Sci-Fi-O-Rama – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 157

Elektrik Karousel, a new release on the Ghost Box label by The Focus Group. “For a clue to its moods, think Czech animation, Italian Giallo, early Radiophonics, HP Lovecraft stories, 1960s underground cinema, Lewis Carroll and baroque psych.” Julian House’s package design is “heavily inspired by 1960s underground press and conceived as a kind of mind altering DIY board game”.

• Joseph Stannard of The Outer Church compiles a mix for Kit Records, and talks about rural psychedelia and malevolent lighthouses, among other things.

• At Sci-Fi-O-Rama: a sampling of Dan Nadel & Norman Hathaway’s Electrical Banana – Masters of Psychedelic Art (2012).

• Stranger than Paradise: Tilda Swinton photographed by Tim Walker in the Surrealist Wonderland of Las Pozas, Mexico.

• Whistler in Limehouse & Wapping: stunning etchings by the 25-year-old artist when he was newly arrived in London.

• The complete catalogue of Sunn O))) recordings is now on Bandcamp for preview and purchase.

• La Danza de la Realidad: Alejandro Jodorowsky returns to his childhood in Tocopilla, Chile.

• Enjoy The Silence: Jude Rogers talks to Michael Rother about joy of quiet.

• Dressing the Air, “the Bureau of Sensory Intelligence”, had a relaunch.

• Fast forward – and press play again: Cassettes are back

• The Lovecraft Expert: An Interview with S.T. Joshi

• Book Graphics: an illustration blog.

• Paint Box (1967) by Pink Floyd | Beat Box (1984) by Art of Noise | Glory Box (1994) by Portishead

Weekend links 138

Heartsick (2011) by Kelly Durette.

• Now that Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch album is out and causing the usual consternation, the spotlight-shy singer/composer has been doing a surprising amount of promotional interviews. Simon Hattenstone talked to him for the Guardian at the end of last month; this week it was John Doran’s turn at The Quietus. One quote from the latter piece stood out in the light of this week’s posts: “…the music we’re making is meant to be an aural version of the HR Giger drawings for Alien. It always sounds to me like those look.”

• Satanica is a limited-edition publication curated by Gio Black Peter & Christopher Stoddard “for anyone who rejects societal norms, for those dedicated to a life of pleasure, excess and self-reflection”.

• Sci-Fi-O-Rama has put five years’ worth of blog pictures onto Pinterest. I don’t really need to do that, there’s already a diverse crowd of Pinterest users compiling their own selection of things posted here.

As Susan Sontag once observed, pornography is practical. It was designed as a marital aid, and its vocabulary should follow natural biological rhythms and stick with hot-button words in order to produce a predictable climax. It is not about sex but is sex. Whereas the great sex writers (Harold Brodkey, DH Lawrence, Robert Gluck, David Plante, the Australian Frank Moorhouse) have a quirky, phenomenological, realistic approach to sex. They are doing what the Russian formalists said was the secret of all good fiction – making the familiar strange, writing from the Martian’s point of view.

Edmund White on writing about sex in fiction

• When pirate DVDs of films by Cocteau, Bresson and Pasolini are on sale in a Mexican market, life in the 21st century increasingly resembles a William Gibson novel. Joanne McNeil investigates.

• Copies of City Fun, Manchester’s premier music fanzine/alt culture mag (founded 1978), can now be read online at the Manchester District Music Archive.

• Linked everywhere during the past few days, the astonishing map of bomb hits on London during the Blitz (October 1940 to June 1941).

• At 50 Watts: 30 Vintage Magazine Covers from Japan and Alfred Kubin’s illustrations for Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel (1913) by Paul Scheerbart.

• Earlier this year for Frieze Magazine Geeta Dayal talked to musical collaborators of the great German producer Conny Plank.

• Invisible Ink by Christopher Fowler, “the extraordinary stories of over one hundred forgotten authors”.

• Cynthia Carr talks about Fire in the Belly, her biography of American artist David Wojnarowicz.

• “Blasphemy, Filth, And Nonsense” More Aleister Crowley ephemera at Front Free Endpaper.

• At Strange Flowers: Surrealist art by Jindrich Heisler (1914–1953).

• Vladimir Nabokov wrote to Alfred Hitchcock in 1964.

• Scott Walker’s four tracks from the Nite Flights album (1978): Shutout | Fat Mama Kick | Nite Flights | The Electrician.

Weekend links 86

Salammbô by Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt) from Harry Crosby‘s Red Skeletons (1927). Dover published a new collection of Alastair’s drawings in September.

“A Taste of Honey showed working-class women from a working-class woman’s point of view, had a gay man as a central and sympathetic figure, and a black character who was neither idealised nor a racial stereotype.” RIP Shelagh Delaney. Related: Shelagh Delaney’s Salford (1960), directed by Ken Russell, and all 47 minutes (!) of The White Bus (1967), Lindsay Anderson’s strange, pre-If…. short, written by Shelagh Delaney, filmed in and around Manchester.

