Kenneth Anger – Page 12 – { feuilleton }

Street Fair, 1959

The street is upper Grant Avenue, San Francisco, seven minutes of local colour captured on silent 16mm film by Edward Silverstone Taylor:

This edited Ektachrome home movie with professional titles documents a 1959 street fair, upper Grant Avenue, San Francisco—the center of Beat culture. The film includes shots of filmmaker Dion Vigne and his wife Loreon, artist and occultist Marjorie Cameron, and artist Wallace Berman, displaying and selling their art works.

The presence of Marjorie Cameron (below) is what fascinates in these quarters, recognisable thanks to her red hair and the distinctive profile seen when she played the Scarlet Woman in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome five years earlier. You also see what appear to be a couple of her paintings. The street fair looks pretty bohemian for the late 50s but a glance at Anthony Stern’s frenetic San Francisco short from a decade later shows a much wilder place. (Via Dangerous Minds.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• San Francisco by Anthony Stern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again

Weekend links 153

Scarfolk, as was noted here last month, is a home from home, especially if you grew up in the 1970s. The mayor of the rabies-afflicted town, Richard Littler, talked to Creative Review about his unheimlich design project.

• Ensemble Pearl, an album stream of “cosmic psychedelic space-doom minimal drone soundscapes” by Atsuo, William Herzog, Eyvind Kang, Michio Kurihara, Stephen O’Malley and Timba Harris.

• At Dangerous Minds: Louise Huebner’s Seduction Through Witchcraft (1969), an album of occult instruction with an electronic soundtrack by Louis & Bebe Barron.

My apartment is teeming with unfinished books. They cover my desk, coffee table, and nightstand. They sit two rows deep on my bookshelves. There they remain, neglected, misunderstood, unappreciated, still with the last read page firmly marked with a piece of paper, a subscription card, or a proper bookmark: a reminder of my stagnation, my failure to engage.

Gabrielle at The Contextual Life on The Secret Lives of Unfinished Books.

• Hauntological mix of the week: Electronic Music For Schools by Pattern & Shape. Related: Pye Corner Audio live at Cafe OTO, March 2013.

• Tumblrs of the week: Des Hommes et des Chatons, Remarkably Retro, The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, and Shit My Cats Read.

• Icons: An exhibition of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood memorabilia, and other material from his home, at Sprüth Magers, London.

Hooray for Gay, an exhibition of pre-Stonewall images at Boo-Hooray, NYC.

• The Servant, “a 60s masterwork that hides its homosexuality in the shadows”.

• The Cosmic Bicycle, collages by Wilfried Sätty made into a short film.

• Photos of the derelict R Power Plant in Pennsylvania.

• 1913: The Year of Modernism

• RIP Richard Griffiths

• Wildspot (2005) by Belbury Poly | Now Ends The Beginning (2011) by The Advisory Circle | Wildspot (2012) by The Advisory Circle | Now Ends The Beginning (2012) by Belbury Poly

Brush of Baphomet by Kenneth Anger

Another recent piece of Angeriana, and another short video sketch, Brush of Baphomet (2009) is a kind of addendum to Anger’s The Man We Want to Hang (2002), being a further look at Aleister Crowley’s paintings. The title refers to one of Crowley’s many occult names. As a painter Crowley’s technical ability was almost nil but that never dissuaded him from trying, and I’m sure I’m not alone in finding his work to have a naive malevolence. Anger has had a lifelong interest in Crowley’s paintings, famously journeying in 1955 to the abandoned villa in Cefalù, Sicily, where he cleaned whitewash from the walls to reveal the remains of the murals Crowley had painted there.

The music in Brush of Baphomet is a surprising choice, an extract from the second part of Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon (1967). Anger’s musical selections have never been random ones so you have to wonder why this particular score. Was it because the electronics are reminiscent of the Moog drones Mick Jagger supplied for Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969)? Subotnick’s title is borrowed from The Song of Wandering Aengus by WB Yeats, a poet for whom Crowley (also a poet) had little affection. In Crowley’s occult novel Moonchild, Yeats appears as “Gates”, a mediocre painter (yes, well…), who ends up being killed in an act of magical revenge. Crowley must have been mortified a few years later when Yeats was awarded a Nobel Prize.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Anger Sees Red
• Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon
• Lucifer Rising posters
• Externsteine panoramas
• Missoni by Kenneth Anger
• Anger in London
• Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken
• Edmund Teske
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again
• Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Anger Sees Red

A video sketch from 2004 in which Kenneth Anger manages to give us in four minutes some familiar preoccupations: Rudolph Valentino, occult symbolism, and a hunky guy in the form of the sunbathing gentleman named Red who provides the focus of the piece. The copy on YouTube is labelled “restricted work print” so this may not be its final state.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon
• Lucifer Rising posters
• Externsteine panoramas
• Missoni by Kenneth Anger
• Anger in London
• Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken
• Edmund Teske
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again
• Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon

Nigel Finch was a key member of the team of producers and directors working on the BBC’s Arena arts documentaries throughout their golden run during the 1980s and 1990s. The films he directed himself—among them studies of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, and a history of the Chelsea Hotel in New York—gave him an opportunity to push some gay content into the TV schedules at a time when Britain’s gay population were seen as enough of a public threat to be legislated against. Some of that proselytising impulse can be found in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (1991), an hour-long documentary which alternates the life and work of the filmmaker with readings and enactments of the lurid episodes recounted in Anger’s scandal anthologies, Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II. Finch at one point asks whether Fireworks, the first film in Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle, should be regarded as a pioneering piece of gay cinema; Anger’s says he’s happy if people take it that way but says little else about its evident homoerotic atmosphere. He remains as resistant to identity politics as he’s always been. (See the unauthorised biography by Bill Landis for details.)

Between the readings and interview sections Finch shows Anger being chauffeured around Beverly Hills in a hearse which stops occasionally at some locus of bygone scandal. Most of the Anger anecdotes are familiar ones from subsequent interviews but there is a bonus for Angerphiles with the appearance at the end of Marianne Faithfull who talks a little about their relationship before singing Boulevard Of Broken Dreams. ~~The picture quality of this YouTube copy could be better but it’s watchable enough.~~

Update: That YouTube link went private so I’ve updated the links to a better copy at the Internet Archive.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lucifer Rising posters
• Externsteine panoramas
• Missoni by Kenneth Anger
• Anger in London
• Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken
• Edmund Teske
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again
• Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally