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Weekend links 347

Dream Animal (1903) by Alfred Kubin.

• The week in Finland: A set of Finnish emojis includes icons for notable cultural exports such as Tom of Finland and Moominmamma. Tove Jansson’s creations have received fresh attention this month with the debut release of the electronic soundtrack music for The Moomins, an animated TV series made in Poland in 1977, and first broadcast in the UK in 1983. Andrew Male talked to Graeme Miller and Steve Shill about creating Moomins music with rudimentary instrumentation.

• Russian company Mosfilm has made a new copy of Andrei Tarkovsky’s science-fiction masterpiece, Stalker (1979), available on their YouTube channel. Tarkovsky’s films have been blighted by inexplicable flaws in their home releases, as Stalker was when reissued on a Region B Blu-ray last year. The new Mosfilm upload looks better than my old DVD so for the moment this is the one I’ll be watching.

• Before straight and gay: the discreet, disorienting passions of the Victorian era. Deborah Cohen reviews A Very Queer Family Indeed by Simon Goldhill. Related: Kevin Killian reviews Murder in the Closet: Essays in Queer Clues in Crime Fiction Before Stonewall, edited by Curtis Evans.

• “How many graphic designers owe their introduction to typography to a teenage encounter with the typefaces and lettering found on album covers?” asks Adrian Shaughnessy.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 210 by Ascion, FACT Mix 587 by Seekersinternational, and The Séance, 4th February 2017.

• Pankaj Mishra on Václav Havel’s lessons on how to create a “parallel polis”. Related: The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel.

• Hans Corneel de Roos on Dracula‘s lost Icelandic sister text: How a supposed translation proved to be much more.

• “I live outside the world in a universe I myself have created, like a madman or a holy visionary.” — Michel de Ghelderode.

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art makes 375,000 images of public art freely available under Creative Commons Zero.

• Richard H. Kirk on Thatcherite pop and why Cabaret Voltaire were like The Velvet Underground.

• Emily Gosling on what David Lynch’s use of typography reveals (or doesn’t).

• White Noise Sounds of Frozen Arctic Ocean with Polar Icebreaker Idling.

• John Gray on what cats can teach us about how to live.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Day of the Mellotron (Restored).

• The Warburg Institute Iconographic Database.

• Sastanàqqàm by Tinariwen.

• Tanz Der Vampire (1969) by The Vampires of Dartmoore | Dracula (1983) by Dilemma | Vampires At Large (2012) by John Zorn

Weekend links 344

Axiom Dub – Mysteries Of Creation (1996), a Bill Laswell production. Art by James Koehnline.

• As noted earlier, the great Bill Laswell has made some of his sprawling back catalogue available at Bandcamp, news of which has prompted Vinyl Factory to put together a recommended listening guide. Judging by the comments I’m not the only Laswell-head deploring the absence of the masterpiece from Material, Hallucination Engine. Linked here before, and happily still being updated, the comprehensive Bill Laswell discography at Silent-Watcher. Related: An ESP-Disk Primer by Marc Masters.

• Listen to the Voice of Fire, a symposium concerning alchemy in sound art, takes place at the National Library of Wales at the beginning of March. Phil Legard offers some thoughts on alchemy, music and John Dee.

• The guilty cinematic pleasures of John Carpenter. Related: Director and actor Alice Lowe chooses seven favourite horror films.

• The Broomway, Essex, a tidal path known as “The Doomway” for its reputation as the most dangerous walk in Britain.

• Mixes of the week: K-Punk presents Return to the Fourth World, and FACT Mix 584 by Lawrence English.

• “There was more to the late John Berger than that TV series and art book”, says Richard Turney.

• “Music’s cassette-tape revival is paying off,” says John Paul Titlow.

• Diamanda Galás announces two new albums.

• Bob Dylan paints a Blackpool pier.

• Pixel art by Uno Moralez

• One Letter Words

• Reduction (1980) by Material | Ghost Light/Dread Recall (1996) by Material | No Guts No Galaxy (1999) by Material (feat. Ramm Ell Zee & phonosycographDISK)

Weekend links 339

Untitled (2011) by Roger Hiorns. Photograph by Kate Green.

• “Most surprising and troubling of all is the status of a series of new paintings, also depicting naked male bodies. The figures look archaic, painted using latex and molten and folded plastic. They have sex with each other and with themselves. Extra penises float about, and fill any otherwise unoccupied orifice. There’s a lot of rogering going on, anal and oral, the figures consumed entirely by the act.” Adrian Searle reviews Roger Hiorns’ latest show at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

• “At the heart of magical belief is the belief in your own free will, in your ability to make changes and influence the world. It wasn’t accepting your circumstances, it was working to understand and directly change them.” Jessa Crispin on the women of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

• Addison Nugent on William Hope Hodgson: “The Forgotten Bodybuilding, Shark-Fighting Sailor who Invented Cosmic Horror (and annoyed Houdini)”. I’d quibble with the “forgotten”—Hodgson is sometimes overlooked but not exactly unknown—but the appraisal is welcome.

• More end-of-year lists: The Quietus posts its Albums of the Year, Bandcamp does the same, while Adrian Curry at MUBI announces his favourite film posters of the year.

• Callum James has devised The Quite Difficult Book Quiz for those who’d like a challenge (and a donation to charity) over Christmas.

• “A profoundly poetic anomaly”: Kenan Malik on the Tantric paintings that pre-empt Modernist abstraction.

• Patricia M’s Flickr albums contain a wealth of antique graphic design, advertising art and undigitised letterforms.

• “Cronky, shonky, soggy, knackered”: Simon Reynolds on ten years of Moon Wiring Club.

• Michael LePointe on the delightful mysteries of The Voynich Manuscript.

• Veloelectroindustrial: Wandering the wastelands of former industry.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 202 by JG Biberkopf.

• “Was Edmund Wilson jealous of Lolita?” asks Alex Beam.

• “Research finds MP3s drain your music of emotion.”

• Richard H. Kirk‘s favourite albums.

• Pavel Banka‘s surreal abstractions.

• Dennis Cooper‘s Alan Clarke Day.

• Cosmic Surfin’ (1978) by Yellow Magic Orchestra | Cosmic Meditation (1991) by Moondog | Cosmic Call (2006) by The Evpatoria Report

Weekend links 338

At the mountains of madness, fragment I (2014–16) by Céli Lee.

• Spirits of Place, edited by John Reppion: new writings from Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir, Vajra Chandrasekera, Maria J. Pérez Cuervo, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Kristine Ong Muslim, Dr. Joanne Parker, Mark Pesce, Iain Sinclair, Gazelle Amber Valentine and Damien Williams.

• “Are we wrong to neglect [Jean Cocteau]? We are.” Kevin Jackson reviews Jean Cocteau: A Life, a biography by Claude Arnaud that’s finally available in an English edition (translated by Lauren Elkin & Charlotte Mandell). Related: Jean Cocteau speaks to the year 2000.

• Void Beats / Invocation Trex by Cavern of Anti-Matter has been one of my favourite music releases this year. Tim Gane talks about the inadvertent origin of the group, and there’s also the welcome news of a reissue for the scarce first album, Blood Drums.

• Pauline Oliveros: 1932–2016; Geeta Dayal looks back on the life of US composer Pauline Oliveros, including reflections from, amongst others, Betsey Biggs, Fred Frith, Terry Riley, and Morton Subotnick.

• The relaunched Jayde Design website is selling copious Moorcock publications and ephemera, back issues of New Worlds magazine, and much else besides, including rare works of my own.

• New from Mute Records: Richard H. Kirk #7489 (Collected Works 1974–1989) and Sandoz #9294 (Collected Works 1992–1994).

• Drawings by Austin Osman Spare are on display for the next two weeks at the Atlantis Bookshop, London.

• The Architecture of the Overlap: Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, scanned in three dimensions.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 201 by Félicia Atkinson, and FACT mix 579 by Jenny Hval.

• “No one has the slightest idea what is and isn’t cultural appropriation,” says Fredrik deBoer.

• I’m never keen on end-of-year lists but I’ll read any list that John Waters writes.

• “The Driller Killer and the humanist behind the blood and sickening crunch”.

• More Lovecraft: Stories to make you say UGH! by Pete Von Sholly.

• Alan Moore talks to Stewart Lee.

• At The Mountains Of Madness (1968) by H.P. Lovecraft | Mountains Falling (2001) by Bluebob | Mountains Crave (2012) by Anna von Hausswolff

Weekend links 337

A Post-traumatic History Lesson (2009) by David Avery.

• Last week it was the teaser, this week it’s the full thing: When a New Trick Comes Out, I do an Old One / Exit Pantomime Control by Moon Wiring Club, 29-minutes of woozy and degraded psychedelic VHS weirdness.

• Over the summer I watched 32 Robert Altman films. When faced with such a diverse and unpredictable filmography it helps to have a guide; Geoff Andrew suggests where to begin.

• Some tools in the ongoing war against the Agents of the Control Virus: The Best Anonymous VPN Services of 2016.

Sky Blue Press bills Auletris as a work that “breaks many taboos.” Fans of [Anaïs] Nin know that she has covered plenty of salacious territory before: tubercular nymphomaniacs, exhibitionists, voyeurs, orgies, gender bending, bondage, bestiality, incest, hermaphroditism, etc. Nin was a pioneer of women’s sex writing in English, and all contemporary erotica authors are indebted to her, whether they realize it or not. In the 1940s, she wrote risqué stories for an anonymous private collector at the rate of a dollar a page. Despite how Nin downplayed her bespoke smut as “literary prostitution,” compared to other explicit writing of her time in English, hers was revolutionary. The two steamy volumes, Delta of Venus and Little Birds, were not published for the public until the ’70s, just after her death, but they were best sellers and set a new standard for erotica.

Laura Frost reviewing Auletris, a book of rare fiction by Anaïs Nin

• HP Lovecraft’s Fungi From Yuggoth and Other Poems, a new collection of readings by William E. Hart.

• The Harlan Ellison® Books Preservation Project is on the brink of achieving its Kickstarter target.

• The Haunted Ceiling, a neglected ghost story by HG Wells, is being published for the first time.

• A Quietus Hour Radio Special: Shirley Collins on her favourite songs.

• Kellie Woodson recommends “5 transgressive horror publishers”.

• Alice in Wonderland‘s engravings—a forgotten story in pictures.

• “Alan Moore’s Jerusalem is a moveable feast,” says Alan Wall.

• Musiceureka: “collecting vinyl in a special way”.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Terrarium makers.

• RIP Pauline Oliveros.

• Bye Bye Butterfly (1965) by Pauline Oliveros | Lear (1989) by Pauline Oliveros / Stuart Dempster / Panaiotis | Silence Echoes (1997) by Pauline Oliveros & Randy Raine-Reusch