Poster for the recent Ballard-themed Only Connect Festival of Sound in Oslo. Design by Non-Format.
• Bulldozer by Laird Barron was my favourite piece in Lovecraft’s Monsters, the recent Tachyon anthology edited by Ellen Datlow that I designed and illustrated. So it’s good to hear that Nic Pizzolato, writer of the justly-acclaimed HBO series True Detective, is among Barron’s readers. True Detective, of course, created a stir for referencing Robert Chambers’ weird fiction in a police procedural. The series is out now on DVD and Blu-ray, and I can’t recommend it too highly.
• Citation-obsessed Wikipedians don’t believe Hauntology is a genuine musical genre, a sentiment which will probably surprise some of its practitioners. Whatever the merits of the argument, I rather like the idea of a musical form that resists strict definition.
• “This year, in order to do things differently, I will make a conscious effort to separate the man from his writing.” Giovanna Calvino, daughter of Italo Calvino, remembers her father.
With ideology masquerading as pragmatism, profit is now the sole yardstick against which all our institutions must be measured, a policy that comes not from experience but from assumptions – false assumptions – about human nature, with greed and self-interest taken to be its only reliable attributes. In pursuit of profit, the state and all that goes with it is sold from under us who are its rightful owners and with a frenzy and dedication that call up memories of an earlier iconoclasm.
Alan Bennett delivers a sermon.
• Zarina Rimbaud-Kadirbaks, aka Dutch Girl In London, reviews the Chris Marker exhibition that’s currently running at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
• Exteriorizing the Inner Realms: Christopher Laursen talks to Phantasmaphile and Abraxas magazine‘s Pam Grossman about occult art, past and present.
• The Beast is back: Erik Davis talks to Gary Lachman about his new book, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World.
• The body as factory: anatomy of a New Scientist cover image. Rick Poynor on the recurrent use of a familiar visual metaphor.
• Mix of the week without a doubt is FACT Mix 445 by Stephen O’Malley, a three-hour behemoth.
• Jennifer in paradise: Photoshop developer John Knoll on the story of the first Photoshopped image.
• The trailer for Grandfather of Gay Porn, a documentary about Peter de Rome by Ethan Reid.
• Giorgio’s Theme is a new piece of electronic music by Giorgio Moroder.
• Agender, a series of androgynous photo-portraits by Chloe Aftel.
• RIP Little Jimmy Scott
• Chase (1978) by Giorgio Moroder | Call Me (1980) by Blondie | The Apartment (1980) by Giorgio Moroder
Laird Barron is a brilliant writer, & The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All was one of last year’s best collections. I’m hankering to buy & binge-watch the True Detective box-set, but I heard a lot of negative comment on the series finale; would be interested to know your take on it.
And I love the idea of any artistic form that resists strict definition. Any form of anything at all, in fact!
Barron’s story surprised me for its structure as much as anything, he’s doing things you seldom find in the conservative horror field which makes me want to read more.
Re: True Detective, Borges famously wrote (and I’m always quoting this) “The solution to the mystery is always inferior to the mystery itself”, so some people would have been disappointed whatever the ending. Given that the story is a police drama–albeit an exceptional one–you were only going to get a limited range of options for an ending anyway. I found the finale to be sufficiently weird and scary, and a satisfying resolution to all that came before it.
The series as a whole makes recent US cinema look like very poor fare indeed: superbly acted–Matthew McConaughey is astonishing–written and directed; the Robert Chambers stuff was the icing on the cake but Pizzolato also worked a Burroughs quote into one of Rust Cohle’s nihilistic monologues, something I’ve not seen anyone else pick up on. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next.