Nite Jewel – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 597

Untitled art by Toshio Okazaki from JCA Annual 5, 1984.

• “Yeah, when I first started writing it, nobody knew what to call it at all. I mean, the publishers didn’t know what to call it. They thought that Tolkien was (writing about) a post-apocalyptic nuclear world. That’s the only way they could perceive an alternate world, in other words. And it was the same with Mervyn Peake… they’re all interpreted that way. The idea of putting ‘fantasy’ on a book meant usually meant that it was a children’s book. And if you put fantasy as the genre, they usually put ‘SF’ larger than ‘fantasy’ to show that it was what it was.” Michael Moorcock (again) talking to Derek Garcia about fiction, games, and (of course) Elric.

• “Non-payment, low payment, late payment and promises of jam tomorrow, or at some unspecified future date, bedevil the freelance life as they did five centuries ago.” Indeed. Boyd Tonkin on Albrecht Dürer, patron saint of stroppy freelancers.

• “All at once, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret is tender, outrageous and daft.” Patrick Clarke compiles an oral history of Soft Cell’s debut album.

Yeah, it was kind of a media hype. In January [1967], the media said, [breathless] ‘Oh my god, San Francisco is the place to be. Come to San Francisco, wear flowers in your hair.’ So we had a meeting of the people in the Haight-Ashbury about how we were going to deal with so many people coming. The Diggers decided to kind of make it a university of the streets, an alternative anarchist culture.

We knew that all these people were coming to San Francisco, and we knew they weren’t going to stay. And we thought, well, the best thing we could do would be to kind of educate them about the kinds of things that are possible in society, and then let them go back to where they’re from, and they would carry these ideas. And that is what happened. We were quite successful in that.

Judy Goldhaft of the San Francisco Diggers talking to Jay Babcock for another installment of Jay’s verbal history of the hippie anarchists

• “What ‘impossible’ meant to Richard Feynman; what I learned when I challenged the legendary physicist,” by Paul J. Steinhardt.

• At Strange Flowers: part one of James Conway’s essential end-of-year shopping list, Secret Satan.

• Mixes of the week: Part II and Part III of the three-part At The Outer Marker series by David Colohan.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Olivia Duval presents…Suave: A History of Les Disques du Crépuscule.

• Mystery and Truth of the Cthulhu Myth, a Japanese guide to the Cthulhu Mythos.

• Intimacy, Loss and Hope: Inside Florian Hetz’s beautiful 2020 photo diary.

• New music: The Tower (The City) by Vanessa Rossetto/Lionel Marchetti.

• Nite Jewel’s favourite albums.

• RIP Stephen Sondheim.

• Nothing Is Impossible (1974) by The Interns | Mission Impossible Theme (1981) by Ippu-Do | Impossible Guitar (1982) by Phil Manzanera

Weekend links 125

Coronal Mass Ejection from the surface of the Sun, August 31st, 2012.

• “Most of the main parts were recorded in a single day using Vangelis’s famous technique: try to play as many synths as possible at once.” Simon Drax on the prolific musical output of Zali Krishna. The new Krishna opus is Bremsstrahlung Sommerwind, free to download at the Internet Archive.

• The Northants International Comics Expo (N.I.C.E.) opens on September 22nd. Among the many attendees there will be Mr Alan Moore making his first convention appearance since 1987.

• “Isolated for one night in a boat overlooking the Thames, Geoff Dyer explores representations of reality through the lens of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”

Now seems the right time to revisit this secret archive of public broadcasting. It’s an antidote to the celebrity-led, format-driven nature of so many arts documentaries made today. It shows that it’s possible to produce TV that is both populist and experimental. And it also refutes the cliché that the 1970s was a decade only of crisis and downturn. “Feminism, political theatre, Ways of Seeing: I wasn’t thinking, ‘what a terrible time’. It was very dynamic, activist, political. Creatively it was very exciting. Yet all they show on those television retrospectives are episodes of Top of the Pops.”

Sukhdev Sandhu talks to Mike Dibb, the director of Ways of Seeing.

• From 1999: Colm Tóibín reviews A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods.

• What We See: a song by Julia Holter & Nite Jewel with a film by Delaney Bishop & Jose Wolff.

• Rick Poynor on The crash test dummy: from subcultural fringes to pop culture mainstream.

In his 1973 book on Joyce, Joysprick, Burgess made a provocative distinction between what he calls the “A” novelist and the “B” novelist: the A novelist is interested in plot, character and psychological insight, whereas the B novelist is interested, above all, in the play of words. The most famous B novel is Finnegans Wake, which Nabokov aptly described as “a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room.” The B novel, as a genre, is now utterly defunct; and A Clockwork Orange may be its only long-term survivor.

Martin Amis on A Clockwork Orange, fifty years on. My old post about the film’s record shop scene continues to be one of the most popular pages here.

• Wild Boys: David Bowie and William Burroughs in 1974, hand-coloured by DB.

• Alfred Kubin‘s illustrations for Haschisch (1902) by Oscar AH Schmitz.

• Revolution off: industrial ruins photographed by Thomas Jorion.

• Tetrahedra of Space: 22 pulp illustrations by Frank R. Paul.

• The Blue Boy Studiolo: a Tumblr.

• Marina Warner visits Hell.

• The art of Casey Weldon.

• RainyMood.com

• Third Stone From The Sun (1967) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience | Sunrise In The Third System (1971) by Tangerine Dream | 3rd From The Sun (1982) by Chrome.

Arthur #31

Cover photography by Lisa Law, design by Alia Penner.

It was only a few months ago that Arthur Magazine was struggling to stay afloat in a nation swimming in inflated wealth. How quickly things change… Arthur #31 is available right now as a free PDF download while those in the US can pick up the paper edition (free!) at the best kind of record stores, coffee houses and Wall Street soup kitchens. Or be the envy of your friends by taking out a subscription. Douglas Rushkoff’s take on the credit crisis can also be read here.

Author Trinie Dalton traveled into the wilds of New Mexico to live with psychedelic earthers BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT for two days. Sublimity ensued. Here’s what happened. With photography by Lisa Law.

Douglas Rushkoff: The mortgage and credit crisis wasn’t merely predictable; it was predicted. And not by a market bear or conspiracy theorist, but by the people and institutions responsible. Illustration by Arik Moonhawk Roper.

Dave Reeves: Having doubts about Iraq? America’s victory is Infinite. Just have a look at Vietnam…

Molly Frances on all sorts of delights in, from, or about Los Angeles—from Wallace Berman, Velaslavasay Panorama and Lily Tomlin in The Late Show to Show Cave, Nite Jewel and the new Flying Lotus album. Plus other, non-geographically specific stuff.

On May 10, 1968 SLY & THE FAMILY STONE opened two shows for THE JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE at the Fillmore East in New York City. Artist/scholar Plastic Crimewave reports on this extraordinary, little-known moment in American countercultural history.

Greg Shewchuk: What is it about skateboarding that makes kids willing to break laws in order to do it? Illustration by Joseph Remnant.

Nance Klehm: What to do with the nuts, seeds and berries you can find while foraging in the urban jungle. Illustration by Makeswell.

The Center for Tactical Magic: Do the ends ever justify the magic(k)? Illustration by Cassandra Chae.

Erik Davis: Is the “planetary consciousness” of neotribal psytrance gatherings like Portugal’s Boom festival just window dressing for the same old hedonism and escapism—or could it actually be what it says it is?

A centerfold of new ARTHUR COMICS by Jeffrey Brown, Charles Burns, Al Columbia,

P.W.E., Simon Evans, Matt Furie, Tom Gauld, Lisa Hanawalt, Joseph Hanks, Tim Hensley, Ted May, Anders Nilsen, Laura Park, Helge Reumann, Souther Salazar, Julia Wertz and Dan Zettwoch. Edited by Buenaventura Press.

STYLE: Annakim Violette, glampire vamp, tells an arachnid tale from a rainbow’s underbelly. Styled by Miss KK, with photography and design by Alia Penner.

BYRON COLEY & THURSTON MOORE review choice finds from the deep underground.

C and D let it rip about the Fela! musical, Hacienda, Megapuss, Little Joy, Kasai All-Stars, Grouper, Natacha Atlas, Matt Baldwin, Mercury Rev, Desolation Wilderness, Gang Gang Dance, Raglani, Jonas Reinhardt, Apse, and Eagles of Death Metal.