John – Page 582 – { feuilleton }

Lunation: Art on the Moon

Image by Noah Doely.

Steve Moore’s lunarian occult novel Somnium was published a couple of months ago, and now we have an art exhibition exploring similar themes. Lunation: Art on the Moon is a group show at Observatory, Brooklyn, NYC which opens on January 7th:

Artists portray the moon as a source of danger and power, and latter-day sorceresses and men of magic call up to that heavenly lamp, seeking to transcend the ordinary night. For them, the old myths have not changed so much: the moon is still a secret mirror, showing in pale light how the familiar contains always an element of the unexpected…

Participants include Grace Baxter, Jesse Bransford, Susan Crawford, Noah Doely, Joanna Ebenstein, Theo Ellsworth, Michelle Enemark, Ted Enik, Jesse Gelaznik, Ethan Gould, Dr. Gary Greenberg, Pam Grossman, Maria Liebana, Gerald Marks, Chad Merritt, Heidi Neilson, G.F. Newland, Rebeca Olguín, Kathryn Pierce, Lado Pochkhua, Dylan Thuras, Binky Walker, James Walsh and Julianne Zaleta.

Lunation: Art on the Moon runs to the end of February, 2012.

The Lake at Night by Jesse Gelaznik (2011).

Salvio Hexia by Chad Merritt (2011).

A gigantic space-man has landed on the moon, but why?! by Theo Ellsworth (2011).

Luna by Jesse Bransford (2009).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Somnium by Steve Moore
• Blood on the Moon
• Filippo Morghen’s Voyage to the Moon

Cthulhu for sale

As promised last month, my latest piece of Cthulhu art has spawned itself over a range of CafePress products including posters, cards, T-shirts and CafePress’s recent line of iPod/iPad cases. For the latter items and the apparel I’ve used the simpler version of the drawing above. See the artwork larger size here.

And it’s customary at the beginning of January to reduce the Coulthart calendars to a dollar above their base price. Psychedelic Wonderland and Through the Psychedelic Looking-Glass for 2012 can now be had for $17.99/£13.50/€16.00 each. My thanks to everyone who bought copies before Christmas.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Weekend links: 2012 edition

The Hand of Fate, Life magazine, October, 1912. Artist unknown.

• In Search of Barney Bubbles: the great graphic designer is profiled on BBC Radio 4, Monday, 2nd January. And speaking of album cover designers, Cool Hunting talked to Storm Thorgerson about his work.

• FACT mix 310 is a hugely eclectic two-parter from Moon Wiring Club. Grab it while it’s still available. And there’s also Solstmas 2011/2: The Final Countdown, a mix by El Minko Misterioso.

• One of the music events of the new year will be the release of Captain Beefheart’s Bat Chain Puller album. Pre-order it here.

In 1972, at the age of thirty-one, [Fred] Halsted released L.A. Plays Itself, a film which drew upon Kenneth Anger’s surrealist eroto-expressionism, and went way beyond Anger’s sublimated homoeroticism to explicitly portray gay male S/M sex. In 1969, when Halsted first decided to make a sexually explicit film, he decided to create a part for himself, and then be that part.

Halsted Plays Himself by William E. Jones reviewed at Lambda Literary

• Lunar Rover: An interview with Steve Moore and extract from Somnium.

• Battersea Power Station, a graveyard of architectural schemes.

Editors might admire a fine book, but are overridden by marketing and accounting departments who now have the final say. I know of a novel that wasn’t accepted by one publisher after the manuscript was first submitted to W.H. Smith, who said that it wouldn’t sell enough.

Jenny Diski on the state of fiction publishing in the UK

• EU copyright on James Joyce‘s works ended at midnight.

• Dressed to Kill: Dispelling the Myths of Men in Drag.

• The Geology of the Mountains of Madness

• Mandala of the Day

• Chomeography

• The Floppy Boot Stomp (1978 mix) by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band.

Let England Shake

Design by Michelle Henning, drawings by PJ Harvey.

An album that’s been a continual visitor to the Coulthart CD player over the past few months, Let England Shake was consciously composed like George Crumb’s Black Angels “in time of war”, referencing not only wars present but those long past. Coiled around the bellicose theme is a portrait of a nation whose patriotism is built on sand. England did shake this year, and the unavoidable correlation of PJ Harvey‘s words with the events of the summer makes her album stand in relation to 2011 the way The Specials’ Ghost Town did to 1981.

In addition to the CD, Let England Shake also comes as a DVD of a dozen short films by photographer Seamus Murphy, one film for each song. Harvey and Murphy have very generously put the full set on YouTube in HD. Follow the links below.

Let England Shake

The Last Living Rose

The Glorious Land

Continue reading “Let England Shake”

The weekend artists

Flower Me Gently (2010) by Linn Olofsdotter.

Yes, this is one of those lazy end-of-year retrospectives, a look back at all the artists whose work was highlighted in the weekend posts for 2011. Thanks to BibliOdyssey, Form is Void and 50 Watts for so often pointing the way.

Blasphemous Rumours (2009/2010) by Ryan Martin. The artist now has a dedicated site for his paintings.

DG-2499 (1975) by the fantastic (in every sense of the word) Zdzisław Beksiński (1929–2005). See the Dmochowski Gallery for a comprehensive collection of the artist’s work.

Continue reading “The weekend artists”