John Coulthart's Blog, page 25

Providence on DVD

Providence (1977). Polish poster by Andrzej Klimowski.

After mentioning Alain Resnais’s Providence in the Sibylle Ruppert post I tried searching eBay again to see if any of the long-deleted French DVDs of the film could be found for under £100. This has been at the top of my DVD/blu-ray wants list for some time even though I’ve had an illicit DVD rip for a couple of years. I like having hard copies of favourite films, however, and this particular one has been bizarrely, stubbornly unavailable for far too long. Is it streaming somewhere? Probably. That may be fine for you but I don’t use those services.

Anyway, there were no French DVDs at all but there are now plenty of these, a new Italian DVD which is almost the same as the French one—Italian/English audio tracks rather than French/English—with the same bonus feature about the making of the film. (French or Italian, the film was shot in English with a British and American cast.) I could enthuse at length about Providence but it’s one of those films that’s probably best seen without knowing too much in advance. Last Year at Marienbad is the film for which Alain Resnais will always be remembered but Providence is very clever and more fun to watch. Jan Dawson in Time Out described it as “a haunted, haunting journey through the corridors of the unconscious mind…a Freudian ballet that is also pure cinema.” The original screenings in France were accompanied by Scarabus, a very strange animated short by Gérald Frydman.

So that’s another one to tick off the list, although I’d still prefer a blu-ray edition; the sombre photography by Ricardo Aronovich deserves as much. Meanwhile, I think another Resnais film, Je t’aime, Je t’aime, may now be at the top of the wants list. Either that or a collection of all the short films made by Anthony Balch in the 1960s, although I’m not expecting these to surface any time soon.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Art on film: Je t’aime, Je t’aime
• Art on film: Providence
• Marienbad hauntings
• Les Statues Meurent Aussi, a film by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais
• Toute la mémoire du monde, a film by Alain Resnais

The Japanese Sandman, a film by Ed Buhr

I upgraded my DVD of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch to blu-ray recently. The film is one of my favourites in the Cronenberg oeuvre even though its connection to the novel is minimal at best. After watching it again I was thinking (not for the first time) that one way to adapt either Naked Lunch or any of the books in the “Nova Trilogy”—The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express—would be to commission ten or twenty very different film-makers to adapt portions of the novel in whatever manner they chose. The resulting short films could either be run in sequence or cut together to make a meta-film which, if nothing else, would be closer to the disjointed structure of William Burroughs’ early novels than the semi-biographical narrative that Cronenberg delivered .

Which brings us to The Japanese Sandman, a 12-minute film made by Ed Buhr in 2008 which turned up recently on YouTube. Buhr’s short is a dramatisation of passages from the letters that Burroughs wrote to Allen Ginsberg in 1953, in which Burroughs recounts his experiences in Panama while searching for the yage vine, a plant which yields the hallucinogen known as ayahuasca. Narrator John Fleck is a decent Burroughs mimic (although the real Burroughs pronounced “Panama” with a distinct drawl at the end, more like “Panamawww”), and since Burroughs’ own words provide the text of the piece the film is closer to Burroughs’ books than many other short films. Black-and-white scenes in Panama rooms alternate with a colour sequence where Burroughs recalls a doomed love affair with a boy in the St Louis of the 1930s. It’s gratifying to see someone draw attention to an aspect of Burroughs’ writing that’s often ignored, the persistent thread of melancholy and regret for lost time/lost people which runs through so many of his novels. It’s a side of the fiction that would also have to be accounted for in any longer adaptation of Burroughs’ work.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

Marian Zazeela album covers

Drift Study 4:37:40-5:09:50 PM 5 VIII 68 NYC (1968) by La Monte Young.

One of the links at the weekend was to the late Marian Zazeela’s poster designs of the 1960s and 70s. She also designed a number of album covers around the same time, mostly for recordings by her husband, La Monte Young, and for associated groups and individuals like Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music—in which Zazeela played the tambura—and raga master Pandit Pran Nath. Some of the albums shown here haven’t always been easy to find thanks to Young’s refusal to reissue his earlier recordings (although he did relent recently and allow digital reissues), but the music has nevertheless been influential. Artists as diverse as the early Velvet Underground, many electronic musicians, and metal bands such as Earth and Sunn O))) owe debts to Young’s compositions.

