{surrealism} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 692

Illustration by Alfred Pearse for The Horror of Studley Grange by Clifford Halifax & LT Meade. Via.

• The Haunting at 60: Guy Lodge asks “Is it still one of the scariest films ever made?” I say yes but then it’s always been a favourite. Also, Robert Wise is something of a cult figure in this house, not for his big-budget directing jobs on The Sound of Music and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but for his RKO horror entries (The Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher), his film noir (Born To Kill, The Set-Up, Odds Against Tomorrow), and two smaller science-fiction films from different decades, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain. All this and he also edited Citizen Kane.

• “This show makes an irrefutable case for her technical mastery while also affirming her as a first-rate fabulist whose disparate influences—chivalric romance, medieval architecture, tarot, psychology, astronomy, and much more—cohere into a visionary whole.” Jeremy Lybarger reviewing Science Fictions, the retrospective devoted to the art of Remedios Varo.

• New music: Improvisation On Four Sequences by Suzanne Ciani; Incorporeal by Hidden Horse; Atlas by Laurel Halo; Infinito (Version) by Moritz von Oswald.

While Ballard’s more outwardly conventional books may give us solider, more stable realities, what these realities often present…is a child (or childlike figure) frolicking against a backdrop provided by the destruction of an older order of reality that the world previously took for granted. It’s a cipher for his oeuvre as a whole: endlessly playing among the ruins, reassembling the broken or “found” pieces (styles, genres, codes, histories) with a passion rendered all the more intense and focused by the knowledge that it’s all—culture, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization—constructed, and can just as easily be unconstructed, reverse engineered back down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled together in the first place. To put it in Dorothean: In every context and at every level, Ballard’s gaze is fixed, fixated, on the man behind the curtain, not the wizard.

Tom McCarthy: JG Ballard’s Brilliant, Not “Good” Writing

• At Public Domain Review: Behold the Nebulous Smear: ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi’s Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars (ca. 1430).

• At Unquiet Things: Shake, Shiver, and Shriek: The Haunted Gothic Nightmares of George Ziel.

• Winners of Nature TTL Photographer of the Year 2023.

• The Strange World of…Gavin Bryars

• Watch The Stars (1968) by Pentangle | Stars (1983) by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno | Kelly Watch The Stars (1997) by Air

Weekend links 688

Ascending to the Cathedral, Barcelona (1938/1960) by Kati Horna.

• The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith. Related: a four-and-a-half-hour walkthrough of Stray, a game in which you help a cat escape from a deteriorated robot-filled housing complex.

• Quote of the week: “The true master requires the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” Thus Vladimir Nabokov at Lawrence Weschler’s Wondercabinet.

• New music: Orion Nebula by Christian Wittman, and Chthonic by Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci.

Chapter by chapter, Flaubert lampoons his poor pair, who fail at discipline after attempted discipline: landscape architecture, anatomy, history, literature, phrenology, religion, even love, and on and on. In each pursuit, they never lose the optimism or the hubris of thinking they can put their knowledge to work in the world. When they become interested in pedagogy, they adopt a pair of abandoned children who are at turns mystified by and contemptuous of their efforts to improve their well-being. The fruit trees fail, the novel is abandoned, a cat is boiled alive, the children cause scandals.

David Schurman Wallace explores the hazards of distraction with a detour through Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet

• At AnOther: Peter De Potter’s new book explores the erotic performance of social media.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Hobart LaRoche presents…15 experimental video games.

• Take a look at a book chronicling the albums of Island Records.

• At Colossal: Gabriel Schama’s laser-cut plywood reliefs.

• Orion (1986) by Metallica | Shades Of Orion (1993) by Shades Of Orion | Orion (2001) by Jah Wobble and Bill Laswell

Remedios Varo, 1967

Online galleries have made profiles like this short Mexican film rather redundant, but it’s good to know that someone went to the trouble of presenting Varo’s paintings in this way at a time (1967) when you’d be lucky to see more than one of them in a book on Surrealist art. Jomí García Ascot’s camera roams among the details of Varo’s dreamworlds while Spanish voices read from a variety of Romantic and other texts. I hadn’t noticed before the amount of cats in Varo’s paintings. Look for the felines here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Pynchon and Varo
• Remedios Varo’s recipe for erotic dreams

Weekend links 687

The Peacock Garden (1898) by Walter Crane.

• “The trio [Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington & Kati Horna] became known as the ‘three witches’ for their exploration of the supernatural and metaphysical—which ranged…’from tarot readings to shamanic psychedelics to attempts to stop or slow time.'” Teresa Nowakowski on Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, an exhibition of Varo’s paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago which includes the one that Thomas Pynchon singled out for description in The Crying of Lot 49.

• Philip K. Dick giving a lecture on “orthogonal time” to a small audience at the Festival International de la Science-Fiction, Metz, in 1977. Dick’s talks and interviews aren’t exactly scarce, but this one was of interest for me since I recently designed an edition of John Crowley’s Great Work of Time, a novella which involves a similar concept. If you were at the Metz Festival in 1977 you could also see a live performance by Cluster. Lucky you.

• “Our minds remain open when the LSD wears off.” Steve Paulson on psychedelic drugs and their usefulness as therapeutic tools.

• At Cartoon Brew: Stephen Irwin’s animated films “combine the influences of David Lynch, Struwwelpeter, and the Brothers Grimm.”

• Steven Heller looked at NB3, the third book about Neville Brody’s graphic design. Elsewhere, Heller’s font of the month is Scusi.

• The glowing, prismatic nervous system of a sea star wins the Scientific Image of the Year.

• At Unquiet Things: Forgotten worlds and wonderlands from The Art of Fantasy.

• “Don’t waste my time with blood-free monster movies,” says Anne Billson.

• At Aquarium Drunkard: King Tubby And Soul Syndicate — Freedom Sounds In Dub.

• Mix of the week is DreamScenes – August 2023 at Ambientblog.

• Time Machine (1970) by Stray | Time Captives (1973) by Kingdom Come | The Existence Of Time (2012) by Monolake

Weekend links 685

Art by Naoyuki Katoh, 1982.

• RIP Paul Reubens. Here’s Steven Heller on Pee-wee Herman and his clinically hyperactive playhouse (not forgetting Gary Panter’s involvement); Bruce Handy on Paul Reubens’ preposterous grace; and David Hudson on Paul Reubens before and after Pee-wee.

• Three Thousand (2017), a short film by Asinnajaq in which “a riveting collage portrays a century of Inuit history, and envisions a vibrant future”.

• New music: Velocity Of Water by Suki Sou; The Blue Beyond by Jana Winderen; and Jäi mieleen by Aki Yli-Salomäki.

• DJ Food posted a handful of psychedelic LP sleeves for non-psychedelic artists. There’s a lot more to be found.

• “We had no rules. Song structure didn’t exist. It was nihilistic.” It’s Bush Tetras again.

• “Infrared light reveals hidden portrait beneath 1943 René Magritte painting.”

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Gakuryu Ishii Day.

• Tequila (1958) by The Champs | Tequila (1958) by Perez Prado | Tequila (1972) by Hot Butter