Alejandro Jodorowsky – { feuilleton }

Parapsychology by Moebius

I always enjoy seeing illustrations by Moebius but they haven’t always been easy to find, even today when his international popularity has grown but his comics still overshadow his work in other areas. La Parapsychologie et Vous, a book by Paule Salomon and Charlie Cooper, was published in 1980 and illustrated throughout by Moebius. According to a note by Jean-Marc Lofficier, Moebius had been introduced to Salomon by Jean-Paul Appel-Guéry, a French New-Age figure who I think may be the “guru” whose influence over Moebius in the 1980s is referred to rather scathingly by Jodorowsky in the Moebius Redux documentary.

Whatever the circumstances that led to the commission, I love these illustrations which manage to honour the theme of the book while being typical products of their creator’s imagination. It’s also good to see further examples of Moebius adding screentone (aka Letratone or Zip-A-Tone) to his drawings. Moebius and Jodorowsky’s The Eyes of the Cat (1978) was created using the same technique, but elsewhere his black-and-white art is usually shaded by hand, if it’s shaded at all.

All these illustrations are taken from Chaos (1991), a collection of Moebius illustrations and other one-off pieces which may be seen in full here. I’ve not seen a copy of La Parapsychologie et Vous so I can’t say whether this is a complete set of drawings; there’s at least one other picture, showing someone floating in a chair, that seems to be from the same series. In addition to book reprints, the drawings were also reprinted a few years ago as a portfolio set for collectors.

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Zen-Gun and The Zen Gun

Japanese edition, 1984. Cover artist unknown.

At last, kosho Hako Ikematsu permitted himself to exult, at last he held the zen gun in his hands.

Zen in the art of electronics…

He knew its age: more than three Earth centuries. He knew its provenance: the zen master who made it had been a member of the order from which his own had originally sprung. The external appearance of the gun was a testament to certain cultural concepts: it seemed improvised, unfinished, crude, yet in its lack of polish was a feeling of supreme skill…in the Nipponese language of the time it had wabi, the quality of artless simplicity, the rustic quality of leaves strewn on a path, of a gate mended roughly with a nailed-on piece of wood and yet whose repair was a quiet triumph of adequacy and conscious balance. It had shibusa, the merit of imperfection. Only incompleteness could express the infinite, could convey the essence of reality. Hence, the unvarnished wood bore the marks of the carver’s chisel…

These qualities were themselves but superficial excrescences of the principles on which the gun acted, principles so abstruse in character that one dictum alone succeeded in hinting at them: Nothing moves. Where would it go? Pout the chimera had succeeded in using the gun as an electric beam to hurt or kill, without regard to location. But that was the most trivial of its capabilities. Only a kosho could unlock its real, dreadful purpose…

I read a novel recently that was unapologetic space opera. This isn’t something I do very often. Ryuichi Sakamoto is to blame, strange as this may seem, as a result of my spending a day or two listening to my old Sakamoto CDs. One of these, Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia, contains a short instrumental titled Zen-Gun, a piece which almost shares a title with the space opera in question, The Zen Gun by Barrington J. Bayley. I bought the Sakamoto disc in 1990, and I’ve known about the novel, which was published in 1983, for almost as long as I’ve been listening to the album. Every now and then I’ve wondered whether the two works might be connected, or at least whether Sakamoto borrowed Bayley’s title, but I’d never considered reading the novel until now.

US edition, 1983. Cover art by Kelly Freas.

Barrington Bayley (1937–2008) is a writer whose works I’d mostly avoided while he was alive. This despite the continual praise he received from Michael Moorcock, and the acknowledgement by William Burroughs in Nova Express for an idea borrowed from a Bayley story with a Burroughs-like title, The Star Virus. (Samples of Burroughs’ voice happen to turn up on an album that Ryuichi Sakamoto recorded after Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia, the Bill Laswell-produced Neo Geo. Make of this what you will.) Bayley was the odd man out among the British writers of science fiction’s New Wave for persevering with hard SF, a sub-genre I don’t enjoy reading very much unless it’s by a trustworthy writer. All genres have their share of bad writers but science fiction, especially the variety concerned with space-faring and futuristic technology, has historically been home to more than most. I already knew that Bayley could write a decent story—he appeared regularly in the pages of New Worlds magazine—but I feel I’ve been doing him a disservice by ignoring his novels for so long.

The thing that really pushed me towards The Zen Gun was reading the Wikipedia entry for the novel which includes the following praise from Bruce Sterling:

Yet Bayley’s elemental energy, his mastery of the sense of wonder, cannot be denied. His work is the very antithesis of tired hackdom. To invent an entire self-consistent cosmology and physics for a $2.50 DAW paperback…is one of those noble acts of selfless altruism that keep SF alive.

Then there’s this comment about the mysterious Zen Gun itself, a piece of wood carved into the shape of a pistol which is capable of destroying entire suns: “Powerful as the weapon is, its existence is a paradox, as only those who have attained inner peace can use it.” After reading this I knew I had to read the novel.

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Produziert in der Schweiz

Back to the future, after a fashion. A couple of years ago I was pleased to discover that Swissmade: 2069 (1968) had finally surfaced in full-length form on the internet. Fredi M. Murer’s short feature was the first science-fiction film that HR Giger was involved with, made at a time when Alejandro Jodorowsky was still in Mexico and Ridley Scott was a little-known director of TV ads. Giger designed the mysterious “Humanoid” that wanders around Brutalist interiors interviewing the Swiss citizens of the future, and also appears in front of the camera with his drawings and paintings. There’s no need to repeat myself by writing about the film again, this is mainly an announcement that Rarefilmm has just posted a much better copy (including English subs) than was previously available on YouTube.

