John Coulthart's Blog, page 43

B-2 Unit by Ryuichi Sakamoto

RIP Ryuichi Sakamoto. I bought quite a few of his albums over the years but these are only a small fraction of his huge and diverse discography; Discogs lists 116 albums recorded solo or in collaboration with other artists. B-2 Unit, released in 1980, was the first one I discovered, and it’s still a great favourite. The CD shown here was a replacement for a secondhand vinyl copy I bought circa 1982, at a time when albums by Japanese artists were often hard to find unless you could afford expensive imports. As with albums on German labels such as Brain and Sky, if you saw anything like this secondhand you grabbed it, even if the artists were a complete mystery.

Design (after El Lissitzky) by Takeo Aizawa and Tsuguya Inoue.

Sakamoto wasn’t a mystery—I was already listening to Yellow Magic Orchestra and some of the other people he’d worked with—but I wasn’t sure what to expect from a solo release, especially one with such an enigmatic title. B-2 Unit turned out to be closer to the more experimental post-punk albums than anything by YMO: jerky rhythms, scratchy guitar, atonal electronics, distorted vocals, offbeat songs, plus that staple of post-punk music, dialogue samples from TV and radio. Subsequent interviews revealed that Sakamoto had arrived in London with the intention of making a dub (or dub-style) album like the one Andy Partridge released as Take Away/The Lure Of Salvage, hence the credits on B-2 Unit for both dub producer Dennis Bovell, who engineered some of the recording, and Partridge himself, the presence of the latter seeming very unusual at the time, as well as being hard to locate in the music when two guitarists are credited. (YMO ally Kenji Omura is the other guitarist. Andy Partridge apparently gave Sakamoto a tape of those scratchy guitar lines which were then dropped into the recordings.) The dub influence is most evident on E3-A, and the album’s stand-out track and only single, Riot In Lagos, a piece which sounds like an electronic composition deconstructing itself while it plays. The minimal documentation means it can be hard to tell who did what on this release but I’d be surprised if Hideki Matsutake hadn’t helped with the programming, if not the deconstruction, of Riot In Lagos. Matsutake was the synth programmer for YMO, he’s often referred to as the fourth member of the group, yet you never see his name mentioned in discussion of this album. As for Sakamoto, he never did anything like it again. His experimental side still came to the fore now and then, especially the superb run of albums and EPs he recorded with Alva Noto, but his solo work during the 1980s and 90s was increasingly commercial, on albums over-burdened with international guests. For a taste of his less commercial side, here’s an improvisation with Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) in Philip Johnson’s Glass House, recorded one evening while the daylight was fading.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zen-Gun and The Zen Gun
• El Lissitzky record covers

…

It’s been a while since I’ve had to wheel out the train picture… The reason this time was the site being down for 24 hours as a result of severe incompetence by my webhost. I won’t bore you with the details, it’s aggravating enough having to think about never mind write it all down, but for now the situation seems more stable than it was. I’ve wasted so much time over the past two months in communication with various support people that I’d move the hosting elsewhere if I had the time. Luckily for the current shower I’m too busy with creative work to deal with such a major logistical effort. I’m not anticipating any further outages but if they do occur again they shouldn’t be for very long.

Okay, enough of this. The post intended for yesterday is waiting in the wings. Onward!

New Wave Strangeness: Hawkwind’s Calvert years

Antique badges not included.

My weekend has been spent immersed in Days Of The Underground, the latest box of Hawkwind albums from Cherry Red Records. I’d avoided many of the earlier sets but this one was irresistible for being a 10-disc collection (8 CDs and 2 blu-rays), the core of which is three of the four albums recorded by the group for the Charisma label–Quark, Strangeness And Charm (1977), 25 Years On (credited to Hawklords, 1978), and PXR 5 (1979)–with all three albums being given the Steven Wilson remix treatment. The studio material is complemented by further Wilson mixes of live recordings and alternate takes, plus demo tracks (previously available but I didn’t have them). You also get three bonus video clips: Hawkwind (minus Dave Brock) playing the Quark single on Marc Bolan’s TV show in 1977, together with two promo films from the 1978 Hawklords concert at Brunel University. Absent from the set is the group’s first album for Charisma, Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music (1976), also the two singles that were released that year. I’ve not seen any explanation for these omissions but reasons may include the uneven quality of the music (recorded shortly before the group imploded), and Dave Brock’s lasting dislike of the album.

