{electronica} – Page 108

Weekend links 272

No Passing (1954) by Kay Sage.

• More Lovecraftiana: She Walks In Shadows, an illustrated all-woman Lovecraftian anthology, will be published in October. Related: “The octopus genome and the evolution of cephalopod neural and morphological novelties“, a study that’s been filtering through the press as “Do octopuses have alien DNA?”

• “The right to ‘subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism’ is the bedrock of an open, diverse society,” says Kenan Malik in his TB Davie Memorial Lecture.

• Sunn O))) with Attila Csihar at the Berlin Heimathafen. Related: Here’s what you missed at Sunn O)))’s sold out Berlin gig.

Caillois is fascinated by these “beveled buildings,” truly abundant in the Fifteenth, along with an unusually high incidence of blind walls, false façades, and merely ornamental windows, each beloved of his phantoms. In the parts of the arrondissement developed during the postwar period, Caillois’s attention is drawn instead to the ventilator shafts and drainage grates that dot the streets. These structures, built to clear away rainwater or aerate underground garages, have a secret function, according to him. Noting their uncanny similarity to some of the settings in the Weird Tales of HP Lovecraft, he speculates that they may have been constructed to provide the entry points for an extraterrestrial invasion of our planet.

Ryan Ruby on Roger Callois and the phantoms of the Fifteenth Arrondissement

• “I’m really into big moments,” says Julia Holter whose new album, Have You In My Wilderness, is released next month.

• Adrian Utley talks to Peter Zinovieff, co-inventor of the EMS synthesizer. Related: What the Future Sounded Like.

• “Tarkovsky’s Solaris is the anti-2001: A Space Odyssey,” says Marissa Visci.

• Mix of the week: Gizehcast #17 by Rutger Zuydervelt.

• Modernist architecture on film.

• Thaumaturgy at Tumblr

• The Call of Ktulu (1984) by Metallica | Cthulhu Dawn (2000) by Cradle of Filth | Cthulhu: A Cryo Chamber Collaboration (2014) by Various Artists

Weekend links 270

Cover design for UFOs and Extra-Terrestrials in History (four vols, 1978) by Yves Naud.

• Come To The Sabbath, “a festival of dark arts delving into the influence of Black Magick, Witchcraft, Demonology and Satanism in pop culture”, takes place at Apiary Studios, 458 Hackney Road, London, from Tues 18th–Sun 23rd August.

• “Visitors, if there had ever been any, would have said that the little town of Mansfield was haunted.” Showdown is a previously unpublished short story by Shirley Jackson.

• “A sandbox stealthy immersive sim in a surreal, horror-y world inspired by writers like Burroughs and Ballard…” Alice O’Connor previews the forthcoming computer game, Tangiers.

Sometime in the late 1960s, the artist Robert Smithson took a trip to southwestern Ohio. He saw the Great Serpent Mound there and decided that he would make a great spiral too. […] Because the Great Salt Lake’s levels vary several feet from year to year, and also from season to season, Spiral Jetty is not always visible even if you make the trip to Utah. You could go out to Spiral Jetty and find that the entire earthwork is invisible underwater. When Robert Smithson created this earthwork in 1970, he did not care if it could be easily seen or who owned it. And so, even today, no one knows to whom Spiral Jetty really belongs. To view it requires a pilgrimage.

Stefany Anne Goldberg on earthworks, new and ancient, and the art of disappearance

• “Commercial book cover design is a minor portion of Gorey’s award-winning legacy, but not a lesser art.” Steven Heller on Edward Gorey: cover designer.

• “You are accepted,” he says, “by the genre that can accept you.” Samuel R. Delany talked to Peter Bebergal about being an outsider in the world of science fiction.

• A battle of Witts: A brief look at ‘Taboos’ and the work of The Passage. Mark Griffiths on a great, if seldom-remembered, Manchester band.

• “Hispanic photomonteur Josep Renau aimed Technicolor jets of scorn at the mirage of US consumerist culture,” says Rick Poynor.

• Because the internet is really big… Kelli Anderson reworks the Eames’ The Powers of Ten using imagery found via Google searches.

• Against Nature is a forthcoming musical adaptation of Huysmans’ À Rebours by Marc Almond, Jeremy Reed and Othon.

• “What makes a film noir?” Adam Frost & Melanie Patrick have an infographic for you.

• Mixes of the week: Gizehcast #20 by LCC, and Jenny Hval‘s WEIRD Quietus mix.

• Mysterium Tremendum: Russell Cuzner on The Strange World of Lustmord.

• The charming march of the Penguin Books logo.

• Cosey Fanni Tutti: Agent Provocateur

• Dark Times (Peel Session) (1980) by The Passage | XOYO (1982) by The Passage | Revelation (1982) by The Passage

Weekend links 269

Grosses Wasser (1979) by Cluster. Cover art by Dieter Moebius.

• RIP Dieter Moebius: one half of Cluster (with Hans-Joachim Roedelius), one third of Harmonia (with Roedelius and Michael Rother), and collaborator with many other musicians, including Brian Eno and Conny Plank. Geeta Dayal, who interviewed Moebius for Frieze in 2012, chose five favourite recordings. From 2008: Cosmic Outriders: the music of Cluster and Harmonia by Mark Pilkington. At the Free Music Archive: Harmonia playing at ATP, New York in 2008. Live recordings of Cluster in the 1970s have always been scarce but in 1977 they played a droning set at the Metz Science-Fiction Festival, a performance that was broadcast on FM radio (the Eno credit there seems to be an error).

• “I’ve since had the feeling that, if the attacks against The Satanic Verses had taken place today, these people would not have defended me, and would have used the same arguments against me, accusing me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority.” Salman Rushdie on the fallout from the Charlie Hebdo killings.

• “The effect of these memories is to make you think you know the film better than you do, and wonder what it’s like actually to sit down and watch it.” Michael Wood on rewatching Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). Related: Tipping My Fedora on the film’s source novel, Badge of Evil (1956).

“To me, it’s simple,” he says. “Fantasy became as bland as everything else in entertainment. To be a bestseller, you’ve got to rub the corners off. The more you can predict the emotional arc of a book, the more successful it will become.

“I do understand that Game of Thrones is different. It has its political dimensions; I’m very fond of the dwarf and I’m very pleased that George [R R Martin], who’s a good friend, has had such a huge success. But ultimately it’s a soap opera. In order to have success on that scale, you have to obey certain rules. I’ve had conversations with fantasy writers who are ambitious for bestseller status and I’ve had to ask them, ‘Yes, but do you want to have to write those sorts of books in order to get there?’”

Michael Moorcock talking to Andrew Harrison about fantasy, science fiction, the past and the present.

• “Architects love Blade Runner, they just go bonkers. When I was working on the film, it was all about, let’s jam together Byzantine and Mayan and Post-Modern and even a little bit of Memphis, just mash it all together.” Designer and visual futurist Syd Mead talking to Patrick Sisson.

• “Lucian of Samosata’s True History reads like a doomed acid trip,” says Cecilia D’Anastasio, who wonders whether or not the book can be regarded as the earliest work of science fiction.

• Mixes of the week: A Tribute to Dieter Moebius by Vegan Logic, and another by Totallyradio.

• The Phantasmagoria of the First Hand-Painted Films by Joshua Yumibe.

• Islamic Geometric: calligraphic tessellations by Shakil Akram Khan.

• Michael Prodger on The Dangerous Mind of Richard Dadd.

• A chronological list of synth scores and soundtracks.

• Touch Of Evil (Main Theme) (1958) by Henry Mancini | Badge Of Evil (1982) by Cabaret Voltaire | Touch Of Evil (2009) by Jaga Jazzist

Weekend links 268

A City on Pluto (1940) by Frank R. Paul. Related: Paul’s predictions about life on other planets.

• 23 Skidoo’s Peel Session from September 16th, 1981. Only 18 minutes of music but I’m thrilled for its being unique material that’s never been given an official release. There are many more Peel Sessions at the uploader’s channel, not all of which were reissued on the Strange Fruit label. Download favourites in their as-broadcast form (some with John Peel’s introductions) before they vanish or get blocked like the 1981 Cabaret Voltaire session. Related: Wikipedia’s list of Peel Sessions.

• Mixes of the week comprise two collections by Jon Dale of strange and beguiling Italian music: The Prevarications Of The Sky Against The Earth and La Verifica Incerta; the Summer Window Mix (“telly detritus, new-not-new synth nonsense & off-colour pop oddities”) by Moon Wiring Club; and Secret Thirteen Mix 158 by Haunter Records.

