{film} – Page 171 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 269

Grosses Wasser (1979) by Cluster. Cover art by Dieter Moebius.

• RIP Dieter Moebius: one half of Cluster (with Hans-Joachim Roedelius), one third of Harmonia (with Roedelius and Michael Rother), and collaborator with many other musicians, including Brian Eno and Conny Plank. Geeta Dayal, who interviewed Moebius for Frieze in 2012, chose five favourite recordings. From 2008: Cosmic Outriders: the music of Cluster and Harmonia by Mark Pilkington. At the Free Music Archive: Harmonia playing at ATP, New York in 2008. Live recordings of Cluster in the 1970s have always been scarce but in 1977 they played a droning set at the Metz Science-Fiction Festival, a performance that was broadcast on FM radio (the Eno credit there seems to be an error).

• “I’ve since had the feeling that, if the attacks against The Satanic Verses had taken place today, these people would not have defended me, and would have used the same arguments against me, accusing me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority.” Salman Rushdie on the fallout from the Charlie Hebdo killings.

• “The effect of these memories is to make you think you know the film better than you do, and wonder what it’s like actually to sit down and watch it.” Michael Wood on rewatching Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). Related: Tipping My Fedora on the film’s source novel, Badge of Evil (1956).

“To me, it’s simple,” he says. “Fantasy became as bland as everything else in entertainment. To be a bestseller, you’ve got to rub the corners off. The more you can predict the emotional arc of a book, the more successful it will become.

“I do understand that Game of Thrones is different. It has its political dimensions; I’m very fond of the dwarf and I’m very pleased that George [R R Martin], who’s a good friend, has had such a huge success. But ultimately it’s a soap opera. In order to have success on that scale, you have to obey certain rules. I’ve had conversations with fantasy writers who are ambitious for bestseller status and I’ve had to ask them, ‘Yes, but do you want to have to write those sorts of books in order to get there?’”

Michael Moorcock talking to Andrew Harrison about fantasy, science fiction, the past and the present.

• “Architects love Blade Runner, they just go bonkers. When I was working on the film, it was all about, let’s jam together Byzantine and Mayan and Post-Modern and even a little bit of Memphis, just mash it all together.” Designer and visual futurist Syd Mead talking to Patrick Sisson.

• “Lucian of Samosata’s True History reads like a doomed acid trip,” says Cecilia D’Anastasio, who wonders whether or not the book can be regarded as the earliest work of science fiction.

• Mixes of the week: A Tribute to Dieter Moebius by Vegan Logic, and another by Totallyradio.

• The Phantasmagoria of the First Hand-Painted Films by Joshua Yumibe.

• Islamic Geometric: calligraphic tessellations by Shakil Akram Khan.

• Michael Prodger on The Dangerous Mind of Richard Dadd.

• A chronological list of synth scores and soundtracks.

• Touch Of Evil (Main Theme) (1958) by Henry Mancini | Badge Of Evil (1982) by Cabaret Voltaire | Touch Of Evil (2009) by Jaga Jazzist

The Dead, a film by Stan Brakhage

In The Dead (1960), Stan Brakhage’s roaming camera explores the funerary architecture of the huge Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Shots of the tombs and the banks of the Seine viewed from a river boat may be typical tourist fare but Brakhage transforms his footage with fragmented editing, superimposition and continual cutting from positive to negative. The youthful figure glimpsed at the beginning is Kenneth Anger. As usual with Brakhage, the film is a silent one. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mothlight, a film by Stan Brakhage
• Thot-Fal’N, a film by Stan Brakhage

Out Of Limits

Out Of Limits (1963) by The Marketts.

Did you know that Marius Constant, composer of the theme for The Twilight Zone, had a career as a serious composer? I didn’t. I wonder what Constant thought about the reworking of his theme into a surf tune by Michael Z. Gordon and The Marketts in 1963. Gordon’s version was originally titled Outer Limits then changed to Out Of Limits to evade the copyright police. The Marketts’ version will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Pulp Fiction where (as I recall) it’s playing while John Travolta is driving around. But it’s even more familiar to surf obsessives as this small selection of covers shows. There’s more out there (so to speak), and we’ll probably be hearing even more interpretations versions in the future.

