{gay} – Page 79 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 197

Posters by Jay Shaw for Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England which receives a US release this month.

• Alvin Baltrop’s Gay New York: “the clandestine activities taking place under New York piers between 1975 and 1986”. AnOther samples some of the work on display at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. Meanwhile, BUTT has some shots from Texas Porno Road Trip, a photo series by Mike McLeod. Related: HBO will show you anything but a male erection, says Justin Moyer.

• “[Robert] Desnos quickly proved himself to be one of the most gifted in these experiments – eventually known as ‘the period of sleeping fits’. He was capable of writing, speaking, drawing and composing entire fantastical narratives.” Eugene Thacker on the Surrealist séances of the 1920s.

• “It’s history, not a viral feed,” says Sarah Werner. A complaint about the way the ongoing decontextualisation of images is both pernicious and potentially lucrative.

His prose is a palimpsest of echoes, ranging from Eliot’s Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night (lines like “Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium” are Burroughsian before the fact) to Raymond Chandler’s marmoreal wisecracks and Herbert Huncke’s jive. I suspect that few readers have made it all the way through the cut-up novels, but anyone dipping into them may come away humming phrases. His palpable influence on JG Ballard, William Gibson, and Kathy Acker is only the most obvious effect of the kind of inspiration that makes a young writer drop a book and grab a pen, wishing to emulate so sensational a sound. It’s a cold thrill.

Peter Schjeldahl reviews Call Me Burroughs by Barry Miles.

• “Dance music was born in LGBT communities, but has this been forgotten?” Luis-Manuel Garcia on an alternate history of sexuality in club culture.

• Avant-Grade Hallucinogens: the Poetics of Psychedelic Perception in Moving Image Art by Stuart Heaney.

• No Condition Is Permanent: weekly radio shows from Count Reeshard at LuxuriaMusic and iTunes.

• The Golem: where fact and fiction collide. David Barnett on 100 years of Gustav Meyrink’s novel.

• Don’t Let Harlan Ellison Hear This: Nick Mamatas on a great writer.

• Mix of the week: the Ela Orleans Mix at A Sound Awareness.

• Amon Düül II playing live on French TV, 1971 & 1973.

• A soundmap of London canals and minor rivers.

• The Peculiar Underworld of Rare-Book Thieves.

• At Pinterest: William Burroughs and Phalluses.

• Architecture of Doom

• Hallucinations (1967) by Tim Buckley | Phallus Dei (1969) by Amon Düül II | Hallucinations (In Memory of Reinaldo Arenas) (1994) by Paul Schütze

Weekend links 196

Cochemare (1810) by Jean Pierre Simon. One of 100,000 high-resolution images now available from Wellcome Images.

• Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (1990) was a solid biography blighted by a bizarrely bad-tempered and judgemental attitude towards many of Burroughs’ friends and colleagues. Morgan says Burroughs disliked the book (he also says his subject died in 1993, not 1997…) so I’m looking forward to the new biography by Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs: A Life. There’s a curious detail in Jeremy Lybarger’s piece about August Derleth, HP Lovecraft’s publisher and lifetime champion, causing a fuss after the Chicago Review published extracts from Naked Lunch in 1958. Burroughs enjoyed Lovecraft’s fiction but it’s unlikely that Lovecraft would have been anything other than appalled by Burroughs’s work. Barry Miles will be holding a Q&A session at the ICA, London, next month following a screening of Howard Brookner’s restored documentary, Burroughs: The Movie.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 105 by Sturqen. At 3quarksdaily Dave Maier writes in praise of drones (the musical variety), and links to three mixes.

• Interviews: Haakon Nelson talks to Harold Budd, Joseph Burnett talks to William Basinski, John Stezaker talks to Nicolas Roeg.

Derek responded to an invitation to address [AIDS] hysteria by lining the gallery with a set of tarred and feathered mattresses loaded with the traces of queer love-making and then framing them against wallpaper made from Xeroxed, blood-spattered front pages. In the middle of all this he then constructed a makeshift barbed-wire cage that imprisoned and protected a pair of apparently naked lovers – usually a pair of handsome, sleeping boys, but for one afternoon at least Tilda Swinton dropped by, just to make the point that the boys didn’t have an exclusive stake in or artistic rights to this crisis. Between the walls and the cage, the air of the gallery was thick with tension and hatred – sometimes literally so, as visitors to the gallery objected vociferously to what they were seeing.

