February 2009 Archives

 Vampyros Lesbos is considered Spanish cult director Jess Franco's "masterpiece of erotic cinema" and has been described as a "psycho-sexual horror freak out". I've seen more than several of his films and this is certainly the best, though some were pretty bad. Regardless, Vampyros Lesbos has cemented itself into the cannon of art-schlock cinema and deserves a status of cult cinematique. And certainly, Soledad Miranda, the actress portraying leading lady vampire Countess Nadine Carody, deserves her honour as a legendary cult siren.  

For a long time most only encountered the relatively tame Spanish version first released in 1974. Its masterpiece freak-out fame isn't truly appreciated till encountering the more recent dvd released 'Franko Manera' German language version from 1971. Yes, it's naughtier, with all the nude lesbian bloodsucking action lovingly restored. And all while speaking German. And we all know what German does to nudie lezbo vampire films. It makes them even more weird.

Vampyros Lesbos is set in a Turkey of 1970. That's a cool, smooth, dressy Turkey that knew how to wear scarves and tight suits and over-sized sunglasses while lounging on hotel terraces as speedboats shoot past Turkish minarets. This is a very groovy Turkey of naughty cabaret and free love in designer dresses that fall off real easy like. And with all this titillating grooviness you don't have to be brilliant with the camera or with the acting or anything creative like that. Everything you need to know is paraded out front so there's no need to concentrate on anything but that.

  But the grooviest thing wasn't the scenery or the stylishly clothed or unclothed people in the scenery. The grooviest thing isn't that this forgotten but rediscovered classic has obviously inspired a few film-makers and novelists (there's one scene Interview with the Vampire parallels and most of The Hunger can be first seen here first. And this is not to mention much of the porn industry of the seventies). It isn't the repetitive zooms of significance or cutaways to insects or dripping blood. It isn't the side-burns or macho moustaches or the turtle neck sweaters. It isn't that real blondes and brunettes are real blondes and brunettes. It isn't that these naturally exotic women have dimply bottoms or breasts no contemporary Hollywood casting agent would polaroid for a bit role in Bedroom Eyes Part Six.

No, the grooviest thing in Vampyros Lesbos is the music. Yes, the music is glorious psychedelic lounge. It's like those wicked theme tracks from cool British TV shows from the '60s but gone to drug induced sleaze. The idiosyncrasy of bachelorette pad anthems under the influence of sampling and nitric oxide. This soundtrack is worth getting, even if just to pull out and play to unsuspecting friends as you shout out, "Man, isn't that just groovy keen?" And when you get a quiet moment between tracks, just say to yourself, as if no one else is in the room, "Those naughty vampire gals. They sure in need of a spankin'."

The pop art scene is at an all time high. Perhaps not in the world of city centre art galleries, but within the realm that divides the academic and the commercial it is rocketing along. Cool exhibitions and groovy art books are the standard. So too are the prints and vinyl toys. It's a happening thing. Something I'm greatly appreciating.

Two artists finding good niches, if not prominence in this current rich arena are Tara McPherson and Mark Ryden. Their work is rather different from each other's but they seem to easily sit together. They comfortably share the same room of pop-surrealism. Granted, they sit at different ends of the room, but all the same they share the space.

McPherson works more in the style of poster art and print making, using strong contrasts in colours, keeping her compositions clutter free, her lines simple, eloquent, being very aware of her two dimensional surface to play on her three-dimensional shapes. Tara McPherson was born in '76 and grew up in Los Angeles and other parts of California. Her skills developed out of the world of animation, comics and poster gigs. Exhibitions and commissioned work for publication was then a not-so-simple hop, skip and jump.

Ryden follows the path of traditional painting and the techniques of fine art. He has a craftsman's discipline but dances all along the line of painting history from Heronimous Bosh to Diego Rivera. Mark Ryden was born in '63 in Oregon, studied in Pasadena and lives in California. His influence is classical symbolic art and pop ephemera and the cultures that surrounded such art, from secret societies teen idols, from old toys to Freud. The language of dreams seems to have a lot to do with his texts and subtexts. Ryden's career has been pretty much as an exhibition artist but his works naturally pops up everywhere. You can't have a book or magazine article about pop surrealism without a reference to Ryden.

