13Oct
Cult/Fest Magazine - lots more to come here - we will cover in-depth contents of the West Wight CultureFest site, including Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim, fresh from making Barbarella (1968) back-stage at the Dylan Festival - everyone was there!
Most of the Beatles and their girlfriends - in the audience for Bob Dylan at the IOW Festival in 1969... my friend Penny Wavell is shown in the front row...
plus a feature on how Bohemianism and how leading-edge (avant-garde) art migrated from Freshwater to Bloomsbury and Charleston, kick-starting the modern 'boho' lifestyles (like McLuhan's Cultural Distant-Early-Warning systems). Other features include Robert Watts - the famous film-producer of Star Wars and Indiana Jones fame - at Golden Hill Fort in the early 2000s... On Ellen MacArthur and Buckminster Fuller and the goal of an energy-positive Circular Economy Island, a Wightopia harnessing tidal power...and about Anna Keen and local Island artists, and about the remarkable Paul Windridge, his paintings, his books on Foxes, his video-art and his work on Visioneca Festival of Experimental Film at Freshwater Bay - and Bob Seely's new book on Total War, and Robyn Hitchcock in Freshwater and Yarmouth - and Emma Swift's Blonde on the Tracks - and Jimi Hendrix at Dimbola, and locals AJP Taylor and JB Priestley arguing for a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1955!
'She Kissed Me!' - the tagline on Barbarella is that - I was chatting backstage at the 1969 Isle of Wight (Bob Dylan) Festival with Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda, when there was an explosion somewhere deep backstage, and I dropped my glass of beer and must have looked shocked - it was the third day of the festival for me, with loads to do and not much sleep - We had been talking about Barbarella - the film that Vadim directed, and Fonda starred in - it had come out the year before (1968) and was based upon the comic-strip stories written by Jean Claude Forrest. And the French are connoisseurs of comic-strip art - just a couple of years before, in 1966, Jenny and I had been in Paris in 1967- me to make some illustrations for my colleague and friend Chris Robbins who was doing an article on l'Hotel - the famous hotel where the cabaret singer Mistinguett lived - and where Oscar Wilde had lived - and (natch!) we had browsed in the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop - and I had bought a hardback of Philippe Druillet's Six Voyages de Lone Sloane:
Druillet's now famous comic art was new to me - it hadn't been published in the UK as yet. And it was a brilliant amalgum of the zeit-graphics of this period - hints at psychedelia, Escher, Beardsley, sci-fi and fantasy...
And knew that the French adored comics - and Vadim's love of the medium had triggered the remediation to film Barbarella. Jane Fonda's enactment of Barbarella - and Vadim's filmic treatment had complimented the original story brilliantly, so there was lots to talk about.. Then the bang!!!! - and Fonda compulsively learned forward, took me in her arms and gave me a big kiss.
And the late David Gascoyne of Yarmouth and Northwood - the poet who organised the great Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, and rescued Salvador Dali from his Diving Suit when his air-supply was blocked!
Example Text
Gascoyne's not in this photo - but there's Dali in his Deep-Sea Diving Suit - what else do you wear for the opening of a Surrealist Exhibition?
Comments