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Weekend links 173

Icarus (1974–75) by Lili Ország.

• The Cabaret Voltaire albums released on the Virgin label in the 1980s have suffered the same shoddy treatment on CD as other Virgin reissues, a situation to be rectified in November with an extensive revisiting of the CV back catalogue. The long-overdue reappraisal will also include the release of Earthshaker, a collection of previously unavailable recordings from the Virgin period.

• It’s that book again: Design Observer has the preface from Lolita — The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s novel in art and design, a book by John Bertram and Yuri Leving. At The Millions John Bertram talks to designer John Gall about the problems Lolita poses for cover designers.

• Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried (1972) has acquired legendary status over the years for the apparent tastelessness of its subject matter—a clown in Auschwitz—and the fact that its director/star has never allowed the film to be seen in public. This week some footage arrived on YouTube.

• Candy Bullets And Moon (1967), a one-off psychedelic collaboration between Don Preston and Meredith Monk.

• What’s the collective term for many bookshops? Whatever it is, there’s a lot of them in this Pinterest collection.

• At Dangerous Minds: Artist Gail Potocki’s exploration of Alice in Wonderland and the passing of time.

• Anne Billson on the late Karen Black and why horror movies deserve our respect.

• Tobias Carroll on the Surreal life and fiction of Leonora Carrington.

• More details emerge about The Wicker Man – The Final Cut.

• Issue 35 of Arthur Magazine is now available for order.

• Graphics, drawings and collages by Jan Švankmajer.

• Every film poster designed by Saul Bass.

• Cabaret Voltaire: Just Fascination (1983) | Sensoria (1984) | I Want You (1985)

Elric 1: Le trône de rubis

The closest I ever got to illustrating Michael Moorcock’s Elric character was the sleeve for The Chronicle of the Black Sword in 1985, a Hawkwind concept album based on the first couple of Elric books. That design favoured a decorative approach over anything illustrative, however. At the time I felt too intimidated by the renderings of Elric’s first illustrator, James Cawthorn, and subsequent depictions by book cover artists such as Michael Whelan, to attempt my own version of the character. These days I pay little attention to heroic fantasy of any kind but I do look out for new depictions of Moorcock’s anti-hero. Earlier this year the French bande dessinée publisher, Glénat, released the first album in a planned series of five comic-strip adaptations of the Elric books. Many creditable Elric comics have appeared since the 1970s, not least the Cawthorn version of Stormbringer, one of the earliest and best, and Philippe Druillet’s own somewhat eccentric production. Mike Moorcock very generously sent me a copy of the Glénat volume this week, and I’d say this is now the one to beat.

Writer Julien Blondel has adapted the books with the art duties being taken by Didier Poli and Robin Recht. Jean Bastide is the colourist. I’ve always preferred the French and Belgian approach to comic art over the American style so I’m naturally biased towards a book such as this. That said, the art is marvellous, and so many of the details feel just right. Moorcock portrays the Melnibonéans as decadent and cruel, something that Poli and Recht portray with scenes of naked slaves being bled, butchered, and even used as human torches for the blithe amusement of their masters. The general atmosphere in the opening pages is like something from Flaubert’s Salammbô with its combination of antique depravity and the massing of great armies prior to battle. They don’t slouch with the monstrosities, either, there’s a spot of Lovecraftian weirdness when Elric is rescued by Straasha, the Sea King. I look forward to seeing how they deal with Arioch (who puts in an appearance at the end) and the other Chaos Lords. The dialogue is all in French, of course, but if you know the books it’s easy to follow even with French as limited as mine.

The Glénat site has a few more page samples. Moorcock has been watching these books being adapated and re-adapted for decades, and he says this is among the very best. For anyone with more than a passing interest in the brooding albino prince it’s well worth seeking out.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Salammbô illustrated
• Jim Cawthorn, 1929–2008

Alas Vegas Tarot cards

Back in February I bought a Wacom drawing tablet and said I’d show some proper results from its use later. For the past few months I’ve been working on this project using a combination of Wacom drawing and vector graphics. The initial brief from games designer James Wallis was for six Tarot-style card designs for his Alas Vegas role-playing game which has as its theme a fantasy extrapolation from Las Vegas and its gaudy mythology. The Kickstarter funding for the game turned out to be more successful than was anticipated so James asked me to expand the six cards idea into a full set of black-and-white Major Arcana designs.

