Weekend links 717

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Bookplate of Charles P. Searle (1904) by Sidney Lawton Smith.

• “If Minute 9 is the first time we hear the names Deckard and Blade Runner, it’s also the first time we meet the plainclothes cop who will play a key role in LAPD surveillance of Deckard—and in the changed emphasis of four subsequent versions of Blade Runner released over the next twenty-five years.” Des Barry in the latest Minute 9 installment at 3:AM Magazine, in which a writer analyses the ninth minute of a favourite film.

• “I’ve really started to respect the journalists who are documenting what artists are doing… There’s so much reliance on social media for artists to express themselves, but maybe some don’t want to express themselves on social media all the time. Maybe they’d rather talk to a professional journalist who could parse through it for them. It can be more interesting that way.” Julia Holter talking to Skye Butchard about music-making.

• “I didn’t use any instruments that had been manufactured after 1980, but vintage analogue gear to sound like the tracks that they’re trying to evoke.” Matt Berry discussing his enthusiasm for library music, and his new album of the same for the KPM label.

• Mixes of the week: Monument Waves 002 at A Strangely Isolated Place, and DreamScenes – March 2024 at Ambientblog.

• At Public Domain Review: The Art of Sutherland Macdonald, Victorian England’s “Michelangelo of Tattooing” (ca. 1905).

• At Colossal: Unearthly characters populate Spencer Hansen’s salvaged universe.

• At Bandcamp: A Guide to Can by George Grella.

• Galerie Dennis Cooper presents…Amir Zaki.

• New music: Shoures Soote by Cerfilic.

Queens Of The Circulating Library (2000) by Coil | Library Of Solomon Book 1 (2011) by Demdike Stare | The Equestrian Library (2013) by Broadcast

Man with a Newspaper

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René Magritte with a newspaper.


La Nouvelle Médication Naturelle Traduit de l’Allemand – Vol. 2 (1899) by FE Bilz

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Man with a Newspaper (1928) by René Magritte

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Fuzz Against Junk (1959) by Akbar Del Piombo

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The Oxford Book of Short Poems (1986) edited by PJ Kavanagh and James Michie

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Mensonge (1987) by Malcolm Bradbury

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (2015), illustrated by Anthony Browne

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Fuzz Against Junk & The Hero Maker

Weekend links 716

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The Vision of Endymion (1902) by Edward John Poynter.

The Art and History of Lettering Comics by Todd Klein. Eight of the pages in the forthcoming Moon & Serpent book have been lettered by Todd.

• At Igloomag: Chang Terhune looks for music to help you sleep. No mention of an obvious (and superior) candidate, Sleep by Max Richter.

• New music: Ghosted II by Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin; and The Ship by David Shea.

But unlike macroscopic drugs like cannabis, LSD is so small and so powerful that its consumption almost always requires an inert housing—the water, tablets, sugar cubes, bits of string, or pieces of paper that transport the drug from manufacturer to tripper. In the law, this vehicle is described as the “carrier medium,” an object impregnated with drugs, one that can be sold, seized, presented as evidence, and dissolved into the hearts, minds, and guts of consumers.

When you print images onto a paper carrier medium, you are adding another layer of mediation to an already loopy transmission. Hence, a meta medium, a liminal genre of print culture that dissolves the boundaries between a postage stamp, a ticket, a bubble gum card, and the communion host. This makes blotter a central if barely recognized artifact of psychedelic print culture, alongside rock posters and underground newspapers and comix, but with the extra ouroboric weirdness that it is designed to be ingested, to disappear. Blotter is the most ephemeral of all psychedelic ephemera. It is produced to be eaten, to blur the divide between object and subject, dissolving material signs and molecules into a phenomenological upsurge of sensory, poetic, and cognitive immediacy.

Erik Davis, in an extract from Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium

• At Wormwoodiana: John Howard on The London Adventure, or, The Art of Wandering by Arthur Machen.

• At Unquiet Things: Hidden Marvels on Your Bookshelf: The Artistic Legacy of Laurence Schwinger.

• “Some intelligent civilizations will be trapped on their worlds”. Evan Gough explains.

• At Vinyl Factory: The Latin-American women of 20th-century electronic music.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Steve Erickson presents A Black Psychedelia Primer Day.

• At Public Domain Review: Animated Putty by Walter R. Booth.

Vinita Joshi’s favourite music.

Sleepy Theory (1982) by Weekend | Sleep 3 (1995) by Paul Schütze | Sleep Games (2012) by Pye Corner Audio

The Werewolf of Anarchy

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Synchronicity is as universal as gravity. When you start looking you find it everywhere.

