{photography} – Page 62 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 202

Figuras Miticas: Bailarin II (1954) by Leonora Carrington.

• The 26th Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalists have been announced. Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam; Gay City: Volume 5 made the LGBT Anthology list, so congratulations to editors Evan J. Peterson & Vincent Kovar, and everyone else involved. I illustrated and designed the cover of that volume which also contains a piece of my fiction, Study in Blue, Green, and Gold.

• Music in School (1969), episode 4: “A New Sound”. Amazing BBC TV programme for schools showing children playing avant-garde compositions using bowed metal sheets, tape loops, and primitive electronic equipment. I was at school then, and can’t help but feel a little jealous. Related: Delia Derbyshire Day approaches.

• Voices Of Haiti (1953), recorded during ceremonials near Croix Des Missions and Petionville in Haiti by Maya Deren.

These days it’s hard to remember that Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl caused a bigger uproar at the Salon des Refusés of 1863 than Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, or that Monet was more influenced by Whistler than vice-versa. The delicacy of Whistler’s perceptions and his willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of harmony make for an art less bracing than that of Degas or Pissarro. And yet how much life there is in his little Thames riverscapes. Perhaps we need another major exhibition—there hasn’t been one for twenty years—to re-evaluate him.

Whistler’s Battles by Barry Schwabsky

• Mix of the week (and a very good one it is): Abandoned Edwardian Schoolhouse by The Geography Trip.

• Morton Subotnick tells Alfred Hickling how recording Silver Apples of the Moon blew his mind.

• The fantasy artwork of Ian Miller. A new book, The Art of Ian Miller, is published next month.

• Queen for a Day by Alison Fensterstock. A look at the Mardi Gras Queens of New Orleans.

• Tex Avery (1988): A 50-minute BBC documentary about the great animation director.

• The Gentle Revolutionary: Peter Tatchell talks to Joseph Burnett about Derek Jarman.

• The Soaring and Nearly Forgotten Arches of New York City.

• Dennis Hopper‘s photos of American artists in the 1960s.

• Vodun at Pinterest.

• Litanie Des Saints (1992) by Dr. John | Dim Carcosa (2001) by Ancient Rites | Far From Any Road (2003) by The Handsome Family

Weekend links 201

An illustration by John Kettelwell for The Story of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (1928).

• “The strain in everything I write, of not being taken with the bounteousness of humankind, was also the attitude of both my parents.” Jonathan Meades talking to James Kidd about his forthcoming memoirs.

• 7 Trumps From the Tarot Cards and Pinions (1969), and album of electronic music by Ruth White, is being given a limited vinyl reissue. Related: Ruth White—An American Composer.

• 82 minutes of Michael Moorcock talking in 1972 to Jean-Pierre Turmel, co-founder of the Sordide Sentimental record label.

If Verne’s protagonists often seem to stop short of revelation, it’s because the revelation is not meant to be known. Revelation has a way of putting man back at the front of the evolution chart, moving neatly toward a happily progressing future, out of the darkness and into the light. The characters who embark upon the Voyages Extraordinares move backward and forward and all about, spun around like blindfolded children trying to pin the tail on the donkey. The point of the adventure, after all, is not to have a conclusion; it is to get knocked off your feet.

Stefany Anne Golberg on Journey to the Center of the Earth at 150.

• Photographs of pre-Haussmann Paris by Charles Marville, and photographs by Amy Heiden of industrial ruins.

• Mixes of the week: FACT Mix 427 by Wild Beasts, and Secret Thirteen Mix 108 by Kangding Ray.

• Hear Italo Calvino read selections from Invisible Cities, Mr Palomar and others.

• William S. Burroughs in Dub conducted by Dub Spencer & Trance Hill.

• Cycles, Returns & Rebirth: Alexander Tucker on Derek Jarman.

• Harold Budd: the composer with no urge to make music.

• The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments.

• 80 minutes of Monolake playing live in 1999.

• At 50 Watts: Dyl’s Dance.

• Owls And Flowers (2006) by Belbury Poly | Learning Owl Reappears (2011) by The Advisory Circle | The Owls (2013) by Félicia Atkinson

Weekend links 200

Untitled etching by Etsuko Fukaya, 2005.

• “By the time Scorsese met Powell, in 1975, the British director had fallen on hard times and was largely ignored by the UK film establishment.” A London office used by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is given the Blue Plaque treatment.

• Ambient reminiscences at The Quietus: Wyndham Wallace on the genesis of Free-D (Original Soundtrack) by Ecstasy Of St Theresa, and Ned Raggett on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II.

• “Even Queen Victoria was prescribed tincture of cannabis,” writes Richard J. Miller in Drugged: the Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs. Steven Poole reviewed the book.

I don’t relate to standard psychologizing in novels. I don’t really believe that the backstory is the story you need. And I don’t believe it’s more like life to get it—the buildup of “character” through psychological and family history, the whole idea of “knowing what the character wants.” People in real life so often do not know what they want. People trick themselves, lie to themselves, fool themselves. It’s called survival, and self-mythology.

Rachel Kushner talking to Jonathan Lee

• Sound Houses by Walls is a posthumous collaboration based on a collection of “weird sonic doodles” by electronic composer Daphne Oram. FACT has a preview.

• The skeletal trees of Borth forest, last alive 4,500 years ago, were uncovered in Cardigan Bay after the recent storms stripped the sand from the beach.

• Stephen O’Malley talks to Jamie Ludwig about Terrestrials, the new album by Sunn O))) and Ulver. There’s another interview here.

• At BibliOdyssey: Takushoku Graphic Arts—graphic design posters by contemporary Japanese artists.

• The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: Dave Segal on the rumbling splendour of Earth 2.

• So Much Pileup: “Graphic design artifacts and inspiration from the 1960s – 1980s.”

• Lots of illustrations by Virgil Finlay being posted at The Golden Age just now.

• Mix of the week: Episode #114 by Lustmord at Electric Deluxe.

• Lucinda Grange’s daredevil photography. There’s more here.

• Experimental music on Children’s TV

• Kazumasa Nagai at Pinterest.

• Teeth Of Lions Rule The Divine (1993) by Earth | He Who Accepts All That Is Offered (Feel Bad Hit Of The Winter) (2002) by Teeth Of Lions Rule The Divine | Big Church (megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért) (2009) by Sunn O)))

Paul Schütze: Silent Surface

Something for people living in the Thames Archipelago formerly known as London (okay, it’s not that bad but give it a couple of years…): Paul Schütze adds to the list of his polymathic accomplishments with the launch of a book, a new series of prints, and a perfume (or aroma) at Maggs Gallery. Details below. Paying attention to the aesthetics of scent only seems unusual in this context because it’s relatively rare. As Schütze insists: the eyes and ears are routinely flattered while the nose is ignored. Supermarkets exploit the power of scent; isn’t it time for artists of all varieties to follow suit?

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Silent Engine
• Schütze and Unstable at Maggs Bros
• The art of scent revisited
• Paul Schütze online
• Perfume: the art of scent

Weekend links 199

Follow the Leader (London, 2011) by Isaac Cordal.

• “Brutalism is the decor of dystopian films, literature and comics, just as gothic is for horror.” Jonathan Meades‘ A-Z of brutalism.

• Vitaly Shevchenko on the urban explorers of the ex-USSR. Related: Photos by Vitaliy Raskalov from the top of the Shanghai Tower.

• Joe Banks reviews the throbbing, hissing, minatory pulses of the Black Mill Tapes 1–4 by Pye Corner Audio.

Walter Benjamin is the only one among the commentators who attempts to pin down the anonymous, evanescent quality of Walser’s characters. They come, he says, “from insanity and nowhere else. They are figures who have left madness behind them, and this is why they are marked by such a consistently heartrending, inhuman superficiality. If we were to attempt to sum up in a single phrase the delightful yet also uncanny element in them, we would have to say: they have all been healed.” Nabokov surely had something similar in mind when he said of the fickle souls who roam Nikolai Gogol’s books that here we have to do with a tribe of harmless madmen, who will not be prevented by anything in the world from plowing their own eccentric furrow.

Le Promeneur Solitaire: WG Sebald on Robert Walser

• Drink The New Wine, an album by Kris Force, Anni Hogan, Jarboe, Zoe Keating and Meredith Yayanos.

• At 50 Watts: Illustrations by Fortuné Méaulle for Alphabet des Insectes by Leon Becker.

• Lawrence Gordon Clark, Master of Ghostly Horror. An interview by John D’Amico.

• Chapel Perilous: Notes From The New York Occult Revival by Don Jolly.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 107 by Ernestas Sadau.

• An Occult History of the Television Set by Geoff Manaugh.

• Was Ist Das? The Krautrock Album Database.

• First dérive of the year by Christina Scholz.

• John Waters’ Youth Manifesto.

• Gardens of Earthly Delights

• Psychedelic Folkloristic

• Water Music I / Here Comes The Flood / Water Music II (1979) by Robert Fripp & Peter Gabriel | After The Flood (1991) by Talk Talk | Flood (1997) by Jocelyn Pook