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Weekend links 299

Starman (2016) by Nyahzul Blanco. From the Saint Bowie exhibition at Stephen Romano Gallery, NY.

• “…[Dashiel] Hammett’s first-hand experience of political sleaze, industrial violence and the everyday routine of an agent allowed for a realism that brought hard-boiled fiction to new heights.” Oliver Harris reviews a new life of Hammett, a history of the American detective, and a study of film noir.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 177 by Vladislav Dobrovolski, The After-School Club by Melmoth The Wanderer, and Perfect Monolake by Rich Ears.

• Inside High-Rise: product designs by Michael Eaton and Felicity Hickson for Ben Wheatley’s feature film.

Yeats is not the only respected writer to make use of the tarot: Italo Calvino, Salvador Dalí, and even Charles Williams, a novelist and theologian who belonged to the Inklings literary circle, also drew on the cards. Still, the cards remain firmly associated with the occult—and, while [Jessa] Crispin is sympathetic to that tradition, she aims to bring tarot to those who may be skeptical of that way of thinking. Her references are more literary than arcane.

Peter Bebergal talks to Jessa Crispin about making the Tarot literary again

• Legowelt’s best free paranormal synth samples, occult instruments and lo-fi effects.

• At Dangerous Minds: a smorgasbord of sorcerous bad taste via Vintage Occult.

• Free download: Cavern of Anti-Matter live at Acad, Berlin, 2015.

• Conversing with your Subconscious: The Art of Adrian Cherry.

• Diagonal Science is the debut album from Black Helicopters.

• 111 Photographs of 111 Westminster Street in Providence, RI.

• More magick: occult documentaries of the 1970s.

• A Bosch-themed fashion feature by Tim Walker.

• Cycloid Drawing Machine

• Dark Star (1984) by Harold Budd | Dark Start (1994) by ELpH vs Coil | Dark Star Blues (2004) by Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.

High-Rise posters

An early promotional poster from 2014 by Jay Shaw.

Ben Wheatley’s film of the novel by JG Ballard approaches. As is my custom, I’ve been avoiding the trailers of this and any other film of interest but the posters are increasingly impressive. Ben Wheatley and fellow Brit filmmaker Peter Strickland (whose The Duke of Burgundy was produced by Wheatley’s Rook Films) have distinguished themselves not only by the quality of their films but also by caring about the designs used to advertise their work. Last month I linked to a story about the dire state of the US poster world where design-by-committee is the order of the day. The designs for Wheatley’s films have been a welcome riposte to this trend. Can the film live up to its posters? Find out in March.

The first poster shows the doomed jeweller heading earthwards for his rendezvous with a parked car. Easy to imagine this design giving a Hollywood marketing committee the vapours.

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Weekend links 296

Mars (variant design): one of three new posters for NASA by Invisible Creature.

• “If the point of Sade’s work was to marry sexual frustration and release to the practice of interpersonal violence, he could confidently gaze out on the landscape of our popular culture and declare it a fait accompli.” Hussein Ibish on The United Sades of America.

• Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them by Nicola Twilley. Sean Carroll explains the importance of the discovery.

• Another This Heat interview: Bruce Tantum interrogates Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward about being a group ahead of their time.

The English word comes ultimately from Greek magike (in which the original Persian word is spliced with tekhne, “art”), while the Persian magos “one of the members of the learned and priestly class” ultimately derives from magush, “to be able, to have power”, from which we may also derive the word “machine”. So my social hierarchy is your magic, and my magic might be your craft—or even your machinery. My religion is your magic. Your religion is my fairy lore. Or your religions might be a mass of fakery and trickery and foolery. Hence in making magic into an intellectual discipline, I theorize based on my observations, which might not be mine but those of others, heritable observations. But because what I do looks very like empiricism, as I examine materials for the tricks or fooleries, or for the real alterations, checking my results against descriptions of previous experiments, what I do feels like science, feels like the template for Baconian empiricism and its great instauration.

Diane Purkiss reviewing The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment, edited by Brian Copenhaver

• The Strange World Of…The Residents: Sean Kitching talks to The Residents’ resident artist, Homer Flynn.

• At Strange Flowers: film of Natalie Barney in 1962 reminiscing about Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust.

• From Battleship Potemkin to Baker Street: Ian Christie on Sergei Eisenstein’s trip to London.

• Mixes of the week: Krautrock Mix by Tarotplane, and Mix #15 (Transversales) by Jon Brooks.

• From Rock en Stock (France, 1973): Can and Agitation Free in live performance.

• Twenty classic British folk-horror stories: a selection by Kai Roberts.

• Immemory: a Flash version of Chris Marker’s CD-ROM.

• Cronenberg Valentines

• Static Gravity (1980) by Chrome | Zero Gravity (2001) by Monolake | Gravity (2013) by Roly Porter

Shadowland covers

Not the horror magazine, this is an earlier American title that ran from 1919 to 1923. Shadowland covered the arts in general with a preference for stage and film. The thing that immediately sets it apart from other film magazines of the period is the cover art by AM Hopfmuller; many of the paintings resemble theatre backdrops or backgrounds for animated films. The Internet Archive doesn’t have a complete run, unfortunately—the examples here are from volumes 1, 7 and 8—but more of Hopfmuller’s work may be found on other sites. The magazine interiors are also worth a browse for their colour plates and art photographs. (Thanks to Kristian for the tip!)

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Leo Visser calendar, 1903

Leo Visser (1880–1950) was a Dutch artist who created a number of calendars in addition to other decorative designs featuring plants and animals. This example is one of the earliest, combining both flora and the fauna in a series of attractive Art Nouveau plates. You don’t see monkeys very often in Art Nouveau designs, for some reason they were more popular during the Art Deco period.

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