Weekend links 150

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One of A Pair of Peacocks (2012) by Feanne.

• Jonathan Barnbrook reveals his package design for the new David Bowie CD. The Barnbrook studio has also designed the catalogue for the forthcoming V&A Bowie exhibition. And there’s more (don’t worry, it’ll be over soon): Jon Savage on When Bowie met Burroughs.

• “Witches have a fashion moment,” says the NYT. Nice clothes but the writing trots out too many of the usual lazy clichés. Related: A Tale of Witches, Woodland and Half-remembered Melodies…, a new mix by Melmoth the Wanderer.

• Calidostópia! is a free album (FLAC & mp3) from Marcus Popp aka Oval: “an enticing 16-track collaboration…with seven wonderful singers/musicians from all over South America”.

Before meeting Moorcock in person, [Hari] Kunzru went on to say, ‘I didn’t realise the role he’d played in connecting so many different scenes and undergrounds together – the psychedelic music scene, the science fiction scene, the hip experimental literature scene around people like William Burroughs, pop art’.

Brave New Worlds: A Michael Moorcock Retrospective by Carol Huston. Moorcock’s Elric novels will be published by Glénat in new bande dessinée adaptations later this year.

• More art by Michael W. Kaluta at The Golden Age. And more fantastic comics/illustration by Philippe Caza at 50 Watts. There’s more Caza here.

• Mine and David Britton’s new book, Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, was reviewed at The Spectator.

• Google Street Scene: “Moments of cinema captured by Google Street View cameras”.

• Cosmic Sentinels and Spiral Jetties: JG Ballard, Robert Smithson & Tacita Dean

• Strange Flowers showcases the heads of Pavel Tchelitchew, 1949–1952.

• Setting in the East: Diamanda Galás on Women and Real Horror

• Little Joe: “A magazine about queers and cinema, mostly.”

• Nanoparticles loaded with bee venom kill HIV.

• Treatises on Dust: Antic Found Texts

• The Wizard Blew His Horn (1975) by Hawkwind (with Michael Moorcock) | Brothel In Rosenstrasse (1982) by Michael Moorcock’s Deep Fix | Running Through The Back Brain (1983) by Hawkwind (with Michael Moorcock)

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Weird Tales, October 1933. Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

• Michael Moorcock’s novels are being republished this year by Gollancz in a range of print and digital editions. Publishing Perspectives asks Is Now a Perfect Time for a Michael Moorcock Revival? • Related: Dangerous Minds posted The Chronicle of the Black Sword: A Sword & Sorcery Concert from Hawkwind and Michael Moorcock. My sleeve for that album was the last I did for the band. • Obliquely related: Kensington Roof Gardens appear as a location in several Moorcock novels, and also provided a venue for the author’s 50th birthday party. If you have a spare £200m you may be interested in buying them once Richard Branson’s lease expires.

• One of my favourite things in Mojo magazine was a list by Jon Savage of 100 great psychedelic singles (50 from the UK, 50 from the US). This week he presented a list of the 20 best glam-rock songs of all time. For the record, Blockbuster by The Sweet was the first single I bought so I’ve always favoured that song over Ballroom Blitz.

• The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage is a forthcoming book by J. David Spurlock about the Weird Tales cover artist. Steven Heller looks at her life (I’d no idea she knew Djuna Barnes) while io9 has some of her paintings. Related: Illustrations for Weird Tales by Virgil Finlay.

The masterpiece of Mann’s Hollywood period is, of course, Paracelsus (1937), with Charles Laughton. Laughton’s great bulk swims into pools of scalding light out of greater or lesser shoals of darkness like a vast monster of the deep, a great black whale. The movie haunts you like a bad dream. Mann did not try to give you a sense of the past; instead, Paracelsus looks as if it had been made in the Middle Ages – the gargoyle faces, bodies warped with ague, gaunt with famine, a claustrophobic sense of a limited world, of chronic, cramped unfreedom.

The Merchant of Shadows (1989) by Angela Carter. There’s more of her writing in the LRB Archive.

• Television essayist Jonathan Meades was back on our screens this week. The MeadesShrine at YouTube gathers some of his earlier disquisitions on culture, place, buildings and related esoterica.

• Sometimes snark is the only worthwhile response: An A-Z Guide to Music Journalist Bullshit.

