{science} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 810

Image of a Spherical Black Hole with Thin Accretion Disk (1979) by Jean-Pierre Luminet. Via.

• “I would be willing to bet that every student of fantastic fiction has at some point in his or her career read a book with the name EF Bleiler printed on its cover.” Brian J. Showers of Swan River Press talked to EF Bleiler in 2005.

• “James Webb Space Telescope confirms 1st ‘runaway’ supermassive black hole rocketing through ‘Cosmic Owl’ galaxies at 2.2 million mph.”

• “You have to be ready to see it”: Abel Ferrara and Catherine Breillat on why Pasolini’s Salò is a gift that keeps giving.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Kosten Koper presents…Bill Nelson: Acquitted By Mirrors (1982–1987).

• At Skurrilsteer: Ongoing research into the life, work and legacy of Edward James.

• At The Daily Heller: All that jazzy record cover design.

• Cygnus X-1 (1977) by Rush | Blackhole Dropout (1979) by Tod Dockstader | The Competition Of Supermassive Black Holes And Galactic Spheroids In The Destruction of Globular Clusters (1999) by Jah Wobble

Weekend links 809

Atlantis by Sarah Hubacher.

• Regular readers will know Leigh Wright from his Wyrd Daze creations which I’ve linked here many times in the past. (The same goes for his frequent Mixcloud compilations.) Leigh’s wife died recently which means he now has to return to the UK from Canada where he doesn’t have permanent resident status. His request for help is here.

• Melinda Gebbie’s Greatest Fits: “Ranging from painting, illustration, Comix, portraiture, eroticism and so much more, this fully illustrated and beautifully presented book is a glimpse into the unique mind of a woman forged in the fire of counterculture.”

• At The Daily Heller: Adrian Wilson’s collection of elaborate vintage fabric stamps is explored in a two-part feature here and here.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – December 2025 at Ambientblog, and ASIP – Reflection on 2025 at A Strangely Isolated Place.

• Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2025. Thanks again for the link here!

• At Colossal: “Field Kallop meditates on universal patterns through bold chromatic compositions.”

• “Scientists discover massive underwater ruins that may be a lost city of legend.”

• New music: The King In Yellow by Blarke Bayer.

• RIP Rob Reiner.

• Atlantis (1955) by Les Baxter | The Atlantis Healing Harp (1982) by Upper Astral | A Man For Atlantis (2000) by Broadcast

Weekend links 807

Poster art by Nicholas Kouninos for Procol Harum / Pink Floyd / HP Lovecraft at the Fillmore, San Francisco, 1967.

• Take a break from so-called reality with Gruesome Shrewd, more queasy psychedelia by Moon Wiring Club. MWC’s Ian Hodgson described his intentions to Simon Reynolds in a Reynolds roundup which notes the 20th anniversary of the Ghost Box project. The label is apparently on hold for the moment but I have to admit that my interest waned some time after the 10th anniversary, when it became increasingly apparent that the ghost had fled the box. Reynolds ends his piece with a list of favourite GB recordings which I mostly agree with, although I’d shuffle the order and swap some entries with Pye Corner Audio.

• “‘You know that feeling you get when you’ve just gotten back from the dry cleaners a pair of slacks, Dacron slacks, and you reach your hand in a pocket and you feel those fuzzy sandwiches with your fingers? Well, that’s the feeling I’m looking for.’ I just nodded and replied, ‘OK, Dave, I know exactly what you mean.’” Barry Gifford remembers David Lynch.

• Aschenbach’s Last Journey: Lesley Chamberlain, the most recent translator of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, approaches the text by following the progress of its doomed protagonist from Brioni to the Venetian Lido. Related: Polly Barton describes to Katy Whimhurst some of the difficulties involved in translating Japanese fiction to English.

• From The Shout to Bait: Darran Anderson on the uses of sound in cinema. Rupert Hines’ soundtrack to The Shout has just been released by Buried Treasure.

• Video footage of modular synthesists Arc (Ian Boddy & Mark Shreeve) performing Arcturus live in 2004: part one | part two.

• At Aeon: “Black holes may be hiding something that changes everything,” says Gideon Koekoek.

• At the BFI: Michael Brooke selects 10 great Hungarian films.

• Steven Heller’s font of the year is Fillmore.

• Shout The Storm (1984) by :Zoviet:France: | Shout At The Devil (2002) by Jah Wobble & Temple Of Sound | Shout (2005) by Tod Dockstader

Weekend links 806

Cover art by George Wilson for The Twilight Zone #45, September 1972. Via.

• At Public Domain Review: Thea Applebaum Licht on the history of art within art, or cabinets of curiosity and paintings within paintings.

• The final 2025 catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.

• At Smithsonian Mag: See the “Mona Lisa of Illuminated Manuscripts,” a 600-Year-Old Bible covered in intricate illustrations.

It’s amazing, the number of people out there who love everything about queer life except for queer sex, who would prefer that sex and sexual orientation live in entirely different zip codes, that they exist as non-overlapping magisteria; it’s so much safer that way. Who wants gay sex polluting their enjoyment of the abstraction that is Being Gay?

That is what gay love is, now, in the collective imagination of American commerce: a set of identity relations projected onto bored and indifferent celebrities who will half-heartedly play along with the idea because doing so moves units and, anyway, what does it cost them? The more that sexual orientation slouches to the point of pure abstraction, the less effort it takes. Anyone and anything can be gay, now, because gay is just a set of pompous liberal cultural signifiers that have no earthly material relation to homosexuals.

“I miss when homoeroticism was erotic,” says Freddie deBoer. I’ve made similar complaints myself over the years. For some genuinely erotic homoeroticism, see the latest auction link above.

• At Ultrawolveunderthefullmoon: Illustrations for Edmund Weiss’s Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt.

• DJ Food’s latest harvestings of psychedelic ephemera may be seen here.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Bruce Connor’s Day.

• The Strange World of…David Lynch.

• RIP Udo Kier and Tom Stoppard.

• Atlanta Surrealist Group

• Menergy (1981) by Patrick Cowley | Eros Arriving (1982) by Bill Nelson | Erotic City (“Make Love Not War Erotic City Come Alive”) (1984) by Prince & The Revolution

Weekend links 804

Poster for The Phantom of the Opera, 1925. The first Universal horror film, and the best screen adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s novel, was released 100 years ago this month.

• “Evolution seems to have a thing for mind-bending molecules here on planet Earth. Psychedelics are more widespread in nature than you might think. These remarkable compounds, which can profoundly alter consciousness, arose repeatedly across evolutionary time, stretching back at least 65 million years. To date, some 80 species of fungi, at least 20 plants, and a species of toad have been documented to produce psychoactive molecules. And scientists continue to identify new ones.” Kristin French presents a trip around our surprisingly psychedelic planet.

• “There was no condescending sense with Potter —all too present today as then—that the public were idiots who needed to be intellectually housetrained, by their enlightened ‘betters’. […] Television was not treated as a particularly serious medium, something Potter upended not by performing ‘seriousness’ but by bringing out the possibilities few had believed it contained.” Darran Anderson on the television plays of Dennis Potter.

• At Public Domain Review: AD Manns on a possible origin for the occult lore presented in Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia, Or the Gospel of the Witches, a founding text for the witchcraft revival of the 20th century.

• New music: Implosion by The Bug vs Ghost Dubs; Herzog Sessions by Mouse On Mars; VHS Days Vol. 1 by Russian Corvette.

• At Wyrd Britain: A link to a video interview in which the great Ian Miller about his long illustration career.

• At the BFI: David West selects 10 great Hong Kong action films of the 1980s.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – November 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At The Wire: Stream the new album by Ann Kroeber & Alan Splet.

• Seb Rochford’s favourite records.

• RIP Tatsuya Nakadai, actor.

• Phantom Lover (2010) by John Foxx | Phantom Cities (2020) by The Sodality Of Shadows | Phantom Melodies (2018) by Cavern Of Anti-Matter