Cover design by Hipgnosis; photography by Peter Christopherson with graphics by Geoff Halpin. Aubrey Powell says that Robert Calvert commissioned this one after the pair met each other at a party. The photography made use of the interior of Battersea Power Station in the same year that Hipgnosis used the building for a rather more famous album cover.

Steven Wilson did a great job of remixing the Warrior On The Edge Of Time album so I had high hopes for this set, hopes that have been substantially fulfilled. Many of the adjustments are individually minor–boosted bass, more prominent keyboards, some extended intros–but taken together they offer a refreshed experience of three very familiar albums. The packaging has been well-designed by the estimable Phil Smee with a booklet that presents a snapshot of the graphics produced for the group during this period, not only album artwork but also posters, ads and pages from the tour programmes. As a bonus there’s a small reproduction of the 1977 tour poster, a welcome inclusion since I used to own an original one of these which I’ve either misplaced or lost altogether. The attention to detail extends to the animated graphics of the blu-ray interface; when the Quark album is playing you can watch sparks dancing around the control room. The Marc Bolan TV appearance was something I’d seen many times before (including its original broadcast) but the live Hawklords films are revelatory when there’s so little footage of the band from the 1970s with synched sound. The performances of PSI Power and 25 Years offer a frustratingly brief taste of Robert Calvert’s magnetic stage presence, and make me hope that a video of the entire concert may be released eventually.

Cover art by Philip Tonkyn.

Robert Calvert is the key figure here, to a degree that Hawkwind’s Charisma years are also known as the Calvert years, this being the period when the group’s part-time lyricist, occasional singer and conceptual contributor graduated to lead vocalist and songwriter. Calvert’s new role as front man changed Hawkwind from an ensemble of underground freaks into a more typical rock group, albeit one with a very theatrical singer prone to changing outfits to suit the songs, and with props that included a loudhailer, a machine-gun (fake) and a sabre (real). The songs became shorter and, in places, poppier, although none of the singles managed to repeat the chart success of the Calvert-penned Silver Machine. Nevertheless, Brock and Calvert were a great song-writing team, and the lyrics that Calvert wrote from 1976 to 1978 are better than anything else in the discography: witty, alliterative, and filled with clever rhymes that range widely in their subject matter, from the usual science-fiction fare to Calvert’s own obsessions, especially aircraft and flying. Calvert’s approach to science fiction was more sophisticated than the freaks-in-space approach of the group’s UA years. You get a sense of this from his contributions to the Space Ritual album (only Calvert would have known what an orgone accumulator was), but his Charisma songs go much further, condensing whole novels—Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley and Jack of Shadows, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—while maintaining the spirit of the New Wave of SF, where the emphasis was as much on inner as outer space.

Robert Calvert in full flight at Cardiff Castle, 1976.

This latter aspect of Calvert’s time with Hawkwind remains underexamined, although Joe Banks explored many of the literary connections in his excellent study of the group’s first decade. Calvert had been contributing to Friends/Frendz magazine in the early 1970s when the staff there were sharing offices with Michael Moorcock’s pioneering SF magazine New Worlds. Two Calvert poems subsequently turned up in New Worlds Quarterly, while more were published in The Purple Hours (1974), a poetry zine edited by Lisa Conesa which included contributions from Brian Aldiss and John Brunner, as well as the original Moorcock text for Hawkwind’s Sonic Attack, a piece which Calvert had given its definitive reading the year before on Space Ritual. Two of Calvert’s Purple Hours poems, The Starfarer’s Despatch and The Clone’s Poem, were later combined to create the lyrics to the first number on the Quark album, Spirit Of The Age, a song that quickly became a staple of the group’s live repertoire.

