John Coulthart's Blog, page 23

Weekend links 727

Untitled (Hand-Shell) (1934) by Dora Maar.

• “The Secret Public…reads like the book he was born to write…and speaks to the taboo around homosexuality which the bravest pop stars did their best to dispel.” Alex Needham reviewing The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979) by Jon Savage. Anyone buying the book should also find themselves a copy of Savage’s Queer Noises compilation.

• At Dangerous Minds: Richard Metzger advises everyone to seek out Sion Sono’s 237-minute Love Exposure (2008), “Japan’s eroto-theosophical answer to the allegorical journeys of Alejandro Jodorowsky”.

• Prince – Sign O’ The Times (Live at Paisley Park 12/31/87). Pro-shot video of the last performance of the Sign O’ The Times tour, with a unique contribution from Miles Davis.

• Old music: Camembert Electrique by Gong. A rocking riposte to the stereotype of the group as a bunch of whimsical hippies.

• New music: Lambda by ZULI. This is another release on the Subtext label which I designed.

• The Devil in the Flesh: Patrick Clarke on David Sylvian’s Red Guitar at 40.

• Milky Way photographer of the year 2024.

• The Strange World of…Gastr del Sol.

• Jungle Guitar (1961) by The Palatons | Lunatic Guitar (1980) by Ippu-Do | Naive Guitar (1982) by Adrian Belew

Pin culture

In the mail this week, a pair of new pins from the pin-maker and seller who made the exquisite Future Days pin. (eBay shop | Etsy shop) The Ege Bamyasi pin isn’t as effective as the earlier Can design but I feel compelled to encourage the effort, especially when most of the designs from this maker are for punk or post-punk bands. I also enjoy the novelty of seeing things like this at all. The years when I was discovering German music via secondhand releases (late 70s, early 80s) coincided with a period when I spent a lot of time scouring local shops for unusual badges. Growing up in a holiday resort gave me access to a greater quantity of cultural ephemera than you’d find in nearby towns, yet during this time I never saw any badges related to the German groups, not even Kraftwerk. As for prestige enamel items, you seldom saw these outside concert merchandise stalls where hardcore fans could be relied upon to pay more for their memorabilia.

Official pins from Hawkwind, Magma and Ghost Box Records.

The recent emergence of a cottage industry devoted to enamel pins means that these aren’t the only such items you’ll find on eBay or Etsy, but most of the others I’ve seen are either substandard (like another attempt to rework the Future Days cover) or are from North American sellers who want you to pay £25 or more for postage. Nein danke. But wherever the pin makers are located they all face the problem of how to create something related to groups who didn’t have a graphic identity that can easily be converted to metal and enamel. Where Can are concerned you could at least do this with their name as it appears on the Tago Mago cover. (Maybe such a thing exists already?) And I was amused to see that one pin maker has managed to reduce Manuel Göttsching’s chessboard cover for E2–E4 to pin size. What I’d really like now is a Neu! pin in black and white like the design on the cover of Neu! 75. Here’s hoping…

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Can pin
• Rock shirts

The art of Yuhan Ito (1882–1951)

Sacred Bridge in Nikko.

Sunsets, mist and moonlight. Yuhan Ito painted watercolours devoted to these subjects, a technique which he endeavoured to replicate in the less subtle print medium seen here. Those remarkable nebulous effects were achieved by avoiding the use of a black line-block although darker lines are still used to emphasise foregound shapes. Ito wasn’t a very prolific artist—you won’t find many more prints than this handful from the 1930s—but what there is of his work stands out immediately from that of his contemporaries.

Pagoda at Nikko.

Ukimi-do in Biwa Lake.

Boats in the Sunset Glow.

Sarusawa Pond.

Mt. Fuji from Tagonoura Bay.

Misty Moon at Miyajima.

Kiyomizu Temple.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Eight Views of Cherry Blossom
• Fourteen views of Himeji Castle
• One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji
• The art of Kato Teruhide, 1936–2015
• Fifteen ghosts and a demon
• Hiroshi Yoshida’s India
• The art of Hasui Kawase, 1883–1957
• The art of Paul Binnie
• Nineteen views of Zen gardens
• Ten views of the Itsukushima Shrine
• Charles Bartlett’s prints
• Sixteen views of Meoto Iwa
• Waves and clouds
• Yoshitoshi’s ghosts
• Japanese moons
• The Hell Courtesan
• Nocturnes

Weekend links 726

Verticals on Wide Avenues from The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929) by Hugh Ferriss.

