La Hora del Fantasma

My friend James Gracey (author of the excellent Behind the Couch blog) posted a rather doom-laden image earlier on Facebook and I'm responding in kind, feeling rather doom-laden myself on this Friday morning. I don't have much information on this eerie photograph by Spanish photographer Joaquín Pla Janini, entitled La Hora del Fantasma, probably dating from 1930. My guess is that Pla Janini was looking to re-create the dark mystery of Arnold Böcklin's famous painting The Isle of the Dead which depicts an oarsman and a white-robed figure in a small boat approaching a rocky island. Also worth seeking out Pla Janini's triptych Les Parques, a variation on La Hora del Fantasma and featuring in one panel the white robed figure, this time skull-faced standing on the craggy shoreline with a number of naked male bodies writhing among the rocks - a powerful image which anticipates the homoerotic death tripping of Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising... A good overview of Joaquín Pla Janini's work can be viewed here

Vintage Times Square

Times Square circa 1968 and Wild In the Streets appropriately enough is playing at the Embassy... I've posted the link to this thread before but for all you Times Square hustlers and junkies who might have missed it, be sure to check out the Vintage Times Square thread over at the excellent Skyscraper City Forums. This is a favourite thread of mine to browse, 13 pages of fantastic street photography, and it proved a very useful archive of imagery when I was reading John Rechy’s classic 1963 novel about gay nightlife, City of Night. Check it out here

Croatia Crash Cover

The paperback cover for Ballard's Crash, or Sudar as it's called in Croatia... This 1988 edition of the book must rank as one of the strangest covers used for the novel, making a clean break from the usual automobile motif. The artwork is by Igor Kordej who went on to illustrate New X-Men, and I can't help but wonder if this depiction of a robot in passionate embrace with a flame-haired woman was a left-over from a previous assignment, looking more like something ripped from the pages of Heavy Metal. Still the meshing of lust and metal, the eroticism of technology is appropriate enough...

Season of Glass

Listening to Yoko Ono’s 1981 album Season of Glass, the cover image featuring John Lennon’s bloodstained glasses… Ono’s album was released just six months after her husband’s murder and it’s all the more surprising for its restraint – on first approach one would expect the kind of heavy Krautrock jams and abrasive vocal improvisations heard on Yoko’s Plastic Ono Band album, but instead Season of Glass is fitted out with a series of late night introspective moods and colors which not only touches on Lennon’s murder (4 gunshots open the track No, No, No) but the Lennon-Ono relationship as a whole – my favorite track on the album Even When You're Far Away, I’d wager is Yoko’s take on the strange turn of events that was the so-called Lost Weekend (“It's just the way it happens to be”). Incidentally, the track Panty Lies off Sonic Youth’s 1995 album Washing Machine bears more than a passing resemblance to the aforementioned No, No, No…

Stepping Razor Red X

I had penciled in two Bruce Springsteen documentaries for the w/end but when my connection failed to deliver the goods, I turned to a music documentary from my own collection, the 1993 film Stepping Razor Red X, a film on the life of reggae firebrand Peter Tosh. Forfeiting a conventional biopic narrative for an abstract, fragmented structure, the film is as confrontational and aggressive as its subject, with Tosh's own voice-over (courtesy of some recordings known as the Red X tapes) railing against the poverty of Trenchtown and the violence of apartheid. The film also builds a compelling case that Tosh's murder at his home in 1987 was politically motivated rather than a simple armed robbery. Tosh's music is well represented too with plenty of excellent live footage. Superb stuff. Finally, one interesting connection to muse over - the film was written and directed by Nicholas Campbell who might be better known as one of David Cronenberg's regular players, appearing in Fast Company, The Brood, Naked Lunch, and perhaps most memorably as Frank Dodd, the Castle Rock killer who becomes a victim of his own handiwork in The Dead Zone...

In the Company of Danielle

Danielle Dax in all her Gothic finery... I watched The Company of Wolves earlier today (on a double-bill with Valerie & Her Week of Wonders), and not having seen the film close to 10 years I was looking forward to this screening. But the film left me vaguely dissatisfied - despite the exquisite art direction (which looks like it came from a Brothers Grimm engraving), I found the film rather bloodless. But my interest was piqued as the end credits rolled when I spotted among the cast names the English experimental singer, musician and artist Danielle Dax who plays the wolfgirl. I know Danielle Dax's work with the eccentric post-punk band The Lemon Kittens but her unexpected appearance has inspired me to delve into her solo career. Skipping back to her scene in the film accompanied by Neil Jordan's commentary, I was hoping for an interesting anecdote about Dax's involvement with the film but sadly Jordan says nothing worthwhile...

Nine Garmins of the Ninja

A cheerful publicity still from the 1985 film Nine Deaths of the Ninja, with cast members sporting the latest Garmin wrist watches... If Star Trek predicted flip-phones and The Next Generation, tablets, this atrocious entry in the 80's ninja cycle has a claim on portable GPS devices, with the trio below taking time out seemingly every few minutes to attend to their high-tech watches relaying vital mission information via a chorus of bleeps. Garmin fans however should give the film a wide berth, it's simply not worth wading thru the stilted line readings, arthritic martial arts, and pneumatic hairdos. I know because I watched the film last night in a fit of madness, when I could have watched one of the dozen or so still-sealed DVDs I have sitting on my shelf. On the other hand if you're the kind of Trash addict who must see everything, the film at least features one of the most absurd villains I've seen in many a long time - imagine a cross between Dr. Strangelove and Paul Partain's Franklin from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre... Someone actually fronted money for this thing ?

Czech Folk Horror

Weekend reading... Tucking into my copy of the recently published Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies and it's shaping up to be an excellent, illuminating collection of essays and inquiries into the elusive genre of Folk Horror. With the initial opening chapters under my belt, I've skipped ahead to my friend Kat Ellinger's essay on Czech Folk Horror which serves as a brilliant introduction to a particularly magical strand of European Cinema. Beautifully written too - Kat writing about Valerie and Her Week of Wonders says: "Stylistically, Jaromil Jireš employs a strong rural aesthetic with national folk elements using the natural beauty of the countryside and rustic village location to achieve a strong organic feel as well as melting in sumptuous Gothic tones". Elsewhere Kat shines a light on some lesser known classics of the Czech Folk Horror tradition including Juraj Herz's 1978 film of Beauty and the Beast which is a discovery for me and am currently seeking the film out thru unofficial channels... Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies comes highly recommended and has that lovely intimate feel of a small press publication. Copies of the book are available here and worth adding that 100% of all profits from sales of the book will be charitably donated to environmental, wildlife and community projects undertaken by The Wildlife Trusts.

Lawrence's Ruins

Below, a tiny detail from the George Lawrence's famous 1906 photograph of San Francisco in ruins... I'm currently listening to the Grateful Dead's Aoxomoxoa LP, and musing on the album's provisional title Earthquake Country (a better, less fussy title I think) yielded Lawrence's vast panoramic shot of the devastated city taken some six weeks after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck on April 18th 1906. Nowadays cityscape panoramas are a dime a dozen but Lawrence's photograph still impresses with its clarity and scope and all the more amazing that it was taken from "Lawrence Captive Airship", which was simply a kite sent soaring over the bay. The Wiki entry has an excellent blow-up of George Lawrence's photograph here. An even bigger copy of the picture (11mbs) can be found here

It feels like... times have changed

A fatally wounded Slim Pickens knockin' on Heaven's door in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid... I mentioned to someone last week that Peckinpah's film was my all-time favourite American western and with that in mind, I revisited the film earlier today, and one screening later the film is now elevated to my all-time favourite Western, American, Italian or otherwise, elbowing The Good the Bad and the Ugly from the top slot. Today's screening was fortuitous for one particular reason - among Pat Garrett's legendary cast is Gene Evans whom I watched just yesterday in Sam Fuller's 1952 film Park Row. And watching the film again today I couldn't shake the idea that Kris Kristofferson in 1973 would have made a tremendous Jim Morrison, far better that Val Kilmer I think. And I love Peckinpah's cameo as a man who refuses a drink. Favourite line of Rudy Wurlitzer's brilliant dialogue is courtesy of R.G. Armstrong playing another of Peckinpah's brutish God-fearing men, "I got my shotgun full of 16 thin dimes. Enough to spread you out like a crazy woman's quilt."