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Weekend links 124

Couple with Clock Tower (2011) by Louise Despont.

Assuming such a thing doesn’t already exist, there’s a micro-thesis to be written about the associations between the musicians of Germany’s Krautrock/Kosmische music scene in the early 1970s and the directors of the New German Cinema. I’d not seen this clip before which shows the mighty Amon Düül II jamming briefly in Fassbinder’s The Niklashausen Journey, a bizarre agitprop TV movie made in 1970. More familiar is the low-budget short that Wim Wenders helped photograph a year earlier showing the Düül performing Phallus Dei. Wenders later commissioned Can to provide music for the final scene of Alice in the Cities. And this is before you get to Werner Herzog’s lengthy relationship with Popol Vuh which includes this memorable moment. Any others out there that I’ve missed?

• Album sleeves in their original locations. And speaking of album sleeves, photo prints of some very famous cover designs by Storm Thorgerson will be on display at the Public Works Gallery, Chicago, throughout September and October.

• Crazy for kittehs: the quest to find the purring heart of cat videos: Gideon Lewis-Kraus goes where few journalists dare to tread. Also at Wired, the same writer explores the Cat Cafés of Tokyo.

• The City of Rotted Names, a “shamelessly Joycian cubist fantasy” by Hal Duncan, available to read in a variety of formats on a pay-as-thou-wilt basis until Monday only.

• Jailhouse rockers: How The Prisoner inspired artists from The Beatles to Richard Hawley.

• How To Survive A Plague, a documentary about HIV/AIDS activism in the US.

• Deborah Harry: hippy girl in 1968, punk in 1976, and Giger-woman in 1981.

• Alan Garner answers readers’ questions about his new novel, Boneland.

• For steampunk aficionados: ‘COG’nitive Dreams by Dana Mattocks.

• David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Madonna & Asparagus: Kraftwerk in 1976.

• New music videos: Goddess Eyes I by Julia Holter | Sulphurdew by Ufomammut | Warm Leatherette by Laibach.

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder

A great title. As usual I came across this whilst searching for something else. Something about this was familiar but I haven’t read the book, and I suspect it will be one of those where the title proves a lot more evocative than the narrative. The author was a Canadian writer, James De Mille (1833–1880), and this novel of all his works is the most well-known for its predating more famous fantasy novels by H. Rider Haggard. Wikipedia has a précis:

The satiric and fantastic romance is set in an imaginary semi-tropical land in Antarctica inhabited by prehistoric monsters and a cult of death-worshipers called the Kosekin. Begun many years before it was published, it is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and anticipates the exotic locale and fantasy-adventure elements of works of the “Lost World genre” such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot, as well as innumerable prehistoric world movies based loosely on these and other works. The title and locale were inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s Ms. Found in a Bottle.

The illustrations are by Gilbert Gaul from the story’s serialisation in Harper’s Weekly in 1888. The best one shows a ride on a huge pterodactyl-like creature called an athaleb that makes me think of the ride on the shrowk in David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, albeit without the erotic fervour of Lindsay’s episode. Fervour or no, the road to Lindsay’s philosophical weirdness begins with early novels such as this. De Mille’s book may be browsed here or downloaded here.

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Raymond Bertrand paintings

Scanning some of my work today I thought I’d follow yesterday’s post with a few scans of the colour plates in the second Eric Losfeld volume of Bertrand’s work, Dessins Erotiques II (1971). None of the pictures in the book are titled, and there’s little detail either about their production. Among the colour works is the Boschian piece above which for once doesn’t have one of the artist’s strange women as its sole subject. A few more scans from the same book can be seen at this earlier post.

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Raymond Bertrand’s science fiction covers

Work by the elusive French artist Raymond Bertrand has appeared here before although the art continues to be more visible (if obscure) than the man himself. Bertrand’s most famous drawings are the naked women that appeared on the cover of issue 28 of Oz magazine, the notorious School Kids Issue, but I don’t think he was credited for the usage and his name is never mentioned when the magazine is discussed. Looking for information about the Chute Libre books at French SF site Noosfere led me to an entry for Bertrand’s work. The list doesn’t include any of the book collections of his drawings but does have these magazine covers which feature some pieces I hadn’t seen before.

Fiction was the leading French SF magazine, and sported a fascinating range of cover art especially from the mid-60s on. Artists at that time included Philippe Druillet and Philippe Caza, both of whom would become big names in the comics world a few years later. Galaxie was the French edition of American magazine Galaxy, and featured unique material among its translations of Anglophone works. Being French, there’s a greater amount of flesh on display than you’d find on magazine covers in the US and UK; some of this is as salacious as anything else from the period although at least one of the artists drawing naked females was a woman, Sophie Busson. Naked females emerging from—or being absorbed by—strange vegetation, polyps or aquatic organisms were Bertrand’s métier so that’s mostly what one finds here. Few of the covers seem to relate to the magazine’s contents, the artists appear to have been free to draw what they liked; in the case of Druillet that means his usual Lovecraftian architecture. An exception is issue 198 of Fiction which has an article about Bertrand’s work by Jacques Chambon: Raymond Bertrand ou de l’amour de l’art à l’art de l’amour. I’m hoping now that someone might be good enough to translate that piece for us lazy Anglophones.

And speaking of former Oz artists, Renaud Leon left a message recently with news that YouTube now has a channel featuring many examples of Jim Leon’s remarkable paintings.

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Weekend links 123

La Perspective Curieuse (1663) by Jean François Nicéron. From Curious Perspectives at BibliOdyssey.

• 1612 Underture is a forthcoming album by The Eccentronic Research Council and Maxine Peake which extends the electronics + occult concept to encompass Kraftwerk and the Pendle Witches. The Quietus has a review of their album, and an interview and report about a recent live performance (I missed the latter, unfortunately), while the Guardian’s interview with the splendid Ms Peake reveals that “musically, her tastes range from Japanese black metal, garage rock and folk, to techno and psychobilly.” The famous Lancashire witches also happen to be the subject of Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel, The Daylight Gate.

• Yet more Marker: The Owl’s Legacy: Chris Marker’s 13-Part Search for Western Culture’s Foundations in Ancient Greece, and J. Hoberman on The Lost Futures of Chris Marker.

• Dr Oliver Sacks talks about how hallucinogenic drugs helped him empathize with his patients.

Paulo Coelho’s ill-judged Joyce-bashing has made him a butt of scorn this week, but he’s a safe target because, with books that multitask a little too openly as self-help manuals, he’s not so clubbable. Unlike, say, Ian McEwan, who not-that-differently declared against “the dead hand of modernism“, for all the world as if the dominant literary mode in post-war England was Steinian experimentation or some Albion Oulipo, against which young Turks hold out with limpidly observed interiority, decodable metaphors, strained middle-class relationships and eternal truths of the human condition(TM).

China Miéville on the always contentious future of the novel.

• The Foliate Head: a new book by Marly Youmans with illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

• Hysterical Literature: Session Two: Alicia reads from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

• Dreaming in Dirigibles: The Airship Postcard Albums of Lord Ventry.

• The Art of the Literary Fake (with Violin) by Jeff VanderMeer.

• RIP Neil Armstrong, first human on the Moon.

• Macho Man: Morgan Meis on Robert Hughes.

• Book covers by Hannes Bok.

• This Is Now!

• Squid Moth

• Lunar Rhapsody (1947) by Dr Samuel J. Hoffman | Lunar Musick Suite (1976) by Steve Hillage | Back Side Of The Moon (Steve Hillage’s Under Water Deep Space Remix) (1991) by The Orb.