{gay} – Page 79 – { feuilleton }

The art of Sidney Hunt, 1896–1940

Ganymede Before Zeus (1921).

Another of those artists about whom detail remains tantalisingly remote if the web is your primary research tool. Hunt was a British Modernist who also edited an avant-garde magazine, Ray, from 1926–27. Most of the works here are bookplates from around 1923, many of them distinctly homoerotic which adds to their interest. The note at Wikipedia is unsourced but tells us that his output included “experimental prose-poem fantasies of 18-year-old hermaphrodites”. Maybe these, and more of his work, will turn up eventually.

Continue reading “The art of Sidney Hunt, 1896–1940”

What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton

Dr Rance: You can’t be a rationalist in an irrational world. It isn’t rational.

“Lunatic” is a description suited to the frenetic pace and escalating calamities of the stage farce. Here the word gains greater resonance when the farce takes place in a psychiatric hospital. The customary sexual shenanigans are all in place—the play opens with Dr Prentice telling a prospective secretary to remove her clothes so he can see whether she’s suitable for the job—but in place of Carry On-style belly laughs we have another attack against authority and social ideas of normal behaviour, sexual or otherwise. This is a blacker shade of comedy than you usually find in farce. Joe Orton uses the mechanics of the form whilst undermining the cosy formulas; the ending is a happy one but only after the characters have gleefully overlooked double-incest and an act of rape. Bad taste was Orton’s forte, and that quality is very much in evidence here.

What the Butler Saw was one of several plays shown in the BBC’s Theatre Night strand in 1987. In this production Dinsdale Landen plays Dr Prentice with Prunella Scales playing Mrs Prentice. Timothy West (Prunella’s husband off-screen) perfectly incarnates the monstrous Dr Rance, a character so intoxicated with his own righteousness that he’s prepared to sign a committal order against anyone who crosses his path. (He boasts at one point of having committed his entire family.) It’s a great performance but West is ably matched by Dinsdale Landen and Prunella Scales. Barry Davis is the director. Plays such as this suffer without the involvement of an audience but this production gives an idea of how manic a decent stage production must be. The version on YouTube is in six parts.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Genius Like Us: A Portrait of Joe Orton
• Malicious Damage
• Joe Orton Online
• Joe Orton

A Genius Like Us: A Portrait of Joe Orton

Last week’s reading was the script of Joe Orton’s Loot after finding one of the first published editions of the play. Reading a play is never the same as seeing it performed, of course, but it’s still very funny, and many of its digs at police corruption haven’t dated at all. There is a film of Loot but it’s poor stuff, with Richard Attenborough miscast as the belligerent Inspector Truscott. Much better is Douglas Hickox’s film of Entertaining Mr Sloane (1970) which appeared shortly before Loot, and which is worth seeing for Beryl Reid reprising her stage role as the unfortunate Kath.

Orton’s brief career—a mere four years from complete obscurity in 1963 to his death at the hands of partner Kenneth Halliwell in 1967—is explored in A Genius Like Us: A Portrait of Joe Orton, a 70-minute BBC Arena documentary from 1982. Anyone who’s seen Prick Up Your Ears (1987)—Stephen Frears’ Orton biopic with a script by Alan Bennett—will be familiar with the train of events. Pamela Brighton and Nigel Williams’ film interviews some of the real people who appear in Prick Up Your Ears, notably surviving members of Orton’s family and Orton biographer John Lahr. In addition there’s a substantial contribution from Kenneth Williams, a close friend of Orton and Halliwell’s who was also badly miscast as Inspector Truscott in the first disastrous performances of Loot. Between the interviews there are some scenes from a lacklustre TV performance of Loot, a stage performance of What the Butler Saw, and bits of Entertaining Mr Sloane.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Malicious Damage
• Joe Orton Online
• Joe Orton

Weekend links 193

A Problem Glyph by Eliza Gauger. Problem Glyphs are “symbolic illustrations … drawn in response to problems sent in by tumblr users”.

• Kosmische Night takes place at the Museum of Bath at Work, Bath, Somerset, on ~~January 25th~~ (Rescheduled to February 22nd). “…a celebration of all things Teutonic for anyone who enjoys Neu!, Can, Tangerine Dream, Stockhausen and Kraftwerk,” say the organisers. Also on the bill, The Electric Pentacle, a Carnacki-esque collaboration between Narco Lounge Combo and The Levels.

• Shock Headed Peters’ Fear Engine II: Almost As If It Had Never Happened. Joe Banks on Karl Blake, “…one of the most fascinating and colourful characters to emerge from the fertile loam of the post-punk scene”.

• “The great question in the film and the tale is not the existence of the ghosts but the way the governess understands their no-longer-lived lives and desires.” Michael Wood on The Innocents.

Nobody, however, is a greater authority on the intersection of porn and alternative spirituality than Annie Sprinkle. Beginning as a prostitute in the 1960s and 70s, she entered porn in the pre-AIDS era and made over two hundred films. She then jumped into a career as a sex-positive author and educator, which brought her into close conflict not only with feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, but also right-wing patriarch Jesse Helms, who denounced one of her sex magick performance pieces on the floor of the Senate. For Sprinkle, both sexuality and performance are explicitly spiritual and magical, part of her role as a cultural shaman.

In the Valley of the Porn Witches by Jason Louv.

• Stars of the Lid and Wordless Music Orchestra playing for two hours last month at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

• Rick Poynor on the late Martin Sharp’s contributions to People, Politics and Pop: Australians in the Sixties (1968) by Craig McGregor.

• Maggie Greene on The Woman in Green: A Chinese Ghost Tale from Mao to Ming, 1981–1381.

• “TED actually stands for: middlebrow megachurch infotainment,” says Benjamin H Bratton.

• Geoff Manaugh on how corpses helped shape the London Underground.

• Tony White on Eduardo Paolozzi at New Worlds by David Brittain.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 102 by Frank Bretschneider.

• At Dangerous Minds: film of Syd Barrett‘s first psychedelic trip.

• NYPL Wire: a New York Public Library Tumblr.

• Microbial art by Eshel Ben-Jacob and others.

• Interstellar Rock: Kosmische Musik (1974) by The Cosmic Jokers | I, Bloodbrother Be (1984) by Shock Headed Peters | Obscene and Pornographic Art (1991) by Bongwater

Art of Fencing

Race Imboden.

The Men with swords archive hasn’t received much attention recently, the last addition being in May 2012. Had I been more diligent I might have found a photo or two of American fencer Race Imboden before now, the picture above being one of many such images at a Pinterest page entitled Art of Fencing. Many of the pictures there are sport-related but the concerns are also a little less academic, in fact at least two of them are things I’ve posted myself in the past.

If you spend a lot of time scouring the web for images then Pinterest has become very useful, very quickly with all manner of niches and micro-niches covered. That this has happened just as Flickr has been rendered unusable by idiotic interface changes is especially welcome. So we’ll say farewell, Flickr, if we want more pictures of the pulchritudinous Race Imboden in future we’ll look here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive