This is a crop of a photo of Lena Söderberg, the centerfold of the November 1972 issue of Playboy. In 1973, engineers at the USC Signal and Image Processing Institute used it as a test image in their research. The data they collected from the image, specifically the red, green, blue color channel data, have become the standard benchmark for image compression quality ever since. That research also built the foundation for the image compression algorithms used in JPG and MP3s. It adds, I think, a nice resonance to know that the quality of much of what we listen to and see online is tuned to this fetching image. (two great geeky observations and articles on Lena hereand here)
It’s the the title of a a sock-knocker of a record by Cinerama, the retro-pop offshoot of David Gedge’s Wedding Present. It’s the name of the hydrofoil in Thunderball. It’s the nickname of the 1952 Alfa-Romeo Spider.
These associations alone would be enough to secure its unimpeachable cool. What sends it into the stratosphere is its actual definition – Disco volante is the Italian phrase for flying saucer. Can you imagine a sexier transposition of something geeky? Disco volante puts go-go boots on the spacesuit. Disco volante turns Ann Francis into Jane Fonda –Disco volante is the shortest distance from the Forbidden Planet to Barbarella. Could there be a more fetching phrase for such a boss concept?
For your pleasure, here’s Cinerama’sBecause You’re Beautiful, from yes, Disco Volante:
William F. Buckley and John Kenneth Galbraith, skiing, together. The satisfactions of this photo are endless – a reminder of the notes that civilized life can strike. (image via Getty)
What is initially arresting about these works by Giovanni Boldini is their rococo opulence. It’s as your eye lingers, however, that they become truly riveting. Roiling between specificity and gesture, they seem to be continually resolving themselves. Details emerge, register, then dissolve – each drawing seems to come into focus as your eye roves over it, never quite developing the same way twice. Interesting cat, Boldini – friend of Sargent and Degas, he painted dazzling society portraits, fetching nudes, courtly vignettes, all rendered in a expressive, bold style. Despite some ridiculous confections, most of his work is a pleasure, decadent and masterful.
We bargain in good faith, those of us who will read anything, hoping at least to complicate ourselves, at most to save our souls… we put up with a lot and forgive even more… in return for vitality, spontaneity, and the occasional hot flash, we pretend not to notice what’s skin-deep, addlepated, nasty, brutish, and short.
– John Leonard, review of ” The Diviners” by Rick Moody
New York Times, February 9, 2006
During sightseeing cruises on the Sea of Rock, boats usually cut to half speed and glide by the melting tip of Al Stewart. Passengers look up for a moment as a soft melodic zephyr breezes by…in the year of the cat…
Below the waterline, though, looms a singular body of work. Imagine the following: one axis, stretching from tweedy personal narrative sketches to richly detailed historical episodes. The other axis encompassing the sonic spectrum from acoustic folk to richly layered progressive rock. Spatter the resulting quadrants with random points and you have a working map of Al Stewart territory.
The earliest records, like Bedsitter Images and Zero She Flies, close out the 60’s with restless explorations of bookish folk and psychedelia. Lush orchestrations and session work by Jimmy Page, Robert Fripp and Richard Thompson hint at the musical sophistication to come. In 1974 Stewart began a partnership with engineer and producer Alan Parsons (yes, of the Project), who established his reputation helping craft Abbey Road and Dark Side of The Moon. Parsons’ contribution was to deploy his arsenal of progressive production flourishes and session musicians in the service of uncharacteristically subtle songs. Together they recorded Modern Times, Stewart’s masterpiece, filled with character studies, historical narratives, pop sketches and, best of all, a harpsichord embellished precis of Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan.
AM radio, Clive Davis, and Japanese super-stardom followed. As those portents suggest, his fame immediately receded. He retreated to wine collecting, his bookshelf, and a boutique recording and touring schedule.
I saw him play a superb show recently at the Colonial Theatre in Pheonixville, Pennsylvania. He looks and dresses like a retired accountant and has the facial mannerisms of Monty Python’s Eric Idle. His stage banter was brainy and wickedly funny. He concluded a long introduction/digression with an aside about the English city of Dunwich, which was slowly consumed by the North Sea. It is said that you can still hear the bells of the church tolling below the waters. That vignette seems to me the essence of Al Stewart; the power of a painterly detail to emit the power of history – whether it be of youthful romantic manoeuvres in a Swiss cottage or the forgotten Swedish invasion of Russia.
A few selections follow. A small sampler can be downloaded here. Enjoy. And remember, the only things left on the beach when the apes take over will be the Statue of Liberty and acres of Year of the Cat LPs.