This has been a fun series to work on although a number of the cards presented problems at first, the antique nature of the Tarot symbolism being a difficult thing to map across a very commercial American city. The symbolism from the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck was used as a rough guide although we deviated in a few places from the more traditional attributes. Las Vegas has changed over the years so rather than represent a single period of the city’s history there are references to different eras, from the huge casinos of today back to the buildings of the 50s and 60s with their distinctive “Googie” architecture. Notes for the cards follow below. The artwork can be seen at larger size here.

The Fool is usually a young man about to step off a cliff edge with a dog barking a warning at his heels, hence the dog on the sign.

Several of the cards convert the Tarot characters into cabaret acts. This one was pretty inevitable, and I’m sure it’s not the first time a stage conjuror has appeared on this card.

The chair is based on the 1965 “Ball Chair” design by Eero Aarnio (as seen in The Prisoner TV series), adapted here to resemble the Priestess’s crescent moon.

The style on this one is more 70s than 60s: patterned wallpaper (the hearts derive from the symbolism of The Empress, and from playing cards, of course), white rug, Kung Fu pyjamas.

Continue reading “Alas Vegas Tarot cards”

More Cameron

Untitled (Peyote Vision), 1955, Cameron (from Semina journal, no. 1).

Thanks to Erik Davis for drawing my attention to a small online exhibition of Marjorie Cameron artwork and documentary material. Semina was the magazine founded by Cameron’s artist friend, Wallace Berman. The exhibition note tells us that:

Wallace Berman’s only exhibition at Ferus Gallery in 1957 was raided by the LAPD vice squad because of the small reproduction of this sexually graphic work by Cameron that was part of Berman’s assemblage, Temple.

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl successfully fought off an obscenity charge in the same year but the immediacy of visual art means it always fares less well with disapproving authorities. We can assume that Cameron had personal experience of peyote given some verse written by her husband, Jack Parsons, that Robert Anton Wilson quotes in Cosmic Trigger (1977):

I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote,
marjuana, morphine and cocaine,
I never know sadness, but only a madness
that burns at the heart and the brain.

On the same site is this wonderful still (or is it a location photo?) from the shooting of Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide in 1961. Seeing this makes me want to watch the film again.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Wormwood Star
• Street Fair, 1959
• House of Harrington
• Curtis Harrington, 1926–2007
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995

Weekend links 172

Complete Stop (2008), an oil painting by Gregory Thielker from his Under the Unminding Sky series.

• For Halloween last year I watched a very poor copy of a BBC Play For Today production, Robin Redbreast, a piece of rural horror by John Bowen which received a single screening in 1970. That poor copy—black-and-white, timecoded, multi-generation video—has been circulating for years, so it’s good to know that the BFI will be releasing Robin Redbreast on DVD in time for this year’s Halloween. This might be news enough but the following month the BFI also releases Leslie Megahey’s stunning adaptation of Schalcken the Painter in a dual DVD/Blu-ray edition. I wrote a short review of the latter film last October.

• Mixes of the week: August Sun High from The Advisory Circle, and John Wizards’ Quietus Mix “African music, R&B and chamber pop, filtered through gentle electronic arrangements that cross-pollinate with South African house, Shangaan electro and dub”.

• A trailer has surfaced for The Counselor, a film by Ridley Scott from an original screenplay by Cormac McCarthy. Trailers are too spoilerish so I’m refusing to watch it but for those interested Slate has the details.

Luckhurst makes an admirable attempt to link Lovecraft’s most frustrating writing tic to this theme of the unknown when he claims that Lovecraft’s “catachresis”—deliberate muddling of language through the use of mixed metaphors and the like—is a tool he uses to bolster the atmosphere of futility in the face of “absolute otherness.” The trauma of encountering something so far outside the realms of imagination triggers a collapse of logic in the language itself.

Cate Fricke reviews The Classic Horror Stories of HP Lovecraft, a collection from Oxford University Press edited by Roger Luckhurst.

• “Contemporary audiences found it too weird, too wonky and even borderline distasteful…” Xan Brooks goes looking for the locations from Powell & Pressburger’s 1943 film, A Canterbury Tale.

• Two songs from Julia Holter’s forthcoming album, Loud City Song: World and Maxim’s I. Also unveiled this week: Evangeline, a new track by John Foxx & Jori Hulkkonen.

• Have Ghost, Will Find: Colin Fleming on William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, The Ghost Finder.

• At PingMag: Urban Calligraphy: Turning the Streets into Big, Loud Canvases.

• Sex, Spirit, and Porn: Conner Habib talks to Erik Davis.

• Serendip-o-matic: Let Your Sources Surprise You

• The Pronunciation of European Typefaces

• Twilight (2004) by Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd | Luminous (2009) by John Foxx & Robin Guthrie | Cling (2011) by Robin The Fog