31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 – 3:11 AM The Volga Delta (1969) by La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela.

This is about Marian Zazeela’s cover designs, however, not her husband’s music, designs which are immediately recognisable for Zazeela’s calligraphy and the abstract decorative elements which resemble tiles or fabric prints. The calligraphy is the consistent element, present even when the cover is mostly photographic. This degree of consistent aesthetic attention is unusual in the world of avant-garde composition where the packaging of a composer’s recordings is often little better than the perfunctory appearance of classical albums. Without Marian Zazeela’s involvement it’s unlikely that La Monte Young’s albums would look as good as they do.

Ragas (1971) by Pandit Pran Nath.

Dream House 78’17” (1974) by La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, The Theatre Of Eternal Music (front cover).

Dream House 78’17” (1974) by La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, The Theatre Of Eternal Music (back cover).

Ragas Of Morning & Night (1986) by Pandit Pran Nath.

The Well-Tuned Piano 81 X 25 6:17:50 – 11:18:59 PM NYC (1987) by La Monte Young.

The Second Dream Of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From The Four Dreams Of China (1991) by La Monte Young.

The Tamburas Of Pandit Pran Nath (1999) by La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela.

Midnight (Raga Malkauns) (2002) by Pandit Pran Nath.

The Theatre Of Eternal Music String Ensemble (2007) by La Monte Young.

In Augsburg (no date) by La Monte Young & The Forever Bad Blues Band.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The poster art of Marian Zazeela

Weekend links 720

The Poet and the Siren (1893) by Gustave Moreau.

• “Some books become talismans. Because they are strange, wildly different to the common run of literature; because they are scarce, and only a few precious copies are known to exist; because, perhaps, they liberate by transgressing the moral limits of the day; because their authors are lonely, elusive visionaries; because, sometimes, there is an inexplicable glamour about the book, so that its readers seem to be lured into a preternatural reverie. This book possesses all those attributes.” Mark Valentine in an introduction he wrote for a 1997 reprint of The Book of Jade (1901) by David Park Barnitz. The book’s author was an American writer who died at the age of 23 after publishing this single volume, a collection of poetry inspired by his favourite Decadent writers. Praise from HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Thomas Ligotti has since helped maintain the book’s reputation. The Book of Jade turned up recently at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts. Also the home of an increasingly eclectic list of publications.

• At n+1: The Dam and the Bomb by Walker Mimms, a fascinating essay about the entangling of Cormac McCarthy’s personal history with his novels which makes a few connections I didn’t expect to see. Also a reminder that I’ve yet to read McCarthy’s last two books. Soon…

• The latest installation from teamLab is Resonating Life which Continues to Stand, an avenue of illuminated eggs on the Hong Kong waterfront.

• At The Wire: Symphony of sirens: an interview with Aura Satz, David Toop, Elaine Mitchener, Evelyn Glennie and Raven Chacon.

• At Unquiet Things: The Art of Darkness presents The Sleeper May Awaken: Stephen Mackey’s Unrestful Realms.

• RIP Marian Zazeela. There’s a page here with a selection of her beautiful calligraphic poster designs.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Tomona Matsukawa’s realistic paintings reconstruct fragments of everyday life.

• At Public Domain Review: Thom Sliwowski on The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997).

• Trinity (2024), a short film by Thomas Blanchard. There’s a lot more at his YouTube channel.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Lotte Reiniger’s Day.

• Sirens (1984) by Michael Stearns | Sirens (1988) by Daniel Lanois & Brian Eno | Siren Song (2009) by Bat For Lashes

Sibylle Ruppert: Frenzy of the Visible

La Bible du Mal (1978).

