{photography} – Page 6 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 766

The Fantod Pack (1995): a Gorey take on the Tarot deck.

• A happy 100th birthday to Edward Gorey. I was hoping to link once again to Gorey’s appearance on the Dick Cavett Show from 1977 (a rare TV interview) but it’s one of those things that’s no longer available at YouTube. You can always browse Goreyana instead. Meanwhile, there’s this in Scotland: In Gorey Detail: Celebrating An American Friend At Custom House, Leith. A tribute exhibition which is running in Edinburgh for this week only.

• “A blisteringly frank and triple X-rated chat with Peter Berlin”. A blisteringly hyperbolic headline for a discussion between Ted Stansfield and Peter Berlin, the self-invented sex object of the 1970s.

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Smoky Man posts my replies to his questions about the creation of the book’s Rainy Day and Kabbalah sections.

• Tricky’s Maxinquaye was released 30 years ago this month. David Bennun revisited the album five years ago.

• At Colossal: Felines evoke ‘A Floating World’ in Tùng Nâm’s whimsical illustrations.

• New music: Gloam by Emptyset, and The Mount Hibiki Tapes by Mount Shrine.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by Polonius.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Steam.

• Last Of The Steam Powered Trains (1968) by The Kinks | Steam Megawatt (1979) by Tod Dockstader | Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt (1996) by DJ Shadow

Weekend links 764

Bruxelles 1958 Exposition Universelle (1958) by Leo Marfut.

• “In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same.” Welcome back, Ubuweb.

• A catalogue of lots at another After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.

• At Public Domain Review: George Baxter’s print of Crystal Palace dinosaurs (ca. 1864).

• At Spoon & Tamago: Contemporary Nihonga images of hamsters created by Otama-shimai.

• At Discogs: James Balmont explores Japan’s ambient boom of the ’80s and ’90s.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by Sakina Abdou.

• RIP Mike Ratledge, co-founder of Soft Machine.

• New music: Signals And Codes by Andrew Heath.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Les Blank’s Day.

• Signaux Codes Non Identifiés (1978) by Michel Magne | Code Rays (Codex Dub) (1995) by Main | Silent Code (1999) by Robert Musso

Weekend links 763

I Live in Shock (1955) by Mimi Parent.

• At Public Domain Review: “Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare (1922) is at turns obtuse, grotesque, and moralizing—and sought to provoke the obscenity trial of the century. Only it didn’t, quietly vanishing instead. Colin Dickey rereads this failed satire, finding a transcendent rhythm pulsing beneath the novel’s indulgent prose.”

• “There are no surprises when a pallet of CDs arrives at my office, but when a pressing plant alerts me to a shipment of records headed my way I start to worry.” John Brien, head of Important Records, on the problems involved in the manufacture of vinyl albums.

• The sixth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

They were building a vast alternative religion with a lack of dictates but no shortage of rituals and icons. They’d pass through the end of the world to get there first; the next album was based on a vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse slaughtering their animals and constructing a earth-gouging machine from their jawbones, demonstrating they weren’t quite intending to settle down yet. It would take them far from mainstream culture, and indeed mainstream gay culture given their repeated disdain for sanitised queerness, and into enigmatic territory. Having scared away most fans of synth pop and industrial with provocation, and the weak and tyrannical with ambiguity, they were unencumbered and “allowed to mature in the dark”, sustained by a cult following (you rarely encounter a tepid fan of Coil, most are acolytes).

Darran Anderson looking back at Coil’s debut album, Scatology

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See 15 winning images from the Close-Up Photographer of the Year Competition.

• At The Daily Heller: How did pink become a colour? Meanwhile, Steven Heller’s font of the month is Vibro.

• New music: Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds by Lawrence English.

• SciURLs: A science news aggregator.

• Shackleton’s favourite albums.

• RIP Marianne Faithfull.

• The Pink Panther Theme (1963) by Henry Mancini | The Pink Room (1988) by Seigen Ono | Pink (2005) by Boris

Weekend links 762

Aquarius from the 1971 Astrologicalendar by Peter Max. Via.

• AOS of London: Psychogeographia Zosiana is a map guide to the London of Austin Osman Spare with accompanying illustrations by Ben Thompson. The book also contains an interview transcript in which Alan Moore talks about the importance of Spare’s work, and a contextual history by Gavin W. Semple.

• Emigre was “…a (mostly) quarterly magazine published from 1984 until 2005 in Berkeley, California, dedicated to visual communication, graphic design, typography, and design criticism.” The magazine ran for 69 issues which can be downloaded here.

• “The ultimate reason for initiating something ambitious is not to fulfill certain notions but to find out what surprises might emerge.” Stewart Brand, quoted in a long read by Alec Nevala-Lee about the Clock of the Long Now.

• At the Criterion Current: David Hudson on David Lynch’s life and work, an overview of the reaction to last week’s news. I was surprised to find my comments about Alan Splet included in the collection.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the connections between Charles Williams’ The Place of the Lion and an obscure piece of fiction (or is it?) by Ruaraidh Erskine.

• At Public Domain Review: Illustrations by Jay van Everen from The Laughing Prince: A Book of Jugoslav Fairy Tales and Folk Tales (1921).

• At Colossal: Beguiling botanicals fluoresce in Tom Leighton’s otherworldly photographs.

• New music: Glory Fades by Yair Elazar Glotman & Mats Erlandsson.

• Old music: Cités Analogues by Lightwave.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Georges Perec Day.

• The Clock Strikes Twelve (1959) by Bo Diddley | Clock Factory (1993) by The Sabres Of Paradise | Clock (1995) by Node

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