Category: {drugs}
Drugs
Alice in Acidland
No idea how this piece of exploitation from 1968 evaded my attention for so long but going by the IMDB reviews it’s probably safe to say that any obscurity is well-deserved:
this movie is very accurate, as every girl i have met that smokes weed instantly becomes a bisexual nymphomaniac. scientific studies have actual proved this many times over. the accuracy is phenomenal and i think i speak for every man out there when i say i leave my boxers on while having sex. the parties look like any other raging party in the 60’s where people sit together in a well lit room smoking weed and immediate have sex with everyone as soon as they walk in.
The director and writer were evidently embarrassed enough to use pseudonyms (Gertrude Steen…yeah, right) so the poster and title card (below) are probably as good as it gets unless tepid soft porn is something that really turns you on (baby).
Another fabulous Chateau Thombeau tip.
Alice has been in the news again this week with a new trailer turning up for Tim Burton’s forthcoming film and also this lengthy article in New Scientist which looks at the Alice books through an interpretative lens of algebra and geometry. While it’s nice to play with a fresh interpretation of the stories, essays like this are invariably subject to considerable strain as they attempt to wring hidden meanings from every quirk of the text.
The trouble with the Alice books is that their origin is almost as famous as the stories themselves, and it’s well-known that Dodgson wrote down Alice’s Adventures Under Ground as a present for Alice Liddell with no intention of seeing it published. Aside from the addition of extra scenes, the published book doesn’t radically differ from the handwritten original so you have to stretch your credulity to accept that Dodgson managed to improvise an entertaining story for a child whilst simultaneously authoring a critique of developments in contemporary mathematics. As usual in cases such as these it helps to refer to an earlier logician, William of Ockham, whose famous declaration that “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily” is given on this mathematician’s page as “when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.”
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Return to Wonderland
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice
Peyote Queen by Storm de Hirsch
Ubuweb turns up another gem of abstract cinema with this 1965 work by Storm de Hirsch. The only film of hers I’d seen prior to this was Third Eye Butterfly (1968), screened at the 2005 Summer of Love psychedelia exhibition. Both these shorts share the same spilt-screen effect but Peyote Queen cuts kaleidoscopic views of the woman in question with brightly-coloured animated glyphs and shapes created by drawing directly onto the film emulsion. This is an old technique which goes back at least as far as Len Lye’s pioneering films of the 1930s. Peyote Queen‘s drum soundtrack and white dots flickering on black are very reminiscent of Lye’s brilliantly minimal Free Radicals (1958) which was also made by scratching the film.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mary Ellen Bute: Films 1934–1957
Matt Prior’s Golden Bail
Another work update and the second beer label I’ve done for the Adur Brewery who like to match their bespoke ales with bespoke artwork. This one is cricket-themed, as you may have noticed, Matt Prior being a cricket player, apparently, and the Ashes tournament currently in progress. I know next to nothing about the sport (this is about as interesting as it usually gets for me) so I had to do some research beforehand. Those padded gloves cricketers wear are awkward things to draw in perspective.
As with the other label design I produced for Adur, this works better at a smaller size but I’ve added a larger version to the artwork pages. Those stumps look rather flat but I reduced the shadow so they could be read as stumps and bails from a distance. Once again, if anyone sees a bottle of this in the wild, take a photo and I’ll post it here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ropetackle Golden Ale
The art of Robert R Bliss, 1925–1981
Standing boy pulling ropes (1962).
The chiaroscuro above looks like a photo print but is actually a painting. I’ve seen Bliss’s name mentioned a few times before but he remains rather difficult to track down online, most of the visible works being on auction sites. What there is consists mostly of young men in swim suits, to a degree which seems like an idée fixe given the lack of nudes or variation in the poses.
left: Standing boy with red trunks (1961); right: Boy with oar (no date).
In a career outline on the Leslie-Lohman site there’s this curious paragraph:
Bliss…after 20 years of alcoholism, discovered LSD. After that he completely stopped drinking. His work then completely shifted to colorful landscapes as well as psychedelic visionary paintings.
I’ve not been able to find any of this psychedelic work at all. If anyone knows of any, please leave a comment.
Update: Added a few more examples of his male studies.
Seated Boy (1950).
Swinging Boy (1959).
Yellow Shirt (1963).
Kneeling Male Athlete (1964).
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive