Kenneth Anger – Page 18 – { feuilleton }

Aleister Crowley on vinyl

The appearance of occultist Aleister Crowley on the sleeve of Sgt Pepper is well-documented—here he is looking rather grainy on my CD insert—although I always forget which of the Beatles it was who put him in the list of “people that we like”. I’d guess John Lennon who would have appreciated Crowley’s obscene poetry, copious drug intake and ability to consistently épater la bourgeoisie.

Less well-known is what I presume must be the first outing for Crowley’s voice on this rare undated single from the mid-Seventies. Along with the cassette tapes I discussed earlier, this was another item turned up during a recent clearout of household junk. I’ve yet to see a detailed description of the origin of these Crowley recordings. I have the first CD pressing and haven’t looked at later editions so can’t say whether they contain more information about what are supposed to be wax cylinder recordings copied to acetates. The first complete collection of the recordings was a vinyl release produced by David Tibet in a limited edition in 1986. I was among those that ordered a copy.

The Marabo single features two of the same recordings, of course, albeit in slightly poorer quality. (And I love the way it has a removable centre, as though it might well end up in a jukebox.) One feature of the continual reissuing of Crowley the recordings is that sound quality has improved over the years. The versions of The Pentagram and La Gitana on YouTube sound better than the ones on my CD. The occult resonance of Crowley’s voice (which always reminds me of Winston Churchill) have inevitably made it a popular sampling source. In the pre-sampling era 23 Skidoo and Psychic TV (both with David Tibet) used loops of the Enochian Calls. Bill Laswell later took to using samples on his ambient releases, while the most recent CD version includes an entire disc of ambience with Crowley’s voice subjected to digital processing.

The sleeve art for the single was by Steffi Grant, occultist wife of occultist Kenneth Grant, and it’s possible the pair sing backing vocals on the less-than-compelling B-side, a soft rock number entitled Scarlet Woman by Chakra. The song is credited to “Ponton/Ayers/Grant/Magee” so even if one or other of the Grants didn’t sing they helped with the lyrics. It should be noted that Mrs Grant’s artwork is often better than these illustrations and does much to enliven her husband’s volumes of occult philosophy. Some of their work was also featured in the seven-volume encyclopedia, Man, Myth and Magic, which featured Kenneth among the staff of consultants.

Before anyone asks: no, the single isn’t for sale. I’ve sold a lot of old vinyl over the past few years but I’m keeping this particular item. I know a couple of unreleased recordings by Chakra exist; if anyone has further information about the group, please leave a comment.

Update: Jok posted a link which resolves the mystery. It was indeed Kenneth Grant on backing vocals.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Old music and old technology
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare

Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger

Mouse Heaven: Minnie and Mickey.

Kenneth Anger’s paean to Disney rodent memorabilia, and one of his most recent works, turns up at the Grey Lodge. Mouse Heaven is a distinctly minor piece, an awkward mix of film and video which juxtaposes shots of mouse figurines with a song-based soundtrack. Scorpio Rising this isn’t but the editing is up to his usual standard, and it has a curious, if rather grotesque, charm.

Rabbit heaven: Bugs drags up again.

I suspect I’m not the ideal audience for a film such as this, never having been very taken with Mickey and the rest of the Disney crew. This seems to be a generational thing. My parents are about Anger’s age and they watched Disney shorts regularly at the cinema, while older Americans would have seen the Mickey Mouse Club on TV in the 1950s. By the time my sisters and I were watching cartoons on television Disney had retreated into the pop culture background. Plenty of merchandise was available, of course, but the animations that gave birth to these characters were rarely seen on British TV since Disney was worried about over-exposure of their precious assets.

The consequence of this (which I doubt they realised) was that a new generation of kids could happily and eagerly watch all the Warner Brothers Merry Melodies (and MGM’s Tom & Jerry and Tex Avery cartoons) whereas I’ve still seen very few Mickey Mouse cartoons. Those that did turn up were either primitive (Steamboat Willie) or presented a Mouse character that was actually a suburban middle-class American. The contrast between Donald Duck’s irritating petulance and Daffy’s wisecracks, or between the Mouse in a house and a bisexual rabbit, could hardly be more striking. The last shred of any potential Disney charm was dispelled when I read the priceless demolition of Disneyworld and its inhabitants, Mickey Rodent!, by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder, in a reprint of MAD magazine:

Strolling in the foreground of the opening panel is Mickey himself, with a four-day stubble on his face and a snapped mouse trap on his snout; his left arm has a TV screen, smashed in the middle, with “Howdy Dooit” sunrays visible. (That’s an inside joke: in a previous issue, parodying “Howdy Doody,” Mickey was seen at the edge of the opening panel, grasping and shouting, “That’s MY sunray from MY movies behind his head and I wannit back!”) Around him a melodrama unfolds: Horace Horszneck is being dragged off to jail “for appearing without his white gloves.” The animal chorus behind him clucks, moos and barks their annoyance with “Walt Dizzy’s” rule about wearing white gloves at all times… “In this hot weather too!” “And it’s so hard to buy those furshlugginer three-fingered kinds!” (Read the rest of the description here and try and see the comic for yourself; it’s a masterpiece.)

