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Proverbial details

More Google Art Project details from the amazing Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Netherlandish Proverbs (1559) is one of Bruegel’s many paintings which are crammed with curious incident; it’s also one of the more bizarre examples. In a crowded scene the artist depicts in a literal manner one hundred different proverbs or figures of speech. Wikipedia has a guide to the details but if you ignore that you can treat the whole thing as another example of Surrealism before its time. In addition to the usual complement of medieval grotesques there’s a fair amount of earthy humour of a kind which pretty much vanished from painting until the 20th century.

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The Sea of Monsters

The German definite article has unfortunate implications when applied to a group of Brits, but if we overlook this detail the poster makes an interesting contrast with its US counterpart. Where the American design depicts all the film’s main characters, Heinz Edelmann’s painting concentrates almost solely on the creatures from the Sea of Monsters with no Blue Meanies in sight. As is often the case with film posters, both designs give a slightly different impression whilst being accurate in their selective representations. Yellow Submarine was reissued on DVD and Blu-ray last year. It looks and sounds marvellous.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tomorrow Never Knows
• Yellow Submarine comic books
• A splendid time is guaranteed for all
• Heinz Edelmann
• Please Mr. Postman
• All you need is…

Richard Matheson, 1926–2013

The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Of Richard Matheson’s many books I’ve only read I Am Legend so can’t say much about his fiction other than to confirm (as everyone else does) that none of the three adaptations so far have managed to do it justice. Of his work for film and television there’s too much to say, it’s so copious and indelibly memorable. Here’s a list of five favourite Matheson creations.

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

JG Ballard frequently referred to this as one of his favourite science fiction films, not because of the SF element, which is never properly explained, but because of its inadvertent Surrealist qualities. For my part, every time I watched this I was always impatient to get to the later scenes where the unfortunate Scott becomes trapped in the cellar, and his own house becomes an increasingly alien and hostile environment. The ending where he accepts his condition is very Ballardian.

Duel (1971)

A sweating and manic Dennis Weaver is pitted against an anonymous truck driver who remains unseen but for a few shots of an arm and some boots. The lethal game of cat-and-mouse was famously directed by Steven Spielberg, his second feature, and one that’s a lot more impressive than some of his subsequent films. Watch it on YouTube.

The Legend of Hell House (1973)

Matheson’s take on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House—four investigators in a haunted mansion—with the gain ramped up 100%. The film starts off quietly but is very soon into full-on hysteria; director John Hough finds so many eccentric camera angles you could actually calm down after this by watching a Terry Gilliam film. Meanwhile Roddy McDowell chews the scenery as though over-acting is going out of fashion. Bonuses are a grown-up Pamela Franklin (Flora in Jack Clayton’s superb The Innocents), and a great score from Radiophonic synthesists Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire. Watch the trailer.

Trilogy of Terror (1975)

A three-story TV movie in which Karen Black took all the leading roles. No one remembers the first two stories but everyone who’s seen this remembers the third, Amelia (based on a Matheson short story, Prey), in which Ms Black is hunted in her apartment by a Zuni fetish doll. It’s on YouTube!

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (1983)

Sorry, Shatnerphiles, but the superior version of this story is the one from Twilight Zone: The Movie. John Lithgow is a much better actor than William Shatner, the gremlin on the wing of the plane is a fearsome creature that’s seriously destructive (not, as Matheson lamented of the original, “a surly teddy bear”), and the whole sequence is directed by George Miller fresh from Mad Max 2. The original Twilight Zone episode wasn’t bad but it can’t compete with Miller pulling out all the stops. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• New York City abandoned

What Is A Happening?

Poster for the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream (1967) by Michael McInnerney.

“The language of Mellow Yellow, the art of the Happening…”

Yesterday’s story from International Times appeared in the same week in 1967 as this 30-minute BBC documentary shown as part of the Man Alive documentary strand. Taking them together you receive contrasting views of a major moment for London’s psychedelic underground, The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, an all-night indoor arts-and-music festival staged at Alexandra Palace on 29th April, 1967. The event was a benefit to raise money for International Times following a prosecution for obscenity (Oz magazine later had to endure a similar, more notorious rigmarole). Alexandra Palace was an odd choice of location, being a huge Victorian exhibition space which had once served as the BBC’s main studios. (The first Quatermass serial was filmed there in 1953.) The venue was apparently chosen because it had previously hosted blues all-nighters but the acoustics are dreadful for live music, as the BBC’s documentary demonstrates. The film also shows that most of the audience wouldn’t have been too concerned; being there was more important.

