H.P. Lovecraft’s Monster Drawings: Cthulhu & Other Creatures from the “Boundless and Hideous Unknown”

in Art, Literature | August 18th, 2015

If you’ve ever played Call of Cthulhu, the tabletop role-playing game based on the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, you’ve felt the frustration of having character after painstakingly-created character go insane or simply drop dead upon catching a glimpse of one of the many horrific beings infesting its world. But as the countless readers Lovecraft has posthumously accumulated over nearly eighty years know, that just signals faithfulness to the source material: Lovecraft’s characters tend to run into the same problem, living, as they do, in what French novelist Michel Houellebecq (one of his notable fans, a group that also includes Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jorge Luis Borges) calls “an open slice of howling fear.”

Read enough of Lovecraft’s middle-class east-coast professional narrators’ mortal struggles for the words to convey what he called “the boundless and hideous unknown” that suddenly confronts them, and you start to wonder what these creatures actually look like. The clearest word-picture comes in the 1928 story “The Call of Cthulhu,” whose narrator describes the titular ancient malevolence—avoiding instantaneous mental breakdown by looking at an idol rather than the being itself—as “a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.”

And so modern Lovecraftians have enjoyed a new variation of that giant octopus-dragon-man form on “Cthulhu for President” shirts each and every election year. (You can find one for 2016 here.) While that phenomenon would surely have surprised Lovecraft himself, constantly and fruitlessly as he struggled in life, I like to think he’d have approved of the designs, which align in fearsome spirit with the sketches he made. At the top of the post you can see one sketch of the Cthulhu idol, drawn in 1934 on a piece of correspondence with writer R.H. Barlow, Lovecraft’s friend and the eventual executor of his estate.

If “The Call of Cthulhu” ranks as Lovecraft’s best-known work, his 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness surely comes in a close second. Just above, we have an illustrated page of the writer’s plot notes for this unforgettable cautionary tale of an Antarctic expedition that happens disastrously upon the mind-bending ruins of a city previously thought only a myth – and the monsters that inhabit it. It exemplifies the defining quality of Lovecraft’s mythology, where, as Slate’s Rebecca Onion puts it, “ancient beings of profound malevolence lurk just below the surface of the everyday world.”

“Mountains featured several species of forgotten, intelligent beings, including the ‘Elder Things.’ The sketch on the right side of this page of notes (click here to view it in a larger format), with its annotations (‘body dark grey’; ‘all appendages not in use customarily folded down to body’; ‘leathery or rubbery’) represents Lovecraft working out the specifics of an Elder Thing’s anatomy.” That such things lurked in Lovecraft’s imagination have made his state of mind a subject of decades and decades of rich discussion among his enthusiasts. But just the body count racked up by Cthulhu, the Elder Things, and the other denizens of this unfathomable realm should make us thankful that Lovecraft saw them in his mind’s eye so we wouldn’t have to.

Note: The second image on this page was featured in the 2013 exhibition held at Brown University, “The Shadow Over College Street: H. P. Lovecraft in Providence.” The Brown University Library is the home to the largest collection of H. P. Lovecraft materials in the world.

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The First Scientific Map of the Moon (1679)

in Art, Astronomy, Maps, Science | August 14th, 2015

Millions watched as astronaut Neil Armstrong put boots to the moon in 1969.

It was, as he famously remarked, one “giant leap for mankind,” but from a scientific standpoint the territory was far from virgin.

Nearly 300 years earlier, engineer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, astronomer to Sun King Louis XIV, made lunar history in 1679, when he published the first scientific map of the moon, above.

Needless to say, the event was not televised and Cassini never had the opportunity to walk on the surface he studied. Instead he observed it through the eyepiece of a telescope, a relatively new invention.

His predecessors, including Galileo, used the then-revolutionary tool to delve deeper into their own lunar obsessions, making sketches and performing experiments designed to replicate the craters they noticed in the moon’s crust.

Cassini, then eight years into his forty year career as Director of the Paris Observatory, produced a map so exhaustive, it provided his peers with far more details of the moon’s surface than they had with regard to their own planet.

He also used his powers of observation to expand human understanding of Mars, Saturn, and France itself (which turned out to be much smaller than previously believed).

A man of science, he may not have been entirely immune to the sort of moon-based whimsy that has long infected poets, songwriters, and 19th-century romantic heroines. Hiding in the lower right quadrant, near Cape Heraclides on the Sinus Iridum (aka Bay of Rainbows), is a tiny, bare-shouldered moon maid. See right above.

Or perhaps this appealingly playful vision can be attributed to Cassini’s engraver Claude Mellan.

Either way, she seems exactly the sort of female life form a 17th-century human male might hope to encounter on a trip to the moon.

via Pickover Reality Carnival

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

One of World’s Oldest Books Printed in Multi-Color Now Opened & Digitized for the First Time

in Art, History | August 14th, 2015

Now free for the world to see on the Cambridge University Digital Library are some treasures from the library’s Chinese collections. Fire up that time machine called the Internet, and you can start perusing:

The oracle bones (pieces of ox shoulder blades and turtle shells used for divination in ancient China) which importantly bear the earliest surviving examples of Chinese writing. They’re over three thousand years old.
A digitization of one of the world’s earliest printed books (Mahapraj馻-paramita-sutra or Perfection of Wisdom), a Buddhist text dating between 1127 and 1175.
A 14th-century banknote. According to Cambridge, “Paper currency first appeared in China during the 7th century, and was in wide circulation by the 11th century, 500 years before its first use in Europe.”

But what’s been burning up the Internet during the past few days (largely thanks to Hyperallergic) is the digitization of the Manual of Calligraphy and Painting.

Made in 1633 in Nanjing, the Manual of Calligraphy and Painting is noteworthy partly because “It is the earliest and finest example of multi-colour printing anywhere in the world, comprising 138 paintings and sketches with associated texts by fifty different artists and calligraphers.” And partly because “The binding is so fragile, and the manual so delicate, that until it was digitized, we have never been able to let anyone look through it or study it – despite its undoubted importance to scholars,” says Charles Aylmer, Head of the Chinese Department at Cambridge University Library.

Begin your digital tour of the 388-page Manual here (or see a few samples above) and be among the first to lay eyes on it.

via Hyperallergic/Book Patrol/Cambridge University Library

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New Study: Immersing Yourself in Art, Music & Nature Might Reduce Inflammation & Increase Life Expectancy

in Art, Health, Life, Philosophy, Psychology | August 7th, 2015

Of all the philosophical concepts Immanuel Kant is known for, the one I’ve had to struggle the least to grasp is his description of the sublime, a state in which we are overawed by the scale of some great work of man or nature. It’s an experience, in typical Kantian fashion, that he explains as being not about the thing itself, but rather the idea of the thing. Yet the concept of the sublime isn’t his. Philosophers from the Greek teacher Longinus in the 1st century to Edmund Burke and other English Enlightenment thinkers in Kant’s own 18th century have had their take on it. For the classical writers, the sublime was rhetorical, for the Brits, it was empirical. But above all, the sublime is peak aesthetics—a supra-rational experience of art or nature one cannot get one’s head around. To be so fully absorbed, so stricken with awe, wonder, and, yes, even fear—all of these philosophers believed in some fashion—is to have an experience critical to transcending our limitations.

We may not, in either common speech or academic philosophy, talk much about the sublime these days, but whatever we call the feeling of being absorbed in art, music, or nature, it turns out to have physical benefits as well as mental and emotional. “There seems to be something about awe,” says professor of psychology Dacher Keltner. “It seems to have pronounced impact on markers related to inflammation.”

In other words, immersing yourself in art or nature is good for the joints, and it could possibly preempt various diseases triggered by inflammation. Keltner and his fellow researchers at UC Berkeley conducted a study which found that “awe, wonder and beauty promote [lower and overall] healthier levels of cytokines”—proteins that “signal the immune system to work harder.” He goes on to say that “the things we do to experience these emotions—a walk in nature, losing oneself in music, beholding art—has [sic] a direct influence upon health and life expectancy.”

Never mind that Kant and Burke thought of the sublime and the beautiful as two very different things. Whether we become totally overwhelmed by, or just find deep appreciation in an aesthetic experience, the emotions produced “might be just as salubrious as hitting the gym,” writes Hyperallergic. That may seem a crude way of thinking about the spiritual and emotional grandeur of the sublime, but it brings our physical being into the discussion in ways many philosophers have neglected. Granted, the researchers themselves admit the causal link is uncertain: it might be better health that leads to more experiences of awe, and not the other way around. But certainly no harm—and a great deal of good—can come from conducting the experiment on yourself. Read an abstract (or purchase a copy) of the Berkeley team’s article here, and learn more about their work with the University’s Greater Good Science Center, which aims to “sponsor groundbreaking scientific research into social and emotional well-being.”

via Hyperallergic

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Read Pablo Picasso’s Poetry: Modernist Meditations on Making Art, World War, Dogs & More

in Art, Poetry | August 6th, 2015

What makes Pablo Picasso such a representative 20th-century artist? Most of it has to do with his particular achievements, such as the visual ground he broke with his Cubist painting, sure, but some of it also has to do with the fact that his interests extended so far beyond painting. We think of creators who could create across various domains as “Renaissance men,” but conditions a few centuries on from the Renaissance enabled such artists to exert their will across an even wider range of forms. Picasso, for instance, worked in not just painting but sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, and letters.

That last even includes poetry, to which Picasso announced his commitment in 1935, at the age of 53. At that point, writes Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher, “he began writing poems almost every day until the summer of 1959,” beginning “by daubing colors for words in a notebook before moving on to using words to sketch images,” ultimately producing hundreds of poems composed primarily of “stream of consciousness, unpunctuated word association with startling juxtaposition of images and at times an obsession with sex, death and excrement.”

If this sounds like your cup of tea, you can find plenty of Picasso poetry over at Ubuweb, which offers A Picasso Sampler: Excerpts from the Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems free for the viewing. “Picasso, like any poet of consequence, is a man fully into his time and into the terrors that his time presents,” writes the collection’s editor Jerome Rothenberg. His words reflect “the state of things between the two world wars — the first one still fresh in mind and the rumblings of the second starting up,” a time and place “where poetry becomes — for him as for us — the only language that makes sense.”

Before diving into that collection, you can also get a sense of Picasso’s poetry by having a look at some of his shorter poems collected at the site of artist Jef Borgeau, such as “the artist & his model”:

turn your back
but stay in view at the same time
(now look away,
anything else confuses)

stand still without saying a word

you can’t see but this is how
i separate day from night

and the starless sky

from the empty heart

“dogs”:

dogs eat at the night
buried in the yard
they chase the moon in a pack
the white of their teeth
compared to stars

the windows close against them
iron bars in transparency

life closes against them

the morning will crush them to dust
with only the wind left
to stir them up

And “the morning of the world”:

i have a face cut from ice
a heart pierced in a thousand places
so to remember
always the same voice
the same gestures
and my laughter
heavy
as a wall
between you and me

the ones who are most alive
seem the most still

behind the milky way
a shadow dances

our gaze climbs toward the stars

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Women of the Avant-Garde: An Introduction Featuring Audio by Gertrude Stein, Kathy Acker, Patti Smith & More

in Art, Music, Poetry | August 5th, 2015

The story of the avant-garde is never just one story. But it tends to get told that way, and we tend to think we know how modernist and post-modern literature and music have taken shape: through a series of great men who thwarted convention and remade language and sound in ways their predecessors never dreamed. Arthur Rimbaud, Claude Debussy, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage… We could make many such lists, and we do, all the time, occasionally including the names of a few women—Yoko Ono, for example, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf….

But we might write it differently, indeed, for the simple reason that women have shaped the avant-garde just as much as men have, as prominent poets and composers, not simply spouses of famous men or guest stars in a mostly male revue. You can hear one version of such a story here, thanks to Ubuweb, “the learned and varietous online repository” of “all things avant-garde.” Their podcast Avant-Garde All the Time offers us two episodes called “The Women of the Avant-Garde,” hosted by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who admits the survey is a corrective for the podcast’s own blind spots. Through a small but select number of poets and musicians, Goldsmith aims “to show that there are dozens and dozens of great women artists on Ubuweb”—and everywhere else art lives.

Instead of a history, Goldsmith gives us something of a constellation of artists, many of them clustered tightly together in time and space. New York poets, writers, and musicians who came of age in the 70s and 80s—Kathy Acker, Lydia Lunch, Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Eileen Myles—all feature in Goldsmith’s account. Theirs was a time and place the poet Myles has described as “a moment” that was “very uncensored and really excited and it just made you feel like there was room for more.”

It’s a moment that saw a revival in the 90s, when riot grrrl arose to challenge the patriarchal establishment. Around this time, artists working in a more academic context directly and indirectly engaged with literary history ancient and modern. Scholar and poet Anne Carson has twisted and translated the texts of Ovid, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and the writers (and translators) of the King James Bible. And German-Norwegian-French experimental poet Caroline Bergvall, whom Goldsmith discusses in episode one above, rewrote Chaucer and rearranged Dante.

In episode two, Goldsmith reaches somewhat further back—to Yoko Ono and Denise Levertov—and farther away from New York, with work from Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad. Prominently featured in this second part of the series, and for good reason, is fierce patroness of early twentieth century avant-garde art and writing, Gertrude Stein. Stein’s own poetry radically disrupted the accepted, and acceptable, codes of speech and writing—setting a precedent for several decades of feminist writers and artists whose appearance in archives like Ubuweb, Goldsmith notes, increasingly come to match or outweigh those of their male counterparts. Hear Stein read from her own work at another such archive, PennSound, and visit the Poetry Foundation to stream and download more episodes of Ubuweb’s Avant-Garde all the Time, including an episode devoted to Stein called “Almost Completely Understanding.”

Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice

Yoko Ono Lets Audience Cut Up Her Clothes in Conceptual Art Performance (Carnegie Hall, 1965)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Ralph Steadman’s Evolving Album Cover Designs: From Miles Davis & The Who, to Frank Zappa & Slash (1956–2010)

in Art, Design, Jazz, Music | August 4th, 2015

Ralph Steadman will always best be known—and for good reason—as the visual interpreter of Hunter S. Thompson’s druggy gonzo vision of American excess and hubris. As Colin Marshall wrote in a previous post on Steadman and Thompson’s powerful collaborative relationship, it’s hard to imagine a more “suitable visual accompaniment to the simultaneously clear- and wild-eyed sensibility of Thompsonian prose.” But the British artist has had a long and distinguished career, pre- and post-Thompson: illustrating Lewis Carroll’s surrealist classic Alice in Wonderland; creating limited edition DVD covers for the dark cult hit TV show Breaking Bad; making bullet-riddled collage art with counterculture hero William S. Burroughs…. To name just a few of his offbeat assignments over the years.

Today we bring you a lesser-known facet of Steadman’s work: designing album covers. As artist and illustrator John Coulthart notes in a post on Steadman’s album designs, he’s been at it since the mid-fifties, when—for example—he illustrated a release of Conception (top), “an underappreciated masterpiece of cerebral cool jazz” featuring the likes of Miles Davis, Stan Getz, and Sonny Rollins. Steadman’s abstract expressionist-inspired jazz covers soon gave way to more Steadmanesque, though still relatively tame, covers like that above for The Who’s single “Happy Jack”/“I’ve Been Away” from 1966.

It’s not until the 70s, however—after he’d begun his collaboration with Thompson—that his album covers begin to take on the decidedly crazed look his work is known for, such as in the cover for Paul Brett’s Phoenix Future, above, from 1975.

By 1997, Steadman seems to have perfected his inimitable riot of grotesque imagery, wild color palette, and unhinged black lines and lettering, as in the cover for Closed On Account Of Rabies: Poems And Tales Of Edgar Allan Poe, a compilation of Poe readings by stars like Christopher Walken, Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull, Jeff Buckley, and Abel Ferrara, which we’ve featured on OC before. The artists represented here are—as in his work with Thompson and Burroughs—perfectly fitting for Steadman’s sensibility. So, of course, is the clean-living but otherwise totally bonkers Frank Zappa, whose 1997 Have I Offended Someone? received the Steadman treatment, as you can see below.

In the past few years, Steadman has mellowed a bit, if you could call it that, and his work has taken on a slightly more refined character. His Breaking Bad illustrations seem restrained by the standards of his work with Thompson or Zappa. And in a 2010 cover for Slash’s first official single, “By the Sword,” below, he reigns in some of his wilder graphic impulses while retaining all of the stylist signatures he developed over the decades.

Steadman has always been a one-of-a-kind illustrator. In his album cover design, we can perhaps best watch his work evolve. As Coulthart writes, “the style of the early sleeves is markedly different to the angry, splattery creations that made his name, and without a signature you’d be unlikely to recognise the artist.” See many more Steadman album covers over at Coulthart’s excellent blog.

via Feuilleton

See Ralph Steadman’s Twisted Illustrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on the Story’s 150th Anniversary

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Releases New Animated Video Inspired by Gustave Doré & Milton’s Paradise Lost

in Animation, Art, Literature, Music | August 3rd, 2015

Next month, David Gilmour will release his first solo album since 2006 and launch his first tour since ’08. But right now, in the dead of August, you can watch a new animated video for his upcoming track, “Rattle That Lock.”

Created under the leadership of Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis (the design group that produced the iconic artwork for Dark Side of the Moon and other Pink Floyd LPs), the animation pays homage to Gustave Doré, whose illustrations of Dante, Poe and Cervantes we’ve featured here before. And the lyrics themselves, they draw inspiration from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, reports Rolling Stone. Gilmour, Doré, Milton — surely a trifecta for many OC readers.

Gustave Doré’s Splendid Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

Gustave Doré’s Exquisite Engravings of Cervantes’ Don Quixote

William Blake’s Hallucinatory Illustrations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

H.P. Lovecraft’s Monster Drawings: Cthulhu & Other Creatures from the “Boundless and Hideous Unknown”

The First Scientific Map of the Moon (1679)

One of World’s Oldest Books Printed in Multi-Color Now Opened & Digitized for the First Time

New Study: Immersing Yourself in Art, Music & Nature Might Reduce Inflammation & Increase Life Expectancy

Read Pablo Picasso’s Poetry: Modernist Meditations on Making Art, World War, Dogs & More

The Women of the Avant-Garde: An Introduction Featuring Audio by Gertrude Stein, Kathy Acker, Patti Smith & More

Ralph Steadman’s Evolving Album Cover Designs: From Miles Davis & The Who, to Frank Zappa & Slash (1956–2010)

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Releases New Animated Video Inspired by Gustave Doré & Milton’s Paradise Lost

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