Alan Moore – Page 16 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 316

Stasis, the second album by Pye Corner Audio for the Ghost Box label, will be released at the end of August. Design, as always, is by Julian House.

• “In the modern internet world you have what I talk about as the ‘War of the Certain’: people insisting that their absolutist viewpoint, in 140 characters, is exactly the right way to think, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is terrible. If you’ve grown up reading Robert Anton Wilson this is awful. Having all of these certain people with no nuance or doubt, and no understanding of multiple-model agnosticism, is not going to go anywhere good.” Writer John Higgs talking to Ben Graham about RAW, Discordianism and related matters. A related matter: Higgs talks to Alan Moore about virtual-reality mysticism, creating a new counterculture, reinventing magick, and the eternal nature of time.

• Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon is out this month so features and interviews are proliferating. I’ve been avoiding them for the usual spoiler-shunning reasons, but this was worth noting: Refn’s mood-establishing playlist for the production. More Neon Demon: Cliff Martinez talks about working with Refn.

• ” ‘Paint me like one of your French girls” takes on a whole new meaning in Nicole G. Albert’s book Lesbian Decadence: Representations in Art and Literature in Fin-De-Siècle France,” says Rachel Wexelbaum.

The decaying low-baroque tableau of conjugal tenderness, features eaten away by the syphilis of time, played so well, on an anvil of whitewashed cement, alongside a municipal bowling green, that it became the provocation for a pedestrian expedition testing the Brexit boundaries of a timeless mead-hall England, before the fleet of plundering Papist Normans came sailing over the horizon. Just as tabloid gangs of Albanian drug-trafficking white slavers were now reputed to be sneaking ashore on Romney Marshes, at Deal and Camber Sands, on their Rigid Inflatable Boats, kayaks and leaking air mattresses. Could anyone bring themselves actually to cast a vote for Brexit, a commodity that sounds like a cereal bowl of Nordic cattlecake manufactured from wood shavings with an added ingredient to purge the bowels?

Iain Sinclair and company head south in turbulent times

• At Dangerous Minds: a video recording of Psychic TV live in Manchester, 1983 (I’m in the audience but up on the balcony so you won’t see me), and an interview with dub maestro Adrian Sherwood.

• The Columbia Years, 1968–1969: fabled recording sessions by Betty Davis are to receive an official release by Light In The Attic.

• We’re Here Because We’re Here – Jeremy Deller’s silent commemoration of the soldiers of the Somme.

• Inside Las Pozas, Edward James’ Surrealist Garden in the Mexican Jungle.

• The body as amusement park: A history of masturbation by Barry Reay.

• Nicholas Olsberg on the mirage of an ideal metropolis.

• The Strange World of…David Toop

• Static Electrician (1994) by ELpH | Static (1998) by Redshift | Static (2001) by Monolake

Weekend links 313

The Sullen Son (1921) by Rose O’Neill from her Sweet Monsters series (also here).

• 10 hours of Popcorn (1972) by Hot Butter. Related (and linked here before) 79 different versions of Gershon Kingsley’s original. If that’s not enough, there’s at least 100 more out there.

• Mixes of the week: Touristica Mystica Sigillistica by Gregg Hermetech, FACT Mix 554 by The Body, and Secret Thirteen Mix 187 by Dalhous.

• Another electronic cover version: Trans Europe Express by Cobby & Mallinder.

In the 1950s people like Pierre Schaeffer and John Cage were saying: “But there are all these sounds in the world, and if you listen to them carefully enough you will hear the music that they speak.” This immediately opened up a new world; it’s enriching once you’ve educated your ear to that, because when you’re annoyed by the sound of the street you can make music out of it. You can make music out of almost everything!

Eliane Radigue discussing her career with Paul Schütze

• Patricia Highsmith’s Snail Obsession and Two Weird Tales of Monstrous Mollusks.

• Youth and Alex Patterson remember the making of Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb.

• Strange Flowers pursues Sheila Legge and other Phantoms of Surrealism.

• Revealed: Cambodia’s vast medieval cities hidden beneath the jungle.

• Alan Moore describes the cover of epic novel Jerusalem.

• Ashgabat: the city of the living and the city of the dead.

• In praise of the tram by Christian Wolmar.

• Taxidermists at DC’s

• Brian The Snail (1982) by Pigbag | Slow Loris Versus Poison Snail (1996) by David Toop & Jon Hassell | Popcorn (2000) by Gershon Kingsley

Weekend links 312

The Shadow by Kenton Nelson.

• The week in Coil: An interview by Derek de Koff, plus an extract from the new edition of England’s Hidden Reverse by David Keenan. Opening later this month at Ludwig, Berlin, is Chaostrophy, a Coil-related exhibition/celebration.

• Strange Flowers remembers the incomparable Marchesa Casati, a woman who happens to feature in the book I’ve been designing and illustrating for the past few weeks. (More about that later.)

• “It wasn’t about how we could meet the demands of the book, but rather how the book meets us.” Ben Wheatley (again) talking to Jamie Sherry about bringing High-Rise to the screen.

• The latest release from Hawthonn is Sea-Spiral Spirit. The album has two accompanying videos: Pan Laws and Last Chimes From A Dormant Moon.

• Alan Moore celebrates Chris Petit’s The Psalm Killer—a nerve-shredding Irish noir.

• Not a mix but a reading guide: The Brit Horror Mixtape collated by Mark West.

• More Penda’s Fen: Graham Fuller on the Romantic tradition in British film.

• Previews of Tooth by Raime, “a steadfast concoction of brooding dystopia”.

• “How big an issue is the nausea problem for Virtual Reality products?”

• FACT chooses 16 of the best songs powered by Sly and Robbie.

• Geeta Dayal on the pioneering computer music of Bell Labs.

• Mix of the week: Finders Keepers’ Space Rock Special.

• Paul Schütze: The True Art of Fine Fragrance

• The Surrealist Legacy of Claude Lalanne

• Les illustrateurs de Baudelaire

• RIP publisher Peter Owen

• Perfumed Garden Of Gulliver Smith (1967) by John’s Children | Perfumed Metal (1981) by Chrome | Fragrance (Ode To Perfume) (1981) by Holger Czukay

Weekend links 305

Threads of Fate—The Weird Sisters from Macbeth (2013) by Fiona Marchbank.

• The week in books: Claire Cameron on the difference between US & UK cover designs | Jason Diamond asks “Why do cats love bookstores?” | Alan Moore’s cover art for his forthcoming novel, Jerusalem, has been revealed | Brian Phillips on the typefaces used by New English Library for their Dune covers in the 1970s.

• On writing: Poetry and horror “share a universally human quest toward intimacy” says Evan J. Peterson | “The best work neither shows nor tells: it says by being, not by saying,” says M. John Harrison.

• At the BFI this week: Where to begin with Jerzy Skolimowski, and 10 overlooked British horror films of the 1970s. Both lists include Skolimowski’s excellent The Shout (1978).

Cultures do not, and cannot, work through notions of ‘ownership’. The history of culture is the history of cultural appropriation—of cultures borrowing, stealing, changing, transforming.

Nor does preventing whites from wearing locks or practicing yoga challenge racism in any meaningful way. What the campaigns against cultural appropriation reveal is the disintegration of the meaning of ‘anti-racism’. Once it meant to struggle for equal treatment for all. Now it means defining the correct etiquette for a plural society. The campaign against cultural appropriation is about policing manners rather than transforming society.

Kenan Malik on ill-considered complaints against “cultural appropriation”. Malik isn’t the first to note the intersection of such complaints with those of white supremacists who also want cultural purity and segregation

• OUT, DEMONS, OUT!: The 1967 Exorcism of the Pentagon and the Birth of Yippie! An oral history by Larry “Ratso” Sloman, Michael Simmons and Jay Babcock.

• The long-overdue republication of Moebius’s work in English will begin with a new edition of The World of Edena (1985).

• More from radioactive Russia: Nadav Kander’s photographs of Soviet nuclear test sites.

• Comic artist and illustrator Kris Guidio in conversation with Jonathan Barlow.

• Francesca Gavin meets Tadanori Yokoo, “the Grandmaster of Pop-Psych Art”.

• “LSD’s impact on the brain revealed in groundbreaking images”

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 182 by Paul Jebanasam.

• A trailer for Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon.

• Tony Conrad: 1940–2016 by Geeta Dayal.

• Brian Eno’s favourite records

• Neonlicht (1994) by Mitja VS (with Enzo Fabiani Quartet) | On Demon Wings (2000) by Bohren & Der Club of Gore | Shout At The Devil (2002) by Jah Wobble & Temple Of Sound

Weekend links 291

Femme avec des fleurs (1912) by Romaine Brooks.

• This week’s anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo murders was noted by some of those who defended the magazine last year. “I don’t write about Charlie Hebdo in France,” said Robert McLiam Wilson, “they have plenty of people who can do that. But I’ll do almost anything I’m asked to do in the anglosphere. Why? Well, two reasons. Because none of the other Charlie people bothers to do it. And because, really, that’s where all the bullshit lives.” A year on, and the bullshit-mongers seem to have fallen silent, what with knee-jerk outrage being a short-lived affair, and the Bataclan massacre having demolished one of the main criticisms, namely that the magazine wouldn’t have been attacked if the artists and writers had shown some respect. “[Charlie Hebdo‘s] real crime is not racism but its challenge to what has become an unbreakable commandment for many contemporary liberals: ‘Thou shalt not cause offence’,” says Kenan Malik. At Literary Hub Adam Gopnik explored the same issue in a foreword for Stéphane Charbonnier’s Open Letter.

• “Immersion in the past is no escape from the present, but it supplies a constant corrective to the narrative spit out daily by media, advertising, politics, and all those other forces that attempt to mould our thinking like jelly in a pan.” Luc Sante (again) talking to Simone Wolff about his books, Low Life and The Other Paris.

• “…throwing a lot of money behind vintage equipment? Well, that’s just a millionaire’s game. Dave Grohl can do that, but David Bowie doesn’t care about that. Just stick a microphone in front of him and he’s really happy.” Tony Visconti talking to Allyson McCabe about the music business and producing Bowie.

• “Nico Hogg’s photography captures the transformation of urban London,” says George Kafka who talks to Nico about a collection of his work, Sign & Signifiers, which I designed late last year.

• At Strange Flowers: James Conway talks to Cassandra Langer about her recent biography of artist Romaine Brooks (1874–1970).

• At Dangerous Minds: Godzilla, girls and guns, the science-fiction art of Noriyoshi Ohrai. There’s more at Pinterest.

• Mixes of the week: XLR8R Podcast 420 by Andrey Pushkarev, and Secret Thirteen Mix 172 by Julien Bayle.

• Alan Moore’s magnum opus, Jerusalem, will be published later this year. Gosh Comics has a teaser.

• New York Public Library makes 180,000 high-res images available online.

• Prints of darkness: macabre vintage posters

• Scarfolk Television is coming

• Godzilla (1977) by Blue Öyster Cult | Giant Robot / Machines in the Modern City / Godzilla (1992) by Praxis | Free-Bass (Godzillatron Cush) (1995) by Axiom Funk