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Weekend links 135

Two Grove Press covers by Roy Kuhlman. From Arden Kuhlman Riordan’s Pinterest page collecting her father’s cover designs.

• “When people asked me what boylesque was, I’d say I’m doing burlesque and I have a penis,” said Mr. Ferguson.

• Sequence5: 42 tracks of new, atmospheric/ambient music. A free download in a variety of formats.

• The trailer for Jimmy’s End, the forthcoming film by Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins.

As a porn performer, I can say from experience and with confidence that I’ve never been objectified by other performers. Nor have I been objectified by viewers. At least not in a way that seemed to confuse them into thinking I was an object. What happens instead is that I shift in and out of object-hood. Athletes do this too—they engage with their bodies for a specific task. At the end of the game or the shoot, the context changes.

Conner Habib on The Virtues of Being an Object

• Secret Weapons (1972), David Cronenberg’s lost TV movie resurfaces.

• Joseph Burnett reviews Nude, the new album by The Irrepressibles.

• Over a third of e-readers are used just once before being set aside.

The guarded, the cautious, the small-scale, the modest, the well-crafted—such books may be rewarded (in our own time, at the national level), but they are rarely preserved. They are not preserved because guardedness, caution, smallness, modesty, and craft can be replaced in any given generation. What is irreplaceable is excess: Of verbal kinesis, religious intensity, intellectual voracity.

Amit Majmudar on Entertainment and Excess: The Great Literary Audiences

• Miniature Book Interviews with Louis Wain Bound by Hand.

• A Tour Inside Salvador Dalí’s Labyrinthine Spanish Home.

• Horror fiction should be deep, not cheap, says Nina Allan.

• RIP Peter Kuhlmann aka Pete Namlook

• More is More by Alex Trochut

• The Useless Web

• Lost In The Sea (1992) by Sequential (Pete Namlook & DJ Criss) | Angel Tech (1994) by Bill Laswell & Pete Namlook | Yenlik (Part II) (1996) by Burhan Öçal & Pete Namlook

In which the sorely missed Arthur magazine returns to the world of print after a four-year slumber in Avalon. I was involved with the magazine from the outset so regular readers may recall many earlier posts about America’s most vital cultural bulletin:

After a four-year sabbatical (faked death?), your beloved revolutionary sweetheart Arthur returns to print, renewed, refreshed, reinvigorated and in a bold new format: pages as tall and wide as a daily newspaper, printed in color and black and white on compostable newsprint, with ads only on the back cover(s). Amazing!

In partnership with Portland, Oregon’s Floating World Comics, Arthur’s gang of goofs, know-it-alls and village explainers are back, from Bull Tonguers Byron Coley and Thurston Moore to radical ecologist Nance Klehm to trickster activists Center for Tactical Magic to Defend Brooklyn‘s socio-political commentator Dave Reeves to a host of new, fresh-faced troublemakers, edited by ol’ fool Jay Babcock and art directed by Yasmin Khan. You want a peek at the contents? Sorry, compadre. That would be saying too much, too soon. Wait ’til Dec. 22, 2012: that’s right—THE DAY AFTER THE NON-END OF THE WORLD!

Please keep in mind… Arthur is no longer distributed for free anywhere. Those days are (sadly) long gone. Now you gotta buy Arthur or you won’t see it. Our price: Five bucks cheeeeeep!

Arthur No. 33
Broadsheet newspaper, 15″ x 22.75″
Available Dec. 22, 2012
NOW YOU MAY PRE-ORDER ARTHUR NO. 33 HERE.

The NYT picked up on the news on Thursday. Is re-launching a paper magazine in 2012 a crazy idea? We’re about to find out. A selection of my illustrations for previous issues follows.

MBV Arkestra (2003).

The Aeon of Horus (2004).

Out, Demons, Out! (2004).

Brian Eno (2005).

Sir Richard Bishop (2007).

A Journey to Avebury by Derek Jarman

Among the Doublevision video releases I was writing about earlier this month there’s a notable omission from those which have been reissued on DVD: Derek Jarman’s In the Shadow of the Sun was the seventh release on the label, the 1980 version of a film which was compiled in 1974 using footage from his earlier Super-8 shorts, one of which was A Journey to Avebury (1971). Several of the short films have appeared as extras on recent DVDs but the gorgeously oneiric In the Shadow of the Sun remains stubbornly unavailable.

