Can (group) – Page 10 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 75

Eternal Pain (1913) by Paul Dardé. (And also here)

Rain Taxi caused a stir this week with its savaging of Hamlet’s Father by science fiction writer Orson Scott Card. The book is another of Card’s blatherings about the hell of being homosexual dressed in garments stolen from the unfortunate William Shakespeare. Rain Taxi made the obvious point about many of Shakespeare’s sonnets being homoerotic. For my part I was more appalled by the quoted extract which reduced one of the greatest plays in the language to that lifeless, cardboard-character-speak which is endemic in bad genre writing. News of the travesty quickly spread to gay news blogs, The Outer Alliance and elsewhere, ensuring that what’s left of Card’s reputation continues to spiral down a Mel Gibson-shaped black hole.

• “Sounds only like itself, like no one before or after.” Julian Cope on Tago Mago by Can which will be reissued in a new edition in November. Nice to see the return of the original sleeve design, something I saw once in a record shop then didn’t see again for years. For a long time I thought I’d imagined it. Related: two German art exhibitions inspired by the group.

• The Responsive Eye (1965), a catalogue for the MoMA exhibition that launched Op Art. Also at Ubuweb: La femme 100 têtes, a film by Eric Duvivier based on the collage work by Max Ernst.

• More apocalyptic art: William Feaver on John Martin whose exhibition will be opening at Tate Britain later this month. There’s a trailer here.

• Borges and I, an essay by Nandini Ramachandran. Related: Buenos Aires: Las Calles de Borges, a short film by Ian Ruschel.

• “Who was JG Ballard? Don’t ask his first biographer,” says Robert McCrum.

• Biologically-inspired fabric and material design by Neri Oxman.

• Cross-pollinating subgenres: “Steampunk ambient” at Disquiet.

• In the Shadow of Saturn, a photo by the Cassini spacecraft.

• The art and fashion designs of Alia Penner.

• Fleet of hybrid airships to conquer Arctic.

• RIP Jordan Belson, filmmaker.

• Ten years of Ladytron whose new album is released on the 12th of September: Playgirl (2001), Seventeen (2002), Destroy Everything You Touch (2005), Sugar (2005), Ghosts (2008), Ace Of Hz (2011).

Weekend links 58

Oya by Alberto del Pozo (1945–1992). Also known as Yansa, Oya is Changó’s third wife. She is the goddess of the winds and of lightning and is mistress of the cemetery gates. Passionate and brave she fights by her husband’s side if needed. Her favorite offerings are papaya, eggplant and geraniums. From Santeria at BibliOdyssey.

Austin Osman Spare is a good example of the dictum that quality will out in the end, no matter how long it remains buried. Overlooked by the art establishment after he retreated into his private mythologies, a substantial portion of his output was equally ignored by occultists who wanted to preserve him as a weird and scary working-class magus. One group dismissed his deeply-felt spiritual interests in a manner they wouldn’t dare employ if he’d been a follower of Santeria, say (or even a devout Christian), while the other group seemed to regard his superb portraits as too mundane to be worthy of attention. Now that Phil Baker’s Spare biography has been published by Strange Attractor we might have reached the end of such short-sighted appraisals and can finally see a more rounded picture of the man and his work:

[Kenneth] Grant preserved and magnified Spare’s own tendency to confabulation, giving him the starring role in stories further influenced by Grant’s own reading of visionary and pulp writers such as Arthur Machen, HP Lovecraft, and Fu Manchu creator Sax Rohmer. Grant’s Spare seems to inhabit a parallel London; a city with an alchemist in Islington, a mysterious Chinese dream-control cult in Stockwell, and a small shop with a labyrinthine basement complex, its grottoes decorated by Spare, where a magical lodge holds meetings. This shop – then a furrier, now an Islamic bookshop, near Baker Street – really existed, and part of the fascination of Grant’s version of Spare’s London is its misty overlap with reality.

Austin Osman Spare: Cockney visionary by Phil Baker.

• Austin Osman Spare: The man art history left behind | A Flickr set: Austin Osman Spare at the Cuming Museum | HV Morton meets Austin Spare (1927).

• More quality rising from obscurity: Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End. Skolimowski’s drama is one of unpleasant characters behaving badly towards each other. Anglo-American cinema featured a great deal of this in the 1970s when filmmakers disregarded the sympathies of their audience in a manner that would be difficult today. John Patterson looks at another example which is also given a re-release this month, the “feral, minatory and menacing masterwork” that is Taxi Driver.

Echú Eleguá by Alberto del Pozo. Among the most ancient of the orishas Echú Eleguá is the messenger of the gods, who forges roads, protects the house, and is heaven’s gate-keeper. In any ceremony he is invoked first. He owns all cowrie shells and is the god of luck. A prankster, Echú Eleguá frequently has a monkey and a black rooster by his side. Like a mischievous boy he enjoys gossip and must be pampered with offerings of toys, fruit, and candy.

• Minutes, a compilation on the LTM label from 1987: William Burroughs, Jean Cocteau, Tuxedomoon, Jacques Derrida, The Monochrome Set, and er…Richard Jobson. Thomi Wroblewski designed covers for a number of Burroughs titles in the 1980s, and he also provided the cover art for this release.

• Mikel Marton Photography: a Tumblr of erotic photography and self-portraits.

• From Death Factory To Norfolk Fens: Chris & Cosey interviewed.

• NASA announces results of epic space-time experiment.

• Oritsunagumono by Takayuki Hori: origami x-rays.

• Plexus magazine at 50 Watts.

• Mother Sky (1970) by Can | Late For The Sky (1974) by Jackson Browne.

Weekend links: fifth anniversary edition

The Figure 5 in Gold (1928) by Charles Demuth.

It’s a little surprising to find I’ve been doing this for five whole years yet here we are. Having seen a number of blogs call it quits at the five-year point I should note that I don’t feel quite that exhausted although maintaining a discipline of daily posting can be a chore at times, especially when you’re pressured by work. On the whole the advantages continue to outweigh the disadvantages. Some of the discoveries here have fed back into things I’ve been working on or opened avenues for future exploration. Researching something for an audience (however slight that audience or the resulting post) encourages you to look more deeply into a given subject; sometimes you learn more as a result and occasionally make surprising discoveries. Obsessions are teased out which might otherwise have lain dormant. Yes, it’s an extra bout of work but I’ve spent much of my life saying to people “if you like that, you may like this”, and that’s all many of these posts are doing.

This year promises to be an interesting one so watch this space. And, as always, thanks for reading!

John x

On to the links…

• Cathedral Scan translates the architectural plans of Gothic cathedrals into open-ended musical scores via custom software. There’s more at Blake Carrington‘s website.

• Forty-three William Burroughs recordings (tape experiments and readings) at the Ubuweb archives.

• The opening scene of Deadlock (1970), an obscure German film with a theme by the mighty Can.

• Strange Lands: A Field-Guide to the Celtic Otherworld, a new book by Andrew L Paciorek.

• The enduring nature of Frankenstein, currently on stage at the National Theatre, London.

Owl One (2004) by Yuri Shimojo.

• ¡Activista! by Sonny Smith: Drag Queens, Borders, Rivers, Death and Transformation.

• Estonian sculptor Mati Karmin makes furniture out of Russian anti-submarine mines.

• Alan Moore’s contribution to the Save Our Libraries campaign.

• Innsmouth Free Press is raising funds for their running costs.

• A history of queer street art (Facebook link, unfortunately).

• Illuminated book design for Heston’s Fantastical Feasts.

• Physica Sacra, an engraving set at Flickr.

• Egypt (1985) by Tuxedomoon | Egyptian Basses (1998) by Coil | Soleil D’Egypte (2001) by Natacha Atlas.