John Coulthart's Blog, page 33

Weekend links 696

The Brownie of Blednoch (1889) by Edward Atkinson Hornel.

• “None of the theatrics of most films are available in Bresson, because in some ways Bresson’s characters, along with Dreyer’s and Cassavetes’s are the most inscrutable in motion pictures—maybe since their creators are the best believers in suggestion.” Greg Gerke explores the later films of Robert Bresson.

• Iizuna Fair is a short animated film by Sumito Sakakibara that will be viewable at Vimeo for the next few months.

• Occult scholar Mitch Horowitz returns to the Aquarium Drunkard podcast for a wide-ranging discussion.

Marty [Scorsese] went to the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1974 to collect an award for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. They asked him who he wanted to present it to him, and he said Michael Powell. They had no idea who he was. No one did, but I found an American doing publicity for Kubrick’s 2001 who knew where he was. He introduced Michael to Marty at a lunch where Marty bombarded Michael with questions about how he did this and how he did that. Michael writes in his autobiography that the blood started to run in his veins again, it had been so long that he and Emeric had been living in oblivion.

Marty brought Michael to America, where we had already started working on Raging Bull. Marty had been educating me about Powell and Pressburger’s films, sending me home with VHSs. I had fallen in love with them, and then he said that Michael Powell was coming for dinner one night and asked if I would like to meet him. That’s how we met and eventually became involved, all thanks to Marty.

Thelma Schoonmaker remembering her husband, Michael Powell, and discussing the ongoing restoration of his films. Good to hear that plans are afoot to resurrect Gone to Earth

• Whole Earth Index is a near-complete archive of the Whole Earth Catalog and its related publications.

• At the Daily Heller: David Byrd, the East Coast’s psychedelic poster man.

• See the winners of the Nikon 2023 Photomicrography Competition.

• New music: Golden Feelings by Better Weather.

• Mikrostruktury (1963) by Wlodzimierz Kotonski | La Chasse Aux Microbes (1997) by Michael Bundt | Microscopic (1995) by Gas

In this house…

The feeling of the eerie is very different from that of the weird. The simplest way to get to this difference is by thinking about the (highly metaphysically freighted) opposition—perhaps it is the most fundamental opposition of all—between presence and absence. As we have seen, the weird is constituted by a presence—the presence of that which does not belong. In some cases of the weird (those with which Lovecraft was obsessed) the weird is marked by an exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it. The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or [if] there is nothing present when there should be something.

Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (2016)

The blurb on the box draws a comparison with David Lynch but I’d say Kyle Edward Ball’s film is closer to a collaboration between Robert Bresson and Mark Snow. More like this, please.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Wavelength

Quicksilver

Letraset rub-down sheet, 1977.

Work-related research this past week had me looking for old Letraset fonts like Quicksilver here, one of the foundry’s many quirky type designs from the 1970s whose novelty inspired brief flushes of popularity before they were replaced by trendier designs. Quicksilver, which first appeared in 1976, has been lodged in my memory since I first saw it in a Letraset catalogue that was one of only two books lurking in a cupboard in the art room at school. (The other was a much-thumbed copy of The World of MC Escher.) The catalogue fascinated me because it revealed that these unusual typefaces could be identified by name: Data 70, Block Up, Pluto, Shatter, etc. I already knew that typefaces had names, of course, thanks to the occasional notes you’d find in paperbacks telling you that the book was set in 11pt Plantin or similar; but in the days before computers made everyone a lot more familiar with typography the typesetting business was a remote and mysterious world. Information about new type designs wasn’t easy to find unless you had access to the latest design magazines or a well-stocked library. The further realisation, that typefaces were designed by individuals who also had names, came later.

Quicksilver was designed by Dean Morris who was only 16 at the time he sent off his design to Letraset:

The name Quicksilver was my second choice, however. Letraset Englishly felt that my first choice, ‘Polished Sausage’, would be ‘rather unpopular in foreign markets’. I designed it as a 16-year-old kid at John Glenn High School in Bay City, Michigan (born in Mercy Hospital 3 months after Madonna), and sent Letraset a xerox of a tight marker sketch of 3″ letters letterspaced with the heavy outlines slightly overlapping as I originally intended. I drew only a skinny S without an alternate, and submitted no punctuation. I knew nothing about submitting typeface artwork and I assumed there’d be, you know, discussion.

But Letraset wanted it, and they must have wanted it REAL FAST (fifties nostalgia and disco were WHITE HOT then, remember), because they sent a letter and contract soon after, and they did the finished art themselves at 5″ high (they can’t have known my age, maybe they had no confidence in my technical skills), starting with the E as did I in the design stage. And what a gorgeous rendering job they did in the pre-Mac days of ruling pens, straight-edges, and compasses (they shunned rapidographs!) — and they hand retouched the curves where they met the straight lines! Letraset sent a 5″ sample E for approval, but I’m sure they had already drawn all the characters. They followed my sketch very closely, designed the punctuation, and suggested an alternate but weird wide S, which I approved, figuring there was probably no other decent way to design it. I don’t know if the thematically wrong heavy-overlap-line on the P came from me or them. (more)

Morris has a collection of Flickr albums which show how popular the design was in the late 70s and early 80s, especially on record sleeves. It’s probably going a little too far to describe this as “the disco font” but it was certainly popular with the disco crowd. The robot book below is one of the few book covers. I expected there to be many others but Morris’s design might have been regarded as too eccentric for use in the publishing world where readabilty is more of an issue.

Cerrone 3 (Supernature) (1977) by Cerrone. Silly cover art but Supernature is a great song.

Robots (1978).

The Message (1982) by Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five.

Quicksilver also proved distinctive enough but not too weird (like Block Up, for example) to stay around and find further uses years later, often ironically as tends to happen to type designs that become associated with a particular period or idiom. The font’s bold outline is an unusual feature, one that gives it an advantage over similar designs like Letraset’s later Chromium One which doesn’t read so well at a distance. And I like the shape of the letters, the result of Morris’s determination to shape everything with a single shiny bar.

One thing that Quicksilver does share with a handful of its contemporaries from that old Letraset catalogue is a lack of an official digital version. The sample above has been created with Neon Lights, a copy afflicted with poor spacing and inconsistent character sizes. It works if you need something in a hurry but Morris’s design deserves better treatment. As to my use of the font that prompted the Letraset search, this is subject to the usual embargoes so you’ll have to wait a while before seeing the results.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Typefaces of the occult revival

Weekend links 695

The Sleepwalker (1878) by Maximilián Pirner. Via.

• The latest non-fiction book from A Year In The Country is Threshold Tales, “an exploration of the edgelands, borderlands and liminal places in film; of the places whether literal, in the mind, cultural or amongst the paranormal realm where the boundaries between worlds, ways of life, the past and the future become thin and porous.” Featuring some useful viewing tips for the Spook Season, no doubt.

• Spoon & Tamago reports on VHS cafe opening in Tokyo’s Shimokitazawa district. I was happy to see the end of VHS format but I admire the Japanese dedication to redundant technology.

• There are more seasonal viewing (and reading) recommendations at Unquiet Things where Ms. E. has been blogging her way through the month. Begin here.

• At Public Domain Review: Edmund Fry’s Pantographia: A Specimen Book of All the Alphabets Known on Earth (1799).

• See 12 winning images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Contest.

• Wyrd mail (and further links to other things) for autumn from Wyrd Daze.

• At The Daily Heller: The Art of Invented Scripts, Meaning Optional.

• Mix of the week is DreamScenes – October 2023 at Ambientblog.

• New music: N/Y by The Haxan Cloak.

• Sleepwalker’s Timeless Bridge (1972) by Amon Düül II | Sleepwalkers Woman (1983) by Scott Walker | Sleepwalking (1985) by Cabaret Voltaire

Very tasty

StudioCanal’s blu-ray of The Final Programme seems to have been out for a few months but I only spotted it this week on a visit to Fopp, a welcome upgrade for my old Anchor Bay DVD. Not everything labelled as “cult” would go on my cult list but the term is warranted for this one, still the only feature film based on any of Michael Moorcock’s novels. Moorcock has been persistently vocal about his dislike of Robert Fuest’s adaptation but his readers continue to fly the cult flag. Some films deliver a unique thrill when they present an incursion into the cinematic world of an uncommon cultural component, the less likely, the better: Frank Maxwell in The Haunted Palace intoning the names “Cthulhu” and “Yog-Sothoth”; Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh appearing as a blind piano player in Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser; the credit at the beginning of The Final Programme: “starring Jon Finch as Jerry Cornelius”.

Jerry Cornelius meets his maker, with what appears to be Stacia from Hawkwind gesturing in the background. StudioCanal has many more such stills, most of which I hadn’t seen before.

