{design} – Page 161 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 160

• “…slowly, block-by-block, pedestrians are starting to take back the streets.” Wayne Curtis on the hazards of being a pedestrian in a world of cars.

• Michael Hann looks back at LA’s Paisley Underground, and also talks to some of its key members.

• Meighan O’Toole interviews JL Schnabel about her Blood Milk jewellery designs.

My central thesis is that camp was always a kind of signifying practice invented out of necessity (both for survival and for sheer creative pleasure) by “queer” (in the classic sense) outsiders – fags, drag queens, transsexuals, deviants, sexual renegades – and that it was always by its very nature deeply political and committed: Some people dedicated their entire lives to it! Sontag’s interpretation always seemed a bit dismissive to me somehow.

The seldom unprovocative Bruce LaBruce talking to Mark Allen about camp in the 21st century.

• Studiocanal launches an appeal to find the lost materials of The Wicker Man.

• At Flickr: Tales from a Parallel Universe and London’s Lost Music Venues.

• Michael Wood tells us what we learn when we read Italo Calvino’s letters.

• Fragments of a Portrait: Francis Bacon and David Sylvester in 1966.

• An extract of a live session from Adrian Sherwood and Pinch.

• In Baba Yaga’s Hut: Amelia Glaser on Russian folk tales.

• Buckminster Fuller Book Covers from the 1970s.

• A Century of Proust.

• The Real World (1982) by The Bangles | With A Cantaloupe Girlfriend (1982) by The Three O’Clock | Medicine Show (1984) by The Dream Syndicate | No Easy Way Down (live in Tokyo, 1984) by The Rain Parade

Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake

More psychedelia (there’s always more psychedelia). Listening to this Small Faces album this week I couldn’t remember whether my vinyl reissue from the 1980s had survived the vinyl purge I instituted a few years ago. It turns out I do still have the vinyl copy, a facsimile of the original circular sleeve. Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake was released in 1968. Despite the innovative sleeve design and the generally tripped-out atmosphere (especially on side two) it seldom gets included in retrospectives of psychedelic album art. This is surprising since for design and execution it’s far better than the sleeves for Their Satanic Majesties Request and Magical Mystery Tour, the latter a great album with a really awful cover. I suspect the Small Faces’ album gets overlooked because the most typically psychedelic aspect of the artwork—the drawing/collage below—is hidden inside, the rest of the cover being a careful imitation of an “Ogdens’ Nut-brown Flake” tobacco tin. XTC borrowed the circular sleeve idea for their 1984 album The Big Express.

Interior panel. Illustration by P. Brown.

The drawing is credited to one “P. Brown”; the sleeve design, we’re told, was the work of Mick Swan who did nothing else in this area. If I’m vague about the details it’s because my copies of the album (CD and vinyl) contain no information other than the label copy. I imagine recent reissues which have had booklet notes will are more enlightening. This page has some comments from the band as to how the tobacco tin idea came about.

The opened-out sleeve.

Original copies of this album used to command high prices (so to speak) since the fragile nature of the hinges holding together each part of the sleeve meant they rapidly wore out. Subsequent editions tended to be in regular square sleeves. My CD edition from 1989 was the first to make the most of the tobacco tin concept by packaging the whole thing in a tin. Inside you get a small reproduction of the fold-out sleeve and six somewhat redundant beer mats or coasters.

The band played two-thirds of the album on the BBC’s Colour Me Pop in 1968, complete with an appearance by Stan “The Man” Unwin who provides the “loony links” on the second side of Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. Most editions of Colour Me Pop are lost but that episode survived, and may be watched here.

The opened-out sleeve (obverse).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Tadanori Yokoo album covers

Kokoro No Uramado (1969) by Asaoka Ruriko.

A few examples of Tadanori Yokoo’s earlier cover designs which are the ones I prefer. Although he’s continued to produce collage art for music releases, the CD format does his work few favours. I lose interest musically in Santana after about 1970 so I’d not looked properly at their triple-live set Lotus before, an album which is one of those worth having for the cover alone. Worth having for the cover and the music is Miles Davis’s thundering jazz-rock monolith Agharta which for some reason was given a different cover by Elena Pavlov on its US and European release. For Yokoo’s more recent cover art see his Discogs page.

