David Ehrenstein – { feuilleton }

Cover art by Alonso for a 1929 Spanish edition of The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde.

• Major music news of the week is the announcement, after a hiatus of nine years, of a new Jon Hassell album. Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) will be released on Hassell’s new label, Ndeya, in June. Meanwhile, Paul Schütze has a new album (also his first in a long while), The Sky Torn Apart, released at the end of this month by Glacial Movements. For those impatient for new sounds, Red Goddess (of this men shall know nothing) by Hawthonn is out now, and very good it is too.

• Ghost Story (1974): a British film directed by Stephen Weeks, and starring (among others) Marianne Faithfull, Penelope Keith, Murray Melvin and (in a rare appearance) Vivian MacKerrell, the real-life model for Withnail from Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I. Also from 1974, a TV adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost starring David Niven.

• Nandini Ramnath on how an Indian film distributor in London (Mehelli Modi of Second Run DVD) is helping rescue forgotten classics from obscurity.

• Simon Reynolds explains why he thinks Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children is the greatest psychedelic album of the ’90s.

• At I Heart Noise: an interview with Dylan Carlson about his forthcoming solo album, Conquistador.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: David Ehrenstein presents…Donald Cammell Day.

• Photos by David Graham of Mexico City’s “gay subway”.

• Circuit Des Yeux‘s favourite albums.

• The Gospel of Filth: a book list.

• Fountain Of Filth (1974) by Devo | The Heart’s Filthy Lesson (1995) by David Bowie | Filthy/Gorgeous (2004) by Scissor Sisters

The Endlessness (2012) by Emma Bennett.

• “Clearly if you’re familiar with The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin you’ve got a leg up on what Rivette and company are up to. […] Like all Rivette works, it’s obsessed with the interrelationship between theater and life—reality and fantasy.” David Ehrenstein makes Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 sound even more intriguing. The 729-minute film is being reissued later this year.

• “It’s all your artistic friends. They frighten me…they seem evil, somehow—somehow unhealthy. And when you’re with them, dear, you change…” Steven Cordova reviews To the Dark Tower (1946), the debut novel by gay writer Francis King.

• “Sex isn’t a subtext in The Bloody Chamber, but the text itself. (Carter would explain that she was only making explicit a ‘latent content’ that is ‘violently sexual.’)” Laura Miller on Angela Carter’s re-told fairy tales.

Yet, as a citizen, and especially as an artist, [Chimamanda Ngozi] Adichie refuses to censor herself. “There is already enough silencing in public discourse,” says Adichie, and this is certainly true when the topic is race, and especially when the conversation is in America. It is our addiction to comfort that demands our silence regarding certain truths. Too often in America, Adichie claimed, “the goal of public discourse is comfort, not truth.” Comfort, Adichie said, also demands “international digestibility,” a reduction of complicated stories to a simple narrative. In the lecture, Adichie also warned of the silencing that is sometimes a product of social media outrage.

Kay Iguh on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture at the PEN World Voices Festival

• New books: The Strangers and Other Writings by Robert Aickman, and Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco by Stephen Thrower & Julian Grainger.

• The world is rediscovering Mad Max and George Miller’s prowess for action cinema so Anne Billson posted a transcript of her 1985 interview with the director.

• Mixes of the week: Dmytro Fedorenko presents artists from Ukrainian record label Kvitnu, and The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. VII by David Colohan.

• Assault on Precinct 13 goes disco: The End (John Anthony’s New Scratch Mix) (1983) by “John Carpenter” (The Splash Band).

• John Coltrane talked to Frank Kofsky for an hour in November 1966.

• Sleazy Cinema: A guide to Peter Christopherson‘s music videos.

• Six hours of women in electronic music.

• The weird world of Alfred Kubin.

• Giallo Magic Orchestra

• Blood (1972) by Annette Peacock | Blood On The Moon (1981) by Chrome | Blood From The Air (1986) by Coil

Tag: David Ehrenstein

Weekend links 407

Weekend links 259