Lesbian Witches Claim Credit For Falwell Demise
Goddess bless them.
Category: {occult}
Occult
Alan Moore in Arthur magazine
Glykon and Asmodeus by Alan Moore (1994).
Alan’s lengthy 2003 interview with Arthur magazine is now online if you missed it the first time, wherein he “gives Jay Babcock a historical-theoretical-autobiographical earful about the connection between the Arts and the Occult”. And his equally lengthy piece on the history of pornography from Arthur #25 is also on the Arthur site.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Of Moons and Serpents
• Watchmen
• Alan Moore interview, 1988
Curtis Harrington, 1926–2007
Curtis Harrington, who died on Monday, was chiefly known as a director of low-budget horror films, the most acclaimed of which is his debut feature Night Tide (1961), a watery riff on Cat People (1942) starring a young Dennis Hopper. But Harrington should also be remembered for his associations with early American avant garde cinema, especially the productions of Kenneth Anger. Harrington was behind the camera for Anger’s Puce Moment (1949) and appeared in front of it as Cesare the Somnambulist in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954). Harrington’s early films were similarly uncommercial experimental shorts, one of which, The Wormwood Star (1956), was based around the paintings and person of Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel aka Cameron. Harrington and Cameron both appeared in Anger’s Pleasure Dome and Harrington featured Cameron again when he came to make Night Tide, where she appears as a mysterious, witch-like presence.
Night Tide is well worth a look, despite the limitations of its budget. Dennis Hopper had been ostracised from Hollywood after a fall-out with director Henry Hathaway and was hanging around with various artists and experimental filmmakers (including Andy Warhol’s crowd), acting in TV shows and generally biding his time. Harrington gave him a starring role and the opportunity to pull some Method faces, and he’s very impressive as he falls for a girl who may or may not turn into a murderous sea creature with the next full moon. Good use is made of the crumbling beachfront of Venice, CA, and there’s some sly camp humour to be found in Hopper’s appearance (he’s dressed in a sailor uniform most of the time, looking like an extra from Anger’s Fireworks), and in the scene where he goes for a (chaste) massage. Night Tide isn’t as strange as Carnival of Souls (1962) but both films share enough of the same atmosphere and period detail to make a perfect double-bill.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• Coming soon: Sea Monsters and Cannibals!
• Freddie Francis, 1917–2007
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
Harry Smith revisited
Harry Smith in the middle of the Twentieth Century with some of his drawings.
The first European exhibition of work by artist, writer, filmmaker, collector, Kabbalist, ethnographer…okay, polymath Harry Smith, opens today at the Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland. The exhibition runs from 2nd May–8th June 2007. In addition, there’s a companion exhibition, Harry Smith Anthology Remixed, at alt.gallery from 8th May–30th June. Among his many accomplishments, Smith compiled the landmark Anthology of American Folk Music and the latter showing features 84 musical and non-musical artists responding to each of the 84 songs which comprise that collection.
Heaven and Earth Magic (1962).
Harry Smith: Hobbies and films
2nd May–8th June 2007
Reg Vardy Gallery
School of Arts, Design, Media & Culture
University of Sunderland
Ashburne House
Ryhope Road
Sunderland
SR2 7EF
Reg Vardy Gallery is proud to host the first European exhibition devoted to Harry Smith’s films and hobbies.
Smith, who died in 1991, was a polymath of the highest order. With his coke bottle glasses, slight hunchback and long, bony tobacco-stained fingers, Smith dedicated himself to a life of seemingly infinite interests. He collected Seminole patchworks and painted Ukranian Easter eggs. He was a leading authority on string figures (such as the ‘cat’s cradle’) and made a study of the underlying principles of Highland tartans. He recorded the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians and in a project entitled “Materials for the Study of Religion and Culture in the Lower East Side”, made vast live recordings of traffic noises, children’s jump-rope rhymes and city birdsong, as well as the drug talk of junkies and the death-rattles and prayers of hobos in Bowery flophouses (where he himself lived in poverty for some time).
He was one of the most influential figures in avant-garde film, developing new and ingenious methods of animation, and he collected thousands of folk records which later formed the basis for the work he is best remembered for—the Anthology of American Folk Music—the seminal collection of early music recordings that was in a large part responsible for triggering the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s.
