Alan Garner – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

In the Mind’s Eye

One of the posts last December concerned a short TV film by Alan Garner, To Kill a King, the final entry in the Leap in the Dark series which the BBC ran from 1973 to 1980. Each half-hour episode concerned the supernatural, presented in either drama or documentary form, which for me would have meant prime viewing but I don’t recall ever seeing the series. The Garner film was a strange piece of drama whereas In the Mind’s Eye (1977) is a documentary about ghosts presented by writer Colin Wilson. The film is almost more interesting for its production details than its subject, the Phantom Vicar of Ratcliffe Wharf, an alleged spectre whose murderous life is shown in a piece of unconvincing dramatisation. The Phantom Vicar was the invention of writer Frank Smyth who needed a supernatural story for the Frontiers of Belief section of Man, Myth and Magic during its publication as a part-work in the early 1970s. Smyth and friend describe hatching the tale then we hear a number of subsequent reports which show the story quickly became an East End legend. Between the interviews you get to see bits of the docklands area before the spirits of old London had been exorcised by redevelopment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• To Kill a King by Alan Garner
• Dreaming Out of Space: Kenneth Grant on HP Lovecraft
• MMM in IT
• Terror and Magnificence

Owls and flowers

1: The pattern

2: A novel by Alan Garner

The Owl Service (1967). Cover design by Kenneth Farnhill.

3: A Granada TV serial

The Owl Service (1969). Eight episodes, written by Alan Garner, directed by Peter Plummer.

4: A diversion

Chapter 8 of The Owl Service.

Gillian Hills as Alison in The Owl Service.

Gillian Hills (left) as Sonietta in A Clockwork Orange (1971).

5: A single by Pram

The Owl Service (2000) by Pram. Cover art by Mary Jo Bole.

6: Ghost Box

The Owl’s Map (2006) by Belbury Poly. Design by Julian House.

Track 1: Owls And Flowers

As The Crow Flies (2011) by The Advisory Circle. Design by Julian House.

Track 11: Learning Owl Reappears

7: A group

The Owl Service.

8: A Folio Society edition

The Owl Service (2013) by Alan Garner, illustrated by Darren Hopes.

9: Twelve audiological pathways

In Every Mind: Transmission Resonances, Volume 1 (2015) by A Year In The Country.

Transmission Resonances: Volume 1 takes as its wellhead the continuing reverberations of the 1969 cathode ray version of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service.

It pushes open the attic door from whence the scratching descends and travels to places that surprised, intrigued and even delighted our good selves when it was being shaped on our own particular audiological potters wheels.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• To Kill a King by Alan Garner
• Red Shift by Alan Garner

Weekend links 256

Of a Neophyte, and How the Black Art Was Revealed unto Him by the Fiend Asomuel. Aubrey Beardsley for the Pall Mall Magazine, 1893.

• The occult preoccupations of the 1970s appear to be in the ascendant just now. Whether this is mere nostalgia or something in the zeitgeist remains to be seen but BBC Radio 4 aired an hour-long documentary on the subject this weekend entitled Black Aquarius. The guest list implies an inevitable focus on film and television but Matthew Sweet covered a lot of ground, taking in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, Dennis Wheatley, The Process Church, and Alex Sanders, the public face of British witchcraft in the 1960s and 70s. Earlier this week at AnOther the focus was on Maxine Sanders, High Priestess of the Alexandrian coven and putative fashion icon even though she was generally photographed naked. Maxine and husband Alex are unavoidable when reading about UK occultism in the 1970s; among other things they were occult advisors to Satanic rock band Black Widow, and also released an album of their own in 1970, A Witch Is Born. Of more interest is Sacrifice by Black Widow, a 55-minute concert for German TV’s Beat Club.

• Jacques Rivette’s OUT 1 (1971) is a film more talked about than seen, in part because of a running time that exceeds 12 hours. So news of a Blu-ray release later this year is very welcome.

• “Bruce LaBruce: taking zombie porn and gay homophobic skinheads to MoMA”. The director goes through his filmography with Nadja Sayej.

• “Art is anarchistic, and when it becomes categorized, it loses impact.” RIP Bernard Stollman, founder of the amazing ESP-Disk record label.

