Weekend links 763

parent.jpg

I Live in Shock (1955) by Mimi Parent.

• At Public Domain Review: “Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare (1922) is at turns obtuse, grotesque, and moralizing—and sought to provoke the obscenity trial of the century. Only it didn’t, quietly vanishing instead. Colin Dickey rereads this failed satire, finding a transcendent rhythm pulsing beneath the novel’s indulgent prose.”

• “There are no surprises when a pallet of CDs arrives at my office, but when a pressing plant alerts me to a shipment of records headed my way I start to worry.” John Brien, head of Important Records, on the problems involved in the manufacture of vinyl albums.

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

They were building a vast alternative religion with a lack of dictates but no shortage of rituals and icons. They’d pass through the end of the world to get there first; the next album was based on a vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse slaughtering their animals and constructing a earth-gouging machine from their jawbones, demonstrating they weren’t quite intending to settle down yet. It would take them far from mainstream culture, and indeed mainstream gay culture given their repeated disdain for sanitised queerness, and into enigmatic territory. Having scared away most fans of synth pop and industrial with provocation, and the weak and tyrannical with ambiguity, they were unencumbered and “allowed to mature in the dark”, sustained by a cult following (you rarely encounter a tepid fan of Coil, most are acolytes).

Darran Anderson looking back at Coil’s debut album, Scatology

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See 15 winning images from the Close-Up Photographer of the Year Competition.

• At The Daily Heller: How did pink become a colour? Meanwhile, Steven Heller’s font of the month is Vibro.

• New music: Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds by Lawrence English.

SciURLs: A science news aggregator.

Shackleton’s favourite albums.

• RIP Marianne Faithfull.

The Pink Panther Theme (1963) by Henry Mancini | The Pink Room (1988) by Seigen Ono | Pink (2005) by Boris

Copyright-free images

images.jpg

In recent discussions about AI ethics I’ve been seeing the same question raised by commenters, something like the following: “Okay, this stuff is bad…but if we shouldn’t use it then what can I use instead for my book cover/album cover/Substack article…?” This post is intended to provide one answer to the question, a guide to some of the more substantial alternatives for those who complain they can’t afford to hire a human being to decorate their work. Many of these archives have been around for years but searching for single images doesn’t always bring you to a useful copyright-free solution right away, especially if you’re using Google’s deteriorated service.

Wikimedia Commons. An obvious yet indispensible resource, especially for illustration research, and one that’s continually updated and improved. I only noticed recently that Wikimedia now has very large scans of Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur that are much better quality than the books at the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive. And speaking of which… The Internet Archive has its own images section but for years now I’ve been mining the texts section looking for illustrated books. This isn’t an ideal solution for most purposes, not when the best material is often hidden under blank library covers, but persistence can be rewarding, especially where old engravings are concerned. Many of the 19th-century illustrations sold by stock libraries may be found here for free.

Gallica. The public face of the Bibliothèque Nationale of France, and a very useful resource despite being cursed with a slow and buggy interface. There’s also a Gallica app but you’re better off using the website.

Library of Congress. Excellent for anything to do with US history. Also a great selection of photochromes, among other things.

NYPL Digital Collections. “Explore 1,060,155 items digitized from The New York Public Library’s collections.”

Public Domain Image Archive. “Explore our hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.”

Smithsonian Open Access & Smithsonian Image Gallery

Biodiversity Heritage Library. Animals and plants.

Wellcome Collection. Public domain medical (and related) images.

Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access.

The Getty Museum Open Content.

The British Library Flickr Albums. A shame it’s Flickr, they really ought to have a dedicated site of their own for images.

Europeana. “Discover Europe’s digital cultural heritage.”

David Rumsey Map Collection. Maps, maps and more maps.

NASA Image and Video Library. NASA materials have always been free to use so long as you also credit their source.

ESO. ESO is the European Southern Observatory which is housed at a number of sites in the Chilean Atacama Desert. As with NASA, the high-resolution images created there are free to use so long as credit is included.

National Library of Medicine. “Images from the history of medicine.”

Pixabay. “Stunning royalty-free images & royalty-free stock.”

Pexels. “The best free stock photos, royalty free images & videos shared by creators.”

Unsplash. “All images can be downloaded and used for personal or commercial projects.”

Exotic Animal Photo Reference Repository. “Artists creating derivative or transformative works without Generative AI have blanket permission to reference these photos.”

Heidelberg Universitäts-Bibliotek: Art and satirical periodicals. An invaluable resource for European periodicals of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, with downloadable of scans of The Studio, The Yellow Book, Ver Sacrum, Pan, Jugend, and many other titles. Heidelberg is only one of many university libraries which now make parts of their collection available as free downloads. I’d love to point the way to the best of the others but I don’t have a useful list to hand. A recent discovery, however, is Polona, the site for the National Library of Poland which has a large quantity of prints and photographs as well as whole books. Happy searching!

Update: Added a few more links.

Weekend links 755

emsh.jpg

A painting by Ed Emshwiller for the cover of Fantastic Stories of Imagination, July 1962, illustrating The Singing Statues by JG Ballard .

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: my comments about the creation of the book’s cover and magical alphabet have been posted at Alan Moore World. At (Quasi), Smoky Man (in Italian) looks at other parts of the book, and includes my answers to his questions about the creation of The Soul, a character originally planned for a comic strip that Alan Moore and I were working on. I’ve been trying recently to find the first sketches I made of The Soul back in 2000 or 2001, without success. If I do find any of them I’ll post them here.

• New music: Juk-Shabb by Cryo Chamber Collaboration is this year’s installment in the Lovecraft-themed album series (previously) from Cryo Chamber. Also this week: Xerrox Vol. 5 by Alva Noto; Nocturne (Soundtrack for an Invisible Film) by Avi C. Engel; and Cat Location Conundrum by Moon Wiring Club.

Code: Damp: An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms by Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, being “an alternative occult and esoteric history of England told through one of its most popular cultural forms: the comedy sitcom”.

…the joy of art isn’t only the pleasure of an end result but also the experience of going through the process of having made it. When you go out for a walk it isn’t just (or even primarily) for the pleasure of reaching a destination, but for the process of doing the walking. For me, using AI all too often feels like I’m engaging in a socially useless process, in which I learn almost nothing and then pass on my non-learning to others. It’s like getting the postcard instead of the holiday.

Brian Eno at Boston Review

• “The typographic choices that Godard made were thematic and not only chosen for their stylistic properties.” Arijana Zeric looks inside the design world of Jean-Luc Godard.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: The Stammering Librarian: Essays by Timothy D’Arch Smith, edited by Edwin Pouncey & Sandy Robertson.

• At Public Domain Review: Fantastic Planet: The Microscopy Album of Marinus Pieter Filbri (1887–88).

• At the BFI: Michael Brooke offers suggestions for where to begin with Guy Maddin.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Dennis Bovell.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by KMRU.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Gigafly.

Fantastic Cat (1996) by Takako Minekawa | Fantastic Analysis (2001) by Mouse On Mars | Fantastic Mass (2016) by Time Attendant

Weekend links 752

nemo.jpg

Captain Nemo by Alphonse de Neuville, from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1875) by Jules Verne.

• “…physical remoteness is a category of its own. It is an enhancer: It can make the glorious better and the terrible worse. The oceanic pole of inaccessibility distills physical remoteness on our planet into a pure and absolute form. […] Point Nemo is nearly impossible to get to and offers nothing when you arrive, not even a place to stand. It is the anti-Everest: It beckons because nothing is there.” Cullen Murphy explores the remotest place on Earth. A long and fascinating read, but no mention of Point Nemo’s dreaming tenant.

• More Bumper Book business: Smoky Man has posted the second part of his analysis of the book for (Quasi) (in Italian) which includes some comments from myself about the origin of the Moon and Serpent Magical Alphabet, and why the letter Q in the alphabet is assigned to Cthulhu. Elsewhere, Panini have announced an Italian edition of the Bumper Book for May next year, while at The Beat Steve Baxi reviewed the book from a philosophical perspective.

• At the BFI: David Parkinson on where to begin with Louis Feuillade. I’d suggest starting with Fantômas rather than Les Vampires but then I’m biased.

