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Weekend links 673

Butterfly (1988) by Ay-O.

• “[Mike] Jay says there are notional lessons to be learned about what happens next from the characters who populate Psychonauts but says they would have been of greatest benefit to ‘the legislators, the bureaucrats, the statisticians and social scientists of the early 20th century who created the idea of “good drugs” and “bad drugs”.’ It is the framework of ‘drugs’ itself which needs to be dismantled.” John Doran discussing Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind with the book’s author, Mike Jay. The piece ends with an extract from the book itself. There’s another extract at Nautilus.

• “From the eerie electronics of Earth Calling through to the warp speed crescendo of Master Of The Universe, Space Ritual is like no other live record released at the time or since.” Joe Banks explores the events that led to the recording of the definitive Hawkwind album, Space Ritual, which was released 50 years ago this week.

• “You know, it’s actually all about life, and love, and death, and it’s sexy, and it’s funny and it’s not depressing.” Simon Fisher Turner talking to Emily Bick about Blue Now, a new live staging of Derek Jarman’s final film.

From The Castaway Captives (1934): Mickey Mouse in a deep fix. Ignore the signature, this one was written and illustrated by Floyd Gottfredson.

• New music: Kinder Der Sonne (From Komplizen) by Alva Noto, and S.W.I.M. by Gunnar Jónsson Collider.

• Mixes of the week: Isolatedmix 120 by Lord Of The Isles, and XLR8R Podcast 799 by KMRU.

• Take a radiating, immersive trip into Ay-O’s Happy Rainbow Hell.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: New Queer Cinema 1985–1998 Day.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Hopeless Diamond.

• Rainbow Chaser (1968) by Nirvana | Rainbows (1969) by Rainbows | Rainbow (2006) by Boris With Michio Kurihara

Dennis Leigh book covers

Secker & Warburg, 1989.

Most people will know Dennis Leigh—if they know him at all—as John Foxx, the name that Leigh adopted in the 1970s when he was the lead singer and songwriter in Ultravox! (That exclamation mark was a fixture for the group’s first two albums.) Foxx and Leigh maintained parallel careers for a while, or alternating careers in the 1990s when he was working more as an illustrator than as a musical artist.

Routledge/Thomson Learning.

I’ve been asked a few times to consider writing about artists or designers who create covers for literary titles. This is something I often consider myself but the research is never easy. If you’re looking for genre titles you can go to isfdb.org and immediately find entries for hundreds of artists with lists of their credits; Dennis Leigh has an entry there himself. There’s no equivalent source for literary fiction, and nothing for crime novels or non-fiction either. This post is based on a list compiled by a correspondent (thanks, Marc!) to which I added a couple of discoveries of my own. It’s not complete but it ranges through Leigh’s career as a cover artist from the 1970s to the 2000s.

Bloomsbury.

One of the useful things about Dennis Leigh having a more popular alter ego is the amount of interviews in which John Foxx discusses his work outside the music business. While researching this post I found a Smash Hits interview where Foxx mentions having attended Blackpool art college for a short time. This was the same art college that my mother attended in the 1950s, and a place I happily avoided myself. The college is so undistinguished I think Foxx/Leigh may be the only person of any note to have passed through its doors. A more recent interview for Shakespeare Magazine features some discussion of the techniques behind the book covers.

Faber, 1973. Reginald Hill wrote two science-fiction novels as “Dick Morland”, this one and Albion! Albion! (1974). The latter is also listed as having a Leigh cover but the evidence for this is unclear so I’ve not included it.

Missing from this list are covers for novels by Neil Bartlett, Michael Cunningham, Evan Eisenberg, Eva Figes, and Marina Warner, all of which are only available as very low-grade images or not available at all. Another hazard when researching these posts is that artists and designers aren’t always credited, especially on paperbacks, so there may be a few more to be found. Be aware that some covers that might look like Dennis Leigh creations may be the work of somebody else. In the late 80s/early 90s there was a trend for Photoshop montage and what I call “artschool assemblage” (collage riffs on Joseph Cornell and others). If any of the examples here are erroneous attributions let me know.

Faber, 1973.

Vintage, 1990.

Continue reading “Dennis Leigh book covers”

Anger Magick Lantern Cycle, 1966

Here’s a rare thing: Kenneth Anger’s programme (PDF) for a Spring Equinox screening of his films in New York in 1966, an event that saw the first public appearance of Magick Lantern Cycle as a collective title. This small publication is described at some length by Bill Landis in the unauthorised Anger biography, while the cover design appears on the first page of the booklet inside the BFI collection of Anger’s films. There are 13 pages in the scan, the original item being a collection of loose sheets inside a folded cover.