I’m late to this but it’s worth passing on the news about an exhibition of paintings, drawings and collages by Sibylle Ruppert (1942–2011) which is currently running at Project Native Informant in London. Ruppert’s art has been mentioned here many times, she’s one of my favourite artists, so it’s great to see her receiving more recognition, and in London as well, not Paris as I would have expected. I ought to go and see this but finishing the Bumper Book of Magic book took longer than I expected so I’ve had scheduled work backed up which I’m dealing with at the moment. I also don’t fancy taking another chance with Britain’s failing rail network, not when the last experience a few weeks ago was a bad one. But if you’re closer to London I’d recommend this exhibition which Artforum says is Ruppert’s first solo show in the UK.

Ma Soeur Mon Epouse (1975).

It’s tempting to connect the exhibition to this year’s 100th anniversary of Surrealism but I’ve never seen Ruppert’s name mentioned in Surrealist circles. She isn’t referred to in Penelope Rosemont’s wide-ranging Surrealist Women, for example, but then neither is Leonor Fini, possibly because Fini tried to maintain some distance from groups and movements. Was Ruppert the same? Without further information it’s hard to say. She was friends with HR Giger, however, and pictures by both artists may be seen in Providence (1977), the Alain Resnais film, as I noted a couple of years ago.

Frenzy of the Visible will be running until 20th April.

Le Sacrifice (1980).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Art on film: Providence
• Hans by Sibylle
• Sibylle Ruppert revisited
• Sibylle Ruppert, 1942–2011

Rare Opals

In the mail at the weekend, a pair of reissued Opal CDs that I didn’t expect to see any time soon, Happy Nightmare Baby (1987) and Early Recordings (1989). Opal were an American group who were active throughout the 1980s but they didn’t record very much, only releasing these two discs towards the end of their career. Both albums sank from sight in the early 1990s, and had been unavailable in any form when CD reissues were announced in late 2019 on guitarist David Roback’s own label, Salley Gardens. The reissues were withdrawn shortly before the release date, possibly as a result of Roback’s illness and subsequent death in February 2020. All of this is niche stuff but aficionados of the niche in question may like to know that I bought these new from an eBay (UK) seller for a fraction of the price you’ll pay at Discogs or elsewhere. (Here and here.) I’d seen reports that copies had been shipped before the cancellation was announced but hadn’t seen any on sale outside Discogs until last week. I’ve also seen suggestions that there might be bootlegs circulating but if these are boots then someone has managed to imitate the matrix numbers on the discs which I don’t think is an easy thing to do.

Opal is a group you seldom see mentioned today but plenty of people know the name of Mazzy Star, the group that Opal became after the departure of singer Kendra Smith in the late 1980s. David Roback was the key member, the link between Mazzy Star and the neo-psychedelia of the Los Angeles Paisley Underground which gave rise to both Opal and Roback’s other outlet, the Rain Parade. The Paisley Underground was never as psychedelic as I hoped it might be, only the Rain Parade could be classed as a bona fide psych band, but the groups associated with this loose scene—The Bangles, The Dream Syndicate, The Three O’Clock, et al—were all preoccupied with the music of the late 1960s, and of the early 70s via Neil Young and Alex Chilton. Opal followed the trend, being less oneiric than Mazzy Star would be, more concerned with reviving older musical styles than creating something new. Early Recordings, a collection of singles, EPs and other songs, owes less to psychedelia than it does to late-60s balladeering: guitar and vocals, lots of reverb and minimal percussion and keyboards. Kendra Smith, formerly of The Dream Syndicate, sings almost all the songs on both albums. The origin of the Opal sound may be found in the cover versions on Rainy Day (1984), a one-off album that David Roback recorded with Kendra Smith plus members of The Bangles, Rain Parade and The Three O’Clock. Lou Reed’s I’ll Be Your Mirror is the early Opal sound in miniature, especially in the version by Nico and The Velvet Underground which Roback emulates with Susanna Hoffs.

