A scare at bedtime

A marauding, enraged giant, a child-snatching goblin, a nana-eating wolf and an unstoppable pot of oozing porridge - the stuff that nightmares are made of... My 20-month daughter tends to dictate most of my reading these days – her current faves are Daisy Duck, Little Lamb and the unputdownable Puppy Dog, and it has me reflecting on Ladybird’s Well Loved Tales series which I loved as a child. I haven’t thought about these books in well over 30 years so it was a treat to discover a page containing scans of the various covers. Ladybird have re-issued the series many times over the years but the original artwork courtesy of Eric Winter and Robert Lumley has rarely been bettered. I’ve always cited 2000AD as the origins of my love of Fantasy and Horror, but I wonder was something already stirring in those early years with the help of those Ladybirds ? Even now, looking at the cover for The Magic Porridge Pot, I can feel a little frisson of panic, perhaps an ancient buried memory of fooling around with a sink and gushing taps beyond my control… Check out the Well-Loved Tales series here

As I was putting this post together, I was reminded of Cinema's first adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk made by Edwin S. Porter in 1902. Over a century later, it looks undeniably stagey and primitive - the camera is locked down and distant, and the special effects, rudimentary, but this 10min film is remarkable in two respects. Firstly, the concept of a narrative cinema can be seen slowly emerging from the film - unlike many silent films from the era which were little more than brief sketches of everyday life, Porter's film has a definite story structure. The film has no intertitles and was most likely made before intertitles were introduced (Porter's own film Uncle Tom's Cabin is said to be one of the earliest uses of intertitles, in 1903) but Porter sticks closely to the folktale so audiences could follow the story. The second important aspect of the film was that it showed how Cinema could transcend theatre. Porter was able to bend space and time with a simple edit, and the film's optical effects, create a kind of magic that could not be replicated on the stage. This charming film can be viewed here

Alice

My latest round of obsessive listening comes courtesy of David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label and their new compilation of Alice Coltrane devotional music recorded in the 80’s and 90’s. Despite one track sharing its title with her 1971 masterpiece Journey In Satchidananda, this collection of Ecstatic Music, taken from three self-released albums Divine Songs (1987), Infinite Chants (1990) and Glorious Chants (1995) has little to do with Alice’s signature astral jazz music; on the face of it, the blend of Tangerine Dream-esque synths, Eastern instrumentation and Krishna chants and mantras would be more in line with New Age, that most loathed of musical genres. But it’s good to have your prejudices trashed once in a while, and in some considerable style too - the music Alice composed primarily for an audience of religious devotees and scholars at the Vedantic Center, located in the hills of Santa Monica, is absolutely spellbinding, radiating the warmth and joy of American Gospel, and the sublime spacey futurism of analogue electronica. Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson are well known Alice fans (the closing track on sunnO)))’s Monoliths & Dimensions album is named after her) and I wonder were the long funereal Wurlitzer drones on the aforementioned Journey To Satchidananda (the slight variation on the names is noted) an inspiration for the opening track on the live Dømkirke album ? As well as extraordinary music, the album also serves as a rare outing for Alice’s gorgeous bluesy, yearning voice which alone marks these recordings as essential. World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda is available on all formats, (the CD and 2LP come with extensive liner notes) and can be sampled over at the dedicated bandcamp page

Bloomsday

Continuing the theme of last year’s Bloomsday post...  I’m always on the lookout for interesting and unusual cover designs for Ulysses, and I very much like Kirsty White’s cover for Penguin’s 2011 Annotated Student edition. Pictorial views of Dublin in the early 20th century are de rigueur for art directors tasked with presenting Joyce’s masterwork but it’s nice to see an artist given the opportunity to present original work. I haven't seen a cover this striking since Richard Hamilton’s 1985 etching The Transmogrifications of Bloom, used on various editions of the Oxford World Classics series, and I particularly like that the artist has included little references to the book within the drawing - thoughtfully color-coded for the reader to puzzle over. And the framing device of the drawing, a faux supplement of the Freeman's Journal newspaper (where Leopold Bloom sells advertising space), is rather ingenious too, in fact I initially assumed the design was adapted from an actual illustration from that paper. (Click here for a large scan of the cover)

400 Beats That

I shouldn’t let June slip by without saying something about The Wire magazine which celebrates its 400th issue this month. Putting out a magazine of any kind is a Herculean task, but for a publication, which has for most of its tenure dealt with experimental and marginal music to reach 400 issues is something significant. I picked up my first copy of The Wire back in 1996 when the October issue devoted an article to Throbbing Gristle, and I’ve been buying it ever since. If that unwieldy stack in the pic below looks impressive, my collection is still short about 100 issues from the magazine’s early years when it was primarily a Jazz journal, bearing the immortal strapline: Jazz, Improvised Music and.....

