Weekend links 112

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“Venus moves across the Sun in this image captured by Japan’s satellite Hinode, on June 6, 2012.” Via.

The imagery in Ah Pook covered a wide range of ideas. A train full of Mayan Gods for instance travelled through various time zones to end up alongside a carnival in a red brick town outside St Louis. Then they got out…out of the books Mr. Hart was reading on the train. Fact also alternated with fiction. We could be chugging along with Lizard boys in a Mayan City one moment then switch to a history of Immigration Laws in the US or the development of tape recorders and Speech Scramblers. Then switch to a bright red Shrew boy with a hard-on on a bicycle in Palm Beach at the end of the world. Time was what the book was about: defining it, controlling it and moving back and forth within it.

Malcolm McNeill

Malcolm McNeill talks to The White Review about working with William Burroughs on Ah Pook Is Here. Related: Jan Herman as Publisher of Nova Broadcast Press. Reality Studio has all the Nova Broadcast publications as downloadable PDFs.

• More Graphic Canon news: design historian Steven Heller reports on the project while at Nashville Scene editor Russ Kick talks to Joe Nolan about the books.

• There’s still a couple of days left to hear Martyn Wade’s Blue Veils and Golden Sands, a BBC radio drama about electronic composer Delia Derbyshire.

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“Venus in silhouette, seen between the Earth and Sun, from NASA’s orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, on June 5, 2012.” Via.

• From 2010: Video of an hour-long lecture by Alberto Manguel at Yale University on “Borges and the Impossibility of Writing”.

• Bauhaus reflections: Frank Whitford on the design school and the exhibition currently running at the Barbican, London.

• “It’s easier to be gay in the US army than it is to be gay in hip-hop.” Zebra Katz, Mykki Blanco and the rise of queer rap.

• Back at the event site: Another extract from M. John Harrison’s forthcoming novel Empty Space.

• Rare 1959 audio: Flannery O’Connor reads A Good Man is Hard to Find.

Venus Transit 2012 – Ultra-high Definition View (NASA/ESA).

• The kitties just don’t care: Indifferent cats in amateur porn.

What happened to Dorothy Parker’s ashes?

Space Teriyaki 5 at 50 Watts.

Venus/Upper Egypt (1991) by Sonny Sharrock | Venus (1996) by Funki Porcini | Venus (2003) by Air

Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen revisited

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Messes Noires. Lord Lyllian (1905).

An email earlier this week from French bookdealer Chez les libraires associés contained a link to an online catalogue of books by or related to that disreputable Uranian Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, the subject of this earlier post. The catalogue describes the poet as “l’Oscar Wilde français” which isn’t strictly true since Wilde had (and has) a far higher literary reputation. And when it came to homosexual scandal Fersen didn’t suffer anything like Wilde’s appalling treatment, he simply decamped (so to speak) to Capri with his boyfriend, Nino Cesarini. The latter is the subject of another document linked in the same email, Nino et son jumeau, an investigation (in French) concerning “Faces and legends of the friend of Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen. What is known of the appearance of Nino, are there pictures of him by von Gloeden, von Plüschow or Vincenzo Galdi?” A number of the pictures in question show Nino and others in various states of undress so those wishing to view the pages will need to be registered at Issuu first.

A couple more covers from the catalogue follow. All these publications are rare and correspondingly expensive but I still find it fascinating seeing any of this material at all when it’s been proscribed and ignored for so long. While we’re on the subject, I’ve only just noticed that Fersen’s Le Baiser de Narcisse (with illustrations by Ernest Brisset) can be viewed complete at Gallica.

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Notre-Dame des mers mortes (1902).

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Paradinya (1911).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Le Baiser de Narcisse

Externsteine panoramas

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Lucifer Rising (1973).