Watching this again I’m reminded of an intention I’ve had for a while of putting together a list of offbeat SF films, a collection of the unusual, the unpredictable, the seldom-seen or the downright weird that offers an alternative to the cultural imperialism of Hollywood. Swissmade: 2069 would be a candidate for such a list even though it only runs for 40 minutes and presents a rather stereotypical view of a future world. Just now I’m a little too preoccupied with design and illustration work to consider such an endeavour, and I’m sure similar lists exist already at Letterboxd or somewhere. But it’s an idea for the future. Our future. Watch this space.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Art on film: Providence
• Giger’s first alien: Swissmade: 2069
• HR Giger’s Passagen
• Heimkiller and High
• The Man Who Paints Monsters In The Night
• Hans by Sibylle
• Giger’s Tarot
• HR Giger album covers
• Giger’s Necronomicon
• Dan O’Bannon, 1946–2009
• Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
• The monstrous tome

Foss, Jodorowsky and low-flying spacecraft

Discovered last week in a local charity shop (and for a fraction of the usual asking price), 21st Century Foss, the Dragon’s Dream collection of Chris Foss paintings from 1978. Foss’s book covers were impossible to avoid in the Britain of the 1970s, often to a ridiculous degree when publishers would stick a spacecraft by the artist or one of his imitators on a book containing no spaceships at all. His ubiquity made him the first cover artist who registered with me as exactly that, an identifiable name whose work suggested that this kind of artistic activity might be something worth pursuing.

I bought a few of the books published by Dragon’s Dream/Paper Tiger in the late 70s/early 80s but many of them weren’t interesting enough to warrant the exhausting of my meagre finances. Ian Miller, yes; Chris Foss, no. Architecture, whether real or invented, was generally more interesting than spaceships, even when the latter were unique designs like the typical Foss behemoth. (There is architecture in many of Foss’s paintings but I preferred Roger Dean’s aesthetics, the fluid and organic buildings, the vehicles modelled on birds, fish and insects.) Foss also suffered from that process of mental evolution whereby you reject an early enthusiasm when you find something that has a more obsessive hold. In musical terms, his paintings were like glam pop, the first music that made a deep impression but which was swiftly displaced by progressive rock and electronic music. Despite the repudiation I still get a weird charge when I see one of his paintings, an instant jolt back to an adolescent mental space. His cover for Midsummer Century by James Blish does this to an excessive degree, being one of a handful of Foss pictures that caused me to attempt some imitative drawings of my own circa 1975. Those drawings, which went astray years ago, caused a minor stir of appreciation among schoolfriends, a reaction that made me realise I was doing something right, however amateurish the attempt.

Ballard’s Low-Flying Aircraft collection is labelled on the rear as “Fiction”, and is spaceship-free, whatever the cover may suggest.

21st Century Foss belies its title by being more than a simple parade of spacecraft designs. There are Foss covers that you never see in internet galleries—pictures of submarines, ships and aircraft from the Second World War—together with a few pieces used on the covers of crank titles. Ballard aficionados may like to know that the cover for the Panther paperback of Crash is reproduced here on a full page. The latter is a good example of the thinking in paperback publishing at the time: “Ballard is science fiction so we need an SF artist for this one!” Foss had earlier illustrated two volumes of The Joy of Sex so must have seemed an ideal match. According to Rick Poynor, the artist hated the novel while the author disliked the cover.

Foss’s book opens with a section about his designs for three feature films: Jodorowsky’s Dune, Superman and Alien. None of his concepts ended up on the screen but it’s good to see the Dune designs in print. This section is also prefaced by two pages of hyperactive hyperbole for Foss and his art from Alejandro Jodorowsky. The same text may be found at Duneinfo but it bears repeating here as a further example of the manic director in full flight. Incidentally, the “English magazine” that’s referred to is most likely Science Fiction Monthly for February 1974, an issue which contained a collection of Foss paintings plus an interview with the artist.

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Weekend links 596

Jam III (2021) by Kotaro Hoshiyama.

• “Powell and Pressburger are peerless in realizing what Orson Welles would term plotless scenes—extra bits that ostensibly do not advance the story, but are a story unto themselves, and aggregate such that they’re vital to how we understand the characters who are living the story.” Colin Fleming says thanks for the Archers.

• A short promo for The Incal: The Movie. Hmm, okay. A film that adapted all 300 pages of the original story without changing anything or trying to explain away the weirdness would be worth seeing. But I doubt that’s what this will be. Read the book.

• “If a single word distills the New Wave aesthetic, it’s plastic…ironically flaunted artificiality became a leitmotif of the era.” Simon Reynolds reviews Reversing Into the Future: New Wave Graphics 1977–1990 by Andrew Krivine.

• Mixes of the week: a mix by Princess Diana Of Wales (not that one) for The Wire, and At The Outer Marker Part I, a Grateful Dead Twilight Zone mix by David Colohan.

• The Bloomingdale Story: read the never-before published Patricia Highsmith draft that would become Carol (aka The Price of Salt).

• At Spoon & Tamago: Multiple panels form collaged portraits painted by Kotaro Hoshiyama.

• New music: Pyroclasts F (excerpt) by Sunn O))), and Loop return with Halo.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: William E. Jones Day.

• Plastic Bamboo (1978) by Ryuichi Sakamoto | Barock-Plastik (2000) by Stereolab | Black Plastic (2002) by Ladytron