{ feuilleton }

Hip Gnostics and more Moore

Coincidence abounds: on Wednesday I was following a few referral URLs to see who’d been linking here and was led to a Lexic.us page about hermaphrodites which in turn had me looking again at the wonderful Borghese Hermaphroditus in the Louvre. Thursday’s postal delivery brought issue 1 of The Gnostic which prominently features the Louvre sculpture on its cover. Inside there’s my portrait of William Burroughs illustrating a piece about Burroughs’s Gnostic identification by Sven Davisson. (I linked to another essay on the same theme in 2007.) The Gnostic is an excellent publication which, the Alan Moore interview aside, I’ve only skimmed through so far. Alan’s piece is very enlightening since the discussion stays fixed around religion, science and the occult and includes the most thorough extrapolation I’ve seen to date of his long work in progress, Jerusalem. There’s also a transcript of part of his William Blake piece from 2001, Angel Passage. If you want to know more I suggest you order a copy ($12 / £8 / €9) from Bardic Press.

Coincidence further abounds as this arrived just as Pádraig Ó Méalóid publicly announced his discovery of the long-lost and unpublished third issue of Alan Moore’s Big Numbers. This was Alan’s self-published “real life” comic series from 1989 which got off to a great start then fatally collapsed when artist Bill Sienkiewicz, then his replacement, Al Columbia, both dropped out of the project. It’s one of the great lost projects of contemporary comics and seeing the third issue sustaining the quality of the first two is deeply frustrating.

The last piece of Moore news concerns The Mindscape of Alan Moore once again which is now available to buy through iTunes. $9.99 will only get you the feature-length documentary, however. If you buy the double-disc DVD you also get my groovy interface design and an extra disc of interviews with major comic artists.

Update: Alan Moore has certainly ruled the week in this household with the delivery on Friday of The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, a new edition of George Khoury’s book-length autobiographical interview with Alan, and an essential purchase for anyone with more than a cursory interest in Alan’s life and work. The book features copious artwork examples by many Moore collaborators including my CD designs and the cover for the forthcoming Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Burroughs: Gnostic visionary

Xiphophilia

How else to name this obsession? (Which, it should be noted, is more a mild preoccupation than a full-on fetish.) Xiphoid isn’t a word one hears very often:

\Xiph”oid\ (?; 277), a. [Gr. ? sword-shaped; xi`fos a sword + ? form, shape: cf. F. xiphoide.] (Anat.)
(a) Like a sword; ensiform.
(b) Of or pertaining to the xiphoid process; xiphoidian.

Ensiform is less of a challenge but doesn’t lend itself to a suffix while foinery is a term which only refers to combat with foils. Xiphophilia will have to suffice.

The Aragorn type at the top of the post is a Polish model, Jared Koronkiewicz, and his uncredited photo is via Queerty. The identity of the pouting sword boy is a mystery but this picture and another look like scans from a fashion mag. Thanks to Callum for the tip. Finally, the umbrella swords are a design concept from Materious. While these might be useful for keeping commuters at bay, in the current climate of security theatre they’d probably only lead to your arrest or worse. But they look good. Via Core77.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive

The White Peacock

The White Peacock (1910).

A typical piece of mysterious erotica by Austrian illustrator and pornographer Franz von Bayros (1866–1924). Like all good Decadents, Bayros used peacocks and peacock feathers as decorative motifs in his pictures but this is the first I’ve seen where the peacock itself is the result of amorous attention. If that sounds overly-perverse, you haven’t seen his Sweet Snail.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka’s porn unveiled
• The art of ejaculation
• The art of Félicien Rops, 1833–1898

Susan Kare

A post for Ada Lovelace Day, “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.”

Susan Kare was, and still is, a graphic designer specialising in user interface graphics. Facebook users may recognise her gift icons but her earlier work is even more familiar to Macintosh users since it was her job at Apple in 1983 to design the icons for the first Macintosh interface. Many of the original black & white images have been phased out or replaced by higher-resolution equivalents but some still remain, in particular the pointing hand, the stopwatch (which became an hourglass in Windows) and the Command symbol which was based on a map icon for Swedish camping grounds. She also designed some of the fonts used by the first Mac OS including Geneva—still a web standard—and Chicago which was the primary Mac font for many years. In a field overly-dominated by men, her work lies at the heart of technology we’re using today, right down to the Mac keyboard on which I type these words.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Folder icons

Vintage movie posters

An example from this Flickr set.

Hell is a City is a Hammer melodrama from 1960 directed by Val Guest, mentioned here recently for his earlier The Day the Earth Caught Fire. This one doesn’t succeed quite as well, being a misguided attempt to do a film noir in Manchester. The poster tries to disguise the mundane reality by showing a city which looks more like New York than our small northern metropolis. But it’s worth watching for the great Stanley Baker and, like A Taste of Honey and other films with Manchester settings, you can have fun spotting familiar places in the background. If it’s Brit film noir you want, there’s only one place to go: Jules Dassin’s marvellous Night and the City.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Edward Judd, 1932–2009
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Czech film posters
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters