David Cronenberg – Page 4

The Nest, a film by David Cronenberg

This isn’t exactly news when it’s been posted on numerous sites over the past few days, but for the benefit of those who haven’t yet seen it, The Nest is a short film by David Cronenberg made for the exhibition of the director’s work that’s currently running at the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam. Nine minutes, a single shot and no overt horror but it’s still an insidious piece. It’s only on YouTube for as long as the exhibition is in progress so watch it while you can.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Long Live the New Flesh: The Films of David Cronenberg

Weekend links 215

Julian House artwork for Other Voices, a new singles series on the Ghost Box label. Other Voices 01 is a collaboration between Sean O’Hagan of the High Llamas and Jon Brooks of The Advisory Circle.

Last week I linked to a copy Zadie Smith’s new introduction for Crash by JG Ballard. That piece could only be read in full by NYRB subscribers but this week the Guardian has the full text:

I was in college when the Daily Mail went to war with [David Cronenberg’s] movie, and found myself unpleasantly aligned with the censors, my own faux-feminism existing in a Venn diagram with their righteous indignation. We were both wrong: Crash is not about humiliating the disabled or debasing women, and in fact the Mail‘s campaign is a chilling lesson in how a superficial manipulation of liberal identity politics can be used to silence a genuinely protesting voice, one that is trying to speak for us all.

Related: Thomas Jones in 2008 reviewing Miracles of Life:

Despite all the bodily fluids spurted and smeared onto wrecked dashboards, the problem isn’t that it’s too pornographic but that it isn’t pornographic enough: the novel is too conscious of the deeper meaning of the sex and violence for the sex and violence to work as elements in themselves.

The fetishisation of Ballard’s novel (and Ballard’s fetishes) show no signs of abating: B-Movie (Ballardian Video Neuronica), is a short film by John Foxx, Karborn and Jonathan Barnbrook.

• Last Thursday I was watching a live performance by Pye Corner Audio and Not Waving, so it’s good to find this mix by the pair surfacing in the same week. Kudos to the latter for choosing something by Chrome. More mixes: FACT mix 468 by Throwing Snow, and Secret Thirteen mix 120 by Drøp.

• Ellen Datlow’s horror anthology, Lovecraft’s Monsters, continues to gather plaudits. Among recent reviews there’s Matt Barone at Complex who included the book in his Year’s Best Genre Fiction Books (So Far) list, and also praised my illustrations.

In recent years, many of the people on book covers have been women without faces. So prevalent is this visual cliché that the publishing industry has cycled through at least two well-documented iterations. The first, the Headless Woman, features some poor thing cut off above the neck, like the swimsuit-clad beachgoer on Alice Munro’s story collection “The View from Castle Rock.” The website Goodreads’s Headless Women page has 416 entries. Last year, the Headless Woman was supplanted by the Sexy Back, in which a woman is shown from behind, often gazing out over a vista.

Eugenia Williamson on the packaging of books for a female readership.

• The latest Taschen volume from Dian Hanson, editor of (among other titles) The Big Penis Book, is My Buddy. World War II Laid Bare, featuring photos from the archives of Michael Stokes. World of Wonder has pages from the interior.

• I Have Walked This Body by Jenny Hval and Susanna is a track from a forthcoming album inspired by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon. It sounds fantastic so I’m looking forward to hearing more.

• If you have a spare half-million dollars, and don’t mind the possibility of possession by murderous supernatural entities, the Palmer house from Twin Peaks is for sale.

• Read an extract from Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll by Peter Bebergal.

• The Stars and Their Courses: over six hours of the Nevada night sky in 4k definition.

• Lee Siegel on the fraught friendship of TS Eliot and Groucho Marx.

• Harmony Korine talked to Kenneth Anger for Interview Magazine.

• New Scientist: How magic mushrooms induce a dream-like state.

• 3D-print your own Marcel Duchamp chess set.

• Scott O)))

• Crash (1980) by Tuxedomoon | Burning Car (1980) by John Foxx | A Crash At Every Speed (1994) by Disco Inferno | Burning Car (Dubterror Remix, 2008) by John Foxx

Weekend links 213

No Tears for the Creatures of the Night (2005) by Will Munro.

• Steve Barker’s On The Wire show on BBC Radio Lancashire is one of the longest-running music shows on British radio but it’s not broadcast in London so you seldom hear it mentioned at all. (It’s also the only radio show I’ve appeared on, oddly enough.) Some of Barker’s shows, which predominantly feature dub and reggae artists, can now be heard at Mixcloud.

• “As protagonist after protagonist is undone by temptation and lust, one can’t help but divine a sinister double entendre in the book’s title – something nocturnal and obscene.” James Lovegrove on the reissue of Robert Aickman’s 1964 collection of “strange stories”, Dark Entries.

• Coil vs. Kenny Loggins sounds like no contest, and so it proved in 1988 at the Mike Tyson/Michael Spinks fight. There’s another surprising connection between Tyson and Industrial culture with the poster that Neville Brody designed for the boxer’s Tokyo bout.

• Ventriloquism: Unheimlich manoeuvres: Sarah Angliss (who performs as Spacedog) on the history of ventriloquist dummies. With a bonus appearance from the great Ray Alan and Lord Charles. Related: the Vent Haven Museum.

• I’ve been wanting to read Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu for years but always hesitate over which translation to choose. As Leland de la Durantaye shows, the arguments about translating Proust into English are still unresolved.

• Music For A Good Home 3: a collection of 31 rare or unique tracks by a variety of artists including Belbury Poly, Pye Corner Audio, and Grumbling Fur. All proceeds go to Shelter.

• David Cronenberg – The Exhibition is running throughout the summer at the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam showing props and other materials from the director’s films.

• “’I’m in pictures,’ John Wayne explained when Nabokov cordially inquired about his line of work.” Blake Bailey on Vladimir Nabokov’s unpublished Lolita screenplay notes.

• Original artwork for the Linweave Tarot (1967) at Sweet Jane’s Pop Boutique. As noted before, the full set of cards is probably the grooviest ever created.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 118 by Ensemble Economique, and a Wyrd Daze Solstice mix from The Ephemeral Man.

• At One With Chaos & Abandonment: The Irrepressibles’ Jamie McDermott talks to Joseph Burnett about his music.

• From the Zodiacal Light, a new track from Earth with vocals by Rabia Shaheen Qazi.

• The Ultimate Chinatown Filming Location Map of Los Angeles.

• Tuxedomoon at Pinterest.

• Dark Companion (1980) by Tuxedomoon | Dark River (1990) by Coil | Dark Turn Of Mind (2011) by Gillian Welch

Decoder, a film by Jürgen Muschalek

The Burroughs Centenary approaches, and this month sees the 30th anniversary of this Burroughs-related item. Decoder is a low-budget feature film from 1984 written by Klaus Maeck, and directed by Jürgen Muschalek (aka Muscha). Despite the constraints of budget and casting—many of the actors are amateurs—Decoder is truer to the techno-anarchist strand of Burroughs’ fiction than anything attempted before or since, and it’s arguably truer to the spirit of his works as a whole than David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.

Decoder was shot in Hamburg in the early 1980s although the city is never properly identified in order to maximise the film’s near-future qualities. The narrative concerns attempts by FM (played by FM Einheit from Einstürzende Neubauten) to combat the insidious effects of muzak in burger restaurants using tapes created with his home-made electronics. William Burroughs makes a couple of brief appearances as the “Old Man” with a shop full of electronic components. Among the rest of the cast there’s Christiane Felscherinow, dividing her time between peep-show sex-work and languishing in a room filled with her pet frogs; and Genesis P-Orridge in his Psychic TV gear as the head of an underground pirate cult who encourage FM to launch an offensive against the muzak signals. Original music is provided by Dave Ball (from Soft Cell) and FM Einheit. The complete score is very good, featuring additional tracks by Soft Cell, Einstürzende Neubauten and Matt Johnson. Watched today, the narrative seems very much a product of its time, and somewhat outmoded. In 1984 home computing was increasingly prevalent, and cheap sound-sampling was just around the corner; Decoder is the last hurrah of an analogue struggle against the agents of the Control Virus.

It’s a shame Jürgen Muschalek didn’t get to make anything else when he was obviously trying for some kind of cross between Burroughs’s The Electronic Revolution (1970) and Godard’s Alphaville (1965). Low-budget films often suffer visually but this one makes impressive use of vivid lighting and plenty of shadow which helps alleviate some of the weaknesses elsewhere. David Cronenberg has often acknowledged the influence of avant-garde types such as Burroughs and Warhol but his own films tend to be very conservative in their presentation. Muschalek at least tries to parallel some of Burroughs’ fragmented narrative techniques with an abrupt and disjunctive editing style. The film as a whole is much more in tune with the early Industrial Culture ethos than Peter Care’s noir pastiche, Johnny YesNo, but suffered from being more read about than seen in the 1980s. A few copies can be found online. In 2010 it finally appeared on DVD with extra material and a soundtrack disc.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

Weekend links 195

Untitled painting (c. 1920–1933) by Ethel le Rossignol depicting “the Sphere of the Spirit”. An exhibition of Ethel le Rossignol’s channelled paintings takes place at the Horse Hospital, London, next month.

• “It’s always disconcerting to discover a favourite writer was kind of a jerk. How does this realization effect our understanding of Walter Benjamin’s work?” asks Morgan Meis.

• Mixes of the week: Georges Vert (aka Jon Brooks) presents The Pan-Europa Mix. Mr Brooks also unveiled another seasonal mix which he calls Winter Velvet.

• Knopheria by Chrome Hoof ft. Shingai Shoniwa. A video from the band’s latest album.

Without sci-fi trappings of any kind, The Metamorphosis forces us to think in terms of analogy, of reflexive interpretation, though it is revealing that none of the characters in the story, including Gregor, ever does think that way. There is no meditation on a family secret or sin that might have induced such a monstrous reprisal by God or the Fates, no search for meaning even on the most basic existential plane. The bizarre event is dealt with in a perfunctory, petty, materialistic way, and it arouses the narrowest range of emotional response imaginable, almost immediately assuming the tone of an unfortunate natural family occurrence with which one must reluctantly contend.

David Cronenberg on Franz Kafka’s story.

• “I was very much into now-ism.” Laraaji talks to Bobby Barry about his music.

• The Edge Question for 2014: “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?”

• Storybook Apocalypse: Beasts, Comets, and Other Signs of the End Times.

• Return of the wunderkammer: Philip Hoare on cabinets of curiosities.

• Birditis: Ian Penman on the “full catastrophe” of Charlie Parker.

• Rick Poynor on The Compulsively Visual World of Pinterest.

• RIP psychedelic poster artist Gary Grimshaw.

• At PingMag: The automaton clocks of Tokyo.

• Dust & Grooves: Vinyl music culture.

• Wunderkammern at Pinterest.

• Ligeti: String Quartet No. 1 “Metamorphoses nocturnes” (recorded 1978) The Arditti Quartet | Thru Metamorphic Rocks (1979) by Tangerine Dream | Metamorphosis (2012) by Demdike Stare