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Laibach on ‘Wir sind das Volk,’ a posthumous collaboration with playwright Heiner Müller
05.18.2022
06:55 am
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Laibach’s new album ‘Wir sind das Volk (ein Musical aus Deutschland)

Laibach’s latest project, a musical theater production based on texts by the German playwright Heiner Müller, has been staged in Berlin, Klagenfurt, Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Hamburg. As Laibach’s early work was not enthusiastically greeted by authorities in post-Tito Yugoslavia, so Müller, whose New York Times obituary described him as an “independent Marxist,” was banned for years from the East German stage. Indeed, the director of one of his early plays was rewarded with a trip to the coal mines.

Müller’s association with Laibach dates from 1984, when the group composed music for a Slovenian production of his Quartet. Laibach and Müller met in Berlin the following year, and he suggested that they collaborate; but though he apparently did use Laibach’s music in one of his stage productions, the collaboration did not come to pass before Müller’s death in 1995.

More than twenty years later, prompted by a suggestion from Anja Quickert, the head of the Internationale Heiner Müller Gesellschaft (International Heiner Müller Society), Laibach renewed their collaboration with the dramatist. As Laibach explains its approach to creating Wir sind das Volk in the press release:

We followed Heiner Müller’s own strategy of cutting and rearranging the material, taking his text and putting it into another context, rebooting it with music, in order to drag the audience into it or alienate them from it. Music unlocks the emotions and is therefore a great manipulative tool and a powerful propagandistic weapon. And that’s why a combination of Heiner Müller, who saw theatre as a political institution, and Laibach, can be nothing else but a musical.

Laibach kindly answered a few questions about Wir sind das Volk and related matters by email.
 

Photo by Valter Leban

Speaking in Dresden in 2014, South Korean President Park Geun-hye proclaimed: Wir sind ein Volk! What is the difference between this assertion and Laibach’s Wir sind das Volk?

Laibach: Wir sind das Volk is a more general slogan and Wir sind ein Volk is a more particular one. When East Germans demanded the change of policy and reunification of the two Germanies in 1990, one of the slogans of the protesters at the time was Wir sind das Volk—“We are the people”—which meant that it is the people who will decide, not the authorities. When the wall between the two countries actually started to crumble, the slogan on both sides of the wall quickly changed to Wir sind ein Volk—“We are a people, one people, one nation, one state…” In this spirit, in 2014, South Korean President Park Geun-hye, speaking of the idea of reunification of the two Koreas, proclaimed Wir sind ein Volk!, which, of course, in the context of South and North Korea, means that they are one nation, violently divided in the Korean War and which, in a certain perspective of time, should be again reunited, just like Germany was.

Please tell us about the production of Laibach’s posthumous collaboration with Heiner Müller. Why, for instance, does the album open with the figure of Philoctetes?

Back in 1984 we contributed music for Heiner Müller’s Quartet, a play that was presented at the Slovenian National Theatre in Ljubljana, directed by Slovenian director Eduard Miler. This was at a time when Laibach was officially forbidden in Slovenia and Yugoslavia, and we were grateful to Eduard Miler for being brave enough to include Laibach in this theatrical piece, performed by the national institution. A good year later, in February 1985, we met Heiner Müller by coincidence in Berlin, where we had a concert at some festival, and it turned out that he was very enthusiastic about Laibach and he also proposed that we collaborate on one of his upcoming theatre productions. Unfortunately, that did not happen (in the meantime we were invited by another legendary theatre and artistic director and in fact Heiner Müller’s fierce opponent, Peter Zadek, to work the score for Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1987—and perform in it—staged at the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in Hamburg), but we were told that Heiner Müller had apparently used some of our music in a theatre production that he worked on. Heiner Müller passed away in 1995 and only a few years ago, in 2019, we finally received an invitation from Mrs. Anja Quickert, the head of Internationale Heiner Müller Gesellschaft (H. M. Society), proposing a project based on Heiner Müller’s texts, to be premiered and performed at the HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) theatre in Berlin. The premiere of Wir sind das Volk—Ein Musical nach Texten von Heiner Müller was held on 8 February 2020 and more shows followed after the pandemic. At this point something like 10,000 people have seen the musical, in spite of the epidemics.
 

The poster for ‘Wir sind das Volk’

Heiner Müller is one of the most prominent post-WWII German playwrights, writers, and intellectuals, and one of the main protagonists who radically practised the denazification of Germany and ruthlessly led German Volk through the purgatory of collective guilt. Our ‘musical’ speaks of this process of denazification, but also about Heiner Müller personally, about his observation of his own life in the postwar reality of this country, divided by the Cold War. He was very fond of German national traumas as well as of the time of German patriotism and this is the topic in most of his writings. The texts and songs for the musical were selected by Anja Quickert, who also was the dramaturge and director of the show. The musical opens with an extract of Müller’s interpretation of the Philoctetes, the tragedy where he dramatizes the state’s predicament as it finds itself adopting inhumane methods in order to achieve a humane future for its citizens. In presenting the state’s point of view, Müller boldly challenges Sophocles (Philoctetes) and Gide (Philoctète), who focus their plays on the individual, not the state. Müller’s radical rewriting of the myth negotiates the question of belonging: exclusion and inclusion in a society that wants to destroy the “other” and destroys itself by tolerating only an ability to function. In the part of the text that we are using in the musical, Müller is actually talking about his own childhood traumas and that is why this text stands at the beginning of the album as well.

