VISTAMATIC

I've always had a soft spot for Studio Vista / Dutton Picturebacks: the 'comprehensive pictorial surveys written by experts for laymen' on a wide range of topics: cinema, art, crafts, antiques, architecture, ballet, cars, cybernetics, guns, etc. so I thought I'd share some of (far from complete) collection. Yeah, it's no problem, really, please don't mention it.

This pictureback covers Andy Warhol (his paintings, films and everything else) and was published in 1971, a great time to review the career of an artist who had been both brilliantly creative and incredibly influential in the sixties, but whose subsequent work was far less daring in comparison for all sorts of reasons, including being shot and nearly dying, then, later, totally dying. 

STOP! HAMMER TIME

 

The comic book industry is nothing is not commercial, so the first Marvel tie in's came early. The Marvel Super Heroes was a 1966 syndicated cartoon featuring five of their superheroes, three of which (The Hulk, Iron Man and Thor) had debuted in Kirby & Lee's annus mirabilis, 1962 (Captain America and Namor, the Submariner had been knocking about since the 1940s).

Produced quickly and cheaply by Grantray-Lawrence Animation, the 'animation' took copies of art from the original comics, then added stiffly moving mouths, darting eyes, waving limbs and the odd mobile silhouette. You couldn't get away with it now, but the cartoons are short and bright and noisy and fast moving and must have seemed quite exciting to children at the time. I still like them now, but then, as we have already established, there is something wrong with me.

In 'The Tomorrow Man', the God of Thunder faces Zarrko, a megalomaniac villain from the 23rd century. It does not end well for Zarrko, or for Thor's half-brother, Loki, who, as usual, is stirring the shit behind the scenes with a big wooden spoon.

BRIGHT STAR

 

Fear No Evil, d. Frank LaLoggia (1981)

An atmospheric, slightly hysterical movie teling the hitherto untold tale of the son of the Devil's troubled teenaged years in in the suburban hell of Rochester, New York, Fear No Evil has a great punk / new wave soundtrack, an often unwholesome blend of sex and violence, and a genuinely exciting, partially animated climax in which Lucifer Jr. is destroyed by the coruscating, cleansing light of a processional cross to semi-psychedelic and eye rubbing effect.

DANCE AWAY

Luis Bunuel's 1965 film Simon Of The Desert is a huge favourite of mine for a number of reasons, a mere eight of which I will now detail below:

1. I have come to consider Bunuel as the single greatest film director of all time.

2. This film is a superb example of his mature style, being beautifully staged and filmed, but without any fussiness or obtrusive 'artistic' interventions.

3. It's ostensibly the story of a 5th Century Syrian Saint who lived on top of a pillar for 39 years, but Bunuel makes it far more relatable and, no pun intended, down to earth. Simon is just trying to get on with stuff, but it's just one thing after another for the guy.

3. It is very funny, particularly in how petty and pathetic and powerless the Devil actually is (see also Bedazzled).

4. It doesn't have the 'logic' of a dream, but it does work in the same way as a dream, i.e. it makes sense as you are having it rather than when you later remember it. This may, of course, be the point of Surrealism in general.

5. Fanatical religiosity is intrinsically weird and disturbing, a mental disorder, so Bunuel doesn't have to labour the weirdness, he just shows us the basics.

6. Bunuel cuts only when necessary, and each shot is exactly the right length no matter how long or short it is.

7. The film is only 45 minutes long, which, again, is exactly how long it needs to be.

8. It ends in an extraordinary way*.

* The Devil (Silvia Pinal) transports Simon Stylites (Claudio Brook) six thousand miles and fifteen centuries into the future to a nightclub in contemporary New York. They smoke, sip beer and watch the kids lose their shit to a groovy band. The frenetic dance, according to the horned one, is called Radioactive Flesh. 

Bored and out of his element, Simon wants to leave, but the Devil tells him he'll have to stick it out - he'll have to stick it out to the very end. Such is the lot of the Ascetic, I suppose. 

FAMILIAR STATES (DEJA VU)

 

'Anxiety may be debilitating or stimulating; it can result in neurotic symptoms or in improved, heightened performance in an actor or athlete. It is something every human being has experienced'

CREATIVE THINKING

'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'  (Arthur C. Clarke)                     

I'm 57 years old. I'm white, male, heterosexual, English, middle class, liberal, woke a.f, and I try to be aware of my privilege. I work in local government and my life is steady and although I try to vaguely keep up with things, I haven't been fully tapped into the zeitgeist for over thirty years. Despite all of this, I really like Tyler the Creator, and I'm totally in awe of his eclectic, powerful and multi-faceted artistry although I actually understand only a little of who he is, what he does and what it means.

I can't pretend to know the life Tyler leads, or has had in the past, or to say that I parse the cultural references, artefacts, influences, microtrends, clap backs, look forwards and leaps into the unknown which comprise the kaleidoscopic shards of a voice and viewpoint which extend beyond music into dance, film, fashion, sport, performance art and social commentary. I don't like all he says, because he says some provocative things, some of which he apologises for, some of which he doesn't (his song 'Sorry, Not Sorry' covers this in revealing detail). But Tyler is a Creator, an artist, an individualist, an adult: he does what he likes. He doesn't need any sort of approval as far as I can see, least of all from me.

His art is not fully knowable to me and, as such, it has an even more potent allure. It's gleeful co-opting and mutation / usurpation of every facet of culture seems like the future right here and now, and is clearly the refined product of a fully formed and highly sophisticated permaculture that has developed all around me whilst my attention was elsewhere. This system is febrile and fertile and is strong with hybridity, diversity, variance. It is resilient, and seems better adapted to how we must live on this planet now. This is a good thing, a natural and necessary evolution and I welcome it, even if it is not really for me and it doesn't need any of my attention to exist. 

No, I don't fully understand Tyler the Creator or, for that matter, lots of things in contemporary music, film, art and literature, and if I were born a  hundred years earlier, I might have felt the same about Dada, or Stravinsky or  Eisenstein. But gaps in comprehension are not the same as disapproval or, at least, they shouldn't be. The fact is that, despite Francis Fukyama's 1992 announcement about the end of history*, new and exciting things still happen or, rather, like Tyler the Creator, simply and steadfastly refuse to stop happening - whether you as an individual are in the right space or place to get that is a completely different matter.

* There is more to this statement than meets the eye, of course, and Fukyama may have even been right at the time, but  he didn't reckon for a. the seething complexity of the world outside the West and b. the broiling insanity of the twenty first century. 

DIRK BOGARDE FLIPS HIS WIG

 

Frustrated by his ongoing inability to dispatch superspy Modesty Blaise, archvillain Gabriel (Dirk Bogarde) tears off his trendy hairpiece and prepares for a final showdown.

Joseph Losey's 1967 pop arty take on the comic strip heroine sort of sums up British film making at a time when they were awash with American money: it's hip, flash, colourful, funny - and slapdash and inconsequential as hell. I like the result very much, though - in fact, if Terence Stamp wasn't in it so much, it would probably be one of my favourite films.

POSTSCRIPT: 16 days after this post was published, Terence Stamp died, aged 87. Although I have never been a fan of Stamp, I have never disliked him or, indeed, wished him dead, so please don't draw any conclusions. Believe me, if I had that sort of power I'd be directing it elsewhere. 

EVERYDAY ELECTRONICS

 

012: Egg Timer

WHEN THEY TIE YOU UP

 

Remember...even a half inch slack in bonds can mean the chance of escape.

From The Book of Survival by Anthony Greenbank (1967).

HANS (JEAN) ARP / (JEAN) ARP

 

Schnurruhr / Moustache Watch (1923)

DON'T LOOK BACK 3

John Martin (1789-1854) was a hugely popular English painter of vast, often apocalyptic scenes. 

'The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah' dates from 1852 and is five feet high and nearly eight feet wide. In the foreground, Lot and his daughters hurriedly flee the swirling inferno of God's terrible wrath. Far behind them, still in poignantly recognisable human form, is the arrested and petrified figure of their fatally curious wife / mother.

In his short discussion paper 'The Chemical Death of Lot's Wife', published in the Royal Journal of Medicine in 1988, Professor Irving M. Klotz gives a detailed explanation of the environmental conditions that would led 'Mrs. Lot' to die instantly from rigor calcium carbonitis and turn into a rigid block of calcite, salted by moisture heavy crosswinds originating from the nearby Dead Sea. He includes chemical formulas and calculations, and clearly knows science stuff, so I am in no position to push back on any of it.

