A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Photography
After a week or so of posts looking back over a century of dance, this brings everything into the present. Eric Paré’s LightSpin used stop-motion photography and twenty-four cameras to capture half a million photos which were then edited into a short video. All of the lighting, which floats around the dancers, is done by hand. Core77 goes into the technical detail, and also has some astonishing jpeg loops from the same sessions.
Salomé: portrait of Tamara Karsavina (1914) by George Barbier.
A slight return to the Russian ballet, and another Barbier portrait. Tamara Karsavina danced lead roles for the Ballets Russes, most notably with Nijinsky in the original performances of The Firebird. The pictures here are from La Tragedie de Salome, a ballet with music by Florent Schmitt, and costumes based on Beardsley’s illustrations by Sergei Sudeikin, another member of the Diaghilev circle.
Tamara Karsavina as Salomé in the Beecham Russian ballet season, 1913.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• George Barbier’s Nijinsky
Collage by Jeneleen Floyd.
• “…slowly, block-by-block, pedestrians are starting to take back the streets.” Wayne Curtis on the hazards of being a pedestrian in a world of cars.
• Michael Hann looks back at LA’s Paisley Underground, and also talks to some of its key members.
• Meighan O’Toole interviews JL Schnabel about her Blood Milk jewellery designs.
My central thesis is that camp was always a kind of signifying practice invented out of necessity (both for survival and for sheer creative pleasure) by “queer” (in the classic sense) outsiders – fags, drag queens, transsexuals, deviants, sexual renegades – and that it was always by its very nature deeply political and committed: Some people dedicated their entire lives to it! Sontag’s interpretation always seemed a bit dismissive to me somehow.
The seldom unprovocative Bruce LaBruce talking to Mark Allen about camp in the 21st century.
• Studiocanal launches an appeal to find the lost materials of The Wicker Man.
• At Flickr: Tales from a Parallel Universe and London’s Lost Music Venues.
• Michael Wood tells us what we learn when we read Italo Calvino’s letters.
• Fragments of a Portrait: Francis Bacon and David Sylvester in 1966.
• An extract of a live session from Adrian Sherwood and Pinch.
• In Baba Yaga’s Hut: Amelia Glaser on Russian folk tales.
• Buckminster Fuller Book Covers from the 1970s.
• The Real World (1982) by The Bangles | With A Cantaloupe Girlfriend (1982) by The Three O’Clock | Medicine Show (1984) by The Dream Syndicate | No Easy Way Down (live in Tokyo, 1984) by The Rain Parade
El Banquete Magnético (2011) by Cristina Francov.
• Did Vertigo Introduce Computer Graphics to Cinema? asks Tom McCormack. He means Saul Bass’s title sequence which mostly uses still harmonographs but also features some animated moments by John Whitney.
• Temple of the Vanities by Thomas Jorion. “Pictured here are political monuments and munitions depots, hulking concrete forms that marked the edges of empires.” Related: Paintings by Minoru Nomata.
• Musical reminiscences: Matt Domino on the Small Faces’ psychedelic magnum opus Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, and Richard Metzger on the sombre splendours of Tuxedomoon.
Harrison is best known as one of the restless fathers of modern SF, but to my mind he is among the most brilliant novelists writing today, with regard to whom the question of genre is an irrelevance. To read his work is to encounter fiction doing what fiction must: carrying out the kinds of thinking and expression that would be possible in no other form. I pass through his novels feeling a mixture of wonder, calmness and disturbance; I end them brain-jarred and unsettled. Metaphysical echoes persist for days afterwards. It feels as if I have had a strabismus induced, causing illusions that slowly resolve into insights.
Robert Macfarlane on M. John Harrison and the reissue of Climbers.
• Divine Machinery: An Interview with Paul Jebanasam. Arvo Pärt, Cormac McCarthy and Algernon Blackwood are folded into his new album, Rites.
• Autostraddle shows the evolution of twelve queer book cover designs. As is often the case in cover design, latest isn’t always best.
• “My Definition Of Hell? It’s Other People, At The Cinema!” Anne Billson on the very thing that finished me as a cinema-goer.
• “London in the 1830s was a truly weird and terrifying place.” Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of London.
• At Scientific American: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens.
• Van Dyke Parks: “I was victimised by Brian Wilson’s buffoonery.”
• Colour film of London in 1927.
• Tuxedomoon: Tritone (Musica Diablo) (1980) | Desire (1981) | Incubus (Blue Suit) (1981)
El Trigono de las lesiones (2010) by Cristina Francov.
I:MAGE is an exhibition of occult-inspired art which opens a week on Sunday, 19th May at the Store Street Gallery, Bloomsbury, London. As exhibitions go it’s modest in scale but with an impressive roster of contributors old and new: Agostino Arrivabene, Ithell Colquhoun, Denis Forkas Kostromitin, Steffi Grant, Orryelle, David Chaim Smith, Michael Bertiaux, Andrew Chumbley, Cristina Francov, Barry William Hale, Francesco Parisi, Austin Osman Spare, Jesse Bransford, Peter Dyde, Rik Garrett, Noko, Residue, and Michael Strum. A few examples of the work on display are shown here, some of which will be available for purchase.
The event is being organised by Fulgur Esoterica, and their website has details of some related events including John Constable’s one-man play, Spare (about artist Austin Osman Spare), a one-off performance which will be held at Treadwell’s, London, on the 24th. This catches my attention because Constable was responsible for the acclaimed theatre adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast which David Glass and company staged in the 1990s. It’s always good to find one’s favourite people joined through these lateral connections.
The Earth Magic Series (2012) by Rik Garrett.
Steffi Grant.
Demon by Denis Forkas Kostromitin.