• Magickal (and pseudonymous) synth music by Mort Garson: Black Mass (1971) by Lucifer, and The Unexplained (1975) by Ataraxia.

• Kevin Titterton on Angelo Badalamenti and the soundtrack that made Twin Peaks.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 149 by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe.

• Rare Decay, a free bonus track from Aurora by Ben Frost.

• Alan Garner is celebrated in a new collection, First Light.

• At Dangerous Minds: The Residents’ radio special, 1977.

• Black Sabbath (1969) by Coven | Black Sabbath (1970) by Black Sabbath | Her Lips Were Wet With Venom (Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas 1 & 2) (2006) by Boris & Sunn O)))

Weekend links 253

A painting by Stephen Mackey.

• “Creativity is visual, not informed thought. Creativity is not polite. It barges in uninvited, unannounced—confusing, chaotic, demanding, deaf to reason or to common sense—and leaves the intellect to clear up the mess. Above all else, creativity is risk; heedful risk, but risk entire. Without risk we have the ability only to keep things ticking over the way they are.” Revelations from a life of storytelling by Alan Garner. Related: Tygertale on Garner’s Elidor (1965), “the anti-Tolkien”. The BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Elidor remains unavailable on DVD but may be watched on YouTube.

• “One of my revelations was to reverse everything I’d been taught. Making lettering as illegible as possible falls into that way of thinking.” Psychedelic artist and underground cartoonist Victor Moscoso talks to Nicole Rudick about a life in art and design. Related: “I’ve gotten a lot of bad write-ups in newspapers over the years and they like to refer to my stuff as ‘kitsch’…Well, my stuff is way fuckin’ kitsch. It’s kitsch to an abstract level, you understand. It’s fuckin’ meretricious.” I love it when Robert Williams kicks the art world.

• “…a cerebral, challenging, visually stunning piece of 1970s American science fiction that enweirds the human perspective by challenging it with a nonhuman one.” Adam Mills on the inhuman geometries of Saul Bass’s Phase IV.

• “[Delia Derbyshire] taught me everything I knew about electronic music.” David Vorhaus talks to David Stubbs about White Noise and why he prefers the latest technology to old synthesizers.

• Costumes from Alla Nazimova’s film of Salomé (1923) have been discovered in a trunk in Columbus, Georgia.

• Mix of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. I, “music for a residual haunting” by David Colohan.

• At Dangerous Minds: Queer, boho or just plain gorgeous: photographs by Poem Baker.

• Grimm City, a speculative architectural project by Flea Folly Architects.

• Mad Max: “Punk’s Sistine Chapel” – A Ballardian Primer.

• In Search of Sleep: photographs by Emma Powell.

• Drains of Manchester

• Road Warrior (1985) by The Dave Howard Singers | Warriors Of The Wasteland (Original 12″ mix, 1986) by Frankie Goes To Hollywood | Drive It Mad Max (Super Flu Remix, 2009) by Marcus Meinhardt

To Kill a King by Alan Garner

This is a very curious short film I’d not come across before, the final entry in Leap in the Dark, a series of half-hour supernatural dramas and documentaries broadcast by the BBC from 1973 to 1980. To Kill A King could be viewed as a supernatural piece although it’s more of a psychodrama with writer Harry (Anthony Bate) struggling to maintain contact with his spectrally visible muse after a long period of inactivity. Bate is a familiar face from TV drama of this period, often playing government officials, memorably so in his role as Oliver Lacon for the BBC’s two George Smiley serials. Jonathan Elsom and Pauline Yates play Harry’s secretary and sister, neither of whom are very sympathetic to Harry’s predicament or to each other.

What’s odd about the film is that it seems to be a partial self-portrait of its author: the house where Harry lives is either Garner’s own or one very like it, close to the Jodrell Bank radio telescope on the Cheshire Plain; Garner has spoken about the years of deep depression that prevented him from writing. If these details are circumstantial there’s a brief shot of the Carnegie Medal that Garner was awarded for The Owl Service in 1967. The whole film is so hermetic and inaccessible it seems to have been written more as an act of personal exorcism (or perhaps of evocation) rather than anything intended as mere entertainment. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Red Shift by Alan Garner