{gay} – Page 86 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 168

Window to the Universe (1967) by Roberta Bell. From Summer of Love: Psychedelic Posters from SCMA currently showing at the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA.

• Sympathy for the Shoggoth: China Miéville’s Revolution of the Weird Tale, an essay by Christina Scholz which features one of my Cthulhu pictures among its embellishments. Related: “‘New Strange’ stories hold a chilling mirror to life” says Rick Kleffel discussing Robert Aickman and others. And speaking of Aickman (so to speak), Reese Shearsmith has recently recorded Aickman’s Cold Hand in Mine for Audible.

• An erotic alphabet book from the Soviet Union circa 1931, created to promote adult literacy. Who says porn can’t be educational?

• Angelystor is a new 39-minute composition by Phil Legard which he describes as “often heavy, Saturnine and melancholic”.

• James Ward’s postcards of the Post Office Tower. Related: film of the revolving restaurant at the top of the Tower in 1967.

•You Might Never Find Your Way Back: Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman by Nicholas Rombes.

Stone Garden (1967) by Wilfried Sätty.

• High Over Blue is “a mind-warping 20-minute freakout” by Moon Duo.

• Queer Visual Splendour: Jon Macy discusses his erotic comics.

• The Origin of the Pilcrow, aka the Strange Paragraph Symbol.

• Mix of the week: the Kranky 20th Anniversary Mixtape.

• Ten Amazing Cheeses and their Literary Counterparts.

• PingMag looks at the past and present of Ginza.

• Mind Gardens (1967) by The Byrds | The Garden (1981) by John Foxx | The Toy Garden (2006) by Helios

Weekend links 165

Cahill Expressway (1962) by Jeffrey Smart whose death was announced this week.

• “Russell Beale is awed by the beauty of the Roman silver Warren Cup showing men and youths making love, so startlingly erotic that the first time the British Museum was offered it in the 1950s, it turned it down flat. In 1999, when it came on the market again, the museum had to raise £1.8m to acquire it. ‘It’s just heaven, isn’t it?’ Russell Beale sighs.” Maev Kennedy on Same-Sex Desire and Gender Identity, a new exhibition at the British Museum.

• “The route to Tyburn Tree snaked through Holborn and St Giles, then went along Tyburn Road, today’s Oxford Street. It was dense with spectators.” Matthew Beaumont on the tiny memorial (Google view) for the estimated 50,000 people executed in the centre of London.

• Mixes of the Week: Bottoms Up by Staffan Lindberg for BUTT Magazine, and Electronic Ladyland, a collection of women with synths (and other instruments) from Bitch Media.

But the very thing that is valuable about diversity – the cultural and ideological clashes that it brings about – is precisely what many people fear. And that fear takes two forms. On the one hand you have the little Englander sentiment: immigration is undermining the national fabric, eroding our sense of British or Englishness, turning our cities into little Lahores or mini-Kingstons. And on the other you have the multicultural argument: that diversity is good, but it has to be policed to minimise the clashes and conflicts and frictions that diversity brings in its wake. And so we have to restrain speech, and police the giving of offence.

Kenan Malik on The Pleasures of Pluralism, The Pain of Offence.

• L’Empire des Lumières is a great title for Anne Billson’s blog about Belgium. Tram-wire covered streets are one of my favourite things.

• The Outer Church, 28 musical artists with an uncanny temperament collected by Joseph Stannard for Front & Follow.

• His Heavy Heart, a film by Alan Moore & Mitch Jenkins, is looking for Kickstarter funding.

• In 1997 Quentin Crisp wrote about “Ten Wonderful Gangster Movies” for Neon magazine.

• Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep redesigned for the Penguin Design Award, 2013.

• Out on DVD/Blu-Ray this month: The Curtis Harrington Short Film Collection.

• A billion-pixel panoramic view of the planet Mars from the Curiosity Rover.

• In the TLS: Robert Craft on Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring.

• Typophonic: Album cover typography.

• The Owl Theremin is a thing.

• LSD ABC

• Spring Rounds From The Rite Of Spring (1975) by Alice Coltrane | Revenge Of The Black Regent (1999) by Add N To (X) | Sore Ga Afrirampo (2010) by Afrirampo

Keep Your Timber Limber

Untitled drawing by Tom of Finland.

Tom of Finland’s beefy clones arrive within cruising distance of Buckingham Palace this week as part of an exhibition of drawings at the ICA. Keep Your Timber Limber is subtitled Works on Paper, and features contributions from eight artists old and new: Judith Bernstein, Tom of Finland, George Grosz, Margaret Harrison, Mike Kuchar, Cary Kwok, Antonio Lopez and Marlene McCarty.

Keep Your Timber Limber (Works on Paper) explores how artists since the 1940s to the present day have used drawing to address ideas critical and current to their time, ranging from the politics of gender and sexuality, to feminist issues, war and censorship. Stretching from fashion to erotica, the works can all be viewed as being in some way transgressive, employing traditional and commercial drawing techniques to challenge specific social, political or stylistic conventions.

The piece below by Cary Kwok isn’t one of those on display; according to BUTT magazine he’ll be showing a new series of his Biro fantasias. All the more reason to get to the ICA if you can. The exhibition runs to September 8th, 2013.

Pole Dance (2005) by Cary Kwok.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Weekend links 164

Ekaterina Panikanova paints on books.

Back in 2009 I bought a book of Art Nouveau illustration and design which contained an intriguing drawing by an Austrian artist, Franz Wacik (1883–1938). At the time there was little of Wacik’s other work online so I was delighted by the latest post at 50 Watts which showcases a selection of his illustrations. Wacik was a contemporary of British illustrator Sidney Sime, and both artists share a predilection for the comic and the grotesque.

• “The outlawing of drugs such as cannabis, MDMA and LSD amounts to the ‘the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo’, the former Government drugs advisor Professor David Nutt has claimed.” Related: “At last, the edifice of drugs prohibition is starting to crumble,” says Amanda Feilding.

• Alan Johnston on “A gay island community created by Italy’s Fascists”, and at Another Nickel In The Machine a report on The Gateways Club, one of the few meeting places for London’s lesbians in the 1960s. Alex Park wonders “Why Is Gay Porn So Popular In Pakistan?”

• If it’s June 16th then it must be Bloomsday: The Irish Times has a page of Joyce-related links to mark the anniversary. This year there’s a global reading of Ulysses taking place.

• “Now we can concentrate on album number nine,” says Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hutter. The rest of us will impatiently count the passing seconds.

• After a week in which George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has seen an increase in sales, a look at its cover designs old and new.

• Aleister Crowley: Wandering the Waste is a 144-page graphic biography of the Great Beast by Martin Hayes and RH Stewart.

• Barnbrook Design‘s presentation of Taxidermy, a book by Alexis Turner, is rather splendid.

• FACT Mix 386 is a great collection of dubby grooves compiled by Young Echo.

• From 2001: Michael Wood in the LRB reviewing Apocalypse Now Redux.

• The first recording of Allen Ginsberg reading Howl.

• Rejoyce (1967) by Jefferson Airplane | The Sensual World (1989) by Kate Bush | Molly Bloom (2013) by Alan Munde

Weekend links 163

Le Cadavre Exquis by Yukio Michishita. As featured in The Purple Book: Sensuality & Symbolism in Contemporary Art & Illustration by Angus Hyland & Angharad Lewis.

• ” Like Polo’s magic cities, which in the end all turn out to be Venice, fantasy finally refers us back to reality and the challenge of everyday social engagement.” Jonathan Galassi on The Dreams of Italo Calvino. In the same edition of the NYRB, Anna Somers Cocks on The Coming Death of Venice?

• Mix of the week: Solid Steel Radio Show 7/6/2013 Part 3 + 4: Peter “Look Around You” Serafinowicz compiles 70 minutes of Boards of Canada-inflected ambience.

• “Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring.” Alan Moore talks to Peter Bebergal.

The gay rights movement around the world has promoted a basic idea: we want to show society that we are human beings like everyone else. The problem is that the train driver at the Kashirskaya train station doesn’t necessarily think that those few dozen passengers in whose face he closes the doors are a priori inferior and deserve such treatment. He feels that he becomes superior to them by means of using his power over them. This sense of superiority can be trumped only by some higher superiority.

On the Moscow Metro and Being Gay by Dmitry Kuzmin.

• “I went from being a very promising young writer to being completely ignored in two novels.” Madeleine Monson-Rosen on Angela Carter.

• Sequence6, another excellent sampler from Future Sequence: 40 new pieces of music as a free download.

The Arrival on Mars, an illustration from The Ship That Sailed to Mars (1923) by William Timlin.

• At PingMag: An Icon for Everyone: Shoryu Hatoba, Japanese Crest Artist.

• More Japanese weirdness at Sardines Bizarres.

• Larry Nolen on Bruno Schulz.

• Magic Ritual (1976) by Black Renaissance | Magic Fly (1977) by Space | Magic Vox (1981) by Ippu-Do