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Pay It All Back

Two things of interest to William Burroughs aficionados are looking for funding this month. The Burroughs Century is an event being planned to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Burroughs birth next year in Bloomington, Indiana:

We are calling this event the Burroughs Century, but we are not looking backward; rather, we believe that the Burroughs Century is ongoing, that we are in the midst of it, and we intend to stage an event that indicates the full range of that continuing influence, including a film series, art and literature exhibits, speakers and panels, musical performances, and more.

There’s more detail at Indiegogo. The organiser of the event, Charles Cannon, has expressed an interest in showing some of the Wild Boys portfolio which I keep tinkering with. Having a deadline to work towards may compel me to finish some of those pieces.

I’ve already mentioned Alex Harvey’s computer game-in-progress, Tangiers, but the game now has a Kickstarter fund which Harvey and co. are hoping will push their work to completion. The Burroughs influence here is more oblique since this is an original creation but it’s still a promising development in a medium with a tendency to rely on Hollywood and genre stereotypes for its scenarios:

You play an outsider to the world, an entity with a singular, enigmatic goal – to find and dispose of five other beings. Your arrival here has fractured the world; the city that these other beings resided in is now broken into shards across a broken, bleak landscape.

You must infiltrate these cities, searching to discover your marks – investigating both precisely who, and where. Keeping to the shadows is to be encouraged – reality here is a fragile place. Your interactions with the world cause it to fall apart. In homage to Burrough’s cut-up technique, the world collapses and rebuilds itself the more you interact with it – future areas rebuilt with the fragments and personality of places you mistreated. From this every play-through will, subtly or drastically, be unique to you.

Find out more at the game’s Kickstarter page.

Top of the world

How quickly things change. When I began this blog in February, 2006 the Burj Khalifa in Dubai had been under construction for two years but wouldn’t be finished for another three; Google’s Maps was an ongoing thing but the company had yet to introduce their Street View. Now you can use the one to visit the other via the latest Street View tour which takes you up that monument to hubris at the heart of Dubai. One new feature is the addition of a scale showing the available floors: you can start at the ground floor then jump upwards having viewed a succession of expensively bland (and increasingly cramped) rooms and corridors. Google’s cameras always make places appear smaller than they are, but the effect when caught in a tiny space at the top of a very tall building gives the impression of being in a computer game where there isn’t much room to manoeuvre. Did you know there’s a Nando’s in the Burj Khalifa? I didn’t. If you’re wealthy enough you can eat multi-national cuisine while watching the dust storms blow in from the desert. They should have buried JG Ballard there. Welcome to the future.

The lifts on the ground floor.

The view from the 154th floor.

Weekend links 166

The Julian House cover art for the forthcoming collaboration between John Foxx and Belbury Poly (here renamed) has been revealed. Single no. 9 in the Ghost Box Listening Centre Study Series is now available.

• In addition to new Ghost Box records there’s more Hauntological (for want of a better term) cinema on the way this summer with the DVD/BR release of Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England. The potted description at Movie Mail is “a monochrome psychedelic trip into magic and madness set during the English Civil War”. Julian House has made a trailer. Meanwhile at Fangoria, there’s a PIF mixtape from The Advisory Circle. This accompanies an interview with John Krish, director of the most bizarre of the UK’s many strange and alarming public information films from the 1970s.

• More mixes: The hour-long OH/EX/OH show for The Geography Trip on Chorlton FM. “Expect slumber / tension / euphoria in almost equal measures.” It’s marvellous. At Self-Titled mag there’s DJ Food with O Is For Orange: Boards of Canada, Broadcast, The Books, etc.

• Tangiers is a computer game based on the fiction of William Burroughs. Jim Rossignol talked to Alex Harvey about the development of the project.

Walpurgisnacht (1917) by Amadeus. A drawing that could easily be from the late 1960s. If anyone knows the full name of the artist, please leave a comment. Via Beautiful Century.

• Rebecca J. Rosen asks “What would the night sky look like if the other planets were as close as the moon?”

• The mystery of Charles Dellschau and the Sonora Aero Club.

• The Surreal Cave Paintings Of Stockholm’s Metro Stations.

• At 50 Watts: More strange art from Marcus Behmer.

• Ry Cooder in 1970. Directed by Van Dyke Parks!

• The Post Office Tower: now you see it…

• At Little Augury: 99 Meninas.

• Sartori In Tangier (1982) by King Crimson | City Of Mirage (2010) by John Foxx

LightSpin

After a week or so of posts looking back over a century of dance, this brings everything into the present. Eric Paré’s LightSpin used stop-motion photography and twenty-four cameras to capture half a million photos which were then edited into a short video. All of the lighting, which floats around the dancers, is done by hand. Core77 goes into the technical detail, and also has some astonishing jpeg loops from the same sessions.

Weekend links 161

My friend James Marriott died last year. He was 39. His final book, The Descent, a study of Neil Marshall’s acclaimed horror film, is launched on Friday at the Cube Microplex in Bristol. The book is published by Auteur, a UK imprint, in their Devil’s Advocates series. James was finishing the book a year ago this month, and sent me a late draft for comments. In addition to examining Marshall’s film in detail he also looks at its sequel and explores the micro-genre of cavern-oriented horror. When it came to literature James preferred Robert Aickman and Thomas Ligotti; he enjoyed their cinematic equivalents too but he also had a great appetite for horror films of any description, and would happily wade through hours of giallo trash in the hope of finding something worthwhile. I miss our long, digressive email exchanges, and the opportunity they afforded to swap new discoveries.

• “For artists not working in digital media — those who cut, build, draw, paint, glue, bend, and make things in the more traditional manner — there is something of a ‘Surrealist’ popularity at hand today,” says John Foster.

• At Open Culture: Duke Ellington’s Symphony in Black starring a 19-year-old Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone performs six songs on The Sound of Soul (1968).

• I’m not remotely interested in Baz Luhrman’s latest but I do like the Art Deco graphics and logos created by Like Minded Studio for The Great Gatsby.

• Alejandro Jodorowsky: “I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul”

• The Clang of the Yankee Reaper: Van Dyke Parks interviewed.

• A 45-minute horror soundtrack mix by Spencer Hickman.

• At But Does It Float: Album art by Robert Beatty.

• Topological Marvel: The Klein Bottle in Art

• Anne Billson on The Art of the Voiceover.

• Soviet board-games, 1920–1938

• A Brief History of Robot Birds

• Le Chemin De La Descente (1970) by Cameleon | Descent Into New York (1981) by John Carpenter | The Descent (1985) by Helios Creed