Weekend links 746

mondrian.jpg

Composition B (No.II) with Red (1935) by Piet Mondrian.

• “Red is practically faultless, save, perhaps, for one hard-to-get-excited-about foray into atmospheric free jazz (Providence), though the sprawling, epic roller coaster of emotion and dexterity that follows (Starless) surely makes up for any shortfall.” Patrick Clarke on 50 years of my favourite King Crimson album. I like Providence, the piece is part of a live performance in Rhode Island so the Lovecraft connection adds to the aura of doom that pervades the album; and the structure of the album’s second side—jazz improv followed by a multi-part, Mellotron-heavy epic—harks back to the group’s debut.

• “It’s important to challenge the common idea of an almost evolutionary procession, where modernist abstract art is somehow the climax, a new and perfectly original approach to the visual world, absolutely different from all that preceded it.” Hunter Dukes on the yellow rectangle that denotes silence in the Silos Apocalypse.

The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy, an exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner, London. Meanwhile, at the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, there’s Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation.

• “I did not realize how much I had done. I am a serial polluter.” Ralph Steadman and his daughter, Sadie Williams, talking to Steven Heller about Steadman’s latest exhibition which is touring the USA.

• New music: Come Back To Me [Demo] by Broadcast; The Last Sunset Of The Year by Marcus Fjellström; Hexa by Cleared.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artists summon mythical creatures of the Echigo region for the 2024 Wara Art Festival.

• The Italian Art of Violence: Samm Deighan on the giallo cinema boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

Gavin Friday’s favourite albums.

Red (1991) by Jarboe | Red Earth (As Summertime Ends) (1991) by Rain Tree Crow | Red Sun (2012) by Anna von Hausswolff

Weekend links 737

pinkfloyd.jpg

The Massed Gadgets of Auximines – Pink Floyd – in stereo concert with the “Azimuth Co-ordinator”. Design by Hipgnosis, 1969.

• At Rond1900: Sander Bink explores the life of another obscure Dutch Symbolist, Léonard Sarluis (1874–1949): artist, friend of Oscar Wilde and lover of Alfred Jarry.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Manga artist Hirohiko Araki pays tribute to Osaka station’s history and culture with new public art sculpture.

• At Public Domain Review: Scenes of reading on the early portrait postcard by Melina Moe and Victoria Nebolsin.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 33 films that either faked ingesting LSD or did.

• At Bandcamp: Blissful Noise, Bad Vibes: A Doomgaze Primer.

• Mix of the week: Azimuth Coordinator by Tarotplane.

• New music: Global Transport by Monolake.

• The Strange World of…Gay Disco.

Speak & Glitch

Postcard From Jamaica (1967) by Sopwith Camel | Postcards Of Scarborough (1970) by Michael Chapman | An Unsigned Postcard (1991) by Tuxedomoon

Weekend links 727

maar.jpg

Untitled (Hand-Shell) (1934) by Dora Maar.

• “The Secret Public…reads like the book he was born to write…and speaks to the taboo around homosexuality which the bravest pop stars did their best to dispel.” Alex Needham reviewing The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979) by Jon Savage. Anyone buying the book should also find themselves a copy of Savage’s Queer Noises compilation.

• At Dangerous Minds: Richard Metzger advises everyone to seek out Sion Sono’s 237-minute Love Exposure (2008), “Japan’s eroto-theosophical answer to the allegorical journeys of Alejandro Jodorowsky”.

Prince – Sign O’ The Times (Live at Paisley Park 12/31/87). Pro-shot video of the last performance of the Sign O’ The Times tour, with a unique contribution from Miles Davis.

• Old music: Camembert Electrique by Gong. A rocking riposte to the stereotype of the group as a bunch of whimsical hippies.

• New music: Lambda by ZULI. This is another release on the Subtext label which I designed.

• The Devil in the Flesh: Patrick Clarke on David Sylvian’s Red Guitar at 40.

Milky Way photographer of the year 2024.

The Strange World of…Gastr del Sol.