• London venue the Horse Hospital celebrates 20 years of unusual events.

• The Politics of Dread: An Interview with China Miéville.

• How Giallo Can You Go? Antoni Maiovvi Interviewed.

• A guide to Terry Riley’s music.

• Three more for the glam list: Coz I Love You (1971) by Slade | Get It On (1971) by T. Rex | Starman (40th Anniversary Mix) (1972) by David Bowie

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Ai No Corrida poster design by Egil Haraldsen (2001).

• “Back then, publishing an interview with Félix Guattari alongside little chats with rough trade and street walkers was unheard of — it still is for the most part.” BUTT on Kraximo, a gay Greek magazine of the 1980s.

• 13 books for 2013: A selection of forthcoming titles at Strange Flowers which so closely aligns with my preoccupations that I worry he’s reading my mind.

• “The Macaulay Library is the world’s largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings.”

• A free BitTorrent Robert Anton Wilson audio and video pack. See also the RAW files at the Internet Archive.

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The Pangu Building, Beijing, January 12th, 2013. Blade Runner arrives six years early.

• Wired celebrates 100 years of Edward Johnston’s typeface for the London Underground.

• Borges’ translation of Ulysses. Or of the last page of Ulysses as a translation of Ulysses.

• 0181, a new album by Four Tet, can be heard in full at SoundCloud.

• The Edge question for 2013: “What should we be worried about?”

• JG Ballard documentaries at Ubuweb.

• Unlocking Dockstader.

• RIP Nagisa Oshima.

• Ai No Corrida (1980) by Quincy Jones | Empire Of The Senses (1982) by Bill Nelson | Forbidden Colours (1983) by David Sylvian & Riuichi Sakamoto

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Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (2012) by Lesley Barnes. She also has peacock wrapping paper.

Big thanks to Dennis Cooper for including this blog in his favourite music, fiction, poetry, film, art & internet lists for 2012. Lots of good company there. One benefit of end-of-year lists is the way they suggest things to look for in January.

• “…the best pictures of dicks that I’ve ever seen…” Rudy Rucker reviews Malcolm McNeill’s The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here and Observed While Falling, out at last from Fantagraphics. Rucker notes that William Burroughs’ text is still only available in out-of-print editions in which case you’ll need a book dealer. Elsewhere, Burroughs: The Movie has cleared 50% of its restoration Kickstarter goal but still needs supporters.

• Julia Holter has been a recurrent presence in these posts since the release in March of her acclaimed second album, Ekstasis. FACT has an alternate version of the album’s opening song, Marienbad, one of the extra tracks on the recent UK reissue.

Suttree’s saga carried me down, down, down to the bottom of a heightened surrogate reality, a nadir where the rarest jewels of clarity are found. The fourth time through the novel I arrived at a state of barometric equipoise, a balancing between my mental state and Suttree’s. Then, as he descended again, I began to rise. There was a hypnotic poetry to his fall — his life disintegrated, then the fragments disintegrated, then those fragments followed suit ad infinitum.

Jim White on the life-preserving qualities of Suttree by Cormac McCarthy.

• “An 18-year-old boy who discovers he has a fetish for the aged gets a job in a nursing home and develops an intimate relationship with one particular old man.” Gerontophilia, a proposed film by Bruce LaBruce, is looking for funding.

• Can’t wait for this: Groenland Records announces Who’s That Man?, a four-CD set of music produced and performed by Conny Plank. FACT has a track list.

• At BUTT magazine: Pink Courtesy Phone Mix by Richard Chartier, a great selection of electronica old and new.

• Another end-of-year list: Volumes 1 & 2 of The Graphic Canon are in NPR’s Indie Bookseller best of 2012 selection.

• The Nightmare Paintings: art by Aleister Crowley currently touring Australia.

• Christmas with Monte: Colin Fleming on the ghost stories of MR James.

• “The war on drugs is a war on human nature” says Lewis Lapham.

• Alan Moore: why I turned my back on Hollywood.

• More electronica: Chris Carter discusses synths.

• Saul Bass poster sketches for The Shining.

• At Pinterest: The Pan Within.

• Ah Pook Is The Mayan God Of Death (1975) by William Burroughs | Panic (1985) by Coil | Light Shining Darkly (1992) by Coil.