{painting} – Page 66 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 368

Piazzetta San Marco by Moonlight (no date) by Friedrich Paul Nerly.

• RIP Heathcote Williams (Guardian obit, NYT obit): poet, playwright, actor, artist, anarchist, stage magician, and no doubt many other things besides. Being a product of the counter-culture, and one of Britain’s foremost anti-establishment writers (his polemics against the Royal Family were unceasing), Williams was a regular in the early publications produced by my colleagues at Savoy Books; in fact there’s a piece by him in The Savoy Book itself. Consequently, Williams always felt like a distant relative even though we never met. Of his many film appearances, which ranged from low-budget independent productions to Hollywood junk, he was ideally cast as Prospero in Derek Jarman’s film of The Tempest, and he audaciously steals a scene from Tilda Swinton in Sally Potter’s wonderful Orlando. Elsewhere: Jeremy Harding on Williams’ run-ins with the gatekeepers, and Why D’Ya Do It?, a song by Marianne Faithfull with lyrics by Williams.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 226 by Chihei Hatakeyama, and SydArthur Festival 2: Summer of Love Edition by Head Heritage.

• Geeta Dayal on composer and musique concrète pioneer Pierre Henry whose death was also announced this week.

• Jonathan Meades reviews Vinyl.Album.Cover.Art: The Complete Hipgnosis Catalogue by Aubrey Powell.

• “Brutal! Vulgar! Dirty!” Polly Stenham on Mae West and the gay comedy that shocked 1920s America.

• Hannah Devlin on religious leaders getting high on psilocybin for science.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…In Transit (1969) by Brigid Brophy.

• At Bibliothèque Gay: Matelots (1935) by Gregorio Prieto.

• SD Sykes on reconsidering Venice, crumbling city.

• Letters and Liquor

• This Ain’t The Summer Of Love (1976) by Blue Öyster Cult | Orlando (1996) by Trans Am | Transit (2004) by Fennesz

Weekend links 367

Human Nature by Esther Sarto.

• I Feel Love: “Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder created the template for dance music as we know it”. Bill Brewster on the creation of one of the greatest songs ever recorded.

• The Tearoom by Robert Yang “is a (free) historical public bathroom simulator about anxiety, police surveillance, and sucking off another dude’s gun”.

• Tim Walker’s Leonora Carrington-themed fashion shoot with Tilda Swinton reaches i-D‘s website at last. More pictures and in better quality.

• Joe Dante on the legacy of Nigel Kneale. Related: We Are The Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale, edited by Neil Snowdon.

• Beth Comery‘s report on the progress of Gage Prentiss’s planned statue of HP Lovecraft for Providence, RI.

• The Plagiarist in the Kitchen: Jonathan Meades talks food and cooking with John Mitchinson.

• At Dangerous Minds: “Forget Louis Wain’s psychedelic cats, here are his crazy Cubist ceramics”.

• “Court orders Salvador Dalí‘s body be exhumed for paternity test.”

• Flash the flesh: Manchester’s gay club heroes – in pictures.

• Rick Poynor on the joy and sadness of dust.

• MostlyCatsMostly

• From The Tea-Rooms Of Mars…To The Hell-Holes Of Uranus: “Beguine”, “Mambo”, “Tango” (1981) by Landscape | I Feel Love (Patrick Cowley Mega Mix) (1982) by Donna Summer | Martian Sperm And Bagpipes (1991) by Helios Creed

Weekend links 366

Dandelion (2009) by Tomoko Kashiki.

• “Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style guide, lightly modernizes them, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to take advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.”

• Obscenity and the Arts, a previously unpublished essay by Anthony Burgess, will appear in book form later this year via Pariah Press.

• Mixes of the week: VF Mix 97: Talk Talk by The Last Dinosaur, and Secret Thirteen Mix 225 by Janek Schaefer.

Rub any two writers together and similarities will show. No two writers, however different, are completely different. Here’s a crucial instance: Lovecraft and Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, even though neither had the slightest formal training in the subject. And it is via this interest that the two intersect in an unexpected way. They are connected, through time and space, by that most humble of architectural events: the corner, the junction between two walls. What Lovecraft and Ballard did was to make the corner into a place of nightmares — and in doing so, they reveal its secret history.