Panther paperback, 1977, with unusually poor art by Chris Foss.

Those are the documented facts. More arguable are the connections to JG Ballard, an author who shared Calvert’s aviation obsessions. I’ve always regarded the influence here as very obvious but this may be a result of my over-familiarity with both Hawkwind’s music and Ballard’s fiction. For the record, I offer as evidence: the line from 10 Seconds Of Forever on Space Ritual that mentions “the vermilion deserts of Mars, the jewelled forests of Venus”, something I always take as oblique references (via Ray Bradbury) to Vermilion Sands and The Crystal World. Then there’s High Rise, a song which shares a title with Ballard’s novel although it’s not necessarily based on it. (Joe Banks notes that Calvert had lived in a typical example of high-rise Brutalism in Margate.) Ballard’s hyphenated High-Rise was published in 1975, with a paperback arriving in 1977, the same year the song appeared in Hawkwind’s set lists. Moorcock says there was no connection to the novel, while Ballard refused to believe that a bunch of freaks from Notting Hill Gate had been inspired by his books, and yet…when Calvert is detailing all the problems of skyscraper living he mentions “high-speed lifts and elevators”, a feature you won’t find in any of Britain’s decayed social housing but which is mentioned throughout the novel. He also refers to someone jumping from the 99th floor, a detail that brings to mind not only one of the deaths in the novel but also The Man on the 99th Floor, a Ballard story from 1962 that involves suicide by skyscraper. Calvert’s High Rise eventually appeared on the PXR 5 album, together with another song with Ballardian overtones, the punk-influenced thrash of Death Trap. This is a Calvert lyric that’s as much Ballard’s Crash set to music as the better-known Warm Leatherette by The Normal, and a song that was played in tandem with High Rise on the 1978 tour.

Design by Barney Bubbles. Photo by Chris Gabrin.

The lethal fetishism of Crash brings us to the strangest Hawkwind scenario of all, 25 Years On, the album where Hawkwind became Hawklords for a year. The album and the tour which promoted it were intended to showcase a dystopian science-fiction project created by Calvert and designer Barney Bubbles concerning the activities of Pan Transcendental Industries (slogan: “Reality you can rely on”), a corporation whose city-sized “Metaphactories” are in the business of the industrialisation of religion. The concept was detailed in a small booklet that accompanied early pressings of the album (also used as the tour programme), a fascinating if not very enlightening document which blends photography by Brian Griffin and Chris Gabrin with Zener Card graphics (a reference to the song PSI Power) and several pages of evocative text. Some of this reads like outtakes from Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, especially the following:

Assembly Rooms
Staffed by car crash victims whose function is to generate new forms of social behaviour through the transformation of private into public fantasies. The institute is equipped to stimulate fantasies that once rehearsed cause a chain reaction by suggesting further elaborations.

Computers
In a soft environment of hypnotic suggestions, various athletic facilities are provided to aid physical voluntary self experimentation. Here Nature, obliterated by the new psycho-technology, returns from its total eclipse as an unstable series of superimposed and simultaneous activities into egalitarian flight, scar tissue and immolation.

You can read the whole booklet here. Barney Bubbles complemented the text with designs that were closer to his innovative New Wave covers for Stiff and Radar Records than his earlier psychedelic art. 25 Years On stands apart from the Hawkwind discography with its homoerotic cover photo, the band name sprayed in the vivid pink common to punk graphics, and the de Chirico reference in the title of the abstract assemblage on the back cover (“Metaphysical view of Factory with album cover”). The Hawklords stage show had Calvert and other performers dressed in the same industrial outfits as the de Chirico-faced figure on the album’s inner sleeve, together with Bubbles’ film footage projected behind the band. These elaborate performances only lasted for a few concerts (see this lengthy post for a more detailed examination of the live PTI concept) which is why the existence of a filmed record of one of the gigs has been tantalising for such a long time.