Neil Bartlett on celebrating Derek Jarman 20 years after his death.

• William Friedkin’s Wages of Fear remake, Sorcerer (1977), receives an overdue reissue on DVD/Blu-ray in April.

• James Knowlson asks “What lies beneath Samuel Beckett’s half-buried woman in Happy Days?”

• The UK’s web filtering seems to be blocking common sense says Jane Fae.

A devil buggering a man (19th century).

• The poetry of Hart Crane, from the American epic to personal belonging.

• The Sonny Sharrock Quartet play Stupid Fuck, live 1988.

• Pinterest nightmares

• Borogoves

• Lutinemusic: Espera | Died Of Love | All I Have Is Gold

The art of Sidney Hunt, 1896–1940

Ganymede Before Zeus (1921).

Another of those artists about whom detail remains tantalisingly remote if the web is your primary research tool. Hunt was a British Modernist who also edited an avant-garde magazine, Ray, from 1926–27. Most of the works here are bookplates from around 1923, many of them distinctly homoerotic which adds to their interest. The note at Wikipedia is unsourced but tells us that his output included “experimental prose-poem fantasies of 18-year-old hermaphrodites”. Maybe these, and more of his work, will turn up eventually.

Continue reading “The art of Sidney Hunt, 1896–1940”

What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton

Dr Rance: You can’t be a rationalist in an irrational world. It isn’t rational.

“Lunatic” is a description suited to the frenetic pace and escalating calamities of the stage farce. Here the word gains greater resonance when the farce takes place in a psychiatric hospital. The customary sexual shenanigans are all in place—the play opens with Dr Prentice telling a prospective secretary to remove her clothes so he can see whether she’s suitable for the job—but in place of Carry On-style belly laughs we have another attack against authority and social ideas of normal behaviour, sexual or otherwise. This is a blacker shade of comedy than you usually find in farce. Joe Orton uses the mechanics of the form whilst undermining the cosy formulas; the ending is a happy one but only after the characters have gleefully overlooked double-incest and an act of rape. Bad taste was Orton’s forte, and that quality is very much in evidence here.

What the Butler Saw was one of several plays shown in the BBC’s Theatre Night strand in 1987. In this production Dinsdale Landen plays Dr Prentice with Prunella Scales playing Mrs Prentice. Timothy West (Prunella’s husband off-screen) perfectly incarnates the monstrous Dr Rance, a character so intoxicated with his own righteousness that he’s prepared to sign a committal order against anyone who crosses his path. (He boasts at one point of having committed his entire family.) It’s a great performance but West is ably matched by Dinsdale Landen and Prunella Scales. Barry Davis is the director. Plays such as this suffer without the involvement of an audience but this production gives an idea of how manic a decent stage production must be. The version on YouTube is in six parts.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Genius Like Us: A Portrait of Joe Orton
• Malicious Damage
• Joe Orton Online
• Joe Orton

A Genius Like Us: A Portrait of Joe Orton

Last week’s reading was the script of Joe Orton’s Loot after finding one of the first published editions of the play. Reading a play is never the same as seeing it performed, of course, but it’s still very funny, and many of its digs at police corruption haven’t dated at all. There is a film of Loot but it’s poor stuff, with Richard Attenborough miscast as the belligerent Inspector Truscott. Much better is Douglas Hickox’s film of Entertaining Mr Sloane (1970) which appeared shortly before Loot, and which is worth seeing for Beryl Reid reprising her stage role as the unfortunate Kath.

Orton’s brief career—a mere four years from complete obscurity in 1963 to his death at the hands of partner Kenneth Halliwell in 1967—is explored in A Genius Like Us: A Portrait of Joe Orton, a 70-minute BBC Arena documentary from 1982. Anyone who’s seen Prick Up Your Ears (1987)—Stephen Frears’ Orton biopic with a script by Alan Bennett—will be familiar with the train of events. Pamela Brighton and Nigel Williams’ film interviews some of the real people who appear in Prick Up Your Ears, notably surviving members of Orton’s family and Orton biographer John Lahr. In addition there’s a substantial contribution from Kenneth Williams, a close friend of Orton and Halliwell’s who was also badly miscast as Inspector Truscott in the first disastrous performances of Loot. Between the interviews there are some scenes from a lacklustre TV performance of Loot, a stage performance of What the Butler Saw, and bits of Entertaining Mr Sloane.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Malicious Damage
• Joe Orton Online
• Joe Orton