Will Wiles in a long and rewarding essay, The Corner of Lovecraft and Ballard

• Dungeons Deep, Forests Dark – A beginner’s guide to Dungeon Synth by Daniel Pietersen.

• Alex Ross on Joséphin Péladan, the Symbolists and the occult roots of Modernism.

• Cooling the Tube: engineering heat out of the [London] Underground by IanVisits.

• Caroline on the mysteries of Pye Corner: Flames, poltergeists and bodysnatchers.

• The Saint of Sin City – Tony Kail Visits Las Vegas’ Santuario de la Santa Muerte.

• Photographs of Art Nouveau architecture by Keiichi Tahara.

• A stream of the new Porter Ricks album, Anguilla Electrica.

• Jasper Sharp on 100 years of Japanese animation.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 197 clocks.

• On The Corner [Take 4] (1972) by Miles Davis | Corner Crew Dub (1976) by Augustus Pablo | Empty Avenues And Dark Corners (Pye Corner Audio Mix) (2013) by John Foxx and the Belbury Circle

Weekend links 365

Il Fascino Della Morte (1988) by Albin Brunovsky.

• One of the forthcoming books featuring my cover art is Behold! Oddities, Curiosities, & Undefinable Wonders, a story collection due to be published next month by Crystal Lake Publishing. Bleeding Cool talked to editor Doug Murano about the collection and its contributors.

• Six episodes of Tom Keating on Painters, a TV series from 1983 presented by Britain’s most well-known art forger. In six further episodes Keating examines the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

• Opening at the Guggenheim, NYC, at the end of this month: Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897.

The most potent form of gatekeeping is religion. When certain beliefs are deemed sacred, they are put beyond questioning. To challenge such beliefs is to commit blasphemy. The accusation of cultural appropriation is a secular version of the charge of blasphemy. It’s the insistence that certain beliefs and images are so important to particular cultures that they may not appropriated by others.

In Defence of Cultural Appropriation by Kenan Malik

• Mixes of the week: FACT Mix 605 by Anthony Parasole, and Secret Thirteen Mix 224 by Fanny Kaplan.

• Artist Tom Phillips at 80: “I’m still reading books. Nothing changes and everything changes.”

• Negative Chambers is a new album by Yair Elazar Glotman and Mats Erlandsson.

• “Pornhub is the Kinsey Report of our time,” says Maureen O’Connor.

• “Postmodernism is dead. What comes next?” asks Alison Gibbons.

• Cat Street View

• Mystic Eyes (1965) by Them | Mystical Dream (1965) by The Roland Kirk Quartet | Mystic Green (1985) by Rain Parade

A Portrait of the Author

Portrait of James Joyce (1929) by Constantin Brancusi.

A post for Bloomsday. Joyce’s writing was always concerned more with words and phonics than with the appearance of things—understandable given his failing eyesight—but throughout his life he was a persistently attractive subject for portraits and caricatures. This was partly a consequence of being surrounded by artists but it’s also the case that the figure he cut as a man, especially in his younger years, is striking enough to be recognisable in a hasty sketch as much as a study in oils. Prior to John Lennon, Joyce’s round spectacles are the most famous in the arts of the 20th century; when added to a high forehead, a trim moustache and beard, a broad-brimmed hat and a lanky figure you have a subject that even a non-caricaturist such as myself was able to deal with when drawing the Reverbstorm series.

I’ve limited the examples here to portraits produced when Joyce was still alive. There are further examples to be found (the Augustus John is one of a series), while those produced after Joyce’s death proliferate without end.

Portrait of James Joyce (1920) by Wyndham Lewis.

Joyce at Midnight (c. 1930) by Desmond Harmsworth.

James Joyce (1930) by Augustus John.

James Joyce (1932) by César Albin.

James Joyce (1935) by Jacques-Emile Blanche.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Labyrinth
• The Duc de Joyeux
• Dubliners
• Covering Joyce
• James Joyce in Reverbstorm
• Joyce in Time
• Happy Bloomsday
• Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
• Books for Bloomsday