A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Photography
Kristopher photographed by David Belisle.
A little something for the 14th; I can always be relied on to post some gore for Valentine’s Day. I was tempted to post this still from Bride of Re-Animator but it’s a bit excessive for something so frivolous. Ephraim Lilien’s drawing shows that the bleeding love heart isn’t such a recent idea.
Illustration by EM Lilien for Jugend, 1900.
MMOB :: Far West (2013) by Alison Scarpulla.
• “…although same-sex love is as old as love itself, the public discourse around it, and the political movement to win rights for it, arose in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This message may surprise those who believe that gay identity came of age in London and New York, sometime between the Oscar Wilde trials and the Stonewall riots.” Alex Ross reviewing Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. Beachy talks about his book here.
• “I was in a room with tube synthesizers, where you had to tune them up to play them. It was unbelievable.” John Carpenter talking to Joseph Stannard about composing with electronics. Carpenter’s album of new music, Lost Themes, may be previewed here.
• From 2010: John Ridpath on Mervyn Peake’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland. Related: “The most twisted version of Alice in Wonderland you’ll ever see.”
I was brought up in a world where art was something owned and insured—usually inherited: but seldom if ever made by anyone one I knew.
I had an early inkling that there was fun to be had over the hill, like the feeling when faced with a sunset that someone’s throwing a mega awesome party just beyond the nearest cloud, and I set off to join the caravan. Let’s just say I was in search of company, headed towards the glow, and I found it.
Tilda Swinton‘s speech at the Rothko Chapel
• “Her art often touches on alchemy and magic; and in her memoir of insanity she writes of misreading an Imperial Chemicals sign as ‘chemistry and alchemy’.” Charlotte Higgins on Leonora Carrington.
• Shadows Over Main Street, an anthology of small-town Lovecraftian terror, is out this week from Hazardous Press. 20 stories and poems plus interior illustrations including a contribution of my own.
• “With Fantastic Planet, I felt torn about using it, because it’s…the title of an animated film.” Guitarist Sarah Lipstate, aka Noveller, talks to Ned Raggett about her new album.
• Jim Jupp of Belbury Poly and the Ghost Box record label answers 15 questions.
• A DeLorean driving through a Tron cityscape: Retrowave by Florian Renner.
• Powell & Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann (1951) has been restored.
• Music from Forbidden Planet (1956) by Louis & Bebe Barron | The Four Horsemen (1972) by Aphrodite’s Child | Assault on Precinct 13 (Main Theme) (1976) by John Carpenter
Genesia (2011) by Bette Burgoyne.
• “…so I started buying these old gay porn novels, just for the covers and kept on collecting them.” Maitland McDonagh on the underexamined world of gay pulp. McDonagh’s 120 Days Books is reprinting some of these scarce titles. More gay erotica: Plans are afoot to republish Des Grieux, the rare prequel to Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal (1893), a novel often attributed (without much evidence) to Oscar Wilde.
• Merricat is the name under which the Turrell Brothers, John & Tom, produce their atmospheric “nacht music”. Albums with titles such as Oneiros, Widdershins and Zerkalo give an idea of the spheres of interest. They also make short films, clips from which may be seen here.
• “Fascists don’t like satire. They don’t like it at all. And they especially don’t enjoy visual satire. Because of its unique power to communicate.” Ralph Steadman talking to Robert Chalmers about recent events.
There is an unexamined commonplace now floating around the social media, which has it that satire derogates its proper function when it stops targeting the powerful, and targets the relatively powerless instead. Theodor Adorno has also been cited here and there with his remarks on satire in the Minima Moralia of 1951, but few have noticed that the account he offers there stands in direct contradiction to the current received wisdom. For Adorno, satire is in its essence wistful and traditionalist. It looks back to something that has been lost, and dismisses the straight-facedness of everyone who attempts, against all evidence, to maintain the illusion that there is anything respect-worthy about the present state of things. It targets not just elected officials, but the yokels who elected them; not just the honcho who runs the saloon, but the sucker who hands over his last possessions at the poker table. There is a need for this: the yokels and the suckers need it most of all. There is redemption in it, and I confess to harboring whatever amount of traditionalism it takes to appreciate this redemptive quality.
Paris, 2015: a lengthy meditation by Justin EH Smith on the responses of left and right to the Charlie Hebdo killings
• “When the surface of the world is so overloaded with competing narratives…there is an understandable impulse to go underground.” Iain Sinclair on the excavation of London.
• More German music: Sinai Desert (1981) and Kailash, Pilgerfahrt Zum Thron Der Götter (no date), two films with music by Popol Vuh.
• Kim Fowley: Sins & Secrets of the Silver Sixties. UglyThings Magazine makes available its definitive Fowley interview from 2001.
• More electronica and mix of the week: the FACT guide to the Yellow Magic Orchestra and associates.
• Vegetable-snake Undersea Beings: Allen Ginsberg writes to the Paris Review about LSD in 1966.
• The Edge Question for 2015: What do you think about machines that think?
• Life of Cats: Selections from the Hiraki Ukiyo-e Collection.
• NGC 891 (1974) by Edgar Froese | Overture (1974) by Tangerine Dream | PA 701 (1976) by Edgar Froese
Ghost in the Machine (2012) by Hope Kroll.
• Nothing Here Now But The Recordings, an album of William Burroughs’ personal tapes originally released by Industrial Records is reissued on vinyl this month. Andrew Spragg reviews it here. Burroughs’ readings fill several collections but this one was the first I owned, and it’s always been a favourite. The album features recordings of early texts such as The Last Words of Hassan I Sabbah, as well as cut-up tape experiments which fuelled some of the chapters in the Nova Trilogy.
• The Melancholy of Perversion: a study of Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Metamorphosis A by Scott Dwyer. More weird fiction: “Written with real psychological depth, these enigmatic tales rise far beyond straightforward ghost stories.” Chris Power on Robert Aickman.
• At Dangerous Minds: Gay Semiotics, a taxonomy of San Francisco life in the 1970s. Related: The case of One, a gay magazine from Los Angeles prosecuted for obscenity in 1958.
Poe’s mind was by no means commonplace. In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka, which would have established this fact beyond doubt—if it had not been so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it. Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe.
Marilynne Robinson on Edgar Allan Poe
• Vanished City: London’s Lost Neighbourhoods, a book by Tom Bolton with photographs by SF Said.
• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 143, a selection of soundtrack music by Las CasiCasiotone.
• “I am in Brussels, numbering the Bruegels.” Toby Ferris conducts a Brueg[h]el Census.
• Mothmeister “taxidermy collector & curiosity cabinet”.
• Ben Zurawski collects and makes flip books.
• Akira Kurosawa’s 100 favourite films
• The Trip (1965) by Kim Fowley | The Trip (1966) by Donovan | The Trip (1967) by Park Avenue Playground
The Double Doorway, rue de la Ferronnerie.
Photos of Parisian streets, alleys and courts taken by Charles Marville (1813–1879) in the 1860s. Marville had been commissioned to document the areas of Paris that were soon to be demolished as part of Baron Haussmann’s controversial plans for restructuring the city. Some of the photos of the more populous streets feature those spectral smears that are the sole traces of people walking through the picture while the plate was being exposed. In these instances the buildings as well as the people have become ghosts.
Wikimedia Commons has many more examples of Marville’s photos some of which are high-res images.
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Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche (from the Rue de la Huchette).
Rue des Lavandières.