{film} – Page 273 – { feuilleton }

A Moment of Inspiration, 1983

Marc Almond (1983) by John Coulthart.

This, girls and boys, is how we occupied ourselves in the long nights before the advent of 24-hour television: we sat up drawing portraits of Marc Almond. A conversation on Twitter reminded me of this, a drawing that’s never before appeared in public but which is now added to the web collection. For a quick piece of art it’s actually a lot more successful than many of the more laboured things of mine that were printed far and wide at this time. The portrait was copied from a magazine photo, I forget which one, possibly Flexipop if it was still going, an increasingly wayward title that had a soft spot (so to speak) for Soft Cell. The Spanish hat identifies it as being from the Torment and Toreros period while the lettering was taken from Val Denham and Huw Feather’s cover design for the first Marc and The Mambas album, Untitled (1982). The padded-cell background refers, of course, to Marc’s former group, and was copied from the back of the Bedsitter 12″. Most of the drawing is done in black Biro pen with the hat and shirt in gouache. On the back I happened to make a note of the date, something I seldom bother with.

The Twitter conversation was prompted by the appearance of Soft Cell’s notorious Sex Dwarf video at Dangerous Minds; Flexipop enjoyed the scurrilous side of Soft Cell so much they printed a still from this Bacchanal as a centre-spread in one of their issues. Meanwhile Marc himself was writing in the Guardian this week about Bowie manqué Jobriath, one of the real-life inspirations for the Brian Slade character in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, and the subject of a feature-length documentary, Jobriath A.D., by Kieran Turner, currently showing at the BFI’s London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Derek Jarman’s music videos

The art of Yoshi Sodeoka

Violet Dark Spring of the Numinous Orb (2011).

Those for whom Enter the Void wasn’t enough (I know you’re out there) are advised to direct their attention to the prints and videos of Japanese artist Yoshi Sodeoka. The website has numerous screen grabs and examples of the prints while the artist’s Vimeo channel has the videos. Via Dressing the Air.

Psychedelic Death Vomit (2008).

The Palace Of Light (Revisited) (2011).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Enter the Void
• Chris Parks
• Matrix III by John Whitney
• John Whitney’s Catalog
• Arabesque by John Whitney
• Jordan Belson on DVD
• Ten films by Oskar Fischinger
• Lapis by James Whitney
• Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood

Weekend links 101

Kraken from Ernie Cabat’s Magical World Of Monsters (1992) at Monster Brains.

“I think for a lot of people who don’t read pulp growing up, there’s a real surprise that the particular kind of Pulp Modernism of a certain kind of lush purple prose isn’t necessarily a failure or a mistake, but is part of the fabric of the story and what makes it weird. There’s a big default notion that ‘spare,’ or ‘precise’ prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose.” China Miéville at Weird Fiction Review expressing an opinion that few in the literary world ever articulate, never mind agree with. Far more common is (to pick a recent example) Ursula K Le Guin dismissing Cormac McCarthy for “pretentious prose”.

• “Militant feminist scientists brainwash a research subject to assassinate the Welsh Minister of Prostitution. Meanwhile World War III is being fought and the USA has been invaded.” The IMDB précis for Taking Tiger Mountain (1983), a feature film directed by Tom Huckabee from a script by William Burroughs, and featuring a 19-year-old pre-Aliens/Near Dark Bill Paxton. The director discusses the film’s production at Screen Slate and attends a rare screening at Spectacle, Brooklyn, NYC, today (March 25th). YouTube has a three-minute clip. Surprising this has remained buried for so long. When can the rest of us get to see it?

• Prestel have published the catalogue for In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States. AnOther previewed some of the contents. The exhibition runs at the LACMA, Los Angeles, until 6th May.

…gays only make up about 3% of the population so we spend our whole lives “translating” straight movies, books, ballets into gay terms and studying the heterosexuals around us—we know much more about them than they know about us, just as blacks know a lot about whites but whites know virtually nothing about blacks.

Edmund White (again) interviewed by Frank Pizzoli at Lambda Literary Review.

• New on Caroline True Records: Jon Savage’s “Fame”, Secret History of Post-Punk 1978–81. “Some of it doesn’t sound like anything that has happened since,” says Savage. Indeed. FACT has the track list which I was pleased to see includes Chrome among the usual suspects. Hear a 12-minute promo mix at Soundcloud.

