John – Page 7 – { feuilleton }

Hon by Yasmine Hamdan

If you’ve seen Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive, you may remember the scene near the end where the film stops for a moment in Tangier so that Yasmine Hamdan, a Lebanese singer, can perform one of her songs. I’ve got the soundtrack CD which includes Hal, the song she sings, but despite my predilection for Middle Eastern music I’ve been remiss in chasing down the albums that she’s released since. Hon is a new Yasmine Hamdan song, her first in a while if the YT comments are correct (her last album was in 2018), with an animated video credited to Khalil. The video is a wholly animated piece which is one reason why it’s featured here; as I’ve said in the past, I lost patience with the live-action video format years ago but still like those that use animation provided the technique is well-deployed.

The song itself is a political one, you might say inevitably so given the singer’s background and the state of current events. No prizes for guessing what the “tiny country with a gaping wound” refers to. Khalil’s animation uses its variety of collaged objects to spell out Arabic words. Is one of these a fleeting reference to the opening shots of Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomengrates? Maybe. The link to the song came via Animation Obsessive, a favourite Substack which teaches me something new with every post. The latest instalment concerns Robert Sahakyants, an Armenian animator described as a Soviet hippy, or the closest you could get to such a thing in the Soviet Union of the 1970s. That’s another lead to go chasing after.

Gwenaël Rattke record covers

Muscle Up (2015) by Patrick Cowley.

This post is partly a reminder to myself that I’m still missing the last two Patrick Cowley album releases on the Dark Entries label. Dark Entries have distinguished themselves over the past few years by compiling selections from Cowley’s previously unreleased tape archive. Many of the recordings were made in the years before Cowley established himself as a producer of Hi-NRG disco hits, long pieces of instrumental electronic music which are closer to the typical electronica of the 1970s than the club music he became known for. This didn’t prevent his early recordings from being used as soundtracks for gay porn films, however, a connection that Dark Entries acknowledge in the packaging for their first three Cowley releases: School Daze (2013), Muscle Up (2015) and Afternooners (2017). The fourth album in the series, Mechanical Fantasy Box (2019), was released in tandem with a book of the same name, a journal of Cowley’s sexual encounters during the late 70s. The book and the albums from Muscle Up on have all featured art and graphics by Gwenaël Rattke, a German artist who uses traditional collage methods to repurpose imagery and graphics copied from gay magazines and porn publications of the 1970s and 1980s. The last time I looked at Rattke’s work I wasn’t aware that he’d created more album art so this post gathers a few additional examples along with his designs for Dark Entries.

Lesbians On Ecstasy (2004) by Lesbians On Ecstasy.

I always like to see an accurate pastiche, and Rattke’s pastiches are close enough to their targets to be mistaken for products of the period they resemble, especially when assisted by fonts like Quicksilver, Stop, Sinaloa, and Motter Textura, all of which are redolent of the disco decade. Creating collages with scissors, paper and what looks in places like Risograph reproduction also helps with the period authenticity. You could create work like this with wholly digital means but if you did you’d have to do spend time disguising the absolute precision of those techniques.

We Know You Know (2007) by Lesbians On Ecstasy.

Liquidation (2015) by Liquid G.

Patrick Cowley – Afternooners (2017) by Patrick Cowley.

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Weekend links 765

An Ideal Life (1950) by Leonor Fini.

• “…there has not been anything like a general, systematic discussion of what other, semantically different kinds of languages there can be, and the philosophical consequences of this. If reality has a certain structure, it would be a miracle if familiar languages contain all the resources to capture this structure.” Matti Eklund on the potential nature of alien languages.

• “As cats evolved from feral ratters into beloved Victorian companions, a nascent pet-food economy arose on the carts of so-called ‘cat’s meat men’. Kathryn Hughes explores the life and times of these itinerant offal vendors, their intersection with a victim of Jack the Ripper, and a feast held in the meat men’s honour, chaired by none other than Louis Wain.”

• Kinoteka, the UK’s Polish Film Festival, revealed its 2025 programme this week. Among the events will be a screening of the new Quay Brothers film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (extract), at BFI Imax in London. Also in London (and with free entry), Swedenborg House will be hosting an exhibition of the Quays’ film decors.

