A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Music
One of my favourite 20th century composers and I’ve always liked this 1934 caricature from the BBC’s Radio Times magazine, reprinted a few years ago during the Proms season. I’ve searched in vain for the identity of the artist in the hope of finding more work in this style; the “R” monogram is undoubtedly a clue. The picture also turns up on a few Bartók websites uncredited. If anyone knows the answer, please leave a comment. Meanwhile this page has some examples of more recent portraits.
Arriving today—and barely surviving the postman’s attempts to cram it through the letterbox—is the latest volume from Strange Attractor, Welcome to Mars by Ken Hollings. I’m really looking forward to reading this since it touches on areas of interest which span the development of Cold War technologies to pulp science fiction, examining the interconnections between these disparate zones; most histories of the period prefer to stay in one area or the other. A glance at the chapter titles immediately pushes my buttons: “1947 Rebuilding Lemuria”, “1951 Absolute Elsewhere”. If all that wasn’t enough there’s an intro by Erik Davis and the first 250 copies come with a CD of “classy analogue Outer Space exotica” by Simon James. Order from the SA Shoppe and get a free postcard!
‘Welcome to Mars is a map of the post-war Zone, a non-fiction Gravity’s Rainbow that follows the arc of Germany’s V2 rocket to the end of the rainbow – to America.’ Erik Davis
Welcome to Mars is an iconoclastic, penetrating and darkly humorous history of America from 1947-1959, the decade in which the nation defined its image and created the blueprint for the world we live in today.
Welcome To Mars draws upon newspaper accounts, advertising campaigns, declassified government archives, old movies and newsreels from this unique period when the future first took on a tangible presence. Ken Hollings depicts an unsettled time in which the layout of Suburbia reflected atomic bombing strategies, bankers and movie stars experimented with hallucinogens, brainwashing was just another form of interior decoration and strange lights in the sky were taken very seriously indeed.
Seamlessly interweaving developments in technology, popular culture, politics, changes in home life, the development of the self, collective fantasy and overwhelming paranoia, Hollings has produced an alarming and often hysterically funny vision of the past that would ultimately govern all of our futures.
“Ken Hollings shows brilliantly how the extraordinary web of technologies that drove the Cold War have shaped not just our culture but the very way we think of ourselves as human beings. Welcome to Mars offers a rare and fascinating glimpse of the roots of the strange humanoid culture we live in today.” Adam Curtis
‘Ken Hollings has placed his critical focus at the precise point where the high technologies of information control and social manipulation intersect the passionate search for scientific ways to probe the human mind. Welcome to Mars is a searingly accurate and deeply disturbing exposé of the fantasies of American modernism that have inspired the many nightmares and the few hopeful visions of our new Millennium.’ Dr Jacques Vallée
Previously on { feuilleton }
• SAJ again
• Strange Attractor Journal Three
• How to make crop circles
Last in Line is the debut album by Manchester band Light Syndicate and the CD packaging is something I put together after being asked to rescue a design which wasn’t quite working. I kept the band’s original idea of black trees on a red background but substituted their drawing with an adaptation of a 1910 folk tale illustration by Reginald Lionel Knowles. Knowles’ name is an obscure one today, his most visible work being the florid endpaper design which the Everyman Library used on their books up to 1935.
Last in Line is available locally from today (I guess that means Piccadilly Records) and nationwide from January 12th.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive