{drugs} – Page 43 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 10

One of a number of vintage ads and ephemeral items at this Flickr set.

• From 1971: The Anthony Balch/William Burroughs/Jan Herman video experiment.

• The NYT reports on World on a Wire, a neglected science fiction drama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

• “While some of the technology industry’s brightest minds were inventing the first PCs and developing groundbreaking software, they were also feeding their heads with LSD.”

• The archive of author and illustrator Mervyn Peake has been acquired by the British Library for £410,000.

• Thames & Hudson are publishing I Wonder, a book by the wonderful Marian Bantjes, later in the year. Her site has a preview. I want.

• The gays: It’s election season in the UK so My Gay Vote looks at how the three main parties have supported LGB issues. (No data for the graphs, however.) Is theatre finally glad to be gay? Yet more Tumblrs: I heart skinny boys & Cute boys with cats.

• Trend-spotter, “svengali”, Situationist and the man who named the Sex Pistols: RIP Malcolm McLaren. The Guardian ran a number of memorial pages. Related: Anarchy in Gardenstown.

• Dublin’s One City, One Book choice for April 2010 is The Picture of Dorian Gray.

• The Catastrophist: Christopher Hitchens on JG Ballard.

• Steampunk Taxidermy by Lisa Black.

• LIFE looks back at Aleister Crowley.

• Groovy songs of the week: Julie Driscoll (with Brian Auger & The Trinity), a pair of songs by Bob Dylan—This Wheel’s On Fire—and Donovan—Season Of The Witch—and sets which look like a collaboration between Verner Panton and Marcel Duchamp. Amazing.

Weekend links 8

Another label design of mine for the Adur Brewery. Much as I like Otto Weisert’s Arnold Böcklin typeface it’s something I’ve been reluctant to use in the past due to its lazy deployment by UK shop sign makers. The ribbon motifs and the hops are adapted from one of my Art Nouveau reference books, however, so it seemed appropriate in this case.

• Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs, a forthcoming exhibition at IMT, London, “presenting two unreleased tape experiments by William Burroughs from the mid 1960s alongside responses by 23 artists, musicians, writers, composers and curators.” Related: get a Naked Lunch t-shirt (or another cover design) at Out of Print clothing.

• Ronald Clyne: American folk modernist. Rediscovering the album and book cover designer.

• Better Things: The Life and Choices of Jeffrey Jones. A documentary about the work of artist Jeffrey Jones. Related: Mike Kaluta appears in the trailer and Golden Age Comic Book Stories has pages from Kaluta’s illustrated Metropolis (1988), a novel by Thea von Harbou.

• “I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from earth like a spaceship.” WFMU’s Beware of the Blog explores Cary Grant’s use of LSD. Related: Orange Sunshine – The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, a book by Nicholas Schou.

• Britain’s armed forces have a lesson for the US: “Only 10 years ago, the Army was expelling soldiers for homosexuality. Now gay weddings get the regimental blessing.” A very modern military partnership.

• Cassette tapes and their growing curiosity/fetish value. Related: Michael Stipe and Maison Martin Margiela’s sterling silver microcassette charm.

• Another week, another theremin link: Detergent bottles become theremins.

• “Edinburgh is a city built on the production of books”.

• The National Archives UK’s photostream at Flickr.

• Typographic playing cards.

• A song for Cary Grant: The Trip by Park Avenue Playground, an obscurity from 1967. And These New Puritans have a new video for Attack Music.

Weekend links 6

Shades of Toho: the city of San Francisco encounters its octopoid nemesis on this gig poster from DKNG. Via OMG Posters!

• Related to the above: Godzilla Haiku.

• View from Another Shore: a fantastic (so to speak) and overdue interview with Franz Rottensteiner, writer and editor of landmark studies of fantasy and science fiction.

• Ronald Searle: a life in pictures: an appreciation by Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell.

• 832 masks: The Maskatorium at Flickr.

• The Cult of the Theremin: lots of theremin links including this page of scans from a beautiful Art Deco theremin brochure. (Thanks to Kara for the tip!) Related: the DIY IKEA lamp theremin.

• Music & Science Fiction, an exhibition at Maison d’Ailleurs.

• Nathalie found a stoned angel in Rome.

• EVB’s Boy of the Week is a Spanish guy in his underwear drawn by Jacobo Labella.

• Film of the month: Sally Potter’s Orlando on DVD, featuring the luminous enigma of Tilda Swinton.

Passage 12

Ed Jansen writes again to notify me that the latest number of his web magazine, Passage, is now online, about which he says:

In Passage nr. 12 there are articles about a 17th century garden in The Hague, about the mysterious visit to The Hague by the Comte De Saint Germain. Was he really a enlightened man or a fraud? If you’re an occultist you’ll tend to believe the first, the historian thinks otherwise. Then there are the photos of the dancer and performer Hiroake Umeda. Strange movements underlined by light-effects. Living in a Capsule is a combination of the paintings by the Dutch artist Tjebbe Beekman and the work of J.G. Ballard. Lastly there is an article about Jan Bastiaans, the doctor who experimented with LSD to ‘free’ the victims of the concentration camps of the nightmares and repressed memories.

Once again the text content is in Dutch but that doesn’t exclude all visitors here. I hadn’t come across the work of Tjebbe Beekman before. His paintings of urban desolation are indeed a good match for one aspect of Ballard’s work, and they make an interesting contrast with Dick French’s earlier views of the author’s Drowned World.

Trust by Tjebbe Beekman (2005).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Drowned Worlds
• Passage 11
• Passage 10

The Dark Ledger

The boundless depths of Chris Mullen’s VTS site continue to yield treasures. The documentation for these pictures is somewhat vague but they seem to be illustrations for Fantômas stories which Mullen has grouped under the title The Dark Ledger, part of a larger selection of pages devoted to the Lord of Evil. The depiction of the Eiffel Tower is of interest here for its showing a view over one of the Paris expositions, possibly the Exposition Universelle of 1900. The opium den, on the other hand, seems remarkably overlit and well-appointed compared to the more customary renderings of such places.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exposition Universelle publications
• Exposition cornucopia
• Return to the Exposition Universelle
• The Palais Lumineux
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• Exposition Universelle, 1900
• The Palais du Trocadéro
• The Evanescent City
• Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
• Fantômas