Did someone say “woody”? Plenty more toy antics at TheOneCam.
• And yet more Haeckelisms: Praying in Haeckel’s Garden, recent works by artist Mary O’Malley.
• Seasons of the Peacock, the perennial showoff as depicted by a handful of Art Nouveau artists. A couple of examples there I hadn’t seen before.
• Dorian Cope presents On This Deity, “Commemorating culture heroes and excavating world events.”
• At long last, Fantagraphics will be publishing Ah Pook is Here, the comic strip collaboration between William Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill. Something to look forward to for next year. Related: Malcolm McNeill’s website.
• David Lynch Dark Splendor: “Der große Filmemacher David Lynch als Fotograf, Maler, Zeichner und Grafiker.”
• More on the forthcoming album from Brian Eno, Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins. With this degree of hype the end result is going to be a disappointment.
• Book design by Richard Hollis, including John Berger’s essential Ways of Seeing.
• A fistful of Vignellis: the work of Lella and Massimo Vignelli celebrated.
• Berni Wrightson’s Frankenstein at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.
• Jimi Hendrix, Philip José Farmer reader.
• El UFO Cayó (2005) by Ry Cooder.
The David Lynch as well as the William S. Burroughs ‘graphic novel’ entries are both great. As with his movies, Lynch can make otherwise mundane and harmless seeming objects and scenery bristle with dangerous, mystical, and forbiddingly alluring undercurrents. Art itself can tap into that inner irrationality and chaos of one’s self with utter grace, where other applications would stumble with awkwardness. In this sense, I can think of no one else nearly as artistic when in it comes to motion pictures as Lynch.
Then there’s the Burrough’s page, which is teasing to say the least. I am surprised you never attempted any such narrative pictorial adaptations of his back when you were doing graphic novel type projects. Not that I blame you, writers as abstract as him would be hard to adapt.
todo un hombre”””!!!! xxx
Regarding the Eno, it’s remarkable how much coverage you can secure by switching to a new, once fashionable label and announcing a ridiculous, limited edition box set… The brief pre-release interview suggests that it won’t be particularly remarkable, though I’m sure we’d both love to be proved wrong…
Wiley: I should have added a link to Malcolm McNeill’s site, I’ve corrected that.
I have considered Burroughs adaptations in the past, and if I’d have had more interest in big illustration projects I’d want to do something based on Cities of the Red Night. But you have to make a choice if you have your own creative impulses: do you want to keep embellishing the work of other people or do you want to create something new of your own? For the past nine years I’ve been doing the latter. (And most of this work has yet to see the light of day…) It’s also the case that adaptation which is as close as my Lovecraft work was tends to ruin the story for you since you have to break the whole thing apart. The Malcolm McNeill stuff is at least original since they created the thing together. The artist was in correspondence with one of my Savoy colleagues a couple of years ago about putting an exhibition together. I kept saying that someone should do it all as a book so it’s good to see that finally happening.
Colin: Yes, I’d love to be proved wrong. And the hype is rather inevitable these days when everything gets trailed and talked up so much in advance that the experience of the work itself seems like an anti-climax. It’s got to the point where it would be a radical gesture for a big name to say absolutely nothing about any new release until the day it goes on sale.
I know what you mean – it’s all over-accelerated. Moments after Autechre’s most recent album was announced, it spread across Twitter like wildfire and I immediately saw multiple shots of the packaging. I lost interest very quickly, there’s no space for imagination or anticipation. Having said that, I’m no fan of annoying teaser campaigns.
I think the worst example of over-packaging that I’ve seen recently is Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back. I’ll risk wagering that the design quality greatly outweighs the quality of the music. Hypnosis’ cover for Gabriel’s first album, on the other hand, is a real favourite.
There must be more interesting ways to release new albums than these hugely expensive boxes. I’m not a big fan of Arcade Fire’s music, but I was intrigued by their HTML5 and MP3 experiments. I’d like to see the same degree of originality in physical form.
I think the main thing I disliked about the new Peter Gabriel one was its horrible title, and the bizarre set of presumptions that went with it. Far more interesting was that idea of he and Fripp and Daryl Hall producing interconnected albums. It didn’t quite work but the results were fascinating.
The trouble with packaging–as I know all too well from working with small labels–is that expense precludes many people who aren’t already rich and famous from doing anything interesting. I made a suggestion recently that a design I was producing might use one of those jewel cases with the rounded corners; it turned out that the additional cost was a great deal more than anticipated, so it’s being packaged in the nasty regular jewel case.