I picked up a few issues here and there from the early years, (and worth noting that this era featured some exquisite photography) but it was the arrival of the millennium that saw The Wire really hit its stride (at least for this reader), as every new issue would see my album collection expand in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions. It was through the good offices of The Wire that I discovered the music of Sun Ra, AMM, Herbie Hancock, Evan Parker, Fela Kuti, John Fahey, Tod Dockstader, Phill Niblock to name but a few. The magazine's championing of The Grateful Dead, King Crimson, John Martyn, even James Brown, artists that I previously had only a casual interest in, inspired me to delve deeper into their output. I heard Coil for the first time through The Wire, when in 2000, an early draft of A Cold Cell appeared on the 6th installment of the magazine's cover mounted CD series The Wire Tapper. To borrow a phrase from Cornelius Cardew, this was the time of The Great Learning.

If The Wire seems less vital in these recent times, it is perhaps a consequence of this reader not having the time to keep up with the endless flow of new music that emerges every month, but I must admit I've become increasingly frustrated by the magazine’s unfortunate inclination for fussy scholarly writing. The most recent offender, Philip Clarke's overview of Lou Reed's RCA & Arista Album Collection, in issue 397 in which the author couched the review in esoteric musicological language ("plagal cadences" and so on) was virtually unreadable. And yet I still eagerly buy it every month, usually rushing to grab one of the four or five copies my newsagents stocks. Incidentally, I had my name mentioned in The Wire back in 2012, albeit in the letters page when a tongue-in-cheek complaint about the previous issue's cover was fired off to the amused editor, who published it much to my dismay...

The Wire reviews Throbbing Gristle's TG24 boxset, issue Issue #227, January 2003

Coil, Issue #194, April 2000

The Herbie Hancock Sextet, Issue #174, August 1998

Yoko Ono, Issue #146, April 1996

What is Blade Runner ?

"A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. New climate, recreational facilities.....absolutely free. Use your new friend as a personal body servant or a tireless field hand - the custom tailored genetically engineered humanoid replicant designed especially for your needs. So come on America, let's put our team up there...."

Quoted from the Blade Runner FAQ... I was rooting around some film magazines over the weekend when I discovered to my delight, a dog-eared copy of the Blade Runner FAQ bulking out an old Empire magazine. Compiled back in the early 90’s, the 70-odd page FAQ was a treasure trove of Blade Runner lore, crammed with fascinating facts, trivia and answers to those niggly questions the film poses (Was the Unicorn sequence taken from Legend ? What is the significance of the chess game?) Back in 1993, the BR FAQ felt like it was beamed from the future – my older brother, working at Motorola at the time printed me a copy from that mysterious newfangled thing known as the Internet, and for years the FAQ served as my Blade Runner Bible, endlessly read cover to cover up to its retirement with the arrival of Paul Sammon’s definitive chronicle of the film, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (which seems to be out of print these days). I’m looking thru an online version of the original FAQ now and enjoying the minutiae that easily slips the mind, like the association of each of the characters with an animal: Leon (Turtle), Roy (Wolf, Dove), Zhora (Snake), Rachel (Spider), Tyrell (Owl), Sebastian (Mouse), Pris (Raccoon), Deckard (Sushi (raw fish), unicorn). Morphology? Longevity? Incept dates? Answers here...

