A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Books
Relativity (1953) by MC Escher.
Escher’s famous lithograph has a less familiar companion piece in the woodcut below.
Delirius (1972) by Philippe Druillet.
Lone Sloane’s adventure on the pleasure planet of Delirius was written by Jacques Lob, and features this diversion in the Palais d’Escher. Possibly the first fictional use of one of Escher’s prints.
Mountain Voices.
In which the illustrator of Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem illustrates six ballads or lieder by Heinrich Heine. These etchings don’t bear comparison to Steiner-Prag’s peerless Golem illustrations, or those for his illustrated Poe, but they’re good to see even if the meaning remains obscure.
Man Behind a Window.
The Dream.
El Hotel Satina (2006) by Oscar Sanmartin.
• Andrew Kötting’s By Our Selves is “a melancholy, maverick film” says David Jays. With Toby Jones following in the footsteps of poet John Clare, Iain Sinclair in a goat mask, and Alan Moore warning about the “vision sump” of Northampton.
• “Shunga means ‘spring pictures’. They depict sometimes spectacular sexual contortions and come imbued with the power of taboo. For years they have largely been out of sight—until now.” Related: shunga prints at Ukiyoe Gallery.
• “Who else could link Smokey Robinson and JG Ballard, Iggy Pop and Josephine Baker, James Bond and Stephen Sondheim, Gary Numan and Johnny Cash, Tricky and Tom Moulton…” Grace Jones is the best, says Joe Muggs.
Ballardian space – what he called “inner space” to differentiate it from the science fiction that concerned itself with distant planets and space rockets – is in fact a fusion of inner and outer space. There is no “out there” totally separate from his characters; just as there is no exclusively private, isolated inner life. His most psychologically fulfilled characters look to transcend their physical surroundings, however hostile, by embracing them.
Chris Hall on High-Rise by JG Ballard
• “In March 1984, Jorge Luis Borges began a series of radio ‘dialogues’ with the Argentinian poet and essayist Osvaldo Ferrari, which have now been translated into English for the first time.”
• “I came up with a couple of tunes, literally in my bedroom. People think of bedroom recordings as a modern, laptop invention. It wasn’t.” Daniel Miller on the accidental success of Mute Records.
• “It was in Prague that I first awoke.” Strange Flowers on Gustav Meyrink’s life in Prague.
• At 50 Watts: Stencilled ornament and illustration by William Addison Dwiggins.
• Mix of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. X by David Colohan.
• Wyrd Daze, Lvl2 Issue 4, is free and brimming with the weird.
• Mythology, a new series of drawings by Howard Hardiman.
• Spike Jones is the best, says MetaFilter.
• Peacocks at National Geographic.
• Warm Leatherette (1980) by Grace Jones | Warm Leatherette (1998) by Chicks On Speed | Warm Leatherette (2013) by Foetus
I’ve been reading Thomas Ligotti for the past week so here’s something Ligottian: a short film performed by life-size wooden puppets. Švankmajer’s production from 1969 conveys the Don Juan legend with actors masquerading as traditional Czech marionettes, the proceedings being scored by music from the great Zdeněk Liška. No English subtitles on this one so if you don’t speak Czech or Russian you can either relish the mystery or take it as a prompt to buy a DVD. While we’re on the subject of Ligotti, the new Penguin edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer/Grimscribe is published next week. I recommend it.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
• Two sides of Liška
• The Torchbearer by Václav Švankmajer
Sunday by Amanda Elledge.
• Coming from Strange Attractor this November: The Moons at Your Door, an anthology of strange tales selected by David Tibet. “The Moons At Your Door collects over 30 tales, both familiar and unknown from: Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, DK Broster, AM Burrage, RW Chambers, Aleister Crowley, Sheridan Le Fanu, Elizabeth Gaskell, WW Jacobs, MR James, Vernon Lee, LA Lewis, Thomas Ligotti, Arthur Machen, Guy de Maupassant, Perrault, Thomas De Quincey, Saki, Count Stenbock, Montague Summers, HR Wakefield and Edith Wharton. The volume also includes extracts and translations by the author from Babylonian, Coptic and Biblical texts alongside poems and fairy tales.”
• Gay-rights activists give their verdict on Stonewall: “This film is no credit to the history it purports to portray”. The only surprise about this episode is that anyone expected Roland Emmerich to make a historically accurate film in the first place. Related: Edmund White’s first-hand report written a few days after the riots.
• “If you hate [Boom!], I hate you, and I could never be your friend or your boyfriend. Divine and I had seen Boom! right before we made Pink Flamingos, and it’s about Elizabeth Taylor, retired, writing her memoirs, which is what Pink Flamingos was too, in a way.” John Waters (again) gives Hayley Campbell some dating tips.
• “We moderns may too-often suffer from a mixing up of historical sequences, but better that, surely, than risk raising a population that is entirely not-arsed about its past.” Julian Cope explores the Celts: Art and Identity exhibition at the British Museum, London.
• “But I am talking about psychedelic music, and obviously some of that comes from early psychedelic rituals, which are all about losing yourself…and I did come back into the world in a different way.” Natasha Khan on her new musical project, SEXWITCH.
• At Dangerous Minds: Vincent Price teaches the dark arts on his 1969 album An Adventure in Demonology.
• A trailer for Salthouse Marshes, “a short, landscape obsessed ghost story” by Adam Scovell.
• Rare video of Young Marble Giants playing for 45 minutes in Vancouver, 1980.
• A collection of Ghost Box posters and flyers designed by Julian House.
• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 163 by Ssleeping desiresS.
• Ministry, a new photo series by Ellen Rogers.
• Julia Holter‘s favourite albums.
• Boom Stix (1962) by Curley & the Jades | Things That Go Boom In The Night (1981) by Bush Tetras | Boom! (1991) by The Grid