There was no going back after that, and Wally Wood’s Disneyland Memorial Orgy was merely the icing on an already mouldering cake. So, sorry Kenneth, but I’m an apostate; Bugs Bunny rules my blue heaven.

• The Look traces the history of Wally Wood’s scurrilous poster from hippie to punk to Alison Goldfrapp

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• The Realist
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Les Demi Dieux revisited

Watching the Kenneth Anger DVDs last week (which really are superb, by the way, and should be on the Christmas shopping lists of anyone interested in underground cinema) had me hunting around for more of the kind of period imagery one sees in his Scorpio Rising (1964) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), imagery that’s erotic if seen with the correct eye (a gay one, naturally). The photos produced by Les Demi Dieux, a New York photographer of the Fifties and Sixties, correspond very much to the atmosphere in Anger’s films, not least because of the location, Scorpio Rising being filmed among the biker groups of Coney Island. I linked to a Flickr page showing some of these photos in March and since then this page has surfaced which sheds a bit more light on the still elusive history of these pictures.

• Les Demi Dieux at Big Kugels

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Les Demi Dieux
• James Bidgood
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Austin Spare in Glasgow

Austin Spare

Self-portrait by Austin Osman Spare (1907).

A late discovery but worth a mention, an Austin Spare exhibition that’s been running in Glasgow this month. From the press release:

An exhibition of 13 prints from this great artist and Occultist will run until 29th September 2007 at Mono, King’s Court, King Street Glasgow.

We have a diverse array of his styles to exhibit, and some of these have never been exhibited publicly before. We begin in 1921 with “The Magic Circle”, through his renowned “Ugly Ecstasy” drawings of 1924 (3 drawings & Grotesque), a demonic watercolour featuring a three headed demon?one of whose heads is Cthulhu, a postcard with drawing of his friend the bohemian writer Oswell Blakeston as Satyr and message about his art show on the reverse, “Self Portrait as Satyr” significantly signed ZOSAOS, a sidereal pastel entitled “Dire Awakening”, a watercolour which depicts a kind of celestial phallus endowing the receiver with “ecstasy” and a lambent woman, “Punch and Judy”, “The Return” and ending with “The Death Mask of Voltaire”—painted two years before the artist’s death, and being a meditation on death itself.

As our opening night of the exhibition show was so popular and created so much interest, we are thinking of having an end-of-exhibition get together to discuss Zos and the effect it’s had on people, so if Zos has inspired you, let me know or leave a message on our MySpace at myspace.com/23enigmashop and we’ll let you where and when.

We have produced a catalogue to mark this unique occasion in Scottish occulture and to honour the memory of AOS/ZOS. The catalogue is a folio containing a three page essay on Zos, specially written for us and kindly donated by Michael Staley. The 13 artworks from our exhibition have been expertly reproduced, and photographic quality prints made. These are all included in the catalogue, we also have a range of t-shirts, a set of 13 postcards of the prints from the exhibition and individual full scale prints for sale which are truly stunning.

Via Midian Books.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare

The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger

The title comes from a newspaper headline, one of many that the tabloid press bestowed on occultist Aleister Crowley whilst titillating their readers with lurid descriptions of orgies and Black Masses throughout the 1920s. Before the Second World War it was still possible to label a self-aggrandising magus “The Wickedest Man in the World”. If only they knew what was coming…

The picture above is a still from Kenneth Anger’s 2002 film of Crowley’s paintings which you can see in two parts at YouTube. The paintings were filmed in exhibition at the October Gallery in 1998 and Anger turns the original tabloid headline around by making the “hang” refer to hanging a painting. Crowley’s crude artwork often turns up in books but there are several pictures in the film I hadn’t come across before. Crowley’s depiction of the Himalayas, where he spent some time mountaineering, look very similar to those of Nicholas Roerich, the painter whose work HP Lovecraft references in At the Mountains of Madness. It would have been nice to have some more information about the pictures but that’s not Anger’s style.

• The Man We Want to Hang pt 1 | pt 2

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare