Weekend links 683

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She Did Not Turn (1974) by David Inshaw.

• “Pauline Kael compared Bruce Lee to Fred Astaire; I think the comparison works better with Rudolf Nureyev. Astaire had a besuited, playful grace, while Nureyev was shirtless, dramatic, and muscular. Astaire moved with athletic modesty, while Lee’s bravura dominated the screen.” Micah Nathan on 50 years of Enter the Dragon.

• New music: This Stolen Country Of Mine by Alva Noto, and Denshi Ongaku No Bigaku (The Aesthetics of Japanese Electronic Music) Vol.1 by Cosmocities Records.

• At Cartoon Brew: A profile of Sally Cruikshank. The spooky psychedelia of Face Like a Frog has long been a favourite round here.

• “My Life in a Hop, Skip and a Jump!” Clive Hicks-Jenkins answers a few questions about his art.

• At Public Domain Review: Hokusai’s Illustrated Warrior Vanguard of Japan and China (1836).

• More martial arts: Tom Wilmot on Bruce Lee’s greatest fight scenes at Golden Harvest.

• Submissions to the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Lucrecia Martel Day.

• RIP Jane Birkin.

Enter The Dragon (1974) by The Upsetters | Dragon Power (A Tribute To Bruce Lee) (1978) by JKD Band | Edit The Dragon (1985) by Colourbox

Weekend links 682

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La Voie Lactée (1921) by George Barbier.

• Fun news of the week: “The Taylor Swift vinyl haunted by Britain’s weirdest musicians.” The “weirdness” is tracks from Happy Land: A Compendium of Electronic Music from the British Isles 1992–1996 which have been mispressed onto Swift’s latest, the re-recorded Speak Now. One of the offending pieces is Soul Vine (70 Billion People) by Cabaret Voltaire, a relatively understated instrumental from the Plasticity album which features samples from the Demon with a Glass Hand episode of The Outer Limits. “It’s possibly the most subversive thing we’ve ever done,” says Stephen Mallinder. Adventurous Swifties looking to broaden their horizons are advised to try The Crackdown next.

• “For McCarthy, violence is the signature of God: God, who cannot be seen, who is only indicated by an absence, who no amount of experimenting or observing will reveal, but whose existence is in evidence all around us, every day, through the apocalyptic and apophatic violence that makes up the very stuff of the world.” JC Scharl on the violent faith of Cormac McCarthy.

• Strange news of the week: Reclusive guitarist Master Wilburn Burchette (age 84) was found dead in a house with the body of his younger brother (age 76) after decades spent avoiding anyone showing an interest in his music. Numero Group, the label behind the recent reissues of Burchette’s albums, posted an interview from 2018.

Takrar by Waref Abu Quba is “an experimental film that celebrates the timeless and intricate beauty of ancient craftsmanship. Filmed in Istanbul, the film takes us on a mesmerizing journey into the past, paying homage to Islamic, Ottoman, Greek, and Byzantine art forms.”

• “Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?” Probably not, but if it was in the deep past how would we know? Joel Froelich investigates.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Visual evidence from almost every museum devoted to prestidigitation in the world (for Derek McCormack).

• At Spoon & Tamago: Osaka celebrates Star Festival with river of 40,000 LED lights evoking the Milky Way.

• At Unquiet Things: Even more sneak peeks from The Art of Fantasy.

• Mix of the week is DreamScenes – July 2023 at Ambientblog.

• At The Daily Heller: Sign writing and glass engraving.

