Strange Flowers – Page 13

Weekend links 113

Wunderkammer (2011) by Emma Leonard.

As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like. Did I expect I would be living in such a world of wonders? Of course. Everyone did. Do I feel cheated now? It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them.

A quote from Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit, an essay by David Graeber. Related: Another World: David Graeber interviewed by Michelle Kuo at Artforum.

• Constellation, a series of portraits by Kumi Yamashita: “This body of work consists of three simple materials that, when combined, produce the portraits: a wooden panel painted a solid white, thousands of small galvanized nails, and a single, unbroken, common sewing thread.”

• Nicole Rudick at The Paris Review on the history of psychedelic art. Related: The psychedelic art and design of Keiichi Tanaami. Also Manifesting the Mind: Footprints of the Shaman, a two-hour documentary about psychedelic drugs.

• Already mentioned here, The Lost Tapes, a 3-CD collection of previously unreleased recording by the mighty Can, is out on Monday. There’s a preview of ten of the tracks here.

• “I can’t think of anybody who would have a good word to say for centipedes…” Duncan Fallowell (a Can associate for many years) interviewed William Burroughs in 1982.

• Herb Lubalin: American Graphic Designer and the Herb Lubalin Study Center’s Flickr sets.

• Strange Flowers goes to the movies with everyone’s favourite Bavarian king, Ludwig II.

• The Sphinx’s Riddle: The Art of Leonor Fini at the Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco.

• More Teutonica: A Spacemusic Primer by Dave Maier.

• Van Dyke Parks: return of a musical maverick.

• Forty Posters for Forty Years at Pentagram.

• Donovan’s Colours (1968) by Van Dyke Parks | Sailin’ Shoes (1972) by Van Dyke Parks | Clang Of The Yankee Reaper (1975) by Van Dyke Parks.

Weekend links 108

Bob Staake’s cover illustration acknowledges President Obama’s statement last week in favour of gay marriages.

• Related to the above: Gay rights in the US, state by state, an infographic and a useful riposte to people like Orson Scott Card (yes, him again) who claim that gay Americans are equal in everything but the right to marry. On the same theme, “Now Obama’s come out on same-sex marriage, maybe so will I,” says Edmund White (yes, him again), and Eric Berkowitz, author of Sex & Punishment: 4,000 Years of Judging Desire, who writes that “In the period up to roughly the thirteenth century, male bonding ceremonies were performed in churches all over the Mediterranean.”

• The fifth edition of A Humument by Tom Phillips will be published soon by Thames & Hudson. The Tom Phillips website has just been relaunched in a form which now incorporates the notes I made in December about Phillips’ album cover designs.

• The Greenfriars are encouraging people to follow their example and get involved with their local communities (the habits are optional). Kudos for the choice of a Dürer knot.

The action centres on the arrival of a man who may or may not be a prophet, or the devil, or just a violent con-man, in a rotting, rain-drenched Hungarian hamlet. This is the “estate”, apparently some sort of failed collective, where all hope has been lost and all the buildings are falling down. It is inhabited by a cast of semi-crazed inadequates: desperate peasants cack-handedly trying to rip each other off while ogling each other’s wives; a “perpetually drunk” doctor obsessively watching his neighbours; young women trying to sell themselves in a ruined mill; a disabled girl ineptly attempting to kill her cat.

Sátántango by László Krasznahorkai is published in a new translation by George Szirtes

• The Quietus interviewed Kevin Shields following the long-awaited reissue of the My Bloody Valentine catalogue.

• The first volume of Russ Kick’s Graphic Canon (to which I’m a contributor) has been sighted in the wild.

• Rise of the Living Type: Stylised 17th century floriated letterforms & grotesque mask sprinkles.

• Ed Jansen’s Camera Obscura III, a tour of museums, galleries and venues, 2009–2011.

• io9 reports on the new translation of Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky.

• Shanghai Expression: Graphic Design in China in the 1920s and 30s.

• Liberty Realm, a monograph of drawings by Catharyne Ward.

• 100 mins of Adrian Sherwood‘s best dub productions.

• Strange Flowers checked into the Chelsea Hotel.

• Chelsea Girls (1967) by Nico | Chelsea Morning (1968) by Fairport Convention | Chelsea Hotel #2, Rufus Wainwright sings Leonard Cohen.

Weekend links 107

Le Faune (1923) by Carlos Schwabe.

• “When I recently attended a conference in China, many of the presenters left their papers on the cloud—Google Docs, to be specific. You know how this story ends: they got to China and there was no Google. Shit out of luck. Their cloud-based Gmail was also unavailable, as were the cloud lockers on which they had stored their rich media presentations.” Ubuweb’s Kenneth Goldsmith on why he doesn’t trust the Cloud.

• “I’m a poet and Britain is not a land for poets anymore.” A marvellous interview with the great Lindsay Kemp at Dangerous Minds. Subjects include all that you’d hope for: Genet, Salomé, David Bowie, Ken Russell, Derek Jarman, The Wicker Man and “papier maché giant cocks”.

• “As early as the 1950s, Maurice Richardson wrote a Freudian analysis which concluded that Dracula was ‘a kind of incestuous-necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match’.” Christopher Frayling on the Bram Stoker centenary.

