Joseph Losey – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 467

~~Artwork by Kuldar Leement (maybe…I’ve yet to see a credit for this).~~ No, it’s the work of Rupert Lloyd.

• In Search Of Hades: The Virgin Recordings 1973–1979, is a retrospective box set comprising 16 CDs and 2 blu-ray discs devoted to the first phase of Tangerine Dream’s output on the Virgin label. For enthusiasts of the group’s Virgin recordings (myself among them) this is very welcome, especially for the albums being given the Steven Wilson remix treatment, and the wealth of rare and unreleased material. In addition to several live concerts the box will include the complete Oedipus Tyrannus theatre soundtrack, the overture of which appeared on a compilation in 1975 but has since been unavailable outside bootlegs. Baroque 2 is a taster of the unheard soundtrack. The box itself will be released on 14th June. Related: Edgar Froese interviewed on a US radio station in 1974. Among the topics of discussion are German music of the time, Tangerine Dream’s dissatisfaction with Ohr Records, and their happiness at moving to Virgin.

• “As the witch-burning begins, the image gradually dissolves into a stroboscopic onslaught of neon colours accompanied by rapid, high-pitched ringing and a thundering drone.” Don’t come to Gaspar Noé for social realism. Lux Aeterna is his new thing.

• An ode to the ultimate camp film: Nathalie Atkinson on Boom!, Joseph Losey’s adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, and (unsurprisingly) one of John Waters’ favourites.

“Adhesive,” a term borrowed from phrenology, was Whitman’s synonym for homosexuality. According to gay studies pioneer William A. Percy, “the term became part of the special vocabulary of the emerging homosexual subculture of the nineteenth century,” which Whitman and his coterie would have understood. Despite Whitman’s private vows to resist temptation, and to be more aloof, he continued to court young men until he died. One of the final photos of Whitman, taken at the Camden docks in 1890, shows the poet with his handsome male nurse Warren Fritzinger. “I like to look at him—he is health to look at: young, strong, lithe,” Whitman told Traubel.

Jeremy Lybarger on Walt Whitman’s boys

• Psychedelic Promos & Radio Spots: 8 volumes, over 500 tracks, all free downloads. Hear many of the most popular groups of the late 60s shilling for commercial radio stations.

• Hildur Gudnadóttir used only sounds from a nuclear plant in her score for Chernobyl.

• US museums of the week: Poster House, NYC, and The Moogseum, Asheville, NC.

• “Yes, witches are real,” says Pam Grossman, “I know because I am one.”

• Photos by Chas Gerretsen from the set of Apocalypse Now.

• Geeta Dayal on the brainwave music of David Rosenboom.

• Mix of the week: Self-Titled NE285 Mix by Kevin Martin.

• RIP Roky Erickson

• Boom Boom (1961) by John Lee Hooker | Boom Stix (1962) by Curley & The Jades | Boom! (1992) by The Grid

In Germany before the war

1: Fritz Haarmann (1879–1925)

Arrow shows Haarmann’s attic residence in Rote Reihe, Hanover.

Haarmann was one of several serial murderers haunting Weimar Germany, variously nicknamed “the Butcher of Hanover”, “the Vampire of Hanover”, “the Wolf Man”, etc. for his sexual assault, murder and dismemberment of at least 24 boys and young men between 1918 and 1924. Haarmann also sold meat on the black market which led to rumours that some of the mince and other produce he sold was human flesh.

2: M (1931), a film by Fritz Lang.

Thea von Harbou’s script for M is based in part on the Haarmann case although Lang’s child-killer is shown preying on girls rather than boys. Peter Lorre is superb in his first major role as the murderer, while Lang’s use of the new sound technology is remarkably inventive when compared to his stagey contemporaries in Hollywood.

3: M (1953), a film by Joseph Losey.

Lang’s masterwork reworked as a Los Angeles film noir by Joseph Losey before McCarthyism sent him to Europe. This is one noir I still haven’t seen even though a major sequence takes place in that cult location, the Bradbury Building.

Continue reading “In Germany before the war”

Weekend links 54

Film and opera posters by Franciszek Starowieyski (see below).

• At first glance, Jerzy Skolimowski’s new film, Essential Killing, sounds like Joseph Losey’s Figures in a Landscape (1970) reworked for our era of renditions, torture and war without end. The trailer is here; Sight & Sound liked the film and dismissed any Losey comparisons. The Quietus interviewed the director this week, and there’s also a video interview here.

“He was trying to tell the truth about war. In the 1950s the US was telling itself a mythic, grandiose, heroic story about the second world war and GI Joe saving the world. [James] Jones was saying, ‘That wasn’t the war I saw, I want to write something more honest and realistic. Whatever the mid-America myth, one of the things men were doing was giving blow jobs for money.'”

From Here to Eternity is published in an uncensored edition.

• Edogawa Rampo‘s sinister short story The Human Chair concerns a man who conceals himself inside a chair. Taiwanese artist Lan Hungh may have had Rampo’s story in mind for his Demolished Chair art piece about which we’re told “Hungh’s flaccid penis is the only body part that’s visible, and becomes hard as soon as anyone starts discussing the chair or sitting on it.” BUTT magazine spoke to the artist.

…unaware of their double standards, the police objected to the portrayal of men in Harrison’s work as demeaning. There was Hugh Hefner squeezed into a bunny girl costume, a beefy but emasculated Captain America wearing false breasts and a stars ‘n’ stripes-patterned basque, and Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who tried to murder Andy Warhol, stamping on his Brillo box artwork.

A piece about artist Margaret Harrison whose work is on show at Payne Shurvell, London.

• Connecting Science and Art: “Novelist Cormac McCarthy (!), filmmaker Werner Herzog, and physicist Lawrence Krauss discuss science as inspiration for art and Herzog’s new film on the earliest known cave paintings.”

• At Tumblr: Gurafiku, “a collection of visual research that encompasses the history of Japanese graphic design”, and Archidose.

• “Michael Moorcock’s Modem Times 2.0 is a good introduction to the literary legend.”

• The Spring 2011 edition of Periwinkle Journal (Queer Art + Creativity) is now live.

• Rick Poynor (again) on [Franciszek] Starowieyski’s Graphic Universe of Excess.

• Coudal now have a page of links for the great Terrence Malick.

• Wake in Progress is Finnegans Wake illustrated.

• Brown Study, a blog by Jay Babcock.

• RIP Sidney Lumet.

• Ry Cooder & The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces: Let’s Have a Ball is a film by Les Blank of a fantastic performance by Cooder’s band in Santa Cruz, California, in 1987. It’s not available on DVD but most of it can be seen on YouTube.

Quite a performance

As mentioned earlier, I designed the jacket for this excellent biography of Donald Cammell some time ago. The book is reviewed in today’s (London) Times by Barry Miles.

Quite a performance
review by Barry Miles

DONALD CAMMELL: A Life on the Wild Side
by Rebecca and Sam Umland
FAB Press, £24.95 hardback, £16.95 paperback; 304pp

THERE IS A PERSISTENT rumour that after shooting himself in the head the filmmaker Donald Cammell lived on in a delirious, euphoric state for 45 minutes. The story is that he asked his wife China to place a mirror so that he could watch himself die and said: “Do you see the picture of Borges”? This is a reference to the death scene in Performance, his best known film, when the gangster Chas (played by James Fox) shoots the rock star Turner (played by Mick Jagger).

In a profoundly shocking sequence, the camera follows the bullet into his brain, only to find there a photograph of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges who is much quoted in the film. This is but one of the many myths surrounding Cammell that these authors debunk — he died the instant the .38 bullet entered his skull.

Continue reading “Quite a performance”