Cult, yes; perfect, no. If you’re familiar with the Cornelius novels the film doesn’t capture the spirit of Moorcock’s barbed ironies (although it hits the mark in places), but we live in a world where you wouldn’t expect a Jerry Cornelius feature to exist at all, especially one with such an extraordinary cast: Jenny Runacre, Hugh Griffith, Patrick Magee, Sterling Hayden, Ronald Lacey, Harry Andrews, Graham Crowden, George Coulouris, etc. I always wish that Fuest had let Hawkwind perform at least one song in the arcade scene (or even let us see the group for longer than half a second), while also doing more with some of the settings. But Hawkwind in 1973 were too heavy—sonically, visually, politically—for a film intended for a general audience, and the budget was paltry by today’s standards (£222,000) which makes the existence of the thing seem even less likely. Given this, it’s amazing it looks as good as it does.

Above and below: panels by Mal Dean from the first UK edition of The Final Programme, 1969.

The main highlight for me among the disc extras is an interview with Kim Newman which I’m looking forward to seeing. I don’t usually listen to commentary tracks but I did listen to the one on the DVD where Fuest mentions that the score by Beaver & Krause was prompted by his hearing the second side of the pair’s Gandharva album. Gerry Mulligan’s lugubrious sax playing doesn’t really suit a Cornelius story but the lineage is another factor that adds to the film’s cult value.

• Watch the trailer

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Strange Adventures: a film list
• Moorcock: Faith, Hope and Anxiety
• Eduardo Paolozzi at New Worlds
• Into the Media Web by Michael Moorcock
• The Best of Michael Moorcock

Mystical prints by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn

The Central Spiritual Sun.

This picture appears on the cover of an album of electronic music, The Golden Apples Of The Sun by Suzanne Ciani and Jonathan Fitoussi, which was released last Friday. Being already partial to the music of both Ms Ciani and Monsieur Fitoussi I’ve been enjoying this one (although there’s no CD…bah), and was curious about the cover art which I took at first for a contemporary creation. The artist, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962) was born in the Netherlands but spent most of her life in Zurich where she was friends with Carl Jung, Richard Wilhelm and other mystically-inclined intellectuals, and where she formed Eranos (later the Eranos Foundation), a conference/institute for the exchange of ideas between West and East.

Eternal Energy.

Fröbe-Kapteyn wasn’t a full-time artist, the screenprints she made in the 1930s appear to be an offshoot of her researches into archetypal symbolism, but she had an evident flair for this kind of image making. The Central Spiritual Sun is one of a series of 14 prints which are described as “Theosophist” although I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this. At least one of them (Kether, The Crown) refers to the Kabbalah, while several others have obvious Christian qualities. For those who like the Ciani/Fitoussi cover art, there’s an edition of the vinyl release of The Golden Apples Of The Sun that comes with a poster reproduction.

Kether, The Crown.

Reincarnation.

The Divine Breath.

The Portal of Initiation.

The Way of the Cross.

The Chalice in the Heart.

The Cosmic Incarnation.

The Creation.

The Grail.

The Light of the Soul.

The Mystery of Life.

Om Mani Padme Hum.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hidden Hands: A Different History of Modernism
• Synthesizing
• Golden apples and silver apples

Weekend links 694

Reading the Tarot at Southend-on-Sea (c.1968) by Linda Sutton.

• “Starship Africa, released in 1980, was a densely textured audio collage emulating the sensation of intergalactic space travel, though it freaked out some in the scene. According to [Adrian] Sherwood, DJ David Rodigan told him: ‘What do you think you’re doing to reggae music?'” David Katz on the return of Creation Rebel.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Subcontinental Synthesis, a history of India’s first electronic music studio, edited by Emptyset’s Paul Purgas. There’s also a related compilation album, The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969–1972.

• New music: The Lamentations Of Jeremiah by Vince Clarke, and Tidescape by Roger Eno.

But even when it’s a signal, even when it’s a microbe, we’ll likely never know if it’s aliens. Not just because of the vast distances involved or because of the wild possibilities presented by chemistry and biology, but because science seldom works that way. Discoveries almost never arrive as we think they will, as lightning bolt eurekas. They are slow, gradual, communal. Alien life may not be something we ever ‘find’, but instead inch towards, ever closer, like a curve approaching its asymptote. For all our desire to know who’s out there, that may have to be enough.

Jaime Green on the scientific method and the search for extraterrestrial life

• At Public Domain Review: Charles H. Bennett’s Shadows (ca. 1856).

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is JAF Herb.

• Make a Spawn of Cthulhu mask.

• Theon Cross’s favourite music.

• Herb (1980) by Sly And The Revolutionaries With Jah Thomas | Pause In Herbs (1995) by Ken Ishii | Herb Is Burnin’ (2010) by Method Of Defiance

Okinami letterforms

A couple of years ago I posted an incomplete collection of record covers based on Hokusai’s prints, many of which included his most famous work, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. In our age of mechanical reproduction Hokusai’s wave has become as much an emblem for Japan itself as any of the official national symbols, reproduced endlessly in a variety of media while being subject to the usual 21st-century derivations and pastiches. This is a common fate for well-known artworks but Hokusai’s wave is one of the few that are flexible enough to be mutated into a seres of letterforms (you can’t really call this a font) like the ones we have here, a design created by Indonesian designer Aditya Tri which grafts portions of the print onto Garamond serifs. The name of the design, Okinami, is the Japanese word for an offshore wave.

Okinami is an unusual design but this isn’t the first time that Hokusai’s wave has been combined with letterforms. When Tomita’s “Musical Fantasy of Science Fiction”, The Bermuda Triangle, was released in the West it was given new cover art, with a gatefold illustration by Don Punchatz and a title design that added the Great Wave to the modified Sinaloa typeface which by this time had become Tomita’s signature font.

Design by Joseph J. Stelmach.

Are there other examples out there? I wouldn’t be surprised. Meanwhile, Hokusai’s print will be even more visible next year when it appears on the back of the new 1000 Yen banknote. A good argument for the retaining of physical currency, and further evidence that Japan gets all the best things.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hokusai record covers
• Waves and clouds
• Tomita album covers

The art of Shin Taga

The World of Edogawa Rampo (1991).

Ushering in the Spook Season with the dark and strange etchings of Japanese artist Shin Taga. Dark, strange, also meticulously detailed and erotic enough for his work to be featured at Shunga Gallery where they draw fitting comparison with the eroto-Surrealism of Hans Bellmer. As is often the case with older Japanese artists—Taga was born in 1946—there doesn’t appear to be a dedicated website or even much information about the creator of these works. There are, however, a number of online galleries with decent reproductions, also catalogues, including one which presents a series of prints based on the stories of Japanese horror writer Edogawa Rampo.

Mask 01.

View with a Face.

Peerless.

Fish No. 19.

Blorden.

Bejart by Be Jart.

Nostalgia.

The World of Edogawa Rampo (1991).

The World of Edogawa Rampo (1991).

The World of Edogawa Rampo (1991).

The World of Edogawa Rampo (1991).

The World of Edogawa Rampo (1991).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Takato Yamamoto

Weekend links 693

Imaginary (no date) by Sidney Sime.

• Victor Rees was in touch this week to alert me to a one-off screening of The Gourmet (previously), a cult TV drama from 1986 written by Kazuo Ishiguro and directed by Michael Whyte. The screening, which will take place at Swedenborg House, London, on 16th October, is one of a series of retrospective events based around an exhibition from 1974, Albion Island Vortex, by Brian Catling and Iain Sinclair. The film, which is connected to Sinclair’s oeuvre by its use of one of the Hawksmoor churches, will be followed by a Q&A session with Sinclair and Michael Whyte. The screening is free but places are limited so prior booking is required.

• “Alongside his thieves and vagabonds, Hotten includes religious slang, public schoolboy slang, pirate slang, equine stable slang, phrases coined by Dr. Johnson, the slang of softened oaths, workmen’s slang, stagehand slang, shopkeeper’s slang, and dozens of other argots.” Hunter Dukes on A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860) by John Camden Hotten.

• The Night Land, William Hope Hodgson’s “Dying Earth” doorstop, is republished in an abridged version as part of MIT Press’s Radium Age series, “proto–science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935”. All the reprints come with new introductions, the one for Hodgson being by Erik Davis.

• “My partner wanted me to stop buying lava lamps. It was an expensive hobby, and we were running out of room in our apartment.” Nora Claire Miller on the lure of the lava lamp. I only own a single one but I appreciate the obsessive attraction.

• Rambalac takes his roaming camera for a walk through teamLab Planets, Tokyo, a labyrinthine exhibition featuring plenty of water (and wet feet), and a moss garden filled with large silver eggs.

• At Strange Flowers: An examination of the connections between the self-mythologising Marie Corelli and her fictional counterparts in the Mapp and Lucia novels of EF Benson.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Cabarets of Death, a book about the otherworldly cabarets of Montmartre by Mel Gordon, edited by Joanna Ebenstein.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Secret Glory by Arthur Machen.

• 10 essential Japanese reggae releases selected by Kay Suzuki.

• Mix of the week: A Fact Mix by Venus Ex Machina.

• Modern Art in Mid-Century Comics.

• RIP Michael Gambon.

• Planet Caravan (1970) by Black Sabbath | Planet Queen (1971) by T. Rex | Oszillator Planet Concert (1971) by Tangerine Dream