A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Painting
Men Shall Know Nothing of This (1923) by Max Ernst.
Happy new year. 02023? Read this.
Taj Mahal by Moonlight (1923) by Charles W. Bartlett.
The Road, Winter Morning (1923) by George Clausen.
Hélice (1923) by Robert Delaunay.
Composition 1923–1924 by Theo van Doesburg.
Landscape with Antiquities (1955) By Ithell Colquhoun.
• “The ontological horror at the core of these stories is that the stone–which represents the natural world and the uses we carve out for it–is unknowable. It’s been here, affecting the land, whether erected as a monument or laid as bricks, for longer than we can fathom, and its inaccessible past has some frightening bearing on the present.” Sean McGeady on 50 years of stone-tape theory, from Nigel Kneale to Ben Wheatley. Also a reminder that Christmas ghosts on TV could be more than another adaptation of MR James.
• “Midnight is the time when one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the Great Works which every gentleman ought to have read but which some of us have not. For there is almost as much clotted nonsense written about literature as there is about theology.” At Wormwoodiana: That Black-Edged Light: A Note on HM Tomlinson.
• “Anxious but stubborn herself, she was a lucid observer of social awkwardness, her subject matter in her books being primarily worry: at disasters real and imagined (comet-fall, floods, unplanned chaos), but also at small-scale domestic panics (such as how to mollify unwanted guests).” Mark Sinker reviewing Tove Jansson, a new biography by Paul Gravett.
• Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2022. Thanks again for the link here!
• “A is for Alphabet and Architecture.” Public Domain Review now has an index. Rather slight but still useful.
• Ju-on: The Curse and four other Y2K J-Horror movies you may have missed: a list by James Balmont.
• At Smithsonian Magazine: Listen to the sound of a dust devil swirling around on Mars.
• Unquiet Things offers the latest accumulation of Intermittent Eyeball Fodder.
• Stone God (1957) by Martin Denny | Sanctuary Stone (1973) by Midwinter | Children Of Stone (2006) by Espers
This painting by Kandinsky turned up on my tablet this morning, courtesy of a Google widget that shows you a new piece of art on the day of the artist’s birth. Kandinsky was born on 16th December, 1866, although this is an adjusted date since the Russian calendar at the time was still following the Julian system. Anyway, the painting is Yellow-Red-Blue from 1925, and you can see the real thing at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Some Manuel Göttsching-related graphic ephemera. This 1971 flyer for Ash Ra Tempel seems to be a rare item, the only place I’ve seen it being inside one of the inserts for The Private Tapes, a series of six CDs limited to 1000 copies each that Manuel Göttsching released in 1996. I was lucky to buy these when they were first released. A double-disc selection from the series followed two years later but neither this nor the rest of the set have been reissued since, despite containing a wealth of previously unreleased recordings from Göttsching’s archives, including many live concert recordings of Ash Ra Tempel. The flyer was the work of Bernhard Bendig who also drew the sleeve art for the group’s first two albums.
Not as scarce, but not very visible either, is this painting of another somewhat wonky temple by P. Praquin for a 1975 reissue of two Ash Ra Tempel albums: Inventions For Electric Guitar (which isn’t really ART), and Seven Up, the ramshackle studio jam which is mostly spoiled by the bellowings of Timothy Leary and friends. Discover Cosmic was a short-lived series of double-disc reissues of albums originally released on Cosmic Music, an imprint of Barclay Records that repackaged releases from Ohr and Kosmische Musik for the French market. There were three volumes of Discover Cosmic, the other two showcasing Popol Vuh and “The Klaus Schulze Sessions”, this being the first Cosmic Jokers album plus Join Inn by Ash Ra Tempel. The mysterious P. Praquin was responsible for all three cover paintings of which this is the best, wonky or not, a variation on the church-as-spaceship idea that may have been borrowed from the Roger Dean cover for Space Hymns by Ramases. This is one of those graphic contrivances that I usually expect to find repeated elsewhere, although to date the only other example I’ve seen was a Viennese museum poster. But there are more than enough churches that resemble spaceships to give people ideas, especially recent constructions like the Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík. If you know of any other steeples blasting off then please leave a comment.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Manuel Göttsching, 1952–2022
• The kosmische design of Peter Geitner
• Raising the roof
The Horror of Living (1907) by Tyra Kleen. Via
• “Voss suggests Af Klint was a pioneer of abstract painting, a label that fits in some ways – her work certainly isn’t representational in the normal sense – but jars in others. She saw her work as a spiritual calling, supercharged with meaning in ways most of her contemporaries struggled to grasp. Most, but not all. Af Klint socialised and collaborated with other visionary women. Some were artists, others were writers, but all were adherents of the new philosophies sweeping Europe in the late 19th century: spiritualism, Rosicrucianism, theosophy.” Madoc Cairns reviewing Hilma af Klint: A Biography by Julia Voss.
• “I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet. At last, in 2023, I want to tell the tech CEOs and venture capitalists: pipe down. Buzz off. Go fave each other’s tweets.” Robin Sloan looking for new avenues away from the corporate cul-de-sacs of social media.
• “Even when subjects take psychedelics in clinical environments devoid of nature…many of them still emerge with stronger relationships to the natural world.” Simran Sethi on the connections between psychedelic use and eco-activism.
• At A Year In The Country: A Shindig! Selection: From Celluloid Hinterlands to Children of the Stones via The Delaware Road and a Sidestep to the Parallel World of él Records.
• At Public Domain Review: Mighty Mikko: A Book of Finnish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales (1922) by Parker Hoysted Fillmore.
• “When coffee is all gone. It’s over.” Spoon & Tamago gets existential at Tokyo’s Museum of Wonky English.
• The “S” Word: Spirtuality in Alternative Music is a book-length study by Matthew Ingram (aka Woebot).
• New music: Does Spring Hide Its Joy by Kali Malone (featuring Stephen O’Malley & Lucy Railton).
• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Geetype.
• Spiritual Awakening (1973) by Eddie Henderson | Spiritual Blessing (1974) by Pharoah Sanders | Spiritual Eternal (1976) by Alice Coltrane