Cor Klaasen
Cor Klaasen
Record sleeves for the Mercier Catholic Record Club, designed by Cor Klaasen
Cor Klaasen was a Dutch designer who worked in Irish advertising throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s, but is best remembered for the covers he designed for numerous Irish books and records, including school books for Fallons and sleeves for the Mercier Catholic Record Collection, the original incarnation (pardon the pun) of Mercier Press. A brief exhibition of his work, held as part of Dublin Design Week, is on show in Adifferentkettleoffishaltogether, a small gallery on Ormond Quay, until next Wednesday 10th November. It’s worth a visit, both to appreciate Klaasen’s clean, clever design and to get a feel of some of vibrancy that existed in Irish art and design between the 50s and the 70s.
As exhibition co-ordinator, Niall McCormack (who also maintains the excellent site about vintage Irish book covers, www.hitone.ie) said at a talk he gave as part of OFFSHOOT last night, we assume that 50s Ireland was all ‘Angela’s Ashes and people whipping each other’, but while Ireland was nowhere near as advanced as other European countries in art and design, there was still a number of talented, enthusiastic people who did their best to shake up the stifling social conservatism that dominated in all cultural fields for so long.
I thought McCormack was perhaps a little too dismissive about the Catholic Church’s cultural influence in this period during his talk, because the Klaasen exhibition shows that though it was largely responsible for the lack of innovative cultural activity in the country at the time, there was a surprisingly strong forward-thinking element within the Church at the time too, who provided Klaasen with a substantial portion of his employment. Some of the record sleeves he designed for Mercier are astonishingly radical, like one where the almost cartoonishly dull title ‘Building a new moral theology’ read by Rev. Albert Johnson, belies the surreal black-lined Christ-head, complete with long red spikes extending from his stylised crown of thorns. It certainly wasn’t John Charles McQuaid and his ilk who were OK-ing this and other striking cover designs.
Klaasen worked in a simple, classic style, occasionally branching out into 60s-style cartoon but overall you get the feeling he preferred the clean lines of the De Stijl style he would have grown up with in Amsterdam. One highlight is a cover for a religious book entitled ‘The Methods of Dogmatic Theology’ by Walter Kaspar, which is a plain black background broken by a simple white circle enclosing the text of the title. Smaller white bubbles extend from the large circle, but not so much so as to break the tranquil cleanness of the design. His more detailed images are successful too, particularly the abstract covers of the various schoolbooks he designed for Fallons, many of which were carved out directly on his printing surface without the aid of a pencil drawing.
He could turn his hand to political material too, evidenced by his cover for a book on the UVF, published in 1973 by Torc Press, in which a row of grotesque-looking paramilitaries, printed in lines so thick as to be almost unintelligible, line the bottom of a plain red cover, with the word UVF rendered in jarring black-lined orange above. He incorporates the symbolic orange of the Unionist paramilitaries against what would normally be a clashing red tone, perhaps to imply the blood that was on the hands of the people suggested by the images below. The grimaces of the terrorists evoke the grotesque leers of George Grosz’s villains, an artist that Klaasen admired and often imitated.
It’s easy in the 21st century to dismiss mid-20th century Ireland as a place of unmitigated drear and uncreativity, so it’s a good thing for exhibitions like this to display the often-forgotten figures who played a role in bucking that trend. I would recommend catching this exhibition before it finishes, it can be viewed in the gallery from 11am-5pm daily between now and next Wednesday.
More Posts from Slenderfire-blog and Others
16 year old Pauline Blackburn is queuing for tickets to see The Beatles at The Majestic Ballroom in Birkenhead, England | 17 April 1963
It actually happened.
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melody maker letters as the burn book from mean girls
So you think 'Imagine' ain't political? It's 'Working Class Hero' with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself!! You obviously didn't dig the words. Imagine! You took 'How Do You Sleep' so literally (read my own review of the album in Crawdaddy.) Your politics are very similar to Mary Whitehouse's -- 'Saying nothing is as loud as saying something.' Listen, my obsessive old pal, it was George's press conference -- not 'dat ole debbil Klein' -- He said what you said: 'I'd love to come but...' Anyway, we basically did it for the same reasons -- the Beatle bit -- they still called it a Beatle show, with just two of them! Join the Rock Liberation Front before it gets you. Wanna put your photo on the label like uncool John and Yoko, do ya? (Aint ya got no shame!) If we're not cool, WHAT DOES THAT MAKE YOU? No hard feelings to you either. I know basically we want the same, and as I said on the phone and in this letter, whenever you want to meet, all you have to do is call.
John Lennon's letter responding to Paul, published in its entirety in Melody Maker
literally the ramblings of an insane person I am GAGGED
John not into chicks in this January 1966 issue of Fabulous magazine.
Naturally I googled the photoshoot...
The face and sleeves of a man who does not want to be doing this at all 😄❤️🐥🐥
currently 70 pages into Derek Taylor's book and I'm absolutely charmed, did everyone else know how funny he was and just not tell me!!?
New fic: Under his carpet
Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990. Chapter 1 of 5 posted.
Plinda fans/Paul superfans dni (JOKING! No sugarcoating, but not a hatchet job on either. Most of it is based on fact, but plenty is invented - speculative fiction an' all that.)
While not shying away from the darker sides of the marriage, this story is primarily intended as a character study about flawed individuals, none of whom are villains. It also explores the tension between visually appearing liberated, as many Boomer women did, and the reality of their domestic lives. A tension which is still relevant today.
Review of an early Hilary Mantel
Goodreads review of 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street', an early novel by Hilary Mantel:
A terrific sense of menace pervades this story from the beginning, as cartographer Frances struggles to navigate her new home in Jeddah, where her husband has landed a lucrative construction job.
It's the mid-1980s, and Saudi Arabia is riding high on the back of oil wealth, marble and glass towers rising out of empty lots, a modern-looking yet feudal economy carried on the backs of exploited immigrant workers. Cloistered in a luxurious apartment, Frances is frustrated by her Muslim women neighbour's refusal to accept Frances' assertions that life is better for women in the West. It's cautionary tale in how a superior attitude will only drive others further into their own convictions.
Frances recognises her essential prejudice against Saudis and Muslims in general, but the crushing imprisonment and police state-like surveillance of the society she's living in break what little will she has to separate her legitimate protests from bigotry. The novel presents expat life satirically, showing the other English people living in Saudi as essentially venal and bigoted, staying the country just long enough to save up for a 'city flat' in London. Expat life hasn't changed much in 30 years, it seems. Corrupt, arrogrant Saudi politicians and minor royals are equally skewered. The novel's main flaw is the lack of resolution in the central mystery, a story that is built up, clue by clue, through the whole story. Perhaps the details are unimportant and that aspect of the plot merely functions to illustrate Frances' growing paranoia, but what little details that emerged were interesting enough to warrant further explanation. The powerful sense of dread ended up feeling anticlimactic. Also, Frances herself was somewhat thinly drawn, considering she was the central character - her neighbours and the other expats came much more vividly to life. Some experiments in structure didn't really work for me either.
Overall, worth reading, if only as a warning against falling into the trap of becoming the eternal expat, staying in the hated host country for “just another year”....
Dark times in the city
Below is a review of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, showing in the IFI in Dublin till Thursday. This review has also been published in Politico magazine.
For decades the only version available of Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterpiece ‘Metropolis’ was a cadavre exquis made up of what footage survived after American distributors cut nearly an hour from the original edit and the lost scenes were left to rot in various warehouses. Bits of film have been rediscovered over the years, leading to various ‘definitive’ versions, including the 1986 cut accompanied by Giorgio Moroder’s infamous synth-heavy soundtrack, but it’s only this year that the fullest, most logical version of the film can be seen. This was faciliated by the discovery in 2008 of over 30 minutes of original footage in an archive in Buenos Aires, and it is the existing footage plus these additions that is on view in the IFI until Thursday 23 September.
‘Metropolis’, set in a dystopian future where countless workers toil underground to facilitate the luxurious lifestyles of the inhabitants of the eponymous city, is a truly unique film, combining high art with blockbuster melodrama with complete unselfconsciousness. Its technical and imaginative achievements remain unparalleled – the prototype for all TV robots, the ‘mad scientist’ and his lab and the dystopian city of the future are found in this extraordinary feat of technical and creative imagination. The plot apparently makes far more sense in this complete version than in previous edits, and centres around the discovery of the subterranean hell of the workers by Freder, the somewhat hysterical son of Metropolis’ founder, Joh Frederson, and his attempts with the saintly Maria to help the workers using non-violent means. Rotwang, the mad scientist employed by Joh Frederson, creates a robot version of Maria to incite the workers to open rebellion and thus justify Joh Frederson’s intentions to crack down violently on them. Modern-day parallels are hard to ignore, when the third world labours on subsistence pay to accommodate the lifestyle of the West, but the film had more immediate, and questionable, appeal at its time – its message of a ‘Mediator’ being needed to reach concord between the workers and the bureaucrats struck a chord with Goebbels and Hitler. This appeal can perhaps be attributed to the movie’s scriptwriter, Thea von Harbou, Lang’s wife at the time and later an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party (she and Lang had divorced by that time). The ‘good’ Maria’s peasant-girl costume and rather wimpy appeals to the workers to wait for the mythical ‘Mediator’ are easily identified with the contemporary growth in nationalistic sentimentality that the Nazis piggybacked so effectively on, while the ‘evil’ Maria’s exhortations to violently rebel are clearly meant to echo (and criticise) Bolshevism (her gestures while speech-making are even reminiscent of Lenin).
But ‘Metropolis’ is by no means a ‘Nazi’ movie, and should not be judged by its political sympathies of its writer and fans. Frankly, the script comes a poor second to the magnificent cinematography and montages that Lang showcases, from the iconic opening sequence of the cogs and pistons of the ‘Heart-Machine’ to the jaw-dropping sequence where the ‘evil’ Maria performs an atavistic erotic dance, spinning off into wild apocalyptic fantasy with the Grim Reaper and the personified Seven Deadly Sins turning up for good measure. Sequences such as these will more than make up for the tediously melodramatic acting beloved of silent cinema at the time. The addition of the original score by Gottfried von Huppertz also carries things along at a fine pace. Not to be missed.
No wonder it's so prestigious...
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Joanna Newsom at Grand Canal Theatre, Dublin
Joanna Newsom and band performing in Vancouver. Photo: Skot Nelson
It’s been three years since Joanna Newsom’s last gig in Dublin, so on Tuesday evening fans from all over the country eagerly converged on the Grand Canal Theatre for the opening date of her latest tour. As some commentators noted, there was a positive outpouring of hipsters into what is normally a suits ‘n’ heels kind of area, with trendily dressed people at varying stages of youth milling around the windswept square and gleaming lobby of the theatre from the early evening onwards. But unlike some events that draw that kind of crowd, this was no exclusivist gig designed to alienate those ‘not in the know’. From the moment a smiling Joanna appeared on stage to rapturous applause, she showed yet again why she and the musicians she works with deserve all the praise they get.
Her music is complex but hugely accessible, even more so when performed live. My companion, who’d never heard her music before, was astounded and delighted at the beauty and richness of the arrangements performed, reproduced almost note-perfectly from her latest album Have One On Me. The band, comprising uber-arranger and multi-instrumentalist Ryan Francesconi, percussionist Neal Morgan, two women on violin and viola respectively whose names I didn’t catch and Andrew Strain on trombone (who, incidentally, looked like the love child of Dougie Howser MD and Spencer from The Hills – thanks to Alice for that observation!) performed such epics as the album’s title track, ‘Easy’, ‘Kingfisher’ and a tremendous new arrangement of Ys’ Monkey and Bear with passion and military precision.
Joanna’s harp playing is better than ever, showcased beautifully on the show opener, ‘Jackrabbits’ and on ‘Peach Plum Pear’, performed as an encore. She took to the piano a number of times too, though the location of the instrument toward the back of the stage meant her voice carried less powerfully during these tracks and was sometimes drowned out by the drumkit. (I have heard since that those sitting further back actually had a better acoustic experience, as the instruments sounded more balanced when heard from further away). Her voice is less abrasive than in recent years but still carries a tune powerfully, with only a few bum notes hit. Uncharacteristically for her, she mixed up some of the lyrics in Soft As Chalk, but considering the vast quantity of words she manages to learn by heart and sing perfectly every night a small blunder is easily forgiven. A slightly fuzzy memory was also revealed when she repeated a story she told the last time she played in Dublin, about how she overheard some people criticising her performance. From what I can tell, this incident occurred the first time she was in Dublin, not in 2007, since she told the same story at the last gig. Anyway, the criticisers would be eating their words if they were in attendance last night!
Small mistakes such as these also makes her seem more human, a side of her that came out during a brief interlude when she interacted with the audience while re-gluing her fingers (necessary for harp-playing). Joanna may look the picture of innocence, but I laughed heartily when she commented ‘This is taking longer than I anticipated because I haven’t finished gluing my fingers….that’s what she said’. A funny back-and-forth between her and Neal Morgan about Twitter and its lack of appeal for them indicated a good rapport within the band.
She played two tracks, Kingfisher and Autumn, that I tend to skip over on the CD, but the live context brought out a richness to these delicate tunes that I will be going back to investigate further. Soft As Chalk and the the aforementioned Monkey and Bear were highlights, full of excitement and drama. Neal Morgan’s percussion was astounding, on a par with Joanna’s harp playing, as he switched between a variety of sticks and surfaces to get exactly the right sound.
The show was just under 90 minutes long, time that seemed to shoot by. The pre-encore closer was the wonderful Good Intentions Paving Company, with its piano and trombone coda extended to a rocking jam that nearly had the audience on its feet – proof yet again that Joanna can really rock out when she wants to. A richer arrangement of Peach Plum Pear was actually an improvement on the album original. The near-capacity crowd (in a venue that accommodates 2,000 people) gave a riotous standing ovation and the trendyheads even cracked a few smiles on their way out. Let’s hope Joanna doesn’t leave it as long for her next visit.
Some writing and Beatlemania. The phrase 'slender fire' is a translation of a line in Fragment 31, the remains of a poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho
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