Happy Nightmare Baby has a rather prosaic monochrome cover but this is where the psychedelic rock comes to the fore, with Roback breaking out the fuzz box and wah-wah pedal to fashion a heavier sound that would later be heard on Mazzy Star songs like Ghost Highway. I said that only the Rain Parade warranted the psych label but Happy Nightmare Baby certainly gets there on songs like Magick Power and the slow explosion of Soul Giver, the latter being the closest that Opal get to the Rain Parade’s finest moment, No Easy Way Down. There’s also a touch of glam in the opening number, Rocket Machine, which harks back to the T. Rex of Electric Warrior. Happy Nightmare Baby is a fiery debut—and Opal could be even heavier live—but it’s one of those albums that you’d expect would be surpassed by later releases, instead of which all we have is Early Recordings*. The two albums are dissimilar enough to almost be the work of different groups; together they suggest that David Roback spent most of the 1980s trying to orient his music in a way that honoured his influences while also accommodating all his favoured modes of expression, from fuzz squall to languid blues to nocturnal drift. The first Mazzy Star album, She Hangs Brightly, is the place where the influences and intentions fused to create something new. And Roback found his ideal singer in Hope Sandoval, of course. Kendra Smith is okay but her voice can get monotonous over a whole album, she lacks Hope Sandoval’s mystique and emotional range. Opal were good but you can’t imagine many people wanting to cover their songs the way people have done with Mazzy Star. But then without Opal there might never have been a Mazzy Star. Niche stuff this may be but it doesn’t deserve to be buried for another thirty years.

* Or almost all. There is another album, Early Recordings Volume 2, a collection of unreleased songs and covers. But this has never been given an official release.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Balloon parade
• The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!
• Strange Things Are Happening, 1988–1990

Weekend links 719

The Decoy (1948) by Edith Rimmington.

• “Among other things, [Dalí’s] storyboards involved [Ingrid] Bergman turning into a statue that would then break up into ants.” Tim Jonze talks to film scholar John Russell Taylor about the storyboards for Alfred Hitchcock’s films, including the ones for Spellbound which Taylor found in a bric-a-brac sale.

• “Of all the pop acts that proliferated in the early 80s, it was Soft Cell who retained punk’s sharp, provocative edges.” Matthew Lindsay on 40 years of Soft Cell’s This Last Night In Sodom.

• Coming soon from White Rabbit books: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds.

Anathema to many philosophical systems, or perhaps philosophy itself, Lovecraft’s philosophical project fundamentally holds that contemplations of higher reality or the nature of things can never be fully realised. Ultimately, the search for knowledge does not constitute some telos, some purpose, for humankind, but rather leads to the violent dissolution of the self. Higher reality is that which the limited human psyche can never fully comprehend.

Sam Woodward on the cosmic philosophy of HP Lovecraft

• At Public Domain Review: Grotesqueries at Gethsemane: Marcus Gheeraerts’ Passio Verbigenae (c.1580).

• “Here is a remarkable form of popular heraldry.” Mark Valentine on the mystique of old inn signs.

• At Bandcamp: Brad Sanders on where to begin with Lustmord’s cosmic ambient.

• New music: Eleven Fugues For Sodium Pentothal by Adam Wiltzie.

• At Aquarium Drunkard: Jason P. Woodbury talks to Roger Eno.

• Gomorrha (1973) by Can | Sodom (1978) by Can | Spellbound (1981) by Siouxsie And The Banshees

Liber Artificiosus Alphabeti Maioris

The previous post reminded me of this, one of my favourite examples of ornamented alphabets from the 18th century. Liber Artificiosus Alphabeti Maioris (“Artistic Book of the Major Alphabet”, 1782) was written and designed by Johann Merken, with the book’s 56 plates being engraved on copper by Heinrich H. Coentgen. I first saw these in a post at the now-defunct (and much missed) BibliOdyssey where Mr Peacay had found copies of the alphabet plates at some library archive or other. Happily, the Getty Research Institute made a scan of their own copy of the book a few years ago which includes all of the plates plus the accompanying German text.

