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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

Blivets

Cover by Norman Mingo, March 1965.

It’s a short step from Escher’s perceptual games to optical illusions in general. Blivets are one of those curious cultural artefacts that appear everywhere but whose origin is a mystery. Even the name blivet isn’t settled (or, for that matter, the meaning of the word) since the impossible figure is also known as The Devil’s Tuning Fork (or Pitchfork), The Ambiguous Trident, the Mad magazine Poiuyt, and more. It was the Mad usage that prompted me to draw these things endlessly on schoolbooks. A friend had a collection of the paperback reprints of the magazine which I eagerly borrowed; Poiuyts are a running joke in issues of the 1960s, appearing on maps or diagrams, or simply sitting in the margin of a page.

Anonymous reader submission, Analog, June 1964.

Wikipedia’s article on the blivet mentions the figure appearing in a 1964 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact but I suspect it goes back much further. This is one of those simple jokes that could have been invented during an idle moment in a factory or office then spread meme-like among workers. Blivets are easy to remember, and can be quickly drawn anywhere which explains their staying power today. Glenn Jones’ T-shirt design is only one of many recent examples. There’s more to be seen at Mighty Optical Illusions.

Undecidable Monument (1968) by Roger Hayward.

Escher’s Dogs by Glenn Jones.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• False perspective
• Trompe l’oeil

Escher’s snakes

The Magic Mirror of MC Escher (1985).

MC Escher has been in the news recently as a result of the exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland. By coincidence, I’ve been engaged in some Escher-like work of my own this week, the project at hand being one that makes reference to Escher-style effects rather than anything specifically derived from the artist’s prints. As a consequence of this I’ve had Bruno Ernst’s book lying around, the cover of which kept catching my eye with its astonishing precision. The standard collection, The World of MC Escher (1971), has been on the shelf for many years but I only picked up a copy of the Ernst book a few months ago. It’s an ideal complement to the earlier volume being a combined monograph and analysis of Escher’s pictorial effects which includes sketches, reference material and even a few pieces that aren’t included in the bigger book.

The print on the cover, Snakes (1969), is a woodcut of incredible accuracy, a quality that’s much more evident in the Ernst book which not only shows the print in colour but also shows more of the preliminary sketches that the earlier book. Many viewers of this print might be fascinated by the fractally interlaced circles but for me the fascination is in the scales of the snakes and the perfect grading of light and dark, concave and convex. We’re used to woodcuts being fairly crude representations (see yesterday’s post) but Escher used the medium with absolute precision. The sketches show how he worked out the arrangement of the scales although he still had to carve every line perfectly—then do the same again for the other two snakes. This was Escher’s last print but as Ernst says, “it proved that there was no diminution in his skill”.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Fantastic World of MC Escher
• MC Escher album covers
• Escher and Schrofer

Célio’s Les Amis du Crime

More porn. The Internet Archive has, until recently, been a somewhat chaste place where illustrations of sexual encounters are concerned. That’s mostly a result of their books being scans of works from libraries that wouldn’t have stocked illustrated editions of De Sade and company. Les Amis du Crime, together with yesterday’s volume, is part of the Wellcome Library’s sexology collection, an archive that includes eye-catching titles such as Curious Cases of Flagellation in France (1901).

Les Amis du Crime dates from around 1929. “Célio” was a pseudonym of artist Paul-Albert Moras whose woodcut illustrations imitate the engraved illustrations of De Sade’s own time. The borders follow the erotic style favoured by Franz von Bayros, albeit without Bayros’s attention to detail and graphic invention. This is, however, the first book I’ve seen where the page numbers are positioned between a woman’s open legs.

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Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiquis

A small selection of illustrations from Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiquis (1785), a study of the pornographic art of antiquity by Pierre d’Hancarville. The book comprises 80 or so drawings with accompanying text in English and French, so for once it’s possible to read the commentary. Most of the selections here are (predictably) of the phallic variety but the book runs the gamut of mythological liaisons. The phallic procession shown below has a long history (so to speak) which has been discussed here on more than one occasion.

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