25 Years 12-inch single. Design by Rocking Russian.

So…New Wave science fiction, New Wave design, and even New Wave music on Death Trap and 25 Years (the song), where Calvert’s vocals aim for the delivery of the punk groups. This is especially evident on the live Hawklords recordings where the tempo is faster and Calvert is a lot less restrained than he was in the studio. (The 25 Years promo film ends with faces from British politics and the mass media being flashed on the screen, among them Siouxsie and Sid Vicious.) The 12-inch single continued the album’s dystopian theme with its grey vinyl and sketchy cover art showing some kind of future revolution. The PTI concept may not be very coherent–only four of the album’s eight songs seem to be related to it–but I’ve never been troubled by this, concept albums often work best when they suggest more than they explain. Calvert’s notes for the project are as elliptical as those he wrote for the In Search Of Space “Hawklog” in 1971, and could easily have been run as they were in an issue of New Worlds.

A Calvert play programme, 1981.

Listening to these albums again provokes my usual mixed feelings about a part of Hawkwind’s history that I just missed experiencing in person. I was 15 in 1977, and remember a boy at school showing off his ticket for the group’s forthcoming gig at Lancaster University. I certainly knew who Hawkwind were–if you were reading science fiction then the Moorcock connections made them impossible to miss–but at the time I hadn’t heard much of their music, so the prospect of seeing them in a distant town was less attractive than it was to become two years later. Robert Calvert left the group in late 1978 after his manic episodes proved too much for everyone while they were on tour. He sings on most of the PXR 5 album but this was essentially a compilation of studio and live recordings recorded before the Hawklords album but only released in mid-1979. I didn’t get to meet Dave Brock until late 1980, by which time the group’s line-up and musical style had changed completely. I did see Calvert a year later, however, in a tiny theatre in Covent Garden, London, where he staged one of his plays, The Kid from Silicon Gulch, a futuristic “electronic musical”. And I eventually got to meet him at another Hawkwind gig in October of that year, backstage at the Hammersmith Odeon. He was very tall, very well-dressed, and seemed very spaced-out compared to how he’d been in the theatre, possibly as a result of the medication he had to take to maintain his mental equilibrium. He later joined the group onstage for a rambling version of Sonic Attack. This was one of the last appearances he made with Hawkwind so it was a fortunate encounter, especially at such a historic venue. But I still wish I’d seen him in his flying gear on that tour in 1977, channelling the zeitgeist while aiming for the stratosphere.

See also:
• Robert Calvert – Hawkwind’s prescient space-rock poet by Joe Banks.
• Hawkwind: Do Not Panic, a BBC documentary from 2007.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Twinkle, twinkle little stars
• Motorway cities
• Reality you can rely on
• Silver machines
• Notes from the Underground
• Hawkwind: Days of the Underground
• The Chronicle of the Cursed Sleeve
• Rock shirts
• The Cosmic Grill
• Void City
• Hawk things
• The Sonic Assassins
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

Weekend links 667

Design by Yusaku Kamekura.

• “Music and intoxication have gone hand in hand since prehistory, but the relationship of music and cannabis is particularly strong and complex, says Jono Podmore, a former habitual smoker, as he investigates a groundbreaking new study which may get us closer to understanding these links.”

• “[There] have been many instances of persons, who thought themselves metamorphosed into lanterns, and who complained of having lost their thighs.” Public Domain Review offers words to the wise from An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (1768).

• “Mathematicians have finally discovered an elusive ‘einstein’ tile.” Emily Conover explains. I thought Roger Penrose had already discovered these but none of his aperiodic patterns are created by a single tile.

