Gustave Doré – { feuilleton }

Kenneth Anger, 1927–2023

Kenneth Anger, Topanga Canyon (composite with Gustave Doré engraving) (1954) by Edmund Teske.

The other day…I had a date with Tom Luddy at a New York hotel in the East Fifties to meet Kenneth Anger, the genius who made Scorpio Rising and whose New York flat is a shrine to Valentino.

Michael Powell, from A Life in Movies, 1986

There’s not much I can add to all the plaudits, especially when Kenneth Anger has been a continual fixture here since 2007, with the last post about him going up only two weeks ago. I always find it impossible to make one of those lists where people name their ten favourite films but Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle is one of the very few titles I could add to such a list, and it probably sits in the top five. What the other four might be depends on changes of mood or weather.

The most Anger recent post came about after I’d been re-reading the unofficial Bill Landis biography, a book I’d dipped into over the years but not gone all the way through again since it was published in 1995. It’s an uneven study of Anger’s life and erratic career, detailed yet slapdash, but Landis did at least interview many of Anger’s colleagues and acquaintances while they were still around. Even though Anger himself hated the results of the often gossipy investigation the book will remain an invaluable resource for future writers.

Some links:
• Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (1991). In which Nigel Finch persuaded a reluctant Anger to drive around Los Angeles in a hearse visiting sites of death or disaster mentioned in Anger’s first book. I suspect Finch was more interested in discussing Anger’s films, which are also featured, but needed the scandalous stuff to get the thing made at all. The BBC hadn’t done anything about Anger before this, and haven’t done anything since.

• Kenneth Anger–Magier des Untergrundfilms (1970), a 53-minute documentary made for WDR by Reinhold E. Thiel. A frustrating film, being a mix of awkward interviews (Anger didn’t like Herr Thiel very much) with priceless footage showing the filming of parts of Lucifer Rising. A shame, then, that all the copies which have been circulating for the past decade are low-grade and blighted throughout by one of those proprietary signatures that idiots stick onto footage they don’t own. WDR must still have the film so maybe we’ll get to see a better copy one day.

• Sex, Satanism, Manson, Murder, and LSD: Kenneth Anger tells his tale. Paul Gallagher recounts his own meetings with Anger and also posts several Anger-related pages from Kinokaze zine, 1993.

• Hollywood Bohemia: An interview with Kenneth Anger by AL Bardach for Wet magazine, 1980.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Anger Magick Lantern Cycle, 1966
• Don’t Smoke That Cigarette by Kenneth Anger
• Kenneth Anger’s Maldoror
• Donald Cammell and Kenneth Anger, 1972
• My Surfing Lucifer by Kenneth Anger
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: The Eldorado Edition
• Brush of Baphomet by Kenneth Anger
• Anger Sees Red
• Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon
• Lucifer Rising posters
• Missoni by Kenneth Anger
• Anger in London
• Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken
• Edmund Teske
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again
• Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Anger Magick Lantern Cycle, 1966

Here’s a rare thing: Kenneth Anger’s programme (PDF) for a Spring Equinox screening of his films in New York in 1966, an event that saw the first public appearance of Magick Lantern Cycle as a collective title. This small publication is described at some length by Bill Landis in the unauthorised Anger biography, while the cover design appears on the first page of the booklet inside the BFI collection of Anger’s films. There are 13 pages in the scan, the original item being a collection of loose sheets inside a folded cover.

Among the many points of interest are Anger’s evocative production notes and dedications for the films, comments which have been recycled ever since in articles about the director and his work. There’s also a page of biographical detail which includes a list of Anger’s preferences and interests, a Crowley-style piece of hyperbolic self-description, and a collage bearing the title The Golden Grope of Marilyn Monroe. The latter features a Gustave Doré illustration which prefigures the appropriation of Doré for the first Lucifer Rising poster.

This being early 1966, LSD was hip and still legal, so the screening information suggests the ideal time for psychedelic voyagers in the audience to ingest their sugar cubes. The evening was to begin with the Anger Aquarian Arcanum, a prelude comprising a display of various magical symbols and iconography. Some writers have taken this to be a lost film but Landis says it was a slide show, presumably with Anger’s explanatory commentary. Enough of the programmes for the event were printed that you can still find them for sale today, although if you want to buy one the cheaper copies start at around £500.

Continue reading “Anger Magick Lantern Cycle, 1966”

Consulting the Oracle

Good to find such a pristine reproduction of this Rick Griffin poster. Kenneth Anger commissioned the design in 1967 when he was putting together a package of promotional items to stimulate the interest of potential investors in his new film. Bill Landis in the unofficial Anger biography says the ploy was a successful one, investors were forthcoming although it would be several years before Anger had enough footage for the ill-fated first version of Lucifer Rising to appear in public. While we’re on the subject, I’ll note again that the Gustave Doré engraving used here is from the Purgatorio section of The Divine Comedy, not Paradise Lost as some people continue to claim. Milton’s Lucifer had wings of his own, as well as god-like powers, he didn’t need to be ferried around by a giant bird.

This copy of Griffin’s poster is from issue 7 of the Oracle, or the San Francisco Oracle as it was later titled and known outside the city, an underground newspaper, and one of the best where graphics are concerned.

