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Other Sides

Cover designer unknown.

What becomes clear in the course of Kubin’s long career is how literary a temperament he was, not only because of implicit narratives in much of his work, illustrative and otherwise. Some of his most arresting images in pen and ink seem to arise from some middle ground between writing and drawing, not calligraphy, exactly, but rather as though typeface had sprouted roots and tendrils and spread like invasive groundcover over the whole expanse.

Christopher Benfey, The Shadow World of Alfred Kubin

All art by Alfred Kubin unless otherwise noted.

• All the illustrations from the first edition.

Cover art by Roman Cieślewicz.

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Weekend links 525

Polish poster by Franciszek Starowieyski, 1970.

• Tony Richardson’s Mademoiselle (1966) is one of those cult films that’s more written about than seen, despite having Jeanne Moreau in the lead role as a sociopathic schoolteacher, together with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet, plus uncredited script-doctoring by David Rudkin. John Waters listed the film as a “guilty pleasure” in Crackpot but it’s been unavailable on disc for over a decade. The BFI will be releasing a restored print on blu-ray in September.

“While the hurdy-gurdy’s capacity to fill space with its unrelenting multi-tonal dirge is for some the absolute sonic dream, for others it is the stuff of nightmares.” Jennifer Lucy Allan on the pleasures and pains of a medieval musical instrument.

• “I truly believed”: Vicki Pollack of the San Francisco Diggers talking to Jay Babcock for the fifth installment of Jay’s verbal history of the hippie anarchists.

• “If you want to call yourself a composer, you follow every step of the instrumentation.” Ennio Morricone talking to Guido Bonsaver in 2006.

• Dutchsteammachine converts jerky 12fps film from the NASA archive to 24fps. Here’s the Apollo 14 lunar mission: landing, EVA and liftoff.

• New music: Suddenly the World Had Dropped Away by David Toop; Skeleton and Unclean Spirit by John Carpenter; An Ascent by Scanner.

• Peter Hujar’s illicit photographs of New York’s cruising utopia. Not to be confused with Alvin Batrop‘s photos of gay New York.

• Mixes of the week: XLR8R Podcast 651 by Dave Harrington, and Mr.K’s Side 1, Track 1’s #1 by radioShirley & Mr.K.

• Simon Reynolds on the many electronic surprises to be found in the Smithsonian Folkways music archive.

• The Gone Away by Belbury Poly will be the next release on the Ghost Box label.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Ed Emshwiller Day.

• Shirley Collins’ favourite music.

• Mademoiselle Mabry (1969) by Miles Davis | Hurdy Gurdy Man (1970) by Eartha Kitt | Danger Cruising (1979) by Pyrolator

Don’t Smoke That Cigarette by Kenneth Anger

Another of Kenneth Anger’s post-Magick Lantern works at YouTube, and one I’d managed to miss until now. Anger’s later films have tended to be documentative—The Man We Want to Hang, Mouse Heaven, Anger Sees Red, My Surfing Lucifer—or collage projects like Ich Will!, a cut-up of Nazi propaganda films that was also on YouTube for a while before vanishing into the puce ether.

Don’t Smoke That Cigarette (2000) is a long collage piece with none of the director’s usual preoccupations, the raw material this time being propaganda for the US tobacco industry. Anger is apparently a fervent non-smoker so this can be considered a polemical work although it also offers a glimpse for younger generations into a vanished world where almost everybody smoked some kind of tobacco, the advertising was ubiquitous, and dissenting voices very much in the minority. With a running time of 45 minutes this is also Anger’s longest film. The copy at YouTube has the look of a VHS tape that’s been duplicated several times, a degraded appearance familiar from the bootleg tapes that used to circulate in the days of “video nasty” censorship. It also turns into a video nasty of its own when Anger reinforces his message with footage of people afflicted by a variety of nicotine-induced diseases. With Johnny Roventini (the Philip Morris bellboy) as your host for the evening, more tobacco-addicted stars than there are in heaven, and “Electro”, a cigarette-smoking robot.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kenneth Anger’s Maldoror
• Donald Cammell and Kenneth Anger, 1972
• My Surfing Lucifer by Kenneth Anger
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: The Eldorado Edition
• Brush of Baphomet by Kenneth Anger
• Anger Sees Red
• Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon
• Lucifer Rising posters
• Missoni by Kenneth Anger
• Anger in London
• Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken
• Edmund Teske
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again
• Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

The Fantastic Fiction of Hannes Bok

A belated note of thanks to Robert T. Garcia who sent me a PDF of this book a few weeks ago. The Fantastic Fiction of Hannes Bok is a hardcover collection of three fantasy novels by artist Hannes Bok, all of which have been out of print for decades (75 years in the case of Starstone World). Bok has a lasting reputation as an illustrator of fantasy, science fiction and horror during the pulp era but he also wrote fiction and poetry for the pulps, in addition to essays for Mystic Magazine that included a short-lived astrology column. Two of Bok’s novels were published posthumously by Lin Carter in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, the existence of which intrigued me for many years, not least because the Ballantine paperbacks weren’t easy to find in UK bookshops. Bok’s fantasy isn’t quite to my taste (I prefer things to be generally darker and more grotesque) but I’m pleased to see these stories back in the world.

Contents:
• The Fantastic Fiction of Hannes Bok‘s cover art is by Bok (published previously in Hannes Bok: A Life in Illustration in a poor image, scanned here for the first time from the original).
• Original Introduction by Charles de Lint!
• Ballantine Adult Fantasy editor Lin Carter’s introductions to The Sorcerer’s Ship and Beyond the Golden Stair, plus an all-new afterword detailing the publishing history of The Sorcerer’s Ship by Bok collector and college professor William Lorenzo. Publisher, Bob Garcia provided an introduction to Starstone World.
• A number of unpublished photos of Bok.
• Bok’s pulp art for The Sorcerer’s Ship is included, plus two paintings specified by the artist as illustrating that novel: a color reprise of an interior illustration and a color portrait of the creature Yanuk done for a fan.
• Since the other two novels did not have artwork by the artist, Jim Pitts provides us a wonderful original frontispiece for each.
• Bok sketches from The Hannes Bok Sketchbook Folio, and A Hannes Bok Sketchbook plus unpublished sketches.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers

Zemania

Invention for Destruction (1958).

In addition to Jean Kerchbron’s Golem my weekend viewing involved a fresh immersion in the semi-animated fantasies of Karel Zeman, one of which, Invention for Destruction, I’d not seen for many years. It hadn’t occurred to me before how closely Zeman’s technique on these films matches some of my own recent illustration when it applies original drawn elements to settings constructed from old engravings. For Zeman, combining actors with animated models and pictorial backgrounds was an economical way of bringing to life the worlds of Jules Verne, Rudolf Erich Raspe and others while retaining the feel of the original book illustrations. These films are also closer to the Max Ernst school of engraved collage than they may at first seem. The mansion at the beginning of Invention for Destruction could easily have been an illustration of a single building but Zeman offers a hybrid construction with unrealistically conflicting perspectives; later on we see a desert cavalry of camels on roller skates. It’s no surprise that Jan Švankmajer admires Zeman’s films. And having recently watched all the Švankmajers it’s good to know there are several Zeman features still to see.

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