{magazines} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Biblio-hauntology

An invented book cover from the latest post at blissblog. Since I like fakes of this nature, especially when they’re carefully done, I had to go in search of the creator. Rachel Laine is the person responsible, and there’s more along these lines at her Flickr pages, together with many similar items from the universe next door. (I know someone who’ll appreciate all those faded magazine covers combining soft-porn photos with headlines for stories about analogue synths.) Another of the book covers is a guide to “Witches and Witch Craft”, a title whose real-life counterparts included books such as the Hamlyn guide to witchcraft and black magic from 1971. As I’m often saying, the 1970s was the witchiest decade of the 20th century.

All of which reminded me of a couple of recent inventions of my own. One of the advantages of writing here is that I can retrieve from obscurity some of the things I’d previously cast into the Malebolge formerly known as Twitter. This impromptu creation is something I threw together after Callum J posted the cover of an old I-Spy book dedicated to “The Unusual”. (If you don’t know what the I-Spy books were—and still are—Wikipedia has the history.) The screen-grab from Whistle and I’ll Come to You is a lazy choice but I wanted to surprise Callum by reworking his cover as quickly as possible.

A little more considered is this proposal for a set of British postage stamps dedicated to Nigel Kneale and his works. This one came about after a comment from Kim Newman that such a thing was overdue from the Royal Mail. Since I agreed I thought I could at least fake them into existence. They’re still a little incomplete—actual stamps would have a mention of Kneale on each one—but they look plausible. The artwork was swiped from a series of Quatermass book covers created by the prolific Karel Thole for Mondadori in the late 1970s. The images for the first Quatermass and Quatermass and the Pit work very well, I think, the fourth one less so. If I was doing these myself I’d try some combination of a radio telescope and a stone circle. Windows into another world; in the universe next door Quatermass is bigger than Star Wars. But we live here, not there.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Disciples of the Scorpion
• Ghost Box and The Infinity Box
• Llewellyn occult magazine and book catalogue, 1971
• Typefaces of the occult revival
• The Book of the Lost
• Books Borges never wrote
• Forbidden volumes

Talking time: Cabaret Voltaire interviews

Cabaret Voltaire, circa 1981. Left to right: Richard H. Kirk, Chris Watson, Stephen Mallinder.

…A few brief facts. CV came about from a mutual interest in producing “sound” rather than “music”, a few years ago, making very rare live appearances from time to time. Now an interest has developed in the band, we are playing live more frequently instead of just recording. CV dislike the sick commercialism which pervades most “contemporary music”.

At the moment we are working on a basis which involves two types of performance. A “set” which consists of songs, and a set which is completely improvised, lasting from 20 minutes to “x” number of hours. CV also use films + slides as lighting in live performance. A CV concert is like a bad acid trip; CV want to create total sensory derangement. MIT UND OHNE POLITIK, UNVERNUNFTIGKEIT.

INFLUENCES — “anything which is unacceptable”.

The band’s line up is —
RICHARD – Guitar, Clarinet, Tapes, Vocals.
MAL – Bass, Electronic Percussion, Lead Vocals.
CHRIS – Electronics, Tape, Vocals.

Early band correspondence with a German fanzine

Another week, another book of music talk. Cabaret Voltaire: A Collection of Interviews 1977–1994 was published two years ago but I only just discovered it as a result of my recent cycling through the Cabs’ discography. I’ve never been a great reader of music books yet here I am with three of them devoted to this particular group. Fabio Méndez’s collection joins Cabaret Voltaire: The Art of the Sixth Sense, the first Cabs book from 1984, in which Mick Fish and D. Hallberry interrogate Kirk and Mallinder about their progress to date; and Industrial Evolution, a reprint of the Sixth Sense interviews plus newer ones appended to Fish’s memoir about life in the Cabs’ home town of Sheffield during the 1980s. The Méndez collection is the most substantial of the three, gathering articles from fanzines, magazines and newspapers, and translating into English many pieces from European publications.

Badges not included.