The Colossi of Memnon by Jules Guerin. From Egypt and its Monuments (1908) by Robert Hichens at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• Gay Life Stories, “a colourful compendium of same-sex love through the ages” by Robert Aldrich. Reviewed here. Related: Alice Dreger asks “Are straight people born that way?”

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins created a series of designs for a Washington DC performance of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. Follow their evolution in reverse order at his blog.

• Hocus Pocus: Margaret Eby on the brief epistolary relationship between Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle.

• Rick Poynor on more cover designs for JG Ballard’s Crash.

• London, city of dreams and rivers, caught on Polaroid.

• Photo prints by Thom Ayres for sale at Society6.

• B*tches in Bookshops

• Meet You In The Subway (1979) by Chrome | New Age (Version III) (1980) by Chrome | Danger Zone (1981) by Chrome | Firebomb (1982) by Chrome.

The Torchbearer by Václav Švankmajer

Švankmajer? Yes, Václav is the son of Czech Surrealists Jan Švankmajer and Eva Švankmajerová, and The Torchbearer (2005) is the third of three short films he’s directed. Like the celebrated films of his father this is an animated piece in which a faceless warrior navigates a ruined labyrinth where lethal traps are prepared by a group of living female statues. The style reminded me more of some of the Brothers Quay shorts than the snapping, jerking works of Švankmajer Sr.: the gliding statues are reminiscent of the tailors’ dummies in Street of Crocodiles (1986) while the mechanical traps call to mind Gilgamesh’s murderous table in This Unnameable Little Broom (1985). (And, yes…also the death machine in The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope.)

Václav Švankmajer’s website has a page devoted to the production of the film. Also on his site are several galleries of the paintings and drawings that are the focus of his attention today. Via Form is Void.

• The Torchbearer on YouTube: Part 1 | Part 2

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jan Švankmajer: The Complete Short Films

Creel Pone

One of the many surprises for me about Enter the Void was finding recordings by electronic composer Jean-Claude Eloy mixed into its droning soundscape, namely extracts from his 1979 album, Shànti. I’d been listening to this a week or so before watching the film after having downloaded a large quantity of obscure electronic releases on the bootleg Creel Pone label.

Flowers Of Evil (1969) by Ruth White.

The Creel Pone project by Keith Fullerton Whitman began with the intention of reissuing in a limited form 100 albums of electronic or electro-acoustic music dating from the period 1947 to 1983 (or 1952 to 1984 according to the label seal); The Analogue Age, in other words. Most of the albums were long out of print, and few had ever been available on CD when the project began although some have since had official reissues. The recordings were transferred from vinyl then burned to 50 CD-Rs per album, each release coming in a CD-sized facsimile of the original cover. Simon Reynolds wrote a piece about the label for The Wire in 2010 but I first encountered the releases a couple of years earlier via an acquaintance who was one of the collectors trying to accumulate the entire run. The run finished some time ago so the reissues themselves will soon be as difficult to find as the releases they made available, hence the recourse to mp3, and this cache of almost the entire catalogue. I haven’t listened to everything there yet (iTunes tells me this would take 2.2 days, non-stop)—and I find my patience often runs out with tape-collage electro-acoustic compositions unless I’m in the mood—but some of these albums are so good, the Thomas Köner-like Shànti among them, you have to wonder why they were overlooked for so long. A few of the uploads have tracks missing, and they’re all variable quality, but you won’t find this amount of Creel Pone material anywhere else in a hurry. (There’s also no guarantee they’ll be there for long so don’t complain to me if you’re visiting this post after they’ve all been deleted.)

Musique Pour Le Futur (1970) by Nino Nardini.

Discogs has an incomplete catalogue listing. Several of Jean-Claude Eloy’s albums are now available on CD. Gil Mellé’s excellent soundtrack for The Andromeda Strain was given a limited CD release two years ago but is out of print again. For some recordings it seems, the struggle to reach an audience is a continual one.

The Andromeda Strain: Original Electronic Soundtrack (1971) by Gil Mellé.

Pythagoron (1977) by Pythagoron™

Reflecting On The First Watch, We Uncover Treasure Buried For The Blind (1978) by Cellutron & The Invisible.

Shànti (1979) by Jean-Claude Eloy.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Enter the Void
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• The Avant Garde Project