The recurrent pose 27

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Moss Roberts photographed by James Bidgood.

I missed this back in January, a great version of the Flandrin pose by James Bidgood, the justly-celebrated beefcake photographer and director of that micro-budget masterwork of gay erotica, Pink Narcissus (1971). The photo was part of a feature commissioned by Out.com which asked notable photographers to present a contemporary take on the Physique Pictorial style. Bidgood’s pictures strike me as the best of the bunch but then I’m biased, having recently bought Taschen’s republication of their splendid book of Bidgood photos from the 1960s. Luscious and kitsch, and—if you’re a fan of Bobby Kendall—highly recommended.

Via VMP.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Let’s get physical: Bruce of Los Angeles and Tom of Finland
• The Male Gaze
• James Bidgood

Outage

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Extended downtime over the past few days was caused by a major server calamity at the webhost end so my apologies to regular visitors. I keep backups of everything for precisely this reason—servers of all kinds can be subject to failure—but one of the problems with an increasingly sprawling site such as this (8,000+ files, 450 web pages, etc) is that restoring the thing from scratch can take some time. Reinstalling the database was the most difficult part but that’s been done without any loss. Normal service is now resumed. Thanks for your patience. And a belated Happy Bloomsday!

Medicine Road by Charles de Lint

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The second of my book designs for Tachyon Publications is published this month and it was good to receive a copy in the same week as getting a load of new CDs. Medicine Road is a contemporary fantasy of shape-shifting and shamanic magic set in the American South West. This job was particularly pleasurable for being illustrated by Charles Vess, celebrated among other things for his many collaborations with Neil Gaiman, including Stardust. I embellished the opening pages with designs based on Native American petroglyphs, a couple of which are from the tribes mentioned in the text.

Laurel and Bess Dillard are charismatic bluegrass musicians enjoying the success of their first Southwestern tour. But the Dillard girls know that magical adventures are always at hand. Upon meeting two mysterious strangers at a gig, the red-headed twins are drawn into a age-old, mystical wager along the Medicine Road.

One day, seeing a red dog chasing a jackalope, Coyote Woman gave them human forms. They became Jim Changing Dog and Alice Corn Hair. In return, both of them must find true love within a hundred years or their “five-fingered” forms will be forfeit. Alice has found her soul mate, but trickster Jim is unwilling to settle down — until he sets eyes upon free-spirited Bess Dillard.

Yet time is running out for the red dog and the jackalope. In just two weeks they will journey to their reckoning at the Medicine Wheel. Meanwhile, a motorcycle-riding seductress and a vengeful rattlesnake woman are eager to meddle, and Bess and Laurel, caught in a web of love and lies, must find their own paths into the spirit world.

Next up from Tachyon will be a book by Kage Baker. More about that later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Best of Michael Moorcock

New music and design

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A visit to Baked Goods distribution this week brought me a haul of new releases, all items I’ve either designed or overseen the production of. Among the new CD designs I’ve already mentioned the Tectonic Plates compilation, a really excellent collection of dubstep singles with a bonus disc of mixes by Pinch. Related to Tectonic’s Bristol underground is a compilation of singles from the Caravan label mixed by DJ October. I’ve put together the labels for Caravan’s vinyl over the past year and assisted with the layout of this, their first CD. The other new design (which I’ve yet to add to the site) is a collection of live improvisations by Mojo-tipped Liondialer (influences: Supersilent, Talk Talk, Ornette Coleman, Tony Conrad, Stars of the Lid, Jandek, Loren Connors, Ben Frost, Shearwater…), aka Greg Haines and Danny Saul. This is another release on the White Box label and was recorded, edited and sequenced by my good friend Gav whose knowledge of music esoterica has been drawn upon for previous posts here.

Also new: a clutch of recent vinyl (I really need to add a vinyl section to my pages), a Tectonic promo T-shirt (!), and two releases which I helped guide through the production process, Cloaks Versus Grain and The Sleeper by The Leisure Society, the latter being a very well-received release which was nominated earlier this year for an Ivor Novello award.

Meanwhile, there’s more book work turning up but I’ll talk about that when I’ve had a chance to further update the site.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Plates: Volume 2