Film and opera posters by Franciszek Starowieyski (see below).
• At first glance, Jerzy Skolimowski’s new film, Essential Killing, sounds like Joseph Losey’s Figures in a Landscape (1970) reworked for our era of renditions, torture and war without end. The trailer is here; Sight & Sound liked the film and dismissed any Losey comparisons. The Quietus interviewed the director this week, and there’s also a video interview here.
“He was trying to tell the truth about war. In the 1950s the US was telling itself a mythic, grandiose, heroic story about the second world war and GI Joe saving the world. [James] Jones was saying, ‘That wasn’t the war I saw, I want to write something more honest and realistic. Whatever the mid-America myth, one of the things men were doing was giving blow jobs for money.'”
From Here to Eternity is published in an uncensored edition.
• Edogawa Rampo‘s sinister short story The Human Chair concerns a man who conceals himself inside a chair. Taiwanese artist Lan Hungh may have had Rampo’s story in mind for his Demolished Chair art piece about which we’re told “Hungh’s flaccid penis is the only body part that’s visible, and becomes hard as soon as anyone starts discussing the chair or sitting on it.” BUTT magazine spoke to the artist.
…unaware of their double standards, the police objected to the portrayal of men in Harrison’s work as demeaning. There was Hugh Hefner squeezed into a bunny girl costume, a beefy but emasculated Captain America wearing false breasts and a stars ‘n’ stripes-patterned basque, and Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who tried to murder Andy Warhol, stamping on his Brillo box artwork.
A piece about artist Margaret Harrison whose work is on show at Payne Shurvell, London.
• Connecting Science and Art: “Novelist Cormac McCarthy (!), filmmaker Werner Herzog, and physicist Lawrence Krauss discuss science as inspiration for art and Herzog’s new film on the earliest known cave paintings.”
• At Tumblr: Gurafiku, “a collection of visual research that encompasses the history of Japanese graphic design”, and Archidose.
• “Michael Moorcock’s Modem Times 2.0 is a good introduction to the literary legend.”
• The Spring 2011 edition of Periwinkle Journal (Queer Art + Creativity) is now live.
• Rick Poynor (again) on [Franciszek] Starowieyski’s Graphic Universe of Excess.
• Coudal now have a page of links for the great Terrence Malick.
• Wake in Progress is Finnegans Wake illustrated.
• Brown Study, a blog by Jay Babcock.
• RIP Sidney Lumet.
• Ry Cooder & The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces: Let’s Have a Ball is a film by Les Blank of a fantastic performance by Cooder’s band in Santa Cruz, California, in 1987. It’s not available on DVD but most of it can be seen on YouTube.
Whether it be Starowieyski, Beksinski, Szukalski, or a few others I’ve seen over the years, the artwork of many Polish men and women whose content looms prevalent within that world commonly described by such words as surrealism, symbolism, or esotericism, has a recurring quality of abrasive, almost expressionistic contortion and methodical madness within its compositions and an ancient, partially decomposed, painfully tensed and defined quality about the textures and colors therein.
There are numerous other small examples of this such some of the illustrations accompanying the title sequence to the ‘Saragossa Manuscript’. It is almost as unmistakable as when one knows accurately at first glance that something is Japanese. Somewhat common amongst Slavs in general, but many of these Polish fantasists in particular have this very specific quality about their paintings and sculpture.