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A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score

CBS 73059; construction by Karenlee Grant, photo by David Vine (1972).

A1 Timesteps (13:50)
A2 March From A Clockwork Orange (7:00)
B1 Title Music From A Clockwork Orange (2:21)
B2 La Gazza Ladra (5:50)
B3 Theme From A Clockwork Orange (1:44)
B4 Ninth Symphony: Second Movement (4:52)
B5 William Tell Overture (1:17)
B6 Country Lane (4:43)

Viddy well the stuff of obsessions, O my brothers: Kubrick, cover design and electronic music in one convenient 12-inch package. Those of us in Britain who were too young to see A Clockwork Orange during its initial run had to wait a long time for its re-release after Stanley K withdrew the film from circulation. Until bootleg VHS copies started to turn up in the 80s I knew the film mostly from the MAD Magazine parody and the soundtrack album which was ubiquitous in secondhand record shops. Having become familiar with the score, an additional layer of frustration was added when it became apparent that two soundtrack albums had appeared in the 1970s, the “official” one, which was a mix of the orchestral and electronic music used in the film, and another which contained all the music Walter (later Wendy) Carlos recorded.

The Wendy Carlos music was the principal attraction for this electronic music obsessive and I fretted for a long while trying to find a copy of her Complete Original Score album which was paraded in all its elusive glory on old CBS vinyl inner sleeves. Half the tracks are present on the official release but the omissions are crucial: Timesteps, the incredible composition which accompanies Alex’s first deprogramming session was edited down from thirteen to five minutes, there was Carlos’s Moog version of Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra (an orchestral version is used in the film) and also an original piece, Country Lane, intended to accompany Alex’s police brutality session at the hands of his former droogs. The score was one of the first projects to successfully incorporate a vocoder into electronic compositions; Rachel Elkind, Carlos’s regular collaborator, provided the vocalisations. Finally securing a copy was no disappointment, in fact I was overwhelmed. This is still my favourite Wendy Carlos album and one of my top five favourite analogue synth albums. The transcription of La Gazza Ladra is nothing short of miraculous, thundering away with the power of a full orchestra yet created by laboriously recording one note at a time. (Wendy Carlos’s very thorough website goes into detail about the recording process.)

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Rene Beauclair

Bijoux modernes (c. 1900) from a series of Art Nouveau designs by Rene Beauclair. As usual the peacock caught my attention on this page. There’s more by Beauclair at the NYPL Digital Gallery

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga
• The Divine Sarah
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard

Over the rainbow

Today is the 30th anniversary of the first appearance of the rainbow flag at a gay pride event. Gilbert Baker designed the flag which was used for the 1978 Gay Freedom Parade in—where else?—San Francisco and he talked to The Independent last week about its legacy.

Baker’s original design can be seen below, with the stripes signifying (from top to bottom) sexuality, life, healing, sunlight, nature, magic, serenity and spirit. Subsequent changes dropped sexuality and magic to give us the more familiar arrangement seen in the photo above but it seems Baker would prefer everyone to revert to his original design. I tend to be ambivalent about rainbows, not only are they ubiquitous in other contexts—the spinning “Marble of Doom” on the left is a familiar sight to Mac users—but any spectrum arrangement presents problems for graphic designers. That aside, I wouldn’t mind seeing the original design returned to in order to distinguish it from the many other rainbow flags. But it may well be too late for that now, the six stripe flag is firmly embedded in gay culture. Garish it may be but it has the advantage of being highly visible, which is partly the point, of course. Flickr photos show how effective it is at standing out in a variety of surroundings.

I was hoping to find a credit for the gay pastiche of Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima photo but details about its creator seem elusive. If anyone knows who the photographer was, please leave a comment. I’ve noticed recently that this photo in particular, one of many pastiches of that famous image, annoys a certain type of knuckle-dragging American who sees it as an insult to the soldiers of the Second World War. In which case one has to hope they haven’t seen this Terry Pratchett book jacket. Here in Britain we regard it as bad taste to take flags too seriously, hence the increasingly common appearance at UK gay events of pink Union flags like the one below. Flags are signs, not religious icons, and as such they’re always open to change and reinterpretation; the evolution and appropriation of Gilbert Baker’s flag is the perfect example of that.

Update: The Joe Rosenthal pastiche is by Ed Freeman.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose #2
• Michael Petry’s flag

The Mentor

Two Deco covers from this collection at VTS. No illustrator credited.

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• The art of Cassandre, 1901–1968
• The Decorative Age
• The World in 2030

Stamps of horror

The Royal Mail continues to rifle popular culture for suitable anniversary subjects, this week following its series of James Bond postage stamps with stamp sets celebrating the 50th anniversaries of Hammer’s first run of horror films and the Carry On series. I don’t think I’d use the word “celebration” in the case of the latter, I seem to be in the minority in always having regarded the Carry On films with considerable loathing, despite the best efforts of Kenneth Williams (who hated them) and company; give me some wit, please, not the laboured double entrendres of Talbot Rothwell.

Grievances aside, it’s gratifying to see the original posters used for these stamp designs, the Dracula one is especially good, suitably so seeing as it’s the best film of the lot. “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough,” says Noah Cross in Chinatown; based on this evidence the same could also be said of cheap cinema.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Horror comics
• Endangered insects postage stamps
• James Bond postage stamps
• Please Mr. Postman
• Hail, horrors! hail, infernal world!