We hear so much about populism in politics these days. Who are the people, and what do they want? As Freud might have asked, Was will ein Volk eigentlich?

People are the suppressed majority that occasionally smells the power of victory and then they want it all.

At least one reliable source reports that Russian propaganda is simultaneously insisting that Ukrainians are racially inferior to Russians and denying that Ukrainians have a distinct nationality. If citizenship in the NSK State is not based on language, nationality, ethnicity, or race, what are the criteria?

Possession of at least one Laibach album and a good sense of humor, especially when inferiority and superiority complexes are in question. For all else we are quite flexible.
 

‘Epiphany (Adoration of the Magi)’ by Gottfried Helnwein (via Denver Art Museum)

How does Laibach’s approach to working on theatrical productions (Krst pod Triglavom-Baptism, Macbeth, Also Sprach Zarathustra) differ from its usual working method? Do any principles of Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre’s work persist in Laibach’s approach?

We approach each project in a completely different way. We don’t have any creative platform or templates to use either for theatrical productions or as ‘usual working method.’ Composing is always different because most of the time we work with a slightly different combination of people, and we therefore adapt to a common operating model. Within the theatre projects it is also important who initiates it, who leads or directs it. For these productions we create the material in communication and collaboration with directors, and we try to adjust to their ideas and their vision of how the music and sound should function, as much as we can. It is true, however, that usually it is best that producers and directors give us a totally free hand for the best results.

Is it possible to express one’s personality in Schlager music or Volkslieder without ruining the performance? For instance, giving voice to the German national character seems to suit Heino so well because he only uses emotions as signs of filial piety. “Folk music” in the US these days, on the other hand, consists almost entirely of people crying about their hurt feelings.

They really do it in pop and rock music too, there is a lot of ‘crying’ and trading in emotions in pop and rock music tradition. In principle we do not see much difference between pop-rock music and Schlager music or Volkslieder in Germany. In the context of the German national character, Heino, who deals with emotions perfectly, as well as Kraftwerk, who actually took a lot of their inspiration from Volkslieder and Schlager music—their versions are not contaminated by emotional hyperinflation. In America, on the other hand, it’s hard to imagine popular music—with the exception of hip hop and rap—without such emotional exploitations… What would Presley, Prince, Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Whitney Houston, Dolly Parton or Taylor Swift (etc., etc.) be without their hurt feelings? 

Singing in 1985, U.S.A. for Africa proclaimed: “We Are the World.” Is Laibach the world, too?

We are Africa and the Universe.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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05.18.2022
06:55 am
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Barry Adamson: Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars
11.10.2021
03:06 pm
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Photo of Barry Adamson by Mark David Ford

Multihyphenate musician-soundtrack composer-photographer-filmmaker (and former Bad Seed and member of Magazine) Barry Adamson has now added “memoirist” to that list.

Certainly no moss is growing under the feet of the Moss Side, Manchester-born Adamson. His incredibly evocative, highly detailed and sometimes frankly shocking autobiography, Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars was recently published by Omnibus Press, he’s got a new digital EP, Steal Away, just out and has completed a soundtrack for an upcoming documentary about London’s legendary arthouse cinema, the Scala Cinema.

Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars is an extremely well-written book, one of the best things I’ve read in ages. And I would be remiss in my duties here not to inform the reader that Adamson is either playing on, or created no fewer than six albums that would easily be in my top fifty: The first three Magazine albums, the first two Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds albums, and his own soundtrack for an imaginary film, Moss Side Story.  The man is a living legend.

I asked Barry Adamson a few questions via email.

First, your memory! How are you able to recall such vivid details about your life? It’s extraordinary!

Thanks! Some things are best forgotten, as the saying goes but throughout most of my life I’ve collected snapshots and angles on my own and the lives of others and stored them, committed them to memory like an archive and I never knew why but perhaps now I do. I thought everybody did this and I think to some extent they do. The amount of people I’d say I was writing a memoir to and then suddenly, they would find things stored away in there own archive. There’s also the noir style which helped me put them into a particular context as well.

There’s a very cinematic quality to so many of the anecdotes recounted in the book. Will you be developing this material further, say, writing a script?

I’ve not thought about that but sometimes, borrowing from Dennis Potter, the scenes in the book become ‘film-like’ to almost thrust the sense of that cinematic quality. I needed (in the same way I do with music) to be able to clearly visualise each sentence, so maybe that’s a factor in how the book’s overall filmic structure formed. It was a gamble to try and write it that way but one I think that paid off.

As far as autobiographies go, this one is a very, very nakedly revealing memoir indeed. I don’t get the sense that you’ve held much of anything back. What made you decide to do this?

I put myself as the central character in my life and decided that if it were a film or perhaps a novel, then you would see all the sides of this character; their challenges, struggles, conflict (on many levels) and light and dark and crap decision making and sitting with him throughout the story, so, difficult as it was at times and I make no bones about it, it really was, I knew that holding back would weaken ‘the story’ and that the filmic arc that I wanted to create around those first thirty years of my life could flatten out to a possible blandness which I didn’t want.

You’ve done a soundtrack to a documentary about London’s legendary repertoire moviehouse, the Scala. I’ve been there a few times myself. One time I saw Warhol’s Chelsea Girls and I was the only one in the cinema when it started, but by the time it was over several homeless people had camped out around the room. It seemed like a fairly sleazy place, did it widely have that reputation?

Well, for me, it was a place of refuge where you were fed this… art, art that you didn’t come across anywhere else. Sleazy. Yes. Glamorous. In it’s own way, yes. The all-nighters were events like no others and the fact that those films imprinted themselves so ferociously into my brain is to me, a sign that what was happening there was something special. Interesting that you remember so clearly what film you saw and the homeless scenario. I was possibly one of them!

Below, the video for “The Climber,” the lead track from the new Steal Away EP

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.10.2021
03:06 pm
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Cats and the meaning of life: John Gray on ‘Feline Philosophy’
11.10.2020
09:13 am
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‘Feline Philosophy,’ out November 24 in US and Canada
 
“Epidemiology and microbiology are better guides to our future than any of our hopes or plans,” the philosopher John Gray wrote nearly 20 years ago in Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Anyone who entered 2020 with hopes and plans has seen these words vividly illustrated.

Gray’s work makes a strong case that our species is incorrigibly irrational, and it raises questions about humanist beliefs that should be particularly important for those of us on the political left to consider. Among his books are False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, and Seven Types of Atheism.

In his latest, Feline Philosophy, Gray pursues the deep interest in the nonhuman world that makes his critique of humanism so sharp in fang and claw. Through his reading of Montaigne, Pascal, the Stoics and Epicureans, and Spinoza, as well as literary writers from Dr. Johnson to Mary Gaitskill, Gray considers what cats have to teach us about philosophy and the good life. As I write this, the hardcover edition of the book is #15 on Amazon’s “New Releases in Philosophy” list and #1 in “New Releases in Cat Care.”

John Gray answered a few of my questions about cats by email in October.
 

John Gray (photo by Justine Stoddart)
 
While Feline Philosophy returns to questions that will be familiar to readers of your work, it seems different in some ways from anything else you have published. How did you come to write this book?

I’ve been thinking of writing a book on cats for many years. I’ve always wondered what philosophy would be like if it wasn’t so human-centred. Among all the animals that have cohabited with humans cats resemble us least, so it seemed natural to ask what a feline philosophy would be like. My book is an attempt at answering this question, and tries to imagine how a feline creature equipped with powers of abstraction would think about death, ethics, the nature of love and the meaning of life.

The book is also an ode to cats, expressing my admiration for their life-affirming capacity for happiness and their courage in living their lives without distractions or consolations.

Do you live with cats? Have you always? Can you tell us about a particular cat you have known?

My wife and I lived with four cats over the past thirty years, two Burmese sisters and two Birman brothers. For some years they all lived contentedly together, until mortality began to take its toll on them. The last of them, Julian, died on Xmas Eve 2019 in his 23rd year. He was perhaps the most tranquil of all four, and even when old and a little frail seemed to enjoy every hour of his life.

The most companionable was Sophie, who passed away at the age of 13 around seventeen years ago. She was extraordinarily intelligent and extremely subtle in her insight into the human mind, and very loving.

Why don’t cats share humans’ concern with making the world a better place?

Because they are happy. Wanting to improve the world is a displacement of the impulse to improve yourself. But cats are not inwardly divided as humans tend to be, and don’t want to be anything other than what they already are, so the idea of improving the world doesn’t occur to them. If it did, I suspect they would dismiss it as an uninteresting fantasy.

Your writing often deals with distressing truths about human beings, such as their capacity for cruelty and self-delusion. It can be upsetting. But I read Feline Philosophy with a feeling of serenity, which I attribute to cats’ total incapacity for cruelty or self-delusion. Does contemplating cats provide you relief from thinking about human affairs?

Cats are a window looking out of the human world, so I suppose that’s one reason I love being with them. I think they also help me look at the human world as if from their eyes, with tranquil detachment and a certain incredulity.

Do you know of any works of art that plausibly represent the mental experience of cats, or any other nonhuman animals?

I don’t know of any art works that capture the mental experience of cats. Whether literary or visual, they would be very difficult to produce. There are some books that try to enter into the inner world of dogs, the best of which seems to me to be Sirius (1944) by the British science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon. Perhaps the most brilliant book I know that tries to enter into a nonhuman mind is the Polish writer Andrzej Zaniewski’s Rat (1994).

You suggest that cats’ independence arouses envy and hatred in the people who torture them. Is this a culturally specific diagnosis, or do you think all cat torturers share these motives?

By no means all unhappy people hate and envy cats, but I think pretty well all of those who do are unhappy. That seems to be a universal truth.

I was surprised to learn recently that one of my closest friends, who is a committed vegan and supporter of animal rights, is a cat-hater. When I asked him why, he talked about his love of birds. Can there be meaningful ethical standards for nonhuman animals’ behavior?

I can’t speculate as to why your friend feels as he does, but it may be the innocence with which cats kill and devour other living things that offends him. Perhaps he’d like the natural world to conform to human values, which for me would be a kind of Hell.

I’m not persuaded that it is the well-being of birds that he cares about. Birds are also innocent killers, after all. The British writer J.A. Baker, who in his shamanistic masterpiece The Peregrine (1967), described ten years of his life attempting to inhabit the life of a falcon, loved the bird partly because it lived according to its nature as a predator.

The Cynics took their name from Diogenes’ epithet, “the dog.” Why haven’t any philosophers styled themselves after cats?

That’s a very good question. I don’t know a good answer, but possibly philosophers suspect that cats don’t need them.

As a reader of your work, I am very happy to have finally gotten a list of tips for living well from you. Are there any prescriptive philosophies that have helped you conduct your own life?

