{science} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

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

Weekend links 803

Ad for The United States Of America from Helix magazine, 1968.

• American composer Joseph Byrd died this week but I’ve yet to see a proper obituary anywhere. He may not have been a popular artist but he was significant for the one-off album produced in 1968 by his short-lived psychedelic group, The United States Of America. Their self-titled album has been a favourite of mine since it was reissued in the 1980s, one of the few American albums of the period that tried to learn from, and even go beyond, the studio experimentation of Sgt Pepper. The United States Of America didn’t have the resources of the Beatles and Abbey Road but they did have Byrd’s arrangements, together with an energetic rhythm section, an electric violin, a ring modulator, some crude synthesizer components, the voice of Dorothy Moskowitz, and a collection of songs with lyrics that ranged from druggy poetry to barbed portrayals of the nation’s sexual neuroses. The album became an important one for British groups in the 1990s who were looking for inspiration in the wilder margins of psychedelia, especially Stereolab, Portishead (Half Day Closing is a deliberate pastiche), and Broadcast. Byrd did much more than this, of course, and his follow-up release, The American Metaphysical Circus by Joe Byrd And The Field Hippies, has its moments even though it doesn’t reach the heights of its predecessor. Byrd spoke about this period of his career with It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine in 2013.

• At BBC Future: “The most desolate place in the world”: The sea of ice that inspired Frankenstein. Richard Fisher examines the history of the Mer de Glace in fact and fiction with a piece that includes one of my Frankenstein illustrations. The latter are still in print via the deluxe edition from Union Square.

• A Year In The Country looks at a rare book in which Alan Garner’s children describe the making of The Owl Service TV serial.

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

• At Public Domain Review: Perverse, Grotesque, Sensuous, Inimitable: A Selection of Works by Aubrey Beardsley.

• At Colossal: Ceramics mimic cardboard in Jacques Monneraud’s trompe-l’œil ode to Giorgio Morandi.

• At the Daily Heller: The “narrative abstraction” of Roy Kuhlman‘s cover designs for Grove Press.

• New music: Elemental Studies by Various Artists; and Gleann Ciùin by Claire M. Singer.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Archive Matrix.

• Sensual Hallucinations (1970) by Les Baxter | The Garden Of Earthly Delights (United States Of America cover) (1982) by Snakefinger | Perversion (1992) by Stereolab

Weekend links 801

The Magic Circle (1886) by John William Waterhouse.

• The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic has just been published in France by Editions Delcourt. A preview here shows how carefully they’ve managed to translate and reletter my page designs.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Algernon Blackwood’s stories of John Silence, occult detective.

• Relevant to some of my recent reading: The Necronomicon Wars, an examination of the many attempts to give life to HP Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire.

Altered States is tremendously exciting to watch—and not only during its psychedelic interludes when goat Jesus is being crucified and writhing red figures are toppling, Hieronymus Bosch–like, into hell and abstract splotches give the impression of cells endlessly dividing or murky membranes dissolving and beautiful women stare into Magritte skies and waves of lava crash as though the molten core of humanity itself were erupting. Even in its quieter moments, it is a beautiful film, with Hurt’s every appearance shot by cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth to emphasize his character’s alien otherworldliness.

Jessica Kiang explores the creation of Ken Russell’s flawed but fascinating psychedelic feature, Altered States

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

• Tarot decks through the ages: a video showing some of the cards from Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection.

• More psychedelia: Neuroscientist Grigori Guitchounts asks “What is your brain doing on psychedelics?”

• At the Daily Heller: Ryan Hughes has published a weighty collection of his typeface designs.

• Old music: Caged (25th Anniversary Edition) by Ian Boddy & Chris Carter.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great Technicolor melodramas.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: The Old School Horrors of Terence Fisher.

• Photographs from the 2025 Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

• Ambientblog celebrates 20 years of existence.

• RIP Dave Ball.

• Necronomicon (1970) by Les Baxter | Liriïk Necronomicus Kahnt (1975) by Magma | Necronomicon–The Magus (2004) by John Zorn