The notable contrast between McPherson and Ryden, besides the obvious one of styles, is their manner of humour. Both are humourous artists, both are playing on the idea of art as self-important forms of philosophy. But Ryden employs a dark irony. He has cute animals and sweet little doll-like children, but in the context of the worlds they inhabit, they look creepy, disturbing, and even violent in some hidden ritual kind of way. Ryden plays on a paranoia that under the surface is the sinister, but he also shows that underneath can be the transcendent, albeit through some ritualised symbolic status. Regardless, the works become mesmerising for all of it. You are compelled to seek for secret messages.

Tara McPherson puts her heart on her sleeve. Though that heart can more often look like a hole through the chest.  Like Ryden she plays with dream, but hers are waking dreams, fantasy dreams that touch on many aspects of the emotional life, especially of the female spirit. She touches on sad themes and angry themes, hopes and fears, but there's no alternate meaning, she keeps it up front. To me most of her work is about searching, learning, finding truth where all is illogical. All with a charming veneer of honesty and cuteness, but not Ryden's creepy kind.

I really like both their pre-rendering drafting techniques and their pencil studies and preliminaries. I fully understand why those works are cherished like their finished paintings. I also like how they both explore outside the two-dimensional medium and have done sculptures and vinyl toys. Their art worlds are wanting to be more intertexual and interactive.

Tara McPherson's work has found a bit more of a commercial home over Ryden's, appearing in Vertigo comics and magazine illustrations. Still her exhibitions are very successful and she's about to come out with a second book Lost Constellations, after the first, Lonely Heart, hit the mark. Her art is also very much at home adorning journals and diaries. But I find her Somewhere Under the Rainbow Coloring Kit exceptionally cool. I love the whole packaging from colouring book with crayons and a clear plastic schoolbag nicely decorated.

Ryden's work has gone more in the direction of prints and very exclusive art books. Too exclusive in my mind. Still, we have his Bunnies and Bees Micro Portfolio #3 of fourteen prints. And his art books Fushigi Circus and The Tree Show. Otherwise his work will always make appearances in new pop modern art anthologies like The Upset: Young Contemporary Art and the annual Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art.

Back in the mid-eighties William Gibson inadvertently began the cyberpunk lit movement with a handful of short stories and his first novel Neuromancer. Though exciting at the time - I was a full on cyberpunk enthusiast - one can debate the final value of this post-modern SF movement outside of Gibson's own work.

Regardless, Gibson and the movement fed into a part of postmodern fiction that is a significant aspect of contemporary literature. Today's key players include Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow, and spill over into the writings of people like Elizabeth Hand, David Mitchell and Jonathan Lethem. But throughout this William Gibson has remained a leading post-modern, post-millennial light.

This guru status was at its premium at the turn of the century. Not surprising that a documentary about Gibson was made at that time. No Maps for these Territories did a successful turn around the extended festival circuits and took its time for release on dvd. Even though the content is close to a decade old it still holds up as a study of Gibson, at least pre-2001 Gibson.

The premise is that Gibson sits in the back of a limousine decked out to the full audio/visual and travels around the US (from his current home in Canada) espousing about anything asked by the driver who is treated as some ethereal/net presence. There are stops for readings, not that the car stops. At one point Bono is reading the opening passages of Neuromancer on a large wall screen on the side of a building. Gibson can see it from out his passenger window and hear it inside the car. Gibson responds to the reading, but then Bono asks him a question, which suggests that this was a live interaction. Just as cute is when passing a diner and inside is felow guru Bruce Sterling to give a mini-interview.

Lots of pretty visuals, cute tricks and some arresting music, but it's all there to make this feel less like a feature length interview. But I'm not really complaining, as the interview was more than enough to justify this film. It's a good thorough exploration of Gibson as person, thinker and writer, allowing him to express, in his enigmatic Gibson style, about all the things Gibson followers want to hear, from why he writes, where does he get his ideas, the future, the now, media, culture, the persona of William Gibson.

But I stress that this is William Gibson and Gibson's world just before September 11. When the planes hit the towers a lot of gurus dropped in status having lost their bearings when the world so dramatically shifted. But Gibson was true to his philosophy that there are no maps for these territories. Since that time and that documentary Gibson has come out with two novels, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Both are set facsimiles of our contemporary type world very aware of 9/11 and very sensitive to it. The former novel is set soon after these events and reflects on them as we follow a logo zeitgeist specialist making her way through the media maze to find the underground filmmakers who may have the key to a new level of viral marketing. The novel considers the need to find meaning, or patterns, in what seems like cultural white noise.

Spook Country is about looking past the patterns and seeing what is hidden underneath the seemingly random noise of the media and politics. In a fashion lighter of heart than all his previous works, Gibson addresses our want for meaning, for value in the patterns. Spook Country takes the structure of an espionage novel and focuses on the action within this world rather than just the mere observation. With a hint of tongue in cheek he puts forward his view that all the understanding of our new media rich millennium means little if you don't act upon it.

Perhaps that is why that though I've enjoyed all eight of Gibson's novels, Neuromancer my favourite, Pattern Recognition my second, there was something more satisfying about Spook Country because Gibson has his characters not just be witnesses and survivors of out new world but be players and in some small way be part of what determines how we move on in this new age. He makes the reader feel they are participating in this change, even if it's just by reading this book.

When Eyes Without a Face was first released in 1959 this French film received very mixed responses from European critics, from exultant praise to utter disgust. Recut in 1962 for US release it was retitled The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus and double-billed with Manster (which I've also seen but wont talk about here). Audiences on the whole did not know quite what to make of it, but a mildly vocal following kept it alive over the years. Since then it has been restored and rediscovered as the film the makers always intended. But the discussion still continues on whether it is a horror movie or an art film.

The story goes that a brilliant and highly respected surgeon is kidnapping young women and removing their faces seeking to repair his own beloved daughter's disfigurement. Until her face is restored she must wear an expressionless mask with no discerning features except for her beautiful eyes staring out from the alabaster. Hence the original French title, LesYeux sans visage, which even sounds better in French.

And it sounds like an opportunity for a bit of gore, but little of such is actually shown. The skill of director Georges Franju for suggestion creates images in the mind so visceral you almost remember seeing gruesome horrors never made visual. Also, the film is so seductive, so sensual and delicately smooth you are virtually hypnotised as you peer within the darkness of the doctor's mansion and his within own tormented mind.

Perhaps stylistically inspired by Jean Cocteau's poetic cinema the film knows how to linger and even touch on moments of expressionism, such as when the doctor's innocent daughter, wearing that ethereal mask, wanders through the mansion like a doll-like ghost. But this works all the more for the stark realism that also surrounds the admittedly outlandish premise. Hauntingly beautiful, disturbingly cruel, this perfect balance of dreamery and verisimilitude makes this film unique and worthy of the title of Cult Classic.

Astroboy was created by manga legend Osamu Tezuka in 1951 - when World War II was still fresh in memory - as Tetsuwan Atomu or Mighty Atom. Twelve years, and thousands of manga later, Astro became the star of the Japan's first commercial animated television show. Yes, Astroboy is the birth of anime.

The little metal blighter has been around fifty-eight years. Of course, you couldn't tell by looking at him. With a fresh coat of paint he still looks like a mechanical boy of twelve. And in that time he's been in print or on TV somewhere in his, at least, three animated incarnations and even a live TV show made in 1959 a couple of years before the first anime. The live action has the obvious limitations but it still captures enough of that Astro charm.

Adventuring across several generations Astroboy has remained popular. More than popular. He's a multicultural, multigenerational icon of ephemera. Quite regularly I see people wearing an Astroboy t-shirt of some funky design. Who knows how many of these wearers have ever seen the show. It doesn't matter. He's Astroboy. He is because he is.

So what is it now that Astro represents that makes so many use him as an identifier? I think it's because he's the happy zooming rocket boy of a glorious happy future that was a past dream. He is the embodiment of the dream of the flying car and technological luxury for all. He the promise of a fun filled future that would be exciting and entrancing.

But he also, by being a naive little boy who is more than capable of defending himself, represents that attitude that we know better about the realities of the world today but we still have the willing ability to dream. We didn't get our future of flying cars, but we were no more robbed than those who dreamt of wondrous future things in the first place.

Astro is a sympathetic bridge between past, present and future. Today we are the reality biting truth of those long ago dreams that bore little fruit. All the same, we must be grateful that they did try to dream. Astroboy is the good will ambassador to our millennial disappointment. And in this time of war and technological horror - and the religious callousness that controls it, on both sides - the need for sweet and well-meaning symbols like Astroboy is more important than ever.

Of course, a smiling, waving Astro can also just look très cute on a t-shirt.

Viva la Astroboy!

Viva la Astroboy t-shirts!