• Wes Anderson does science fiction…maybe. After watching The French Dispatch last month I’d caught up with the Anderson oeuvre so it’s good to have something new to look forward to.

• 20th century Japanese poster art. Related: Jason Booher on creating a cover for a book by Carlo Rovelli.

• The Winners of Smithsonian Magazine’s 20th Annual Photo Contest.

• New music: Ghost Town Burning by The Lonely Bell.

• Anthony “Surgeon” Child’s favourite music.

• RIP Raoul Servais, animator.

• East Of Asteroid (1976) by 801 | Asteroide (1978) by Joël Fajerman & Jan Yrssen | Asteroid Witch (2022) by Ghost Power

Art on film: The Dark Corner

Continuing an occasional series about artworks in feature films with a post that suits a week where Surrealism has been a dominant theme.

I’ve been watching a lot of film noir recently, and I do mean a lot. Since August last year I’ve watched almost 100 films that warrant the label (I’ve been keeping a written record to avoid losing track), with more of them still to come. Many of these have been first-time viewings, an experience that’s been enlightening and mostly positive. I’ll have more to say on the subject in the future but for now here’s a discovery from The Dark Corner (1946), a detective drama directed by Henry Hathaway, and one I hadn’t seen before.

A Vermeer in a dark corner.

The story concerns a New York private eye, Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens), who’s being framed by parties unknown. When Galt investigates the mystery with his secretary, Kathleen (Lucille Ball in a straight role), their researches lead them to a Fifth Avenue art gallery run by Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb playing the same waspish aesthete as he did in Laura). Many of the art details can’t help but seem amusing or bizarre today, such as when someone brings home a genuine Vincent van Gogh painting and leaves it propped in a chair. There’s also a painting that we’re told is a rare Raphael but since this has to resemble Cathcart’s wife it looks nothing like a Renaissance picture. Elsewhere, a Donatello statue is priced at a mere $40,000, while Cathcart has Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring on sale despite the real painting having been in the collection of the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902.

As to the Surrealism, a scene inside the gallery features a blink-and-you-miss-it moment when a pair of would-be purchasers are seen peering at this Salvador Dalí painting, one of the few pieces of contemporary art on display. Before the camera pans away we see the man on the right shaking his head. I think this painting was also created for the film but unlike the alleged Raphael it looks genuine, and resembles several pictures that Dalí painted in the 1930s (eg: this one), all of which feature telephone receivers. The choice of imagery is apt. Two years earlier Dalí had created a seven-picture sequence illustrating “The Seven Lively Arts”. The Art of Cinema is represented by a figure whose head is a giant eyeball positioned between two huge ears, and with eyelashes that are cords leading to yet more telephone receivers.

Imitation or not, the painting in The Dark Corner did at least end up on the screen. In 1946 Dalí was working with Disney’s animators on the Destino project but the results of this wouldn’t be seen for another 50 years. I’ve been wondering what other Dalínean references might be hiding in American feature films from this time. (Don’t say Spellbound, everybody knows that one…)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Art on film: Je t’aime, Je t’aime
• Art on film: Space is the Place
• Art on film: Providence
• Art on film: The Beast

Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), a film by Nelly Kaplan

André Breton has acknowledged that his personal ideal of female beauty was established in his adolescence when he visited the Gustave Moreau museum in Paris; like Joris-Karl Huysmans’s protagonist, Des Esseintes, Breton was enthralled by Moreau’s depiction of figures such as Salomé.

Keith Aspley, Historical Dictionary of Surrealism

André Breton happens to be one of four narrators whose voices may be heard (all speaking French) in this short study of Gustave Moreau’s paintings and drawings made in 1961. Director Nelly Kaplan was an Argentinian writer and film-maker who moved to Paris in the 1950s where she became creatively involved with Abel Gance, and with what was left of the original Surrealist movement based around the autocratic Breton. I’ve often drawn attention to Breton’s pettiness, especially his penchant for excommunicating from his circle anyone he disagreed with, but he deserves credit for championing Gustave Moreau during the decades when the artist was resolutely beyond the critical pale. A lesson I learned from the Surrealists early on is that you don’t let other people dictate the limits of your cultural tastes.

