Weekend links 127

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M15, The Whirlpool Galaxy photographed by Martin Pugh. The overall and deep space winner of Astronomy Photographer of the Year, 2012.

The Final Academy, the series of William Burroughs-themed events that took place in London and Manchester in 1982, will be celebrated at the Horse Hospital, London, on 27th October. Academy 23, a publication edited by Matthew Levi Stevens, will include my report on the Manchester Haçienda performances.

• “Architects are the last people who should shape our cities,” says the thrillingly pugnacious Jonathan Meades in a piece from his new writing collection Museums Without Walls. Andy Beckett reviews the book here.

• Ex-Minimal Compact singer/bassist Malka Spigel talks about her new album, Every Day Is Like The First Day, which can be streamed in full here.

What’s new about the current acknowledgments page is that it’s unsolicited—it appears like an online pop-up ad, benefiting no one but the author and his comrades. This is surely why these afterwords are often so garrulously narcissistic and strewn with clichés. The most radical experimentalist adheres to the most mindless acknowledgments-page formula; the most stinging social critic suddenly becomes Sally Field winning an Oscar.

Sam Sacks at the New Yorker on the blight of novelists’ acknowledgments pages. DG Myers at Commentary Magazine piles on.

• Another streaming album: Composed by Jherek Bischoff. Try Insomnia, Death & The Sea featuring Dawn McCarthy.

• Film of Lindsay Kemp being interviewed in 1977 about his production of Salomé.

Electronic Performers (2004): a video by Machine Molle for the song by Air.

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One of a series of Beardsley-like drawings by Djuna Barnes posted at Strange Flowers. The resurgent Ms. Barnes is mentioned three times in this Terry Castle review of All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen.

Fictitious Dishes, meals from novels photographed by Dinah Fried.

• Life, the Dinosaurs & Everything: Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino.

The Baby Died: Morbid Curiosities found in Old Newspapers.

• Portishead’s Adrian Utley gives a tour of his synth collection.

• Minimal Compact: Babylonian Tower (1982) | Not Knowing (1984) | When I Go (1985) | Nil Nil (1987).

Weekend links 94

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Mateo (2011), carved wood sculpture by Bruno Walpoth.

“Dennis Potter’s [The Singing Detective] is 25 years old but still feels avant garde,” says Stephen Armstrong. No fucking kidding, I watched the DVDs again last weekend. Potter’s drama featured non-linear flashbacks, song-and-dance hallucination sequences, an intertextual sub-plot, and a central character who was vitriolic, misanthropic, misogynist and covered from head-to-toe in flaking skin. This wasn’t exiled to an arts channel ghetto but was primetime viewing, Sunday evenings on BBC 1. • Related: “Is Dennis Potter’s singalong noir miniseries the all-time pinnacle of television drama? Graham Fuller thinks it is.”

• American band Earth are using Kickstarter to fund their next project, Wonders from the House of Albion, an LP/CD/DVD/book combining their music with “field recordings from various megalithic and other sites of human/fairy encounters across the UK, also the use of ritual and folkloric magical practices”. Dylan Carlson & Adrienne Davies discuss their work here.

…sort of like Nabokov’s objection to Our Lady of the Flowers, which he saw as a masterpiece but thought, “Why isn’t this book about women?” Nabokov hated homosexuality and was very edgy around it, partly because his own brother was homosexual and his uncle. And he believed that it was hereditary, so he was always nervous about it.

Edmund White chooses five favourite gay novels. Related: a dance adaptation by Earthfall of Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys.

• “The Belbury Tales is the kind of record you feel should have come out on Vertigo around ’73, but never actually did.” Belbury Poly‘s Jim Jupp on ploughman’s lunches, prog rock and avoiding “Clarkson/Wakeman territory”.

Morbid Curiosity: The Richard Harris Collection, an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center exploring “the iconography of death across cultures and traditions spanning nearly six thousand years”.

Geoff Dyer’s Zona, an exegesis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, is officially out at the end of this month. The book is reviewed here and here.

• “Through a blurry electronic prism“: MetaFilter traces a history of analogue video synthesis.

Dylan Ricci‘s wonderful photography of the male body has moved to a new location.

Infinite Forest by Studio a+i, a design for an AIDS memorial in New York City.

Susan Cain discussing “the power of introverts” at Scientific American.

• Strange Flowers on that icon of Middle Eastern music, Umm Kulthum.

Ewan Morrison on “The self-epublishing bubble”.

Winter Sleep (2007) by Valgeir Sigurdsson feat. Dawn McCarthy | Black (2008) by Ben Frost with Valgeir Sigurdsson, Sam Amidon & Sigrídur Sunna Reynisdóttir | Unbreakable Silence (2011) by Ben Frost & Daníel Bjarnason