Alan Lee, “The Golden Book of the Mysterious” by Jane Werner Watson & Sol Chaneles, 1976
1 day ago
Notes From A Superfluous Man
@thefugitivesaint
An Accumulation of Inconsequential Notices
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Stacey Ransom & Jason Mitchell, ’It Will Be Ours’, 2013
I found this on the hard drive of an old laptop. I touched it up slightly, making the image a bit brighter to suit my own tastes. If you’re curious as to how this image was made, I tracked down a couple of blog posts about just that here & here (because I was curious myself and I didn’t have any information about who made it, I only had the image itself).
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‘Shock Treatment’, “Fantastic Films”, Vol. 14, #3, Jan. 1982
A movie that was not received kindly by Rocky Horror fans but one whose premise became more relevant with the rise of so-called “reality television.” It’s what I consider a bad movie that’s probably worth one viewing if you’ve never seen it.
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“Cinefantastique” Vol. 12, #5 & 6, July & August, 1982
This entry into the production design for ‘Blade Runner’ crafted by the artist Tom Southwell is the kind of thing I’ve always loved. It’s all about the background minutia that makes a fictional world feel grounded and lived in but often goes overlooked and underappreciated. It’s also a reminder of just how much work goes into making a movie and how much of that effort is just passed by from scene to scene. There’s also the little fact mentioned here that there was $10,000 worth of neon used which sounds crazy to me.
“Southwell’s most interesting assignment—certainly the one that gets the most attention—was designing 2019’s magazine covers—a last minute job that produced some of the most humorous examples of what life might be life in 2019. Given just four days to come up with covers suitable for a Ridleyville newsstand, Southwell created a number of startling titles (going for $29 a copy); Moni, with a cover story about "illegal aliens” by R. Scott; Kill, whose motto is “All the News That’s Fit to Kill”; Fash, a large-format fashion magazine featuring an article on “Spray-on Swimwear”; Creative Evolution; and Horn, the skin mag of the future, with an article “Hot Lust in Space.”
Southwell’s original designs were reproduced with a Xerox color copier, cut to size and glued directly to the covers of existing magazines, such as OMNI and Playboy. Although the Xerox process was relatively crude, it was the only reproduction method fast enough to meet the deadline.
Delivered to the set, the 2019 magazines were mixed in with a number of contemporary magazines titles, including Scott’s favorite Heavy Metal, and the punkish Wet-The Magazine for Gourmet Bathers.
Like most of his other work, the magazines can barely be glimpsed on camera, becoming just another component of in Scott’s so-called “700-layer cake.”
“I was always aware that my designs were a small tile in the overall mosaic,” Southwell said. “In the case of the magazine covers—which were intentionally raw and unfinished—Ridley had simply wanted a fuzzy visual backdrop for the newsstand. It might have been nice to have gotten a closer view of those magazines, though. I’d put the names of all the top production crew right there on the covers.”
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Ewa Frysztak (1930-2021), “Z piekła rodem” (Straight from Hell*) by Maria Kędziorzyna, 1976
*This might be a terrible translation. I tried. It’s probably better translated as just “From Hell.”
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Eric Kincaid (1931-2023), ‘The Spirit in the Bottle’, “The Kincaid’s Book of Witches, Goblins, Ogres, and Fantasy”, 1980
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Robert Crumb, “Bring Me Your Love” by Charles Bukowski, Black Sparrow Press, 1990
Suggested re-title: “American MAGA”.
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Petra Gall (1955-2018), ‘Hole - Courtney Love & Jill Emery“, 3-12-1991 (taken at the Loft at Nollendorfplatz in Berlin)
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Michael Echter (1812-1879), “Allgemeine Kunst-Chronik”, 1893
“Siegfried! Siegfried!
Selig gilt dir mein Gruss!”
(Siegfried! Siegfried!
Blessed be my greeting to you!)
And here’s a bunch of text below related to the above image:
“In the beginning was Siegfried: that is, the poem Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried’s Death). This long, lyrical poem that Wagner completed in November of 1848 eventually became the fourth and last “music drama” of his monumental tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen. Little did Wagner know at the time that Siegfrieds Tod was the substantial seed from which the other three operas would spring and that this poem/libretto was itself the first draft of what would be renamed Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). For upon completion of Siegfrieds Tod, Wagner realized that the poem he’d penned assumed too great a knowledge of the Nibelungen myth on the part of his audience. As a consequence, and to fill in the gaps, he wrote the poem/libretto Der junge Siegfried, (The Young Siegfried, later to become simply Siegfried), to which he then appended Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) and Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold) in that order, extending backward through time. As Thomas Mann would write in the opening line of his own tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, “Very deep is the well of the past.”
Wagner completed the massive poem Der Ring des Nibelungen on December 15, 1852, as an exile in Switzerland, resulting from his anarchist activities and participation in the Dresden rebellion of May 1849. Importantly, and prior to completing the three opera librettos following Siegfrieds Tod, Wagner interrupted that work to produce three theoretical essays on the nature of opera that shaped his aesthetic/compositional approach to the genre and the articulation of his concept of “music drama” for the rest of his career: Art and Revolution (1849), The Art Work of the Future (1850), and Opera and Drama (1852). These essays encompassed drama, music, politics, myth, religion, et al. Wagner wrote them while under the spell of the greatly influential German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). Here is Feuerbach’s philosophy, stated very briefly and simplified to the nth degree: humans are the creators of gods, thus religion is a construct of the human mind that reveals fundamental truths about ourselves; the very essence of human life is love; since there are no gods in reality, humans are responsible for their own actions; god-like characteristics that human beings have regarded as divine for millennia are in fact human – we are divine.
Feuerbach’s was not the only philosophy that informed Wagner’s thoughts at this time; he was deeply influenced by philosophical anarchism as well. Aspects of this philosophy in The Ring were that the original state of nature is idyllic and harmless; an imposition of law-governed orders such as marriage, property, and money are evil; and that property is theft, etc. On the flip side, however, it is by means of love that human beings can live harmoniously with each other, and nature without property, money, laws, or government – love will hold it all together.
These are several non-musical themes [artistically] transformed by Wagner in The Ring: the rejection of love and the pursuit of power as embodied in the possession of the ring (Alberich and Wotan); the violation of the natural order through imposed contractual law (Wotan’s spear). Possession of power and gold usurps love at every level of The Ring. This is true even for Siegfried and Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung, until the very end, when Brünnhilde, in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice [for love of Siegfried], rides horseback onto his funeral pyre with the ring, thereby cleansing it of its curse and destroying the old order of the gods.” (source)