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

Weekend links 671

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No. 54 (1915) by Anna Cassel.

• “I called it the treasure hunt: two years of tapes appearing from closets, letters dropping out of attics, persuading a film company to find the rushes of a TV show buried in a warehouse, paying a film director to digitise unused footage and a radio company to surface an old broadcast.” Nick Soulsby on pursuing the ghosts of Coil for his book about the group, Everything Keeps Dissolving.

• “It is likely that af Klint scholarship is on the brink of some radical changes regarding attribution and authorship.” Susan L. Aberth on the researches revealing collaborations between Hilma af Klint and other mystically-inclined women artists. It makes a change reading something about this group that isn’t completely dismissive about the beliefs that informed their work.

• New music: No Highs by Tim Hecker (“a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue…”), and Seascape–polyptych by Jan Jelinek.

I think an unfortunate effect of Foucault’s work, as it was absorbed by academia, was that it made historians reluctant to call people or sexual acts in the past ‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’ since these terms ‘did not exist at the time’ or were recent creations. This gave some homophobes a spurious defence when suggestions were made as to the inclinations of their heroes, but it also—or so I thought—tended to downplay the reality of non-opportunistic homosexual desire as a constant in history, reducing it to recorded acts performed and then deeming these inadequate evidence anyhow, because they were assumed to have taken place in a fuzzy sexual universe.

If, as it seems to me, and as it seemed to Symonds and Carpenter, terms like ‘homosexual’ were invented in the effort to describe a type of person that has always existed, then they are in essence just a shorthand. Each term has its history, associations and effects, but—and perhaps this makes me an unsophisticated thinker—I think it’s the sexual feelings that fundamentally matter, and that these have existed across time. For that reason, I don’t find the Victorian sexual psyche, as far as it can be defined, alien or outlandish, or hard to speculate on. It is the product of sexual feeling filtered through observable social beliefs and conditions.

Tom Crewe talking to Amia Srinivasan about The New Life, Crewe’s debut novel which explores Victorian sex and sexuality

• “I’ve been tumbling down the rabbit-hole of toy theatre all my life, and I’m tumbling still.” Clive Hicks-Jenkins on the dark art of the toy theatre.

• At Public Domain Review: Jean Baptiste Vérany’s Chromolithographs of Cephalopods (1851).

• “Glass is perhaps the most frequently overlooked material in history,” says Katy Kelleher.

• At Cartoon Brew: Chris Robinson remembers the surreal animations of Run Wrake.

• At Unquiet Things: Of Dreams and Dark Pasts: Surrealist Painter Sofía Bassi.

• RIP Harry Belafonte.

House Of Glass (1969) by The Glass Family | Heart Of Glass (1978) by Blondie | Slow Glass (1997) by Paul Schütze

Weekend links 662

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Pierrot le Fleur by Marina Mika.

• I’ve been saying for years that Andrzej Zulawski’s On the Silver Globe should be given a proper blu-ray release, and that’s what Region B viewers will receive soon courtesy of Eureka. Andrzej Zulawski: Three Films will be released in May, a set that comprises the director’s unfinished SF film, his debut feature, The Third Part of the Night (1971)—which I still haven’t seen—and also The Devil (1972), which I have seen but only as a poor copy that’s been circulating via illicit channels for many years.

• “The album’s 18-minute, multi-section standout Jenny Ondioline acquired a crucial role. It became the first track I’d play whenever I boarded a train, slipped on my headphones, and settled in beside an anonymous rail rider.” Hayden Merrick on travelling across the USA to the sounds of Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements by Stereolab.

• At Aquarium Drunkard: E. Hehr explores musical exotica via Technicolor Paradise: Rhum Rhapsodies & Other Exotic Delights, “…a compilation that touches upon the noir side of exotica, far more gritty and raw compared to the lavish production on the esteemed exotica albums from Capitol and Liberty.” I own this collection. It’s a good one.

“My own experience,” Leda muses “tells me that more love goes into the thought of homosexuality than the practice.” Other gays are neither radical heroes nor the pathetic, self-hating fairies of, say, Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band. This frankness makes Love, Leda a singular work; a contemporary portrait of working-class gay London in the years running up to decriminalisation that neither flatters nor sensationalises. In doing so, Hyatt transforms gay sex and love from an abject taboo to a deeply human intimacy.

Huw Lemmey on Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt, a candid tale of gay life in the Britain of the 1960s

• “It became something like a ritual, an exhumation of long-unheard music reanimated as glacial drones and ghostly symphonic movements—the sound of the cathedral transmuted into an enveloping shadow of pulsation, echo and glitch.” Orgelwerk by Ted Reichman.

Max Richter answers 50 questions. Sleep, Richter’s 8-hour ambient epic, is still my favourite among his compositions that I’ve heard to date: 8 CDs and a blu-ray disc from Deutsche Grammophon.

• RIP Alastair Brotchie, publisher of books at Atlas Press, and biographer of Alfred Jarry. Also a commenter here on one occasion when he corrected an erroneous photograph caption.

• A trailer for Suzume, a new feature film by Makoto Shinkai. Related: A Gathering of Cats.

• The story behind Jack Pierson’s homoerotic new photo book.

• The Strange World of…Phew.

Why Do I Still Sleep (1983) by Popol Vuh | Sleep I (1995) by Paul Schütze | The Dreamer Is Still Asleep (1999) by Coil

Weekend links 618

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O Superman (1981), a seven-inch single on One Ten Records. Design by Laurie Anderson and Perry Hoberman.

• “…I was painting a picture of a garden at night. It had a lot of black and this green kind of coming out of the black, and I sat back, probably to take a smoke, looking at this painting, and I suddenly heard a wind coming from the painting, and the green started to move. And I thought, ‘Oh, a moving painting.’ And that experience led to cinema.” David Lynch talking to Josh Hitchens about living in Philadelphia.

• “This is the time and this is the record of the time.” Big Science, the album that propelled Laurie Anderson from performance artist to pop star, is 40 years old this month. Mat Colegate recalls his confused impression that the album was the work of a West Country folk singer, while Studs Terkel talked to Laurie Anderson about the album shortly after its release.

• At Public Domain Review: Kensy Cooperrider explores a millennium of “hand mnemonics”, “the variety of techniques practised by Buddhist monks, Latin linguists, and Renaissance musicians for remembering what might otherwise elude the mind.”

Ghosts in the Machine is an exhibition being hosted by Bower Ashton Library, Bristol, for World Book Night, 2022. 93 participants contributed ghost-related images for an accompanying artist’s book [PDF].

• “Sixty years after Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition, world’s fairs have largely fallen out of fashion in the US.” Grant Wong charts the rise and fall of world’s fairs.

• A trailer for Ennio: The Maestro, a feature-length documentary about Ennio Morricone by Giuseppe Tornatore.

• “The film Putin doesn’t want the world to see: Firebird, a gay love story about fighter pilots.”

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Andrei Tarkovsky Day.

• New music: Intersections by Specimens.

Schöne Hände (1977) by Cluster & Eno | Hands 2 Take (1981) by The Flying Lizards | Red Hand (1996) by Paul Schütze

Weekend links 604

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Poster by Chris Ware for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010).

• “He is a proponent of “slow cinema,” which is to say, movies that inspire reflection because they are unhurried but fluid, clear but framed by mystery.” Hilton Als on the metaphysical world of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

• “You could take off your clothes and lay in the sun, nude, with other guys looking for sex, right in Manhattan. And the police didn’t care. It was safe…” Stanley Stellar on his photographs of New York’s “Gay Piers”.

• At Wormwoodiana: An interview with RB Russell who talks about his new book, Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography.

• New music: Mysterium by Held By Trees; A Journey by Hinako Omori; Waves by The Soundcarriers.

• Get some cosmic perspective with an updated version of Charles & Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten.

• You Cut Your Hair and Made a Friend: Richard Conway on Ladytron’s 604 and Light & Magic.

• At Unquiet Things: The Tawdry Technicolor Horrors of Vicente B. Ballestar.

• Alexis Petridis compiles a list of the late James Mtume’s greatest recordings.

• Steven Heller’s Font of the Month is Valvolina.

Slow Motion (1978) by Ultravox | Slow And Low (1995) by Tetsu Inoue | Slow Burning Ghosts (1996) by Paul Schütze