• In a recent comment here I said that some of Charles Williams’ metaphysical novels were like John Buchan thrillers with an occult twist. At Wormwoodiana G. Connor Salter investigates the possible connections between the two writers.

• Alice Coltrane & Carlos Santana, 1974: Lossless downloads of previously unissued recordings from the Illuminations album and a live set with John McLaughlin at San Francisco’s Kabuki Theater.

• “‘The Köln Concert is the hit he wants to disown’: why Keith Jarrett shunned two new films about his unlikely masterpiece.”

• New music: Shards by Tim Hecker; and Some Other Morning by Memory Effect.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – February 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At Colossal: Outdoor light installations by Lachlan Turczan.

• Galerie Dennis Cooper presents…Paul Laffoley.

• Cat’s Eye (1977) by Van Der Graaf | Cat’s Eye (2015) by Patrick Cowley | No Cat’s Eyes (2017) by The Belbury Circle

Suggestions in Design by John Leighton

Among the new book arrivals at the Internet Archive is this study of global design and ornamentation, with art by John Leighton and text (or “descriptive and historical letterpress”) by James K. Colling. Suggestions in Design was published in 1880, with the pictorial matter having been available for many years as part of Dover Publications’ Pictorial Archive series. I don’t have a copy of the reprint, however, so this was a useful find. Leighton’s illustrations are black-and-white throughout, and all separated from each other, which is what you want if you’re looking for a design you may use yourself. The illustrations are also carefully done, something you can’t always say about the smaller books of this type.

The Victorian era is where design history begins. Suggestions in Design follows the structure of Owen Jones’ landmark study, The Grammar of Ornament, ranging across the world and through the ages to demonstrate the evolution of decoration and sculptural form. Leighton ends the book with several pages of his own designs. Browse it here or download it here.

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A Day of Expo 70

Poster design by Yusaku Kamekura.

More expositiana. Expo 2025 opens in Osaka in April, 55 years after the last expo staged in the city. Looking at the Expo 2025 website I can’t see the event generating much interest 50 years from now the way that Expo 70 does today. Expo 70 is the only 20th-century exhibition with any substantial cult value, something I’d guess to be a combination of several factors. On the design and architecture fronts the exposition was especially notable, with a great logo, great posters, and pavilions that look like a future that never arrived. In the 21st century the Japanese dimension of Expo 70 adds to its attraction; among other things the event is the only exposition whose site gets trashed by battling kaiju monsters, as happens at the end of Gamera vs. Jiger.

The Tower of the Sun from the Expo 70 Official Guide.

Then there’s the centrepiece of the event site, Taro Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun, which joins the Eiffel Tower, the Brussels Atomium and Seattle’s Space Needle in being an exposition remnant that future generations have decided to preserve. Okamoto’s Tower is the strangest of all the surviving exposition structures, the creation of a multi-talented artist, designer and jazz drummer (!) who exhibited with the Surrealists in Paris in the 1930s. Now that the Tower is now left standing alone in open parkland it seems more like the world’s largest Surrealist sculpture. In 2018 Kôsai Sekine released a feature-length documentary, Tower of the Sun, about the artist and the construction of his tower.

A Day of Expo 70.

A Day of Expo 70 is a much shorter documentary made to promote New Zealand’s involvement with the exposition. This is one of the longer English-language films made while the expo was still in progress, and one of many films about the event at this dedicated YouTube channel. Most of the clips are in Japanese, like this three-hour TV special, but still worth seeing for the documentary detail. For French speakers there’s an hour-long documentary at the Radio Canada archives. And while I usually dislike the pointless upscaling of old film and video material this clip shows overhead views of the expo site from the monorail and the cable cars.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Impressions of Expo 67
• Expositiana
• The exposition moiré
• Angkor in Paris, 1931
• The world of the future
• Space Needle USA
• A Trip to the Moon, 1901
• Le Panorama Exposition Universelle
• Exposition cornucopia
• The Evanescent City