George Pendle
This exhibition includes a variety of Smith?s eccentric ethnographic collections, or what he called “Encyclopaedias of Design” such as string figures, Pysanky (Ukrainian Easter eggs), early sound recordings, and a range of his hand-painted, stop-motion and collaged animations such as Early Abstractions, and Late Superimpositions. The exhibition will also include documentation of Smith?s paper airplane collection. This unusual and rare collection is comprised of hundreds of paper airplanes found by Smith on the streets of New York City from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. This exhibition of the hobbies and artistry of Harry Smith has been organised in collaboration with the Harry Smith Archives and Anthology Film Archives, New York. George Pendle writes for Frieze, Cabinet, and the Financial Times . His most recent book Strange Angel (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005) traces the life of the eccentric rocket scientist John Whiteside Parsons. Both Parsons and Harry Smith were heavily involved with the occult fraternity—the Ordo Templi Orientis.
Harry Smith Anthology Remixed
8th May–30th June
alt.gallery
61/62 Thornton Street
Newcastle Upon Tyne
NE1 4AW
The exhibition brings together the work of 84 leading artists and musicians, who have been invited to make a visual artwork in response to 1 track each from the groundbreaking music release the Anthology of American Folk Music. The Anthology was edited by seminal New York artist, musicologist and experimental filmmaker Harry Smith, and first published by Folkways in 1952.
The Anthology is comprised entirely of recordings issued between 1927 (the year electronic recording made accurate reproduction possible) and 1932 when the Depression stifled folk music sales. Harry Smith used the new LP technology to create an unbroken sequence of songs, divided into three colour coded sets, which represented three elements: air, fire and water. The Anthology is considered to be one of the most important collections of information in modern society, creating a folk canon and contributing to numerous folk revival movements.
This exhibition aims to create a new visual collection of the Anthology, to continue the collective history and revival of the work, as seen through the eyes of contemporary visual artists and musicians. The exhibition includes artists from the Europe, Japan and the US reflecting a diverse and exciting range of practice including: visual art, outsider art, comic book, design, craft and illustration.
Exhibition curated by Rebecca Shatwell. A specially commissioned essay by David Keenan accompanies the exhibition and can be downloaded here.
Harry Smith Anthology Remixed includes work by: Dave Allen, Jonathan Allen, Diane Barcelowsky, Marcia Bassett, Eric Beltz, Hisham Bharoocha, Jesse Bransford, Vashti Bunyan, Jelle Crama, Jaron Childs, Rob Churm, Marcus Coates, Karen Constance, Christian Cummings & Jed Lackritz, Dearraindrop, Arrington di Dionyso, Graham Dolphin, Bill Drummond, Jorn Ebner, Espers, Peter J Evans, Yamataka Eye, Jad Fair, Feathers Family, Kyle Field, Alec Finlay, Devin Flynn, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Luke Fowler, Chris Graham, Susie Green, Doug Harvey, A Hawk And A Hacksaw, Rama Hoffpauir, Dan Howard-Birt, Zoe Irvine, Rich Jacobs, Juneau Projects, Seth Kelly, Jeffrey Lewis, Linder, Derek Lodge, Lone Twin, Robert AA Lowe, Ant Macari, The Matinee Orchestra, Maya Miller, Gean Moreno, Heather Leigh Murray, Michael Nyman, Dylan Nyoukis, John Olson, John Orth, Paper Rad, Mike Paré, Plastic Crimewave, Dave Portner, Devin Powers, Adam Putnam, The Rebel, Ginnie Reed, Clare E Rojas, Chris Rollen, Arik Roper, Giles Round, Royal Art Lodge, Mathew Sawyer, David Sherry, Ross Sinclair, DJ Spooky, Andre Stitt, Philip Taaffe, Vernon & Burns, Daryl Waller, Flora Whiteley, Michael Wilson, Simon Woolham, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, C. Spencer Yeh, Yokoland, zoviet*france
• The Harry Smith Archives
• American Magus: Harry Smith—A Modern Alchemist
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren
• Jodorowsky on DVD
• Jordan Belson on DVD
• The art of Arik Roper
• Wallace Burman and Semina
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• Ten films by Oskar Fischinger
• Lapis by James Whitney
• The art of Harry Smith, 1923–1991
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau
• Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood
• The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda
Exuma: Obeah men and the voodoo groove
Do Wah Nanny by Exuma (Kama Sutra LP, 1971).
I came down on a lightning bolt
Nine months in my Mama’s belly.
When I was born, the midwife scream and shout,
I had fire crystals coming out of my mouth.
I’m Exuma, I’m the Obeah Man!