• Megalopolis, the futuristic epic written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, now has a trailer and a handful of mixed reviews. I recall Coppola saying years ago that he was the kind of director who would happily make films in any genre, science fiction included. I’ve wondered ever since what a full-on Coppola SF film might look like. (Captain EO and Peggy Sue Got Married don’t count). Now it seems we’re about to find out. Given his previous missteps I remain sceptical yet curious about this one. I’ve avoided his output since Bram Stoker’s Dracula but I’m still happy to see him being so ambitious while retaining his independence.

• And RIP Roger Corman who Coppola remembered as “my first boss, task-master, teacher, mentor, and role model. There is nothing about the practical matter of making movies I didn’t learn by being his assistant.” Related: It rained on the Sunday: a career interview with Roger Corman by Matthew Thrift.

• At Retro-Forteana: Fortean-themed music, from opera to metal. A difficult subject for a such short post, as the author admits. I’m amused to see one of my Hawkwind album covers in the list although the album itself doesn’t seem very Fortean to me.

• “Did you know that, if things had gone differently, the Pompidou Centre could have been an egg?” Oliver Wainwright on architecture that might have been.

• At Cartoon Brew: A closer look at great animated title sequences. I deplore the omission of Richard Williams’ titles for The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968).

• At Public Domain Review: Love Spells and Deadly Shrieks: Illustrations of Mandrakes (ca. 650–1927).

• At Wormwoodiana: “That Strange Little Book”: Ding Dong Bell by Walter de la Mare.

• At Unquiet Things: The latest collection of Intermittent Eyeball Fodder.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – May 2024 by Ambientblog.

• Mandrake Root (1968) by Deep Purple | Mandrake (1975) by Gong | The Mandrake’s Hymn (2019) by Earth

Four short films by Vince Collins

The expressions “psychedelic” and “surreal” are often so casually applied that they lose any useful definition, but in the case of these early films by American animator Vince Collins “psychedelic surrealism” is an accurate description. All have somehow managed to evade my weirdness radar until now, despite being superior examples of the endlessly mutating dream-landscape which animation can do so well. The last of them, Malice in Wonderland, is a breathless run through Lewis Carroll scenarios which Collins made in collaboration with his wife, Miwako Collins. That punning title has been overused in the music world but the pair ought to be given sole ownership of it, their bad-trip film is the most grotesquely nightmarish reworking of Alice themes that I’ve seen.

Vince Collins’ YouTube channel contains many more recent works done with computer animation. The hand-drawn films are more to my taste but it’s good to see him still being active and creative.

Gilgamish (1973).

Euphoria (1974).

Fantasy (1976).

Malice in Wonderland (1982). (Or avoid YouTube’s adults-only policy by going here.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The groovy video look

The Atropine Tree

My latest piece of cover art is for Doug Murano’s new imprint, Bad Hand Books. I designed the cover for the Behold! collection that Doug edited a few years ago, a book which included the author of the present tale of Gothic horror, Sarah Read:

Aldane Manor is an ancient home of low-beamed ceilings, crumbling walls, poison gardens, and deadly secrets. When Alrick Aldane returns to his family’s house, he expects to simply inherit his father’s land and title. Instead, he discovers that he is also heir to the property’s disturbing history—one full of witchcraft—and a ghostly mystery that could condemn him to a fate worse than death.

The cover for this one had a specific brief which required a family tree presented as two flowering stalks of Atropa belladonna or Deadly Nightshade, with both stalks growing out of a blue-glass poison bottle. Other details follow from the author’s mood board samples: hollow-eyed ghost children and loops of hair. The medical tone of these elements sent me looking at old pharmacy labels which is what I’ve used as a basis for the general design. Old pharmacy labels and medical documents were often just as fancy as any other 19th-century print designs so all the fine details around the title lettering are what printers referred to as “combination ornaments”, tiny typographic embellishments that form detailed patterns when pieced together. The ones seen here have been copied by hand from an old page design. You can scan these things from books, or try working up a vector shape from an Internet Archive scan, but the results are never as sharp or as clear as those you create yourself. For anyone who runs across this post hoping to find a good collection of combination ornaments, the MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan type catalogue of 1892 is a favourite of mine.

The Atropine Tree will be published in July 2024.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• BEHOLD! Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders

Weekend links 725

Springtime in Paris (1923) by Georg Kretzschmar.

• I’ve been asked to mention that the tribute book put together for Alan Moore’s 70th birthday, Alan Moore: Portraits of an Extraordinary Gentleman, is still available. As before, the book features contributions from many well-known comic artists, a foreword by Iain Sinclair, and this piece of my own.

• “I never posted any lecture of mine on Tumblr, even though Tumblr would seem to have plenty of elbow-room for hour-long, learned, European public lectures (with many lecture slides).” Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling.

