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Peake’s Insects

Having recently watched Jan Švankmajer’s self-reflexive film of the Capek Brothers’ Insect Play I was intrigued by a mention in one of the Mervyn Peake biographies that Peake had created costumes for two stagings of the play in London in 1932 and 1936. “Mr Mervyn Peake’s costumes could not be bettered,” said James Agate in the Sunday Times, but my sole book of Peake artwork doesn’t mention the play at all, and these drawings are the only examples to found after a web search, not the photos I was hoping for. The one below is a more original conception than those used by the amateur actors in the Švankmajer film.

My own workload is gaining momentum just now so posting here may be sporadic for a while. I’m also recoding my website from scratch which doesn’t help when you already have more than enough plates spinning. Having refreshed the blog with a flexible template that resizes itself for different devices I decided it to do the same for the rest of the site. I last attempted anything on this scale in 2005 so I’m having to educate myself all over again in the mysteries of cascading style sheets. And I have hundreds of pages that need working on… This will take some time.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bookmark: Mervyn Peake
• The Web by Joan Ashworth
• Peake’s glassblowers
• Mervyn Peake in Coronation Street
• The Worlds of Mervyn Peake
• A profusion of Peake
• Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs
• Peake’s Pan
• Buccaneers #1
• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput
• The Illustrators of Alice

Miles and Miles

I listen to music all the time when I’m working but it’s not always a good idea to give new music an airing when you’re also concentrating on new work. What often happens on these occasions is that the album will fail to make an impression and end up being laid aside in favour of more familiar sounds, which is what happened to the copy of Milestones (1958) by Miles Davis that I bought last year in a charity shop. Listening to it again this week provoked a “Wow!” response as well as making me realise that I’d heard the tune of the fourth track, Miles, somewhere before. Miles, or Milestones as it’s confusingly also known, is covered by Barry Adamson on his 1996 album, Oedipus Schmoedipus, a simpler version but still jazzier than everything else on the album. I’d always suspected that Adamson was referring to Miles Davis with the title but since I’d never looked at the writing credits until this week I didn’t make the connection. Davis had a habit of naming new pieces of music after people he knew—John McLaughlin, Billy Preston, Mtume, producer Teo Macero, etc—so Miles (as opposed to Milestones) can be taken as an early example of the habit even though it refers to him and also doubles as a reference to measurement rather than a person.

The same title, but not the same piece of music, appears on a 1985 album by Sly & Robbie, Language Barrier, the track in this case being a renamed reworking of Black Satin from Miles Davis’s On The Corner album. Language Barrier in turn was produced by Bill Laswell who later remixed the original Black Satin for his excellent compilation/reconstruction of Davis’s electric period, Panthalassa, and who may have suggested that Sly & Robbie record their own version of the Davis piece. Whatever its origin, Miles (Black Satin) is credited to “B. Laswell, M. Davis, R. Shakespeare & S. Dunbar” which brings us back to Barry Adamson whose Miles has a similar credit at Discogs (but not on my CD…) although Laswell is now (bizarrely) “William Laswell”. I still don’t know what connection Laswell or Sly & Robbie have with Adamson’s track, unless it’s a Discogs error or contains a sample I’ve missed, but the ghost of M. Davis might at least be satisfied that he was influencing popular music after so many years on the outside looking in. Always miles ahead. And that’s the title of another Davis album I’ve yet to acquire…

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.

Continue reading “Other Sides”

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