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Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)

Turnabout, 1967. Cover art by Ventilla.

Regular readers will know that Bloomsday is one of the few persistent observances here, although I think I’ve missed a couple of them since the tradition began in 2006. This year is the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Big Blue Book but I was doubtful I’d be able to provide a suitable Joyce-related novelty this time. Doubtful, that is, until I remembered this electro-acoustic composition by Luciano Berio which I’m surprised to find I’ve not linked to before despite having had a copy of Electronic Music III for many years.

Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958) takes a reading of the prelude of the “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses as its raw material, the reading being performed by singer Cathy Berberian. The prelude is often described as a written equivalent of an orchestra tuning up, with Joyce listing some of the euphonious or onomatopoeic words from the music-themed chapter before the chapter itself begins. It’s one of the more unusual parts of the novel which in its emphasis on the sounds of words rather than their meaning looks forward to the verbal and auditory pyrotechnics of Finnegans Wake. After Berberian has read the text Berio subjects the recording to a variety of manipulations. Or that’s what happens on the original recording… The examples on YouTube are all the later versions which Berio regarded as definitive even though they’re missing the two minutes of reading that precede the manipulations. There is one video that includes the complete recording, however, where it provides the score for a dance piece by Xiao-Xuan Yang Dancigers. I included the “Sirens” extract in the very first Bloomsday post so if you require a libretto for all of this, here it is.

Metamorphose: MC Escher

This is a Dutch documentary with narration in English, made in 1998 for the centenary of MC Escher’s birth. Unlike other films about the artist which examine the famous tessellated patterns and visual paradoxes the approach here is a strictly biographical one. Being a Dutch production, the producers had access to a large quantity of material about Escher’s life: photographs, diaries, sketches and so on, which means we learn a lot about his early years and his subsequent travels in Italy. The film seeks out some of the places that Escher drew in the 1920s, the tiny southern towns whose architecture would turn up decades later in many of his well-known prints. There’s also a visit to the Alhambra in Spain where Escher not only sketched the architecture but also made copies of the tile patterns. Best of all is footage of the artist himself in the 1960s talking about his work, together with extracts from other films that show him pulling prints from his engravings.

What we don’t have is any indication as to how an artist who was struggling to make a living for at least half his career suddenly came to find his work featured in TIME magazine in the 1950s. Expert commentary in documentaries can sometimes seem superfluous but this is a film that would have benefited from the contribution of someone like Bruno Ernst whose Magic Mirror of MC Escher is an excellent study of the artist’s working methods and the thinking behind them. The film alludes to the growing popularity of Escher’s prints in the 1960s but there’s no mention of this being fuelled in part by illicit reprinting. While scientists and mathematicians were decorating their offices with bona fide Escher prints, their drug-taking students were doing the same in their dorm rooms with bootleg blacklight posters. Escher wasn’t impressed by the hippies, and showed little interest in the art world; there’s a brief mention of Dadaism in a reading from one of his letters but we’re not told what he thought of the Dadaists, or of the Surrealists who would seem like his natural allies, Magritte especially. (Escher’s Castle in the Air woodcut from 1928 was made 31 years before Magritte’s Castle of the Pyrenees.) Art critics reciprocated by ignoring Escher until his popularity made the avoidance unsustainable, after which the default position was to dismiss him as too “tricky” or coldly cerebral. Escher’s outsider status is almost unique in 20th-century art, and warrants a mention at least. Caveats aside, Metamorphose is still worth seeing, especially if you only know the artist from his later works. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More swans and robots
• Suspiria details
• MC Escher book covers
• Relativity
• Escher’s snakes
• The Fantastic World of MC Escher
• MC Escher album covers
• Escher and Schrofer

Luminous Procuress

How to describe this one? Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, pt 2? Bargain-basement Satyricon? The latter is probably more apt, Kenneth Anger’s longer films are more formal than Luminous Procuress. Steven Arnold’s only feature film resembles something made by the extras from a Fellini extravaganza after they’ve stayed overnight at Cinecittà; a series of artfully-arranged tableaux (artful arrangement being Arnold’s forte), together with a hardcore sex-scene (hetero) that seems out of place beside the relatively chaste antics elsewhere:

