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Impressions of Expo 67

I ought to have included this miniature in the collection of exposition films I posted a couple of years ago. Impressions of Expo 67 was made by William Brind for the National Film Board of Canada. It’s a lot shorter than Henry Charles Fleischer’s home-movie record of the Montreal exposition but has the edge over Fleischer’s shaky, hand-held shots by being very smartly shot and edited. Brind also avoids spoiling his film with over-eager narration, what you get is eight minutes of light-rail journeys, international visitors and speculative architecture, all of it scored by a groovy soundtrack.

The architecture had a lot to recommend it at this expo: the inverted pyramid of the Canadian pavilion, Buckminster Fuller’s enormous geodesic dome (one of the few structures still standing today), the “Gyrotron” pyramid, and Frei Otto’s West German pavilion whose membranous roof looks forward to the stadium he designed for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Wikimedia Commons has a detailed map of the entire site.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Expositiana
• The exposition moiré
• Angkor in Paris, 1931
• The world of the future
• Space Needle USA
• A Trip to the Moon, 1901
• Le Panorama Exposition Universelle
• Exposition cornucopia
• The Evanescent City

The art of Wallace Smith, 1888–1937

Fantazius Mallare (1922).

One of the links this past weekend was to a lengthy essay about Ben Hecht’s censor-baiting novel, Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath (1922), a book illustrated by Hecht’s friend, Wallace Smith. I wrote a piece of my own about the novel in 2007, at a time when information about Hecht’s early fiction was much harder to find. Also hard to find was any other work by Wallace Smith, an artist of considerable accomplishment whose fine black-and-white illustration I hadn’t seen elsewhere. We now know that Smith devoted most of his energies to writing, working initially as a journalist. He later followed Hecht to Hollywood where he spent his remaining years writing novels and screenplays.

Illustration by “Vulgus” from the Chicago Literary Times.

There were a few other illustrations, however, including more ink drawings in the same flat style he used for Fantazius Mallare. Given the state of the US economy in the 1930s one can hardly blame Smith for going after the money but his painted work proves that he could easily have made a living as a book and magazine illustrator. What you see here is some of his other black-and-white art. There are no doubt more examples to be found in the back issues of the Hecht-edited Chicago Literary Times where Smith was a contributor of small illustrations under the name “Vulgus”. Also worthy of note is Smith’s facility with lettering design, something he shared with J. Allen St John who created many stylish title designs for his Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books.

The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur Detectives (1923) by Ben Hecht.

Continue reading “The art of Wallace Smith, 1888–1937”

Weekend links 763

I Live in Shock (1955) by Mimi Parent.

• At Public Domain Review: “Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare (1922) is at turns obtuse, grotesque, and moralizing—and sought to provoke the obscenity trial of the century. Only it didn’t, quietly vanishing instead. Colin Dickey rereads this failed satire, finding a transcendent rhythm pulsing beneath the novel’s indulgent prose.”

• “There are no surprises when a pallet of CDs arrives at my office, but when a pressing plant alerts me to a shipment of records headed my way I start to worry.” John Brien, head of Important Records, on the problems involved in the manufacture of vinyl albums.

• The sixth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

They were building a vast alternative religion with a lack of dictates but no shortage of rituals and icons. They’d pass through the end of the world to get there first; the next album was based on a vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse slaughtering their animals and constructing a earth-gouging machine from their jawbones, demonstrating they weren’t quite intending to settle down yet. It would take them far from mainstream culture, and indeed mainstream gay culture given their repeated disdain for sanitised queerness, and into enigmatic territory. Having scared away most fans of synth pop and industrial with provocation, and the weak and tyrannical with ambiguity, they were unencumbered and “allowed to mature in the dark”, sustained by a cult following (you rarely encounter a tepid fan of Coil, most are acolytes).

Darran Anderson looking back at Coil’s debut album, Scatology

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See 15 winning images from the Close-Up Photographer of the Year Competition.

• At The Daily Heller: How did pink become a colour? Meanwhile, Steven Heller’s font of the month is Vibro.

• New music: Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds by Lawrence English.

