Chris Marker – Page 5 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 169

Cover illustration by Gray Morrow, 1967. One of the less exploitative examples from a collection of hippy book covers.

• Ten Photographs by Alain Resnais: Mise en scène of Memory, Aesthetics of Silence by Ehsan Khoshbakht. In the comments to that post someone shows an old Penguin book with cover photos by Chris Marker. This confirms that the “C. Marker” whose name I found on the back of another Penguin book was indeed Monsieur Chat.

• There’s more (there’s always more…): Cornelius Castoriadis interviewed by Chris Marker in 1989, the complete footage of an interview edited down for Marker’s TV series L’héritage de la chouette (The Owl’s Legacy). Watch the series itself at YouTube.

• “A generation of innovators want to change the way we have sex and consume porn, but Google, Apple, and Amazon won’t let them,” says Andrea Garcia-Vargas. Related: Sam Biddle on how Tumblr is pushing porn into an internet sex ghetto.

• Mix of the week: the Chop Quietus Mix, “a jagged journey all the way from Broadcast to the uneasy thrum of Suicide, kosmische flavours from Popol Vuh and Cluster, Alexander Robotnik and many more.”

• Strange Flowers looked back at The Student of Prague: “the first art film, the first horror film and the first auteur film”, and now a century old.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins talked to animator Barry Purves about the pleasures and difficulties of creating animated films for adults.

• Mazzy Star released a song, California, from their new album which arrives in September. Can’t wait.

• Suzanne Ciani, “American Delia Derbyshire of the Atari Generation” explains synthesizers, 1980.

• Christer Strömholm‘s photos of Parisian transgender communities in the 1950s.

• What are These Giant Concrete Arrows Across the American Landscape?

• How Kiyoshi Izumi built the psych ward of the future by dropping acid.

• Alan Moore: The revolution will be crowd-funded.

• Fuck Yeah Mazzy Star

• Suzanne Ciani: Lixiviation | The First Wave—Birth Of Venus (1982) | The Eighth Wave (1986)

Weekend links 123

La Perspective Curieuse (1663) by Jean François Nicéron. From Curious Perspectives at BibliOdyssey.

• 1612 Underture is a forthcoming album by The Eccentronic Research Council and Maxine Peake which extends the electronics + occult concept to encompass Kraftwerk and the Pendle Witches. The Quietus has a review of their album, and an interview and report about a recent live performance (I missed the latter, unfortunately), while the Guardian’s interview with the splendid Ms Peake reveals that “musically, her tastes range from Japanese black metal, garage rock and folk, to techno and psychobilly.” The famous Lancashire witches also happen to be the subject of Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel, The Daylight Gate.

• Yet more Marker: The Owl’s Legacy: Chris Marker’s 13-Part Search for Western Culture’s Foundations in Ancient Greece, and J. Hoberman on The Lost Futures of Chris Marker.

• Dr Oliver Sacks talks about how hallucinogenic drugs helped him empathize with his patients.

Paulo Coelho’s ill-judged Joyce-bashing has made him a butt of scorn this week, but he’s a safe target because, with books that multitask a little too openly as self-help manuals, he’s not so clubbable. Unlike, say, Ian McEwan, who not-that-differently declared against “the dead hand of modernism“, for all the world as if the dominant literary mode in post-war England was Steinian experimentation or some Albion Oulipo, against which young Turks hold out with limpidly observed interiority, decodable metaphors, strained middle-class relationships and eternal truths of the human condition(TM).

China Miéville on the always contentious future of the novel.

• The Foliate Head: a new book by Marly Youmans with illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

• Hysterical Literature: Session Two: Alicia reads from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

• Dreaming in Dirigibles: The Airship Postcard Albums of Lord Ventry.

• The Art of the Literary Fake (with Violin) by Jeff VanderMeer.

• RIP Neil Armstrong, first human on the Moon.

• Macho Man: Morgan Meis on Robert Hughes.

• Book covers by Hannes Bok.

• This Is Now!

• Squid Moth

• Lunar Rhapsody (1947) by Dr Samuel J. Hoffman | Lunar Musick Suite (1976) by Steve Hillage | Back Side Of The Moon (Steve Hillage’s Under Water Deep Space Remix) (1991) by The Orb.

Weekend links 121

Title spread for The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011) edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.

I was surprised this week to find myself nominated as Best Artist in the World Fantasy Awards. The results will be announced at the World Fantasy Convention in November. Among the books nominated for Best Anthology is the Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities for which I provided title page designs and some illustrations. Editors Ann & Jeff are well-represented (and ought to win for their landmark The Weird anthology), and I’m pleased to see Mark Valentine receive a nod for his excellent Wormwood magazine. Mark and Roger Dobson published my first Lovecraft adaptation, The Haunter of the Dark, in a large-format edition under their Caermaen imprint in 1988.

