{science fiction} – Page 106

The psychedelic art of Howard Bernstein

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (1967).

I made a post a while back about the work of Bob Pepper, an artist whose illustrations from the 1960s can also be described as psychedelic and who was equally visible in the music and book publishing worlds. Howard Bernstein (not to be confused with musician Howie B) wasn’t as prolific as Pepper but this post was prompted by the appearance at Sci-Fi-O-Rama of the swirling abstractions of his Roger Zelazny cover. Like Pepper, Bernstein produced album cover art as well as book covers although it’s possible the Zelazny piece may have been a one-off. This was the jacket of the first edition and a rather flagrant attempt by Doubleday to co-opt the trendiness of the psychedelic style for a science fiction readership. They tried something similar with the cover for Harlan Ellison’s landmark anthology Dangerous Visions in the same year, the art in that case being the work of Leo & Diane Dillon. The Zelazny cover caught my attention for another reason, the typography is a variation on the 19th century Kismet typeface by John F Cumming which I used for my two Alice in Wonderland calendars and which turns up regularly in psychedelic design. And while we’re considering conjunctions of music and science fiction, I ought to note that the Hawkwind song Lord of Light lifts its title from Zelazny’s novel.

The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra, Vol. I (1965).

As for Bernstein’s music work, most of this appears to have been for Bernard Stollman’s eccentric ESP Disk label where the roster of artists included many free-jazz greats along with The Fugs, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary and fringe psychedelic groups such as Pearls Before Swine, Cromagnon, The Godz and others. Bernstein’s Cromagnon cover (below) exists in both monochrome and coloured versions but the monochrome one seems to be the original. In fact much of his art looks like it was drawn in black-and-white with the colours being created by separations at the print stage. His poster for The Godz is especially striking, so much so I’m surprised to find there isn’t more of his work around. Wolfgang’s Vault has a blacklight poster and there are some other blacklight works here. If anyone knows of other posters, please leave a comment although I suspect if there was much more then Wolfgang’s Vault would have the goods.

Continue reading “The psychedelic art of Howard Bernstein”

Weekend links 41

Being an inveterate Kubrickphile I was naturally pleased to hear that some of the excised scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey have survived in a watchable form, even though I’m often ambivalent about the restoration of such material. While it was good to see at last the missing French compound sequence of Apocalypse Now, for example, that sequence added nothing to the film as a whole and its inclusion was spoiled by music which Coppola used for sentimental reasons. In Kubrick’s case, there’s a longer version of The Shining which the director allowed to be screened on UK TV in the 1980s but, again, most of the unseen material was incidental and added nothing to the film.

• Related: Roger Ebert’s review of 2001 from 1968; Olivier Mourgue, designer of the Djinn chairs seen in the film’s space Hilton scenes; Magnificent obsession, a Vanity Fair piece from 2002 about the search for the missing scenes from The Magnificent Ambersons. Meanwhile, the trailer for Terrence Malick’s new film, The Tree of Life, features some surprising cosmic moments among its scenes of family life.

The separate history [of gay and lesbian artists] has been kind of edited out of art history but in fact art history is very much interwoven with gay or queer history. In a way the two can’t be separated. America doesn’t like anything uncomfortable. I find in my dealings with museums that if I ask a question and the answer is ‘no,’ they don’t answer. If the answer is ‘yes,’ I get these amazingly enthusiastic responses. I find it sort of strange sometimes, not being American myself. In a way what they’re doing is editing out the uncomfortable. David Wojnarowicz’s work can make you uncomfortable — and they’ve edited out that possibility in the show.

Canadian artist AA Bronson (see below).

• More on the Smithsonian versus David Wojnarowicz affair: Frank Rich examined the train of events in a comment piece, Gay Bashing at the Smithsonian, for the NYT; the Andy Warhol Foundation threatened to withdraw their funding for future Smithsonian events unless the work is reinstated, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation will be doing the same; another artist featured in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition, AA Bronson, requested that the gallery withdraw his work from the show in protest; the NPG refused, citing a contractual arrangement; among the increasing number of galleries showing support for Wojnarowicz, Tate Modern, London, will host an event in January which will feature a screening of the contentious video; lastly, there’s a protest event in New York City today (Sunday, December 19th) at 1.00pm, details here.

• More censorship in America: Jeffrey Deitch Censors Blu’s Political Street Art Mural. In the book world, writer Selena Kitt finds her erotic incest stories removed from Amazon’s Kindle store. Other authors, Jess C Scott and Esmerelda Green, have had their erotic titles removed from the store. Selena Kitt says:

When some of my readers began checking their Kindle archives for books of mine they’d purchased on Amazon, they found them missing from their archives. When one reader called to get a refund for the book she no longer had access to, she was chastised by the Amazon customer service representative about the “severity” of the book she’d chosen to purchase.

Can you imagine buying a paper book and the bookstore then paying you a visit to forcibly reclaim it? To date no adequate explanation from Amazon has been forthcoming but they’ll be happy to sell you a Kindle edition of the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom.

Galaxy M51 aka The Whirlpool. One of the Top Astronomy Pictures of the Year from a selection by Bad Astronomy. Photo by the Hubble Heritage Team & Robert Gendler.

• More cosmic events: there’ll be a total lunar eclipse this coming Monday, visible in much of the Northern Hemisphere.

• “Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses!” The Raspberry Reich (2004), a film by Bruce LaBruce.

• New editions of Borges poetry. Fine so long as you accept that the translations can never truly satisfy.

• Just the thing for the winter weather, illustrations for Pushkin’s Queen of Spades from 1966.

