John Martyn, 1948–2009

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John Martyn on stage in 1975 with ubiquitous spliff.

Given a choice, I’d probably pick his 1977 opus, One World, as a favourite although everything he did in the 1970s is worth hearing. Great songs and great collaborators, especially bassist Danny Thompson. His use of echo and volume pedal to extend the range of his guitar gave him a unique sound, closer to Manuel Göttsching’s Inventions for Electric Guitar than anything in the folk world where he started out. The last song on One World is the marvellous nocturnal ballad Small Hours which features a muted drum machine, a Steve Winwood keyboard solo, and flock of Canadian geese. There’s a great live performance of that here.

Cosmic Zoom

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Cosmic Zoom (1968) is a short, semi-animated film by Eva Szasz, one of the many great shorts financed by the National Film Board of Canada. When I wrote about this in 2006 there was only a low-res version available for viewing on the NFB site while Powers of Ten (1977), a very similar film by Charles and Ray Eames, could be seen on YouTube. Three years on and Powers of Ten has disappeared behind a registration wall but Cosmic Zoom can now be seen in higher quality on the newly relaunched NFB site. A shame about the annoyingly obtrusive onscreen logo but it’s worth browsing the site for more of their excellent animations, not least the work of Norman McLaren. The time when these shorts would regularly turn up on UK TV are long gone so it’s good to know that they’re now available for viewing any time we wish.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Norman McLaren
• Cosmic Zooms

Ma Petite Ville

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A typically splendid fin de siècle cover design by Léon Rudnicki for an 1898 volume of childhood memoirs by Jean Lorrain (1855–1906). The author was a flamboyantly homosexual poet, novelist and journalist whose addiction to ether and other excesses ended his life at the age of 50. Philippe Jullian is quoted on glbtq.com as saying Lorrain was “truly, at the fin de siècle, Sodom’s ambassador to Paris”. Jullian, as I never tire of repeating, wrote the best book on the Symbolist period, Dreamers of Decadence (1971), and that quote reminds me that I ought to track down a copy of his Lorrain biography.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Macho men

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An ad campaign which can’t possibly be ignored given the present train of obsessions. Andrés Ramírez photographs a collection of tight packages for underwear manufacturer, Macho. I’m not sure what a group of Roman gladiators would be doing sparring in what appears to be a Bollywood boudoir like the one in Moulin Rouge! but, ya know…underwear and swords… Consistency is the hobgoblin of fevered imaginations.

Via Queerty.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive