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Tokyo details

Another enormous gigapixel panorama appeared this week, this one being a view from the Tokyo Tower by Jeffrey Martin. Some cities suit this detailed bird’s-eye view more than others. A similar panorama of Prague wasn’t as interesting for me as the view over London which appeared at the beginning of this year. Tokyo from this vantage may be an endless clutter of concrete and tarmac but it still yields some interesting details.

Tokyo’s Ginza district, and Chuo-dori Avenue, are locatable by these signs.

Further away there’s this cat-and-kitten sign.

While elsewhere Colonel Sanders proves inescapable. The Colonel’s Wikipedia entry contains this, er…nugget:

The Japanese Nippon Professional Baseball league has developed an urban legend of the “Curse of the Colonel”. A statue of Colonel Sanders was thrown into a river and lost during a 1985 fan celebration, and (according to the legend) the “curse” has caused Japan’s Hanshin Tigers to perform poorly since the incident.

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Alas Vegas Tarot cards

Back in February I bought a Wacom drawing tablet and said I’d show some proper results from its use later. For the past few months I’ve been working on this project using a combination of Wacom drawing and vector graphics. The initial brief from games designer James Wallis was for six Tarot-style card designs for his Alas Vegas role-playing game which has as its theme a fantasy extrapolation from Las Vegas and its gaudy mythology. The Kickstarter funding for the game turned out to be more successful than was anticipated so James asked me to expand the six cards idea into a full set of black-and-white Major Arcana designs.

This has been a fun series to work on although a number of the cards presented problems at first, the antique nature of the Tarot symbolism being a difficult thing to map across a very commercial American city. The symbolism from the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck was used as a rough guide although we deviated in a few places from the more traditional attributes. Las Vegas has changed over the years so rather than represent a single period of the city’s history there are references to different eras, from the huge casinos of today back to the buildings of the 50s and 60s with their distinctive “Googie” architecture. Notes for the cards follow below. The artwork can be seen at larger size here.

The Fool is usually a young man about to step off a cliff edge with a dog barking a warning at his heels, hence the dog on the sign.

Several of the cards convert the Tarot characters into cabaret acts. This one was pretty inevitable, and I’m sure it’s not the first time a stage conjuror has appeared on this card.

The chair is based on the 1965 “Ball Chair” design by Eero Aarnio (as seen in The Prisoner TV series), adapted here to resemble the Priestess’s crescent moon.

The style on this one is more 70s than 60s: patterned wallpaper (the hearts derive from the symbolism of The Empress, and from playing cards, of course), white rug, Kung Fu pyjamas.

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More Cameron

Untitled (Peyote Vision), 1955, Cameron (from Semina journal, no. 1).

Thanks to Erik Davis for drawing my attention to a small online exhibition of Marjorie Cameron artwork and documentary material. Semina was the magazine founded by Cameron’s artist friend, Wallace Berman. The exhibition note tells us that:

Wallace Berman’s only exhibition at Ferus Gallery in 1957 was raided by the LAPD vice squad because of the small reproduction of this sexually graphic work by Cameron that was part of Berman’s assemblage, Temple.

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl successfully fought off an obscenity charge in the same year but the immediacy of visual art means it always fares less well with disapproving authorities. We can assume that Cameron had personal experience of peyote given some verse written by her husband, Jack Parsons, that Robert Anton Wilson quotes in Cosmic Trigger (1977):

I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote,
marjuana, morphine and cocaine,
I never know sadness, but only a madness
that burns at the heart and the brain.

On the same site is this wonderful still (or is it a location photo?) from the shooting of Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide in 1961. Seeing this makes me want to watch the film again.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Wormwood Star
• Street Fair, 1959
• House of Harrington
• Curtis Harrington, 1926–2007
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995

Weekend links 172

Complete Stop (2008), an oil painting by Gregory Thielker from his Under the Unminding Sky series.