Not me at all

Reading an old issue of Uncut (#148, Sept 2009) over breakfast this morning and the centerpiece of the issue is an article celebrating The Beatles influence on culture in the form of 69 fascinating and sometimes fanciful factoids. I generally consider Uncut writers to a reliable bunch of scribes, but shame on the usually reliable David Cavanagh for reprinting that old howler that David Bowie recorded a cover of Penny Lane for the cut-price Music For Pleasure label in those hungry pre-fame days. I think I first read about the Penny Lane rumor in Nicholas Pegg’s excellent 2002 Complete David Bowie compendium (found in the Apocrypha section), so clearly Uncut dropped the ball on this one. I was debating on whether to post the offending cover version here - God forbid someone might skim over the post and shrug “Bowie covered Penny Lane ? That’s interesting” and propagate the myth further, but for the sake of completeness, you can listen to it here. David Cavanagh seems to have been thoroughly hoodwinked by this, writing "Note the hilarious out of time trumpet and Bowie's northern accent..." - as you will note, the vocalist, identified by Record Collector's Chris Groom as one Tony Steven, sounds nothing like the Deram-era Bowie. The Penny Lane cover first appeared on the Hits '67, one of those innocuous budget compilations that were designed squarely for the indiscriminate listener and his pitiable portable picnic player (12 Top Hits Superbly Recorded promises the front cover Can you tell the difference between these and the original sounds ?)

Incidentally, the album's entry over at Discogs includes a comment that explodes the myth, which is just as well - a seller is currently offering a copy of the album for the king's ransom of £15...

Alien: Covenant

There’s a scene in Ridley Scott’s latest film where a couple are making out in a shower unaware that the alien creature is closing in for the kill, and watching this scene I had a momentary flashback to those Alien knock-offs that New World put out in the early 80’s – Forbidden World or Galaxy of Terror, take your pick. I can’t recall with certainty if such a scene exists in either of those Roger Corman productions, but that feeling of deja-vu is indicative of the problem of Alien: Covenant – watching the film last night I couldn’t escape the sense that I’d walked this ground many times before. Perhaps it was the side-lining of Giger’s alien for Prometheus that prompted the screenwriters of Covenant to get the series back on track so to speak, and while the face-hugger and xenomorph return in all their slithering, salivating glory, the film is simply content to fall back on familiar plot lines and ideas from the earlier films – lest we think we’re not watching an Alien film this time round. In fact the first hour of the film is essentially a remake of the 1979 film - an awkward and disorientating deux ex machina in the opening reel has the Covenant crew finding their way to the derelict spacecraft, where the film plunges into similar territory mined, unlikely as it seems by David Fincher’s much maligned sequel, while the climax, shamelessly lifts Ripley’s rescue from the infernal processing station in Aliens. Even the power loader makes a cameo of sorts. Ultimately the film feels like a disposable greatest hits package, or at one point, greatest misses - the first appearance of Michael Fassbender’s mad scientist David, draped in a monastic cloak put in mind Vincent Ward’s rejected concept for Alien 3. Perhaps most disappointing though is how underwhelming the visuals are. I made a rare excursion to the cinema to see the film (I regretted not seeing Prometheus on as large a screen as possible) but there’s little touch of the epic that made the preceding film so enjoyable, flawed as it was. Apart from one large impressive Roger Dean-style vista, the landscapes are surprisingly non-descript. One final note – the film has a sting in the tail that sets up yet another sequel, but if you know your Star Trek The Next Generation, and the S1 ep Datalore, you’ll have figured it out long before the denouement is revealed...

Bless the rains down on Arrakis

Listening to the soundtrack of David Lynch’s Dune and musing on Toto’s unlikely involvement with the film. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a satisfactory explanation how Toto got this gig, although the group’s chief songwriter David Paich suggests in the liner notes penned for the 1997 PEG Recordings edition of the soundtrack (which contains only Toto music), that he essentially auditioned for the scoring job when he visited David Lynch in Mexico and handed him a demo tape of proposed music, the deal finally sealed over a mutual love of Shostakovich’s 11th symphony. I had a plan to listen to some of Toto’s early albums in preparation for this post, but I balked at the idea of listening to anything cut from the same cloth as Rosanna or Africa. And yet, the music Toto wrote and recorded with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra is frequently stunning, far removed from the slick, soft rock the group is largely known for, from epic brooding orchestral passages to short synth driven numbers, and quiet introspective atmospheres, which mesh very nicely with Brian Eno’s Prophecy Theme, an excellent leftover from the Apollo albums sessions which I believe is not available elsewhere. It’s interesting to note that Toto never worked in the soundtrack field again and I wonder was it due to the critical mauling the film received ? Listening to the Dune Desert Theme, which could easily fit the heroics of Top Gun, the group might well have had a second day job á la Tangerine Dream…

The Art of American Unease

The fact-of-the-day on my desk calendar informs me that on this in 1869, the First US transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory, Utah, and it's reminded me of a favorite piece of artwork from my DVD collection - the Masters of Cinema edition of John Ford's Silent masterpiece The Iron Horse, which re-stages the driving of the "golden spike" that joined the rails of the First Transcontinental Railroad across the United States, connecting the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads. The beautiful Masters of Cinema sleeve modeled on one of the original Fox film posters from 1924, depicts an Indian warrior perched on a cliff top gazing at a locomotive journeying through the valley below.