The first part of Merken’s volume is unique in its combination of abecedarium with a variety of objects, emblems, symbols and other designs: silhouette figures, plants and flowers, ornamental gardens, coats of arms, calligraphic doodles, trophies (those accumulations of military paraphernalia), birds and animals (eg: a pair of monkeys playing the drums), monograms, mathematical figures, etc, etc, all festooned with the familiar swags and foliage of baroque decoration. In the second part of the book there’s more emphasis on science and technology, with plates devoted to astronomy, alchemy/chemistry, the orders of Classical architecture, and so on. The later pages are interesting but it’s those in the first section that really stand out. Many of the alphabet designs push their elaboration and embellishments to such a degree that the letters appear to be mutating to resemble their own decorations. The book as a whole is a curious blend of the 18th-century enthusiasm for taxonomy and categorisation combined with the baroque love of the grotesque and the arabesque. I wish there was more like it.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Wendel Dietterlin’s Architectura
• Abeceda
• Liénard’s grotesques
• Le style Louis XV

Michael Baurenfeind’s extravagant calligraphy

I like extravagant calligraphy, the more extravagant the better, as with these examples from Schreib-Kunst (1716) by Michael Baurenfeind (1680–1753). The book is a recent scan by the Getty Research Institute whose art and design collection includes many similar volumes, although finding the good ones usually means clicking hopefully on blank covers with promising titles. Baurenfeind’s book was published in the middle of the period that extends from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s when this kind of maximal elaboration of lettering was at its height. Books published later in the 18th century are more devoted to the mastery of careful penmanship, although you still find depictions of calligraphic excess mixed with baroque decoration. These later studies can be very impressive but I prefer the books like Baurenfeind’s which is a demonstration of the calligraphic art pushed to extremes of elaboration and ornamentation. Some of the capitals in this volume are the most excessive examples I’ve seen outside Paul Franck’s Kunstrichtige Schreibart (1655), a book filled with elaborate letterforms which yet seems crude in comparison to many of Baurenfeind’s pages. Baurenfeind goes beyond Franck’s solid black curves to create shaded interlacings that are less examples of calligraphic formation than intricate knotworks that just happen to resemble capital letters.

There’s more of the same in a Baurenfeind book from 1736, also called Schreib-Kunst, which includes several plates that show the construction of the letterforms. Volumes like these are usually showcases rather than instruction guides so this is unusual; Baurenfeind even has a guide to cutting your goose quill before you begin. Having tried writing with a bird’s feather once or twice I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have no other choice. Metal nibs are always better.

Schreib-Kunst (1736)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bergling’s Art Alphabets
• Grand capitals
• Costume capitals
• Paulini’s mythological alphabet
• Joseph Balthazar Silvestre’s Alphabet-album
• Johann Theodor de Bry’s Neiw Kunstliches Alphabet
•
• Paul Franck’s calligraphy
• Gramato-graphices
• John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems
• Letters and Lettering
• Studies in Pen Art
• Flourishes

Weekend links 718

Chatting Cats (c.1960) by Tomoo Inagaki.

• New/old music: Follow The Light by Broadcast, a song which will appear on Spell Blanket—Collected Demos 2006–2009 in May. The album will be followed by another collection, Distant Call—Collected Demos 2000–2006, in September, with both releases being described as the last ever Broadcast albums. This was always going to happen eventually but I thought there might be a final collection of all the tracks the group recorded for compilations which have never been reissued.

• “Cats are all over Turkey. In Istanbul, which I visited before traveling to eastern Turkey, cats are welcome not just in cafes but in houses, restaurants, hotels, and bars.” Emily Sekine on the cats of Turkey.

• “El Shazly’s music is like a rush of new energy, a link between the past and present of Egyptian music that is fresh and vital.” Geeta Dayal on Egyptian singer and composer Nadah El Shazly.

• More werewolves: A trailer for Wulver’s Stane, a contemporary refashioning of werewolf lore. Director Joseph Cornelison is a reader of these pages. (Hi, Joseph!)

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Ghost Stories by EF Benson.

• At Colossal: Sacred geometries and scientific diagrams merge in the metaphysical world of Daniel Martin Diaz.

• At The Quietus: What does dying sound like? Jak Hutchcraft on music and the near-death experience.

• At Unquiet Things: Languid Dreams and Unsettling Poetry: The Art of Jason Mowry.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Ronald Firbank Caprice (1917).

• Ashkasha, a short animated film by Lara Maltz.

• New music: Chimet by Mining.

• I’m The Wolf Man (1965) by Round Robin | The Werewolf (1972) by Barry Dransfield | Steppenwolf (1976) by Hawkwind