• Another Ghost Box download: Radio Belbury Programme 1: “Holidays & Hintermass”.

• Monsters, Inc: Arcimboldo and the Wunderkammer of Rudolf II.

• Silent Porn Star found some burlesque lamps.

• Giant airship powered by algae.

• Space Oddity (1969) by David Bowie.

Ten titles and a cover

The Very Best of Charles de Lint. Art by Charles Vess.

Over the weekend I found the time to finally update the book design section of the site, adding new pages for most of the titles I’ve been working on recently. There’s still a couple of things missing but I’ll add those in due course. Many of these design jobs have been for the interiors only so what follows is a comparison of title spreads from books I’ve worked on that have been published this year. Lest it seem that I have an army of clones at my service it should be emphasised that I was working on several of these last year (and Engelbrecht was completed in 2008) but the nature of release schedules means they all carry 2010 publication dates.

Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.

I invariably make a feature of title pages, usually creating them as a spread in order to heighten their impact. The title page is a kind of gateway to the rest of the book which gives you an opportunity to establish a mood for what follows. It’s also the area where you can be most lavish with your graphic treatment and, where necessary, add illustrative material without worrying too much about intruding on the content. With a number of these designs I was following typographic choices from pre-designed covers so the challenge was to find something that would match the cover and connect to the rest of the interior. The Charles de Lint book was a variation on this process in that the author had chosen a Charles Vess drawing for the cover art. I designed a cover to accommodate the drawing then carried the design inside. The colours were chosen to match Vess’s artwork while the general Art Nouveau style came from an Alphonse Mucha poster he’d placed on the wall. With a different cover picture the entire book would have had a very different design.

The Search for Philip K Dick by Anne R Dick.

Continue reading “Ten titles and a cover”

Weekend links 38

Arriving in the post this week was Lovecraft Black & White, an Italian book whose contents are spelled out in the title, black-and-white illustrations based on the work of the Providence master. Among the featured works is my 1999 rendering of Azathoth. There’s more about the book here and here.

Also on the work front, one of the books I designed interiors for a couple of months back was The Search for Philip K. Dick, a sombre biography and memoir by Anne R. Dick, the author’s third wife. Ms Dick discussed the book with the NYT a few days ago. The design was mostly straightforward layout but I did make a quick ASCII portrait of PKD from one of Anne Dick’s photos.

• Farewell, the documentary film about Lady Grace Drummond-Hay’s flight around the world in the Graf Zeppelin, can be viewed here.

• “I personally think that the pages look better on the iPad than they do in real life.” Artist Tom Phillips again on the Humument iPad app.

• The Birds Are Flying Elsewhere: singer/songwriter Linda Perhacs. Related: Parallelograms – A Short Film About Linda Perhacs.

• St Eia, guitar improvisations by Zali Krishna, “Keywords: jazzgazing; entropy circus; st ives; cornwall; psychogeography”.

• Moon Wiring Club and DD Denham: music for children, by children. Related: Moon Wiring Club’s Jayston Mix.

The 1970s was another country, they did things differently there. One of a number of illustrations for science textbooks by Phil Kirkland at A Journey Round My Skull.

• “Fellatio has become a recurrent theme in your work hasn’t it, I say.” Alan Bennett sheds some inhibitions.

• Talking To The Sci-Fi Lord: Regenerations & Ruminations With Michael Moorcock.

• Time and the Gods (1906) by Lord Dunsany, illustrated by Sidney Sime.

• City of Silence, a calendar for 2011 by Thom Ayres.

• Scientists glimpse universe before the Big Bang.

• Photography by Josef Sudek (1896–1976).

• Aurora photo gallery, November 2010.

• The Last Tuesday Society.

• Parallelograms (1970) by Linda Perhacs | Six AM (1979) by Thomas Leer & Robert Rental | Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart (1989) by Julee Cruise.

Metropolis!

Design by Boris Bilinsky (1927).

The restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) was released in the UK this week by Eureka Video and my head is still spinning from having finally seen the missing scenes I’ve read about for years. There’s little I can say about the film itself that hasn’t already been said at length elsewhere, dramatically it’s not Lang’s best—M (1931) is a superior work on that score—but it’s still essential viewing for anyone interested in cinema history.

Brigitte Helm as cinema’s greatest robot: a screen grab from the Blu-ray edition at the Eureka site. Click for full-size.

The 25 minutes of restored footage add as much to the film as was claimed, especially in the longer sections, the removal of which rendered the motivations of several characters nonsensical, as well as creating disjunctions in the story. The plot thread concerning the dead woman Hel, wife of the master of Metropolis, Joh Fredersen, and idée fixe of the inventor Rotwang, was excised when it was felt that American audiences would laugh at the woman’s name; distributors allowing their low opinion of an audience’s intellect to ruin a work of art is nothing new. That cut at least had an excuse, however misguided. What’s more surprising about the restored version is seeing the minor cuts which were made throughout, many of them occurring in places which makes it appear that the negative had been attacked at random and for no good reason. The new material suffers next to the old which has better photography than many films made years later but the disparity isn’t so jarring once you’re used to it. A short but crucial scene is still missing but intertitles are used to describe the action. For now this is the most complete version of Lang’s film to date, with far more returned to it than I ever hoped to see.

• Watch the trailer
• The film restoration site
• Metropolis Robot: The Maschinenmensch Project
• Metropolis Film Archive: A Bibliography and Checklist of Resources
• Metropolis (1978) by Kraftwerk | Metropolis (1979) by Motörhead (apparently written after Lemmy had watched the film)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Secret Wish by Propaganda
• Metropolis posters