Poster art by Nicholas Kouninos for Procol Harum / Pink Floyd / HP Lovecraft at the Fillmore, San Francisco, 1967.
• Take a break from so-called reality with Gruesome Shrewd, more queasy psychedelia by Moon Wiring Club. MWC’s Ian Hodgson described his intentions to Simon Reynolds in a Reynolds roundup which notes the 20th anniversary of the Ghost Box project. The label is apparently on hold for the moment but I have to admit that my interest waned some time after the 10th anniversary, when it became increasingly apparent that the ghost had fled the box. Reynolds ends his piece with a list of favourite GB recordings which I mostly agree with, although I’d shuffle the order and swap some entries with Pye Corner Audio.
• “‘You know that feeling you get when you’ve just gotten back from the dry cleaners a pair of slacks, Dacron slacks, and you reach your hand in a pocket and you feel those fuzzy sandwiches with your fingers? Well, that’s the feeling I’m looking for.’ I just nodded and replied, ‘OK, Dave, I know exactly what you mean.’” Barry Gifford remembers David Lynch.
• Aschenbach’s Last Journey: Lesley Chamberlain, the most recent translator of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, approaches the text by following the progress of its doomed protagonist from Brioni to the Venetian Lido. Related: Polly Barton describes to Katy Whimhurst some of the difficulties involved in translating Japanese fiction to English.
• From The Shout to Bait: Darran Anderson on the uses of sound in cinema. Rupert Hines’ soundtrack to The Shout has just been released by Buried Treasure.
• Video footage of modular synthesists Arc (Ian Boddy & Mark Shreeve) performing Arcturus live in 2004: part one | part two.
• At Aeon: “Black holes may be hiding something that changes everything,” says Gideon Koekoek.
• At the BFI: Michael Brooke selects 10 great Hungarian films.
• Steven Heller’s font of the year is Fillmore.
• Shout The Storm (1984) by :Zoviet:France: | Shout At The Devil (2002) by Jah Wobble & Temple Of Sound | Shout (2005) by Tod Dockstader
I watched THE SHOUT last September, and it became one of those pieces of art that has embedded itself in my consciousness, with difficulty in being replaced. For me, it is a nigh-perfect fusion of Eastern European existentialism and English eeriness.
Yes, it’s been one of my cult films for many years. I was pleased/relieved to acquire one of the deleted Network blu-rays a while ago. One of the UK video labels ought to put it out there again.
Have you read the Robert Graves story? I think the film is an improvement, not least because of the emphasis on sound.
I have not read the Graves story, though THE WHITE GODDESS has been sitting on my shelf for a decade. For reasons that I do not sufficiently know, I bracketed THE SHOUT with another film that I like, Mike Leigh’s NAKED. Thematically, these films are polar opposites (one is about mysticism, the other about nihilism), but the premise of these dark-clothed vagabond Englishmen wandering where they pleased (and often using their charisma to assert dominance over women) struck me as being parallels, despite the connexion being very tenuous.