The Coelacanth

I think the word is 'feministical'....

2012-01-20T05:49:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday Patricia Highsmith

2012-01-19T15:10:00.000-08:00

Allela Cornell's portrait of Patricia Highsmith, painted in 1943. Today she would've been 91. Photographed in 2006 at an exhibition on the writer in Bern, Switzerland. See the Strangers in a Zine! publication that I made with Ed Webb-Ingall for more.

The Coelacanth Journal Issue No.7 High Rise

2011-12-20T15:54:00.000-08:00

Issue No.7: High Rise, is now available to purchase from the website and all good independent bookstores.

Robert Hawkins

2011-09-23T03:30:00.000-07:00

I first encountered the artist Robert Hawkins not through his work, but in the flesh, having seen only a hint of what his art was like in a forwarded Christmas e-card. Since then I've had a chance to see his work and form a great admiration for his paintings and drawings.

The encounter happened a few years back when my friend David invited me along to a meeting with the artist. We ended up getting cheap Thai food at the marvelously drab Marie's Cafe in Waterloo, and apart from having an entertaining anecdote about Carmen McRae (I won't ruin it here with a fumbled retelling), alluding to his days in the 80s lower Manhattan art scene, and being so kind as to treat us to dinner, I became doubly impressed with Robert Hawkins when I actually got to see his work - not an easy task via the Internet.

I guess I like Hawkins (quoted as Basquiat's favourite artist) in the same way I like Joe Brainard - who also triumphs with "a kind of 'outsider' aesthetic that refuses to be pinned down to one attitude, whether cynical, fantastical, or satirical".

The link above directs to an article from Artforum, and here is a (small) jpeg of one his (large 5"x6") drawings of Famous Haunted English Ruins, plus a few more I managed to glean from the Internet.

Googie Withers

2011-07-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

When I heard that Googie Withers had died the other day, it was suprising in that I hadn't even assumed she was still alive. The Guardian wrote up a good obituary, and the only thing to add is if you haven't seen Night and the City, do so, soon.

Alice Theobald and Design A Wave

2011-06-23T04:30:00.000-07:00

In 2009 my sometime collaborator Alice Theobald and Tom Hirst of Design A Wave did a spellbinding performance at the South London Cultural Centre for The Coelacanth Press's night of Social Realism - 'A Taste of the Kitchen Sink', and Alice has recently posted a video of it on her blog. Here it is again:

'Eyes4u'. Performed at The South London Cultural Centre, 2009. Music arranged and performed by Tom Hirst/ Design A Wave.

Janet Baker

2011-06-23T03:18:00.000-07:00

When I am laid in earth from Dido & Aeneas, Glyndebourne, 1966.
Janet Baker is named three times in this list of mezzo-sopranos' favourite mezzo-sopranos. 'She could rise from a dark, chocolatey sound to a threadbare pianissimo or a siren.'

pilgrimages

2011-06-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

Two of my photographic series from an exhibition (Sobreatico) in Barcelona last year.
Pilgrimage 1 & Pilgrimage 2, respectively.

Queenie

2011-04-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

For a screening at Adam Christensen's Hotel Garderobe, I'm going to show a film from 1964 called Portrait of Queenie, about the pub-landlady and jazz singer Queenie Watts, of the Ironbridge Tavern, East India Dock Road, Poplar, London. It seems like an apt film, with it's scenes of estates raising from the rubble of post-war devastation, and complicated mix of warm and misplaced nostalgia, to show at Hotel Garderobe; the empty flat in a condemned estate in Bermondsey, accessed through a wardrobe via a hole in the wall. Whilst doing some research, I found that Queenie had acted in many TV and film roles, including Up the Junction, and this Play for Today, Waterloo Sunset, from 1979. Don't have nightmares!

Songs, Cycles and Scenas

2011-02-28T04:45:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow: Songs, Cycles and Scenas at the Purcell Room. Works from Cornelius Cardew and Howard Skempton. Listen to these in this order:

Trish Keenan 1968 -2011

2011-01-24T13:52:00.000-08:00

Obituary here.

Three Moons

2010-12-23T14:13:00.000-08:00

Spacesuits from The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Collection

Pierrot Lunaire Op.21, by Anton Schoenberg

Pierrot Lunaire, or 'Moonstruck Pierrot’ is a melodrama composed 8 years prior to Schoenberg’s discovery of twelve-tone, but it already displays his obsession with numerology: The piece is his opus 21, contains 21 poems, and was begun on March 12, 1912. Other key numbers in the work are three and thirteen: each poem consists of thirteen lines (two four-line verses followed by a five-line verse), while the first line of each poem occurs three times (being repeated as lines seven and thirteen). Unsuprisingly, Schoenberg suffered from Triskaidekaphobia - a fear of the number 13 – which took him, depressed and anxious, to his bed on Friday 13^th July, 1951. After one month the composer was dead.

Analysis of the Op.21 shows that it is a work of many paradoxes – ‘moonstruck’ is quite literally evoked in the dual roles of Pierrot as hero and fool, performing cabaret as high art and vice versa with song that is also speech. He is the classic ‘principal boy’ (a boy played by a woman) and the instrumentalists are simultaneously soloists and orchestra. A truely lunatic creation, and one that is as beautiful to listen to as it is to regard the moon.

Quiet Night, by Patricia Highsmith

“With her white toes turned up stiffly, Hattie clumped to the easy chair by the window where a bar of moonlight slanted, and sat down with the scissors and the Angora sweater in her lap. In the moonlight her face gleamed, toothless and demoniacal. She examined the sweater in the manner of a person who plays with piece of steak with a fork before deciding where to put his knife.”

The short story Quiet Night can be found in Nothing That Meets The Eye: The Uncollected Stories by Patricia Highsmith, published by Bloomsbury, 2005.

The above extracts are from the extended 'A Coelacanth Cultural List on the subject of The Moon' - compiled in December 2010 for Luminous Books.

In Birmingham

2010-10-12T07:57:00.000-07:00

I recently visited Birmingham with Bonnie Camplin. We took my book 'A Portrait of Birmingham', designed and issued by The City of Birmingham Information Department, 1969, as a guide.

The book contains highlights of Birmingham such as the College of Food and Domestic Arts.

Here 'the practical work of the College is seen to effect in this demonstration in the Butchery'.

Birmingham seemed grim on the day we visited. The Tory Party Conference was in full swing, and it was pouring with rain. We walked with the thousands of protesters against Tory cuts to public services. A man in front of us comforted his tired son as we slowly trudged through the rain down an underpass, to emerge in a wasteland/coach parking-lot.

Bonnie and I ended up in a Marriott hotel restaurant eating an overpriced plate of Fish & Chips. Then we got the coach back to London.

Coach Upholstery
Incidentally, Bonnie's show, 'Railway Mania', at MIMA is running until November 14th, and is definitely worth travelling for, by coach or otherwise. The catalogue also features essays by the erudite Rebecca Bligh and Fanny Paul Clinton.

"I bought it in Vienna. Mostly to frighten the cat."

2010-08-17T08:43:00.000-07:00

This 1971 television interview with Muriel Spark has wonderfully old-fashioned contrivances of 'the literary interview', multiple costume changes, the backdrop of Rome, and a closing scene with the aforementioned purchase from Vienna that, I'm certain, sent kitty cowering.
Click here to watch.

E.S.V.M

2010-08-02T10:44:00.000-07:00

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again—
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man—who happened to be you—
At noon to-day had happened to be killed,
I should not cry aloud—I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place—
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face,
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

Off the press...

2010-07-24T08:19:00.000-07:00

Issue No.5 - Restoration, is on sale to purchase now from the website and all good independent bookstores. Limited reprints of previously sold-out editions also available.

Bird, Lion, Fish, Dog - A Coelacanth Bestiary, part 1

2010-06-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

The Lion

O lion, miserable image
Of kings lamentably chosen,
Now you’re only born in a cage
In Hamburg, among the Germans.

- Apollinaire

Goodnight

Miriam and Horlick spend a great deal of time putting off going to
bed.
This is the thought that came to me in my bedroom where they
both were, and she said:
Horlick, look at Tuggers, he is getting quite excited in his head.

Tuggers was the dog. And he was getting excited. So.
Miriam had taken her stockings off and you know
Tuggers was getting excited licking her legs, slow, slow.

It’s funny Tuggers should be so enthusiastic, said Horlick nastily,
It must be nice to be able to get so excited about nothing really,
Try a little higher up old chap, you’re acting puppily.

I yawned. Miriam and Horlick said Goodnight.
And went. It was 2 o’clock and Miriam was quite white
With sorrow. Very well then, Goodnight.

- Stevie Smith

Mao + Eggs

2010-06-01T12:59:00.001-07:00

Fig.1 Mao Tse-Tung - Get Organised! Peking, 1967.
Fig.2 Plate X - Birds' Eggs, The Out-Door World, W.Furneaux, F.R.G.S, London, New York, Bombay and Calcutta, 1912.

Patricia Highsmith - covers update

2010-05-27T04:14:00.000-07:00

This is Vintage's new edition of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (as seen on the Caustic Cover Critic blog). It is part of their Vintage Loves Film series (novels that have been successfully adapted for the cinema) which is coming out in August as a summer promotion. My earlier post on Highsmith cover art discussed some of the highs and lows of designs over the years, and how they reflected the way Highsmith's standing in the literary world veers from serious literature to pulp fiction. Vintage's current crop of Highsmiths are simply not as nice as Bloomsbury's 2008 editions, and I learned that Bloomsbury are actually re-issuing Ripley Under Water to tie in more with the Vintage mould.
So they go from this in 2008:

to this in 2010:

I don't like the new rendering of the 'Ripley Under Water' text, and especially the orange background - it reminds me of Sainsbury's promotional adverts - and I think it looks chaotic combined with the original freehand style they used for the author's name. There's also something less brave about the way the three visual elements of author, image, and title are now equally weighted. The perspective in the 2008 design had the effect of dragging you down with it, subconsciously communicating something of the book.
I'm not necessarily a purist; in art I often admire the notion of 'becoming the storm', but in book design, I think there is a greater demand on clarity, understanding, and respect for the novel inside. Of course, purity in design is notoriously difficult to achieve, but I think this new summer edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley succeeds in this sense, and is an elegant addition to the range of Highsmiths available.

The Big City

2010-05-18T04:23:00.000-07:00

In the 1950s, Ronald Searle and Alex Atkinson undertook a new version of Henry Mayhew's 1840s survey: London Labour and the London Poor. The articles appeared in Punch, and although humorous to a degree, and written with a nod to the 'rotund and sentimental' language of the Victorian era, attempted to depict the poverty and degradation that existed very much in their time as in Mayhew's.
It was a melancholic and satirical comment on Britain's 'affluent society', and one that still holds resonance in 2010.
The articles were eventually published in one book, The Big City - or The New Mayhew in 1958. Here are some condensed extracts, with Searle's illustrations.

THE RAILWAY WORKER
I gathered that his work-mates were for the most part prepared to acknowledge his existence, if not his right to share their confidences. There were some in fact who inclined to the theory that his colour was his misfortune rather than his sin. These, I learned, were apt to treat him as they would a backward child, or it may be an amusing pet. His remuneration appeared reasonable, for his way of life did not involve any extravagance beyond an occasional visit to the horse races; but a very considerable part of his weekly wage was required to pay for his rent, and he was in consequence very poor. He had secured rooms on the Surrey side of the river, and because of his dark skin he was required to pay far more for the accommodation than seemed equitable, from his description of it.
"Take it or leave it, that's what they tell you, mister. So I take it. Other houses they say 'No coloured, no coloured,' so what can you do? But the English is very nice, they do not kick you out the way. You know why? No colour bar. All equal, but you have to pay more money and nobody want to sit beside you much in the church. [Here he laughed again, and shook his head.] One time I went in a public house, the man served me, I drink, no trouble. Very nice. But all very quiet, not talking, so then I go out. You know why? They waiting all the time for me to rape some ladies and cut people's head off with a razor. You want to know a secret? I never ate a human man out of a pot in all my life, and my mother's brother is a solicitor."
[He laughed so much at this that I was obliged to smile myself a little.]
He had made a few friends among the West Indian population of London. They visited clubs where the music of their country was performed. At other times they walked in the streets at night, wondering what they might do.
I formed the opinion that he was at some pains to persuade himself that he was contented. He was more proud to be British than anyone I ever met.

AN ORPHAN STENOGRAPHER
She had come to London, she told me, some fifteen years previously (her parents then being dead) to take up a position as a shorthand typist in the offices of a firm of string manufacturers in the city. I judged her present age to be thirty-six or thirty-seven. She had a slight cast in one eye and many of her bones were evident.
She has been residing for some years in a house in one of the northern suburbs of London, where she has a room to herself. I learned that this was quite commodious, and contained a bed as well as the usual comforts of a living-room. In one corner, behind a screen, there were facilities for the cooking of simple meals. She had decorated the screen by pasting upon it coloured portraits of the younger members of the Royal Family taken from popular journals of the day, and several of a cinema actor named Tracy. The window of her room afforded an uninterrupted view of a private nursing home standing in its own grounds.
"I like to keep in touch, and move with the times," she said. "Yes, I gave a little party once, in my flat; but it rained rather, and few people came."

TWO STREET BOYS
The mother of the first lad assured me that he was a good enough son at home, being but seldom there save to sleep, and had rarely threatened her. He had attended school until the age of fifteen, when he was expelled for proposing to stab a student teacher with a clasp knife.
The lad was of a somewhat gypsy aspect, having elaborate sideburns and the coiffure of a woman. His face was as pale as tallow, his demeanour surly. I observed too that his costume appeared partly historical and partly that of a humble worker in rural America. He told me that he thought the name of the Prime Minister at present was Winston, but wasn't too sure, and what did it matter? No, he knew nothing of a Prime Minister's duties and cared less. He would never really use his knife, but had once kicked a young lady in the stomach outside a dance-hall, and would again.
As with many of his kind, his most notable characteristic was a doleful apathy, without even the spark of cynicism to give it liveliness.

There are a few more examples of Searle's illustrations for The Big City here, and copies are available on amazon or abebooks for a few pence should you wish to read more on the other subjects of the book; A Bohemian Soirée in the Metropolis, An Encyclopædia Seller, An Exile, and Sellers of Ice-cream, Nuts, Etc. .... etc...

Never Come Back

2010-05-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

Iron Lady/Papier-mâché Malfeasant

2010-05-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

After passing a bonkers pro-Tory house yesterday in Cambridgeshire, festooned with posters of the Conservative 'greats', and seeing the miserable visages of Margaret Thatcher and John Major looming down at me with a menacing portent of what might be come Thursday's election, I thought I'd post this recent find. It is of striking workers at the British-owned BTR-Sarmcol plant, Durban, South Africa, 1986, putting on the play, The Long March by Lawrence Zondi. The workers interpreted the content of the play to highlight their struggle against the 'imperial factor' using a Papier-mâché mask of Margaret Thatcher. From Beyond the Barricades: Popular Resistance in South Africa in the 1980s, featuring photographs by twenty South African photographers.

Ten NON Commandments

2010-04-18T09:06:00.000-07:00

An interesting and quaint pamphlet from 1964 (Pioneer Press, London, S.E.1) by the sociologist Dr. Ronald Fletcher, on the hysteria of calls for "a new morality", especially for teenagers, in Britain during the the cold war era.
"It is true that the possibility of nuclear war is a ghastly prospect; but earlier generations have also had to face the threatened disruption of their lives and destruction of their civilizations by war, and though nuclear war would be much more devastating, it is doubtful how far the fear of it really enters into our experience as a deeper emotional factor. Somehow, it is a possibility difficult really to believe. But the central question is: how does this threat change moral issues? Clearly, it does not."
A message that rings very true today, when fear-mongering is still a great weapon to wield before a general election.

I was initially interested in this pamphlet because of the bold cover (designed by Tony A. Shapps) featuring a CCTV-style photograph of 'young people'. Unfortunatley it is too much for me to type out Fletcher's knowingly hyperbolic and amusing introduction, but here are his ten 'non' commandments to the British youth - a few of which seem a little out-moded in their language, if not their basis, with short extracts from his further thoughts on each commandment:

1. NEVER ACCEPT AUTHORITY: "whether that of a jealous god, priest, prime minister, president, dictator, school teacher, social worker, parent, or of anyone else whatsoever, unless, in you own seriously considered view, there are good grounds for it (...) But remember: your position should rest upon your own seriously considered point of view. There is a big difference between honest obstinacy and silly insolence. Argue to reach conviction, and, when convinced, be ready to govern your life accordingly.

2. BASE YOUR CONDUCT UPON SIMPLE HUMANE PRINCIPLES: "Recognize the importance of, and seek to preserve, certain fundamental human rights for example: Liberty - that all men should be free to pursue what, for them, is a good and enjoyable life, so long as they respect, and do not infringe upon, the same liberty of others; Equality - that, though men are by nature different, and in their particular abilities superior and inferior to each other, as whole persons they are not superior or inferior to each other, and are deserving o equal consideration."

3. STRIVE TO ELIMINATE WAR: "War is never glorious, though the qualities of character of individuals who endure it may well be. War is one of the most disgusting evils of mankind which now, in addition, has reached the stage of lunacy."

4. STRIVE TO ELIMINATE POVERTY, AND WORK FOR GREATER MATERIAL PROSPERITY FOR ALL: "To try to achieve the highest qualities of excellence of which you are capable both in what you like doing and in what you are committed to do - being a good nurse, a good carpenter, a good cook, a good driver, a good fitter, a good athlete, a good parent - is as good a basis as any for a satisfying personal life."

5. DO NOT BE A SNOB: "There is something pathetic about a society in which people have to make so much fuss about their labels; it can only be because they are so impoverished in their inner human resources. Work for a society in which there is as close an approximation as possible to real economic equality and a good education for all which aims at equal democratic citizenship (...) Work for a society in which there is more human comradeship, and less pretence."

6. IN SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR - USE YOUR BRAINS AS WELL AS YOUR GENITALS, AND ALWAYS IN THAT ORDER. "But remember, too, that love involves more than both. (...) The principles in the light of which we ought to regulate our sexual behaviour are exactly the same as those by which we regulate our other behaviour: to treat others as ends in themselves and not only as means to our own gratification; to practice reciprocity..." The specific 'rules' of sexual behaviour are then further clarified. Of particular interest is one stating tolerance for sexual difference: "Homosexuality, for example, is not wrong (...) it should not be thought of as immoral either (...) The morality or immorality of a sexual relationship does not depend upon the nature of the sexual desire upon which it rests, but upon the sensitivity, care, and responsibility with which it is entered into and governed (...) The fact that one kind of sexual impulse is repugnant to you is not a matter of ethics, but of taste only."

7. TAKE THE CARE NECESSARY TO ENJOY FAMILY LIFE AND MARRIAGE: "The family you make for yourself will be - for better, for worse - the group which will be far and away the most important in your life for determining your happiness or unhappiness and that of the people with whom you will be intimately connected. It is better for everyone concerned that it should be happiness."

8. KEEP THE LAW: "The law exists for positive reasons: to ensure the social order which is necessary for a maximum degree of liberty and personal fulfilment. If you find it sadly lacking in many ways (which it is), then try to improve it, and everyone will be on your side. But do not think it an assertion of independence or freedom or manhood, to steal, or to hit someone with a bicycle chain."

9. COMMIT YOURSELF TO ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP: "The art of citizenship: the art of living, learning, judging and acting co-operatively in order to achieve and sustain a social order which makes possible the maximum opportunity for the fulfilment and enrichment of individual lives, is the art on which we ought to concentrate, and it is this art which ought properly to constitute the core of our education."

10. HAVE CONFIDENCE IN THE MODERN WORLD AND IN YOUR POWERS TO IMPROVE IT: "It is not true that the conflicts and perplexities of the modern world are an outcome of greater human evil. They are chiefly the outcome of the most rapid and complicated social change that mankind has ever experienced. Industrialisation is inevitably bringing together societies of all levels of development. Science is producing a body of new knowledge and a critical attitude of mind which must inevitably disturb traditional beliefs and values. No wonder that our problems are great and that the political situation is dangerous. But the very factors which are producing the problems also give mankind the wherewithal to solve them."

Like a cat loves a bird

2010-04-14T01:43:00.001-07:00

There is a review/digested read of Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark in April 5th's New Yorker. "It is not a criticism to say that Spark's stories don't stick with a reader; the sense one gets of their being quickly erased - snatched - from memory seems a final touch of authorial assertion, a last bit of discomfiting performed by an artist who believed in God, and was determined, in her books, not simply to suggest His presence but to act just like Him." - Thomas Mallon in The New Yorker.
Saying this, it has always stuck with me that the precocious 17 year old Chris Wiley, of Spark's final book The Finishing Touch (2004), was seemingly a fan of Phil Collins.

Diana Roberts

2010-04-12T05:22:00.000-07:00

From a b&w 1974 catalogue:

Bedroom, Nysa, Poland. 48" x 54", oil on canvas

Watching television. 48" x 54", oil on canvas

Diana Roberts b.1941, Worcester, UK.

We've come to scream

2010-03-17T09:42:00.000-07:00

- follow that with this -

Jay Presson Allen

2010-03-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

"You Freud, me Jane?" From Marnie, 1964.
Jay Presson Allen, scriptwriter of Marnie, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Cabaret, to name but a few.
As Charles Derry writes in ths article:
'Allen's greatest critical acclaim came for her adaptation for Bob Fosse of Cabaret , which not only threw out most of the sentimental trappings of the Broadway musical, but also had the courage to go back to the original Christopher Isherwood stories and to make explicit in the film itself the central homosexuality of the character generally patterned on Isherwood. By providing Fosse with a screenplay which allowed him to express his characteristic cynicism in great displays of technical razzle-dazzle, Allen made an inestimable contribution to the institution of the American musical; in its portrait of Nazism and German society, Cabaret claimed definitively for the musical a kind of laudable pretension and seriousness, as well as providing for Liza Minnelli one of the American cinema's great roles—yet another of Allen's portraits of neurotic women."
Her script for Cabaret is highlighted in the comprehensive documentary The Celluloid Closet, a film in which the ways homosexuality had been subtly injected into, (by the makers) and extracted from, (by the audience who looked hard enough) pre-Cabaret era cinema is discussed at great length. How Rock Hudson was a gay man playing straight, who'd play gay to get Doris Day, who played butch in 'Calamity Jane' is just one of the mind-boggling but wonderful ways in which homosexuality wove through the movies in the same way it does in life. But in an era of secrecy, shame and suppression, women might also have found a feminist message coded in Allen's so-called 'neurotic women'. This is a SPOILER ALERT, but anyone who can end a film with “Oh Mark, I don't want to go to jail, I'd rather go with you.” is surely bidding us a bitterly ironic farewell.