As with Coil, I’ve always liked hearing what Kirk, Mallinder and Watson had to say. There was a fair amount of historical intersection between the two groups, Cabaret Voltaire having been a part of the first wave of Industrial music along with Throbbing Gristle, 23 Skidoo (whose records were produced by TG & CV), Clock DVA and the rest; later on the Cabs were part of the Some Bizzare stable along with Soft Cell, Coil, Einstürzende Neubauten and others. One of the interviews in Méndez’s book is from Stabmental, a short-lived fanzine edited in the early 1980s by a pre-Coil Geoff Rushton/John Balance. The zine ended its run with a cassette compilation, The Men With The Deadly Dreams, which included two exclusive recordings by Chris Watson and Richard Kirk. Watson’s piece, which applies cut-up theory to a radio news broadcast, is a good example of Cabaret Voltaire’s engagements with William Burroughs’ speculations about electronic media. Further examples of cut-up theory may be found in the group’s lyrics and in the video material they created, initially for use as projections while playing live, then later for their music videos which were in the vanguard of the form in the early 1980s.

A lot of the things we do tend to get glossed over. We’ll talk to anyone. We do loads of interviews with fanzines.

Unidentified group member, 1980

582 pages of interviews with a group that never had any kind of popular success is more information than most people would ever want or need. But as with Nick Soulsby’s Coil book, Méndez is doing future historians a service by resurrecting material from scarce and ephemeral sources. The post-punk period from 1978 to 1982 was a uniquely fertile musical moment, especially in Britain. For a few years absolutely anything seemed possible, with much of the wilder activity being logged and discussed in fanzines like Stabmental which usually had a limited circulation (often distributed by mail order) and a print run of a few hundred copies at most. The British music press also covered this scene, of course, but only up to a point, especially when the music was pushing the boundaries of the possible or the commercially acceptable. Méndez’s book emphasises the differences between the music-press approach—where the article is often as much about the writer as the group itself—and the fanzine interview which tends to be a list of questions with a small amount of contextual commentary. Fanzines were a circumscribed medium but they had advantages over the music papers; sincerity, for a start, allied with genuine enthusiasm and fewer of the tics that made reading the music press each week such a chore. The small publications weren’t always free of the bad habits of the weeklies but there was less of the journalistic posturing, the ignorant dismissal of whole areas of music, and the relentless snark and sarcasm which you’ll find thriving today on social media. The drawbacks of the fanzines were mostly about quality; fact-checking was often non-existent. Méndez’s book is littered with footnotes that log the errors present in the transcripts.

Which bands are influential on your music?
Chris: “Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Captain Beefheart…especially Can have influenced us.”

Spex magazine interview, 1980

Questions about influence are a common feature of any interview with creative people. Chris Watson’s reply is the first example I’ve seen of the Cabs mentioning so many German groups, as well as Captain Beefheart. A recurrent theme of these interviews concerns the group’s unusual trajectory, a career which evolved through a series of changes in direction that weren’t always predictable. The trio had started out in 1974 as resolute non-musicians and sound-collage provocateurs with Dadaist intentions; the music-making took time to develop. By the late 1970s the group that now called itself Cabaret Voltaire had become a more disturbed and disturbing counterpart to Sheffield’s other electronic music ensemble, The Human League. When Chris Watson departed in 1981 Kirk and Mallinder joined the Some Bizzare roster and followed the League to Virgin Records where a substantial advance helped the pair upgrade their equipment, launch their own independent music and video label, Doublevision, and record some of their best work.

Continue reading “Talking time: Cabaret Voltaire interviews”

Weekend links 675

Lucifer (1890) by Franz Stuck.

• “I wanted to reclaim the word ‘psychonauts’ and take it back into the 19th century, where it describes not only renegades and rebels, but also establishment scientists, doctors, and pillars of the literary establishment. The word that was used at the time was “self-experimenter.” Mike Jay (again) talking to Steve Paulson about psychoactive research and the scientists who taste their own medicine.

• “How did countercultures commune before the internet?” asks J. Hoberman, reviewing Heads Together: Weed and the Underground Press Syndicate, 1965–1973 by David Jacob Kramer.

• At Public Domain Review: Medieval advice concerning the mythical Bonnacon: “the protection which its forehead denies this monster is furnished by its bowels”.

• DJ Food unearths posters and badges for The Kaleidoscope, a short-lived Los Angeles music venue of the late 60s.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Gaku Yamazaki has documented thousands of unusual road signs across Japan.

• New music: Psalm013: Unland by Pram of Dogs, and Intimaa by Bana Haffar.

• At Unquiet Things: A sneak peek from the forthcoming The Art of Fantasy.

• The Strange World of…Shirley Collins.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Bruce Posner Day.

• Kenneth Anger: a life in pictures.

• RIP Tina Turner.

• Kaleidoscope (1967) by Kaleidoscope (UK) | Kaleidoscope (1984) by Rain Parade | Collideascope (1987) by The Dukes Of Stratosphear

Kenneth Anger, 1927–2023

Kenneth Anger, Topanga Canyon (composite with Gustave Doré engraving) (1954) by Edmund Teske.

The other day…I had a date with Tom Luddy at a New York hotel in the East Fifties to meet Kenneth Anger, the genius who made Scorpio Rising and whose New York flat is a shrine to Valentino.

Michael Powell, from A Life in Movies, 1986

There’s not much I can add to all the plaudits, especially when Kenneth Anger has been a continual fixture here since 2007, with the last post about him going up only two weeks ago. I always find it impossible to make one of those lists where people name their ten favourite films but Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle is one of the very few titles I could add to such a list, and it probably sits in the top five. What the other four might be depends on changes of mood or weather.

The most Anger recent post came about after I’d been re-reading the unofficial Bill Landis biography, a book I’d dipped into over the years but not gone all the way through again since it was published in 1995. It’s an uneven study of Anger’s life and erratic career, detailed yet slapdash, but Landis did at least interview many of Anger’s colleagues and acquaintances while they were still around. Even though Anger himself hated the results of the often gossipy investigation the book will remain an invaluable resource for future writers.

Some links:
• Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (1991). In which Nigel Finch persuaded a reluctant Anger to drive around Los Angeles in a hearse visiting sites of death or disaster mentioned in Anger’s first book. I suspect Finch was more interested in discussing Anger’s films, which are also featured, but needed the scandalous stuff to get the thing made at all. The BBC hadn’t done anything about Anger before this, and haven’t done anything since.

• Kenneth Anger–Magier des Untergrundfilms (1970), a 53-minute documentary made for WDR by Reinhold E. Thiel. A frustrating film, being a mix of awkward interviews (Anger didn’t like Herr Thiel very much) with priceless footage showing the filming of parts of Lucifer Rising. A shame, then, that all the copies which have been circulating for the past decade are low-grade and blighted throughout by one of those proprietary signatures that idiots stick onto footage they don’t own. WDR must still have the film so maybe we’ll get to see a better copy one day.

• Sex, Satanism, Manson, Murder, and LSD: Kenneth Anger tells his tale. Paul Gallagher recounts his own meetings with Anger and also posts several Anger-related pages from Kinokaze zine, 1993.

• Hollywood Bohemia: An interview with Kenneth Anger by AL Bardach for Wet magazine, 1980.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Anger Magick Lantern Cycle, 1966
• Don’t Smoke That Cigarette by Kenneth Anger
• Kenneth Anger’s Maldoror
• Donald Cammell and Kenneth Anger, 1972
• My Surfing Lucifer by Kenneth Anger
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: The Eldorado Edition
• Brush of Baphomet by Kenneth Anger
• Anger Sees Red
• Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon
• Lucifer Rising posters
• Missoni by Kenneth Anger
• Anger in London
• Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken
• Edmund Teske
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again
• Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Glaser goes POP

The purchase of big art and design books requires careful consideration round here, what with shelf space being stressed in multiple ways. (One of the shelves bearing the heavier volumes sags alarmingly.) But this one was recommended to me by a couple of people, and I’d also had a book token hanging around unused for over a year so here we are.

Skin types for Seventeen magazine, 1967.

Milton Glaser: POP is a copiously-illustrated 288-page study of the work produced by Milton Glaser and his colleagues at Push Pin Studio, with an emphasis, as the title and cover art suggests, on the company’s prime decade of the 1960s. The book was compiled and edited by the redoubtable Steven Heller, together with Mirko Ilic and Beth Kleber, and presents an overview of Glaser’s remarkable career as designer and illustrator. Glaser was an exceptionally versatile artist, something which has often made appraisal of his career a difficult business. You could easily choose ten of his book or album covers from the many examples assembled by Heller and co., and all would look like the work of different people.

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell; Pocket Books, 1969. I’d much rather have this set than my Faber collection which packages the four books into an unwieldy brick.

Matters are further complicated by the often collaborative nature of the work at Push Pin, and the fact that designers and illustrators aren’t always given credit for their commissions. In the past I’ve gone looking for Glaser’s work then given up when I seemed to be encountering designs that weren’t by him at all. In addition to demonstrating Glaser’s range, Heller, Ilic and Kleber have done everyone a service by showing unused illustrations and crediting work that was previously debatable. Some years ago I wrote a post about the uncredited cover art for the first budget sampler album, The Rock Machine Turns You On (1968), an entry which didn’t manage to resolve the issue of whether or not the cover art was Glaser’s work. It turns out it was by him after all, collage being one of the techniques he employed from time to time.

TIME magazine gets groovy. A fold-out cover from 1969.

On a more personal level, Glaser’s versatility and multi-disciplinary approach is encouraging if you find yourself being led in a similar direction. Designer-illustrators are no longer as rare as they used to be, but illustrators, like many fine artists, still tend to develop a favourable style which they then stay with year after year. Illustrators who change their style according to their mood, or the nature of the brief, or a desire to experiment, remain in the minority. Glaser’s illustration ranges more widely than any other artist I’ve seen, from realistic pen-work and watercolour sketches, through bold, stylised designs, to complete abstraction. He could also be playful and frivolous in a manner you can’t imagine from some of his more serious contemporaries, while also being adept enough at illustrating children’s stories that he might easily have spent his career doing this alone.

Avon Books, 1970.

But the main attraction of Milton Glaser: POP for this reader is the focus on all those bold graphics, especially the commissions that reworked the emerging psychedelic styles for the commercial sphere. The cover illustration is emblematic of many other examples. This drawing first appeared in a New York magazine supplement in 1967 to accompany an article about LSD, before being reused on the dustjacket of Tom Wolfe’s book about Ken Kesey and friends, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Glaser and his colleagues at Push Pin were prime exponents of something I’ve taken to calling “the groovy look“, a term I reserve for commercially oriented quasi-psychedelic art. This isn’t meant to be a serious label, it’s a private term that I used to attach to anything resembling the art styles seen in the Yellow Submarine feature film. Serious or not, the label persists when I continue to feel the need for a suitable descriptor for this type of art. “Psychedelic” is the most common label (and one which obviously suits Yellow Submarine) but it seems inappropriate when discussing magazine adverts for household products or illustrations in children’s books. Steven Heller prefers the term “Pop”, but this strikes me as too loose, risking confusion with the many varieties of Pop Art which seldom resemble the vivid, stylised creations of Glaser et al. Pop would also seem misapplied as a description for commercial art when Pop Art was all about the appropriation (ironic or otherwise) of commercial iconography. If you start to label a swathe of commercial art as Pop along with the gallery art that was borrowing from it then the term becomes so diffuse it loses its meaning. The “groovy style” had a long reach, and evolved beyond the decade it was born in. Plenty of examples may be found in the early 1970s by which time Pop Art (in the gallery sense) had lost its momentum.

Above: Glaser ad art, 1966. Below: Dave Dragon’s cover art for XTC, 1989.

I’ll no doubt return to this question, especially when I’ve just done something in the groovy style myself. (You’ll have to wait a few months before you see the results.) In the meantime there’s a lot to enjoy in this book. I haven’t yet mentioned Glaser’s unused promotional art for the Saul Bass feature film, Phase IV, or the many typeface designs that Glaser created with his associates, and the way one of them—Baby Fat—is used on the cover of the first UK paperback of The Soft Machine. I think this was the first William Burroughs book I ever bought, and it’s been sitting on my shelves all this time without my realising it was a Glaser production. That’s how it often is with graphic designers; they shape our world almost as much as architects do yet their specific influence isn’t always recognised.

Corgi Books, 1970.

And by coincidence, the latest post at The Daily Heller is about a Glaser exhibition tied to the publication of the book. If you’re in New York it’ll be running for the next two weeks.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The groovy look
• Milton Glaser album covers