Luminous Procuress is an altogether extraordinary, individualistic phantasmagoria. It was filmed entirely in San Francisco over a two-year period, and describes the adventures of two wandering youths in San Francisco who visit the home of a mysterious woman, the Procuress. She is an elegant emblem of sorcery, her vivid features glowing under bizarre, striking maquillage, and one is not certain who she is or where she intends to lead the protagonists. Although the language she speaks is vaguely Russian, it appears that the Procuress has psychic powers. She discerns a sympathetic response to her on the part of the youths, and by magical means, conducts them through fantastic rooms, on a psychic journey. Through strange passageways, one voyages with the Procuress and her charges, glimpsing hidden nightmares and panoplied chambers of revelry, where celebrants, ornately festooned, dance and make love before unseen gods… (more)

Arnold’s film follows the low-budget form by being shot without synchronised sound, so the dialogue, such as it is, has been dubbed on later. Rather than try and match words to the improvised scenes Arnold instead gives his characters foreign voices, most of which are mumbling and may not even be saying anything intelligible in their own language. This spares us any Warhol-like amateur theatricals while augmenting the dream-like atmosphere. The music by Warner Jepson is the icing on a very unusual cake. Jepson was a serious electronic composer whose rather abrasive debut album, Totentanz, was included in the Creel Pone catalogue of electronic obscurities in 2005. For the film Jepson provides swathes of synthesizer doodling interspersed with arrangements for keyboards and voices. All this and the Cockettes too. Salvador Dalí loved it.

Continue reading “Luminous Procuress”

Weekend links 625

Hand (1940) by Jindrich Styrsky.

• “I love very much Symbolist painters like Odilon Redon, Ferdinand Knopf or Léon Spilliaert. Or Nordic European painters such as Munch or Gallen-Kallela. I like the way they often mix nature and mythology. Some Surrealist painters are very inspiring too: De Chirico, Tanguy, Toyen, Styrsky, or Dorothea Tanning, for instance.” Lucile Hadzihalilovic talking to Mark Cousins about her new film, Earwig, and her approach to cinema.

• “It was no accident that Mishima chose to experiment with science fiction. It was a genre he had long admired. He adored Arthur C. Clarke, and lavished praise on Godzilla…” Alexander Lee on Yukio Mishima’s sole venture into science fiction, Beautiful Star.

• Old music: Roforofo Fight by Fela Kuti, a great favourite round here, is receiving a 50th anniversary reissue.

Readers of Berlin’s Third Sex were confronted with a whole fête galante of misfits, deviants, and sexual mutineers cavorting on the legal edgelands of society. There’s the “gathering of obviously homosexual princes, counts and barons” discussing Wagner, the women-only ball where a “dark-eyed Carmen sets a jockey aflame”, the drag act burlesquing Isadora Duncan, a café in the city’s north where Jewish lesbians play chess, gaggles of gay labourers meeting up to gossip before tending to their needlework, the Russian baron distributing alms to hustlers in the Tiergarten, a canal-side tavern where soldiers from the nearby barracks find gay men only too willing to pick up their tab, and the encrypted classified ads with which the lonesome and horny sought to make the vast metropolis just a little smaller.

James Conway on the pioneering sexology of Magnus Hirschfeld

• At Aquarium Drunkard: The Miles Davis Septet playing live at Chateau Neuf, Oslo, in 1971.

• Industrial Symphony No. 1 by David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti featuring Julee Cruise.

• Mix of the week: Ghosts & Goblins 1 by The Ephemeral Man.

• New music: The Homeland Of Electricity by Scanner.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Pufff.

• Galerie Dennis Cooper presents Ilse Bing.

• RIP Paula Rego and Julee Cruise.

• Teacher Of Electricity (1970) by Old Gold | Electricity (1980) by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark | Night Electricity Theme (2017) by Dean Hurley

A Penrose pentagram

A classic text although that cover art always looks a little off. I’m sure MC Escher would have insisted on the triangle being equilateral.

Most people are familiar with the Penrose triangle by sight even if they don’t know who “Penrose” was. (Psychiatrist Lionel, together with his son, Roger, the celebrated mathematician and physicist.) I’ve been playing with these things for years, most notably on the cover art I created for Zones by Hawkwind, although the triangle also formed the basis for the robot pathways I created a couple of years ago when illustrating Bruce Sterling’s Robot Artists and Black Swans.

Earlier this week it occurred to me that I hadn’t tried applying the Penrose effect to a pentagram. For a fleeting moment I thought the idea might be a novel one but a quick web search disabused me of this; plenty of similar examples exist already. Here it is anyway, after 20 minutes or so in Illustrator. I’m tempted to try a few more things like this when I have the time. Many possibilities present themselves.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More Swans and Robots