Moreau was still beyond the pale in 1961 so Kaplan’s film was in the vanguard of the reappraisals that were to take place later in the decade, culminating in major exhibitions in the early 1970s. One of the curators of the Hayward exhibition of 1972, Philippe Jullian, made an unfinished Moreau painting, The Chimeras, a key reference in his landmark study of Symbolist art, Dreamers of Decadence (1971). You see a few details from this picture in Kaplan’s film when the camera is roaming the walls of the Moreau Museum, formerly the artist’s residence in the rue de la Rochefoucauld, Paris. The years of neglect had their advantages, one of them being that the house/museum hasn’t had to change very much in order to accommodate visitors; the same goes for Moreau’s art which didn’t get scattered around the world like the works of his contemporaries. The upper floors of the museum are filled with original paintings, together with preliminary sketches which you see here in their hinged frames which allow you to leaf through them like pages of a book. No film or book does justice to the jewelled splendour of the finished paintings, however, especially the detailed works like Jupiter and Semele. You really have to see these things in person if you can.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• New Life for the Decadents by Philippe Jullian
• More chimeras
• Philippe Jullian, connoisseur of the exotic
• Ballard and the painters

Echoes of de Chirico

The Song of Love (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico.

His art studies, begun in Athens, were continued in Munich where he discovered the work of Max Klinger and Arnold Böcklin, not to mention the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, whose influence is perceptible in the paintings he went on to produce in Florence and Turin. In addition, his melancholy temperament lay behind the works that Guillaume Apollinaire labelled “metaphysical,” works in which elements from the real world (deserted squares and arcades, factory chimneys, trains, clocks, gloves, artichokes) were imbued with a sense of strangeness.

Keith Aspley, Historical Dictionary of Surrealism

The Enigma of a Day (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico.

Plate II from Let There Be Fashion, Down With Art (Fiat modes pereat ars) (1920) by “Dadamax Ernst”.

The Birth of an Idol (1926) by René Magritte.

Some time during the latter part of 1923 [Magritte] came face-to-face with his destiny, in the form of a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, who was one of the painters most admired by the Paris Surrealists: Le Chant d’amour (The Song of Love, 1914); to be more precise, a black-and-white reproduction of that painting in the review Les Feuilles libres, a very contrasty reproduction, as Sylvester has it, which only heightened the drama of the outsize objects suspended in the foreground of one of de Chirico’s “metaphysical landscapes”… He was shown it by Lecomte, or Mesens, or both. He was overwhelmed. […] Magritte always spoke of de Chirico as his one and only master. As a rule, he was exceedingly parsimonious in his assessment of other artists, past and present. In his own time, de Chirico (1888–1978) and Ernst (1891–1976) appear as the only two he admired, more or less unconditionally.

Magritte: A Life by Alex Danchev

Sewing Machine with Umbrellas in a Surrealist Landscape (1941) by Salvador Dalí.

La Ville Luminaire No. 2 (1956) by Paul Delvaux.

The Disquieting Muses (1957) by Sylvia Plath.

Misterioso (1958) by Thelonious Monk Quartet. Design by Paul Bacon.

The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.

The Spider’s Stratagem is a movie conceived of, written and shot in colour and is evocative of certain paintings by René Magritte or Giorgio de Chirico.

BernardoBertolucci.org

Metaphysical Interior with Large Factory (1916) by Giorgio de Chirico.

Sleeve rear: “Metaphysical view of Factory with album cover.”

25 Years On (1978) by Hawklords. Design by Barney Bubbles. Photography by Brian Griffin and Chris Gabrin.

Inner sleeve.

The Voice (1981) by Ultravox. Design by Peter Saville (credited to “Estudio Saville”).