No, I can’t think of any prescriptive philosophies that have influenced me. In the early Seventies I met Isaiah Berlin, and talked with him regularly until his death in 1997. His value-pluralist philosophy of competing and often incommensurable values strengthened my suspicion of any strongly prescriptive ethics. In recent years I’ve been more and more influenced by Montaigne, whose scepticism about philosophy as a guide to life appeals to me greatly.

My ten feline hints for living well are of course meant playfully, as examples of feline philosophy. But they might not do much harm if taken seriously.

Feline Philosophy, already out in the UK, will be published in the US and Canada on November 24.

Posted by Oliver Hall
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11.10.2020
09:13 am
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Meet Wendy Erskine: An Exclusive Interview with Your New Favorite Writer
07.20.2020
12:37 pm
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There are too many writers in the world. Too many bad writers. I’ll include myself in that group. No, not false modesty, just how it rolls for the sake of this tale. But you see I have an excuse. I use my bad writing to introduce you to good writing, great writing, writing that will change and inspire you. What purpose is there for bad writing other than to make you yearn for truly great writing?

So, here you go…

Wendy Erskine is a great writer. A true original. A writer whose first collection of short stories Sweet Home contains some of the finest tales ever written. Clever, sassy, nuanced, with a rich seam of dark humor. Erskine’s stories of working class life in East Belfast have been hailed by critics as works of brilliance and her book has been nominated for several awards. Though experience suggests Erskine has worked on these stories and crafted them into things of beauty, they appear so fresh, so fully formed, so organic, that they may have just fallen like ripe fruit straight from the tree.

Go on, take a bite.

Born and raised in Northern Ireland during The Troubles that most dangerous and murderous time in the province’s history, Erskine has produced a wry, wise, funny, and utterly compelling collection of stories. She is the kind of writer that makes you fall back in love with reading. A magician who pulls the Ace of Spades from behind your ear while you’re still wondering how it was removed from your tightly gripped hand in the first place.

Her collection of stories opens with a three-part tale that is compelling and disturbing in equal measure. “To All Their Dues” is centered around a beauty parlor, and the lives of three people: the owner Mo, the local villain Kyle, and his wife Grace. Kyle is a psychopathic character with a pulsing menace few crime novelists have ever imagined or described in such chillingly simple and unforgettable terms. But if that weren’t enough, wait till you meet his wife.

Erskine has a remarkable eye for detail, for character evinced through thought and action, that reminded me of John Updike, Fitzgerald, or the Scottish writer James Kelman.

That long thin scar, running along the inside of your thigh, lady in the grey cashmere, what caused that? Those arms like a box of After Eights, slit slit slit, why you doing that, you with your lovely crooked smile, why you doing that? The woman with the bruises round her neck, her hand fluttering to conceal them. Jeez missus, is your fella strangling you? Bt you don’t ask, why would you?

While the second tale “Inakeen” works, its ending felt slightly contrived in a way that J. G. Ballard sometimes forced his stories to fit a purpose. Even so, it’s a small quibble but is another story that sticks long after reading. “Observation” about two teenage girls and an older man is a powerful work about what’s left unsaid between knowing and action. “Locksmiths” is about the troubled relationship between a daughter and her mother just released from jail. “Last Supper” deals with a manager covering for two employees having sex in a diner’s restroom. “Arab States: Mind and Narrative” and the devastating “Sweet Home” (parts of which I had to stop reading because it hit me so hard) show a writer who is in full control of their talent and knows exactly what she wants to say and how best to say it.

But how to interview such a writer? By email of course. But let’s not get too serious, or ahead of ourselves. Let’s start our interview with Erskine as if this was for one of those teen-pop magazines like Smash Hits:

Writer of the Week: Wendy Erskine

Starsign:  Taurus.

Favourite color: Duck egg blue.

First record bought:  “Ma Baker” by Boney M.

Favourite food: Green papaya salad, really hot.

First gig: Depeche Mode, the Ulster Hall, 1983.

Favourite band: Velvet Underground.

Favourite singer: Small Faces era Steve Marriott

Favourite artist:  Maurice van Tellingen

If you were Prime Minister/President what would be your first law: No one can earn100 times more than someone else.
 
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A full interview with Wendy Erskine, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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07.20.2020
12:37 pm
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Witches, bats, and black cats: The fairy tale art of Arthur Rackham
10.15.2019
07:48 am
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An illustration by Arthur Rackham for the story ‘Jorinda and Joringle’ from ‘Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.’ The caption for the illustration in the book read ‘By day she made herself into a Screech-owl. Or a Cat” as the cat is actually a shape-shifting witch.
 
Artist Arthur Rackham was one of twelve children born to Alfred Thomas Rackham, a legal clerk, and Anne Stevenson in London in 1867. Rackham demonstrated a deep, nearly consuming interest in art at a very young age, and when he ran out of paper to draw on, he would use his pillowcase as a canvas. His artistic talent would not go unnoticed once Rackham enrolled in school, and at the age of sixteen, he would travel to Australia, where he would spend many months painting images of the country’s rolling landscape. Other accounts of Rackham’s trip down under indicate the trip was in part to help the young artist combat a state of ill-health. Upon his return, his father, who was not necessarily supportive of Rackham’s artistic ambitions, convinced his son to seek work in a conventional setting, which he did as a clerk in 1855. During this time, Rackham would continue his studies at the highly specialized Lambeth School of Art.