The first time I saw Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising (1983, at a film club) I recognised all the ancient monuments apart from the peculiar group of rocks where we see a line of robed and cowled torchbearers ascending a stairway at night. These shots are intercut with a caped Marianne Faithfull making the same ascent in daytime until she reaches an alcove where she’s given a vision of an Egyptian sunset. It took a few more years to discover the location was the Externsteine rock formation in northwest Germany, one of those singular outcrops which—like Glastonbury Tor—was a focus of pagan ritual before being co-opted by the Christian church.

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Photo by Markus Krueger.

360cities.net has a number of panoramic views of the area, the best being the one above which shows Marianne’s alcove as well as allowing views of the surrounding countryside. Photos such as the one below are far more common. While these give some idea of the unusual nature of the site they don’t show just how isolated the rocks are. For an older view, the Library of Congress has this Photocrom print.

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Photo by Wilfried Pinsdorf.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The panoramas archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Kenneth Anger on DVD again

Weekend links 106

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Gold Head 2 (2011) by Kouji Oshiro.

Josef Hartwig’s 1922 Bauhaus chess set. Contemporary copies can be bought from Naef Spiele but they’re not cheap. Related: Bauhaus: Art as Life, a major exhibition at the Barbican, London. Related, related: Art as life by Fiona MacCarthy.

• Rattera is a new font by Barnbrook Design for Fuse 1–20, Taschen’s collection of the experimental typography publication. Related: The Fuse poster explained.

Genesis (1981), video feedback and computer animation by Ron Hays with an electronic score by Ragnar Grippe.

Deadly Doris, a recording by Malcolm Mooney-era Can from the forthcoming Lost Tapes collection.

• “How did a pop band end up in a museum” Sasha Frere-Jones on Kraftwerk.

Philip Glass & Robert Wilson on how they made Einstein on the Beach.

• An astonishing aerial photo of post-quake San Francisco in 1906.

• More electronic music: Buddha Machine’s SoundCloud page.

My Baby, music and video from Julia Holter & Jib Kidder.

Homotography‘s photos can now be browsed at Pinterest.

Deviates, Inc., a Tumblr.

• Raoul Björkenheim live: Apocalypso pt. 1 | Apocalypso pt. 2 | 1-2-11 DMG, NYC

Weekend links 105

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A suspended fluid photograph from Demersal, a series by Luka Klikovac.

• “Soon, Mr. Lachman was writing occult music. His song “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear,” which appeared on Blondie’s 1977 album Plastic Letters, was an example.” Gary Lachman: from Blondie to Swedenborg.

Neil Krug’s cover art for the new Scissor Sisters album, Magic Hour, channels the cloudless skies and photographic surrealism of Storm Thorgerson.

Implicate Explicate, a multiple 16mm film installation by Rose Kallal. Sound by Rose Kallal & Mark Pilkington using modular synthesizers.

Despite conservative queerdom’s best efforts to hide its “otherness” behind a velvet wall of “same as you” Tom and Hank and Jill and Janes, Mattilda and her like will not be ignored. As parades of neo-nuclear same sex families mug for the cameras on courthouse steps, queer body boys parade and flex impossibly taut muscles across our nation’s gym runways and circuit parties, and far, far too many proudly proclaim in knee-jerk defensiveness how “straight-acting” they are across the net, Sycamore blows raspberries at the forced mirage and holds up faded pictures of yesteryear boys and girls whose one claim to fame once was their difference.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is interviewed at Lambda Literary

Paul Oestreicher, an Anglican priest, sets the cat squarely among the pigeons with the question (and answer) “Was Jesus gay? Probably.”

Andromeon, video by Alexander Tucker and Serena Korda for a new song by Alexander Tucker.

• Museums of Melancholy: Iain Sinclair on London’s memorials. An LRB essay from 2005.

FACT mix 325 is by Battles: from Boredoms to Cluster and The Alchemist.

The glass hills of Mars, “a region the size of Europe”.

Labyrinths and clues, an essay by Alan Wall.

The Alchemy of Emptiness.

Drop (1972) by Soft Machine | Drop (2002) by Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions | Airdrop (2006) by Kashiwa Daisuke.