A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Theatre
Much of the work I’ve been doing for the past few weeks has been steampunk-related so I’ve been searching for more antique reference material than usual. A recent delve unearthed this pair of vintage contortionists. The photograph above dates from circa 1880 and is from the George Eastman House collection at Flickr. Also at Flickr is a great set of vintage theatre posters which includes the example below. (And also at the Library of Congress.) More about the steampunk work in due course.
A commemorative Borges coin.
He says, “Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment’s objectivity or the individual’s psychic history.” There, of course, he sums up all of realism, no? “Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument and forges, beyond spatial and temporal prisons, a personal vision.” That’s Borges.
• The Borges Behind the Fiction: Colin Marshall talks to translator Suzanne Jill Levine. Related: The Garden of Forking Paths.
• From The Quietus: Blondie in Conversation with William S. Burroughs by Victor Bockris, 1979; An Interview with Laurie Anderson by Robert Barry, 2010.
In 962 Abd-er Rahman III was succeeded by his son Al-Hakim. Owing to the peace which the Christians of Cordova then enjoyed […] the citizens of Cordova, Arabs, Christians, and Jews, enjoyed so high a degree of literary culture that the city was known as the New Athens. From all quarters came students eager to drink at its founts of knowledge. Among the men afterwards famous who studied at Cordova were the scholarly monk Gerbert, destined to sit on the Chair of Peter as Sylvester II (999–1003), the Jewish rabbis Moses and Maimonides, and the famous Spanish-Arabian commentator on Aristotle, Averroes.
Entry for The Diocese of Cordova from The Catholic Encyclopedia (1917).
• Professor Newt’s Distorted History Lesson. A riposte to the ignorance of the wretched Gingrich. Related: the Mezquita de Córdoba.
Jorge Luis Borges and a cat. Via.
• Joseph and His Friend—A Story of Pennsylvania (1870) by Bayard Taylor, America’s first (?) gay novel. Related: 20 classic works of gay literature.
• Elegies For Angels, Punks and Raging Queens at the Shaw Theatre, London, from 10–28 August 2010.
• Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony is released later this month. Café Kaput’s first release, Electronic Music in the Classroom by DD Denham, appears in September.
• “Just relax and enjoy it.” k-punk on the ambition and vision of David Rudkin’s Artemis 81.
• Chris Watson explores Alan Lamb’s The Wires: three audio recordings to download.
• Jonathan Barnbrook: Tuxedomoon fan, 1988, and Tuxedomoon designer, 2007.
• Rob Young’s Electric Eden reviewed by Michel Faber.
• Brian Eno gets the Warp factor.
• No Tears (1978) by Tuxedomoon; Atomic (1979) by Blondie; Everything You Want (1980) by Tuxedomoon; Next One Is Real (1984) by Minimal Compact; Hologram (2010) by These New Puritans.
Yet another Salomé, this 1927 edition being a beautifully stylised Art Deco version by John Vassos (1898–1985), a Greek artist who moved to America in the 1920s. There aren’t many examples of these drawings online, unfortunately, I love to see a complete set of the illustrations. Salomé’s underarm hair is a detail one can’t imagine seeing in many renderings before or after this. Vassos followed Salomé with two more Wilde editions, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1928) and The Harlot’s House and Other Poems (1929). Bud Plant’s page has more about the artist’s life and work and further examples of his monochrome art.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The Salomé archive
A new production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé is touring the UK this month, a presentation of the Headlong company which will appear in a number of venues throughout the country but not in Manchester, unfortunately. My disappointment at this news prompted me by way of compensation to finally order a DVD of the Steven Berkoff production, a live performance filmed in Tokyo in 1992. I wish I’d done so sooner.
Herod (Steven Berkoff).
Berkoff’s production was first staged at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 1988. The play’s success led to a run at the National Theatre in London (with a Beardsley-derived poster) followed by performances worldwide. I don’t know how significant the original choice of venue was but the Gate Theatre was founded by Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards in 1928. MacLiammóir was a great Wilde enthusiast whose one-man portrait of the writer, The Importance of Being Oscar, achieved considerable success in the 1960s. He would have relished Berkoff’s production.
Salomé (Myriam Cyr).
Another chance find at the Internet Archive. This small book from 1913 is an appraisal of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes written by noted actress Ellen Terry and with illustrations—which Archive.org doesn’t mention—by Pamela Colman Smith, an artist whose Tarot designs are some of the most successful ever created yet who received little credit for her work while she was alive. It’s a shame that the Internet Archive perpetuates this state of affairs despite her name on the book’s title page. This is a fascinating set of ink sketches all of which are marked by the distinctive monogram familiar from her Tarot cards. One of the drawings in the book is also marked by an obscene doodle; I’ll leave it to the curious to discover which one.