A Journey to Avebury lasts for ten minutes, and in its original state was nothing more than silent, static shots of fields, pathways (putative ley lines, perhaps), silhouetted trees, and finally the Avebury stones. I still find it one of the most fascinating of his short films. The yellow filter gives all the shots an oppressive, sulphurous cast which turns the otherwise bucolic landscape into a place of imminent (or even post-) apocalypse. I’m reminded of the yellow skies in Charles Platt’s erotic nightmare The Gas (1970), or some of the outdoor shots in Penda’s Fen (1974) which are equally suffused with menace.

The copy of A Journey to Avebury that’s currently on YouTube is a recent version with an uncredited electronic score. ~~I still don’t know who did the music; it doesn’t sound like Coil. Cyclobe?~~ (It’s Coil.) The YouTube version can be found in far better quality on the Second Sight DVD of Jarman’s The Last of England.

And just to show how everything here is connected to everything else, that brooding megalith above (known locally as “The Devil’s Seat”) can be seen in at least one shot in Children of the Stones. No surprise there but the shot also reveals the place where Jarman and co. would have been standing five years earlier.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Children of the Stones
• Avebury panoramas
• Derek Jarman’s music videos
• Derek Jarman’s Neutron
• Mister Jarman, Mister Moore and Doctor Dee
• The Tempest illustrated
• Penda’s Fen by David Rudkin
• In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman
• Derek Jarman at the Serpentine
• The Angelic Conversation
• The life and work of Derek Jarman

The art of Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, 1884–1965

Tjur och Matador III (Bull and Matador III) (1926).

My thanks again to Will at 50 Watts for generously sending me this selection of paintings by Swedish artist Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, or GAN as he was known. These pictures alone show him to have been a very versatile artist, ranging from the late Symbolism of his Young man with death to the works below which deploy a variety of Modernist styles including nods to Cubism and Futurism. A translation of his Swedish Wikipedia page explains the preponderance of matelots and toreadors thus:

The GAN was homosexual reflected in several of his works. For example, he was at times almost manic fixed at the Mariners, and he worshiped the masculine force. Other favorite subjects were male athletes. Meanwhile, the homosexual eroticism both forbidden and taboo and GAN forced to live a double life.

It’s a shame there isn’t a good single site for his work but Google’s image search turns up a lot more paintings. There’s also this Swedish site which contains more biographical detail.

Ynglingen och döden (Young man with death) (1908).

Epilog.

Ilja (Portrait of Karl Edvard Holmström) (1911–12).

Inspiration (1928).

Continue reading “The art of Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, 1884–1965”

Children of the Stones

“Pretty phantasmagorical!” says precocious teenager Matthew when he and his father drive into the fictional village of Milbury in the opening scene of Children of the Stones. Matthew’s father is a scientist whose work requires a three-month stay in a village built in the centre of a series of ancient ramparts and stone circles. Once settled, they find many of the villagers to be blandly cheerful, while Matthew discovers that his maths skills at the local school pale beside younger children who can solve complex equations with ease. Omnipresent characters in the village are Hendrick, a retired astronomer who owns the local manor house and acts as village squire; Margaret, a newly-arrived archaeologist who knows the history of the stones; and Dai, a vagrant poacher who lives outside the circle, and who seems eager to remain free of the Stepford-like happiness afflicting his neighbours.

Matthew (Peter Demin).

Matthew’s “phantasmagorical” epithet is directed at the neolithic mound outside the village but could easily apply to the whole of this seven-part serial which I watched again recently. HTV produced Children of the Stones which was first broadcast in early 1977. A mystery serial for children involving pagan history, folk rituals and an undercurrent of science fiction wasn’t such a surprising thing in the 1970s, this being a decade when a popular interest in the occult and the paranormal was more prevalent than at any time before or since. Children’s television reflected adult trends which is why we got to see an adaptation of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, the occult adventure series Ace of Wands (with its hero named “Tarot”), The Tomorrow People (which occasionally strayed from science fiction to science fantasy) and others (see an earlier post, Occultism for kids). Children of the Stones was the most complex of all of these, a well-crafted drama with similarities to Nigel Kneale’s TV plays, The Wicker Man and The Prisoner. With a slight change of emphasis it would have worked just as well as a serial for adults. The best children’s serials of the period were usually adaptations of novels; Children of the Stones was an original work for television, written by Jeremy Burnham & Trevor Ray, and directed by Peter Graham Scott.

Adam (Gareth Thomas), Margaret (Veronica Strong) and Hendrick (Iain Cuthbertson).

Continue reading “Children of the Stones”