Potrzebie
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
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This is a collage I did in the summer of 1967 for Paul Williams' Crawdaddy. At the end of 1966, Paul moved Crawdaddy from Cambridge to New York. He was living on Jane Street, one block away from me, and he had his office on Sixth Avenue in the same building as the Folklore Center. As I recall, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in June, just as Paul finished paste-ups for his July-August issue (#10). So with no time or space to review the album, he asked me to do a "visual review" overnight.
It must have been rushed because only two songs are referenced, and the images have nothing to do with the Beatles. Instead, we see stills from Bewitched and Fellini's 8 1/2, plus the muted post horn from The Crying of Lot 49. I can't recall why I drew the flying locomotive or that free association; it's probably clipped from something else I had drawn. Maybe the asterisk devices are supposed to be diamonds from "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". The central block of copy was added by Paul or someone after I turned in the art.
To read Paul's 1966-68 issues of Crawdaddy, go here.
For two separate pages in Crawdaddy #11, in an effort to tune in to the spirit of the magazine, I did this lettering, obviously influenced by Rick Griffin.
This is a collage I did in the summer of 1967 for Paul Williams' Crawdaddy. At the end of 1966, Paul moved Crawdaddy from Cambridge to New York. He was living on Jane Street, one block away from me, and he had his office on Sixth Avenue in the same building as the Folklore Center. As I recall, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in June, just as Paul finished paste-ups for his July-August issue (#10). So with no time or space to review the album, he asked me to do a "visual review" overnight.
It must have been rushed because only two songs are referenced, and the images have nothing to do with the Beatles. Instead, we see stills from Bewitched and Fellini's 8 1/2, plus the muted post horn from The Crying of Lot 49. I can't recall why I drew the flying locomotive or that free association; it's probably clipped from something else I had drawn. Maybe the asterisk devices are supposed to be diamonds from "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". The central block of copy was added by Paul or someone after I turned in the art.
To read Paul's 1966-68 issues of Crawdaddy, go here.
Labels: beatles, paul williams, pynchon
¶ 12:12 PM 0 comments
Friday, October 30, 2009
Bob Dylan Comics
November 16 is the publication date of the English language edition of Bob Dylan Revisited featuring visual interpretations of Dylan's lyrics by more than a dozen top international illustrators. Below are some preview pages. The clip is from a Canadian television series, Quest (February 1, 1964). François Avril's site (with the "Girl of the North Country" roughs) is here.
Bob Dylan Revisited contents:
"Blowin' in the Wind" interpreted by Thierry Muraty
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" interpreted by Lorenzo Mattotti
"I Want You" interpreted by Nicolas Nemiri
"Girl of the North Country" interpreted by François Avril
"Lay, Lady, Lay" interpreted by Jean-Claude Götting
"Positively 4th Street" interpreted by Christopher
"Tombstone Blues" interpreted by Bézian
"Desolation Row" interpreted by Dave McKean
"Like a Rolling Stone" interpreted by Alfred (drawings), Raphaëlle Le Rio, Maël Le Maé (scenario) and Henri Meunier (color)
"Hurricane" interpreted by Gradimir Smudja
"Blind Willie McTell" interpreted by Benjamin Flao
"Knockin' on Heaven's Door" interpreted by Jean-Philippe Bramanti
"Not Dark Yet" interpreted by Zep
I'm a-wonderin' if she remembers me at all.
Many times I've often prayed
In the darkness of my night,
In the brightness of my day.
So if you're travelin' in the north country fair,
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline,
Remember me to one who lives there.
She once was a true love of mine.
The Black Crowes in Moscow (1991)
Unfortunately, the creative highs seen above must conclude with a sad footnote on the downward spiral of Dylan music critic/biographer, PKD authority, Crawdaddy creator and past pal Paul Williams, who soared in print with illuminations like lightning over water. I remember the day he pointed out to me the "time differential" pun he viewed as the key sentence in The Crying of Lot 49: "She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT's must give access to dt's of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright."
