A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Mountain Voices.
In which the illustrator of Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem illustrates six ballads or lieder by Heinrich Heine. These etchings don’t bear comparison to Steiner-Prag’s peerless Golem illustrations, or those for his illustrated Poe, but they’re good to see even if the meaning remains obscure.
Man Behind a Window.
The Dream.
The Flying Demon (1889).
The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is also the season of ghosts, spooks and spectres, so this post continues the Japanese trend of the past few days with a selection from New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892). The more I look at Yoshitoshi’s print series the more I like them; the draughtsmanship is stunning, while the composition and graphic effects are persistently inventive. The series subjects range through portraits of warriors and generals, gory crime scenes (Twenty-Eight Famous Murders with Verses), A Collection of Desires, and One Hundred Aspects of the Moon. New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts was a later series produced from 1889 to 1892, and is notable as much for its demons as for its aesthetic qualities. Also of note is the frayed edges Yoshitoshi gives to each of the pictures, an effect I’ve not seen before in Japanese prints.
The Killing of a Nue (1890).
Skulls at Furuhara (1890).
El Hotel Satina (2006) by Oscar Sanmartin.
• Andrew Kötting’s By Our Selves is “a melancholy, maverick film” says David Jays. With Toby Jones following in the footsteps of poet John Clare, Iain Sinclair in a goat mask, and Alan Moore warning about the “vision sump” of Northampton.
• “Shunga means ‘spring pictures’. They depict sometimes spectacular sexual contortions and come imbued with the power of taboo. For years they have largely been out of sight—until now.” Related: shunga prints at Ukiyoe Gallery.
• “Who else could link Smokey Robinson and JG Ballard, Iggy Pop and Josephine Baker, James Bond and Stephen Sondheim, Gary Numan and Johnny Cash, Tricky and Tom Moulton…” Grace Jones is the best, says Joe Muggs.
Ballardian space – what he called “inner space” to differentiate it from the science fiction that concerned itself with distant planets and space rockets – is in fact a fusion of inner and outer space. There is no “out there” totally separate from his characters; just as there is no exclusively private, isolated inner life. His most psychologically fulfilled characters look to transcend their physical surroundings, however hostile, by embracing them.
Chris Hall on High-Rise by JG Ballard
• “In March 1984, Jorge Luis Borges began a series of radio ‘dialogues’ with the Argentinian poet and essayist Osvaldo Ferrari, which have now been translated into English for the first time.”
• “I came up with a couple of tunes, literally in my bedroom. People think of bedroom recordings as a modern, laptop invention. It wasn’t.” Daniel Miller on the accidental success of Mute Records.
• “It was in Prague that I first awoke.” Strange Flowers on Gustav Meyrink’s life in Prague.
• At 50 Watts: Stencilled ornament and illustration by William Addison Dwiggins.
• Mix of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. X by David Colohan.
• Wyrd Daze, Lvl2 Issue 4, is free and brimming with the weird.
• Mythology, a new series of drawings by Howard Hardiman.
• Spike Jones is the best, says MetaFilter.
• Peacocks at National Geographic.
• Warm Leatherette (1980) by Grace Jones | Warm Leatherette (1998) by Chicks On Speed | Warm Leatherette (2013) by Foetus
I’ve been reading Thomas Ligotti for the past week so here’s something Ligottian: a short film performed by life-size wooden puppets. Svankmajer’s production from 1969 conveys the Don Juan legend with actors masquerading as traditional Czech marionettes, the proceedings being scored by music from the great Zdenek Liska. No English subtitles on this one so if you don’t speak Czech or Russian you can either relish the mystery or take it as a prompt to buy a DVD. While we’re on the subject of Ligotti, the new Penguin edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer/Grimscribe is published next week. I recommend it.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
• Two sides of Liska
• The Torchbearer by Václav Svankmajer
Autumn Moon At Ishiyama Temple (c. 1834) by Hiroshige.
The moon is a continual feature in Japanese landscape prints, and the following selection is only a small sample of the many beautiful examples that may be found on this print site. See also this site, and Yoshitoshi’s stunning series, One Hundred Aspects of the Moon.
Rising Moon at Nagase (no date) Artist unknown.
Rising Moon at Katase River (1907) by Shiron Kasamatsu.