Lotus (1974) by Santana.

Continue reading “Tadanori Yokoo album covers”

Weekend links 159

El Banquete Magnético (2011) by Cristina Francov.

• Did Vertigo Introduce Computer Graphics to Cinema? asks Tom McCormack. He means Saul Bass’s title sequence which mostly uses still harmonographs but also features some animated moments by John Whitney.

• Temple of the Vanities by Thomas Jorion. “Pictured here are political monuments and munitions depots, hulking concrete forms that marked the edges of empires.” Related: Paintings by Minoru Nomata.

• Musical reminiscences: Matt Domino on the Small Faces’ psychedelic magnum opus Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, and Richard Metzger on the sombre splendours of Tuxedomoon.

Harrison is best known as one of the restless fathers of modern SF, but to my mind he is among the most brilliant novelists writing today, with regard to whom the question of genre is an irrelevance. To read his work is to encounter fiction doing what fiction must: carrying out the kinds of thinking and expression that would be possible in no other form. I pass through his novels feeling a mixture of wonder, calmness and disturbance; I end them brain-jarred and unsettled. Metaphysical echoes persist for days afterwards. It feels as if I have had a strabismus induced, causing illusions that slowly resolve into insights.

Robert Macfarlane on M. John Harrison and the reissue of Climbers.

• Divine Machinery: An Interview with Paul Jebanasam. Arvo Pärt, Cormac McCarthy and Algernon Blackwood are folded into his new album, Rites.

• Autostraddle shows the evolution of twelve queer book cover designs. As is often the case in cover design, latest isn’t always best.

• “My Definition Of Hell? It’s Other People, At The Cinema!” Anne Billson on the very thing that finished me as a cinema-goer.

• “London in the 1830s was a truly weird and terrifying place.” Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of London.

• At Scientific American: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens.

• Van Dyke Parks: “I was victimised by Brian Wilson’s buffoonery.”

• Colour film of London in 1927.

• Abandonedography

• Social Dead Zone

• Tuxedomoon: Tritone (Musica Diablo) (1980) | Desire (1981) | Incubus (Blue Suit) (1981)

Weekend links 158

Pan II (2012) by Fredrik Söderberg.

• “Aubade was a surprise success, selling some 5000 copies and going into a second printing and an edition published in America. Martin was immediately a minor celebrity, being interviewed for articles that couldn’t mention what his book was actually about.” Rediscovering the works of Kenneth Martin.

• “I can’t stand covers which imitate other covers, or which slavishly look like whatever their designated genre is supposed to look like.” Ace cover designer Peter Mendelsund is interviewed.

• At The Outer Church Isablood & Henry of Occult Hand are interviewed about their mixtape.

I’d decided to pay my respects in an unorthodox way, by time-travelling into the period of Thatcher’s pomp, when she occulted the light, alchemised the bad will of the populace and did her best to choke the living daylights out of the awkward, sprawling, socially coddled essence of metropolitan London. Hers was a tyranny of the suburbs operating from a position of privilege at the centre: she might have invested in a Dulwich retirement property, but she couldn’t sleep in it.

Iain Sinclair visits Tilbury on the day of the Thatcher funeral. Related: Iain Sinclair and Jonathan Meades in Conversation, Oxford Brookes University, March 2013.

• Ormond Gigli’s best photograph: women in the windows in Manhattan. See it full size here.

• Balzac and sex: How the French novelist used masturbation to fuel his writing process.

• At Dangerous Minds: Kenneth Williams and John Lahr discuss Joe Orton in 1978.

• Yet more Bowie: Sukhdev Sandhu reviews Ziggyology by Simon Goddard.

• The Spectacular, Wild World of Tenjo Sajiki and its Posters.

• In 1967 Susan Sontag made lists of her likes and dislikes.

• Stephen Sparks on fin de siècle author Marcel Schwob.

• Day Jobs of the Poets by Grant Snider.

• James Turrell’s Ganzfeld Experiment.

• The Pan Piper (1960) by Miles Davis & Gil Evans | Panorphelia (1974) by Edgar Froese | Pandora (1984) by Cocteau Twins