{occult} – Page 7 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 760

Ermitaño Meditando (1955) by Remedios Varo.

• Public Domain Review announces the Public Domain Image Archive. I’ve added it to the list. Meanwhile, the PDR regular postings include Francis Picabia’s 391 magazine (1917–1924).

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Well at the World’s End by William Morris.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “See 25 incredible images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Contest”.

The ideas are more complex than the presentation suggests, but not vastly. Neither is it exactly breaking new ground. Art is everywhere, they say, from fingernails to fine dining; art is not a message to be decoded, but takes on new meanings in the mind of each viewer; art allows us to experience emotions in a “safe” context, like a form of affective practice; art helps us to imagine new worlds, thereby expanding the boundaries of what’s possible in the real world. The point isn’t to be original, though, but to distil a lifetime’s worth of practical wisdom and reflection. The result is a kind of joyous manifesto: just the thing to inspire a teenager (or adult) into a new creative phase. Eno and Adriaanse conclude with a “Wish”: that the book helps us understand that “what we need is already inside us”, and that “art – playing and feeling – is a way of discovering it”.

Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse talking to David Shariatmadari about their new book, What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory

• “Crunchie: The Taste Bomb!” DJ Food unearths four psychedelic posters promoting Fry’s Crunchie bars.

• New music: Music For Alien Temples by Various Artists, and Awakening The Ancestors by Nomad Tree.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine lays out a history of the Tarot in England.

• Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Research Arkestra live on German TV, 1970.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Chris Marker Day (restored/expanded).

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel on 10 great Mexican horror films.

• Matt Berry’s favourite albums.

• Tarot (Ace of Wands Theme) (1970) by Andrew Bown | Tarotplane (1971) by Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band | Tarot One (2012) by Tarot Twilight

Weekend links 758

Monstrum in animo (1955) by Yves Laloy.

• This week’s obligatory Bumper Book of Magic links: Alan Moore World has more of my ongoing comments about the creation of the book, while Séamas O’Reilly talked to Alan about the book itself and its connections with The Great When. The latter piece lowered my already low opinion of the late Genesis P-Orridge.

• At Timeless: A reprint of Bright Lights and Cats With no Mouths by John Balance. Still in print is The Cupboard Under the Stairs, a selection from JB’s notebooks.

• If you enjoy sleight-of hand magic—and I most certainly do—then Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants (1996) is 58 miraculous minutes by a master of the art.

• Mixes of the week: Winter Solstice 6 at Ambientblog; a mix for The Wire by Rafael Toral; and Reflection on 2024 at a Strangely Isolated Place.

• “Whatever the reason, there is something sorrowful about the disposal of art, whatever the perceived quality,” says Steven Heller.

• New music: The Path Of The Elder Ones by Nerthus.

• Bright Lights (1959?) by Wade Curtiss & The Rhythm Rockers | Bright Lights, Big City (1961) by Jimmy Reed | I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight (1974) by Richard & Linda Thompson

Weekend links 754

The Remains of Minotaur in a Harlequin Costume (1936) by Pablo Picasso. Via.

• At Rarefilmm: Long Live the New Flesh: The Films of David Cronenberg, a TV documentary from 1987 which includes contributions from Martin Scorsese and Stephen King. I wrote about this one years ago but at the time the only available copy was chopped into 10-minute segments.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Delinquent Elementals: A Pagan News Anthology, edited by Phil Hine & Rodney Orpheus.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine explores the possible influence of the Sherlock Holmes stories on Arthur Machen’s early fiction.

Perhaps there was a Super-Sargasso Sea in the upper atmosphere into which were carried objects from earth—frogs, fish, leaves—and from which they later rained. Perhaps the universe was a living thing, rains of blood its bleeding. Perhaps in 1903 the earth, in its orbit about the sun, passed through the remains of a world destroyed in an interplanetary dispute, the particles falling as rains of dust and redness. Perhaps humanity was controlled. “I think we’re property”, Fort wrote. Or, perhaps not; so skeptical he could not accept even his own authority, he had given up theorizing. “We have expressions: we don’t call them explanations: we’ve discarded explanations with beliefs.”

Joshua Blu Buhs on how Charles Fort came to write The Book of the Damned

• More Alan Moore: “Magic is not this big, spooky, dark thing that’s full of nightmares,” he tells Séamas O’Reilly at the Irish Times.

• High-resolution images of 14,000 woodblock illustrations and letterforms free to use at the Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp.

• New music: Music For Bus Stations by Rod Modell; and Between Soil And Sky by Tarotplane.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Denton Welch In Youth is Pleasure (1945).

• At the Quietus: The Strange World of…Irena and Vojtech Havlovi.

