{occult} – Page 104 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 10

One of a number of vintage ads and ephemeral items at this Flickr set.

• From 1971: The Anthony Balch/William Burroughs/Jan Herman video experiment.

• The NYT reports on World on a Wire, a neglected science fiction drama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

• “While some of the technology industry’s brightest minds were inventing the first PCs and developing groundbreaking software, they were also feeding their heads with LSD.”

• The archive of author and illustrator Mervyn Peake has been acquired by the British Library for £410,000.

• Thames & Hudson are publishing I Wonder, a book by the wonderful Marian Bantjes, later in the year. Her site has a preview. I want.

• The gays: It’s election season in the UK so My Gay Vote looks at how the three main parties have supported LGB issues. (No data for the graphs, however.) Is theatre finally glad to be gay? Yet more Tumblrs: I heart skinny boys & Cute boys with cats.

• Trend-spotter, “svengali”, Situationist and the man who named the Sex Pistols: RIP Malcolm McLaren. The Guardian ran a number of memorial pages. Related: Anarchy in Gardenstown.

• Dublin’s One City, One Book choice for April 2010 is The Picture of Dorian Gray.

• The Catastrophist: Christopher Hitchens on JG Ballard.

• Steampunk Taxidermy by Lisa Black.

• LIFE looks back at Aleister Crowley.

• Groovy songs of the week: Julie Driscoll (with Brian Auger & The Trinity), a pair of songs by Bob Dylan—This Wheel’s On Fire—and Donovan—Season Of The Witch—and sets which look like a collaboration between Verner Panton and Marcel Duchamp. Amazing.

Cabala, Speculum Artis Et Naturae In Alchymia

The plates from Stephan Michelspacher’s Cabala, Speculum Artis Et Naturae In Alchymia (1654) are familiar from histories of alchemy but SLUB Dresden has high-resolution scans of the entire book. Also there is Wenzel Jamnitzer’s astonishing Perspectiva Corporum Regularium (1568), a volume covered in detail at BibliOdyssey last year.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Digital alchemy

Kenneth Anger: ‘No, I am not a Satanist’

Kenneth Anger: ‘No, I am not a Satanist’ | Anger interviewed.

The art of Nicomi Nix Turner

The Shaman.

Gorgeous drawings from this American artist, none of which are as innocent as they first appear. Some of my friends with Wunderkammer obsessions will be interested in the three-dimensional constructions detailed on her blog and her Flickr pages.

Via Phantasmaphile.

Arsenic.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Juliet Jacobson

Passage 12

Ed Jansen writes again to notify me that the latest number of his web magazine, Passage, is now online, about which he says:

In Passage nr. 12 there are articles about a 17th century garden in The Hague, about the mysterious visit to The Hague by the Comte De Saint Germain. Was he really a enlightened man or a fraud? If you’re an occultist you’ll tend to believe the first, the historian thinks otherwise. Then there are the photos of the dancer and performer Hiroake Umeda. Strange movements underlined by light-effects. Living in a Capsule is a combination of the paintings by the Dutch artist Tjebbe Beekman and the work of J.G. Ballard. Lastly there is an article about Jan Bastiaans, the doctor who experimented with LSD to ‘free’ the victims of the concentration camps of the nightmares and repressed memories.

Once again the text content is in Dutch but that doesn’t exclude all visitors here. I hadn’t come across the work of Tjebbe Beekman before. His paintings of urban desolation are indeed a good match for one aspect of Ballard’s work, and they make an interesting contrast with Dick French’s earlier views of the author’s Drowned World.

Trust by Tjebbe Beekman (2005).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Drowned Worlds
• Passage 11
• Passage 10