Jungle Guitar (1961) by The Palatons | Lunatic Guitar (1980) by Ippu-Do | Naive Guitar (1982) by Adrian Belew

The Japanese Sandman, a film by Ed Buhr

js1.jpg

I upgraded my DVD of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch to blu-ray recently. The film is one of my favourites in the Cronenberg oeuvre even though its connection to the novel is minimal at best. After watching it again I was thinking (not for the first time) that one way to adapt either Naked Lunch or any of the books in the “Nova Trilogy”—The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express—would be to commission ten or twenty very different film-makers to adapt portions of the novel in whatever manner they chose. The resulting short films could either be run in sequence or cut together to make a meta-film which, if nothing else, would be closer to the disjointed structure of William Burroughs’ early novels than the semi-biographical narrative that Cronenberg delivered .

js2.jpg

Which brings us to The Japanese Sandman, a 12-minute film made by Ed Buhr in 2008 which turned up recently on YouTube. Buhr’s short is a dramatisation of passages from the letters that Burroughs wrote to Allen Ginsberg in 1953, in which Burroughs recounts his experiences in Panama while searching for the yage vine, a plant which yields the hallucinogen known as ayahuasca. Narrator John Fleck is a decent Burroughs mimic (although the real Burroughs pronounced “Panama” with a distinct drawl at the end, more like “Panamawww”), and since Burroughs’ own words provide the text of the piece the film is closer to Burroughs’ books than many other short films. Black-and-white scenes in Panama rooms alternate with a colour sequence where Burroughs recalls a doomed love affair with a boy in the St Louis of the 1930s. It’s gratifying to see someone draw attention to an aspect of Burroughs’ writing that’s often ignored, the persistent thread of melancholy and regret for lost time/lost people which runs through so many of his novels. It’s a side of the fiction that would also have to be accounted for in any longer adaptation of Burroughs’ work.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The William Burroughs archive

The art of Denton Welch, 1915–1948

welch04.jpg

Symbolist Figure (1946).

The visual art, that is, not the novels and short stories. Last month I finally got round to reading Denton Welch’s first two novels, Maiden Voyage (1943) and In Youth is Pleasure (1945). Finally, because I’ve known Welch’s name for a long time, mostly via William Burroughs—who dedicated The Place of Dead Roads to him—and John Waters—who often lists In Youth is Pleasure as one of his favourite novels. This was also the book that Burroughs favoured, and he wrote an introduction for a US reprint in 1983. At first glance, Welch would seem a surprising choice for the pair: the protagonist in each book is a thinly fictionalised avatar of the author—he’s even named Denton Welch in the first—an effete upper-middle-class English teenager who hates his school and most of the people he meets, and who spends as much time as possible wandering alone, looking for affordable antiques and any old buildings that may be of interest. The homosexual undercurrents in each book generate persistent tensions which are an obvious attraction for many readers, even though nothing is ever stated overtly and there’s no hand-wringing over unrequited passions. Welch’s boys are most passionate about the things they collect, and their determination to be left alone to pursue their interests when all the adults around them are trying to push them in different directions. Having been a similar school-hating, art-obsessed, introverted teenager, if I’d read In Youth is Pleasure when I was the same age as the beleaguered Orvil Pym it would have made a huge impression.

welch07.jpg

Self-portrait With Cat.

Art was the interest that Welch most wanted to pursue but it’s the writing for which he’s remembered. Few people have good things to say about his drawings and paintings but there’s a strange quality to many of them that I like, an atmosphere of menace that lurks beneath the often naive renderings. I was surprised how gloomy and claustrophobic many of them are. The refined sensibilities in the novels lead you to expect something lighter, frivolous even, like the paintings and illustrations of his contemporary, Rex Whistler, or other artists of the Neo-Romantic school of the 1930s. In fact looking at Whistler’s work again, it’s the Whistler style I most expected even though it’s unfair to compare the two. Welch and Whistler shared a taste for pictorial decoration, and a blithe indifference to the avant-garde trends of the day, but Whistler was a formidable talent, the kind of successful illustrator that Welch could only dream of being. (That said, both artists were commissioned by Shell for the company’s poster series showing views of Britain.) Yet lack of ability sometimes takes an artist into places that a professional wouldn’t reach. Whistler would have given us a perfect cat, not the strange creatures with almost human faces that Welch liked to draw. I’m curious to know which, if any, contemporary artists Welch preferred. His diaries are now earmarked for a future reading.

A Voice Through A Cloud: Discovering Denton Welch

welch05.jpg

Hadlow Castle, Kent (1937).

welch06.jpg

Horse and Moon (1943).

welch03.jpg

Continue reading “The art of Denton Welch, 1915–1948”