• Reading the Signs: John Kenny in conversation with Mark Valentine about Mark’s new collection Lost Estates.

There remains something suspect about blotter, a stain that is both a blessing and a curse. As the blotter producer Matthew Rick, who started selling sheets as non-dipped ‘art’ collectables at festivals in 1998, puts it: ‘[B]lotter is the last underground art form that’s going to stay underground, simply because you’re creating something that looks like and functions like a felony.’ In other words, blotter is ontologically illicit; it is, as Rick says, ‘drug paraphernalia by its very existence’.

Erik Davis (again) on LSD and the cultural history of the printed blotter

• At Colossal: Uncanny phenomena derail domestic bliss in Marisa Adesman’s luminous paintings.

• Standing stones, urban hellscapes and male nudes: Andrew Pulver on Derek Jarman’s Super-8 films.

• “ [breaking news] An anomaly on earth has brought the cats to over 150 meters. Please be patient.”

• At We Are The Mutants: Alien Renaissance: An interview with illustrator Bob Fowke.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…René Crevel My Body and I (1926).

• At Public Domain Review: The Little Journal of Rejects (1896).

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Sandhouse.

• RIP Steve Albini.

• Sandoz In The Rain (1970) by Amon Düül II | Bon Voyage Au LSD (2001) by Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. | Careful With That Sheet Of Acid, Eugene (2019) by Jenzeits

The Debutante, a film by Elizabeth Hobbs

The Debutante is an 8-minute animated adaptation of a short story by Leonora Carrington, a tale of bestial havoc wreaked by a hyena on an aristocratic dinner-dance. This wish-fulfilling fantasy, which Carrington wrote in the 1930s, is one of the author’s more popular pieces of fiction. The story has been anthologised many times, notably by Angela Carter in 1986 who included it in Wayward Girls & Wicked Women: An Anthology of Stories. Elizabeth Hobbs illustrates the piece with hand-painted rotoscoping, a technique which many people will associate with the Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds sequence in Yellow Submarine although this is by no means the earliest or only example of the form. It’s a useful process for stories which require the blending of the fantastic with the mundane.

Another hyena encountering the English aristocracy may be found in Esmé by Saki, the first story in his essential Chronicles of Clovis collection. Saki shared Leonora Carrington’s anarchic impulses when presented with ennervating upper-class rituals. Enough of his stories feature wild animals and eruptions of chaos in country houses that I wonder whether there was any Saki influence upon The Debutante. I’d guess not—Leonora Carrington possessed more than enough wayward imagination of her own—but whatever the answer, Saki remained fascinated (or appalled) by the aristocracy and their absurdities, while Leonora followed her debutante heroine to a welcome exile from their world.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist survival kit
• Leonora Carrington and the House of Fear

Symmetry, a film by Philip Stapp

Symmetry (1966) is a PIF (public information film) by Philip Stapp (1908–2003), an American animator who made a number of other films in this vein while also working on group projects like the Halas and Batchelor adaptation of Animal Farm. Orson Welles used to compare actors to cherry pickers: they all follow the harvest. The same might be said about animators, many of whom have to work on advertising films instead of any personal projects they may be nurturing. PIFs would seem to offer more creative freedom to judge by this example which wordlessly demonstrates different types of symmetry using animated figures. Stapp animated the film with Jean Williams. The music was by Gene Forrell.

Spell Blanket

Design, as before, by Julian House.

The trees full of new leaves
offering green tears to the earth
to be picked and split
for the tell of green of
what’s fair and unfair
and between the twigs, cassette tape drapes
his silent songs let melody
loose in layers of heartache

The trees are indeed full of new leaves just now. The lyrics for I Want To Be Fine, one of the songs on Spell Blanket, twine into a different shape the words which had earlier appeared as half of Royal Chant on the Broadcast and Focus Group album, Witch Cults Of The Radio Age. Spell Blanket has been a delightful surprise, or a pair of surprises, the first being the CD packaging which emulates the facsimile vinyl sleeves that the Japanese love so much. If people are going to keep releasing CDs then this is the way to go. As for the music, demos are seldom very promising material, the kinds of things that appear as bonus tracks on reissued discs. I’d have bought this one anyway but didn’t expect it was going to be so good or sound so finished in comparison to the demos offered by Stereolab, for example, on their recent album reissues. James Cargill apparently took his time preparing the material for Spell Blanket and its companion collection, the yet to be released Distant Call. His care shows in the sequencing which balances very short sketches with longer compositions to create a collection that feels closer to a proper album than I expected. The general tone is light and unavoidably poignant when you know that these are among the last songs we’ll hear from Trish Keenan. Will Salmon reviewed the album for The Quietus.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Through The Gates Of Yesterday