{film} – Page 307 – { feuilleton }

Happy Bloomsday

A page from Ulysses with amendments by James Joyce.

That time of year again and for your delectation Ubuweb has tapes of the soundtrack from Joseph Strick’s semi-successful 1967 film of Ulysses featuring the voices of Milo O’Shea, Barbara Jefford and others. The film is frequently a series of illustrated voiceovers so this isn’t as purposeless as it might seem. Somewhere I have a vinyl recording of Milo O’Shea and Barbara Jefford reading from the Nausicaa and Penelope chapters and somewhere else a reading of passages from Finnegans Wake. For the latter Ubuweb also has Sylvia Beach’s recording of Joyce himself reading from Anna Livia Plurabelle.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jerry by Paul Cadmus
• Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
• Books for Bloomsday

Weekend links 18

Rogomelec (1978) by Leonor Fini. Via.

• Moving Through Old Daylight: A recording of Mark Fisher, Jim Jupp and Julian House of Ghost Box Recordings and Iain Sinclair in conversation at the Roundhouse, Camden, London, 5 June 2010. Topics under discussion included Nigel Kneale, TC Lethbridge, John Foxx, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, alchemies of sound, the homogenisation of culture, imagining space and the impersistence of memory.

• The Surreal House, “a mysterious dwelling infused with subjectivity and desire” at the Barbican, London.

• Ars Homo Erotica at the National Museum of Warsaw. Related: “(Gothenburg) Museum stops exhibition about homosexuality in religion“.

• A lot of people still arrive here looking for art by Zack aka Oliver Frey. Bike Boy, 96 pages of Frey’s exuberantly homoerotic comic strips, is published in August by Bruno Gmünder.

• “EM Forster was a virgin until the age of thirty-nine, when he had his first ‘full’ sexual experience (a ‘hurried sucking off’, Wendy Moffat informs us) with a passing soldier on a beach in Alexandria.”

• JG Ballard’s archive is accepted by the British Library, or “saved for the nation” as they rather grandiloquently describe the process. Samples from the documents to be preserved at the BBC and the Guardian.

• Shades of Ballard’s singing sculptures, Sun Boxes is a solar-powered audio installation by Craig Colorusso. There’s more at Designboom.

• Nathalie visited the MAXXI, Rome’s new museum of contemporary art designed by Zaha Hadid.

• Stephen Pinker wants everyone to stop fretting over the alleged distractions of electronic media.

• “It basically comes from love”: John McLaughlin in conversation with Robert Fripp, 1982.

• More collections of print ephemera: Agence Eureka and Ephemera Magica.

• The Serpent and the Sword, an Alan Moore rarity from 1999.

• Gulliverovy Cesty (1968) at A Journey Round My Skull.

• Within the Without: a new Thombeau Tumblr.

• The Hidden Posters of Notting Hill Gate.

• The Letters of Sylvia Beach reviewed.

• It’s Kubrick Season in St Albans.

• Riot In Lagos (1980) by Ryuichi Sakamoto still sounds futuristic thirty years on.

Krazy Kat animations

Krazy Kat – Bugologist (1916).

Among the films at the Library of Congress YouTube channel are a number of shorts from the early days of animation including several of the first Krazy Kat films. George Herriman apparently had nothing to do with these, they were Hearst corporation spin-offs, which perhaps explains their lack of Herriman’s eccentricities. They’re necessarily crude, of course; cartoon animation had barely begun in 1916 and Walt Disney was yet to make a film. It’s curious watching a cartoon which transcribes the comic strip conventions so literally, with speech balloons growing from the characters mouths. Also at the LoC channel is one of the later Gertie the Dinosaur films and the very strange The Centaurs, both by Winsor McCay and son.

The Thorns of Love by Antoni Maiovvi

The Thorns of Love CD cover.

One of the consequences of having been so productive of late is having less time to update my web pages. The CD design section is now a year out of date so I’ll be trying to amend the situation as time allows.

The Thorns of Love by Antoni Maiovvi was released last month and is another of my designs for the Caravan label. The attention-grabbing photos are by Liz Eve whose work adorned earlier designs for 2562 and Pinch. It’s great to work with quality images like these, and Liz’s gory pictures are an ideal match for Maiovvi’s music, a series of lengthy compositions in a style which might be described as Giorgio Moroder scoring a Dario Argento horror movie. This is a fantastic album and the CD’s fourth track, Class Dagger, is one of the best new electronic pieces I’ve heard this year.

The Thorns of Love vinyl sleeve.

The Thorns of Love was released on double-12″ vinyl as well as CD so I’ve also posted the vinyl art, something I need to go back and do for previous designs. Vinyl isn’t dead by any means, and it’s a pleasure to work for the larger format.

• Antoni Maiovvi interviewed at Electrofreaks

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dead on the Dancefloor

Weekend links 17

Aladdin Sane (1973). Cover photo by Brian Duffy who died this week.

• Among the obituaries this week: artist Louise Bourgeois; poet and partner of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky; film director Joseph Strick, a man who dared to film James Joyce’s Ulysses; photographer Brian Duffy.

• The dustbin of art history: “Why is so much contemporary art awful? We’re living through the death throes of the modernist project—and this isn’t the first time that greatness has collapsed into decadence.” Admirable sentiments but galleries and dealers have far too much invested in the corrupt edifice to let it collapse any time soon.

• Edinburgh film festival to screen ‘lost and forgotten’ British movies including the director’s cut of Jerry Cornelius film The Final Programme.

Delectable Bawdville burlesque boy Chris “Go-Go” Harder. Via EVB who have more pics.

• Homobody by Rio Safari, “a scrappy diy zine about queerness”. Obliquely related: Lizzy the Lezzie, animations at the Sundance Channel.

• Richard Norris aka Time and Space Machine puts together a psychedelic mixtape for FACT. Fab stuff.

• Diamanda Galás has a message for critics: “Stick to reviewing plant life and leave the Witches alone.”

• Brion Gysin: Dream Machine will be the first US survey of Gysin’s work in NYC next month.

• Geeta Dayal’s study of Another Green World by Brian Eno reviewed at Ballardian.

• For type-heads: font anatomy wallpaper by Sigurdur Armannsson.

• If it was my home: visualising the BP oil disaster.

• Antony Gormley’s Breathing Room III.

• The Paris Review has a new blog.

• Bizarre juxtaposition of the week: John Martyn’s sublime Small Hours with, er… The Clangers.