Tag: Graeme Thomson

Weekend links 831

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Black Hole Accretion Disk Visualization by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman.

• The summer catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn, etc.

• New music: The Sanctity Of Rust by Hollan Holmes; Heavy Water by Magic Tuber Stringband; Sorry I Didn’t Realize by iNFO.

• In another of those foolhardy numbered lists, Alexis Petridis attempts to rank Laurie Anderson’s greatest songs.

“The best of mathematics is a way of thinking,” [Klainerman] said. Progress in the field is made through discoveries rather than inventions, by following its own version of the scientific method. In 1911, for example, Roald Amundsen and four fellow explorers were the first people to reach the South Pole. “The South Pole was there to be discovered,” Klainerman noted, “but the path you take to get there, and the equipment you bring, depends on human inventiveness.” When he and Christodoulou spent six and a half years proving that Minkowski space is stable, they too had to invent the tools to get there. But the stability itself was not their creation. It was a fact to be divined.

A long read by Steve Nadis on Sergiu Klainerman and his conviction that mathematics has an existence that precedes human thought

• At the BFI: Tony Rayns on Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer (1988), a trip into Manila’s gay underworld.

• Read an extract from In Another World: The Four Seasons Of Talk Talk by Graeme Thomson.

• At The Daily Heller: The Serene Surrealism of Guy Billout.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s a Malcolm Le Grice Weekend.

• Mathematics And Electronics (1995) by Gas | True Mathematics (2002) by Ladytron | Music Is Math (2002) by Boards Of Canada

Weekend links 680

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15 Miles into the Earth (1944) by Hendrik Wijdeveld.

• “He realized that there were individuals around him who had never appeared in the great altarpieces and frescoes, individuals who had been marginalized by the cultural ideology of the previous two centuries. And there were hours of the day—transient, yet unequivocal in their lighting—which had never been reproduced, and which were pushed so far from habit and use that they had become scandalous, and therefore repressed.” Pasolini on Caravaggio.

• “Reading Albert Camus and Mikhail Bulgakov by day, by night, crucially, they were listening to Chic, Kraftwerk, Donna Summer, Michael Rother and Grace Jones in the clubs.” Graeme Thomson on the atmosphere and influences that helped create my favourite album by Simple Minds, Empires And Dance. Borges was also a minor influence, apparently, which wasn’t something I knew until this week. I like it when your favourite things join up this way.

• “This being England, a ‘tea shop’ is not a shop that sells tea. That would be a tea merchant. A tea shop serves tea.” Mark Valentine on the perennial connections between rambling and tea-drinking.

Talking about generations as if they really existed and had sway over people is much more respectable and widespread than the belief that events and personalities are governed by the movements of the planets. But is there really much more substance and reality to “generations”? If not “a bunch of bullshit”, the discourse of generations is certainly generative of bullshit: tenuously grounded overviews and opinion pieces, specious analysis and analogies, platitudes and truisms. And yet, like astrology, it is a fun game to play along with. And far more than astrology, it’s a mode of talk that partially constitutes its object: generalizing about a generation actually brings it into semi-existence, shaping how people perceive themselves and how they are perceived by earlier or later generations. What may just be an illusion, a shaky set of alleged affinities, becomes a social fact.

Simon Reynolds analyses the generation game

• More Milton Glaser: PDFs of the Glaser Gazette, a memorial publication in three parts: Vol 1 | Vol 2 | Vol 3

• New music: Tractatus Lyra-Organismus by Lyonel Bauchet, and Grounded Rectangle by Ambidextrous.

• “A digital archive of graphic design related items that are available on the Internet Archives.”

• DJ Food found a handful of psychedelic posters by Nicole Claveloux.

• “Rights to Jorge Luis Borges’s work go to his wife’s nephews.”

• “Is this the earliest known phallic art?”

• Young Generation Dub (1976) by Augustus Pablo | Chile Of The Bass Generation (1990) by Mental Cube | Invisible Generation (1992) by Cabaret Voltaire