Supervert – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

The Ticket That Exploded: An Ongoing Opera

The book that made my head explode when I was 16. Calder & Boyars edition, 1968; design by John Sewell.

Years ago the idea of an opera based on The Ticket That Exploded would have been a wry joke: a novel brimming with text that’s fragmented even by Burroughs’ standards, as well as the usual preoccupations with spurting cocks, alien sex, parasitic invasion and erotic asphyxia. That said, if you can swallow the content (so to speak) a libretto is no doubt easy to create from all those sentence fragments, and there’s no worry about anyone complaining that you’ve missed some crucial part of the story. James Ilgenfritz’s The Ticket That Exploded: An Ongoing Opera attempts just this in an extract which can be seen on YouTube:

Premiered at Issue Project Room while I was Artist in Resident in 2011, and based on William S. Burroughs’ 1962 novel of the same name, The Ticket That Exploded takes all its text directly from the novel. I wrote the libretto and composed the music, which was then exquisitely interpreted by some of the greatest musicians in the New York area. Jason Ponce collected a massive array of bizarre visual materials and innovative digital processing programs to perform the visual component of this work live onstage at the premiere.

There’s more from Jason Ponce at Vimeo. A DVD of the complete work is planned in 2014. Via Supervert.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

Witkinesque

Arriving in the post this week, a Christmas gift from Supervert, a chapbook featuring a new piece of writing that purports to be the unauthorised biography of American artist/photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. The premise is that the facts of the real Witkin’s life are far too mundane to account for his extraordinary photo tableaux so Supervert supplies details such as “Mary Witkin [his mother] worked as a bookkeeper in a DDT plant, slowly saving to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the absurd.” A metaphysical portrait of the artist, then, with echoes of David Lynch or Bruno Schulz. Inside the chapbook was a promo postcard bearing pictures of the delightful Ms. Stoya whose reading of Necrophilia Variations has now gained over four million YouTube views.

The Witkin book isn’t for sale but copies are available to those who enter the Supervert contest which is running throughout December. All you need do is enter an email address here then keep your fingers crossed.

Sanitarium, New Mexico (1983) by Joel-Peter Witkin.

Witkin’s tableaux made an immediate impression circa 1993 when I bought a copy of PhotoVision, a Spanish photography journal which had devoted an entire issue to his work. This arrived at a point when I was halfway through drawing the Reverbstorm comic series, and Witkin’s parade of unorthodox humanity, crucified apes and sundry body parts seemed an ideal complement for the parade of similar grotesqueries (and sundry body parts) we were putting into the comic pages. I also liked the way Witkin worked his own variation on familiar scenes from art history, something we were doing throughout Reverbstorm (Witkin’s Vase: Study For the Base of the Crucifix just happens to combine a partly dissected human skull with Picasso’s Guernica, a recurrent motif throughout the series).

Above and below, some of the more Witkinesque details from part seven of Reverbstorm. The main figure above was a direct reference to Witkin’s Sanitarium, New Mexico. Many figures in other drawings are given Witkin-like blindfolds.

Continue reading “Witkinesque”

Hysterical Literature

Male sexuality receives more than enough attention on these pages so here’s something from the opposite end of the spectrum, albeit with an unusual twist. Hysterical Literature: Session One is a seven-minute video by photographer Clayton Cubitt which shows just how enthralling a film can be when its content is nothing more remarkable than an attractive young woman sitting at a table reading from a book. The subject is Stoya, self-described on her Tumblr pages as “International Porn Superstar”; the book she chose to read is Necrophilia Variations (2005) by Supervert, “a literary monograph on the erotic attraction to corpses and death”. (I designed one of Supervert’s more recent titles, Horror Panegyric (2007), which was published by Savoy Books under the author’s more mundane byline, Keith Seward.)

What gives Cubitt’s film its frisson is that all the time the splendid Ms Stoya is reading from the book she’s being subjected to the attentions of an unseen Hitachi vibrator. This only becomes evident at about the halfway point but it creates considerable tension. If an occasional buzzing noise didn’t give the game away a viewer unaware of this single explanatory detail might believe that the prose Stoya is reading is having a powerful effect. The result is sexy, funny, riveting, delightful and maybe even a little cathartic. Watch it here. Stoya describes the experience here while Supervert offers his own thoughts here. You can also buy copies of Supervert’s books while you’re at his site although if you do you’ll have to supply your own vibrator.

Weekend links 4

Will at A Journey Round My Skull turned up this hand-coloured picture from Ronald Balfour’s illustrated Rubáiyát some of whose other drawings were featured here recently. That distant volcano is a curious detail. Related: Golden Age Comic Book Stories posted plates from Willy Pogány’s edition.

• Authors on authors: China Miéville on JG Ballard; Rodrigo Fresán on Jorge Luis Borges; AS Byatt on Lewis Carroll.

• Events: Alan Moore & Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley present Simultaneous Conjugation of Four Spirits in a Room at the Laing Art Gallery on March 13th, 2010 (via Arthur); in October Weirdstone will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

• New blogs: Wonder Kabinet / Wunderkammer, “curiosities, ephemera, and fragments from The Cutting Room Floor and Evan J Peterson”; Pencil Tool, a Tumblr by Charity Pomaybo; and another Tumblr from Mountain*7.

• Perversity Think Tank is a new book from Supervert. Download it for free or order the delicious limited edition.

• The Casual Optimist lists 10+ Flickr Groups for Book Design and Inspiration.

• Via BibliOdyssey: 400 woodcuts by Eric Gill.

• “At least in self-abuse / There’s a little dignity…” Song of the week was Hands 2 Take by The Flying Lizards from their second album, Fourth Wall (1981). I bought this when it came out but hadn’t listened to it for years. Thrilling, urgent stuff with the fabulous Patti Palladin on vocals. Play loud.

New things for December

Another delivery of work of mine this week with this new design for Savoy Books. Horror Panegyric is a small volume examining David Britton’s Lord Horror novels, writer Keith Seward being the founder of the web’s best William Burroughs site, RealityStudio, and also an author of avant garde erotic fictions which can be found at his Supervert site. The cover painting for this book was my Arcimboldo-style portrait of Lord Horror which originally appeared on the cover of Reverbstorm #3.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• My pastiches