{animation} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 720

The Poet and the Siren (1893) by Gustave Moreau.

• “Some books become talismans. Because they are strange, wildly different to the common run of literature; because they are scarce, and only a few precious copies are known to exist; because, perhaps, they liberate by transgressing the moral limits of the day; because their authors are lonely, elusive visionaries; because, sometimes, there is an inexplicable glamour about the book, so that its readers seem to be lured into a preternatural reverie. This book possesses all those attributes.” Mark Valentine in an introduction he wrote for a 1997 reprint of The Book of Jade (1901) by David Park Barnitz. The book’s author was an American writer who died at the age of 23 after publishing this single volume, a collection of poetry inspired by his favourite Decadent writers. Praise from HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Thomas Ligotti has since helped maintain the book’s reputation. The Book of Jade turned up recently at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts. Also the home of an increasingly eclectic list of publications.

• At n+1: The Dam and the Bomb by Walker Mimms, a fascinating essay about the entangling of Cormac McCarthy’s personal history with his novels which makes a few connections I didn’t expect to see. Also a reminder that I’ve yet to read McCarthy’s last two books. Soon…

• The latest installation from teamLab is Resonating Life which Continues to Stand, an avenue of illuminated eggs on the Hong Kong waterfront.

• At The Wire: Symphony of sirens: an interview with Aura Satz, David Toop, Elaine Mitchener, Evelyn Glennie and Raven Chacon.

• At Unquiet Things: The Art of Darkness presents The Sleeper May Awaken: Stephen Mackey’s Unrestful Realms.

• RIP Marian Zazeela. There’s a page here with a selection of her beautiful calligraphic poster designs.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Tomona Matsukawa’s realistic paintings reconstruct fragments of everyday life.

• At Public Domain Review: Thom Sliwowski on The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997).

• Trinity (2024), a short film by Thomas Blanchard. There’s a lot more at his YouTube channel.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Lotte Reiniger’s Day.

• Sirens (1984) by Michael Stearns | Sirens (1988) by Daniel Lanois & Brian Eno | Siren Song (2009) by Bat For Lashes

Weekend links 718

Chatting Cats (c.1960) by Tomoo Inagaki.

• New/old music: Follow The Light by Broadcast, a song which will appear on Spell Blanket—Collected Demos 2006–2009 in May. The album will be followed by another collection, Distant Call—Collected Demos 2000–2006, in September, with both releases being described as the last ever Broadcast albums. This was always going to happen eventually but I thought there might be a final collection of all the tracks the group recorded for compilations which have never been reissued.

• “Cats are all over Turkey. In Istanbul, which I visited before traveling to eastern Turkey, cats are welcome not just in cafes but in houses, restaurants, hotels, and bars.” Emily Sekine on the cats of Turkey.

• “El Shazly’s music is like a rush of new energy, a link between the past and present of Egyptian music that is fresh and vital.” Geeta Dayal on Egyptian singer and composer Nadah El Shazly.

• More werewolves: A trailer for Wulver’s Stane, a contemporary refashioning of werewolf lore. Director Joseph Cornelison is a reader of these pages. (Hi, Joseph!)

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Ghost Stories by EF Benson.

• At Colossal: Sacred geometries and scientific diagrams merge in the metaphysical world of Daniel Martin Diaz.

• At The Quietus: What does dying sound like? Jak Hutchcraft on music and the near-death experience.

• At Unquiet Things: Languid Dreams and Unsettling Poetry: The Art of Jason Mowry.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Ronald Firbank Caprice (1917).

• Ashkasha, a short animated film by Lara Maltz.

• New music: Chimet by Mining.

• I’m The Wolf Man (1965) by Round Robin | The Werewolf (1972) by Barry Dransfield | Steppenwolf (1976) by Hawkwind

The groovy video look

Under Water/In Air.

This recently-released video for Under Water/In Air by Starfucker (or STRFKR, as they often have to style themselves) is an animated production by Edward Carvalho-Monaghan, an artist whose visuals may be seen to similar effect in an earlier animation for Starfucker’s Armatron. Carvalho-Monaghan’s artwork has appeared on a number of the group’s record sleeves, including the latest album, Parallel Realms, which combines a Surrealist dose of the visual style that I refer to as the groovy look with the kind of impossible architecture popularised by MC Escher. Armatron, meanwhile, features more architecture in what may be borrowings from Giorgio de Chirico.

Armatron.

I lost interest in music videos years ago, I’d much rather listen to the music than have to experience it as a soundtrack to some director’s attempt to illustrate a song with visual novelty. But animated music videos are easier to take, in part because the pairing of animation with music goes back to the earliest days of the medium. The Starfucker videos have had me wondering how much video or animation might suit the “groovy” definition if you went looking for it. And by this I mean following the limits defined by my earlier post which is predominantly concerned with heavy outlines and flat, bold colours rather than quasi-psychedelic effects. I don’t have the time just now to start searching for other examples but The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine is the Ur-text in this department, and the film’s influence may be found in both Carvalho-Monaghan animations.

Sing, Sang, Sung.

One other music video that does come to mind is for Sing, Sang, Sung by Air, directed by Mrzyk & Moriceau. The colour palette is desaturated but the rest of the graphics are definitely in the groovy zone, with the video as a whole coming across like a Surrealist take on those endlessly scrolling, mutating computer games. When the black ball reaches its destination you’re tempted to watch it all again.

(Under Water/In Air tip via Scotto Moore’s This Newsletter Cannot Save You.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The groovy look
• Tadanori Yokoo animations

Weekend links 716

The Vision of Endymion (1902) by Edward John Poynter.

• The Art and History of Lettering Comics by Todd Klein. Eight of the pages in the forthcoming Moon & Serpent book have been lettered by Todd.