Thus Discordian anarchist Stella Maris, making her first appearance in my re-reading of Illuminatus! (previously) in a week when more synchronicities related to the novel have been imposing themselves. “The Werewolf of Anarchy” (published on the 23rd of the month, of course) was a picture that turned up a couple of days ago when I was searching through the back issues of Punch magazine. Punch did a lot of this kind of thing, dropping the humour now and then for some heavy-handed pictorial comment about international affairs. Given my current reading the word “anarchy” was bound to catch my attention but the werewolf image is unusual—why not a regular wolf?—while being further bound to the novel via Robert Anton Wilson’s fondness for Lon Chaney Jr’s lycanthrope. I often wondered why Wilson used to refer to this as much as he did. Illuminatus! mentions the werewolf legend from the first Universal film in its grab-bag of cultural weirdness, and I seem to recall there being more references in Wilson’s later novels. In the 1980s Wilson was living in Ireland where he wrote a werewolf-themed song with a local band, The Golden Horde, one of the few (only?) Irish groups who can be counted as part of the fleeting psychedelic revival that took place in the middle of the decade. The Golden Horde’s first album, The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy, appeared in 1985, and ends with Lawrence Talbot Suite, a number which is “explained” with the following words: “Lon Chaney Jr, The Easter Bunny, The primeval sleeve note, red curtain, the stings, a crush-can dominates a scowling buddha”. Whatever that means.

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Meanwhile, my RSS feed informs me that Pentagrams Of Discordia have just released a new album whose final number bears the title Planetary Radiation (RAW); Robert Anton Wilson turns up again at the end of the track to talk about Chaos Theory in relation to Discordian history. And the above item arrived in the mail this week, a two-disc CD release of a newly-discovered live recording of Steve Hillage and band performing at the Bataclan in 1979. I own a lot of live Hillage albums, along with all his studio recordings, and this is one of the very best. The concert is pertinent for including an early rendition of New Age Synthesis (Unzipping The Zype), a song that made its first appearance in 1979 on the studio side of Live Herald, and which contains what may be the first reference to Illuminatus! in song form (the album sleeve includes thanks “to Robert Anton Wilson for his intriguing books”). Hillage offered an explanation of the studio songs’ lyrics in his own mysterious sleeve note:

For those who find the lingo a bit strange—“unzipping the zype” can be defined as (rising organ music please!):—the spontaneous inner exorcism by which a person can neutralise the harmful, consciousness-distorting effects of the artificial elemental spirits (zypes) formed around each word of everyday language.

The zypes are built up by the identification process by which we manufacture “reality.” Occultists refer to them as “astral glamour,” yogis as “the web of Maya”—but no word is zype-proof, not even zype. Cherish this phrase—it’s a royal flush!

Hmm, okay… No indication there or in the lyrics as to how you go about “unzipping the zype”. New Age Synthesis is a call-and-response between Hillage and partner Miquette Giraudy in which Hillage recounts his experience with the zypes. In the first verse he mentions “word spirits” to which Giraudy replies “Egregores!”, an occult concept which—quelle surprise—has connections to Chaos Magic. In the next verse Hillage blames the existence of the word spirits on the Illuminati—”Paranoia!” responds Giraudy—only to discard this claim in the lines that follow: “It isn’t really them at all, but you and me”. Hillage’s albums of the 1970s are filled with all manner of New Age business—flying saucers, ley lines, mysticism of various kinds—but he isn’t a David Icke. Why werewolves? What zypes? Mysteries abound. This is a great album, anyway, in or out of the Synchronicity Zone.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Ewige Blumenkraft
Twinkle, twinkle little stars

Valentine Hugo’s Contes Bizarres

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Looking around at the weekend for drawings by Valentine Hugo (1887–1968), I was reminded of a defunct bookselling blog which hosts scans of the illustrations that Hugo created in 1933 for Contes Bizarres, a collection of stories by Achim von Arnim (1781–1831). I posted a link to this place in the past but since neglected sites have a tendency to abruptly vanish I thought it worth bumping the illustrations into the future here. Valentine Hugo never seems to receive the same attention as the other well-known women Surrealists despite her evident talent and closer connections to the original Surrealist group than those who came later. Her careful renderings are easy to recognise, often done with pastel or crayon on textured black paper or card. This edition of Contes Bizarres was a collection of translations by Théophile Gautier with an introduction by André Breton which suggests the stories are bizarres enough to be considered Surrealist precursors. Not having read any of them I can’t say much about them but Max Ernst counted von Arnim among his favourites poets. André Breton, meanwhile, favoured German Romanticism enough to make Novalis the Magus of Flames in the Jeu de Marseilles card deck but Achim von Arnim is one such writer who still seems to be more popular in France than he is in the Anglosphere. Valentine Hugo apparently illustrated an edition of Les Chants de Maldoror around the same time as Contes Bizarres. If this is the case I’ve yet to see the illustrations anywhere.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive
The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Max Ernst’s favourites