He would soon leave his position as a clerk to pursue his passion for illustration, much to the disappointment of his father. Rackham Sr.‘s annoyance would be short-lived as his son’s style of illustration and painting for children’s books would eventually become the required standard for other artists of the time period to aspire to. Rackham’s influenced not only his contemporaries but also artists for generations to come, including Walt Disney, who was a big fan of Rackham’s artwork. Disney would later request his talented team of artists and background artists to adapt Rackham’s watercolor/pen and ink style for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Deeply proficient as both a painter and illustrator, Rackham curiously viewed both mediums as very different pursuits pointing out how differently illustrations were generally interpreted by the viewer:

“A picture both in subject and treatment must be considered as a work for constant contemplation - a permanent companion. An illustration, on the other hand, is only looked at for a fraction of time, now and then, the page being turned next, perhaps, to a totally different subject, treated, it may even be, in a totally different way. In this branch, bizarre and unusual effects of arrangement, violent actions, exaggerations and other matters of spasmodic interest may find a place almost forbidden on the walls of a room.”

Rackham’s work as a full-time illustrator was busy, and his work appeared in numerous magazines and books. In 1900, he would meet his soon-to-be-wife painter Edyth Starkie whose work would inspire the artist to define his own style and not to follow the path of convention as it pertained to his artwork. This same year Rackham would contribute 95 pen and ink drawings as well as a color piece for the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. This experience would be the catalyst for Rackham’s artistic evolution most notably in his work for Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1905). Other impactful pieces of literature containing Rackham’s illustrations would follow such as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (J. M. Barrie, 1906), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, 1907) and later in 1909 with the completion of 40 additional illustrations for the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. The demand for books illustrated by Rackham was great, including requests for elegantly bound editions signed by the artist. His decision to leave his clerk position proved to be right on the money, quite literally, as Rackham and his wife would become quite affluent as a result of his success.

Following the conclusion of WWI, interest in books illustrated by Rackham (which were steeped in folklore and fairies), became less appealing to British consumers but he was still in high demand in the U.S. and was offered a huge commission from the New York Public Library to paint a series of pieces based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even with the decline in the consumer market, Rackham had no problem finding work or commissions and in the last part of his life he would add costuming and set design to his vast resume after accepting the task of creating the costumes, background artwork and elaborate curtains for an opera based on Hansel and Gretel-a German fairy tale retold by Rackham’s beloved Brothers Grimm.

When Arthur Rackham passed away, he was memorialized in The Times of London  as “one of the most eminent book illustrators of his day.” His only child, Barbara Edwards, would qualify this statement with her own revealing the core of her father’s ethos:

“To do his job well and give pleasure to as many people as possible was his ambition.”

Below are illustrations by Rackham, and as you will see, he was quite fond of witches (aren’t we all?). Enjoy.
 

 

 

1907.
 

 
Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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10.15.2019
07:48 am
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When William S. Burroughs met Francis Bacon: Uncut
09.18.2019
08:44 am
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When William Burroughs met Francis Bacon a lot of tea was drunk, cigarettes smoked, a few secrets shared but very little was revealed about the two men. At times, this “historic meeting” of two great minds in 1982 is like the old class reunion where two former pupils meet up only to find they have very little in common other than they once shared the same classroom together.

The two men first met in Tangiers in the 1950s when Burroughs was technically on the run for murdering his wife after a “shooting accident” during a drunken game of William Tell. Bacon was then in a brutal and near fatal relationship with a violent sadist called Peter Lacey who used to beat him with a leather studded belt. Bacon once remarked in a documentary that he had lost all of his teeth to his lovers—Lacey was the boyfriend who knocked most of them out.

It was Allen Ginsberg who first introduced Bacon to Burroughs as he thought Bacon painted the way Burroughs wrote. Ginsberg had also wanted Bacon to paint his portrait in the act of having sex with his partner Peter Orlovsky. Bacon wondered if Ginsberg would be able “to keep it up” for the duration of the sitting. In the 1960s, Ginsberg again asked Bacon to paint his portrait. Bacon demurred claiming he had an aversion to long hair and beards and preferred painting short-haired, clean-shaven men because he could see the skull underneath the skin.

Burroughs thought he and Bacon were “at opposite ends of the spectrum.”

“[Bacon] likes middle-aged truck drivers and I like young boys. He sneers at immortality and I think it’s the one thing of importance. Of course we’re associated because of our morbid subject matter.”

This meeting between the two men was filmed by Mike Southon at Bacon’s studio/home 7 Reece Mews for a documentary on Burroughs directed by Howard Brookner. Burroughs appeared slightly standoffish, self conscious, and occasionally looks bored though he almost warms up when he riffed on some of his favorite subject matter—Jajouka, Mayans, and immortality. He also looked far older than Bacon, but was in fact five years younger. Bacon is waspish, bitchy, gleeful like a naughty schoolboy, and delivers the best lines (Jackson Pollock is “a lacemaker,” Mary McCarthy is “a bitch”).

According to Burroughs, when the pair first met in Tangiers they had several conversations about art though Bacon feigned not remembering the details. Burroughs reminded him that he had dismissed the then popular trend in art Abstract Expressionism as “mere decoration.”

Bacon recalled their mutual friendship with Jane and Paul Bowles, going on to discuss Jane Bowles’ mental decline and the tragedy of her last years being tended to by nuns, a situation which Bacon thought ghastly. Ironically, Bacon died just over a decade later being tended to by nuns after becoming ill in Spain (an asthma attack).