Out Of Limits (1963) by The Marketts | Trip Through The Milky Way–An Electronic Panorama (1969) by Raymond Moore | Milky Way (1971) by Weather Report

Chirico by Tanaami and Aihara

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If I’d have seen it earlier I would have included this animated film in my Echoes of de Chirico post. Chirico (2008) is a wordless 4-minute homage to the maestro of pittura metafisica directed by Keiichi Tanaami with Nobuhiro Aihama. In addition to being a celebrated artist and designer, Keiichi Tanaami has been making short animations since the 1960s, usually with the assistance of other artists. This one puts familiar de Chirico motifs through a metamorphic Surrealist wringer in a manner that could easily have been extended into a much longer film. De Chirico has evidently been a preoccupation for Tanaami in recent years, providing a landscape he can appropriate for his bad-trip take on psychedelic art.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Echoes of de Chirico
Sweet Friday, a film by Keiichi Tanaami
Keiichi Tanaami record covers

Phantastische Edelmann

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There’s more to Heinz Edelmann than the designs he created for Yellow Submarine, as Edelmann himself often used to remind people. And there’s more to his work for animated film than the Beatles’ exploits. Der Phantastische Film is a short introductory sequence for a long-running German TV series which has been doing the rounds for a number of years. Brief it may be but a couple of the monstrous details resemble those that Edelmann put into his covers for Tolkien’s books.

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Edelmann had plans to capitalise on the success of Yellow Submarine with more films like this when he set up his own animation company, Trickfilm, but the only other example is The Transformer, a short about steam trains which he designed. (The direction was by Charlie Jenkins, with animation by Alison De Vere and Denis Rich.) Given the persistent popularity of Yellow Submarine I keep hoping someone might revive its style for something new. The first animated feature directed by Marcell Jankovics, Johnny Corncob, comes close but lacks the trippy Surrealism of the Beatles film. The Japanese can certainly do trippy Surrealism (see Mind Game or Paprika) but I’ve yet to see anything that approaches the Edelmann style. Johnny Corncob, incidentally, is now available on Region B blu-ray from Eureka. It’s worth seeing but the main film in the set, Son of the White Mare, is Jankovics’s masterpiece.

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On a slightly related note, until today I hadn’t looked at ISFDB.org for Heinz Edelmann’s genre credits so I hadn’t seen this Lovecraft cover before. Hard to tell if this creature is supposed to be Cthulhu or Wilbur Whateley’s brother when The Dunwich Horror is one of the stories in the collection. Either way, it belongs in the Sea of Monsters. Insel Verlag published this one in 1968, a year before launching their special imprint devoted to fantastic literature, Bibliothek des Hauses Usher.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Return to Pepperland
The groovy look
The Sea of Monsters
Yellow Submarine comic books
Heinz Edelmann

Weekend links 674

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The Far Side of the Moon, as photographed by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

• “It goes against centuries of traditional belief to accept that the moon is barren, that it is indifferent, that it is innocent of any role in monthly spikes in the crime rate or in the cycles of menstrual unreason. When telescopic observation had found nothing on the near side (Roger Boscovich had established by 1753 that it lacks even an atmosphere), the far side still remained a site for the projection of fantasies of a different, neighbouring world.” Justin EH Smith working his way towards a history of the dark side of the moon.

• “It shocks me that movies still lean in so hard to all these outmoded gay narrative tropes: coming out, coming of age; very identity-oriented representations of gay characters. It’s much easier to represent a gay boy who’s repressed in high school and comes out and makes friends. It’s very mainstream, and kind of played out.” Bruce LaBruce on cinematic trends in relation to his new film, a gay-porn take on Pasolini’s Teorema.

• At Cartoon Brew: Pavel Sannikau explains how he developed his own techniques of digital animation in order to create the ever-expanding Floor796.

• There’s always more Poe: Mysterium, Incubus et Terror, Poe-inspired music by a variety of artists, plus illustrations by John D. Chadwick.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: The results of a themed contest in the Close-Up Photographer of the Year Challenge.

• Mixes of the week: In Praise of the Saddest Chord at Ambientblog, and The Funky Eno Pts 2 & 3 by DJ Food.

• Steven Heller talks to Hungarian artist István Orosz about his Escher-like drawings.

• At Unquiet Things: Caitlin McCormack’s ghostly chains of knotted memory.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Intricate and organic sculptures by ceramicist Eriko Inazaki.

• New music: Illumina by Call Super with Julia Holter.

Dark Side Of The Mushroom (1967) by The Chocolate Watchband | Dark Side Of The Star (1984) by Haruomi Hosono | On The Dark Side Of The Sun (live) (2003) by Helios Creed