{books} – Page 206 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 291

Femme avec des fleurs (1912) by Romaine Brooks.

• This week’s anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo murders was noted by some of those who defended the magazine last year. “I don’t write about Charlie Hebdo in France,” said Robert McLiam Wilson, “they have plenty of people who can do that. But I’ll do almost anything I’m asked to do in the anglosphere. Why? Well, two reasons. Because none of the other Charlie people bothers to do it. And because, really, that’s where all the bullshit lives.” A year on, and the bullshit-mongers seem to have fallen silent, what with knee-jerk outrage being a short-lived affair, and the Bataclan massacre having demolished one of the main criticisms, namely that the magazine wouldn’t have been attacked if the artists and writers had shown some respect. “[Charlie Hebdo‘s] real crime is not racism but its challenge to what has become an unbreakable commandment for many contemporary liberals: ‘Thou shalt not cause offence’,” says Kenan Malik. At Literary Hub Adam Gopnik explored the same issue in a foreword for Stéphane Charbonnier’s Open Letter.

• “Immersion in the past is no escape from the present, but it supplies a constant corrective to the narrative spit out daily by media, advertising, politics, and all those other forces that attempt to mould our thinking like jelly in a pan.” Luc Sante (again) talking to Simone Wolff about his books, Low Life and The Other Paris.

• “…throwing a lot of money behind vintage equipment? Well, that’s just a millionaire’s game. Dave Grohl can do that, but David Bowie doesn’t care about that. Just stick a microphone in front of him and he’s really happy.” Tony Visconti talking to Allyson McCabe about the music business and producing Bowie.

• “Nico Hogg’s photography captures the transformation of urban London,” says George Kafka who talks to Nico about a collection of his work, Sign & Signifiers, which I designed late last year.

• At Strange Flowers: James Conway talks to Cassandra Langer about her recent biography of artist Romaine Brooks (1874–1970).

• At Dangerous Minds: Godzilla, girls and guns, the science-fiction art of Noriyoshi Ohrai. There’s more at Pinterest.

• Mixes of the week: XLR8R Podcast 420 by Andrey Pushkarev, and Secret Thirteen Mix 172 by Julien Bayle.

• Alan Moore’s magnum opus, Jerusalem, will be published later this year. Gosh Comics has a teaser.

• New York Public Library makes 180,000 high-res images available online.

• Prints of darkness: macabre vintage posters

• Scarfolk Television is coming

• Godzilla (1977) by Blue Öyster Cult | Giant Robot / Machines in the Modern City / Godzilla (1992) by Praxis | Free-Bass (Godzillatron Cush) (1995) by Axiom Funk

Vintage Mishima

Penguin reprinted several volumes of Mishima in their Vintage line in 2010 with covers designed by Anna Crone. Seven of the covers are shown here although there are one or two more, not all of them available as large images. (Not for the first time I wonder why major publishers don’t make their new covers available at a decent size.) I’d have been wary of using Hokusai’s waves on a Mishima cover but colouring the water red makes it readable as a wave of blood.

Continue reading “Vintage Mishima”

The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima

This is another of those excellent television documentaries that I have imprisoned on a video tape somewhere so it was good to find on YouTube. The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima (1985) was directed by Michael MacIntyre for the BBC’s Arena arts strand. This was the year that Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters was released so the documentary had some topical value even though Schrader’s film isn’t mentioned at all (something that wouldn’t happen today). MacIntyre begins as Schrader does, however, with the events of the final day of Mishima’s life on November 25th, 1970, before rewinding to present a biographical portrait of the writer/actor/director. There’s more footage than I remembered of Mishima discussing his work (in English) while John Hurt reads from Mishima’s writings. Commentary is supplied by biographer Henry Scott Stokes, translator Donald Keene, photographer Eikoh Hosoe (creator of the famous Mishima beefcake poses), director Nagisa Oshima, and Mishima’s lover Akihiro Maruyama, an actor who the credits also describe as a “female impersonator”.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tamotsu Yato’s men with katanas
• Forbidden Colours
• Mishima’s Rite of Love and Death

Weekend links 290

coin

The Royal Mint celebrates 400 years of William Shakespeare with new £2 coins. The “Tragedies” design gives Britain the Gothiest coin of all time.

• “I hate successful films that travel on an easy wave of ‘good taste’: for me, that is simply anti-culture.” Cinematographer Luciano Tovoli talks to Alexandra Heller-Nicholas about photographing Dario Argento’s masterwork, Suspiria.

• Mixes of the week: Für die Liebe II, an hour of ambient drift by Matthew Dekay, and Carwyn Ellis Mixtape No. 354 by The Voice Of Cassandre.

• Americans in Europe: Frances Mayes on the enduring mystique of the Venetian lagoon, and David Farley on the trail of Kafka in Prague.

“We’d read that Brion Gysin and William Burroughs had played around with some scientific equipment from Columbia University,” [Jim] Jarmusch recalls. It was “some kind of strobe light that they claimed, by placing eidetic pulses on the outside of your eyelids, could cause states of hallucination and trance. We found out how to check out this machine and experimented with … not fantastic results! In a way though, Luc [Sante] channels ghosts: he’s able to imagine and mentally reconstruct events and places from the past and weave them into stories. He can cross influences like Blaise Cendrars and JG Ballard with James M Cain and Raymond Roussel.”

[…]

If New York celebrates amnesia, perpetual transformation, accelerated obsolescence – and offers newcomers a blank slate, a chance to be born again – then Sante offers a mordantly heretical vision of the city. For him it’s full of layers and depths, of echoes and eerie reverberations, of occult whispers. “The tech crowd thinks that we can’t afford the past to be sitting on our shoulders. It’s a burden, a dead weight. We’ve got to innovate constantly. We have to … disrupt. But the 20th century is littered with valuable stuff – writers, ideas, daily certainties – that gets discarded and that needs to be picked up and looked at again.”

Sukhdev Sandhu profiles writer Luc Sante

• The Edge Question for 2016: What do you consider the most interesting recent (scientific) news? What makes it important?

• Bradley L. Garrett’s foreword for Secret Tunnels of England: Folklore and Fact (2015), a book by Antony Clayton.

• Caitlin R. Green on the monstrous landscape of medieval Lincolnshire.

• Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan by Brian Eno.

• Arche (live, 2013) by Master Musicians of Bukkake.

• A Year In The Country returns for another year.

• Kafka (1982) by Masami Tsuchiya | Manhattan (1984) by Seigen Ono | Tunnel (1997) by Biosphere

Merlin

Merlin building Stonehenge (14th century) from Folio 30r of British Library, Egerton 3028.

The Arthurian magus in art and illustration. Despite the antiquity of the Arthur legend there doesn’t seem to be much early representation of Merlin outside a few drawings in old manuscripts. The British Library’s folio showing the raising of Stonehenge is the oldest known depiction of the ancient structure.

Most of the pictures here are illustrations for the Merlin and Vivien section of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, the first book of which was published in 1859. Vivien (or Viviane, Nimue, etc) is the sorcerous Lady in the Lake who either imprisons Merlin underground or in a tree depending on whose account you read. Edward Burne-Jones’ The Beguiling of Merlin has long been my favourite of that artist’s paintings. This is only a very small selection of possible pictures, of course. A more complete catalogue would include Nicol Williamson in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), a performance that some find overly mannered but one that I’ve always enjoyed.

Merlin and Vivien (1867) by Gustave Doré.

The Beguiling of Merlin (1874) by Edward Burne-Jones.

Continue reading “Merlin”