Weekend links 193

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A Problem Glyph by Eliza Gauger. Problem Glyphs are “symbolic illustrations … drawn in response to problems sent in by tumblr users”.

Kosmische Night takes place at the Museum of Bath at Work, Bath, Somerset, on January 25th (Rescheduled to February 22nd).  “…a celebration of all things Teutonic for anyone who enjoys Neu!, Can, Tangerine Dream, Stockhausen and Kraftwerk,” say the organisers. Also on the bill, The Electric Pentacle, a Carnacki-esque collaboration between Narco Lounge Combo and The Levels.

• Shock Headed Peters’ Fear Engine II: Almost As If It Had Never Happened. Joe Banks on Karl Blake, “…one of the most fascinating and colourful characters to emerge from the fertile loam of the post-punk scene”.

• “The great question in the film and the tale is not the existence of the ghosts but the way the governess understands their no-longer-lived lives and desires.” Michael Wood on The Innocents.

Nobody, however, is a greater authority on the intersection of porn and alternative spirituality than Annie Sprinkle. Beginning as a prostitute in the 1960s and 70s, she entered porn in the pre-AIDS era and made over two hundred films. She then jumped into a career as a sex-positive author and educator, which brought her into close conflict not only with feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, but also right-wing patriarch Jesse Helms, who denounced one of her sex magick performance pieces on the floor of the Senate. For Sprinkle, both sexuality and performance are explicitly spiritual and magical, part of her role as a cultural shaman.

In the Valley of the Porn Witches by Jason Louv.

Stars of the Lid and Wordless Music Orchestra playing for two hours last month at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Rick Poynor on the late Martin Sharp’s contributions to People, Politics and Pop: Australians in the Sixties (1968) by Craig McGregor.

Maggie Greene on The Woman in Green: A Chinese Ghost Tale from Mao to Ming, 1981–1381.

• “TED actually stands for: middlebrow megachurch infotainment,” says Benjamin H Bratton.

Geoff Manaugh on how corpses helped shape the London Underground.

Tony White on Eduardo Paolozzi at New Worlds by David Brittain.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 102 by Frank Bretschneider.

• At Dangerous Minds: film of Syd Barrett‘s first psychedelic trip.

NYPL Wire: a New York Public Library Tumblr.

Microbial art by Eshel Ben-Jacob and others.

Interstellar Rock: Kosmische Musik (1974) by The Cosmic Jokers | I, Bloodbrother Be (1984) by Shock Headed Peters | Obscene and Pornographic Art (1991) by Bongwater

Sherbet and Sodomy

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Cover art by Coker.

We had Shock Headed Peters walking through Sodom yesterday so this novel from 1971 seems like a fitting follow-up. The eye-catching title is no doubt an allusion to Byron’s description of Turkish baths as “marble palaces of sherbet and sodomy”, an epithet which one imagines sent generations of sweet-toothed Uranians trekking to Constantinople throughout the 19th century. I’d seen the cover of this book before on sites which collect the gay fiction of the late Sixties and early Seventies—that doubly-phallic tower makes a good match for the cover of Bugger Boy—but I don’t recall reading a description of the contents before. Homobilia has an extract from the opening page:

My name is Jud. I am eighteen and a half. I was born from the felicitous conjunction of an anthropologist and an ethnologist under the sign of Capricorn. I have been called cute, handsome, pretty, and good-looking; actually, I am beautiful… my nose is classically English, along the line of Reynolds, maybe with a little Caravaggio thrown in around the nostrils. My athletic adolescence on the swimming team at Sterling High has given me a slender muscular body… my eyes are South Pacific blue. I have read Hesiod. I masturbate regularly. I have no concept of money or its value. I try to keep my farts silent. I have juvenile down on my ass. I have read the minor Elizabethan poets and I have looked at my anal sphincter in the mirror. Until last week I considered myself heterosexual…

Four art and literatures references in a single paragraph…yes, I’m intrigued. The book is out of print, unfortunately, but searching at Abebooks reveals copies for sale and an additional description:

How does a handsome young cat, newly out and grooving on the gay scene of Greenwich village, suddenly find himself in the silken clutches of El-Dahabi, an Arab sect which celebrates the attainment of perfect love through pain and submission?

So now the Byron reference makes sense. Many of these gay paperbacks were written under nommes de plume and IV Ebbing may well be another of these, there’s certainly no other reference to he (or, indeed, she…) on the web aside from this title. There’s a notable dearth of information about the fiction which emerged in a flood after the first flush of liberation in the late Sixties, when numerous titles for lesbians and gay men were published as cheap paperbacks. Strange Sisters and Gay on the Range document the cover art but I’d like to see a site which told us more about the writers and, where possible, the books themselves. The history of all kinds of pulp fiction has been extensively chronicled; isn’t it time that someone did the same for gay erotica?

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Bugger Boy
Gay book covers

Weekend links 2

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A picture for embittered lovers.

Among other things this week I’ve been working on the design for another CD featuring photos by Liz Eve, a photographer whose pictures are always a pleasure to use. (Our earlier encounters can be seen here, here and here.) The latest set have this anti-Valentine for an eye-popping cover image. I’ll be posting the finished layouts once everything is approved by the label.

Crash: JG Ballard’s artistic legacy. Iain Sinclair on Ballard and a new art exhibition inspired by the author’s fiction.

• More art: Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ Artlog is essential reading. Lots of insights into his beautiful work.

Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges will be released in an expanded edition on April 27th with outtakes, documentary, book and other extras.

• Sonic Youth dude and fellow Arthurian Thurston Moore has a blog.

• “That’s all it comes down to in the end, though, isn’t it? Put it in and jiggle it about a bit.” Alan Bennett & John Fortune discuss sex. A hoot.

• “I wanna walk through Sodom with a boy on my arm / Who’s so damn pretty I don’t know where I am…” A song from 1984 for Valentine’s Day: I, Bloodbrother Be (£4,000 Love Letter) by Shock Headed Peters.