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 65

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From Light Beyond Sound, a new series of works by Tatiana Plakhova.

“The invasion philosophy of the Olympic Park strikes me as just like the invasion philosophy behind going into Iraq,” he says, “or anywhere else that you blast into, put up the fence, establish the Green Zone, explain everything, put it all into this lovely eco-terminology…” Iain Sinclair

• Iain Sinclair has a new book out, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project, a critique of the tendency of British governments to waste money on white elephant projects. He’s visited this territory before in Sorry Meniscus, the small book/essay about the Millennium Dome. That book grew out of a piece for the London Review of Books which can be read here. Among the current round of interviews there’s this piece in which the title of the book is explained, and a talk with John Walsh at The Independent where he describes how the site for the 2012 Olympics has destroyed his patch of London.

A celebration of the writing and art of Mervyn Peake: “Mervyn Peake, creator of Gormenghast, is now recognised as a brilliant novelist and artist. Michael Moorcock, China Miéville, Hilary Spurling and AL Kennedy celebrate his achievements.”

• Looking like a children’s book invaded by the inhabitants of alchemical engravings, Die Geburtstagsreise (The Birthday Trip, 1976) by Monika Beisner.

• At AnOther mag this week: The ear in Blue Velvet and publisher Peter Owen on Salvador Dalí’s novel Hidden Faces.

Four Days, Four Recordings by Jon Brooks aka The Advisory Circle. Related: The Hauntological Society.

Leaving it to Chance: maverick director Nicolas Roeg on Don’t Look Now.

Brian Eno: “This is my problem with Tracey Emin; who fucking cares?”

• Scans of Max Ernst’s masterwork Une Semaine de Bonté.

Susie Bright: Mapping the Erotic and the Revolutionary.

How to Become a Sensuous Witch, 1971.

The View From Her Room (1982) by Weekend | Weekend live on the OGWT (October, 1982) • Gormenghast Drift (1992) by Irmin Schmidt.