{psychedelia} – Page 57 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 70

Faustine (1928) by Harry Clarke.

• This week’s Harry Clarke fix: 50 Watts reposts the Faust illustrations while Golden Age Comic Book Stories has the illustrated Swinburne.

• What Goes Steam in the Night is an evening with contributors to The Steampunk Bible hosted in London by The Last Tuesday Society on September 6th:

Co-author S. J. Chambers invites you to the official U.K. celebration of her book The Steampunk Bible (Abrams Image). Part lecture, part signing, and part entertainment, S. J. will be accompanied by contributors Jema Hewitt (author of Steampunk Emporium ) and Sydney Padua (Lovelace & Babbage) for a discussion of the movement, a special performance by Victorian monster hunter, Major Jack Union, and inevitable hi-jinks and shenanigans to later be announced.

• RIP Conrad Schnitzler, an incredibly prolific electronic musician, and founder member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster/Cluster.

• Golden Pavilion Records reissues fully-licensed late 60’s and 70’s psychedelic, progressive, acid-folk & art-rock music.

• Dressing the Air is “an exclusive consulting and online resource for the creative industries”.

• Luke Haines explains how to cook rabbit stew whilst listening to Hawkwind.

• Wood pyrography by Ernst Haeckel from his home, the Villa Medusa.

Satia Te Sanguine (1928) by Harry Clarke.

The truth is, the best novels will always defy category. Is Great Expectations a mystery or The Brothers Karamazov a whodunnit or The Scarlet Letter science fiction? Does Kafka’s Metamorphosis belong to the genre of fantasy? In reality men don’t turn into giant insects. And it’s funny. Does that mean it’s a comic novel? […] At a time when reading is in trouble, those readers left should define themselves less rigidly.

Howard Jacobson: The best fiction doesn’t need a label.

• Pace the redoubtable Jacobson, Alan Jacobs believes We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading.

• How Ken Kesey’s LSD-fuelled bus trip created the psychedelic 60s.

• Salvador Dalí creates something for Playboy magazine in 1973.

• JG Ballard: Relics of a red-hot mind.

• Electric Garden (1978) by Conrad Schnitzler | Auf Dem Schwarzen Kanal (1980) by Conrad Schnitzler.

The City of the Singing Flame

Wonder Stories, July 1931. Illustration by Frank R. Paul.

Looking over Bruce Pennington’s artwork this week sent me back to some of my Clark Ashton Smith paperbacks, many of which sport Pennington covers. One of my favourite Smith stories, The City of the Singing Flame, is also one of his finest pieces, and a story that Harlan Ellison has often referred to as his favourite work of imaginative fiction.

Tales of Wonder, Spring 1940. Illustration by WJ Roberts.

The story as it’s known today was originally a shorter piece, The City of the Singing Flame, followed by a sequel, Beyond the Singing Flame; both stories were published in Wonder Stories magazine in July and November of 1931, then as one in Arkham House’s CAS collection Out of Space and Time in 1942. The two-in-one story is now the definitive version.

Smith’s tale concerns the discovery of a dimensional portal somewhere in the Sierras. Beyond this there lies a path leading through an otherworldly landscape to a colossal city peopled by a race of mute giants. A temple at the heart of the city protects the prodigious green flame of the title, an eerie and alluring presence whose siren call draws creatures from adjacent worlds who prostrate themselves before the flame before immolating themselves in its fire. A narrator, Philip Hastane, give us details of diary entries from a friend who discovered the portal, and who subsequently has to decide whether to resist the lure of the mysterious flame or follow the other creatures into the fire. More than this would be unfair to divulge if you’ve never read Smith’s remarkable piece of fiction.

Continue reading “The City of the Singing Flame”

Weekend links 68

Every man and every woman is a star by Sveta Dorosheva.

• Matt Taylor (illustration) with Gregg Kulick and Paul Buckley (design) provide new Penguin covers for John Le Carré. I love the look which seems inspired by Daniel Kleinman’s title sequence for Casino Royale even if it doesn’t quite suit the shabby world of George Smiley and the Circus.

[Deborah Kass] told me that when she was going to art school in the ’70s, she tripped on LSD almost every week and she said she felt it was her “moral duty as an artist to take the trip.” […] I think psychedelic experience makes you think that there are multiple realities, that there isn’t just this one normal real world to which we’re supposed to conform, but that the reality changes depending on the state of consciousness that we’re in when we’re experiencing it. So, any different kind of art kind of posits a different reality. (more)

New York Times art critic Ken Johnson discussing his new book Are You Experienced?: How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art.

• “That got me thinking that evolution really isn’t survival of the fittest, when it comes to these things, it is more like survival of the interesting, survival of the beautiful, survival of the weird, cool stuff that managed to evolve.” Laurie Anderson and David Rothenberg discuss music and animals.

• Laura Cumming on the late Lucian Freud. And Stephen Heller on Alex Steinweiss, the originator in 1939 of the artistic record sleeve who also died last week.

• Alan Moore says “Think Locally: Fuck ‘Globally'”. He and Queen Calluz explain how Dodgem Logic magazine puts their ideas into practice.

• Adam Curtis gets interviewed while Alan Bennett returns to Armley Public Library in Leeds.

• Peacock’s Garden, a celebration of pavonine splendour.

• A visit to Seher Shah’s studio in Brooklyn, New York.

• Maximum androgyny at Epicenity, a Tumblr.

• Does your god have a penis?

• Chrysalide (1978) is an album of “cosmic” guitar instrumentals by Michel Moulinié which sounds at times like a French equivalent of Manuel Göttsching. It’s never been released on CD but a copy can be found here.

Alchemy & Inquiry

The Dust Blows Forward, The Dust Blows Back (2011) by Fred Tomaselli.

Artistic alchemy has been thriving in New York for the past few weeks. Alchemy & Inquiry is a show which has been running at the Glyndor Gallery, Wave Hill, the Bronx, since April, featuring paintings by Philip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli and Terry Winters. “Alchemy” here is used in its broadest sense:

The word “alchemy” in the exhibition title alludes to transformation on many levels: chemical, magical and spiritual. Creative powers are summoned to transform common elements physically and metaphorically into substances of great value. With practices and insights that prefigure many important discoveries in biology, chemistry and physics, alchemy likewise fascinated and continues to fascinate poets and painters, serving as an allegory for the physical manifestation of immaterial spirit. This tradition unites the work of Winters, Tomaselli and Taaffe. (more)

A PDF catalogue containing commentary by the always enlightening Peter Lamborn Wilson can be downloaded here. A sample:

Certain extra-formal aspects of art cannot be ruled out as irrelevant to our experience of that art or to our understanding of it. A visitor from Alpha Centauri would not know that Tomaselli’s paintings actually contain real pills, maryjane leaves, spore prints, or whatever—real illegal drugs. But we earthlings cannot fail to consider this witty provocation when thinking about Tomaselli’s works. To own one of his paintings—if the Feds ever wanted to make an issue of it—would be, simply, a crime. Is a crime, actually. This fact adds nothing formal to Tomaselli’s art. But, oh, how much it adds, let’s say, conceptually. How much weight? What an aura.

If proof were needed, contra all the puritan anti-drug fascists and priests, that genuine mystical drug states are accessible via entheogenic drugs and various (illegal) ditchweeds, then we could enter Tomaselli’s paintings as evidence. The point is that if drugs could not do this then there would be no reason to make them illegal. Imagine: icons that are also reliquaries, containing edible body parts of vegetable saints, forbidden by the Babylonian Ugly Spirit, the eternal Mind Police.

The NYT reviewed the exhibition but missed a trick in not connecting it to the Alchemically Yours group art show which has been running at Observatory, Brooklyn throughout the past month. That show ends this weekend; Alchemy & Inquiry runs until June 19th. Thanks to Jay for the tip!

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alchemically Yours
• Laurie Lipton’s Splendor Solis
• The Arms of the Art
• Splendor Solis
• Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae
• Cabala, Speculum Artis Et Naturae In Alchymia
• Vision Quest
• Digital alchemy

In the Land of Retinal Delights

In the Land of Retinal Delights (1968) by Robert Williams.

More psychedelia. I’d wanted to link to a decent version of this painting by Robert Williams for some time but it took a while for one to turn up. When people mention psychedelic art it’s usually concert posters they’re talking about. Williams’ super-detailed canvas is a good example of psychedelic painting when it conveys particular aspects of the hallucinogenic experience such as hyper-reality and a sense of physical distortion, something that the posters and album covers seldom convey. That said, Williams’ picture did appear as a cover illustration for The Acid Trip, Vernon Joynson’s guide to psychedelic music in 1984, setting that volume apart from similar books which are often spoiled by poor artwork.

• Robert Williams at Beinart

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Mati Klarwein, 1932–2002
• The art of LSD