He concludes by writing 'Thus, once again, we see how modern science serves to corroborate and elucidate medical events described in the Bible', and, in this instance at least, I can't disagree with that either.  

Finally, just to make this about me again rather than Professor Klotz, one of my first conceptual art objects was a poorly made facsimile Airfix box purporting to contain this cataclysmic scene in model form. No great message, I just thought it was a nice idea.

DON'T LOOK BACK 2

Landscape with the Destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah

Joachim Patinir, circa 1520

Two friendly angels lead Lot and his daughters to the safety of a nearby tent. In the background, the twin cities of Sodom & Gomorrah burn. In the foreground, a slightly bulbous pile of rocks are all that remains of Lot's nosey, disobedient wife.

Dutch master Patinir specialised in Biblical scenes, but this, with its elements of science fiction and horror, is perhaps his strangest work. There's something quite modern looking about it, despite it being painted over 500 years ago.

DON'T LOOK BACK

The Bible contains a lot of finger wagging, not surprisingly given that it is a control manual more than anything else. In it, we read that the people of Sodom were decadent and ungodly, so they needed to be destroyed (a common Old Testament theme - God makes an awful lot of mistakes for an omniscient, omnipotent being). 

Good old Lot and his family, being righteous and reverent, were spared, but only on the condition that they didn't watch the destruction of their former home. Lot's wife (Ado, Idit, or Ildith, according to your source) couldn't resist a last glance so, for her disobedience, was turned instantly into a pillar of salt. 

There is some evidence of a 'cosmic airburst event' in the southern Jordan Valley around 1650 BCE. This violent and sudden explosion devastated the ancient city of Tall el-Hammam and made that area largely uninhabitable for over 500 years. Theories include (in order of wackiness) the Tunguska-style airborne detonation of a meteoroid, a nuclear explosion following a spaceship crash, and alien invasion. Any of these could, apparently, have turned a human being into a column of minerals (I can't say I'm convinced, but this sort of extrapolation is interesting in what it says about the human obsession with sense making).

Whatever the cause, whatever the outcome, the Bible uses this garbled and unknowable story to reinforce its own underlying message, especially when it comes to wives: do what you are told. No wonder it's such a popular book with bigots. We'll come back to this tale, I have a thing for it.

Screenshots taken from John Huston's 1966 epic The Bible: In The Beginning, which takes three hours and a cast of thousands to recount the first 22 chapters of the good book to half-brilliant, half-boring effect. 

FAMILIAR STATES

'A new and unbiased study of vigilance, fear, shock, guilt, shame, depression and other familiar states of mind...'

Cover design by Patrick McCreeth.

WHERE SCIENCE & THE OCULT CLASH!

Nothing But The Night, d. Peter Sasdy (1973)

Nothing But The Night is a bit of a one off, which is wholly appropriate given that it was the sole product of Charlemagne Films, a company set up to make intelligent horror films but lost so much money that they folded before they could make a follow up.   

The narrative takes a while to come together but, ultimately, it turns out to be a curious mix of (to paraphrase the US poster) science and the occult, with some lovely Highlands and Islands scenery and a great cast, including Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Diana Dors, Kathleen Byron, Keith Barron, Fulton Mackay and Cassandra out of ‘Only Fools & Horses’ as a kid who WILL-NOT-STOP-SCREAMING and, ultimately, will utter the greatest lines ever spoken on film by a child:

"You've destroyed my dreams. I curse your cruel God"

At its core is a rather disquieting tale of child abuse in a remote orphanage, but perhaps not in the way that you might immediately think. There’s also a marvellous sequence in which dear old Diana Dors (playing a crazy, shouty clairvoyant) goes feral, running around the countryside evading the authorities like a chocolate munching Ray Mears in a ginger wig and red leatherette rain coat.

Little seen, somewhat neglected, this film always reminds me of a pleasing mix of ‘The Damned’ and ‘Scream and Scream Again’, and although it’s no kind of masterpiece, it nevertheless has strange ideas and weird horror at its core, and that’s like Turkish Delight on Toast for me. 

INCOMING LACUNA

 

I'm going to take a short break to paint, drink and sit in the sun. See you in July!