I remember having a conversation with my father about it. I told him what I’d really have liked to find, in my exhaustive search of the canon, was a gay superhero. You know: fucking dudes, saving the world. Never mind the fact that superheroes, with their notoriously contour-hugging apparel, are usually assumed gay by default. I wanted something that had existed, something from history. My father considered my criteria.

“I think what you want is Gore Vidal.”

Henry Giardina on Gore Vidal’s Bully Republic at the Paris Review.

• Appreciations and memorials for the late Gore Vidal continue to surface: “He was punk rock with a traditional, smooth exterior. But there was nothing traditional about him, not really. He defied singular category,” says Aaron Tilford at Lambda Literary. “Jokes course through Vidal’s entropy-heavy commentaries like a warm, reviving current. They, more than the barbs to which they form a counterpoint, are what make his essays a continuing pleasure to read,” says “J.C.” at the TLS.

• “Winterson’s opposition to strict realism is less an artistic critique than a cultural one. She uses the term ‘realism’ to describe an entrenched way of viewing the world, which it is the writer’s duty to challenge.” Hannah Tennant-Moore on Jeanette Winterson at n+1.

• The Ghosts of Bush by Robin The Fog: “A final hauntological perambulation around the hidden corners of Bush House, Aldwych, London, June 2012”.

• “For everything that is not shown, the filmmaker counts on the power of imagination of his viewers.” Lebbeus Woods on Chris Marker and La Jetée.

• Joseph Burnett on “Rainbow Ambiguity: Defying conservatism in mainstream LGBT culture”.

• Leigh Brackett book and magazine covers at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• BLDGBLOG visited the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London.

• Stilled Life: A collection of photography by Thom Ayres.

• Underground subversion: Stickers on the Central Line.

• Andrei Codrescu on five favourite Fantastical Tales.

• Vangelis performs an analogue synth freakout for Spanish TV in 1982 | Oro Opus Alter, a track from the forthcoming album by Ufomammut | New World, a track from the forthcoming album by The Irrepressibles. Can’t wait.

Weekend links 120

• More Nabokov: The University Poem by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Dmitri Nabokov and read by Ralph Fiennes. And Breitensträter – Paolino, a short story from Nabokov’s Russian period that’s only just been translated into English.

• More LSD: “For decades, the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD. But for one longtime, elite researcher, the promise of mind-blowing revelations was just too tempting,” says Tim Doody.

• More Marker: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans soleil by Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Revolutionary Cinema of Chris Marker by Patrick Higgins, and Chris Marker’s Faces by Brian Dillon.

• “A private realm, not easily penetrated, from which emerged music that would give rise to so much of the music we know today.” Guy Horton on Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang studio.

• A narrative from the swamps of Borneo: BLDGBLOG on the mephitic enigma of London’s sewers.

• At Coilhouse: The Incredibly True Adventures of Gerda Wegener and Lili Elbe.

• “What some people call idleness is often the best investment,” says Ed Smith.

• Book cover design: Rick Poynor on Pierre Faucheux and Le Livre de Poche.

• Metaphysical psychedelia: Erik Davis on Rick Griffin: Superstar.

• Diamanda Galás discusses her 13 favourite albums.

• Rudy Rucker’s Memories of Kurt Gödel.

• The Men of the Folies Bergère

• Olympics or gay porn?

• Smoketography

• The songs of bowhead whales | Another Moon Song (2009) by Espers | One Thousand Birds (2012) by Six Organs of Admittance.

Steinlen’s cats revisited

Chris Marker’s feline obsession was oft-remarked: cats feature regularly in his films, and in later years he’d often send a picture of a cat to anyone requesting a portrait photo. The Immemory CD-ROM features his cartoon avatar/companion/alter-ego Guillaume, a character who later manifested in three dimensions in Marker’s corner of Second Life.

All of which had me thinking about another Parisian cat obsessive, artist Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859–1923). I’ve written about Steinlen’s cats before, one of which, his Chat Noir poster of 1896, is now a permanent fixture in the tourist shops of the city. Parisians are probably sick of the sight of that particular animal although I imagine Marker would have liked Steinlen’s other cats which range from fine art studies to cartoony sketches. All the examples here are from L’oeuvre gravé et lithographié de Steinlen, a catalogue of the artist’s print work from 1913. The song Ronde Des Marmites concerns the grey cats of Montmartre. At the end of the post there’s an other nod to Monsieur Marker (and Edward Lear) with a trio of Steinlen owls.

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