Or, when I was “Lee Quarnstrom.”
The Long Playing Record Album cover of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “Brain Salad Surgery” (obscure slang for fellation, as it turns out. Note the airbrushed penis. )
Swiss “surrealist” artist H.R. Giger is dead, of a fall.
H.R. Giger, Surrealist Artist and ‘Alien’ Designer, Dead at 74 Painter and sculptor, whose cover art graced albums by Debbie Harry, Danzig and more, had recently fallen down a flight of stairs
By KORY GROW Rolling Stone Magazine May 13, 2014 9:25 AM ET
Surrealist painter Hans Ruedi Giger, whose designs inspired the creature in Alien and whose otherworldly and often grotesque art graced album covers for Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Debbie Harry and Danzig, died Monday, following hospitalization for falling down the stairs in his Zurich home. He was 74…
I, like many of my generation, first came across Giger on that ELP cover (which contains the superlative “Karn Evil Nine” suite). And then a long period of no Giger.
But you were struck by it: the rotting corpses, the sexuality superimposed and integrated into it … and Spoilers!
Same girl. Giger’s GF, she committed suicide Note the Alien-like “eggs” in the BG
Giger painted what we call “surreal” art, because there was the shock of recognition attached to it. Like much of early surrealism and especially Dali’s stuff, there was a conscious attempt to get in touch with troubling and “shocking” imagery.
As a good–if from a ‘bastard’ school–Tibetan Buddhist, I have long posited that what Freud did was to fall BACKWARDS into the world of the Sixth Bardo, and Jung managed to top him by falling back into the Fifth Bardo, as described by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodol.
If you aren’t following that, hold that last paragraph in abeyance. We’ll pick it up further down.
Giger from the Rolling Stone obit
What we remember Giger for was in designing the life cycle monsters of “Alien.”
Elsewhere I’ve told the story of talking to Dan O’Bannon (who wrote the screenplay for Alien) for a long while on a movie set, and telling him about the tarantula wasp — which paralyzes a tarantula and injects her eggs directly into the paralyzed host to give her offspring a nice hot meal when they awakened — and O’Bannon going “WOW! There IS such a thing?!??” and I returning the favor by going that WASN’T where you got the notion?
“I wanted men to know what it’s like to be raped,” he said. “It’s male rape.”
[Spoilers!]
Repurposing the imagery. But yes, it IS male rape
And we were mutually surprised at our new knowledge.
Then he said, “tell me about the tarantula wasp…”
Giger then worked with Ridley Scott to create that rapist. At every stage of its life cycle, it’s the Giger specialty: sex and death together. My younger self can explain Giger’s first book, Necronomicon (borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional book of the Mad Arab Abdul al Hazred, a book so terrible that it drove men mad who read it):
H.R. Giger’s Necronomicon
By H. R. Giger;
Big O Publishing, P.O. Box 6186,
Charlottesville, Virginia 22906;
$17.95The artwork of H. R. Giger is familiar to anyone who has seen the motion picture Alien. Giger designed the alien spacecraft and the alien itself. If you liked his work in the film, you’ll enjoy this book. And if you felt a sense of dread and horror from his work in Alien you’1l know what to expect in Necronomicon.
Giger paints strange, grotesque beings: decomposing fetuses, beautiful women with mechanical attachments and diseased skin, machines with vaginas, snakes coiling in human skulls, endless piles of bones.
Giger’s world is populated by ‘biomechanical’ creatures-organisms that are part human and part machine. Technically, his illustrations are rendered with terrifyingly fine attention to detail.
The word ‘Necronomicon’ comes from the writing of horror-story author H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon was a mythical book–supposedly written by a madman–that he referred to in his stories. Giger knew what he was doing when he chose the title.
The text accompanying this generous collection of Giger illustrations was written by the artist himself. No shrinking violet, Giger uses the book as a soapbox from which to give us his opinions on subjects ranging from philosophy to sex. He complains about his dislikes and hatreds; he writes about his life as a struggling artist. He is a cynic, as evidenced by passages like, “I seem to have an uncanny knack for attracting people who are physically ill. . . . They waste my time with their shitty problems and look on me as their free psychiatrist.”
And he writes: “I have often noticed mothers anxiously trying to hide my works from their children; yet these little monsters are without equal when it comes to torturing animals or their fellow human beings.”
But you won’t be buying Necronomicon for its text. The paintings–more than 150 of them–are a good reason for picking it up. ~ Lee Quarnstrom*
Geiger was never popular with the greeting cards industry
[* Here’s an extended footnote that isn’t in the footlights:
(This is followed by a graphic of a beaver’s head, wearing a hard hat with a peace symbol. I don’t think that any symbol interpretist in the world can explain the symbol, so I’ll forego any attempt)
Who is/was “Lee Quarnstrom”? Good question: he was my “Boss” at Hustler, the Executive Editor with the corner office. A former Ken Kesey Merry Prankster, he would eat lunch at the Playboy Club in Century City in one of whose twin towers were located (on the 38th floor; I had to share an office with an acrophobic). At one point, he was dating the editor of Playgirl Magazine. Soon, he returned to Santa Cruz, where he wrote for the paper for years and then retired to the La Habra suburb of Los Angeles. Perhaps he’s still alive. Certainly he’s already planned his funeral.
This was what he told me: “I changed the name, because if Althea rejects it, you’ll be fired.” (I had rewritten the ‘deathless’ prose more than once, which was HUSTLER’s contribution to the Useless Workload of the Universe; multiple polishes to make sure the average ninth-grader could understand it). Since writing stupid was not my specialty, I took Lee at his word. But I have never cared for the arrogation of my writing under another name. I had and have no guarantees that there wasn’t some other agenda involved. But, since I wrote (and rewrote) every word, I refuse to not use my own literary refuse. ]
Egg chamber scene from Alien
At any event, just after Alien, Giger put out that book, and I was working at Partridge Books, next to B. Dalton Pickwick (on Hollywood Boulevard’s “Walk of Fame”) for a man named Roger Weir, who began lecturing at Manly P. Hall’s Philosophical Research Society library, which was a good thing, because Partridge would be out of business within a year or so. But I got an employee discount, and I took a copy of Necronomicon home the first week that it came out.
And, for the only time I can ever remember of any book I’ve ever bought, the next day, I took it back. For an employee discount refund.
The book had a creepy vibe that I did not want in my house.
Later, when I reviewed it for Hustler, I was HAPPY to let a guy in the Art Department keep the mutilated review copy. (The Art Department literally cut out the pages they wanted to reproduce. The pages rarely made it back to the review copy.)
The edition that came out before anyone had ever heard of Clive Barker
A short time later, my teacher, Andrew da Passano, told of a time that he had, upon instructions from HIS teacher, Tullio Castellani, descended into the Low Astral regions every night in lucid dreaming. He described it as a place of unrelenting horror, of rotting, copulating corpses, and unspeakable acts. But eventually, he said, you became inured to it, and it has a strange and terrible beauty in its own horrific ways.
And I thought of the Necronomicon, sitting on the Partridge Books’ shelf four blocks down the street. Later, I went and borrowed the “exhibit” copy (the one NOT sealed in plastic) and took it to Andrew. “Was this what you meant?” I asked
Andrew–who was a commercial artist in Real Life– exclaimed, “YES! That’s it. He has caught it perfectly.”
“But,” he added, “I wouldn’t want his dreams.”
H.R. Giger – Xenomorph the painting that became the “Alien”
Courage.
The iconic Swiss painter and sculptor, who died yesterday at the age of 74, reportedly suffered from night terrors for much of his life, so perhaps his inimitable art was his revenge upon the …
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A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog.
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.