Friday quote

2010-03-05T08:35:00.000-08:00

Katie Horwich on an upcoming day-trip to Nottingham:
"On my list of things to visit is the former Raleigh factory which is now luxury flats. And then I'd like to fall down the stairs & sleep with Albert Finney."

The Soviet Theater... in Slough, 1939

2010-03-04T06:47:00.000-08:00

I found this booklet, published in Moscow in 1939, which seems to have belonged (from the slip still inside) to the Slough "RUSSIA TO-DAY" Society.
The author writes a sufficiently hyperbolic introduction on the first page:
Seven hundred and ninety theaters... Imagine for a moment that you are looking at a large map of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. What a forest of red it would make if a flag marked every spot where there is a theater. How it would blaze with light if they were represented by seven hundred and ninety electric bulbs...

Daisies (Sedmikrásky)

2010-02-22T15:06:00.000-08:00

"For all the male ‘coming of age’ stories in the world, it makes sense that their rare female equivalent would have to be as bizarre as possible,” says Nina Power in her book, One Dimensional Woman (p.40) about Daisies (Sedmikrásky), the 1966 film by Czech director Věra Chytilová .
A commentator on the IMDb cleverly observes, "The whole thing plays like parody Godard, with Marie II as Anna Karina, with meaningful conversations about love accompanied by the girls cutting up sausages and bananas: the butterfly sequence is a wicked lampoon of 'Vivre sa Vie'. Where Godard's heroines remained fixed and stared at, the two Maries laugh, look, escape, see their frame and break it, insist on their body as something more than an object, something they can play with themselves."

Man: "I want this moment to last forever!"
As someone who responded in her interview for film school to the question "why do you want to come here?" with "because I don't want to make films like you do", it seems fitting that Chytilová's film can simultaneously fart in the face of 'The Masters' whilst displaying a masterly grasp of Dadaist tradition, technical experimentation, her country's political situation, and her own gutsy agenda.

The Maries answer their telephone with the words "Die, die, die", and gobble their way through banquets laid out for dignitaries, their own pot of gherkins by the bed, or, when they are particularly ravenous, the glossy photos of desirable foods in Czech-style issues of Good Housekeeping.

The conflicting East/West ideologies of the day are slapped around the chops in equal measures, and although the girls are punished along the way as all good heroines should, they bring to a modern reading nostalgic notes other than the psychedelia, post-war absurdist theatricals and eyeliner of the period. These notes range from flapperish insouciance to riot grrrl ferocity to a very recognisable teenage eye-roll and LOLZ attitude. As Power says, that the "formal inventiveness of the film would undermine its claims to ‘realism,’ (...) is all the better." It is like when Marie II tries to kill herself by leaving the gas on, reclining in a tableaux of apples and leaves, but forgets to close the window, and so rolls over and bites one of the apples, or when a scene of carnage is touchingly (and dare I say, with a feminine kind of bother) rather craply put back together; there are fresh gusts of realism in Chytilová's hysteria, powering the revolt, the solarised burn outs and tramples into trifles, and at 73 minutes (no typical drawn out 'art film' endurance tests here) it's just pure joy to have such a truthful cinematic experience.

weekender

2010-02-19T10:04:00.000-08:00

Built upon a single note

2010-02-08T03:10:00.000-08:00

One Note Samba, or to give it the original Portuguese name, Samba de Uma Nota Só, is a bossa nova standard, composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim, and show-pieced on Jazz Samba by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd in the achingly cool year of 1963.
When you listen to it, thoughts instantly fly in the direction of a Mad Men cocktail party, the awakening of adventerous young girls under the tutelage of sophisticated older men à la An Education, or, perhaps a little less glamourously, the 90s vogue for chill-out lounge compilations to soundtrack a wave of Ikea/retro 'shag-pads'.
If you try and a cappella the tune to someone, the effect is rather weird. You sound like a baby that's just learnt morse code. As the wikipedia entry describes; "The song title refers to the main melody line, which at first consists of a long series of notes of a single tone played in a bossa nova rhythm (typically D, as played in the key of G). The first eight measures consist of D, followed by four measures of G, and then four measures of D. This is followed by eight measures of a more varied melody line."
And when you learn the lyrics, this pattern and progression to the varied melody line is explained:

        Dbm7          C7           B7/4          Bb7/-5
This is just a little samba, Built upon a single note

      Dbm7               C7              B7/4               Bb7/-5
Other notes are bound to follow, But the root is still that note

         Em9            A7/+5               Dmaj7               Dm7     G7
Now this new one is the consequence, Of the one we've just been through

       Dbm7     C7     B7/4        Bb7/-5         A6/9
As I'm bound to be the unavoidable consequence of you

Dm7                            G7                                  Cmaj7
There's so many people who can talk and talk and talk and just say nothing, Or nearly nothing

Cm7                            F7                                Bbmaj7             Bdim Bb7
I have used up all the scale I know, And at the end I've come to nothing, Or nearly no-  thing

     Dbm7              C7             B7/4              Bb7/-5
So I came back to my first note, As I must come back to you

       Dbm7           C7                B7/4            Bb7/-5
I will pour into that one note, All the love I feel for you

   Em9               A7/+5             Dmaj7        Dm7 G7
Anyone who wants the whole show, Re mi fa sol la si do

        C6                B7              Bbmaj7            A7
He will find himself with no show, Better play the note you know

What is so clever about this song is how the concept ties in with the sentiment. It is all about the one note, and the one girl. So simple, perhaps, but a perfect synthesis of words and music that both celebrates and teasingly mocks the limitations and repetitive quality of popular song.
In this clip of Laurindo Almeida and the Modern Jazz Quartet we get a measured instrumental version that impresses, as does this more frantic Ella version, but the nature of embellishment and interpretation, and the forsaking of the lyrics, removes that ironic quality that I like so much about it at its most pared down. For that, look to the effortless Joao Gilberto (Spotify link for the English Version, or here on Youtube in Portuguese), or Betty Carter's full-bodied 'Round Midnight version, all cicada percussion and swaying hips.

Finally, here is One Note Samba being rehearsed by the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz Ensemble; a lesson in how it don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing.

Nights of Cabiria

2010-02-02T05:24:00.000-08:00

"Is it really true? You're not trying to fool me? Do you really love me?" asks Cabiria, and the Hypnotist realises he must break his spell.
Stills courtesy of Pangolin Blues.

exit January

2010-01-20T12:47:00.000-08:00

A View of the Monuments of Easter Island, Rapanui, Oil on panel, 1775, William Hodges (1744-1797) Queen's House, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

Hugh Mundell & Augustus Pablo rare acoustic performance (1979)

Grandma's Bottle Village: The Art of Tressa Prisbrey

2010-01-11T11:18:00.000-08:00

"I got a lot of bottles" - Tressa Prisbrey

Tressa Prisbrey at the dump

Click here to view Grandma's Bottle Village: The Art of Tressa Prisbrey
This is a beautifully judged document of Tressa Prisbrey's art, capturing the absurdity, humour, resourcefulness, and macabre elements in her life that brought about the creation of her village; the first structure being a house made of bottles, collected from the dump, in which she could keep her 17,000 strong pencil collection. It is especially worth watching through to the part when her older sister comes to visit.
From the extensive film archives at folkstreams.net

2010-01-07T16:07:00.000-08:00

Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) and Endora (Agnes Moorehead) from Bewitched.

From an interview with Elizabeth Montgomery in The Advocate, by Robrt Pela, July 30, 1992.

ADVOCATE: Bewitched is sort of a gay allegory: the story of a different person in this case, a witch who's being told that she can't tell anyone who or what she really is. It's the ultimate closet story.

"Don't think that didn't enter our minds at the time. We talked about it on the set certainly not in production meetings that this was about people not being allowed to be what they really are. If you think about it, Bewitched is about repression in general and all the frustration and trouble it can cause. It was a neat message to get across to people at that time in a subtle way."