What I find interesting about this artwork is how the meaning has changed over the years. In the film the sympathies of Ford and his screenwriters lie squarely on the side of the railroad workers who come under frequent attack throughout by marauding tribes of Indians, and the artist of the poster captures well the sense of action and spectacle - within the context of the film the Indian Warrior in the picture could well be a lone scout, part of a war party preparing to ambush the locomotive and claim its spoils (such a raid is seen in one sequence in The Iron Horse). But when I look at the image through the long lens of history, to me it suggests something more disquieting - the arrival of the railroad not just as an instrument of progress, growth and expansion, but rather an unstoppable force of displacement and destruction. Whether the Indian warrior depicted in the sleeve is aware of the unconquerable power of the railroad is uncertain - at one point in The Iron Horse, a train driver cheerfully recalls an Indian trying to lasso a locomotive - but his posture, the cautious vantage point, the weapon he's clutching all suggest unease or fear, perhaps he's seeing this iron horse for the first time. Interestingly, Masters of Cinema opted to use one of the more stylized variations on the more well known Fox poster, and with it's psychedelic arrangement of colors, the boiling molten landscape, seems to accentuate this sense of foreboding.

I wonder had the unnamed artist at the Fox art department seen Herman Schuyler's 1880 oil painting The First Train which depicts a similar scene. In this painting three Native Americans observe a train crossing a prairie. At first glance the painting suggests a tranquil pastoral panorama - but the juxtaposition in the picture of the distant train and a swaddling baby reveals something more profound - the beginning of a new generation, but one that would herald a cataclysmic change for the lives of Native Americans. The laying of the Transcontinental Railroad tore up territories Native American tribes had occupied for generations, land that was deemed sacred was seized by the US Army and more and more European settlers headed west depleting buffalo herds and further displacing the indigenous people. In 1883 William Tecumseh Sherman, General of the Army of the United States, reflecting on the problem of Native American insurrection wrote that the completion of the railroad “has settled forever the Indian question".

Star Wars Holiday Special

So today is Star Wars Day for no good reason (May the Fourth be with you, groan) but happily I'm reminded of the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, truly one of the most embarrassing moments in SW history. Lucasfilm has effectively banished this to a galaxy far far away but youtube as ever comes to the rescue. A word of caution - if you're allergic to Wookies, the Holiday Special might send you into anaphylactic shock. Perhaps a more appropriate title would have been The Star Wars Halloween Special what with the grotesque looking grandfather Wookie, and the scene where an Imperial troopers smashes up Chewbaca's kids' toys which might disturb sensitive younger viewers. And the constant braying from Chewbaca's family is genuinely distressing. Still it's not all bad - look out for a nice bit of intergalactic sleaze when the grandfather Wookie enjoys some virtual reality R&R - the intergalactic babe in the program offers: "I am your fantasy, your experience, so experience me". Fans of Star Trek: The Animated Series will enjoy a very 70's animated segment starring Boba Fett, there's a song from a fully stocked creature-factory Cantina, and a bizarre instructional video with lots of Max Headroom style video ef-ef-ef-effects. Odd. This is the sharp edge of exploitation and CBS who probably couldn't see past the advertisers lining up for airtime like audiences lined up around the block for the film, got what they deserved. I'd like to think that Lucas learned something valuable after whoring out his creative vision to people who didn't care or understand, but I remember being deeply disappointed when I saw The Ewok Adventure in the mid-80's, something I would consider another Star Wars mishap. And now that the Holiday Special is back in unofficial circulation, I must assume it is persona non grata among staff at Lucasfilm. Someday we will see the return of the original versions of Star Wars I've no doubt, but I'm positive this one will forever languish at the bottom of the Death Star's trash compactor.