Thieves Like Us (1984) by New Order. Design by Peter Saville/Trevor Key.

Promo video for Loving the Alien (1985) by David Bowie. Directed by David Bowie with David Mallet.

The Red Tower (1913) by Giorgio de Chirico.

The Red Tower (1996) by Thomas Ligotti.

The ruined factory stood three stories high in an otherwise featureless landscape. Although somewhat imposing on its own terms, it occupied only the most unobtrusive place within the gray emptiness of its surroundings, its presence serving as a mere accent upon a desolate horizon. No road led to the factory; nor were there any traces of one that might have led to it at some time in the distant past. If there had ever been such a road it would have been rendered useless as soon as it arrived at one of the four, red-bricked sides of the factory, even in the days when the facility was in full operation. The reason for this was simple: no doors had been built into the factory, no loading docks or entranceways allowed penetration of the outer walls of the structure, which was solid brick on all four sides without even a single window below the level of the second floor.

Surrealista: A Tribute to Giorgio de Chirico for Windows and Mac computers.

De Chirico – Interno metafisico con biscotti (2020), a romanzo a fumetti by Sebastiano Vilella.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The nightingale echo
• Max Ernst’s favourites
• The art of Carel Willink, 1900–1983

Weekend links 666

Muy Mago (Portrait of Aleister Crowley) (1961) by Xul Solar.

• “…snails amaze with their capacity to move so far, to spread so widely, while doing so little. This, it seems to me, is one of the real marvels of snail biogeography. Individuals do not need to exert great effort because natural selection has acted for them, acted on them, acted with them, to produce these beings that are so unexpectedly but uniquely suited to a particular form of deep time travel, drifting. From such a perspective, rather than being any kind of deficiency, the highly successful passivity of snails might be seen as a remarkable evolutionary achievement.” Thom van Dooren on how snails cross vast oceans.

• “Slow art has layers. And this is why it requires time and effort. We should see this as a good and necessary thing. If this is a kind of obstacle in the way of easy assimilation then it is an obstacle that is integral to the value of the thing itself. The mind is calmed, or disturbed, or made exultant by the art that rewards us for our goodwill and our capacity to take our time.” In Praise of Slow Art by Chris Horner.

• “I have set naturalism and the supernatural in binary opposition but perhaps there is a third way. Let’s call it the supranatural stance…” Paul Broks explores the roots of coincidence.

• At Unquiet Things: The art of Hector Garrido, an illustrator who specialised in the Gothic staple of women in gowns fleeing at night from sinister mansions.

• “The writer Jorge Luis Borges once referred to his friend the artist Xul Solar as ‘one of the most singular events of our era’,” writes Miriam Basilio.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Japanese craftsmanship meets Pokemon at Kanazawa’s National Crafts Museum.

• At Public Domain Review: Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s Microscopic Delights (1759–63).

• New music: Rest Of Life by Steve Roach.

• The Four Horsemen (1972) by Aphrodite’s Child | Supper’s Ready (1972) by Genesis | Six Six Sixties (1979) by Throbbing Gristle

René Magritte, Cinéaste

The title at the Internet Archive has this one as “Magritte Home Movies” which is a more accurate description than the title of the film itself. René Magritte, Cinéaste was apparently made in 1975 (although the print bears a copyright date for 1989), being a compilation of films from the late 1950s made in and around the Magritte household by René and wife Georgette (plus LouLou the Pomeranian) with contributions from friends in the Brussels art world: ELT Mesens (an artist who was later a member of the British Surrealist Group), Paul Colinet (artist), Louis Scutenaire (poet), Irène Hamoir (writer), Marcel Lecomte (writer), and others.