• At Igloomag: Chang Terhune looks for music to help you sleep. No mention of an obvious (and superior) candidate, Sleep by Max Richter.

• New music: Ghosted II by Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin; and The Ship by David Shea.

But unlike macroscopic drugs like cannabis, LSD is so small and so powerful that its consumption almost always requires an inert housing—the water, tablets, sugar cubes, bits of string, or pieces of paper that transport the drug from manufacturer to tripper. In the law, this vehicle is described as the “carrier medium,” an object impregnated with drugs, one that can be sold, seized, presented as evidence, and dissolved into the hearts, minds, and guts of consumers.

When you print images onto a paper carrier medium, you are adding another layer of mediation to an already loopy transmission. Hence, a meta medium, a liminal genre of print culture that dissolves the boundaries between a postage stamp, a ticket, a bubble gum card, and the communion host. This makes blotter a central if barely recognized artifact of psychedelic print culture, alongside rock posters and underground newspapers and comix, but with the extra ouroboric weirdness that it is designed to be ingested, to disappear. Blotter is the most ephemeral of all psychedelic ephemera. It is produced to be eaten, to blur the divide between object and subject, dissolving material signs and molecules into a phenomenological upsurge of sensory, poetic, and cognitive immediacy.

Erik Davis, in an extract from Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium

• At Wormwoodiana: John Howard on The London Adventure, or, The Art of Wandering by Arthur Machen.

• At Unquiet Things: Hidden Marvels on Your Bookshelf: The Artistic Legacy of Laurence Schwinger.

• “Some intelligent civilizations will be trapped on their worlds”. Evan Gough explains.

• At Vinyl Factory: The Latin-American women of 20th-century electronic music.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Steve Erickson presents A Black Psychedelia Primer Day.

• At Public Domain Review: Animated Putty by Walter R. Booth.

• Vinita Joshi’s favourite music.

• Sleepy Theory (1982) by Weekend | Sleep 3 (1995) by Paul Schütze | Sleep Games (2012) by Pye Corner Audio

Bugs Bunny meets Fantômas in the Aquarium of Love

Pop Surrealism, 1949.

More from the Chicago Surrealists. The discovery of the first item comes via a comment from Paul (thanks!) in the post about Arsenal magazine which directed my attention to Monoskop where there’s another publication, Cultural Correspondence, related to the Chicago Surrealist Group. Cultural Correspondence was a US journal which ran for 14 issues from 1975 to 1981. Searching around for more information revealed an archive of the entire run at Brown University:

A journal born from the collapse of the New Left and hopes for a new beginning of a social movement, but also of left-wing thinking about culture, Cultural Correspondence was in many ways a unique publication.

Its founding editors, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, had both served on the editorial board of the journal Radical America, founded in 1967. Buhle had been the founder of that bi-monthly journal, creating it out of a network of activist-intellectuals in the Students for a Democratic Society; Wagner was officially “Poetry Editor,” but after its shift from Madison, Wisconsin, to the Boston area in 1971, he became a member of an expanded board of editors. Together they taught at the Cambridge-Goddard Graduate School, then Wagner left for Europe and Buhle left the editorial board, moving to Yonkers. An exchange of letters from these locations spawned the notion of a new publication. It was to be the first radical magazine put out by members of a generation that had since childhood watched television and appreciated as well as enjoyed a considerable portion of it, also films and “pulp” literature.

The issue at Monoskop was the penultimate one (numbered 10/11), guest-edited by Franklin Rosemont who took the opportunity to give the readers an exploration of “Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices”. The final issue (numbered 12–14) continued the theme with a Surrealist supplement.

Even without the Surrealist content, Cultural Correspondence is an interesting magazine, closer to the era’s underground magazines than an arts publication, especially in its attention to the underground cartoonists. Given my general antipathy to arts magazines I find this very much in its favour. The Rosemont-edited issue shows a different side of the Chicago group when compared to the more pugnacious Arsenal, with no sign of the scowling ideologues that fill the pages of the Surrealist journal. HP Lovecraft turns up once again (musings about Surrealism from his very last letter), together with Rosemont’s beloved blues musicians. Rosemont also reprints the short essay about pulp fiction by Robert Allerton Parker, Explorers of the Pluriverse, which appeared in the catalogue for First Papers of Surrealism.

Meanwhile, at the Internet Archive there’s Marvellous Freedom, Vigilance of Desire, the exhibition programme for the World Surrealist Exhibition which was staged in Chicago in 1976. Penelope Rosemont refers to this event several times in Surrealist Women so it’s great to be able to see some of the artworks which are only described in brief in the book. Many exhibition catalogues are mere lists of pictures with an essay or two but this one looks like it took the First Papers of Surrealism catalogue as its model, being filled with essays, poems, small illustrations and so on. The early Surrealist exhibitions were never satisfied with scattering artworks around an otherwise empty room, several of them extended their themes into the exhibition space in early manifestations of the installation or environment concept. For the Chicago event the visitor passed through “Sleepwalker’s Hill” into the “Corridor of the Forgotten Future”, which led to the heart of the exhibition and eleven “Domains of Surrealist Vigilance” dedicated to significant figures: Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the Duchess of Towers (from one of Andre Bréton’s favourite films, Peter Ibbetson), Sade’s Juliette, Harpo Marx, T-Bone Slim, Peetie Wheatstraw, Robin Hood, Bugs Bunny, Alfred Jarry’s Doctor Faustroll, Melmoth the Wanderer, and the Surrealists’ favourite master criminal, Fantômas. The imperishable wise-cracking rabbit had already appeared in the pages of Arsenal, as well as on the cover of the first issue of Cultural Correspondence, but this is where he becomes a genuine Surrealist icon.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion