George Orwell – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 141

From the Beautiful Faces series (2012) by Tran Nguyen.

• “What possessed a generation of young European artists, and a few Americans, to suddenly suppress recognizable imagery in pictures and sculptures? Unthinkable at one moment, the strategy became practically compulsory in the next.” Peter Schjeldahl on the birth of abstraction.

• “A profanely mystical work of hyperpurple theory-porn, ObliviOnanisM is an auto-erotic intellectual fiction envisioning the phantastical unending odyssey of a young woman, Gemma, whom you will never know.”

• Psychedelia—An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way of Life, a 520-page history of psychedelic culture by Patrick Lundborg. Related: Ken Kesey talks about the meaning of the Acid Tests.

[Hodges] made a convincing case that Turing’s teenage crush on a fellow schoolboy, Christopher Morcom, was an important catalyst for his lifelong preoccupation with the relationship between brain and mind. Morcom’s unexpected death at the age of eighteen was a shattering blow to Turing, who began to reflect on whether his friend’s consciousness might survive after death or whether it was simply a result of complex material processes and expired when life did. Hodges also linked the famous “Turing Test”, in which a computer attempts to pass as an intelligent human being, to Turing’s own dilemma as a gay man in a homophobic world. (Turing called his test the “imitation game”, and Hodges observed, “like any homosexual man, he was living an imitation game, not in the sense of conscious play acting, but by being accepted as a person that he was not”.)

Michael Saler reviews three books about computing pioneer Alan Turing

• Paul Gallagher at Dangerous Minds looks at Flowers, Lindsay Kemp’s theatrical staging of Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers.

• David Pearson designed a new edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for Penguin.

• Quadtone – Lumisonic Rotera: Mariska de Groot plays a light-to-sound instrument.

• “Cash Mobs” Go Global—Battle Spreads Against Chain Store Dominance.

• Cities and the Soul: a feast of Italo Calvino links at MetaFilter.

• 25 dessins d’un dormeur, Jean Cocteau, 1929.

• Haunted Decor: a Flickr group.

• Computer In Love (1966) by Perrey & Kingsley | Computer Love (1981) by Kraftwerk | Computer Love (1992) by The Balanescu Quartet

William Burroughs interviews

With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker (1982) by Victor Bockris. Design by Neville Brody.

If it’s interviews you want, some of the most entertaining are in Victor Bockris’s collection of conversations between El Hombre Invisible and the various New York notables ferried round to sit at Burroughs’ table in his Bowery Bunker. The British edition published by Vermilion was always preferrable for its Neville Brody cover design beside which the US original looks very dull indeed. The encyclopedic Burroughs site Reality Studio has copious lists of earlier Burroughs interviews. They also note the occasions when he put on his journalist hat and went out to interview someone equally famous, usually at the behest of a music magazine. A couple of those pieces are online thanks to the diligence of various fans.

Diamond Dogs (1974), a blend of Lou Reed, George Orwell and William Burroughs.

One such is the 1974 interview with David Bowie for Rolling Stone in which Bowie discusses Burroughs as an influence while Burroughs informs the singer that the heroes of his latest novel, The Wild Boys, favour the Bowie knife as a weapon:

Bowie: Nova Express really reminded me of Ziggy Stardust, which I am going to be putting into a theatrical performance. Forty scenes are in it and it would be nice if the characters and actors learned the scenes and we all shuffled them around in a hat the afternoon of the performance and just performed it as the scenes come out. I got this all from you Bill… so it would change every night.

A year later Burroughs got together with Jimmy Page for Crawdaddy magazine where the discussion circles around some of the same subjects, notably the writer’s obsession with sound as a weapon. There’s also this comment from Burroughs which is the kind of thing that always gets my neurons firing:

Antony Balch and I collaborated on a film called Cut-Ups, in which the film was cut into segments and rearranged at random. Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell saw a screening of the film not long before they made Performance.

Roeg later directed Bowie, of course, and is one of the dinner guests in With William Burroughs, while Jimmy Page and Donald Cammell both appear in Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising. The connections go round and round… Read the whole piece in a post I made a few years ago at the late, lamented Arthur magazine site.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

The art of Ron Rodgers

Century of Progress.

While the web has given many artists a visibility they wouldn’t have had in the past, too many artists’ sites are blighted by the dreaded “Artist’s statement” in which people who express themselves visually are forced to try and articulate for the paying customers what it is they’re doing with all this art stuff. Nowhere will you find anyone saying “I don’t know what I’m doing” or “I do this because I’m compelled to but don’t know why” or even “I do this to make a living”. All too often what you get is a rifle through the favourite jargon phrases of the social sciences where the polysyllabic words seem important but are as worn out and redundant as any of the examples George Orwell complained about sixty years ago in ‘Politics and the English Language‘.

All of which is a very long-winded and polemical way of saying I loved Ron Rodgers’ artist’s statement:

“That’s what his stare has been saying to me all this time:
‘At least I galloped – when did you?'”
– Peter Shaffer, from “Equus”

Here’s hoping more artists follow his example. There’s more of his art at the Glass Garage Gallery. Via Monsieur Thombeau who has a knack for finding good things.

Phoenix.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Geoffrey Haberman’s brass insects
• The art of Arnaldo Pomodoro
• The art of Sergei Aparin
• Sculptural collage: Eduardo Paolozzi
• The art of Igor Mitoraj

Weekend links 19

Peafile (2006) by Shawn Smith; plywood, ink, acrylic paint.

• Surreal Friends, an exhibition of work by Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK. Related: The surrealist muses who roared, Leonora Carrington and other women Surrealists profiled.

• Landscapes From a Dream: How the Art of David Pelham Captured the Essence of JG Ballard’s Early Fiction. A graphic design essay at Ballardian.

• “(T)he significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe — at any rate for short periods — that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue. (…) It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism — that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.” The Sporting Spirit by George Orwell, December 1945.

• One of my cult pop albums from the 1980s, A Secret Wish by Propaganda, is reissued in a 25th anniversary edition next month. I no doubt have most of the bonus tracks already but the prospect is still irresistible.

• Tangier Cut-Up, an uncollected piece by William Burroughs from Esquire, September 1964.

• Ghostwriter — The Continuing Adventures Of The Strange Sound Association.

• Faust And Last And Always: Germany’s Most Radical Rock Group Talk.

• Hollingsville at Resonance FM. Related: Graphic Design on the Radio.

• iPad Publishing No Savior for Small Press, LGBT Comics Creators.

• The Largest Oil Spills in History, 1901 to Present.

• 1948 Buick Streamliner by Norman E Timbs.

• Neville Brody’s work on display in Tokyo.

• Dr Mabuse (1984) by Propaganda; Vladek Sheybal, cowled monks, Fritz Lang references and Anton Corbijn directing.