The film opens with some contextual narration in French but the rest of the footage is soundless with a simple musical accompaniment. As with many home movies there’s a lot of mugging and dressing-up for the camera. What you don’t get in similar films is the setups that involve either quotes of Magritte’s paintings or the paintings themselves. If you’re familiar with the art then some of the props are also familiar, such as the plaster head (or heads) from the various versions of La Mèmoire, and the euphonium which in its painted form Magritte often showed in flames. The most Surrealist sequence is Le Dessert des Antilles, a Cocteau-like experiment with reverse-motion. Where Cocteau preferred to show a flower being pieced together from its constituent parts, Magritte has Irène Hamoir regurgitating a banana, bite by bite, which is then presented unpeeled to her husband, Louis Scutenaire. (This sequence has been flipped horizontally. A duplicate copy here shows the original title card.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Magritte: The False Mirror
• Magritte, ou la lecon de chose
• René Magritte album covers
• Monsieur René Magritte, a film by Adrian Maben
• George Melly’s Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist
• The Secret Life of Edward James
• René Magritte by David Wheatley

Gandalf’s Garden magazine

Issue One.

It’s taken a while but this short-lived underground magazine has finally been scanned and posted online. (It’s actually been available since 2019 but I only just discovered it.) Gandalf’s Garden was a small British publication, edited by Muz Murray, that preferred the definition “overground” to “underground”. Six issues were published in London from 1968 to 1969. There was also an affiliated shop of the same name situated in the World’s End area of Chelsea.

Issue Two.

Having only seen a few sample pages before now it’s been good to look through the magazine’s entire run. The editorial attitude was very different to the often strident and aggressive Oz, with whom it shared a cover artist, John Hurford. Political revolution was a recurrent obsession in the pages of Oz—for some of the writers, anyway—and for a few months seemed like a tangible possibility following the events in Paris in May, 1968. The political stance of Gandalf’s Garden was more concerned with a revolution in the head, reflecting the philosophical side of hippy culture: Eastern religion, occultism, Earth mysteries and so on; issues four to six were subtitled “Mystical Scene Magazine”. The most well-known contributor was BBC radio DJ John Peel who wrote a short column for the first couple of issues, a reminder that the Peel public persona in the late 1960s was very different from the sardonic champion of all things punk ten years later. “Never trust a hippy” unless that hippy can make you famous by playing your singles on his radio show…

Issue Three.

Peel doesn’t say much about music in his columns, but music was a staple subject of the underground mags, so Gandalf’s Garden has interviews with the Third Ear Band, Marc Bolan, The Soft Machine and Quintessence. Meanwhile, Donovan pops up in the letters page, sending the staff good wishes and his greetings to “Lemon” Peel.

Issue Four.

There’s also a letter from Brinsley Le Poer Trench, 8th Earl of Clancarty, asking to be put on the magazine’s mailing list. Trench was a notable flying-saucer obsessive (previously) who I expect would have enjoyed the features by Colin Bord about the UFO worshippers of the Aetherius Society, and the lost continent of Mu. I only found out recently that Bord began his writing and photography career in these pages (see this Wormwoodiana post which leads to this interview with Janet Bord). Janet and Colin Bord put together a series of popular guides in the 1970s and 80s to Britain’s mystic and mythic sites, good books on the whole if you approach them with a sceptical frame of mind. The Bords never ventured as far into the crankosphere as John Michell but they follow the Michell thesis about Alfred Watkins’ ley lines being channels of “Earth energy” rather than trading routes. (Archaeologists have never accepted any of these theories.) The readers of Gandalf’s Garden were the target audience for this kind of thing—issue four has a feature about Katharine Maltwood’s spurious but fascinating “Glastonbury Zodiac”—and sure enough there’s an ad for Michell’s landmark treatise, The View Over Atlantis, in the final issue. In this respect the magazine was probably ahead of its time, folding just as a wave of general interest in all manner of esoteric subjects was about to break. With better funding (and a replacement for its franchise-baiting title) Gandalf’s Garden might have found a niche as an early New Age publication.

Issue Five.

Issue Six.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Oz magazine online
• The Trials of Oz
• Early British Trackways
• The art of John Hurford