Weekend links 104

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Prettiest Star (2004) by Timothy Cummings.

I Want Your Love, a feature film directed by Travis Mathews catches my attention for having been described as “the gay Shortbus” even though (as the director notes) Shortbus was pretty gay to begin with.

• I’ve always found Hans Christian Andersen’s story of The Tinderbox—a tale of spectral dogs with enormous eyes—to be rather weird. But these illustrations by Heinrich Strub for a 1956 edition beat everything.

• “From an early age, however, I became in secret the slave of certain appetites.” The line that Robert Louis Stevenson deleted from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Scientific American: Homophobes might be hidden homosexuals. Not exactly fresh news but always worth bearing in mind when someone starts ranting about those evil gays.

Minimal Wave: The 80s synth-pop underground. The Minimal Wave label releases a vinyl compilation by Hard Corps this month.

• “Blame the Victorians for making menswear boring.” Alex Jung on the endless tyranny of the suit-and-tie combination.

• Women, Vaginas and Blood: Breaking menstrual taboos with artist Sarah Maple.

London’s lost rivers (again): the hidden history of the city’s buried waterways.

Vincenzo Pacelli says the Knights of Malta murdered Caravaggio.

Street style 1906: Edward Linley Sambourne’s fashion blog.

Architectural Stationery Vignettes at BibliOdyssey.

Hans Bellmer & Unica Zürn at Ubu Gallery, NYC.

Pam Grossman admits to being a “candle hooch”.

Dirty (1986) by Hard Corps | Lost Rivers Of London (1996) by Coil | The Tinderbox (2009) by Patrick Wolf.

Weekend links 100

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How to become a mermaid and dissolve into sea foam in just seven surgical operations (2010) by Carla Bedini.

D.I.Y. Magic was a regular feature in the late Arthur Magazine that’s now become a book by Anthony Alvarado: “Think of it as jail-breaking the iPhone of your mind. Teaching it to do things that its basic programming was never set up for. Advanced self-psychology.” A first edition letterpress silver foil cover is limited to 1000 copies. | More magic: Jimmy Page’s unused soundtrack for Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer’s Rising finally gets an official release on March 20th.

Julia Holter‘s tremendous new album, Ekstasis, has been rocking my world this week. She’s interviewed at FACT where you can also hear the opening track, Marienbad, which receives extra points for being derived from that film. And there’s more: Ritual Music, a live performance at Sea & Space Gallery in Los Angeles, and Fur Felix, a film by Eric Fensler.

Brute Ornament, an exhibition of new work by Seher Shah and Kamrooz Aram opens at the Green Art Gallery, Dubai, on Monday. While the UAE is out of reach for most of us, the gallery site has samples of the work on display.

• This week’s mixtape arrives courtesy of BUTT magazine: Rock Bottom Mix by Cesar Padilla, a blend of acid, glam, grunge, punk, surf and stoner rock. Elsewhere, Richard Norris lists his 20 favourite UK psychedelic records.

the name is BURROUGHS ? Expanded Media at ZKM, the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, is a comprehensive exhibition presenting for the first time in Germany the artistic output of William Burroughs.

Boneland by Alan Garner will be published in August, a new novel that concludes a narrative thread begun with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in 1960.

• Coming soon (so to speak) on BFI DVD, The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome, more gay obscurities receiving quality attention.

The Northampton Chronicle reports on Alan Moore’s forthcoming novel about the town, Jerusalem.

Susan Cain is playing my tune (again): Why the world needs introverts.

• Techniques of terror: Carl Dreyer‘s Danish Gothic dissected.

• NASA has the latest map of Everything.

The male sex toy revolution.

Lucifer Rising Sessions (1972) by Bobby Beausoleil.

Astrolabes

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Planispheric Astrolabe (and also below) from Persia, 1675/6 (A.H. 1086). Made by Muhammad Amin.

One of the many astrolabes from the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, who describe their collection as “the world’s largest and most important”. There are pages and pages of these beautiful instruments with large photographs of each in a disassembled state, the better to see the shape of their retes. The site also has an introductory area describing their multiple uses and showing some unusual examples such as an astrolabe clock, and an incredible spherical astrolabe from 1480.

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The rete.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Midsummer Chronophage

Weekend links 96

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Sin título (monstruas) (2008) by Marina Núñez.   

• Salon asks Christopher Bram “Is gay literature over?” Bram’s new book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, is reviewed here.

Robert Montgomery is profiled at the Independent as “The artist vandalising advertising with poetry.”

In addition to aesthetics, McCarthy noted a deeper link between great science and great writing. “Both involve curiosity, taking risks, thinking in an adventurous manner, and being willing to say something 9/10ths of people will say is wrong.” Profound insights in both domains also tend arise from a source beyond the limits of analytic reason. “Major insights in science come from the subconscious, from staring at your shoes. They’re not just analytical.”

Nick Romeo meets Cormac McCarthy at the Santa Fe Institute.

• For FACT mix 316 Julia Holter mixes radio broadcasts, street recordings and music.

• This week in the Tumblr labyrinth: fin de siècle art and graphics from Nocnitsa.

“There’s a widespread cultural barrenness across art and political culture. But there are some pockets of resistance on the extreme margins, like the techno-savvy protest movements, small press, the creator-owned comics, that seem to be getting some signs of hope for the future,” he says. “All of the genuinely interesting work is being done on the margins, with independent companies, self-producing, and alternative distribution networks.”

Alan Moore on Watchmen’s “toxic cloud” and creativity v. big business.

Stone Tape Shuffle, a 12” LP of readings by Iain Sinclair. Limited to 400 copies.

Monolake on how we cope with death: mythologies, rituals, drugs and Ghosts.

Kraftwerk perform at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in April.

Kathy Acker (in 1988?) interviewing William Burroughs.

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Willy Pogány’s erotica: illustrations for a 1926 edition of The Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs.

• Nicholas Lezard on David Lynch: director of dreams.

Did otherworldly music inspire Stonehenge?

Coilhouse has an Eyepatch Party.

Tanzmusik (1973) by Kraftwerk | The Model (1992) by the Balanescu Quartet | Trans Europe Express (2003) by the Wiener Sinfonie Orchestra & Arnold Schönberg Choir.

Weekend links 95

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Seven Songs (1982) by 23 Skidoo. Sleeve by Neville Brody.

The first volume of The Graphic Canon will be published in May by Seven Stories Press, a collection of comic strip adaptations and illustrations edited by Russ Kick. The anthology has already picked up some attention at the GuardianWestern canon to be rewritten as three-volume graphic novel—and Publishers’ WeeklyGraphic Canon: Comics Meet the Classics. I know someone who’ll bristle at the lazy use of “graphic novel”. The Graphic Canon isn’t anything of the sort, it’s a three-volume voyage through world literature presented in graphic form with a list of contributors including Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, Molly Crabapple, Rick Geary, and Roberta Gregory. My contribution is a very condensed adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray that will appear in volume 2. More about that closer to the publication date.

• LTM Records announces a vinyl reissue for Seven Songs (1982) by 23 Skidoo, an album produced by Ken Thomas, Genesis P Orridge & Peter Christopherson that still sounds like nothing else. Related: an extract from Tranquilizer (1984) by Richard Heslop, cut-up Super-8 film/video with audio collage by 23 Skidoo.

• New exhibitions: Another Air: The Czech–Slovak Surrealist Group, 1991–2011 at the Old Town City Hall, Prague (details in English here), and Ed Sanders – Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts 1962–1965 at Boo-Hooray, NYC.

• “…we have a situation where the banks seem to be an untouchable monarchy beyond the reach of governmental restraint…” Alan Moore writes for the BBC about V for Vendetta and the rise of Anonymous.

Announcing Arc: “a new magazine about the future from the makers of New Scientist“. Digital-only for the time being, as they explain here. Their Tumblr has tasters of the contents.

• From another world: Acid Mothers Temple interviewed. Also at The Quietus: Jajouka or Joujouka? The conflicted legacy of the Master Musicians.

• More from Susan Cain on introverts versus extroverts. Related: Groupthink: The brainstorming myth by Jonah Lehrer.

Ten Thousand Waves, an installation by Isaac Julien.

Afterlife: mouldscapes photographed by Heikki Leis.

• The book covers of Ralph Steadman. And more.

• “James Joyce children’s book sparks feud

Arkitypo: the final alphabet.

Book Aesthete

Kundalini (1982) by 23 Skidoo | Vegas El Bandito (1982) by 23 Skidoo | IY (1982) by 23 Skidoo