Read more from that interview here. I was inspired to look up Agnes Moorehead after recognising her in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. *So* much gay interest here it's hard to know where to start!

Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman, and Agnes Moorehead with Sirk on the set of All That Heaven Allows.

In The Alps

2010-01-07T07:46:00.001-08:00

Photo from cloisters.
Click here to listen to 'mountain melodrama' In the Alps by Richard Ayres.

Are normal people sane?

2009-11-20T06:42:00.000-08:00

Are normal people sane? (mp3) From the Gresham College free public lecture series. Full transcript with illustrations here. Painting by Witkacy.

Sovietbus

2009-11-16T14:04:00.001-08:00

My mum had a brilliant collection of books when she was a child, many of which I also enjoyed. This particular one was probably acquired in the same kind of spirit that my Communist-supporting grandparents bought their Lada and East-German radios (which all groaned on to outlive their owners).

There was, however, something that my mum always found off-putting about this book, which at the time she couldn't articulate. Now she thinks it was probably the very Russian toughness of the drawings, and moral tone of the tales inside. And Uncle Joe giving the kids a ride on his fun tank.

A little boy plays with his ball so much, it's goodbye...

This is an example from a beautiful series of lithographs depicting valiant fishermen who "toil that want and hunger may keep away from you and me."

A pesky fly starts life on the river, but soon ends up swatted by a cow:
"It serves you right, fly: Don't annoy people and don't annoy animals. We're fed up with you", the story ends.
Finally, a montage of stills from the film Land of Toys teaches kids to respect all as equals...

The last thing I noticed was her name inscribed on the end-paper... surely the scribblings of a Soviet-inspired child...

(Begun one day in March, 1912)

2009-11-04T08:00:00.000-08:00

Illustrated endpapers by Victor G. Candell. From Alpha by Emery Balint.

Chick Corea's Children's Songs

2009-10-26T12:10:00.000-07:00

Bonnie Greer talks at Peckham Library

2009-10-12T14:40:00.000-07:00

Bonnie Greer gave a talk at Peckham Library this evening. I hope someone recorded it; she had many insightful things to say about writing - the difference between writing and publishing, and how a writer doesn't have to think about 'being a writer', but does have to consider publishing, and attack the mainstream publishing houses and incestuous critics by setting up small presses and literary journals. As the talk was arranged as part of Black History Month, she obviously talked extensively about race (read this article) and growing up in Chicago and moving to London in the 1980's. She was extrememly generous in the way she described her writing process, and talked about the "deamon" that good writers always live with, that usually brings them to their "night" work (Oscar Wilde writing Dorian Gray, for instance, against the "day" work of his lighter output). She said you can get confused with style, and think that this is the thing you have to perfect to be an original writer, but one should just steal it to get going, but always allow the deamon through. She also spoke about the way we are over-saturated by consciousness and how things should be, claiming that most books - she did not think anything of this year's Booker list - still follow a 19th Century sense of prose, and warned of reading only the best things, and not overencumbering yourself with the pressure to read everything, destroying your own voice. She spoke of finding the momentary flash of irrational desire before you stop yourself doing something as a perfect place to explore human beings. Against this she also called for British writers not to emulate American ones too keenly, but to grow stronger. She put all the above much more eloquently than I am here, and with copious examples and anecdotes, but I want to make note of it as a trigger to remember. Aside from writing, she talked about politics (I believe she is up against the BNP this week on Question Time) and history, and made an interesting point that because the UK only finished, in 2007, repaying the USA our debt from WWII (a figure in the billions, which was not wavered because the US feared Atlee was forming a Communist system - the NHS being a point in case), that our 'special relationship' is as much tied up with this as anything else. She also told the story of her father, who'd been part of the D-Day landings; as a black soldier, he was not allowed to carry a weapon until he hit the water, at which point he was handed a gun and made to swallow a white tablet (an amphetamine), then charge towards what was almost certain death. He survived, but when they returned to Normandy 40 years later, she said how he had not wished to talk to other veterans (who were white) also revisiting the beaches, stating that they had "fought another war".

Houdini's Picnic

2009-10-10T00:59:00.000-07:00

Houdini's Picnic is a monthly music programme (created by Ezra Elia and Ruth Donegan) of the finest sort, and available to stream or download here.

Christopher Logue & Tony Kinsey

2009-10-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

Kind of hilarious, excruciating, and brilliant all at once.

Listen here.

Kiss I

2009-09-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

Howard University, 1946

2009-09-01T09:24:00.000-07:00

In 1946, Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed Howard University students for a LIFE magazine photo essay. From its outset, Howard University, situated in Washington D.C, was nonsectarian and open to people of both sexes and all races. By 1950, Howard was proud to be "America's center of Negro learning" (LIFE, November 18, 1946). However, as Rayford W. Logan states in "Howard University: The First Hundred Years 1867-1967", it was not an exclusively "negro" establishment, and although these photographs display an attractive (not least, to my retrogressive tastes, for the fashions!), positive and sincere representation of African-Americans engaged in academic life, they are still, for the time and readership of LIFE, "comfortably segregated".
Of course, in 1946, segregation in state-suported public schools was enforced by law, so the university's commitment to all people, regardless of race, was challenged by higher powers. The Supreme Court declared this unconstitutional in 1954, but it is interesting to note that by 1963 there had only been a slight increase in the number of white students at Howard. In the Board of Trustees mission statement from that year, the members asserted how the University accepted a "special responsibility for the education of capable Negro students disadvantaged by the system of racial segregation, and will continue to do so as long as Negroes suffer these disabillities." In a recent article on Michelle Obama's plans to work her own backgarden and bring change to the disadvantaged of Washington, it is made clear that Washington's underclass is still overwhelmingly black. As Michell Cottle writes, "The Washington of guidebooks is a land of gleaming monuments, glossy law firms and upscale restaurants where slick-suited lobbyists lunch cheek by jowl with players from the Capitol and the White House. “The other Washington” is mired in crime, drugs, violence, unemployment, Aids (the District’s HIV rate is among the highest in the nation), homelessness, and, more broadly, hopelessness. Rarely do denizens of either group venture into one another’s territory." As such, is it deeply saddening or encouraging to think that the Howard Mission Statement of 1963 still applies?
On a positive note, those associated with the University include Alain Locke, editor of The New Negro (published in 1925, the definitve collection of Harlem Renaissance writers) who was Chair of the Dept. of Philosophy, and law student Thurgood Marshall, who went on to bring the epic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case against the state law that denied black children equal education; a triumph ushering in the Civil Rights reform movements of 1955-65. And today, Howard produces more on-campus African-American Ph.D.s than any other university in the world.

Meet you at The Macabre

2009-08-10T01:19:00.000-07:00

Lax i Mörrum

2009-08-06T04:23:00.000-07:00

O my Cod...

My Dad went to to the office this morning and all I got was this lousy fish...

Don't fuck with me fellas, this ain't my first time at the Rodeo...

And neither is it mine...

cute bait

decorative boards

Courtesy of Duncan Carson, procurer of obscure pescetaria.

Les Surfs

2009-08-04T02:13:00.000-07:00

They haven't quite got the moves of the Jackson 5, but the pint-sized Les Surfs provide a suitably laid-back performance for what seems to be the marriage of a stoned Kathleen Hanna prototype at a rather forlorn 1960's lesser-known art gallery opening...

Take Off...

2009-07-16T15:25:00.000-07:00

Fig. 1 - Mina Stinson Crandon, Medium
Fig. 2 - From Vintage 90's Rave Posters
Fig. 3 - Orthodox Monks
Fig. 4 - ....

Honjo and Steichen

2009-07-12T14:16:00.000-07:00

Racetrack
Naoki Honjo
and
Steeplechase Day, Paris - The Grandstand
Edward Steichen

I'll have a coffee

2009-07-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

parts 2+3 on youtube.