• Apollo Explorer

• Pagan Love Song (1959) by Martin Denny | Pagan Lovesong (Vibeakimbo) (1982) by Virgin Prunes | Pagan Sun Temple (2022) by Hawksmoor

Weekend links 753

Grow (1970) by Linda Brewer.Via.

• The week in work-related reviews: Raymond Tyler reviewed the Bumper Book of Magic at Religious Socialism, while James Palmer did the same at Foreign Policy. Meanwhile, Rob Latham at the Los Angeles Review of Books examined the legacy of the New Wave of science fiction with reviews of New Worlds 224, and The Last Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison’s long-delayed story collection.

• “Incline Press is a private fine press publisher in the UK, stubbornly printing with hand set, metal type on a collection of vintage machines, working with poets and artists to make limited edition books and ephemera.”

• New music: Horses In Your Blood, another dose of unhinged weirdness from Moon Wiring Club; The Source by Jon Palmer; and Ekkorääg by Tarotplane.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Rikki Ducornet The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade (1999).

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “Rare atlas of astronomy from the Dutch Golden Age goes on display in England“.

• Old music: Jon Savage’s Space, a space-themed compilation on Caroline True Records.

• At The Daily Heller: Berman’s Book Boom is a boon to graphic design’s legacy.

• At Public Domain Review: Christoph Jamnitzer’s Neuw Grotteßken Buch (1610).

• Mix of the week: A Dungeon Synth mix by Flickers From The Fen for The Wire.

• At Heavy Metal Magazine: The HP Lovecraft Art of John Holmes.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Laurie Anderson.

• I Can Hear The Grass Grow (1967) by The Move | Grow Fins (1972) by Captain Beefheart | The Growing (2011) by The Haxan Cloak

Weekend links 752

Captain Nemo by Alphonse de Neuville, from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1875) by Jules Verne.

• “…physical remoteness is a category of its own. It is an enhancer: It can make the glorious better and the terrible worse. The oceanic pole of inaccessibility distills physical remoteness on our planet into a pure and absolute form. […] Point Nemo is nearly impossible to get to and offers nothing when you arrive, not even a place to stand. It is the anti-Everest: It beckons because nothing is there.” Cullen Murphy explores the remotest place on Earth. A long and fascinating read, but no mention of Point Nemo’s dreaming tenant.

• More Bumper Book business: Smoky Man has posted the second part of his analysis of the book for (Quasi) (in Italian) which includes some comments from myself about the origin of the Moon and Serpent Magical Alphabet, and why the letter Q in the alphabet is assigned to Cthulhu. Elsewhere, Panini have announced an Italian edition of the Bumper Book for May next year, while at The Beat Steve Baxi reviewed the book from a philosophical perspective.

• At the BFI: David Parkinson on where to begin with Louis Feuillade. I’d suggest starting with Fantômas rather than Les Vampires but then I’m biased.

The combination of magic(k)al, ceremonial action, vivid colour and paradoxically serious camp in Jarman’s Super 8 films of the ’70s bears the influence of Kenneth Anger, but the differences between Jarman’s sensibility and Anger’s are more striking than the resemblances. Jarman’s vision is more materialist, austere and hermetic, and less sociological; where Anger identifies the glamour of American popular culture with the Will of the Crowleyan magician, Jarman situates the discovery of the cinematographic mechanism imaginatively within the history of alchemy. Anger cast rock stars as gods and adepts with the intention of harnessing the energy of their recognition; Jarman casts Fire Island, then in its heyday as a gay resort, as a desert defined by sculptural details and occupied by a single masked figure, in scenes that both recall his landscape paintings of the ’60s and ’70s and anticipate the design of his garden at Dungeness.

Luke Aspell on Derek Jarman’s hermetic film/painting, In the Shadow of the Sun

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “Visions of nuclear-powered cars captivated Cold War America, but the technology never really worked”.

• At The Spectator podcast: host Sam Leith talks to Michael Moorcock about 60 years of New Worlds magazine.

• At Public Domain Review: “Light from the Darkness” — Paul Nash’s Genesis (1924).

• At Bandcamp: “Disco godfather Cerrone’s enduring influence on dance music”.

• At Unquiet Things: The Art of Survival: Eyeball Fodder in Dark Times.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – November 2024 at Ambientblog.

• New music: The Laugh Is In The Eyes by Julia Holter.

• At The Daily Heller: The College of Collage.

• RIP jazz drummer Roy Haynes.

• Thermonuclear Sweat (1980) by Defunkt | Nuclear Drive (1982) by Hawkwind | Nuclear Substation (2005) by The Advisory Circle