The combination of magic(k)al, ceremonial action, vivid colour and paradoxically serious camp in Jarman’s Super 8 films of the ’70s bears the influence of Kenneth Anger, but the differences between Jarman’s sensibility and Anger’s are more striking than the resemblances. Jarman’s vision is more materialist, austere and hermetic, and less sociological; where Anger identifies the glamour of American popular culture with the Will of the Crowleyan magician, Jarman situates the discovery of the cinematographic mechanism imaginatively within the history of alchemy. Anger cast rock stars as gods and adepts with the intention of harnessing the energy of their recognition; Jarman casts Fire Island, then in its heyday as a gay resort, as a desert defined by sculptural details and occupied by a single masked figure, in scenes that both recall his landscape paintings of the ’60s and ’70s and anticipate the design of his garden at Dungeness.

Luke Aspell on Derek Jarman’s hermetic film/painting, In the Shadow of the Sun

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “Visions of nuclear-powered cars captivated Cold War America, but the technology never really worked”.

• At The Spectator podcast: host Sam Leith talks to Michael Moorcock about 60 years of New Worlds magazine.

• At Public Domain Review: “Light from the Darkness” — Paul Nash’s Genesis (1924).

• At Bandcamp: “Disco godfather Cerrone’s enduring influence on dance music”.

• At Unquiet Things: The Art of Survival: Eyeball Fodder in Dark Times.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – November 2024 at Ambientblog.

• New music: The Laugh Is In The Eyes by Julia Holter.

• At The Daily Heller: The College of Collage.

• RIP jazz drummer Roy Haynes.

Thermonuclear Sweat (1980) by Defunkt | Nuclear Drive (1982) by Hawkwind | Nuclear Substation (2005) by The Advisory Circle

Leaving the Cafe

cafe.jpg

A good café. Budapest, 1930.

I have a new shop portal page, a deliberately low-maintenance affair which links to Etsy (where a few problems still need addressing), Redbubble (a brand new account), and the page here for Skull Print T-shirts. All the former links to CafePress have been removed. I’d been wanting to move away from the unsatisfying CafePress service for some time but before doing this I needed to arrange suitable replacements. Last weekend I finally disentangled my website from CafePress, something that involved stripping links from more pages than I expected, after which I closed my account there.

I opened an account at CafePress in May 2001 so I must have been one of the first users of their print-on-demand service. This was always a sideline not a business, a convenience for people who wanted something of mine on a print or T-shirt without having to pay the costs demanded by high-end printers like the one I use for the Etsy prints. My earnings from this were minimal at best, usually $50 a year. The rare exception was when my Alice in Wonderland calendar received a mention at Boing Boing during the time when that site had a substantial readership. After a short-lived spike of interest things returned to the usual $50 a year but even this meagre sum began to decline when the pandemic hit in 2020, becoming so sporadic it became evident there was little reason to keep the account open at all.

calendars.jpg

Beyond the meagre earnings there were others reasons for shutting things down. The front end of the site has always been dominated by the CafePress brand, while the back end, where sellers have to upload artwork and maintain their “shops”, never improved very much from its crudely designed beginnings, something I suspect was a legacy of CafePress having been one of the earliest successful print-on-demand outlets. After I’d got in the habit of putting together a new calendar each year they went and removed that product format, changing it to one that didn’t suit my work at all. And in later years they developed a bad habit of plastering your artwork on products you hadn’t approved of, so I’d find something of mine layered across a shower curtain, say, with no thought given (because none had been applied) as to whether the artwork or its ratio suited such a thing.

I’ve only been with Redbubble for just over a week so I’ve no idea whether I’ll earn anything from their service either but the seller process is a lot quicker and easier to set up than CafePress. As before, this is mainly for people who’d like a print of something at a reasonable price. I still have to add more designs so I’m open to requests. I used to have T-shirts available at CafePress but from now on I’ll only be doing these through Skull Print, a genuine small business who I’m happy to support. I’ll be adding more designs to the T-shirt page as well.

masbbom1.jpg

In other consumer news, the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is now on sale in the USA and Canada, with the UK edition being officially published tomorrow. Take a look if you see it in a shop somewhere, it’s a beautiful thing.