• Björk gets enthused by (among other things) Leonora Carrington, The Hourglass Sanatorium and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s YouTube lectures.

• Before Fritz Lang’s Metropolis there was Algol – Tragödie der Macht (1920). Strange Flowers investigates.

David Marsh recreates famous album covers using Adobe Illustrator’s Pantone swatches.

• New titles forthcoming from Strange Attractor Press. Related: an interview with SAP allies Cyclobe.

• 960 individual slabs of vinyl make an animated waveform for Benga’s I Will Never Change.

• An exhibition of works by Stanislav Szukalksi at Varnish Fine Art, San Francisco,

• Keith Haring‘s erotic mural for the NYC LGBT Community Center is restored.

• The Situationist Times (1962–1967) is resurrected at Boo-Hooray.

• Doors Closing Slowly: Derek Raymond‘s Factory Novels.

• Will Wilkinson insists that fiction isn’t good for you.

• More bookplates at BibliOdyssey and 50 Watts.

• The Top 25 Psychedelic Videos of All Time.

• Flannery O’Connor: cartoonist.

• RIP Adam Yauch.

• Their finest moment: Sabotage (1994) by Beastie Boys.

The Secret Life of Edward James

From the earliest days of YouTube there were two films about Surrealist art that I’d been hoping would one day be posted somewhere so I could watch them again. One was José Montes-Baquer’s collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Impressions de la Haute Mongolie – Hommage á Raymond Roussel (1976), which eventually turned up at Ubuweb; the other was Patrick Boyle’s The Secret Life of Edward James, a 50-minute documentary about the wealthy poet and Surrealist art patron that was screened once, and once only, on the UK’s ITV network in 1978. Boyle’s film, which was narrated by James’ friend and fellow Surrealism enthusiast, George Melly, was my first introduction to a fascinating figure who was one of the last—if not the last—of the many eccentric aristocrats that these islands have produced. I knew James’ name from Surrealist art books where the Edward James Foundation was credited as the owner of paintings by Magritte and Dalí, but had no idea that James was the model for three of Magritte’s paintings, including La reproduction interdite (1937); or that he’d abandoned his huge ancestral home to create a Surrealist house at nearby Monkton, and had also commenced the construction of a concrete fantasia, Las Pozas, in the heart of the Mexican jungle at Xilitla. Boyle’s film explores all of this in the calm and uncondescending manner that used to be a staple of UK TV documentaries. I’ve been telling people about this film for years, hoping that somebody might have taped it (unlikely in 1978) but no-one ever seemed to have seen it.

In 1986, two years after James’ death, Monkton was up for sale so Central TV sent George Melly and director Patrick Boyle to revisit the place. Monkton, A Surrealist Dream, was the result, a 26-minute documentary which relied heavily on the earlier film to fill out the details of James’ life. The original resurfaced for me again, albeit briefly, in Brighton in 1998. A Surreal Life: Edward James (1907–1984) was an exhibition at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery that featured many works from the James art collection, including major pieces by Leonora Carrington (who appears in Boyle’s film), Dalí, Leonor Fini, Magritte, Picasso, Dorothea Tanning, Pavel Tchelitchew and others. A tape of the 1978 documentary was showing on a TV in one part of the exhibition but the people I was with were reluctant to stand around for an hour so all I got to see was a minute or so of Edward in his jungle paradise. Happily we’re all now able to watch this gem of a film since it was uploaded to YouTube earlier this month (my thanks to James at Strange Flowers for finding it!).

For anyone whose interest is piqued by all of this, two books are worth searching for: Swans Reflecting Elephants, My Early Years (1982) is an autobiography which George Melly compiled from conversations with its subject (and which apparently finished their friendship). James’ propensity for invention means it can’t always be trusted but then that’s the case with many memoirs. A Surreal Life: Edward James (1998) is the 160-page exhibition catalogue which explores James’ life and aesthetic obsessions in a series of copiously-illustrated essays. Both books can be found relatively cheaply via used book dealers.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Las Pozas panoramas
• René Magritte by David Wheatley
• Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí
• Mongolian impressions
• Hello Dali!
• Return to Las Pozas
• Dirty Dalí
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Las Pozas and Edward James

Geneviève Vix’s Salomé

Geneviève Vix (1926) by P. Godard.

The poster below turned up recently at Beautiful Century, a promotional piece for the Richard Strauss opera in which the splendidly named French soprano Geneviève Vix (1879–1939) took the role of Salomé. The portrait of Mademoiselle Vix by Kees Van Dongen is of interest for the link it provides to a woman of the period who didn’t need to act Salomé, she was pretty much a femme fatale in her own right, the fiery Luisa Casati. Van Dongen was one of many artists commissioned to immortalise the heiress before her fortune ran out, and he painted her on at least two occasions. Some of the portraits can be seen in an eye-popping post at Fashion’s Most Wanted while over at Strange Flowers you’ll find the Scarlet Marchesa is a recurrent woman of consequence.

Geneviève Vix / Salomé (1920) by Jacques Carlu.

Mademoiselle Geneviève Vix dans le rôle de Salomé (1920) by Kees Van Dongen.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive