Tennessee Williams – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 467

Artwork by Kuldar Leement (maybe…I’ve yet to see a credit for this).

• In Search Of Hades: The Virgin Recordings 1973–1979, is a retrospective box set comprising 16 CDs and 2 blu-ray discs devoted to the first phase of Tangerine Dream’s output on the Virgin label. For enthusiasts of the group’s Virgin recordings (myself among them) this is very welcome, especially for the albums being given the Steven Wilson remix treatment, and the wealth of rare and unreleased material. In addition to several live concerts the box will include the complete Oedipus Tyrannus theatre soundtrack, the overture of which appeared on a compilation in 1975 but has since been unavailable outside bootlegs. Baroque 2 is a taster of the unheard soundtrack. The box itself will be released on 14th June. Related: Edgar Froese interviewed on a US radio station in 1974. Among the topics of discussion are German music of the time, Tangerine Dream’s dissatisfaction with Ohr Records, and their happiness at moving to Virgin.

• “As the witch-burning begins, the image gradually dissolves into a stroboscopic onslaught of neon colours accompanied by rapid, high-pitched ringing and a thundering drone.” Don’t come to Gaspar Noé for social realism. Lux Aeterna is his new thing.

• An ode to the ultimate camp film: Nathalie Atkinson on Boom!, Joseph Losey’s adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, and (unsurprisingly) one of John Waters’ favourites.

“Adhesive,” a term borrowed from phrenology, was Whitman’s synonym for homosexuality. According to gay studies pioneer William A. Percy, “the term became part of the special vocabulary of the emerging homosexual subculture of the nineteenth century,” which Whitman and his coterie would have understood. Despite Whitman’s private vows to resist temptation, and to be more aloof, he continued to court young men until he died. One of the final photos of Whitman, taken at the Camden docks in 1890, shows the poet with his handsome male nurse Warren Fritzinger. “I like to look at him—he is health to look at: young, strong, lithe,” Whitman told Traubel.

Jeremy Lybarger on Walt Whitman’s boys

• Psychedelic Promos & Radio Spots: 8 volumes, over 500 tracks, all free downloads. Hear many of the most popular groups of the late 60s shilling for commercial radio stations.

• Hildur Gudnadóttir used only sounds from a nuclear plant in her score for Chernobyl.

• US museums of the week: Poster House, NYC, and The Moogseum, Asheville, NC.

• “Yes, witches are real,” says Pam Grossman, “I know because I am one.”

• Photos by Chas Gerretsen from the set of Apocalypse Now.

• Geeta Dayal on the brainwave music of David Rosenboom.

• Mix of the week: Self-Titled NE285 Mix by Kevin Martin.

• RIP Roky Erickson

• Boom Boom (1961) by John Lee Hooker | Boom Stix (1962) by Curley & The Jades | Boom! (1992) by The Grid

Weekend links 52

Three Seekers (2009) by Kelly Louise Judd.

• Kevin Sessums talked to Elizabeth Taylor in 1997 about Tennessee Williams, her AIDS activism and related matters. Other related matters: Catholics lead the way on same-sex marriage and Mahatma Gandhi was in love with a German body-builder named Hermann.

• Cray porn (the computer, that is) at Barnbrook Design as the CD package for Interplay by John Foxx and The Maths is unveiled.

• Michael Rother and Friends Play the Music Of Neu! A stream of an hour-long concert from August 2010.

One of the tragedies of drug prohibition is that we have never developed a culture in which young people can learn how to use powerful drugs properly from older, wiser and more experienced psychonauts. I count myself lucky to have encountered such good teachers to guide me with such drugs as LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA and mescaline.

Dr Susan Blackmore on using LSD.

• Another Dispatch in a World of Multiple Veils, a new release by Arkhonia.

• Micromachina by Scott Bain “examines what makes the insect world tick”.

• Down with art!: the age of manifestos. Related: The Manifesto Manifesto.

• John Patterson: “We’re all living in the future as seen by Philip K Dick.”

• Music To Play In The Dark: A Wake For Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson.

• Albert Einstein, Radical: A Political Profile.

• Was “God’s Wife” edited out of the Bible?

• Porn made for women, by women.

• Hallogallo (1972) by Neu! | Opa-Loka (1975) by Hawkwind | Jenny Ondioline (1993) by Stereolab | Hallogallo (1997) by Porcupine Tree.

The Vengeance of Nitocris

Cover illustration by CC Senf.

In her mind the queen Nitocris was seeing a ghastly picture. It was the picture of a room of orgy and feasting suddenly converted into a room of terror and horror, human beings one moment drunken and lustful, the next screaming in the seizure of sudden and awful death. If any of those present had been empowered to see also that picture of dire horror, they would have clambered wildly to make their escape. But none was so empowered.

Everyone today will be marking the Tennessee Williams centenary by noting his theatre work, of course, or his subversive celebration of outsiders and, yes, the gays. I’ll confine myself to reminding people that Williams’ first published work was a short story entitled The Vengeance of Nitocris in Weird Tales for August 1928, written when he was only 16. The story reads like the work of a teenager but editor Farnsworth Wright evidently enjoyed an atmosphere of lurid Egyptian melodrama which you can appraise for yourself here. Also in this issue was the debut appearance of Robert E Howard’s Solomon Kane, and The Demoiselle d’Ys by Robert Chambers. Seeing the name Nitocris I have to wonder whether Williams chose it after reading HP Lovecraft who used the name twice in earlier stories published in the same magazine, Imprisoned With the Pharaohs (1924) and The Outsider (1926). That last piece was one of Lovecraft’s most popular tales, and it’s easy to imagine its grotesque parable of alienation making an impression on a would-be writer who, as a gay youth, would have looked upon himself as another kind of outsider.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The King in Yellow

The glass menagerie

Not the play by Tennessee Williams, rather the glass sculptures of sea creatures by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.

Leopold (1822–1895) and Rudolf (1857–1939) Blaschka were a father and son partnership, originally from Bohemia. Their work making spectacular glass models of natural history objects began in 1857, in Germany. Rudolf joined his father in business in 1876 and after 1880 there were so many orders for their glass models that this became their sole business.

The Blaschkas are best known for their glass flowers, made from 1886 to 1936. Many of these are now displayed in the Botanical Museum of Harvard University. After his father’s death in 1895, Rudolf continued to make glass flowers. However, during their lifetimes they also made many accurate models of mainly marine animals. Dying with no children, their glass-working secrets were not passed on.

(More photos like this here.)

Looking at these sculptures I was curious to know whether they worked from real specimens or not. They may have used some for reference but I suspected many of their works were based on the famous colour plates of sea creatures, radiolaria, and so on, in Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (1899–1904). A quick search confirms this, Haeckel was consulted, as were earlier scientific studies such as Philip Gosse’s Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast (1853) and GB Sowerby’s Popular History of the Aquarium of Marine and Fresh-Water Animals and Plants (1857).

(More photos like this here.)

Nancy Marie Brown writes about the Blaschka’s glass flowers (and what’s known of their working methods) here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Bowes Swan