• SciURLs: A science news aggregator.

• Shackleton’s favourite albums.

• RIP Marianne Faithfull.

• The Pink Panther Theme (1963) by Henry Mancini | The Pink Room (1988) by Seigen Ono | Pink (2005) by Boris

Sabin Balasa animations

The Drop (1966).

Changing the appearance of a painting frame by frame is one of the techniques available to animators but you don’t usually see artists working in this manner as offshoots of their gallery careers. Sabin Balasa (1932–2008) was a Romanian artist who created a number of short films from 1966 to 1979, all of which are animated equivalents of the paintings he was producing at the time.

The City (1967).

Having discovered these in a week when I’ve been rewatching all of David Lynch’s films there’s a notable similarity between Balasa’s first film, The Drop, and the animated sections of Lynch’s The Grandmother (1969). This isn’t to suggest that there’s any influence at work, the similarities are more a consequence of both artists painting bold shapes on black backgrounds. Where Lynch’s film was soundtracked by disquieting combinations of organ drone and various noises, Balasa uses dissonant orchestral music which creates equally disturbing moods. None of the music is credited, these soundtracks appear to be collages of pre-existing recordings.

The Phoenix Bird (1968).

The Wave (1968).

Fascinations (1969).

Continue reading “Sabin Balasa animations”

Kadath and Yog-Sothoth

Last month I posted an updated version of the Yuggoth collage I created in 1994 for the Starry Wisdom story collection. I didn’t mention at the time that one purpose of the reworking was to freshen the piece for a more ambitious updating of my own Lovecraft book, The Haunter of the Dark, a volume which has now been through two different editions. I’m generally resistant to the temptation to tamper with old artwork, something which is always present when you’re using digital tools. I’d much rather create something new. In the case of The Haunter of the Dark, however, this has felt necessary when the plan for the new edition requires adding a quantity of my more recent Lovecraft-related pieces to the older art. The section of the book titled The Great Old Ones was a collaboration with Alan Moore in which deities and locations from the Cthulhu Mythos were mapped across the Sephiroth of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Most of the art for this section was done in 1999 when I’d only been using Photoshop for a couple of years. I was excited by the possibilities the software presented but some of the results look very typical of the period: lots of obvious filtering, and transparent layering of a kind I seldom do today. Since I finished reworking the Yuggoth collage (which happens to be a part of The Great Old Ones section) I’ve also reworked three more pieces: Nyarlathotep, Kadath and Yog-Sothoth. The latter two you see here, Nyarlathotep isn’t quite finished yet. My intention with the new versions has been to retain the idea, and in some cases the composition, of the original, while creating a new piece which avoids the shortcomings of the 1999 versions.

Kadath, 2025.

Of the two, the original Kadath was a piece I was never happy with. I hadn’t thought very much about how to represent Kadath beyond having a cluster of buildings in a snowy setting. Lovecraft is evasive about the details but the place is essentially a fantastic palace (or maybe a city) in an icy wasteland. My original version collaged together bits of Indian, Thai and Cambodian architecture which created a definite “exotic” appearance but I was never happy about using identifiable temples in this way. The composition was also rather messy. The new piece also takes the collage route, only this time I’ve used architectural details from some of the pavilions built for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. Several of the themed pavilions built for the exposition were fanciful and fantastic extrapolations of the Beaux-Arts style that don’t resemble anything built before or after. The buildings were also temporary constructions so they’re a lot less identifiable than buildings with a longer history.

Yog-Sothoth, 2025.

As for Yog-Sothoth, this one follows the idea of the original but with better choice of elements and presentation. Once again, details are vague as to Yog-Sothoth’s appearance but I always come back to the description of an inter-dimensional mass of spheres or globes. The original illustration manifested these globes by swiping a variety of globular creatures from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, something that worked quite well but the composition could have been better. The new picture follows suit, only this time I’ve borrowed details from another Haeckel book, Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda radiaria): Eine Monographie (1862), which is less well-known and with illustrations of many more globular or radial organisms than in the other volume.

For the remaining pieces I’m going to be drawing rather than collaging. The results will be posted here in due course.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive