July 2013 – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 169

Cover illustration by Gray Morrow, 1967. One of the less exploitative examples from a collection of hippy book covers.

• Ten Photographs by Alain Resnais: Mise en scène of Memory, Aesthetics of Silence by Ehsan Khoshbakht. In the comments to that post someone shows an old Penguin book with cover photos by Chris Marker. This confirms that the “C. Marker” whose name I found on the back of another Penguin book was indeed Monsieur Chat.

• There’s more (there’s always more…): Cornelius Castoriadis interviewed by Chris Marker in 1989, the complete footage of an interview edited down for Marker’s TV series L’héritage de la chouette (The Owl’s Legacy). Watch the series itself at YouTube.

• “A generation of innovators want to change the way we have sex and consume porn, but Google, Apple, and Amazon won’t let them,” says Andrea Garcia-Vargas. Related: Sam Biddle on how Tumblr is pushing porn into an internet sex ghetto.

• Mix of the week: the Chop Quietus Mix, “a jagged journey all the way from Broadcast to the uneasy thrum of Suicide, kosmische flavours from Popol Vuh and Cluster, Alexander Robotnik and many more.”

• Strange Flowers looked back at The Student of Prague: “the first art film, the first horror film and the first auteur film”, and now a century old.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins talked to animator Barry Purves about the pleasures and difficulties of creating animated films for adults.

• Mazzy Star released a song, California, from their new album which arrives in September. Can’t wait.

• Suzanne Ciani, “American Delia Derbyshire of the Atari Generation” explains synthesizers, 1980.

• Christer Strömholm‘s photos of Parisian transgender communities in the 1950s.

• What are These Giant Concrete Arrows Across the American Landscape?

• How Kiyoshi Izumi built the psych ward of the future by dropping acid.

• Alan Moore: The revolution will be crowd-funded.

• Fuck Yeah Mazzy Star

• Suzanne Ciani: Lixiviation | The First Wave—Birth Of Venus (1982) | The Eighth Wave (1986)

Pay It All Back

Two things of interest to William Burroughs aficionados are looking for funding this month. The Burroughs Century is an event being planned to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Burroughs birth next year in Bloomington, Indiana:

We are calling this event the Burroughs Century, but we are not looking backward; rather, we believe that the Burroughs Century is ongoing, that we are in the midst of it, and we intend to stage an event that indicates the full range of that continuing influence, including a film series, art and literature exhibits, speakers and panels, musical performances, and more.

There’s more detail at Indiegogo. The organiser of the event, Charles Cannon, has expressed an interest in showing some of the Wild Boys portfolio which I keep tinkering with. Having a deadline to work towards may compel me to finish some of those pieces.

I’ve already mentioned Alex Harvey’s computer game-in-progress, Tangiers, but the game now has a Kickstarter fund which Harvey and co. are hoping will push their work to completion. The Burroughs influence here is more oblique since this is an original creation but it’s still a promising development in a medium with a tendency to rely on Hollywood and genre stereotypes for its scenarios:

You play an outsider to the world, an entity with a singular, enigmatic goal – to find and dispose of five other beings. Your arrival here has fractured the world; the city that these other beings resided in is now broken into shards across a broken, bleak landscape.

You must infiltrate these cities, searching to discover your marks – investigating both precisely who, and where. Keeping to the shadows is to be encouraged – reality here is a fragile place. Your interactions with the world cause it to fall apart. In homage to Burrough’s cut-up technique, the world collapses and rebuilds itself the more you interact with it – future areas rebuilt with the fragments and personality of places you mistreated. From this every play-through will, subtly or drastically, be unique to you.

Find out more at the game’s Kickstarter page.

Summer

Summer (1896) by Alphonse Mucha.

With the temperature rising inexorably throughout the week—today it hit 30C—it’s been easy to identify with Alphonse Mucha’s languid spirit of summer, and the urge to drape yourself on a branch beside some water. Mucha produced many picture series on different themes, with several attempts at depicting the seasons. This is from the first series in 1896, and is the one I prefer over all the others. The 1903 version deploys all the traditional harvest iconography but also looks much too sedate and overdressed for warm weather; Summer 1896 is suitably enervated and dishevelled. She even looks as though she may be a little horny although it’s unlikely she’d want to do much about that. Her sister spirits may be seen here.

Nathanial Krill at the Time Node

Nathanial Krill at the Time Node (1978) by Richard Glyn Jones and Robert Meadley.

Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine resumed publication in 1978 after a hiatus of two years following the end of its New Worlds Quarterly paperback format. The issues for the years 1978 and 79 are the oddest in the entire run of the magazine. Issue 214 had the magazine title in Russian, a cover illustration of Union Jack anti-hero Zenith the Albino, and promised to deliver “Politics—Sport—Science”; issue 213 had an Empire-era cover, and contents which mostly dispensed with written fiction in favour of visual features such as newspaper pages from parallel time streams, or satirical collage.

Among the satire there was this two-page piece by Richard Glyn Jones and Robert Meadley which is probably the closest the magazine came to what people now call steampunk. I say probably because many of Moorcock’s alternate histories were doing in the late 60s and early 70s what steampunk does today, although not all of these appeared in NW. Nathanial Krill at the Time Node has the additional interest for me in being another example of the use of period engravings for fantastic or satirical ends, and one that few people will have seen. Richard Glyn Jones was a regular illustration contributor to New Worlds; Robert Meadley had four short stories in New Worlds Quarterly. Ten years ago I designed Meadley’s essay collection, A Tea Dance At Savoy. He’s a great writer, I keep hoping we’ll see more of his work one day.

The Residents: Twenty Twisted Questions

The art/music/performance group known as The Residents has been pushing their work into the media landscape for over 40 years but you could be forgiven for not knowing this. The Residents were delving into their own brand of the sinister and absurd years before the world had heard of David Lynch, but unlike Lynch their work has never been gained the mass audience that feature film and network television offers. The Residents were independent record producers before punk, in part because the music on their early albums was so far from the mainstream that few record companies would have dared take the risk.

Hello Skinny (1980).

Twenty Twisted Questions (1992) is a laserdisc compilation of their early films and music videos which can now be viewed at Ubuweb. I’ve always preferred the earlier material (up to The Mole Show), in part because its analogue nature retains a strangeness that the later productions lack. You get the impression of them carving out new territory on the earlier albums; later on things seemed to become more formulaic as they gained a wider audience. The laserdisc selection covers the first 20 years so you can judge for yourself. My favourites among the films are Hello Skinny, and the four One-Minute Movies from The Commercial Album (1980). If you can’t take all of it, at least stick around to watch those.

One-Minute Movies: The Act Of Being Polite (1980).