• For Halloween last year I watched a very poor copy of a BBC Play For Today production, Robin Redbreast, a piece of rural horror by John Bowen which received a single screening in 1970. That poor copy—black-and-white, timecoded, multi-generation video—has been circulating for years, so it’s good to know that the BFI will be releasing Robin Redbreast on DVD in time for this year’s Halloween. This might be news enough but the following month the BFI also releases Leslie Megahey’s stunning adaptation of Schalcken the Painter in a dual DVD/Blu-ray edition. I wrote a short review of the latter film last October.

• Mixes of the week: August Sun High from The Advisory Circle, and John Wizards’ Quietus Mix “African music, R&B and chamber pop, filtered through gentle electronic arrangements that cross-pollinate with South African house, Shangaan electro and dub”.

• A trailer has surfaced for The Counselor, a film by Ridley Scott from an original screenplay by Cormac McCarthy. Trailers are too spoilerish so I’m refusing to watch it but for those interested Slate has the details.

Luckhurst makes an admirable attempt to link Lovecraft’s most frustrating writing tic to this theme of the unknown when he claims that Lovecraft’s “catachresis”—deliberate muddling of language through the use of mixed metaphors and the like—is a tool he uses to bolster the atmosphere of futility in the face of “absolute otherness.” The trauma of encountering something so far outside the realms of imagination triggers a collapse of logic in the language itself.

Cate Fricke reviews The Classic Horror Stories of HP Lovecraft, a collection from Oxford University Press edited by Roger Luckhurst.

• “Contemporary audiences found it too weird, too wonky and even borderline distasteful…” Xan Brooks goes looking for the locations from Powell & Pressburger’s 1943 film, A Canterbury Tale.

• Two songs from Julia Holter’s forthcoming album, Loud City Song: World and Maxim’s I. Also unveiled this week: Evangeline, a new track by John Foxx & Jori Hulkkonen.

• Have Ghost, Will Find: Colin Fleming on William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, The Ghost Finder.

• At PingMag: Urban Calligraphy: Turning the Streets into Big, Loud Canvases.

• Sex, Spirit, and Porn: Conner Habib talks to Erik Davis.

• Serendip-o-matic: Let Your Sources Surprise You

• The Pronunciation of European Typefaces

• Twilight (2004) by Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd | Luminous (2009) by John Foxx & Robin Guthrie | Cling (2011) by Robin The Fog

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: The Eldorado Edition

More Cameron, and her finest cinematic moment as she plays two roles—The Scarlet Woman and Kali—in Kenneth Anger’s erotic/psychedelic/thaumaturgic Bacchanal from 1954. Ordinarily there wouldn’t be much reason to draw attention to this, it’s been available on DVD and Blu-ray for several years, and various plunderings are scattered all over YouTube. The version here, however, gives an opportunity to experience the film as it was screened in the 1970s.

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, like many of Kenneth Anger’s films, existed in several different forms, with the tinkering and re-editing going on for years after the original footage had been captured. An early edit made in the 1950s was fashioned into a version known as the “Sacred Mushroom Edition” which Anger screened to acid heads in the 1960s. I’ve never seen any mention of the soundtrack used for this version, or the other early editions, but in 1978 Anger released a new version with the film soundtracked by most of the Eldorado (1974) album by the Electric Light Orchestra. The note on the Vimeo page says the 1978 edition has only ever been publicly screened once but this isn’t the case. My first viewing of the film was in 1990 when the Magick Lantern Cycle was touring arts cinemas in the UK, and I very well remember sitting in the dark thinking “What the hell?… Is this the Electric Light Orchestra?” The version that’s seen today is soundtracked with Janácek’s Glagolitic Mass, a choice that seems much more suitable. For some time I’d thought of getting hold of the ELO album and running it with the film to remind myself of that initial viewing but there’s no need now that this version exists. The implication is that what you see here is the actual 1978 edit but the footage seems no different from the DVD version aside from missing a few seconds of credits at the beginning. The ELO album came with a cover photo showing Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, a detail that may explain why the Hollywood-obsessed Anger was drawn to the album in the first place.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• 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