Underground papers and magazines of the late 1960s often followed the form of other amateur or semi-professional publications, with attractive cover art wrapped around more prosaic interiors. The Oracle ran for 12 issues, from 1966 to 1968, and in its later issues gave as much attention to the appearance of its inner pages as its covers, assisted by artists like Griffin and Bruce Conner. Being based in the city that gave the world so many exceptional concert posters was an obvious advantage.

I was hoping the Internet Archive might have a complete run of the Oracle but only four of the highly-decorated issues are currently available. There’s no Wilfried Sätty artwork in evidence either, although I’m not sure he ever worked for the undergrounds despite there being many titles to choose from in the Bay area. Of note in one of the later issues is a full-page announcement for the forthcoming march on the Pentagon, an anti-war protest that took place in October 1967. Kenneth Anger attended the event although the exact nature of his involvement, like so many other Anger stories, varies according to the reporter.

• San Francisco Oracle – Vol 1, No 7
• San Francisco Oracle – Vol 1, No 9
• San Francisco Oracle – Vol 1, No 10
• San Francisco Oracle – Vol 1, No 12

Continue reading “Consulting the Oracle”

The Purloined Eidolon

Dreamland by Frederick Simpson Coburn.

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule—
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE—Out of TIME.

Dreamland by Edgar Allan Poe

There’s always more Poe. Frederick Simpson Coburn was a Canadian artist who illustrated a 10-volume set of Edgar Allan Poe’s complete works in 1902, the collection being edited by Charles F. Richardson, and published in special editions with Poe-esque names such as “Arnheim” and “Eldorado”. Coburn was more of a painter than an illustrator so his full-page pieces tend to be stolidly professional in a manner that doesn’t really suit Poe’s fervid imagination. One exception is his illustration for Dreamland (aka Dream-Land) which would be more impressive if it hadn’t been so heavily “inspired” by a similar picture, The Black Idol or Resistance by František Kupka. Kupka’s picture dates from 1903 so it might seem at first that any suggestion of creative purloining should be dismissed (or even reversed) unless you know that The Black Idol was a slightly reworked version of a similar piece which appeared in a French magazine, Cocorico, in December 1900.

The suspicion of appropriation is reinforced if you also know that Kupka’s earlier work was one of two Poe-derived pieces published in the same magazine, and was itself an illustration for Dreamland, with the first few lines of the poem in the Mallarmé translation being printed underneath the drawing. Coburn grew up in Quebec and moved to Paris in 1896 to study art; he was still there in 1900. Circumstantial evidence this may be but we don’t need the services of Auguste Dupin to suppose that Coburn might have remembered an illustration from a French magazine when the Poe commission arrived a year or so later.

I’m not here to cast aspersions, the pressure of deadlines compelled me to swipe a chunk of Gustave Doré when I illustrated Poe myself a few years ago. I enjoy finding minor artistic connections like these, and the links between Coburn and Kupka are obscure enough that they probably haven’t been remarked on very much or even noticed until now. While we’re on the subject of dark eidolons, Dreamland was illustrated by William Heath Robinson in his own Poe edition in 1900. Robinson isn’t as sublimely grandiose as Kupka and Coburn but he also portrays Night as a literal figure. See the rest of his book here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Martin van Maële’s illustrated Poe
• Narraciones extraordinarias by Edgar Allan Poe
• Fritz Eichenberg’s illustrated Poe
• The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe
• Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings
• Illustrating Poe #5: Among the others
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
• Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke
• Illustrating Poe #2: William Heath Robinson
• Illustrating Poe #1: Aubrey Beardsley
• Poe at 200
• The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA
• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

Weekend links 582

Illustration by Gustave Doré from L’Espagne (1874) by Jean Charles Davillier.

• Warp Records has announced the forthcoming publication of Atmospherics by Jon Hassell, a short book collecting the diary extracts, composition notes and other ephemera that Jon compiled as an evolving appendix for his website. I was involved with the first iteration of the Atmospherics when we were working on his site in 2004, and for me this section was always the most interesting part of the project, comprising unique, personal material. The book will be published in October.

• “Almost everything in his book would be dismissed by today’s streaming behemoths as ‘too quirky, too local, too slow, too dry, too difficult, too weird’.” Sukhdev Sandhu reviewing The Magic Box, a history of British TV from the 1950s to the 1980s by Rob Young.

• New music: Cobalt Desert Oasis by Marco Shuttle, Angel’s Flight (AD 93) by Biosphere, and The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse by Stephen Prince, a sequel to an earlier release by A Year In The Country which includes an accompanying novella.

• Mix of the week, month and year: Sentimental Ornament: A Broadcast Rarities Mix by Aquarium Drunkard. First posted almost a year ago, I only discovered it last week; Aquarium Drunkard is now added to my RSS feed to avoid further neglect.

• I didn’t post anything for Bloomsday this year but if I’d seen these caricatures by Craig Morriss back in June I would have linked to them at the time.

• At Unquiet Things: The Eerie Moods and Pulpy Frights of Henri Lievens.

• Whole lotta rarities: the strangest Led Zeppelin artwork.

• Old music: A Willow Swept By Train by Janet Beat.

• Instant Lettering Database

• Atmospheres (1967) by Wimple Winch | Atmospheric Lightness (2018) by Brian Eno | Ligeti: Atmosphères (2019) by Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France; Alan Gilbert