Arthur magazine – Page 5

Weekend links 9

Own a copy of Arthur #7 (October 2003) with my swirling cover pic featuring cosmic jazz maestro Sun Ra. Lots of good stuff inside, details here.

• Spinetingler Magazine announced their nominees the 2010 Spinetingler Award this week. Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch is one of the titles in the Best Novel category while my cover for Jeff’s book is in the Best Cover category.

• A Journey Round My Skull posted the results of the Raymond Roussel illustration contest. Entrants were asked to read Roussel’s story Bertha, The Child-Flower then create a picture based on that.

• Has Dottie got legs? The New Criterion on the poetry of Dorothy Parker.

• The gays: Fuck Yeah Hot Weird Guys, more from the Tumblr hall of mirrors; Simon Callow reviews Gay Icons Through the Ages by Tom Ambrose; Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art is open again with a new exhibition at a new location in Lambertville, NJ; some things never change: “Secret tape reveals Tory backing for ban on gays.”

• “Make the inaccessible exciting.” Colin Marshall interviews Chris Bohn, editor of music magazine The Wire.

• More music: Jon Savage’s brief history of Krautrock. The new Soul Jazz compilation, Deutsche Elektronische Musik, is released next week.

• Sage of the Apocalypse; Samuel R Delany’s Dhalgren comes to the stage in New York.

• Further Penguin fetishism: “Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain.”

• Yes, they’re out there, the Clients From Hell. For a palliative there’s Herbert W Kapitzki’s elegant poster designs from the 1960s.

• Song of the week: House of Glass (1967) by The Glass Family.

The Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest

Bookplate by Denis Kostromitin.

Following the recent postings of covers and illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, Will at A Journey Round My Skull posts the results of his Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest which encouraged illustrators to create an Orchideengarten-styled bookplate design. You can see the winner and many other splendid entries on his pages. I fully intended to do something for this then got sidetracked by work on the Alice in Wonderland calendar but I’ve picked out a couple of the (inevitably) black-and-white pieces which I thought stood out. The death’s-head moth on @ndy paciorek’s picture below makes a convenient link with yesterday’s post.

Meanwhile, there’s further Orchideengarten goodness over at Arthur Magazine.

Bookplate by @ndy paciorek.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Der Orchideengarten illustrated
• David Becket’s bookplates
• Der Orchideengarten

Eyecandy

Continuing a rather psychedelic week, Eyecandy is another of those groovy web toys, this time putting you inside a kaleidoscopic sphere of coloured circles whose parameters you can change with sliding controls. Fun to mess with when the right music is playing.

And while we’re on the subject, my new calendar has been selling very well thanks to some generous linkage from Arthur Magazine, Jeff VanderMeer, Boing Boing, Trendhunter, and others. Thanks to everyone who’s bought one, I’ll definitely be following this with something similar, not least a set of illustrations for Through the Looking-Glass. And Jabberwocky, yes, have to do something special for that…

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Kaleidoplex
• Colorscreen

DeZ did it first

Rorschach from The Mindscape of Alan Moore.

The hype over the Watchmen film reached critical mass this week and as a consequence there’s been a spike of interest in the two Alan Moore interviews I posted in 2006, with Empire magazine and other movie sites linking here. I won’t bore you with my lack of interest in the film—read the book, it’s a masterpiece—but it’s worth noting that the feature-length DeZ Vylenz documentary, The Mindscape of Alan Moore, dramatised scenes from V for Vendetta and Watchmen back in 2003, long before Hollywood put either of them on screen. The Rorschach scene is especially interesting for having the opening monologue from Watchmen voiced by Alan himself. I’d never thought of Rorschach having such a gravel-throated delivery until I heard this. If Zack Snyder’s version is the same then you know where they swiped it from.

V’s dressing-room from The Mindscape of Alan Moore.

As I’ve mentioned a few times here, The Mindscape of Alan Moore is available on DVD in Europe and the US and includes a bonus disc of interviews with Alan’s collaborators, Dave Gibbons among them. All the packaging and interface was designed by yours truly.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Mindscape of Alan Moore: US edition
• The Demon Regent Asmodeus
• New things for June
• Alan Moore in Arthur magazine
• Watchmen
• Alan Moore interview, 1988

Design as virus 7: eyes and triangles

Continuing this occasional series. The above motif is the Golden Dawn’s Wedjat or Eye of Horus emblem as reproduced in the hardback edition of The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, an “autohagiography”. Crowley was under discussion here a few days ago and the eye in a triangle symbol can also be seen on the sleeve of the single featured in that posting, forming a part of the seal of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the occult order which Crowley joined in 1910. Crowley’s use of the eye in a triangle caught the attention of writer Robert Anton Wilson and the first part of his Illuminatus! trilogy (written with Robert Shea) is titled The Eye in the Pyramid. That latter symbol appears on the reverse of the American dollar bill, of course, and some of the conspiracy theories surrounding that usage are explored in the novel. Wilson went on to make the eye in a triangle something of a personal symbol and his obsessive use of the motif caught my attention in turn when I began reading his books.

All of which leads us to Hawkwind and a person whose name keeps turning up on these pages, designer Barney Bubbles.

Hawklog cover (detail) by Barney Bubbles.

The booklet which BB designed for Hawkwind’s second album, In Search of Space (1971), featured a version of the dollar bill symbol on its cover. This is the only eye in a triangle design I’ve seen among Barney Bubbles’ work although he was so prolific there may well be others. When I began producing my own significantly inferior Hawkwind graphics in the late Seventies I incorporated eyes in triangles partly as a way of avoiding having to draw hawks all the time but mainly because of Robert Anton Wilson. BB had already established a precedent and it so happens that the eye in the Golden Dawn/Crowley version is the eye of a hawk-headed Egyptian god.

Continue reading “Design as virus 7: eyes and triangles”