November 16 is the publication date of the English language edition of Bob Dylan Revisited featuring visual interpretations of Dylan's lyrics by more than a dozen top international illustrators. Below are some preview pages. The clip is from a Canadian television series, Quest (February 1, 1964). François Avril's site (with the "Girl of the North Country" roughs) is here.
Bob Dylan Revisited contents:
"Blowin' in the Wind" interpreted by Thierry Muraty
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" interpreted by Lorenzo Mattotti
"I Want You" interpreted by Nicolas Nemiri
"Girl of the North Country" interpreted by François Avril
"Lay, Lady, Lay" interpreted by Jean-Claude Götting
"Positively 4th Street" interpreted by Christopher
"Tombstone Blues" interpreted by Bézian
"Desolation Row" interpreted by Dave McKean
"Like a Rolling Stone" interpreted by Alfred (drawings), Raphaëlle Le Rio, Maël Le Maé (scenario) and Henri Meunier (color)
"Hurricane" interpreted by Gradimir Smudja
"Blind Willie McTell" interpreted by Benjamin Flao
"Knockin' on Heaven's Door" interpreted by Jean-Philippe Bramanti
"Not Dark Yet" interpreted by Zep
"Blowin' in the Wind"
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"
"I Want You"
"Girl of the North Country"
I'm a-wonderin' if she remembers me at all.
Many times I've often prayed
In the darkness of my night,
In the brightness of my day.
So if you're travelin' in the north country fair,
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline,
Remember me to one who lives there.
She once was a true love of mine.
"Lay, Lady, Lay"
"Desolation Row"
"Like a Rolling Stone"
"Hurricane"
"Blind Willie McTell"
"Knockin' on Heaven's Door"
"Not Dark Yet"
Also see "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" by Flemish cartoonist Kim Duchateau:
The Black Crowes in Moscow (1991)
Unfortunately, the creative highs seen above must conclude with a sad footnote on the downward spiral of Dylan music critic/biographer, PKD authority, Crawdaddy creator and past pal Paul Williams, who soared in print with illuminations like lightning over water. I remember the day he pointed out to me the "time differential" pun he viewed as the key sentence in The Crying of Lot 49: "She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT's must give access to dt's of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright."
Labels: avril, bob dylan, crawdaddy, duchateau, mattotti, mckean, paul williams, pkd, zep
¶ 12:16 PM 1 comments
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Do Androids Dream of Philip K. Dick?
As we rode down Connecticut Avenue, my eyes went to the paragraph on page 30 where "their ship coasted along Connecticut Avenue." We turned from Connecticut Avenue onto Macomb Street, and I noted the spelling discrepancy in this sentence:
The cab stopped. I looked up. There was the tiny lawn. There was the black wrought-iron fence. We were parked in front of 3039 Macomb. I held in my hands nothing more than ink on paper, an author's fantasy, but through the taxi windows I could see the sun shining through the trees and the "five-story brick apartment building where Virgil had lived as a boy." Past the fence, just as described on page 31, I could see the children playing at the doorway. In Dick's novel, these children are "robants in the shape of small boys," so I watched them closely as we walked past them, entering the doorway of 3039 Macomb for the first time, knowing I had walked through a Synchronicity Portal into PKD's version of reality.
In Dick's The Man In The High Castle, Mr. Tagomi, referring to the I Ching, says, "We ask it questions as if it were alive. It is alive. As is the Christian Bible; many books are actually alive. Not in metaphoric fashion. Spirit animates it. Do you see?" I see. Had I read Now Wait For Last Year the previous year, or even a month earlier or later, the address in the book would have slipped by unnoticed. It could have sat inanimate on my bookshelf for decades, and what was buried on pages 30 and 31 would have remained unseen. Skim milk masquerades as cream.
It occurred to me later that the address might have been used in the novel because Virgil's past was, perhaps, Phil Dick's past, so I wrote to him, asking why he had chosen to fictionalize this real location. He responded, "I used that building and address because I had lived there in the Thirties as a kid. So you visited it... my god, that is eerie. Really freaks me. The ghost of a little boy who is now a middle-aged SF author must still be playing there."
