{music} – Page 240 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 115

Untitled painting by Suzanne Van Damme (1901–1986).

• Eric Berkowitz, author of Sex and Punishment: 4000 Years of Judging Desire, chooses five books for The Browser.

• Venus febriculosa is running another competition: Design a new cover for Brian Eno’s Music For Films.

• Paul Mayersberg and Tony Richmond on making The Man Who Fell to Earth.

When a good idea occurs, it has been prepared by a long time of reflection. But you have to be patient. We all have what I call the invisible worker inside ourselves; we don’t have to feed him or pay him, and he works even when we are sleeping. We must be aware of his presence, and from time to time stop thinking about what we are trying to do, stop being obsessed about answers, and just give him the room, the possibility, to do his work. He is tenacious, you see. He never loses hope.

Screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière discusses his remarkable career. Related: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie revisited.

• Tragic Time Capsules: Capturing the Decay of Forgotten Olympic Venues.

• Louis Menand on “The Puns and Detritus in James Joyce’s Ulysses“.

• Saul Bass’s original ending for Phase IV unearthed in Los Angeles.

• Katherine Lanpher uses witchcraft to find a New York apartment.

• Italo Calvino’s adolescence – that in-between time.

• The early film posters of Waldemar Swierzy.

• Psychedelic nano-art in oils and ferrofluids.

• David Toop has a blog.

• Callum James Paper.

• Bodies of Water (1995) by David Toop

The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine was released on Blu-ray earlier this month. The quality is as good as you’d expect, it looks and sounds fantastic with the songs really benefitting from their remixes and high-definition audio. The film atoned for Al Brodax and George Dunning’s earlier role as producers of the lamentable The Beatles animated TV series which ran for 39 episodes from 1965 to 1967. The series as a whole may be cheap and nasty but the penultimate number is notable for being the only one featuring two of John Lennon’s songs inspired by his acid trips: Tomorrow Never Knows and She Said, She Said. These tiny eruptions of psychedelic culture into children’s film and television have always fascinated me, and this is one example I’d missed until now. No wonder it had to end, the Fab Four were getting far too weird. Okay kids, sing along now: “I know what it’s like to be dead…”

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!
• Yellow Submarine comic books
• A splendid time is guaranteed for all
• Heinz Edelmann
• Please Mr. Postman
• All you need is…

Design as virus 14: Curse of the Dead

Curse of the Dead (1966).

Continuing an occasional series. This photograph, reproduced in Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (1973), intrigued me for years. Gifford’s book is a very good collection of stills from horror films of all kinds, ranging from the earliest days of cinema to the 1970s. The pictures are mostly black-and-white, and are often far more stimulating than the films they would have been promoting. The text generally refers to the films depicted but in the case of this picture there’s only a single credit, Curse of the Dead (1966), a film I’d never heard of. These kinds of mysteries have been banished for good now we have resources like IMDB where you can learn immediately that Curse of the Dead is a Mario Bava film whose original Italian title was Operazione Paura. (It’s also known, with the usual hyperbole, as Kill, Baby…Kill!) “An 18th century European village is haunted by the ghost of a murderous little girl” says the summary. Bava’s films were always visually impressive so it’s really no surprise to find it was one of his.

The first repeat usage I know of is this cover from the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult series published by Sphere books from 1974–77. Sphere used Wheatley’s name to sell a lot of reprints but the series was substantial and featured a number of titles that would have been appearing in paperback for the first time. Unfortunately the best thing about the covers was the uniform design of the horoscope circle against a coloured background. The quality of the illustrations was very uneven so it’s probably for the best that the artists and photographers went uncredited.

Then there’s one of Dave McKean’s title pages for Arkham Asylum (1989), the heavily symbolic Batman book he created with Grant Morrison. There’s only a portion of the picture but I’d say it’s a good guess he used the Gifford book since at least one of the panels in his earlier Violent Cases was based on another of the Gifford photos.

