Weekend links 70

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Faustine (1928) by Harry Clarke.

• This week’s Harry Clarke fix: 50 Watts reposts the Faust illustrations while Golden Age Comic Book Stories has the illustrated Swinburne.

What Goes Steam in the Night is an evening with contributors to The Steampunk Bible hosted in London by The Last Tuesday Society on September 6th:

Co-author S. J. Chambers invites you to the official U.K. celebration of her book The Steampunk Bible (Abrams Image). Part lecture, part signing, and part entertainment, S. J. will be accompanied by contributors Jema Hewitt (author of Steampunk Emporium ) and Sydney Padua (Lovelace & Babbage) for a discussion of the movement, a special performance by Victorian monster hunter, Major Jack Union, and inevitable hi-jinks and shenanigans to later be announced.

• RIP Conrad Schnitzler, an incredibly prolific electronic musician, and founder member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster/Cluster.

Golden Pavilion Records reissues fully-licensed late 60’s and 70’s psychedelic, progressive, acid-folk & art-rock music.

Dressing the Air is “an exclusive consulting and online resource for the creative industries”.

Luke Haines explains how to cook rabbit stew whilst listening to Hawkwind.

Wood pyrography by Ernst Haeckel from his home, the Villa Medusa.

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Satia Te Sanguine (1928) by Harry Clarke.

The truth is, the best novels will always defy category. Is Great Expectations a mystery or The Brothers Karamazov a whodunnit or The Scarlet Letter science fiction? Does Kafka’s Metamorphosis belong to the genre of fantasy? In reality men don’t turn into giant insects. And it’s funny. Does that mean it’s a comic novel? […] At a time when reading is in trouble, those readers left should define themselves less rigidly.

Howard Jacobson: The best fiction doesn’t need a label.

Pace the redoubtable Jacobson, Alan Jacobs believes We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading.

How Ken Kesey’s LSD-fuelled bus trip created the psychedelic 60s.

Salvador Dalí creates something for Playboy magazine in 1973.

JG Ballard: Relics of a red-hot mind.

Electric Garden (1978) by Conrad Schnitzler | Auf Dem Schwarzen Kanal (1980) by Conrad Schnitzler.

Weekend links 66

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A design by Emma Kunz (1892–1963).

• Following the news this week it’s worth reminding people of a great post put together by Adam Curtis back in January, Rupert Murdoch—A portrait of Satan. One detail there concerns the death of chat show host Russell Harty in 1988. This week the London Review of Books posted an extract from Alan Bennett’s diaries referring to the Harty episode where he notes how the tabloid practice of getting private phone numbers from the police was common and widespread, not simply the actions of a single newspaper. For more about the deathbed hounding of Russell Harty (and Bennett’s loathing of Murdoch) see Writing Home. Related: Dennis Potter shortly before his death discussing his desire to kill Rupert Murdoch.

• Don’t get mad, get even: Hakim Bey’s Black Djinn Curse: “How to invoke a terrible curse on a malign institution.” See also: Black magic as revolutionary action.

Village Voice talks to Linda Manz about her experience as a young actor in Days of Heaven, The Wanderers and Out of the Blue.

Truth Wins Out infiltrates the “ex-gay” clinic run by Michelle Bachmann’s husband.

Free Situationist booklets by Larry Law. Related: films by Guy Debord at Ubuweb.

• Have tea with Doctor Dee in Mortlake, London, next Wednesday.

Publisher Peter Owen: Sixty years of innovation.

Wilhelm Reich: the man who invented free love.

A conversation with Brian Eno by Ben Sisario.

The mysterious minaret of Jam, Afghanistan.

Stereolab cover designs at Hardformat.

Orgone Accumulator (1973) by Hawkwind | Cloudbusting (1985) by Kate Bush | Orgasmatron (1986) by Motörhead | Orgasmatron (1993) by Sandoz | Orgone Donor (2004) by Deathprod.

Weekend links 52

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Three Seekers (2009) by Kelly Louise Judd.

Kevin Sessums talked to Elizabeth Taylor in 1997 about Tennessee Williams, her AIDS activism and related matters. Other related matters: Catholics lead the way on same-sex marriage and Mahatma Gandhi was in love with a German body-builder named Hermann.

• Cray porn (the computer, that is) at Barnbrook Design as the CD package for Interplay by John Foxx and The Maths is unveiled.

Michael Rother and Friends Play the Music Of Neu! A stream of an hour-long concert from August 2010.

One of the tragedies of drug prohibition is that we have never developed a culture in which young people can learn how to use powerful drugs properly from older, wiser and more experienced psychonauts. I count myself lucky to have encountered such good teachers to guide me with such drugs as LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA and mescaline.

Dr Susan Blackmore on using LSD.

Another Dispatch in a World of Multiple Veils, a new release by Arkhonia.

Micromachina by Scott Bain “examines what makes the insect world tick”.

Down with art!: the age of manifestos. Related: The Manifesto Manifesto.

• John Patterson: “We’re all living in the future as seen by Philip K Dick.”

Music To Play In The Dark: A Wake For Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson.

Albert Einstein, Radical: A Political Profile.

Was “God’s Wife” edited out of the Bible?

Porn made for women, by women.

Hallogallo (1972) by Neu! | Opa-Loka (1975) by Hawkwind | Jenny Ondioline (1993) by Stereolab | Hallogallo (1997) by Porcupine Tree.

Void City

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Friends & Relations Vol. 3 (1985) by Hawkwind.

Unless you assiduously collect everything you’ve ever worked on—which I don’t—you occasionally have to rely on the web to remind you of something you created years ago. This Hawkwind album is a good example, being one of the last releases by the band to use a piece of my artwork. (And I’ll quickly note that the accompanying type design was nothing to do with me; my design suggestions were always ignored, hence a growing frustration at that time with album cover work.) The album itself was the third in a series of odds and ends compilations gathering stray tracks by, yes, friends and relations of Mr Brock and co. Subsequent CD reissues used different packaging so the original vinyl is the only place you’ll see this illustration.

The reason I don’t have a copy is that the record label never sent me anything so unless Dave Brock put something in the post I had to buy them myself. (This happens more often than you’d expect.) I evidently didn’t think this one was worth it even though I much prefer the artwork to many of the earlier things of mine that were used. The drawing was a couple of years old, being inspired by the track Void City on the Choose Your Masques album from 1982. Void City is an atypical piece of electronica which I liked for its resemblance to some of the higher level synth pop and industrial music that was around in the early 1980s. 1982 to ’84 was the height of my JG Ballard obsession so Ballard is also a slight influence here. I had in mind his 1981 novel Hello America, which takes place in a post-apocalypse United States. And there’s also a trace influence from one of my early pieces of writing, a mercifully unpublished splurge of intense prose influenced by the New Worlds school of speculative fiction in which someone wanders around a vast and almost completely depopulated city. Looking at this drawing now it seems emblematic of my loss of interest in doing any kind of science fiction art; it also no longer seems futuristic. I produced my last album cover for Hawkind, The Chronicle of the Black Sword, in 1985; in January 1986 I started adapting HP Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark. This took me out of the public eye for a few years but it was a more rewarding place to be for many other reasons.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Hawk things
The Sonic Assassins
New things for July

Weekend links 47

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DG-2499 (1975) by the fantastic (in every sense of the word) Zdzislaw Beksinski (1929–2005). See the Dmochowski Gallery for a comprehensive collection of the artist’s work. Thanks to BibliOdyssey for the tip.

• More ICA events: From Animism to Zos: Strange Attractor Salon will be “a series of weekly events, consisting of a talk and a film, exploring some lesser-known intersections of culture, history, mind and nature” running from 10 March–12 May, 2011.

• And on May 10, the London Word Festival presents a Dodgem Logic evening with entertainment provided by contributors to that magazine:

Alan Moore’s reinvigoration of the underground fanzine, Dodgem Logic, comes alive in the non-conformist surroundings of Hackney’s Round Chapel. A night of art, comedy, comment and put-something-back localism. (…) With Robin Ince heading up a colossal stand-up bill, artists Steve Aylett, Savage Pencil, Melinda Gebbie and Kevin O’Neill panel-up to talk about their comic work, while music comes from hyperactive racketeers The Retro Spankees. With an exhibition of artwork from the magazine, and conducted by editor-in-chief Alan Moore.

• Taschen publishes a collection of Dennis Hopper’s photographs this week. The Independent has a small selection here. Also new from Tachen, Alex Steinweiss, The Inventor of the Modern Album Cover.

Bass Notes: The Film Posters of Saul Bass at the Kemistry Gallery, London.

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DG-2507 by Zdzislaw Beksinski.

While riding through the bustling streets of London from 1603 to 1621, one was liable to hear the shout “Long live Queen James!” King James I of England and VI of Scotland was so open about his homosexual love affairs that an epigram had been circulated which roused much mirth and nodding of the heads: Rex fuit Elizabeth: nunc est regina Jacobus—”Elizabeth was King: now James is Queen.”

There’s more about the private life of the man who gave his name to the King James Bible here.

Addams and Evil, a Tumblr devoted to the great Charles Addams.

Hannes Bok again at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Caravaggio’s crimes exposed in Rome’s police files.

Deserted City, photographs by Kim Høltermand.

• The blue sand dunes of the planet Mars.

• A map of the ghost signs of Chicago.

The movie title stills collection.

The pitfalls of e-book buying.

Life On Mars? (1971) by David Bowie | Uncle Sam’s On Mars (1979) by Hawkwind | Eyes On Mars (1980) by Chrome | Cache Coeur Naif (1997) by Mouse on Mars.