When you’ve been reading about an event like this for years it’s fascinating to get an extended view of the thing. The BBC were there all night, and capture many key incidents. The three interviewers are deeply sceptical of the whole business but that’s inevitable when they were making a film for a general audience. All the same, the repeated questions of “Why are you here? What’s this for?” are ones that would never be asked of a group of visitors to, say, Ascot, or the Henley Regatta. “It’s the audience which is the interesting part,” an upper-class Chelsea bookseller astutely declares, the interviewer seeming surprised that an older person might wish to be present. If the event looks trivial and even stereotypical today (tripped-out kids and blissful sentiments), it needs to be remembered that this was the very first time anything like this had been seen in Britain, hence the presence of the documentary crew. For sceptics and initiates alike the night was a glimpse of bright new territory opening up. The excitement of the moment still communicates itself.

• What Is A Happening?: part one | part two | part three

• The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream at UK Rock Festivals

Previously on { feuilleton }
• My White Bicycle

My White Bicycle

My White Bicycle (1967), poster by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. Too risqué for EMI.

In what passes here for spare time I’ve been working on a private project that concerns events in London during a single week in 1967. I won’t elaborate for now but the research has been fun, and has led down byways where it’s easy to get lost in a profusion of historic detail. The International Times archive is a great time-sink if you want to see London’s psychedelic culture evolving from one week to the next. Oz magazine covered much of the same ground but in broader strokes; IT being a weekly paper was the closest thing the underground of the time had to a journal of record which means you’ll find things there which weren’t reported anywhere else.

International Times, Volume 1, issue 13, 19/05/1967.

A brief item about a poster for the debut single by Tomorrow caught my eye, the artwork being an early piece by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Michael English and Nigel Waymouth) who we here discover were briefly known by another name:

MY WHITE BICYCLE

EMI join the long and growing list of those self-censors who still believe that the younger generation are going to continue to support them. The above poster for the Tomorrow record, MY WHITE BICYCLE, was rejected by EMI on the grounds that the titties might provoke “complaints from certain organizations…” So Jacob and the Coloured Coat (Mick English and Nigel Weymouth [sic]) put on their crocheted boots and manufactured a poster design from every phallic image they could. Subliminal pornography triumphed where open indecency had failed and the prick within sustains where the exposed breast falters.

Tomorrow were one of the first British psychedelic bands. My White Bicycle is their most memorable song but the rest of their self-titled debut album still holds up today. Ace guitarist Steve Howe became a lot more famous in Yes a few years later, while drummer Twink was in a host of bands in the late 60s and early 70s, Hawkwind included. My White Bicycle sounds superficially like a typical piece of psych whimsy à la Pink Floyd’s Bike (both songs were recorded at Abbey Road) but according to Twink there’s an anarchist subtext:

“My White Bicycle” was written out of what was actually going on in Amsterdam. One of the owners of Granny Takes a Trip, Nigel Weymouth [sic], had gone there and come back with a Provos badge which he gave to me. They were kind of like a student anarchist group that believed everything should be free. In fact, they had white bicycles in Amsterdam and they used to leave them around the town. And if you were going somewhere and you needed to use a bike, you’d just take the bike and you’d go somewhere and just leave it. Whoever needed the bikes would take them and leave them when they were done.

What would have been dismissed as pure utopianism now looks like prescience when bike-sharing schemes have become a reality. As to the redrawn poster, there’s a copy here which is described as very rare, hence its absence from other Hapshash galleries. Not really as phallic as the IT report implies; Aubrey Beardsley got away with a lot more priapic subterfuge in the 1890s when the strictures were also more severe.

My White Bicycle (1967), the replacement poster by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat.

On the same page of IT there’s a brief announcement that The Beatles will have a new album out in June, something entitled Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That album also gave EMI a headache with both Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and A Day In The Life being accused by “certain organisations” of promoting drugs. If the record company could have seen the greater headache that was coming less than ten years later from Malcolm McLaren and his King’s Road scallywags they might not have been so uptight.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hapshash Takes a Trip
• Michael English, 1941–2009
• The Look presents Nigel Waymouth
• The New Love Poetry