Burroughs seemed a little ill-at-ease having a camera crew film his every word. The pot-bellied Bacon seemed more relaxed (he’s on home turf) and even made the occasional dig at Burroughs. When discussing painters Bacon asks “Do you mean Monet or Manet?” like Lady Bracknell.

This is the unedited footage of something that (understandably) ended up being but a few minutes in Brookner’s finished documentary. I suppose one would have (perhaps) expected something far more scintillating and IQ-raising when two great artists meet but Burroughs and Bacon skate around subjects and stick to those things that obsesses them without revealing too much—even if they can’t always remember people’s last names or who or what it is they’re exactly talking about.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.18.2019
08:44 am
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The stop-motion cartoon of William S. Burroughs’ ‘Ah Pook Is Here’


The 1979 collection ‘Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts’
 
William S. Burroughs envisaged Ah Pook Is Here, an extension of the comix serial The Unspeakable Mr. Hart, as “a picture book modelled on the surviving Mayan codices.” However, after nearly a decade collaborating with artist Malcolm McNeill on an illustrated version of the tale, Burroughs was unable to find a publisher for his graphic novel avant la lettre. Instead, it appeared without images in Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts, a 1979 collection of Burroughs’ researches into Mayan, Egyptian, and space age magical techniques. (McNeill has since published his artwork for Ah Pook Is Here in a separate volume.)

Burroughs’ novella concerns an American plutocrat named John Stanley Hart, whose fear of his own mortality leads him to disturb the gods of the Mayan pantheon. Hart is a junkie with a jones for the suffering of others, especially poor people and ethnic minorities. Narcotized by the “blue note” of their pain, congenitally selfish and incurious, he can’t imagine that calling down awful deities from another dimension might have unwanted consequences: “Mr. Hart has a burning down habit and he will burn down the planet.” Before you know it, blood is spurting from delegates’ every orifice at the “American First” rally, and the Acid Leprosy has eaten a hole in time.
 

‘The Unspeakable Mr. Hart’ from Cyclops magazine (via Virtual Library)
 
Philip Hunt made this stop-motion film of Ah Pook Is Here as a student at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in 1994, taking the sound from Burroughs’ collaborations with John Cale on the Dead City Radio album. At six minutes, it is a distillation of the story, but a good one: death gods disturbed by a grotesque people-thing.

Given the vintage of Ah Pook Is Here, I can only interpret the suicide-by-shotgun at the end as a reference to the death of Burroughs’ former collaborator, Kurt Cobain—an unlikely candidate for Mr. Hart.

Posted by Oliver Hall
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03.22.2019
08:49 am
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Off with your nose!: A look at the long, strange, cinematic history of Baron Munchausen


An enchanting movie poster for the Czechoslovakia film ‘The Fabulous Baron Munchausen’ (aka ‘The Outrageous Baron Munchausen’/‘Baron Prášil’) directed by Karel Zeman (1962).
 
I suspect the vast majority of Dangerous Minds readers have seen Terry Gilliam’s’ multi-multi-million dollar film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)—though I also believe that many of our devoted followers are probably also acquainted with the rich, cinematic history (at least eight shorts and more than a handful of films exist) based on the tall-tale-telling Baron who was actually a real person. It should also be noted that any George Harrison superfan likely knows a bit more about the Baron’s 200-year-old history as Harrison was an avid collector of the work of Gustave Doré, the great illustrator and engraver who conceived the quintessential image of the Baron.

As he notes in the extras of the Second Run Blu-ray of The Fabulous Baron Munchausen Terry Gilliam gives much credit for his vision of the story to director and special effects artist Karel Zeman saying Zeman’s influence on his own work is “continual,” and he’s “pretty sure” he has stolen many of Zeman’s artistic methods for his own films. Other fans of Zeman’s work include Tim Burton and special effects legend Ray Harryhausen who has said he “deeply appreciated” Zeman’s talent. As it relates directly to this post, one of the films the former Monty Python member perhaps pilfered from was The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (aka The Outrageous Baron Munchausen/Baron Prášil).

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen was directed by Zeman who also created the multi-layered, dreamlike special effects in the film. Here is Zeman (as seen in an interview with the director in the Second Run release), on his vision for the movie:

“I wanted to capture the surreal world of Baron Munchausen. I wanted this romantic fantasy to be unleashed from the mundane reality. So I used imagery resembling prints from the period. At the same time, I decided to treat color like a painter on a canvas. I put in only when it was necessary.”

 

Zeman on the set of ‘The Fabulous Baron Munchausen’ giving direction to actors Milos Kopecký (Baron Munchausen) and Rudolf Jelínek (Tonik). This image is part of a large collection of Zeman’s work displayed at the Karel Zeman Museum in Prague.
 
Every shot in The Fabulous Baron Munchausen contains some variety of extravagant special effects, and Zeman’s vivid imagery—much of which is based on Doré‘s original illustrations, fill every inch of every frame. According to Zeman’s daughter Ludmila, her father was an avid reader and collector of comic books and would often incorporate jokes or gags he found amusing into actions performed by his actors. Zeman even recruited Ludmila for The Fabulous Baron Munchausen and the then fifteen-year-old got to ride a horse as the stunt double for Jana Brejchova, the stunning Czech actress (and former wife of director Miloš Forman) who played Princess Bianca in the film. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is widely considered a masterpiece thanks to Zeman’s determination to make a very different film than German director Josef von Báky’s beloved Nazi-funded version of Munchausen’s story, 1943’s Münchhausen or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

The budget for Báky’s movie was estimated at $6.5 million dollars (or approximately $95 million dollars if it had been made in 2019) and was commissioned by Nazi propaganda pusher Joseph Goebbels. Interesting, the screenplay for Báky’s adaptation was written by Emil Erich Kästner whose novels were regulars at Nazi book burnings. Kästner was in fact banned from publishing his literature in Germany between the years 1933 and 1945. The wildly opulent film was intended to rival The Wizard of Oz, but with an adult-oriented twist including a scene full of topless harem girls and other fantasy-based, “grown-up” scenarios. Despite the fact the film intended to serve as a mechanism for war propaganda, it ended up a luxurious, over-the-top take on the amorous, adventurous, cannonball-riding Baron.
 

George Harrison and Eric Idle on the set of Terry Gilliam’s ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.’
 
As previously mentioned, Python super-fan George Harrison would be the main conduit for the last of the final big-three Baron Munchausen films, Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. In 1979 he showed off his large assortment of Munchausen stories and shared his love of artist Gustave Doré with Gilliam. Then, Gilliam’s pal musician Ray Cooper gifted Gilliam with a copy of a book full of the stories of Baron Munchausen written (though published anonymously) by Hieronymus Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Münchhausen (1720-1797), encouraging the director (if not daring him) to make a film out of them. Allegedly $46 million (though Gilliam says it was “nowhere near $40 million), flowed into the lengthy, arduous production that was already over budget by two million dollars before filming began. Though it was a financial box-office bomb, it received high praise and would collect three British Academy of Film & Television Awards, and was nominated for four Oscars. The stories from the set have become legendary, such as Oliver Reed being perpetually drunk and hitting on a seventeen-year-old Uma Thurman, who plays Venus/Rose in the film. Gilliam’s finished product will forever be considered a triumph in the realm of fantasy filmmaking and “fantastical exaggeration” which the real Münchhausen perfected and unwittingly passed along over hundreds of years through other storytellers fond of hyperbole.

If you’d like to learn even more about the history of Baron Munchausen in cinema, film historian Michael Brooke provides a fascinating, in-depth exploration of the Baron’s many appearances on the big screen on the Second Run Blu-ray for The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (Baron Prášil). Far-out images and trailers from all three films follow.
 

A still of actor Hans Albert as Baron Münchhausen riding a cannonball in 1943’s ‘Münchhausen’ or ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.’
 

A curious scene from ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.’
 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
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03.19.2019
08:51 am
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The Boston Typewriter Orchestra is better than Bachman-Turner Overdrive
03.12.2019
02:00 pm
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Somewhere Tom Hanks is weeping. For when the Boston Typewriter Orchestra performs, the primary musical technique consists of beating holy hell out of a bunch of vintage typewriters. The filmic embodiment of Chesley Sullenberger is known to be such a fan of old typewriters that he recently published a moderately typewriter-themed collection of stories called Uncommon Type, which (of course) was written on a vintage typewriter. 

The Boston Typewriter Orchestra doesn’t collect typewriters—it punishes them. In their promotional materials they claim (boast?) that typewriters do not last longer than two years once they have been recruited as instruments for the waggish collective.

The combo, which occasionally calls itself “BTO,” has been in existence since 2004 and has a 2008 album and a 2017 10-inch to its name. It has never been idle, performing multiple times in every calendar year since then; despite logging dozens of performances in the New England area, they have never ventured further south or further west than Washington, DC. That changes next month when they play Phyllis’ Musical Inn in Chicago.
 

 
As will readily be imagined, the BTO’s primary mode of music is percussive, although they do get a lot of mileage out of the damned bell that chimes whenever the typist reaches the end of a line. (Then again, bells are percussion instruments too—Wikipedia’s description of a bell runs “a directly struck idiophone percussion instrument,” ahem.) Suffice to say that with a gizmo as complicated as an old typewriter, there are a lot of solid moving parts to fiddle with—you can bash the keys, bang on the housing, crank the platen around, slam the carriage back, and (as mentioned) twiddle on the bells.

Who are the relevant comps for a band like this? The BTO strikes me as a hipster’s cheeky version of a jug band, although I can see an argument for Einstürzende Neubauten. Visually the gang tends to adopt the garb of a midcentury office drone, meaning lots of jackets and ties.

It’ll be a while before the Boston Typewriter Orchestra passes the “other” BTO in terms of sales. I refer of course to Winnipeg’s greatest contribution to boogie rock, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, who released five gold albums during the 1970s. When are the typists going to release their version of “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”?

In 2017 the group released a 10-inch (the title is adapted from George Michael) called Termination Without Prejudice, Volume 1. Etched in the runout of side 1 is the phrase “HOW MANY WORDS PER MINUTE?” You can buy it on Bandcamp.
 

 
Here’s Termination Without Prejudice, Volume 1, available on Bandcamp:

Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.12.2019
02:00 pm
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This Valentine’s Day, tell them you hate them with ‘The Hate Poems’
02.14.2019
08:57 am
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John Tottenham

In Los Angeles, where it is many people’s full-time profession to be cheerful and healthy, John Tottenham’s scowl hits you in the eye like a stream of exudate from a suppurating lesion. Actually, jets of pus are far more common features of LA nightlife than scowls; one minute you’re dancing to the Maytals without a care in the world, the next—splosh!—you’ve got tertiary syphilis. Anyway, when our mutual friend Jessica Espeleta introduced us more than a decade ago on an Echo Park dance floor, it was love, or tertiary syphilis, at first sight.

Ever since, when I ran into John, we would spend a few minutes being clammy and unhappy together, talking country blues and gloomy thinkers. John is the only person I know who could have introduced me to the profoundly dejected philosophy of E.M. Cioran. And to give you some idea of the measure of the man, not only could John have told me about Cioran’s life and thought, but in fact, he did. That’s the kind of person John is. (As you see, I like to refer to him as “John,” in the way people who knew Bob Dylan in the Village never stop calling him “Bobby,” to make a big show of our personal acquaintance.)

But those, as the song says, were different times, before Apollo crowned John with the laurel wreath and anointed his tongue with the Muses’ sweet dew, and accolades fell by the dozen from his praise-occluded ying-yang. Today, he is our city’s poet of failure and regret, though his meditations on these universal themes belong to the world and all its children. He is the poet demanded by the age: the one who takes up the lyre to sing, not of arms and the man, but of “Liquid Consolation and Knob Relief.”

Writing of “icy Retz or La Rochefoucauld aphorisms, shining with hate-filled economy,” the art historian T.J. Clark might have been describing the style of “A Richer Victory”:

Broke, bitter and alone.
What more could I ask for?
I have failed, at last,
beyond my wildest expectations.
I don’t understand
why I’m still not satisfied.

There are three slender volumes of John Tottenham’s poetry, all highly recommended. His first, The Inertia Variations, now in its second edition, has been set to music and otherwise interpreted by The The. His second collection, Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment, permanently befouled the conjugal bed. His latest—his last?—excursion in verse is The Hate Poems, published last September. Exclusive footage of John reading from The Hate Poems at the Cha Cha Lounge on December 21 follows our email interview, below.
 

 
Is hate really the motivating force behind these poems? Often, disgust seems to get the upper hand.

The title is a cheap ruse designed purely to get attention. ‘Poems of Regret and Resentment’ would have been a more appropriate title but it was used for the previous volume. Nobody is going to pick up a book called The Inertia Variations or Antiepithalamia based on the title. We needed something catchy and declarative with a photograph of a kitten on the cover to get some traction in today’s marketplace.

Regret, resentment, revulsion and resignation are my stock-in-trade. I excel, if anything, at the negative; it just happens to be my lot in life.

I have carved out a little niche for myself, one that nobody else would want.

There’s a thin line between exploring a subject to the point of exhausting it and repeating oneself, and that’s the space this book exists in.

It’s a desperate last bid before retiring from the futile, thankless and masochistic pursuit of poetry. I stopped poeticizing entirely three years ago, on doctor’s orders.

After many years of struggling with form, I finally acknowledged that I had no grasp of plot, character or dialogue, and decided to write a novel, which is how I’ve been squandering the last three years.

When did the relationship monumentalized in these poems end? Has your former partner responded to The Hate Poems?

The poems are not directed at or inspired by anybody in particular. They are based entirely on my observations of other people’s relationships.

The process is more sculptural or surgical, a gradual chipping away at slabs of text and grafting together of fragments. It’s not a natural process. There’s nothing organic about it.

I always employ the Universal ‘I’. Everybody feels some degree of ambivalence towards romantic involvement, so people do relate to this stuff.

Love and hate are not antithetical forces, the opposite of love is indifference.

In 1580, Sir Philip Sidney bemoaned poetry’s fall “from almost the highest estimation of learning. . . to be the laughing-stock of children.” Now it sounds like a pretty good gig, to be the laughing-stock of children. Will poetry ever hit bottom?

Sidney wrote a couple of sonnets that are among the only direct precursors to the mean-spirited love poems in Antiepithalamia and Hate Poems that I was conscious of: “Desire, desire, I have too dearly bought, with price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware,” etc.

As Louis Pipe points out in the introduction: “Ironically, to call an artist or a filmmaker a poet—i.e. ‘Lou Reed is a poet,’ ‘Tarkovsky is a poet of the cinema,’ etc — is to bestow the highest honor upon them, but if one actually is a poet, one is a nobody.”

In his study of Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann writes: “Riches, honors, and even scholarship are merely futile multiplications of a value that is zero to start with.” But there is no limit to the number of possible multiplications, and each one is different, even if the result is the same. How can the poem honor the haecceity of each individual’s worthless achievement?

To write as impersonally as possible, while bringing as much personal experience to it as possible; to provoke, console or inspire. If a poet is accessible to people who don’t normally read poetry, i.e. everybody, then he disposes of the middle-man, the critic, and is ignored by the literary establishment, which is an ideal predicament. To be accessible to the reader is to be inaccessible to critics.

How was the show with the Flesh Eaters and Mudhoney?

I’ve covered the waterfront, performed at every toilet in this town—at literary gatherings, comedy clubs, and rock shows—offering tragically comic relief, amplified self-deprecation, stand-up poitry.

It’s too poetic for the stand-up crowd and too comedic for the poitry set, so I often end up performing at rock clubs.

Please tell us about the video of the reading embedded below. The audience is either having fun or doing a very good impression.

It channels the audience’s feelings of failure, bitterness, regret, etc, into something entertaining and cathartic. People seem to relate; they laugh when they recognize felicitously-phrased truths. That’s the triumph of failure.

There was a lot of positive energy—love, if you will—in the room that night. Love for Hate.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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02.14.2019
08:57 am
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