Among the many points of interest are Anger’s evocative production notes and dedications for the films, comments which have been recycled ever since in articles about the director and his work. There’s also a page of biographical detail which includes a list of Anger’s preferences and interests, a Crowley-style piece of hyperbolic self-description, and a collage bearing the title The Golden Grope of Marilyn Monroe. The latter features a Gustave Doré illustration which prefigures the appropriation of Doré for the first Lucifer Rising poster.

This being early 1966, LSD was hip and still legal, so the screening information suggests the ideal time for psychedelic voyagers in the audience to ingest their sugar cubes. The evening was to begin with the Anger Aquarian Arcanum, a prelude comprising a display of various magical symbols and iconography. Some writers have taken this to be a lost film but Landis says it was a slide show, presumably with Anger’s explanatory commentary. Enough of the programmes for the event were printed that you can still find them for sale today, although if you want to buy one the cheaper copies start at around £500.

Continue reading “Anger Magick Lantern Cycle, 1966”

Weekend links 672

Le Vice Errant (1902) by Vincent Lorant-Heilbronn.

• “So however surreal those cities, the invisible ones that he builds, they have their counterpart in the real. They always have their counterpart in visible cities.” Darran Anderson on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the centenary of The Riddle and Other Stories by Walter de la Mare, with special attention paid to The Vats, a very strange story.

• New music: A Bad Attitude by African Head Charge; Lapsed Gasps by Push For Night + Jon Mueller; Forevervoiceless by Brian Eno.

The strands of medicine, consciousness expansion, intoxication, addiction, and crime were tightly entangled in fin-de-siècle Paris, where ether and chloroform circulated among bohemian demi-mondaines alongside morphine, opium, cocaine, hashish, and wormwood-infused absinthe. These solvents were often carried in small glass vials and medicine bottles by the asthmatic, tubercular, and neurasthenic, added to patent tonics and syrups, and, on occasion, to cocktails: an ether-soaked strawberry floating in champagne produced a heady rush, the fruit preventing the volatile liquid from evaporating too quickly. Literary references to ether abounded, either as a signifier of decadence or as a literary prop to shift a realistic narrative into the landscape of dreams and symbols, where its dissociative qualities became a portal to strange mental states, psychological hauntings, uncanny doublings, and slippages of space and time.

Mike Jay on Jean Lorrain and the ether dreams of fin-de-siècle Paris

• At Aquarium Drunkard: Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan talk about the recording of Silver Haze, their first album as Sqürl.

• James Balmont offers a beginner’s guide to the films of Dario Argento.

• At Unquiet Things: Rachael Bridge’s Luminous, Technicolor Shadows.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by Erika.

• Ether Ships (1978) by Steve Hillage | Ether (1998) by Redshift | Ether (2000) by Coil

The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb

The dark fairy tale turns up often enough in animated film to be a genre of its own, a kind of mutant sibling to the more traditional fare which has been a staple of the medium as far back as Lotte Reiniger. The darkness is especially pronounced in The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, an hour-long film in which the tale of the tiny boy is combined with that of Jack the Giant-killer. In this version Tom is the product of an accident in an insemination plant, to which he’s returned after being kidnapped by sinister adults, and from which he escapes to join a community of miniature scavengers.

Dave Borthwick’s film owes nothing to the Tim Burton school of Goth fantasy. This is a queasily British take on the Tom Thumb story: kitchen-sink grotesquerie strained through Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Jan Svankmajer’s savagery; biological experiments, toxic waste, sweating faces, spiders and insects everywhere. There must be more animated houseflies in this film than in any other before or since. The human characters are pixilated throughout, a technique which adds to their lumbering clumsiness while allowing them to blend with the animated figures and other details.

In the previous post I talked about Channel 4’s years of support for underground and experimental cinema. The channel was also a great supporter of animation in its first decade, helping fund films by Jan Svankmajer, the Quay Brothers and many others, as well as regularly screening the kind of child-unfriendly animation which is seldom shown on TV. Having not seen Dave Borthwick’s film since the 1990s I thought this might be another Channel 4 production but it was actually co-funded by the BBC, together with La Sept in France. The BBC’s involvement is surprising considering how weird and unpleasant the film is. The corporation had apparently commissioned a short for their Christmas schedule but turned down the results as unsuitable for the season. (The Christmas connection may explain the detail of a crucified Santa hanging on a wall.) They did, however, agree to help Borthwick and co. make this longer version of the story, a commendable decision that I doubt would pass today. Dave Borthwick died in October last year. His fellow animators regard The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb as his best film. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Magic Art of Jan Svankmajer
• Jiri Barta’s Labyrinth of Darkness
• The Web by Joan Ashworth
• Jiri Barta’s Pied Piper