I first told this story in 1982 in The Comics Journal, and two years later, Paul Williams reprinted it in the PKDS Newsletter (April 1984). Paul prefaced it with a facsimile reproduction of hand-printed sentences written by PKD at the age of seven or eight. Phil was seven years old when he and his mother moved to 3039 Macomb in 1935, and they stayed there until 1938. The paragraph confirmed the address, previously unknown to PKD readers:
A few footnotes: I made the screenshot of 3039 Macomb by stepping into the "mirror world" of EveryScape. "Mirror world" actually sounds like something PKD might have concocted 50 years ago, but now it actually exists. EveryScape just got $7 million in venture capital funding to compete with Google Street View. Oddly, using EveryScape to go around Washington seems very much like the Wash-35 of Now Wait for Last Year. How did PKD know the future so well?
In the novel excerpt above, PKD mentioned the Uptown Theater and the Peoples Drug Store (which has no apostrophe). Only months after PKD and his mother moved into the Macomb neighborhood, Warner Bros. opened the Uptown Theater in DC on October 29, 1936, just around the corner from Macomb at 3426 Connecticut Avenue NW. It's still there today, the last movie palace in Washington still playing first-run films. The Peoples Drug Store was right across the street from the theater. (The one in the above photo was three miles away at 7th Street NW and Massacusetts Avenue.)
Control click above for 1977 PKD interview on Mike Hodel's Hour 25.
I met Philip K. Dick in 1969, and some months later, chance events interleaved so that I seemingly became a character in PKD's fiction. Or was it the reverse? Is the power and magic of a Dick novel so talismanic that it led me directly down causality corridors into his own past?
During a visit to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1970, I had been reading the 1968 MacFadden-Bartell paperback edition of Now Wait For Last Year, Dick's tale of reconstructed pasts and time-travel via the JJ-180 drug. With me was Paula, and at my suggestion, she was also reading the book. She carried it with her as we traveled from museums to malls to restaurants, sometimes a planned route, sometimes drifting.
"What shall we do later today?" I asked.
"Well, I'm going to see my friend Margaret," said Paula, inviting me to join her. So later in the afternoon, we climbed into a cab. Unfamiliar with D.C. streets then, I had no notion of where we were headed -- only that I was to visit someone I'd never met at a house I'd never seen on a street where I'd never been. The taxi door closed, and I learned our destination for the first time when she said to the driver, "3039 Macomb Street."
But the address did sound familiar. Had I seen it before? Read it? I asked to see the novel in her purse and began idly flipping pages, dimly recalling that Dick might have used a similar address in his description of Wash-35, a “painstakingly elaborate reconstruction” of 1935 Washington, a "babyland'' where Virgil Ackerman entertains guests in a lifesize model of his own childhood world:
I met Philip K. Dick in 1969, and some months later, chance events interleaved so that I seemingly became a character in PKD's fiction. Or was it the reverse? Is the power and magic of a Dick novel so talismanic that it led me directly down causality corridors into his own past?
During a visit to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1970, I had been reading the 1968 MacFadden-Bartell paperback edition of Now Wait For Last Year, Dick's tale of reconstructed pasts and time-travel via the JJ-180 drug. With me was Paula, and at my suggestion, she was also reading the book. She carried it with her as we traveled from museums to malls to restaurants, sometimes a planned route, sometimes drifting.
"What shall we do later today?" I asked.
"Well, I'm going to see my friend Margaret," said Paula, inviting me to join her. So later in the afternoon, we climbed into a cab. Unfamiliar with D.C. streets then, I had no notion of where we were headed -- only that I was to visit someone I'd never met at a house I'd never seen on a street where I'd never been. The taxi door closed, and I learned our destination for the first time when she said to the driver, "3039 Macomb Street."
But the address did sound familiar. Had I seen it before? Read it? I asked to see the novel in her purse and began idly flipping pages, dimly recalling that Dick might have used a similar address in his description of Wash-35, a “painstakingly elaborate reconstruction” of 1935 Washington, a "babyland'' where Virgil Ackerman entertains guests in a lifesize model of his own childhood world:
Here was Gammage's, a shop at which Virgil had bought Tip Top comics and penny candy. Next to it Eric made out the People's Drugstore; the old man during his childhood had bought a cigarette lighter here once and chemicals for his Gilbert Number Five glassblowing and chemistry set. "What's the Uptown Theater showing this week?"
As we rode down Connecticut Avenue, my eyes went to the paragraph on page 30 where "their ship coasted along Connecticut Avenue." We turned from Connecticut Avenue onto Macomb Street, and I noted the spelling discrepancy in this sentence:
The ship taxied from Connecticut Avenue onto McComb Street and soon was parking before 3039 with its black wrought-iron fence and tiny lawn.
The cab stopped. I looked up. There was the tiny lawn. There was the black wrought-iron fence. We were parked in front of 3039 Macomb. I held in my hands nothing more than ink on paper, an author's fantasy, but through the taxi windows I could see the sun shining through the trees and the "five-story brick apartment building where Virgil had lived as a boy." Past the fence, just as described on page 31, I could see the children playing at the doorway. In Dick's novel, these children are "robants in the shape of small boys," so I watched them closely as we walked past them, entering the doorway of 3039 Macomb for the first time, knowing I had walked through a Synchronicity Portal into PKD's version of reality.
In Dick's The Man In The High Castle, Mr. Tagomi, referring to the I Ching, says, "We ask it questions as if it were alive. It is alive. As is the Christian Bible; many books are actually alive. Not in metaphoric fashion. Spirit animates it. Do you see?" I see. Had I read Now Wait For Last Year the previous year, or even a month earlier or later, the address in the book would have slipped by unnoticed. It could have sat inanimate on my bookshelf for decades, and what was buried on pages 30 and 31 would have remained unseen. Skim milk masquerades as cream.It occurred to me later that the address might have been used in the novel because Virgil's past was, perhaps, Phil Dick's past, so I wrote to him, asking why he had chosen to fictionalize this real location. He responded, "I used that building and address because I had lived there in the Thirties as a kid. So you visited it... my god, that is eerie. Really freaks me. The ghost of a little boy who is now a middle-aged SF author must still be playing there."
I first told this story in 1982 in The Comics Journal, and two years later, Paul Williams reprinted it in the PKDS Newsletter (April 1984). Paul prefaced it with a facsimile reproduction of hand-printed sentences written by PKD at the age of seven or eight. Phil was seven years old when he and his mother moved to 3039 Macomb in 1935, and they stayed there until 1938. The paragraph confirmed the address, previously unknown to PKD readers:
Once there was an ant. One day he went walking. Soon he came to a forest. It was an ant-mile long. Soon he came to a sidewalk. In the middle was a dead bumblebee. He pulled and he pulled. And he soon got it to a forest. He went on ahead leaving his bee on the ground. But he saw that it was hopeless. The grass was to thick. So he left his bee and went home. By Philip K. Dick. 3039 Macomb St. N.W. D.C. I killed the bumble bee.
A few footnotes: I made the screenshot of 3039 Macomb by stepping into the "mirror world" of EveryScape. "Mirror world" actually sounds like something PKD might have concocted 50 years ago, but now it actually exists. EveryScape just got $7 million in venture capital funding to compete with Google Street View. Oddly, using EveryScape to go around Washington seems very much like the Wash-35 of Now Wait for Last Year. How did PKD know the future so well?
In the novel excerpt above, PKD mentioned the Uptown Theater and the Peoples Drug Store (which has no apostrophe). Only months after PKD and his mother moved into the Macomb neighborhood, Warner Bros. opened the Uptown Theater in DC on October 29, 1936, just around the corner from Macomb at 3426 Connecticut Avenue NW. It's still there today, the last movie palace in Washington still playing first-run films. The Peoples Drug Store was right across the street from the theater. (The one in the above photo was three miles away at 7th Street NW and Massacusetts Avenue.)
Labels: android, bible, everyscape, i ching, macomb, memoir, paul williams, peoples drug store, philip k. dick, pkd, reality
¶ 1:45 AM 4 comments