Hang a Little Moolah on the Washline

2009-07-08T07:40:00.000-07:00

From the musical The Grass Harp, from the novel of the same name by Truman Capote. The video is by suburbanbatherson, and features the popular BBC drama "The Expert" (the bridge attack), an "Armchair Theatre" charmer called "Sharp At Four" (the dancing lady), a foggy British flick called "City Of The Dead" (the witch being burned at the stake) starring Christopher Lee and the man in black himself, Valentine Dyall. And finally the in-flux bearded man is courtesy of a BBC "Horizon" documentary on brain malfunctions and their role in religious experiences.
Heebeegeebeedrama!

Truman Capote, 1977. By Arnold Newman.

RANGE

2009-07-05T14:04:00.000-07:00

Heatwave!

2009-06-29T13:26:00.000-07:00

Berkeley Girls by Elizabeth Lennard

2009-06-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

Berkeley Girl, Four
Berkeley Girl, White Car
Berkeley Girl, Redhead
1968-2007
From the Berkeley Girls series by Elizabeth Lennard.
Film here.

Think Tomorrow's Thoughts

2009-06-24T06:51:00.000-07:00

1991 edition of David Kindersley's Graphic Sayings (thanks P.Johnson)

Design for Death - Barbara Jones

2009-06-08T14:56:00.000-07:00

Design for Death (1967) - A macabre and somewhat ironic exploration of the "beautiful, vulgar, frightening and propitiatory things that people make when confronted by that shocking and unwelcome reminder, the death of another" by Barbara Jones.

Can you handle these lips?

2009-06-05T04:39:00.000-07:00

SPOTTED - Sandra Bernhard - on Tottenham Court Road. My friend Pippa and I were looking for cheapo mp3 palyers and SANDRA BERNHARD walked past and did a really good movement of "yes it is me" with her lips. Pippa missed it, but as S.B sauntered away, Pips said yeah, you can even tell from behind. As far as celebrity sightings go, it was perfection.

Harambee, or The Black House - Colin Jones

2009-06-01T03:31:00.001-07:00

Article here. The book is avilable from Prestel Publishing, and for £10 from Donlon Books.

French Orientalism - 1890s - 1980s

2009-05-12T04:01:00.000-07:00

Photos of

2009-05-08T09:58:00.000-07:00

The garage band: unfamous musicians in everyday settings, literally.

Photo by Von Aisaider

John Lautner and bunkers

2009-05-08T01:31:00.000-07:00

Malin Residence (Chemosphere), 1960.

Wolff House, 1975. Photographed by John Lautner.

and

Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology

There are more pictures of the frightening beauty of bunkers here.

Blues jumped the rabbit

2009-04-29T15:10:00.000-07:00

kitchens and mountains and thunder... the best combination

Sir Benjamin Stone

2009-04-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

The Monks

2009-04-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

Black Monk Time reissued this week.
Oh, how to do now.

The Nomi Song

2009-04-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

Klaus Nomi as a baby.
and
Klaus Nomi doing one of his final performances: The Cold Song

This should probably be my last post about Klaus Nomi, but I finally watched The Nomi Song, and am still in a sort of daze of tragedy.

Famous food

2009-04-12T05:47:00.000-07:00

During my current immersion in the music of Klaus Nomi, I came across a video on youtube of a black-lipstick'd Nomi fan doing an instructional video on how to bake Nomi's Lime Tarts.
Somewhere between the "fresh graham cracker crumb crust" and the sour-sweet filling, the chef reveals that she found the recipe in Frank DeCaro's incredible celebrity recipe archive (Click on "Yummy" top right).

So for lunch it's Edward Albee's Chicken-Tomato Soup:

“I like anything delicate,” said Edward.

INGREDIENTS

1 lb. chicken parts
2 scallions
1 piece fresh ginger root, 2 inches long
1 chicken carcass
1 tsp. salt
2 quarts water
1 large beefsteak tomato, peeled, seeded and chopped very fine
½ oz. bonito flakes, shaved and dried
½ oz. dried daikon (Japanese radish)

1. Wash chicken parts, slice into pieces.
2. Chop scallions and ginger into thin, 1-inch-long pieces.
3. Place chicken, carcass, scallions, ginger, salt and water in a large saucepan. Bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer about 1 hour, or until chicken is tender. Skim fat off the surface several times as it simmers.
4. Cool, cover and chill to remove layer of fat that congeals on the surface. Strain through cloth to obtain clear broth.
5. Reheat. Add tomato, bonito flakes, daikon (hydrate in water according to package instructions, drain well and cut in small pieces), and soy sauce to taste.
6. Heat through, stirring until soup simmers long enough for flavors to blend, about 15 minutes.

Serve at once for luncheon or for first course of dinner.

From: “Celebrity Cookbook” by Johna Blinn (Moby Books, 1981).

And for afters? Eleanor Roosevelt's easy-peasy Blueberry Pudding:

INGREDIENTS
Blueberries
White Bread
Cream

* Cut crusts off white bread and line a casserole with it.
* Pour in cooked berries to cover bottom and place another layer of white bread on top.
* Place more berries and more bread, continuing thus alternately until casserole is filled with berries on top.
* Place in refrigerator until well chilled and serve with cream, plain or whipped.

From "The All American Cook Book: Favorite Recipes of Famous Persons,” sponsored by Glad-U-Kum Sunday School Class, Davidsville Lutheran Church, Davidsville, PA (Walsworth Bros., 1954)

What I really can't wait to try is Boy George's Chick Pea Corruption.

John Waters, age 9.

2009-04-10T04:26:00.000-07:00

“This is the childhood portrait my parents had of me in their home growing up and I now have in my house. I remember posing for this picture and I was nuts then. But I was just figuring it out and I didn’t really mind being nuts, and so I wanted to remember that. That moustache of course I didn’t have at nine-years-old but I should have. In my mind it was festering.”

From the Guardian's highlights of John Water's Rear Projection exhibition at the Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC, April 3 - May 2, 2009.

for breakfast

2009-04-09T02:55:00.000-07:00

Los Smiths

2009-03-29T13:30:00.000-07:00

In 2001 the artist William E. Jones saw an advertisement for London Is Dead, a club exclusively playing music by The Smiths and Morrissey once a month in Los Angeles. He went to the club, and discovered a predominantly Latino fan culture devoted to the band, which he documented in a film and series of photographs: Is It Really So Strange? Here is a small selection, with many more available to view here.

A book documenting the project was published by the David Kordansky Gallery in 2006, and is available from Donlon Books. Like Jones says, it is interesting to look at the connections between The Smiths' working class, Manchester-raised ethnic Irish experience and that of the sons and daughters of Latino immigrants, but also to like, just compare the quiffs...

Who said The Smiths only appeal to potato-faced Tories, chanting "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" as they neck vintage Dom Pérignon at another Bullingdon Club dinner...

Not quite the last of the Teddy Girls

2009-03-25T16:49:00.000-07:00

This photograph is of two Teddy Girls at Battersea Funfair in 1956, by Roger Mayne.
Also found a thorough article on the blog Behind the Curtain, with links to Ken Russell's essay.
And finally, the Sunday Times article.
On a side note, Ken Russell looks so much like my dad.

Last of the Teddy Girls

2009-03-25T07:36:00.000-07:00

I've been researching Ken Russell's Teddy Girls Photo Essay, from Picture Post 1955. More pictures and links here.

The Sweet Flypaper of Life

2009-03-22T14:06:00.000-07:00

Mary Osborne, Vi Redd and Dottie Dodgion photographed by Tom Marcello.

Today at work (I can almost afford a bus pass again) I was cataloging a number of rare and interesting books, and spent some time with a 1955 edition of the Langston Hughes/Roy DeCarava collaborative book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life. It tells the story, written by Hughes, of one woman's life in Harlem in 1955. Here is an example:

You can buy it from Donlon Books, if you're like, loaded. But some more images, with the bold front cover, are here. I thought I'd also post the first photograph, by Tom Marcello, with links to the amazing Vi Redd and Mary Osborne, who I've been listening to recently. I like this photo a lot, it's almost a bit Olympia '91, sort of...

soon is summer so...

2009-03-19T14:25:00.000-07:00

Gundula Schulze Eldowy

2009-03-16T15:37:00.001-07:00

It's quite hard to find much on-line about the photographer Gundula Schulze Eldowy. She was featured in a documentary on "The Lost World of Communism", which is frustratingly not available on iplayer. Gundula Schulze Eldowy was born in 1954 in the East German city of Erfurt, and she was featured in the exhibition Do Not Refreeze - Photography in East Germany, in 2007. There are more images from the show, and a biography here.

100 examples of Stymie Bold Italic

2009-03-13T05:25:00.000-07:00

Please check out the group I set up on flickr, devoted to that most moribund of fonts, Stymie Bold Italic, a Slab Serif font which became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, and most notably used in the Granada Television ident. I just noticed that there have been 100 contributions so far.

Here is a cool example taken by Mhari McMullan.

Because I can't stop with Stereolab...

2009-03-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

The enemy within

2009-03-10T10:09:00.000-07:00

I don't know if it's available to watch again on iplayer... but BBC4 showed a very moving documentary about the Miners' Strike of 1984 last night...
I remember my grandma spitting at the t.v everytime Margaret Thatcher appeared, but I was a child, and just thought she was being funny. I never realised just how crazy the police offensive on the picketers, (or "the evil within" as Thatcher called the Miners) had been. She basically spearheaded one of the darkest attacks on "the British sense of fairness", whatever the "complexitites" of the situation...

Police cavalry attack women from the miners women's support group. Orgreave Coke Works Picket, Miner's Strike, Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Date: 18/06/84 . Photo by John Harris.

Miss world...

2009-03-10T04:30:00.000-07:00

Today Radio 4 broadcast the first part of a series of discussions about Feminist ideas from the 1960's onwards, hosted by historian Bettany Hughes - available here.

Untitled Film Stills

2009-03-04T09:27:00.000-08:00

Even though it might ruin my I-Know-It's-Obvious-But-I-Really-Like-Cindy-Sherman admiration of Cindy Sherman...
Even though Cindy Sherman wants nothing to do with it...
I can't wait to see Guest of Cindy Sherman.
It's got Danny DeVito in it, and David Furnish, and Molly Ringwald and John Waters!

He went that way...

2009-03-03T15:43:00.000-08:00

Radio 4 are having a Ripley love-in at the moment... first there was Looking for Ripley, and now a five-part season of the Ripley novels for The Saturday Play. Perfect listening in London as the rain hammers relentlessly against the window, and you feel yourself becoming introverted and amoral...

a Nordic disposition

2009-02-26T13:51:00.000-08:00

From Mad Men:

Arthur: You are so profoundly sad.

Betty: No, it's just my people are Nordic.

Open the door

2009-02-24T03:55:00.000-08:00

In the jobless vortex there are some small (free) pleasures... one of them is Spotify.
Right now I'm listening to Betty Carter.
Betty Carter said some pretty cool things during her career. I'm taking her advice to heart:

“You can do anything you want to do, if you know what to do”.

Ah!

Joe Brainard, and Writing Art History

2009-02-16T08:46:00.000-08:00

Portrait of Pat, 1971.

Flower Painting IV, 1967.

If Nancy was a Painting by de Kooning, 1975.

Untitled, 1976.

On saturday I went to the Writing Art History: On the Agenda? symposium at the Courtauld, organised by Catherine Grant. I couldn't quite get to grips with Francesco Ventrella's lecture Exercise: Writing a Choreography on the Art Historian’s Hat, which seemed to fly over most of the hatless heads of the Kenneth Clarke Auditorium attendees, but really enjoyed Catherine's Fans of Feminism: Re-writing Histories of Second-wave Feminism in Contemporary Art. Best of all was a lecture on the work of Joe Brainard, and "writing about the minor", which Gavin Butt presented with a good spread of Nancies and Pansies.

Joe Brainard homepage.
Another lecture by C.G here.

Adrian Jack

2009-02-12T10:20:00.000-08:00

Today I created a Wikipedia entry for the composer Adrian Jack. Please view it here.

The last blossom....

2009-02-09T14:47:00.001-08:00

Today I heard that Blossom Dearie has died, aged 82. It was literally the day before yesterday that I was at my friend's house, and we were scouring the internet for a recording of "My Attorney Bernie" or "Answering Machine", and I was reminiscing about the two times I saw Blossom perform; once, when I was only about 2 years old, and fell asleep, no doubt lullaby'd by the tinkling piano, "little-girl-lost" voice, and buzz of adults smoking and clinking glasses... and then once more in 2006, at Danny's Skylight Room in NYC, where I met Blossom afterwards, and told her how I'd become an early, if unintentionally unattentive, fan.
My good friend Adrian has written a fulsome obituary for The Guardian, which you can read here. I remember him telling me that he'd penned it some years ago... the papers have to have these things, morbidly, at the ready, and he had to speak to Blossom personally about some details. Apparently she'd been a little suspect about what the information was for.
Sometimes I can't believe I have actually shared time alive with some of the greats I loved from previous generations, like when I met my all-time favourite singer Anita O'Day. Like O'Day, Blossom Dearie was wonderful, distinctive musician who could define an era in the first few bars, and I'm so glad to have seen her play.

Hurl the bloody urn, Umberto!

2009-02-03T04:44:00.000-08:00

Henrietta – As a designer of artificial ruins, Alexandra was well-known. She designed ruins in the manners of Langley, Effner, Robert Adam, and Carlo Marchionni, as well as her own manner. She was working on a ruin for a park in Tempe, Arizona, consisting of a ruined wall nicely disintegrated at the top and one end, two classical columns upright, and one fallen, vines, and a number of broken urns. The urns were difficult because it was necessary to produce them from intact urns and the workmen at the site were often reluctant to do violence to the urns. Sometimes she pretended to lose her temper:

Alexandra – Hurl the bloody urn, Umberto!

From a dramatization of Donald Barthelme's Henrietta and Alexandra.
Photo of Ai Weiwei.

Up the Junction

2009-01-28T03:06:00.000-08:00

This is the pub scene from the amazing Up the Junction, which I finally watched with Lil'Sis and Chuckles during a very bleak hangover afternoon last week. "E're, when I go, I'm gunna 'ave 'orse n' cart. I mean, you get to your grave too quick in one of 'em motors." This is the kind of sentiment that seemed to ring so true, as we dissolved into a heavy morbid love of sixties British realism. Later that evening I watched the whole thing over again, and Lil'Sis disappeared with a double DVD of A Taste of Honey and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Chuckles went to the gym. Up The Junction is pretty much an ensemble piece, but Maureen Lipman and Adrienne Posta were just brilliant. I recently watched a really interesting Mark Lawson interview with Maureen Lipman, it seems something of a shame that despite the early stuff, her work with late husband Jack Rosenthal, and role in Polanski's The Pianist, to the majority, she is most famous for playing "Beatie" in the BT adverts. Still, they were pretty funny I suppose. And what happened to Adreinne Posta? She was fucking cool. Katie thought there was a Smiths connection, but after googling it and finding nothing, thought maybe this was just a dream, it being so right...

The Friendly Young Ladies

2009-01-25T07:29:00.000-08:00

"Guilt isn't just sin. That would be simple. Guilt is being responsible for the consequences. Orestes found that out. You're my Eumenides, I suppose."
Elsie had not read of Orestes, and did not know what Eumenides were, but the ringing mysterious words gave a kind of grandeur to her trouble, and she registered it for future use. Her brain relaxed, she was even interested. - From The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault, 1944.

