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Weekend links 329

Josef Vyletal borrows figures from Aubrey Beardsley’s Salomé for a Czech poster promoting The Immortal Story (1969) by Orson Welles. Vyletal’s own paintings were often strange and surreal.

• Pale Fire is Nabokov’s “great gay comic novel,” says Edmund White. A surprising but not inappropriate reappraisal. White has noted in the past that Nabokov “hated homosexuality” despite having a gay brother and uncle. The portrayal of Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire isn’t unsympathetic if you overlook his being delusional, and possibly insane…

• At Folk Horror Revival: details of the charity donations raised by sales of the Folk Horror Revival books, the first of which featured my David Rudkin essay. A one-day Folk Horror Revival event takes place later this month at the British Museum, London.

• Mixes of the week: The Bug presents Killing Sound Chapter 2: Inner Space, a 2-hour blend of “sci-fi scores, expansive atmospheres and synthesized psychedelia”; Decoded Sundays presents Scanner; Secret Thirteen Mix 197 is by LXV.

• Stars Of The Lid unveil a James Plotkin remix of their Music For Twin Peaks Episode #30 Pt. 1. Related: the hype for the new Twin Peaks series gets into gear with a teaser.

• Robert Aickman’s only novel, The Late Breakfasters (1964), is being given its first US publication by Valancourt Books.

• “Don’t dream it, bet it.” Evan J. Peterson on 40 years of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

• Anna von Hausswolff’s sister, Maria, directs a video for Come Wander With Me / Deliverance.

• RIP Michael O’Pray, film writer and curator of many festivals of experimental cinema.

• Oli Warwick talks to electronic musicians about the influence of the late Don Buchla.

• Breakfast In Bed (1969) by Dusty Springfield | Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast (1970) by Pink Floyd | Another Breakfast With You (2001) by Ladytron

Weekend links 328

Feathers and Weights (2016) by Susan Jamison.

• The latest release from A Year In The Country is No More Unto The Dance, “a reflection of nightlife memories and the search for the perfect transportative electronic beat”.

• Depero Futurista (1927), the bolted book showcasing the artistic work of Fortunato Depero, returns in a facsimile edition.

• This week in the occult: Sam Kean on 21st-century alchemists, and a second volume of The Occult Activity Book.

How could so many jazz critics have overlooked Davis’s powerful trumpet playing on Bitches Brew, and its continuities with his previous work? The reason for their bewilderment was, in large part, the brew, the music’s muddy electric bottom, which bore no resemblance to the jazz they knew. Davis had never been a pure bopper, but his music had always made allusion, however oblique, to the grammar of Parker and Gillespie. On Bitches Brew, Davis decisively broke with his roots in bop. As [George] Grella argues, building on the pivotal work of Greg Tate and Paul Tingen, the more revealing points of comparison were no longer to be found in jazz but in the psychedelic guitar of Jimi Hendrix, the warbled vocals of Sly Stone, and the bass lines of James Brown.

Adam Shatz on Miles Davis

• Daniel Wenger on Bob Mizer, “the obsessive photographer behind America’s first gay magazine”.

• The Hauntings at Tankerton Park, a book of words and very detailed drawings by Reggie Oliver.

• A 40-minute performance by Pentangle for Norwegian television in 1968.

• Maisie Skidmore on ten things you may not know about René Magritte.

• Shirley Collins is the secret queen of England, says Nick Abrahams.

• Eighth Climate: ethnographic recordings from the imaginal world.

• Pasquale Iannone on five ways to recognise a Pasolini film.

• The greatest record sleeves, as chosen by the designers.

• Cosmic Horror, new comics work by Ibrahim R. Ineke.

• Mix of the week: FACT mix 569 by S U R V I V E.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 47 unmade films.

• Cosmic Dancer (1971) by T. Rex | Cosmic Slop (1973) by Funkadelic | Cosmic Tango (1973) by Ash Ra Tempel

Weekend links 327

The Green Knight Arrives by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Part of a series based on the theme of Gawain and the Green Knight.

• RIP Don Buchla, inventor of the Buchla Electronic Musical Instrument (or simply Buchla to aficionados). The early Buchlas were produced contemporaneously with the Moogs but never achieved an equivalent popularity. Morton Subotnick was an early serious player, using one of the first Buchlas to record Silver Apples Of The Moon in 1967. By coincidence, this month has seen the release of Sunergy, an album created by two Buchla enthusiasts, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Suzanne Ciani, the latter having been a Buchla player for many years. Sean Hellfritsch made a 25-minute film of the pair playing their machines, while they talked about their collaboration to Danny Riley.

• Erik Davis talks to occult book-dealer Todd Pratum about rejected knowledge, growing up Californian, book synchronicities, and the loss of knowledge in the age of the Internet.

• Mix of the week (month, year, etc) is undoubtedly this 12-hour history of Spiritual Jazz. Less intimidating (and more eclectic) is an exclusive mix by Fenriz for The Wire.

• More electronica: (The Microcosm): Visionary Music of Continental Europe, 1970–1986, another quality music collection from Light In The Attic.

• Flying Saucers Are Real! is a history of 20th-century UFOdom by Jack Womack. Related: A map of the last remaining Flying Saucer Homes.

• Coming soon from the Ghost Box label, Peel Away The Ivy by The Pattern Forms. Jon Brooks gives an account of the album’s creation.

• Uri Bram meets computer scientist David Chapman to discuss the limits of formal learning, or why robots can’t dance.

• Andrew Male on Julius Eastman: the groundbreaking composer America almost forgot.

• Ship found in Arctic 168 years after doomed Northwest Passage attempt.

• Anna Cafolia on the resurgence of witchcraft in 1970s Britain.

• Welcome to the Austronesian Embassy of Anaphoria Island.

• Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top chooses some favourite records.

• A profusion of Marty Feldman links.

• The Flying Saucer Pts 1 & 2 (1956) by Buchanan And Goodman | Flyin’ Saucers Rock’nRoll (1957) by Billy Lee Riley and The Little Green Men | Flying Saucers Have Landed (1972) by Paul St. John

Weekend links 326

Anchoress by Judith Schaechter.

• The publication of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem is imminent so the NYT asked him about his favourite books and writers of the moment. For the next post I’ll be writing about my own involvement with Moore’s novel.

• Chris Campion on David Bowie and the missing soundtrack: the amazing story behind The Man Who Fell to Earth. Related: cinematographer Anthony Richmond on his memories of shooting the film.

• Mr Beatnick on how the B-side of Change The Beat by Beside became the most sampled song of all time.

• Lisa Hix on An Un-Conventional Thirst: Collecting 7Up’s most beautiful, hallucinatory billboards.

• Rub Out The Word: Steve Buscemi & Elliott Sharp present texts by William Burroughs.

• Opening next month at the Corridor Gallery, Brighton (UK): An exhibition of art by Ian Miller.

• Folk singer Shirley Collins will be releasing a new album, Lodestar, her first for over 35 years.

• A trip to the mythical Isle of Tiki, Polynesian Pop and A/C Eden.

• Mix of the week: Harvest Hymns by Melmoth The Wanderer.

• Wandering In Space: composer Jherek Bischoff interviewed.

• Heavy Water is a new short film by Adam Scovell.

• “When will New York sink?” asks Andrew Rice.

• The World’s Largest Synthesizer

• The Thai Occult by Jenx

• RIP Richard Neville

• The Other Without

• We Are Cult

• Heavy Rock (1976) by Sound Dimension | Heavy Charm (1995) by The Ear | Heavy Water (2008) by Crackle

Weekend links 325

08-30-16 from the Everydays series by Beeple.

• “Monsieur de Bougrelon is a unique character: loquacious, proud, a leftover from an earlier age, wearing garish outfits and makeup that drips. To his speechless audience, he waxes nostalgic about his life as an exile in Holland, as well as what he calls “imaginary pleasures” – obsessions with incongruous people, animals, and objects. These obsessions are often sexual or border on the sexual, leading to shocking, surreal scenes. Monsieur de Bougrelon also enthuses over his beautiful friend Monsieur de Mortimer, making this novella one of the rare works of the nineteenth century to broach homosexuality in a meaningful way, years before Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet.” Monsieur de Bougrelon (1897) by Jean Lorrain will receive its first English publication by Spurl Editions in November.

• “…The Future seems in retrospect to have been no more than a spectacle, created by the optimistic few for the optimistic many, the readily gulled multitudes who had faith in technological seers just as an earlier generation had had faith in Great Men.” Jonathan Meades reviews Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture by Douglas Murphy.

• In the Woods & On the Heath is a collection of 48 pieces of erotic prose and poetry by 24 writers, all of them illustrated by Van Rijn.

Borneman was widely read in European literature and, once settled in London, wasted no time bringing himself up to speed with developments in English-language writing, discovering a particular affinity with Hemingway and Joyce, not to mention American crime writers such as Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett. This presumably explains the distinctive, sometimes highly eccentric style of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor, which despite being set in an English film studio of the 1930s (which evokes images, perhaps, of genteel musical comedies performed in perfect RP accents), combines laconic, hardboiled dialogue with extended stream-of-consciousness passages, all filtered through the skewed phraseology of someone whose acquisition of English was still, to some extent, a work in progress.

Jonathan Coe on the mysteries of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor, a novel by “Cameron McCabe” (Ernest Borneman)

• How Oscar Wilde paved the way for gay rights in the arts. Wilde will be honoured with a major exhibition in Paris later this month.

• Noisy Rain is a free online publication dedicated to “artists working with the male figure and homo-eroticism”.

• Dennis Cooper’s blog returns. The truth about Google’s deletion of the Blogspot account has finally emerged.

• Peel Away The Ivy by The Pattern Forms will be release number 26 on the Ghost Box label in October.

• Glam Rock & Yorkshire Occult: Ben Myers on his novel Turning Blue.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 195 by Jake Meginsky.

• At Phantasmaphile: Unarius: We Are Not Alone.

• Blokdust is a browser-based musical instrument.

• Official trailer for David Lynch: The Art Life.

• Future Dub (1994) by Mouse On Mars | Future Proof (2003) by Massive Attack | Future Past Perfect pt 01 by Carsten Nicolai