Outer Limits (1963) by Jerry Cole And His Spacemen.

Out Of Limits (1963) by The Ventures.

Out Of Limits (1964) by The Challengers.

Out Of Limits (1964) by Billy Vaughn.

Out Of Limits (1983) by Agent Orange.

Out Of Limits (1994) by Man Or Astro-Man?

Out Of Limits (2003) by Los Straitjackets.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• In The Past
• My Surfing Lucifer by Kenneth Anger
• A Reverbstorm jukebox

James Ellroy’s Feast of Death

In which the Demon Dog discusses his obsession with unsolved murders whilst meeting cop friends (and Nick Nolte) over a series of dinners. Vikram Jayanti’s 90-minute film was made for the BBC’s Arena strand in 2001, and was later released on DVD. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen about Ellroy whose take-no-prisoners attitude can be gauged from the anecdote at the very beginning. Films about writers are often better when they’re like this, talking about the things that interest them rather than discussing their work in a manner which can get blunted by having to answer to the same questions over and over again. Discussion touches inevitably on the murder of Ellroy’s mother, and the Black Dahlia case. “…with very strong language, and scenes you may find disturbing…” Watch it here.

23 Skidoo

1: A slang phrase

Postcard via.

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

skidoo, v. N. Amer. slang. (ski’du:) Also skiddoo. [Orig. uncertain, perh. f. skedaddle v.]

2. In catch-phrases. a. Used as an exclamation of disrespect (for a person). Esp. in nonsense association with twenty-three. (temporary.)

1906 J. F. Kelly Man with Grip (ed. 2) 99 As for Belmont and Ryan and the rest of that bunch, Skidoo for that crowd when we pass. Ibid. 118 ‘I can see a reason for ‘skidoo’,’ said one, ‘and for ‘23’ also. Skidoo from skids and ‘23’ from 23rd Street that has ferries and depots for 80 per cent. of the railroads leaving New York.’ 1911 Maclean’s Mag. Oct. 348/1 Surrounded by this conglomerate procession as I went on my way, the urchins would yell ‘Skidoo,’ ‘23 for you!’

b. spec. as twenty-three skidoo: formerly, an exclamation of uncertain meaning; later used imp., go away, ‘scram’.

1926 C. T. Ryan in Amer. Speech II. 92/1, I really do not recall which appeared first in my vocabulary, the use of ‘some’ for emphasis or that effective but horrible ‘23-Skiddoo’—perhaps they were simultaneous. 1929 Amer. Speech IV. 430 Among the terms which the daily press credits Mr. Dorgan with inventing are:…twenty-three skiddoo (go away). 1957 W. Faulkner Town iii. 56 Almost any time now Father would walk in rubbing his hands and saying ‘oh you kid’ or ‘twenty-three skidoo’. 1978 D. Bagley Flyaway xi. 80 This elderly, profane woman…used an antique American slang… I expected her to come out with ‘twenty-three, skidoo’.

2: An esoteric poem by Aleister Crowley

[23]

SKIDOO

What man is at ease in his Inn?
Get out.
Wide is the world and cold.
Get out.
Thou hast become an in-itiate.
Get out.
But thou canst not get out by the way thou camest in. The Way out is THE WAY.
Get out.
For OUT is Love and Wisdom and Power.
Get OUT.
If thou hast T already, first get UT.
Then get O.
And so at last get OUT.

From The Book of Lies (1912/13)

3: A film by Julian Biggs

23 Skidoo (1964).

If you erase the people of downtown America, the effect is bizarre, not to say disturbing. That is what this film does. It shows the familiar urban scene without a soul in sight: streets empty, buildings empty, yet everywhere there is evidence of recent life and activity. At the end of the film we learn what has happened.

4: 23 Skidoo Eristic Elite by William Burroughs