Weekend links 33

andrews1.jpg

Blue Sky Noise (2010) by Esao Andrews.

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt is the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to the 18th-century sculptor. Related: an earlier post about the artist’s work.

• How are the team behind War Horse planning to follow up their smash hit? With a gay love story performed by puppets. Related: Achilles (1995) by Barry JC Purves.

• More great posts at A Journey Round My Skull: Czechoslovakian Expose VI and Black Cradle of Bright Life, fifteen works by the Macedonian artist Vangel Naumovski (1924–2006).

Top 10 Anti-Gay Activists Caught Being Gay. Related: “Fuck your feelings,” in which columnist Dan Savage gets righteously impatient when a correspondent complains. As Savage says, people who use their faith as a stick to beat gay people contribute to an atmosphere of intolerance in which kids are bullied for being gay (or appearing to be), or transgender, or merely different, and kill themselves as a result. Over the past couple of weeks there’s been an upsurge of US media attention to the most recent suicides; Savage inaugurated the It Gets Better project in order to help. Also related: God Loves Poetry.

andrews2.jpg

Meigh (2010) by Esao Andrews.

Antony Hegarty enthuses about Shoot Yer Load, one of the scurrilous 12″ singles released by my Savoy colleagues in the 1980s. Antony and the Johnsons have a new album out, Swanlights, on Secretly Canadian.

When the future of music was a rainbow hued parabola: book designer John Gall collects old synthesizer manuals.

Fantastic Memories (1944) by Maurice Sandoz, illustrated by Salvador Dalí.

Urban optometry: life as a London crane operator at BLDGBLOG.

• Today is 10/10/10 which means it’s Powers of Ten Day.

These New Puritans: a band like no other.

Art Nouveau: a virtual exhibition.

Diaghilev: Lord of the dance.

Flaming Telepaths (1974) by Blue Öyster Cult; Flaming Telepaths (2005) by Espers.

Circadian by Jack Sparrow

sparrow.jpg

I’m still (still!) playing catch-up posting all the things I’ve been working on this year. Here’s one of the more high-profile releases in the music sphere, Jack Sparrow‘s debut album, Circadian, which is unleashed this week on the Tectonic label. This is another dubstep production and I don’t have to try and describe the music this time when you can hear a stream of it at FACT.

sparrow2.jpg

Vinyl sleeve.

Design-wise, this is another release in CD and vinyl editions, and like all the work I’ve done for Tectonic it comes wrapped in Liz Eve’s wonderful photos. The pictures this time are some kind of industrial detritus which she’s turned into abstract landscapes. The vinyl was a three-disc set and the way the labels have turned out is probably my favourite part of this particular job.

sparrow3.jpg

Vinyl labels.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
New work: Two forms of darkness
The Thorns of Love by Antoni Maiovvi
New music and design
Plates: Volume 2
Aerial by 2562

Weekend links 32

ji1.jpg

Red Quechquemitls (2010) by Sylvia Ji.

• The Blackout Mix, a pay-what-thou-wilt 49-minute mixtape, “specially designed to accompany (or simulate) a human-plant interaction”. Art by Arik Roper, music selection by Jay Babcock.

An ode to the many evolved virtues of human semen: “the penis is capable of dispensing a sort of natural Prozac” says Jesse Bering.

• The new John Foxx CD & DVD release, D.N.A., has a Jonathan Barnbrook cover, a new collaboration with Harold Budd and a disc of short films.

• “I have been copying Margaret Hamilton my whole life, and I am proud to admit it. The Wicked Witch of the West, the jolie laide heroine of every bad little boy’s and girl’s dream of notoriety and style, whose twelve minutes of screen time in The Wizard of Oz can never be topped … I’m a big butch-lesbian hag. I love the ones with chips on their shoulders and heavy attitude. They’re my real favorites.” John Waters always gives great interviews.

• Listen to a track from the forthcoming Brian Eno album while you’re reading Kristine McKenna’s interview with the man himself at Arthur mag. Includes an appreciation by Alan Moore.

ji2.jpg

Atropa Bella Donna (2009) by Sylvia Ji.

• Steven Severin is touring the UK this month, performing a live accompaniment to screenings of Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet. He’s at the Tyneside Cinema this Tuesday. Other dates can be found on his website.

• “I know it’s a very emotive subject and you’re either for it or against it but for a jobbing self-employed musician such as me – bootlegging (CD copying) is just killing us.” Finding The Spaces Between: musician Chris Carter (Throbbing Gristle, Chris & Cosey, et al) interviewed.

Mile End Pugatorio (1991), a one-minute film-poem by Guy Sherwin and Martin Doyle. Related: four one-minute movies by The Residents.

• Gijs Van Vaerenbergh installed an Upside Dome at the St. Michiel Church in Leuven, Belgium.

• Sidney Sime illustrates Lord Dunsany at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Europe according to gay men. There’s more at Mapping Stereotypes.

• There’s never a dull moment in the High Desert.

• Generative art by Leonardo Solas.

Weekend links 31

bock.jpg

One of a series of illustrations by Vera Bock for A Ring and a Riddle (1944) by M.Ilin and E. Segal. Via A Journey Round My Skull.

The Creator of Devotion: Photos from a Vogue Hommes Japan feature by Matthew Stone. And also here.

Dressing For Pleasure: Jonny Trunk gets out the rubber gear. Related: King of Kinky.

Salvator Rosa (1615–1673) is having a show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

Hackney Dissenting Academy #1: Throbbing Gristle, Iain Sinclair & Alan Moore.

Out Of The Flesh (1984) by Chakk. A great single never reissued on CD.

• Photographer Charles Gatewood remembers William Burroughs.

mural.jpg

The Endless Mural. Follow links here to have a play around.

Vinyl record sales are at the top of a four-year sales trend.

Can explosions move faster than the speed of light?

• Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Car is reborn.

• Maximus Clarke talks with William Gibson.

Why Stephen Fry loves Wagner.

Kafka’s Last Trial.

• Alice Coltrane in concert, Warsaw, 1987: Harp solo | Impressions | Lonnie’s Lament | A Love Supreme.

Weekend links 30

woody.jpg

Did someone say “woody”? Plenty more toy antics at TheOneCam.

• And yet more Haeckelisms: Praying in Haeckel’s Garden, recent works by artist Mary O’Malley.

Seasons of the Peacock, the perennial showoff as depicted by a handful of Art Nouveau artists. A couple of examples there I hadn’t seen before.

• Dorian Cope presents On This Deity, “Commemorating culture heroes and excavating world events.”

• At long last, Fantagraphics will be publishing Ah Pook is Here, the comic strip collaboration between William Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill. Something to look forward to for next year. Related: Malcolm McNeill’s website.

David Lynch Dark Splendor: “Der große Filmemacher David Lynch als Fotograf, Maler, Zeichner und Grafiker.”

More on the forthcoming album from Brian Eno, Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins. With this degree of hype the end result is going to be a disappointment.

Book design by Richard Hollis, including John Berger’s essential Ways of Seeing.

A fistful of Vignellis: the work of Lella and Massimo Vignelli celebrated.

• Berni Wrightson’s Frankenstein at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Jimi Hendrix, Philip José Farmer reader.

Imagerie du Chemin de Fer.

El UFO Cayó (2005) by Ry Cooder.