Dodgem Logic

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You need this, boys and girls, yes you do. Dodgem Logic is the first worthwhile independent culture mag this country has produced since the sorely-missed Strange Things Are Happening. Perhaps significantly, both those titles featured Mr Alan Moore, being interviewed in Strange Things and presiding over the new title as resident magus and eminence gris-gris.

“…we’ve tried to resurrect a spirit of the 60s underground papers, but without the look or ambience or some of the oversights. There were a lot of very good ideas that emerged from the 60s underground. It was the first place I heard about women’s liberation – as we used to call it then – or gay liberation. They were fanatically anti-war. Many of their most extreme political statements, such as the fact that sometimes the police kill people, or that sometimes we make deals with dictators and criminal governments that we keep quiet about – these things are pretty much standard stuff of conversation these days and not reserved purely for bearded wild-eyed burbling radicals (chuckles).” (More.)

Among other delights, there’s a page of Alan’s where he returns to cartooning (below) with a paean to my favourite drawing pen, the Rotring Rapidograph, Melinda Gebbie writing on feminism, Kevin O’Neill with a WTF of cosmic proportions, and much more, including a smart feature on how to reclaim local land which the council won’t use. All this and a free CD! Who says we can’t have good things?

Update: I should have noted that Americans can order Dodgem Logic through Top Shelf.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
International Times archive
The Realist
Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
Oz magazine, 1967-73
Alan Moore interview, 1988
Strange Things Are Happening, 1988-1990

The Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest

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Bookplate by Denis Kostromitin.

Following the recent postings of covers and illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, Will at A Journey Round My Skull posts the results of his Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest which encouraged illustrators to create an Orchideengarten-styled bookplate design. You can see the winner and many other splendid entries on his pages. I fully intended to do something for this then got sidetracked by work on the Alice in Wonderland calendar but I’ve picked out a couple of the (inevitably) black-and-white pieces which I thought stood out. The death’s-head moth on @ndy paciorek’s picture below makes a convenient link with yesterday’s post.

Meanwhile, there’s further Orchideengarten goodness over at Arthur Magazine.

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Bookplate by @ndy paciorek.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Der Orchideengarten illustrated
David Becket’s bookplates
Der Orchideengarten

Der Orchideengarten illustrated

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Halloween approaches and as a precursor it’s a great pleasure to be able to post a selection of interior illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, courtesy of Will at A Journey Round My Skull. Der Orchideengarten was a German magazine of weird fiction which ran for 51 issues from 1919 to 1921 and whose existence today is rarely acknowledged despite being credited as the world’s first fantasy magazine. Information is scarce and these scans come from Will’s own copies which is why I’ve posted fifteen more below the fold; you can’t see this stuff anywhere else. A Journey Round My Skull featured some covers and a different set of interior illustrations earlier this year, and there should be a new post complementing this one with more of the magazine’s stunning cover designs.

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What strikes me about these black-and-white drawings is how different they are in tone to the pulp magazines which followed shortly after in America and elsewhere. They’re at once far more adult and frequently more original than the Gothic clichés which padded out Weird Tales and lesser titles for many years. Some are almost Expressionist in style, while the Wild Hunt series below shows a distinct Goya influence. I’d love to know how the written content matches the illustrations; I suspect there’s the same difference of atmosphere and emphasis to American weird fiction as there is in the drawings.

Update: Will’s new post is Watering the Toxic Garden which will be followed on Thursday by the results of his Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest.

Click on any of these pictures for a larger version.

Continue reading “Der Orchideengarten illustrated”

Emil Cadoo

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Untitled (1963).

One of a small number of pictures from a recent exhibition of work by American photographer Emil Cadoo (1926–2002) whose nude studies and often homoerotic themes were controversial in America of the Fifties and Sixties but welcomed in France, as was often the case at that time.

In April 1964, all 21,000 copies of the April/May issue no.32 of the American magazine Evergreen Review – containing (among others) texts by Norman Mailer, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Bryon Gysin, Michael McClure, Karl Shapiro (a who’s who of the day’s practitioners of perceived outrage), and an erotic photo-essay by Cadoo – was seized by the police whilst it was still being bound. The edition had been deemed ‘obscene’ by the county’s district Attorney, whose particular disapproval was leveled at Cadoo. It took the special intermission of Edward Steichen, who compared the images to the work of Auguste Rodin “the greatest living sculptor of our time”, to obtain the condemnation of three judges of this action as ‘unconstitutional’, and to return the magazine to the public domain. (More.)

Cadoo favoured the double-exposure to achieve painterly or (for want of a better word) “poetic” effects, and some of these photos were used on book jackets by Grove Press (also the publishers of Evergreen Review), among them this Genet title which I posted a couple of years ago. More of Cadoo’s work can be found on various gallery sites but there’s no dedicated site unfortunately.

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Photo by Emil Cadoo; design by Roy Kuhlman (1963).

Previously on { feuilleton }
Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal
Un Chant d’Amour by Jean Genet

Blast

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Both issues of Wyndham Lewis’s avant garde art and literature journal can be found in a collection of similar publications from the Modernist years at Brown University here and here. I’ve always liked the bold graphics of Lewis and his fellow Vorticists, and BLAST 2, “the War Number”, is especially good in that regard. The MJP site reminds us that BLAST is still under copyright control outside the US and is also available in facsimile editions from Gingko Press.

BLAST was the quintessential modernist little magazine. Founded by Wyndham Lewis, with the assistance of Ezra Pound, it ran for just two issues, published in 1914 and 1915. The First World War killed it, along with some of its key contributors. Its purpose was to promote a new movement in literature and visual art, christened Vorticism by Pound and Lewis. Unlike its immediate predecessors and rivals, Vorticism was English, rather than French or Italian, but its dogmas emerged from Imagism in literature and Cubism plus Futurism in visual art.

The original BLAST was published by Aubrey Beardsley’s first publisher, John Lane, and it’s fascinating to see Lane advertising back issues of The Yellow Book in pages which include Lewis’s anti-Victorian polemic. Meanwhile I’m still waiting for copies of the Art Nouveau journal Ver Sacrum to turn up somewhere. If anyone runs across quality scans, please leave a comment.

Via Things Magazine.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Wyndham Lewis: Portraits