Since birth I’ve craved all things psychedelic, the energy and beauty of it. The pleasure… […] But in the US the exploration of consciousness and its powers—or really any curiosity about anything at all—is actively discouraged, because the system is so corrupt that it depends on people being virtually unconscious all the time. Burroughs cracked that code long ago. Spirituality here equals money; no one seems to be able to think, never mind explore their own consciousness.

Laurie Weeks: Making Magic Out of the Real

• Ian Albinson shows us The Title Design of Saul Bass while Ace Jet 170 has a copy of the new Bass monograph.

• Kris Kool (1970) at 50 Watts, Philip Caza’s lurid, erotic, psychedelic comic strip.

Götz Krafft by EM Lilien from a collection at Flickr.

• Serious Listeners: The Strange and Frightening World of Coil.

• The Octopus Chronicles, a new blog at Scientific American.

• We now live in a world where there are Ghost Box badges.

• Kilian Eng interviewed at Sci-Fi-O-Rama.

• Dalí Planet

• Bedabbled!

• A Taste of Honey (1962) by Acker Bilk | A Taste of Honey (1965) by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass | A Taste of Honey (Moog version) (1969) by Martin Denny.

The psychedelic art of Howard Bernstein

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (1967).

I made a post a while back about the work of Bob Pepper, an artist whose illustrations from the 1960s can also be described as psychedelic and who was equally visible in the music and book publishing worlds. Howard Bernstein (not to be confused with musician Howie B) wasn’t as prolific as Pepper but this post was prompted by the appearance at Sci-Fi-O-Rama of the swirling abstractions of his Roger Zelazny cover. Like Pepper, Bernstein produced album cover art as well as book covers although it’s possible the Zelazny piece may have been a one-off. This was the jacket of the first edition and a rather flagrant attempt by Doubleday to co-opt the trendiness of the psychedelic style for a science fiction readership. They tried something similar with the cover for Harlan Ellison’s landmark anthology Dangerous Visions in the same year, the art in that case being the work of Leo & Diane Dillon. The Zelazny cover caught my attention for another reason, the typography is a variation on the 19th century Kismet typeface by John F Cumming which I used for my two Alice in Wonderland calendars and which turns up regularly in psychedelic design. And while we’re considering conjunctions of music and science fiction, I ought to note that the Hawkwind song Lord of Light lifts its title from Zelazny’s novel.

The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra, Vol. I (1965).

As for Bernstein’s music work, most of this appears to have been for Bernard Stollman’s eccentric ESP Disk label where the roster of artists included many free-jazz greats along with The Fugs, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary and fringe psychedelic groups such as Pearls Before Swine, Cromagnon, The Godz and others. Bernstein’s Cromagnon cover (below) exists in both monochrome and coloured versions but the monochrome one seems to be the original. In fact much of his art looks like it was drawn in black-and-white with the colours being created by separations at the print stage. His poster for The Godz is especially striking, so much so I’m surprised to find there isn’t more of his work around. Wolfgang’s Vault has a blacklight poster and there are some other blacklight works here. If anyone knows of other posters, please leave a comment although I suspect if there was much more then Wolfgang’s Vault would have the goods.

Continue reading “The psychedelic art of Howard Bernstein”

Fascinating tentacula

Histioteuthis ruppellii.

Suckered pseudopods flex and writhe again this week with simultaneous postings at BibliOdyssey and Sci-Fi-O-Rama. Coincidence or some cephalopodic zeitgeist thing? You decide. BibliOdyssey has a fine set of natural history plates showing various squid and octopuses while Sci-Fi-O-Rama presents a small collection of illustrations by Barnaby Ward. If it’s boys and tentacles you want (and who doesn’t?), then there’s always the art of NoBeast.

Untitled drawing by Barnaby Ward.

Ernst Haeckel remains my favourite tentacle illustrator, and the octopus below is one of his examples from Kunstformen der Natur (1899–1904). Somewhere (although Cthulhu knows where) I have a drawing by Hal Foster from one of his Prince Valiant strips showing a sinister octopus in a pit which is almost a match for Haeckel’s, and may even have been based on it. If I ever find it again I’ll post it here. Meanwhile, China Miéville’s Kraken is currently lurking on bookshelves, and let me remind you again that he discusses that novel and other works over at Salon Futura. While we’re on the subject, let’s not forget the Octopulps.

Octopus by Ernst Haeckel.

Finally, a note to say that my webhost is moving this site to a new server which may cause some disruption to these pages for the next few days. As always, your patience is appreciated.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jewelled butterflies and cephalopods
• Haeckel fractals
• Ernst Haeckel, Christmas card artist
• The art of Rune Olsen
• Octopulps
• The art of NoBeast