I came across this diagram recently while flipping through one of my old Junior Mechanics books. Thirty years later, what strikes me, besides the awesome Dr. Who-ness of the design, was the insane level of detail in the plans. As a kid I used to obsess over this illustration, and its specificity embedded in my little noggin not the notion of it’s construction but the inevitability of its use in my imminent exploration of outer space….
Around the same time, when I was little, 5 or six or whatever, I forget… my cousin explained to me in great detail how I could build a personal rocket ship from parts found in used car lots, hardware stores and workshops. The description left an in impression so vivid and specific – fuel mix, cockpit glass, etc – that I can still dredge up whole chunks of its imagined schematic. Still rattling around in my imagination is a faded loop I can replay at will…. zooming around in my rocketship, hugging the giant strips of no-mans land following the power lines behind our house. Dwelling on all this now, I think it might be one of the last signposts of my childhood – when yearning imagination could still be as tangible as reality itself.
In terms of aesthetics, the classic punk rock flyer is a monument to the xerographic process.The conversion of the disparate source imagery to stark black and white is the primary source of it’s graphic power; unifying a roughly glued assemblage of random snapshots, cuttings from Seventeen, Vogue and the Orange County Register, hand drawn op art patterns and skeletons with martini glasses. The ultra high contrast exposure ladles on gobs of glamour and style. Faces loose all their middle tones, primary features gain mass and shape and everyone ends up looking like a cross between a mugshot and a Patrick Nagel painting. The effect is further enhanced by the translation of the intermediate tones into a coarse black and white grain. This texture, an important consideration in photography, is freely granted by xeroxing. The best flyers are a fusion of the direct urgency of underground publishing, order vicodin online overnight razor sharp glamour, fine art photography, the charm of the homemade, all screaming in the blaring tones of a tabloid.
Further reading: The most aesthetically rewarding period (for both music and flyers) was around 78-81, when the the notion of punk was subject to wildly different musical and stylistic interpretations. Punk rock flyer archives abound. One of the best selections is here. Also it’s well worth checking out the work of Mark Vallen.Vallen was a LA scene fixture and flyer artist (he did the original Decline of Western Civilizationflyer and art for Slash magazine.) He currently works as a figurative painter and activist. His site features old flyers, albums, and fanzines, all accompanied by short thoughtful essays on punk design and scene culture. Forgive him, however, for the site design, which is comically awkward. It’s totally worth exploring fully… (flyers from Operation Phoenix Records)
Friends! Just a reminder that there is always time to stop and smell the roses, even when you find yourselves under the looming shadow of a F4-U Corsair.
Last August, Morrissey was a guest DJ on LA’sKCRW and closed his set with the greatest song he never wrote, “There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner” by Noel Coward. In honor of Morrissey’s upcoming new record and best cover art ever, here’s a short, unlikely tale of cabaret and espionage.
In performance the critic Kenneth Tynan described Noel Coward this way – “…he padded down the celebrated stairs… halted before the microphone on black-suede-clad feet, and, upraising both hands in a gesture of benediction, set about demonstrating how these things should be done. Baring his teeth as if unveiling some grotesque monument, and cooing like a baritone dove…. If it is possible to romp fastidiously, that is what Coward does.”
So hold in your mind this picture of Coward as a fastidiously romping baritone dove when you consider this next biographical detail. Coward, it turns out, was a British secret agent during World War II. His exploits are detailed in a fantastic essay in the New York Times Book Review. He was trained in Bletchley Park, the legendary secret spy training center where tweedy teams worked feverishly to crack the German Enigma code. He used his European cabaret tours and invitations to diplomatic functions to sift for intelligence. He was sent on a mission to Hollywood and paired with fellow spy Cary Grant. He took dinner with Roosevelt and his clearance came from Churchill himself. As he put it, “Celebrity was wonderful cover. My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot … a merry playboy.”
To ponder his biography is to imagine possibly the single greatest movie never made – a spy thriller, splashed with Technicolor and debonair wit, set in Europe and Hollywood amongst the glitter of high society, reaching to the highest levels of power, its suspense and heavy stakes lightened by swaths of swaggering cabaret.
As a bonus, here, for your delectation, is “There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner”
Given my general embargo against hip hop, I’m surprised at how fondly I remember the release of Paul’s Boutique. Pitchfork’s reappraisalof the record was a gobstopper of nostalgia… how it emanated its bong-y idiot glee all throughout the early nineties, to it’s dense referencing of the early 80’s (Robotron!) to it’s crash course in 70’s kitsch. Anything that 20 years later reminds me of how much Vaughn Bode’sCheech Wizard ruled my world back then is a force for good.