This isn’t all, I’m sure I’ve seen the Gifford picture used on a record sleeve but there’s little way of discovering which one unless somebody recognises the photo. If anyone knows, please leave a comment. And despite all of this I still haven’t seen Bava’s film even though I’m told it had a strong influence on Twin Peaks. This account at The Horror Digest is slightly disappointing when a colour equivalent of the Gifford still lacks the particulated creepiness of the black-and-white version. More surprising is finding yet another film featuring the arms-out-of-the-walls motif. This obviously requires further investigation.

Update: Thanks to Irv in the comments for finding the following singles so quickly. The Decorators sleeve was the one I remembered. (See it larger here.) Kicks were an Australian band. Odd that these were both released in the same year.

Twilight View (1980) by The Decorators. Design by Malcolm Garrett.

The Secret (1980) by Kicks.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus 13: Tsunehisa Kimura
• Design as virus 12: Barney’s faces
• Design as virus 11: Burne Hogarth
• Design as virus 10: Victor Moscoso
• Design as virus 9: Mondrian fashions
• Design as virus 8: Keep Calm and Carry On
• Design as virus 7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus 6: Cassandre
• Design as virus 5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus 4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus 3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus 2: album covers
• Design as virus 1: Victorian borders

Weekend links 114

David Bowie’s cigaretted fingers and bulging silver crotch point the way to the future. This summer sees the fortieth anniversary of the Ziggy Stardust album’s release. The Melody Maker ad above can be found with a wealth of other Ziggy-related material at the very thorough Ziggy Stardust Companion site. For me the definitive artefact isn’t the album itself but DA Pennebaker’s film of the final concert from the 1973 tour; the songs really come alive and Bowie’s performance is overwhelmingly electric. Related: Cracked Actor, the BBC documentary from 1975 about Bowie’s post-Ziggy life on and off the stage.

• The week in books: Amanda Katz described the remarkable history of a single copy of The War of the Worlds by HG Wells then asked “Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books?” | Bosnian novelist Aleksandar Hemon in The Browser’s FiveBooks interview put Blood Meridian on his list. | “Call me the greatest American novel”: Christopher Buckley on Moby-Dick. | The Brit Lit Map.

• For another anniversary, the Alan Turing centenary, there’s The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing (part two here) and Breaking the Code (1996), Derek Jacobi playing the tragic genius in a biographical drama.

• Commissioner of Sewers (1991) a William Burroughs documentary by Klaus Maeck in which the author reads some of his work and endures a Q&A session with surprising equanimity.

• Music, flesh and fantasy: When Mati Klarwein’s hyperactive paintings stole the psychedelic show.

• Move Over Casio: Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 Portable Synth Looks Cool, Does Everything.

• A retrospective of art by Madge Gill (1882–1961) at The Nunnery, London.

• “Art is unavoidably work”: Terre Thaemlitz interviewed.

• A trailer for Document: Keiji Haino.

• WB Yeats, Magus

• Pathétique 1 (1994) by Fushitsusha | Pathétique 2 (1994) by Fushitsusha.

Stonehenge

The trilithons of Stonehenge as they appear in Google Earth, a view that few people these days are allowed to experience since visitors are kept to a small path that runs around the monument. Thirty years ago this week, on the day of the Summer Solstice, I was fortunate to be present at the small Stonehenge Free Festival that was taking place in a field across the road. English Heritage always opened up the stones for the Solstice so I got to stand in the centre of the circle and watch a couple of improvised hippie weddings taking place. (Every now and then I wonder whether those couples are still together.) The festival had been staged annually since 1972 and, unlike the walled and ticketed Glastonbury Festival, was a thoroughly anarchist affair: people simply turned up, stayed for a week or so then left. That changed in 1985 when someone at English Heritage decided that the festival wasn’t going to happen; police cordoned off the area and the resulting conflict put an end to the festival for good.

One of Google Earth’s army of diligent model-makers, Tom Harvey, is responsible for the 3D view of the stones. These work better than many of the 3D buildings in Google Earth which often look painfully isolated in otherwise flattened cityscapes. Stonehenge also suits this treatment better than most of Britain’s other ancient monuments which tend to be smaller stone circles or mounds of earth. There is a Silbury Hill but nothing for nearby Avebury as yet.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Stonehenge panorama
• Born again pagans