So you’ve listened to Dr John‘s Gris-Gris over and over and become addicted to its swampy, voodoo-inflected psychedelia. Where to go next? Dr John’s subsequent career isn’t much help even though he dallied with voodoo themes on his next couple of albums; nothing there quite achieves the distinctive flavour (dare we say “gumbo”?) of his first album. Praise Dambala, then, for Exuma, whose career was launched on the back of Dr John’s success but who often manages to sound more “authentic” (whatever that means) than the New Orleans maestro. These are recording studio confections so authenticity doesn’t really enter into it even though both artists strive to sound like feathered and beaded voodoo-priests lifting the curtain on their spooky rituals.
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was one of the first to go this route in the 1950s, albeit in a more comical fashion, with I Put A Spell On You (1956) and the very swampy Alligator Wine (1958). The latter wasn’t written by some chicken-sacrificing Baron Samedi but by Leiber and Stoller, a pair of Jewish boys in New York City. Mac Rebennack also started out doing rock’n’roll novelty records, among them Bad Neighborhood by Ronnie & the Delinquents and Morgus The Magnificent by Morgus & the 3 Ghouls. His new persona of Dr John (full designation: Dr John Creaux, the Night Tripper) was taken wholesale from Robert Tallant’s Voodoo in New Orleans (1946), a book which features a chapter detailing the exploits of the original voodoo chieftain of that name, and whose text includes a number of the songs and chants (including the classic I Walk on Guilded Splinters) adapted by Rebennack for Gris-Gris. His debut album sounds like it was recorded in some deconsecrated church in a New Orleans swamp but was actually created between very mundane pop sessions at Phil Spector’s Los Angeles studio with other session musician friends. Which brings us to Exuma. But who was Exuma? Perfect Sound Forever asked the same question:
Who was Exuma?
• He was a spirit who came from a planet, now extinct, brought to us on a lightning bolt, who had communed with Charon, the ferryman of the River Styx and Vodun priests. When he informed the world of his travels and even warned of Armageddon, he left the Earth, perhaps tiring of the corporeal and moving to the ethereal.
• He was born McFarlane Anthony McKay on Cat Island in the Bahamas in the early 1940’s. He then relocated to New York, to study architecture at the age of 17. He ran out of money for his studies and in 1962, participated in folk music hootenannies. Gaining confidence, he started a group called Tony McKay and the Islanders. He also was in a show called A Little of This ’n’ That in 1965, along with Richie Havens.
• He was a marketing nightmare. Who knew how to peg him? Finding his records has never been an easy task. Often, through dint of color, he was placed in the Soul or R&B bin, even though his music, while soulful, does not belong in either. When his first album was released in 1970, there were sections for music of other countries, however, since he lived in New York and recorded for Mercury, it may have looked out of place there. His music was not Ska or Reggae. He was a contemporary of Bob Dylan’s and Peter Paul and Mary, even playing the Café Wha? and the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, but his music wasn’t quite from the same branch of Folk singing as Dylan, Woody Guthrie or Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. His albums couldn’t be placed in Rock; besides, who would get it if it was put there?
All of the above answers are, in varying degrees, “correct.”
Continues here. Typically with fugitive culture of this kind there isn’t much information around but there’s another appreciation of Exuma’s talents here. As with much black music there’s a political dimension also, despite the magickal doodlings. On Fire in the Hole from the second album, Exuma sings “You can’t build a nation off of bloodshed and expect the blood not to stain the land.” The reference originally would have been to the Vietnam War but that line and others can’t help but have a resonance today.
McFarlane Anthony McKay left the planet Earth in 1997 but happily his early albums are all available on CD. If you’re feeling unfulfilled by current servings of musical minestrone get yourself down to the swamp for a dose of gumbo, authentic or not.
Exuma (LP Mercury 1970, CD TRC 1993)
Exuma II (LP Mercury 1970, CD TRC 1993)
Do Wah Nanny (LP Kama Sutra 1971, CD Castle 1993)
Snake (LP Kama Sutra 1972, CD Castle 1993)
Reincarnation (LP Kama Sutra 1972, CD Castle 1993)
Life (LP Buddah 1973, CD Castle 1993)
Penny Sausage (Inagua 1980)
Going to Cat Island (??)
Universal Exuma (??)
Rude Boy (ROIR 1986) (originally released as Street Life)
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Metabolist: Goatmanauts, Drömm-heads and the Zuehl Axis
• A playlist for Halloween
• Ghost Box
• Voodoo Macbeth
• Davy Jones