Passage 12

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Ed Jansen writes again to notify me that the latest number of his web magazine, Passage, is now online, about which he says:

In Passage nr. 12 there are articles about a 17th century garden in The Hague, about the mysterious visit to The Hague by the Comte De Saint Germain. Was he really a enlightened man or a fraud? If you’re an occultist you’ll tend to believe the first, the historian thinks otherwise. Then there are the photos of the dancer and performer Hiroake Umeda. Strange movements underlined by light-effects. Living in a Capsule is a combination of the paintings by the Dutch artist Tjebbe Beekman and the work of J.G. Ballard. Lastly there is an article about Jan Bastiaans, the doctor who experimented with LSD to ‘free’ the victims of the concentration camps of the nightmares and repressed memories.

Once again the text content is in Dutch but that doesn’t exclude all visitors here. I hadn’t come across the work of Tjebbe Beekman before. His paintings of urban desolation are indeed a good match for one aspect of Ballard’s work, and they make an interesting contrast with Dick French’s earlier views of the author’s Drowned World.

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Trust by Tjebbe Beekman (2005).

Previously on { feuilleton }
Drowned Worlds
Passage 11
Passage 10

Secession posters

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Alfred Roller (1901 & 02).

A selection of posters for the Vienna Secession at Lawrence University’s Art of the Poster site. Alfred Roller’s stylised lettering on the poster below was famously adapted by Wes Wilson for his psychedelic designs in the 1960s.

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left: Koloman Moser (1902); right: Alfred Roller (1903).

Previously on { feuilleton }
The art of Henri Privat-Livemont, 1861–1936
Wilhelm Kåge
Art Nouveau illustration

Alice in Acidland

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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.

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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

Return to Wonderland

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As the festive season shambles into view I’ve reworked my psychedelic interpretation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from calendar to poster format for those who might prefer the latter. There are two poster sizes, the standard CafePress large and small, and the calendar is still on sale, of course. By coincidence, the dreadfully-named Syfy channel is currently running its own TV adaptation of the Lewis Carroll books. I haven’t seen Alice but the reviews I’ve read have been mixed. From the description I can’t imagine I’d enjoy it (Tim Burton’s film is the one I’m waiting for) but it shows once again how endlessly mutable the Alice stories have become.

Previously on { feuilleton }
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

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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