Barbara Lynn

2009-01-22T12:01:00.001-08:00

Sister Spyancop asks for a bottle of tea, Sister Grundy replies, "You'll get plenty of tea out of a tea-pot."

2009-01-22T04:49:00.000-08:00

"It has been the proud lot of No.7 General Hospital, Estcourt, to claim the honour of launching the first local play relating to the (Boer) war. Civil Surgeon A. Balfour, the writer of the play, has proved himself a worthy disciple of Aristophanes. He and his willing band of helpers, chosen from the officers and nursing sisters, have, by their efforts, sent a zephyr of hilarity through the hospital grounds, where the atmosphere, redolent of surgeons and sickness, monotony and medicine, is usually somewhat oppressive."

"The Camp Catch" A farcical farce in two acts - from the Black and White Budget, Nov.17, 1900.

Patricia Highsmith; the covers

2009-01-19T08:17:00.000-08:00

Since I started collecting the books of Patricia Highsmith I have always thought about how the book jackets and cover designs of her books have changed over the years, and how the designs have reflected the flux of Highsmith's catagorisation in a spectrum ranging from pulp fiction, to murder mystery, to cult reading, to serious literature. She is a writer who, in Europe, for example, was always classed as serious, but could always be found in American libraries between genre books and cheap pan editions, which over time, have aquired a whole new kind of seriousness in their kitsch collectablity. Here are some of my favourite first edition covers.

On flickr there is an interesting example of "The Blunderer", which had been issued as a pulp novel under the title "Lament for a Lover" (1956, The Popular Library/Eagle Books). You can view it here, courtesy of Hang Fire Books. The most noticable change in jacket design must be Highsmith's "The Price of Salt" (1952), which apparently inspired Nabakov to write Lolita. It was originally published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, but Highsmith eventually reclaimed the book, and it is now marketed in a much more sophisticated style to its pulp predecessor. In England the title was even changed to the simple "Carol" (see below), to give it a new life and rid it of pulp fiction overtones. I do like the boldness of the original hardback, however.

Tom Ripley is Highsmith's most famous protaganist, and although I am very pleased to own the Cresset Press first edition of "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1955), I am not especially fond of the dust jacket. In fact, even though this is her most popular book, and always in print, I haven't really found an edition that seems ideal, although this Spanish copy is perhaps one of the better ones. W.W Norton reissued the Ripley series with some rather good covers in 2008, the best of which is "Ripley's Game" (1974).

There is a wonderful book design blog, Première de couverture, which features possibly the best recent reissue of Highsmith's books, by Bloomsbury. They have an informative page on Highsmith here. Bloomsbury's designs are what I suppose you could call retro-modern, making allusions to the noir-ish, genre placement which Highsmith falls under, but at the same time being suitably stylish designs of some weight, to match the gravitas of Highsmith's writing. I have always found it hard to recommend one of the absolute best Highsmiths, "Edith's Diary" (1977), because the cover has always been such a let-down! Although I still think there could be a better cover one day, perhaps the Bloomsbury edition helps this predicament, somewhat.

There are many titles that I haven't mentioned here, and I will keep looking for more designs as I am sure there must be lots of foreign editions that I am not familiar with. When I find some more good examples I will post an update.

A Taste of Honey until Up the Junction

2009-01-18T14:42:00.000-08:00

Katie: can't wait for you to see Up the Junction - I think about it constantly!

Graham: 'Up the Junction' goodness me, that takes me back. I noticed it in Fopp tha other week; also I see 'Poor Cow' has come out; obviously January is 60's 'kitchen sink' month...

2009-01-17T07:15:00.000-08:00

Mimei Thompson (who was the feature artist in Issue 2 of The Coelacanth Journal, Hysteria) is having a solo show in Liverpool: Internal Geometry, 23rd January to 8th March, 2009, The Drawing Room at St. Georges Hall, Liverpool.
Mimei's work is at once alive with a painterly and psychological authenticity and sophistication, but also seems to convey a sort of teenage guilt and goonery, like a self-aware guffaw in the night when waking from a wild dream! Somehow she is able to do something very clever, to depict a space between emotion and intellect.
This is one of my favourite recent paintings from Mimei's website:

Long-nose Constellation
oil on canvas
2008
80x100cm

The Saturday Book

2009-01-16T02:56:00.000-08:00

It's friday, but The Saturday Book, published between 1941 - 1975, was such a fulsome compendium of curiosities, that it would probably bring you right on to the following Saturday to read it from cover to cover. These days there is something rather quaint in imagining setting aside the weekend for enrichment of the mind, but The Saturday Book had all the earnest excitement, about pretty much anything, that might well have inspired the reader to gaze towards the new dawn and cry; "Let tomorrow come, I am ready!"

The 7th annual issue, designed by Laurence Scarfe, is contained within this stylish endpaper design. The lettering is an embellished stymie bold italic; a font so reminiscent of the post-war period, to which I set up a photographic record here.

And within this design there are so many of the motifs that Bevis Hillier pin-pointed in his indispensible guide to the decorative arts of the 1940s and 50s, Austerity Binge. Here are the allusions to the countryside, and traditional folk symbolism that was popular in the 40's, possibly inspiring a love of, and patriotic pride in "England's pastures green".

But equally, there is reference in the "dots" motif not only to the medieval jester (another folkloric signifier), but to the incredibly popular "molecular" design of the 1950's; a motif inspired by science and science fiction, and our awe of the atom. The molecular design seems to me one of the most interesting of the post-war motifs because it became a ubiquitous sight in the 1950s, symbolising a fresh kind of smart modern living, and yet had its genesis, perhaps, in the horror of WWII's final blow to Japan, and was then inexorably emeshed in the Cold War. It is strange to think you can look at the endpaper motif of the Saturday Book and trace within it's curves and dots, a frisson of terror, progressiveness in all it's complexity, and a particularly English sense of past, pastural pleasures. Please click on the image to view it at a larger size.

The Saturday Book often featured pieces from famous, fashionable writers of the time like Walter de la Mare and H.E Bates, but there were always odd articles, like "Men's Tears" which might ask why "Englishmen seem to have abandoned the art of crying, at least in public", by the The History of Underclothes author, C.Willet Cunnington.

The Saturday Book belongs to an era of publishing that relished the eclectic, and had a salon style approach to presenting items both serious and whimsical (The Black and White Budget, Liliput). There was breathing space for the absurd, and a mood of the contemplative. If one wanted to be critical, you could say that there was something very middle-class about the language and keen-ness of The Saturday Book, but within its rather English, non-confrontational and conversational style, The Saturday Book brought to readers an awareness and curiosity about things not necessarily found within the everyday paper. This is illustrated particularly in a section called "Votes for Women". A photograph of a woman being roughly moved along by policemen is accompanied by a piece of text that reads; "The old lady on the right was one of 75 suffragettes arrested in March, 1907, for a raid on the House of Commons". The old lady somewhat softens a critical "act of terrorism", as it would have been seen at the time.

Here are two more scans from The Saturday Book's regular Art sections. In the decorative "Toulouse-Lautrec" heading, multi-font madness, and "comedy Rubens" of the first page, here is an example of everything that I love about this publication.

That Old Feeling

2009-01-15T07:08:00.000-08:00

to keep a blog again, or at least somewhere to put things...

2008-04-10T04:47:00.000-07:00

"She wasted away and died of unendurable misery. Her older son vanished into the forests. The twins who were determined to populate South America with a new race devoted to the cult of incest were exterminated together with their infant progeny for addiction to un-American activities." From The Boston Lady, by Bertrand Russell, The Collected Stories of Bertrand Russell, 1972.