• “Hello, this is David Bowie. It’s a bit grey out today but I’ve got some Perrier water, and I’ve got a bunch of records…” Two hours of the Thin White Duke playing favourite music on BBC Radio One, 20th May, 1979.

Some of Vidal’s guests were writers, not exactly his favorite group. “Writers are the only people who are reviewed by people of their own kind,” Vidal said in an interview. “And their own kind can often be reasonably generous—if you stay in your category. I don’t. I do many different things rather better than most people do one thing. And envy is the central fact of American life.”

Frank Pizzoli reviews Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal by Michael Mewshaw

• Yair Elazar Glotman’s new album, Études, conjures “bone-rattling resonance, thick, alien-like atmospheres, and percussive fragments”. Stream it in full here.

• London’s Lost Department Store of the Swinging Sixties: Inge Oosterhoff on the splendours of Biba.

• It’s that Ungeziefer again: Richard T. Kelly on 100 years of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

• The History of Creepy Dolls: Linda Rodriguez McRobbie explores the uncanny valley.

• At Dangerous Minds: Matt Groening tells the story of The Residents in 1979.

• The NYT collects NASA’s photos from the New Horizons Pluto flyby.

• The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments

• Written on the Body: tattoos in cinema

• The Doll’s House (1981) by Landscape | Voodoo Dolly (1981) by Siouxsie and the Banshees | Devils Doll Baby (1986) by Sonny Sharrock

Weekend links 267

Black Fever (2010) by Polly Morgan.

• “She was something of an Auntie Mame figure for me. We spent years haunting secondhand bookstores in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and New York, talking for hours over ever more bizarre dishes of Chinese Hakka cuisine in a hole-in-the-wall eatery at Stockton and Broadway in San Francisco, watching Kenneth Anger flicks and the surrealistic stop-motion puppet masterpieces of Ladislas Starevich, which Tom Luddy would screen for us at the Pacific Film Archive, over and over again until our eyeballs nearly fell out.” Steve Wasserman remembers Susan Sontag.

• California Dreams is “the first career-spanning compendium of Mouse’s work; it includes his recent landscapes and figurative paintings. Taken as a whole, the work is a weird, gilded, space-age, flame-licked way to chart the rise of late-twentieth-century youth culture”. Jeffery Gleaves on the psychedelic art of Stanley Mouse.

• “Not only does moral preoccupation corrupt the artfulness of fiction, but fiction is an inefficient and insincere vehicle for moralizing,” says Alice Gregory, joining Pankaj Mishra to address the question: “Do Moralists Make Bad Novelists?”

Nabokov’s posthumously published Lectures on Literature reprints a corny magazine ad that Nabokov liked to show to his students at Cornell, as an example of a certain kind of sunny American materialism and kitsch (or poshlost, in Russian): it’s an ad for flatware featuring a young housewife, hands clasped, eyes brimming as she contemplates a place setting. Nabokov titled it “Adoration of Spoons,” and it undoubtedly played a significant role in his creation of the suburban widow Charlotte Haze. From such strangely endearing trash was a masterpiece born.

John Colapinto reviewing Nabokov in America by Robert Roper

• “How many typefaces is too many typefaces?” asks Adrian Shaughnessy. “What happens to our ability to discriminate and exercise good judgment when we have a near-infinite number of possibilities?”

• At BUTT: a clip from one of the more dreamlike scenes in Wakefield Poole’s gay porn film, Bijou (1972). Poole’s “sensual memoir”, Dirty Poole, is published by Lethe Press.

• John Banville reviews The Prince of Minor Writers, selected essays of Max Beerbohm edited by Phillip Lopate.

• My thanks once again to Dennis Cooper for featuring this blog on his list of cultural favourites.

• More Moogery: Sarah Angliss, Gazelle Twin and Free School in the Moog Sound Lab.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 394 by Francesca Lombardo.

• Atlas Obscura gets to grips with the enormous Devil’s Bible.

• Feel You, a new song by Julia Holter.

• Spoonful (1960) by Howlin’ Wolf | Spoon (1972) by Can | Spoon (2013) by Mazzy Star