surprised that there aren’t more photo panoramas of stone circles, their shape being optimal for the 360-degree view. The stones at Avebury in Wiltshire are too widely situated to be seen effectively from a single viewpoint so the view above shows the West Kennet Avenue that leads towards the circles. The same photographer also has a view of the entrance to the West Kennet Long Barrow.

Silbury Hill, Avebury. Photo by Matthew Kaye.

Close to Avebury village is Silbury Hill, one of the largest artificial mounds in the world and—since its purpose is still contested—a good contender for Britain’s most mysterious creation. The hill and Avebury stones (not to mention Stonehenge) are only the most spectacular landmarks in a remarkable county that’s scored all over with prehistoric remains. It’s this area of England—Wiltshire and Somerset—I always regard as the true ancient heart of the country, not London which was founded by Roman invaders thousands of years after these structures were raised.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive