Iain Sinclair – Page 5 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 378

Outward Journeys, which will be released on November 3, is the second album on the Ghost Box label by The Belbury Circle (Belbury Poly with The Advisory Circle). As before, John Foxx is a guest vocalist, and as always, Julian House provides the graphic design.

• Music non-stop: Geeta Dayal in 2012 talking to Rebecca Allen about the challenges of turning Kraftwerk into computer animations.

• At the BFI: Jon Towlson on the sublimity of Close Encounters of the Third Kind; and Stephen King’s favourite films.

• Bookogs is the Discogs concept applied to books. Stupid name (Bibliogs would be much better) but there it is.

Julian House goes 8-bit. More artwork for The Belbury Circle.

• Iain Sinclair‘s farewell to London. Sinclair talked to Alan Moore about his book earlier this month.

• At Dangerous Minds: Paul Gallagher on the occult art of Austin Osman Spare.

• The places where Cold War numbers stations broadcast spies’ secret codes.

• Rodney Brooks on the seven deadly sins of predicting the future of AI.

• Nadja Spiegelman on the peculiar poetry of Paris’s Lost and Found.

• At Wormwoodiana: The rise of secondhand bookshops in Britain.

• RIP Grant Hart and Harry Dean Stanton. (And Dirge Magazine.)

• Mix of the week: FACT mix 618 by Tara Jane O’Neil.

• An introduction to Conny Plank in 10 records.

• Reoccurring Dreams (1984) by Hüsker Dü | Canción Mixteca (1985) by Ry Cooder | You Don’t Miss Your Water (1993) by Harry Dean Stanton

Weekend links 353

The Critics (1927) by Henry Scott Tuke.

• Geeta Dayal talks to ambient musician Midori Takada about Through The Looking-Glass (1983), an album being reissued this month by Palto Flats/We Release Whatever The Fuck We Want Records.

• Jacob Brogan reviews The Abominable Mr. Seabrook by Joe Ollmann, a graphic biography of writer, occultist, explorer and determined cannibal, William Seabrook.

• More from the usual suspects (on these pages at least): Jonathan Meades on his new cookbook and a recent bout of heart surgery; and Iain Sinclair on The Last London.

The law only applied to men, but that didn’t mean same-sex relationships between women were immune to opprobrium. Dorothy Todd was hired as the editor of British Vogue in 1922. Under her visionary stewardship, the magazine became a bastion of high modernist style, swapping petticoats and corsets for Picasso, Cocteau, Man Ray and Woolf. Todd lived with her lover, the fashion editor Madge Garland. Sacked in 1926 because of declining circulation, she planned to sue the magazine, but was silenced when the publisher Condé Nast threatened to publicly expose her “morals”.

In such an inimical climate, it’s not surprising that art became a zone of enchantment as well as resistance. The plenitude of camp aesthetics, the lush excess, the cross-pollination of high and low forms might be conceived as a direct response to the paucity and hostility of the culture at large. From the mannered decadence of Aubrey Beardsley’s naughty woodcuts, to Cecil Beaton’s portraits of Stephen Tennant as a radiant boy prince, to the cabaret high jinks of Danny La Rue, to the wickedly doctored library book covers made by the playwright Joe Orton (a crime for which he received a jail sentence), camp offered a way of remaking the world, cutting it down to size and reassembling it in richly strange and strangely rich new forms.

Olivia Lang on the British artists working in defiance of iniquitous laws prior to the (partial) decriminalisation of homosexual acts in 1967.

• Due for publication later this year, You Should Come With Me Now, a new collection of short fiction by M. John Harrison.

• Daniel Marner reviews Scarred For Life Volume One: The 70s, a book about the dark side of British pop culture.

• Jay Babcock talks to Erik Davis about the end of Arthur magazine and his new life in the Californian desert.

• The nature photography of Nobuyuki Kobayashi and the ruin photography of Gina Soden.

• Jon Forss of design team Non-Format on his time designing The Wire magazine.

• Mac McClelland on how doctors treat mental illness with psychedelic drugs.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 216 by WSR.

• Hisham Matar on Jorge Luis Borges.

• London Boys (1976) by T. Rex | Last Train To London (1979) by Electric Light Orchestra | London (2004) by Patrick Wolf

Weekend links 338

At the mountains of madness, fragment I (2014–16) by Céli Lee.

• Spirits of Place, edited by John Reppion: new writings from Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir, Vajra Chandrasekera, Maria J. Pérez Cuervo, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Kristine Ong Muslim, Dr. Joanne Parker, Mark Pesce, Iain Sinclair, Gazelle Amber Valentine and Damien Williams.

• “Are we wrong to neglect [Jean Cocteau]? We are.” Kevin Jackson reviews Jean Cocteau: A Life, a biography by Claude Arnaud that’s finally available in an English edition (translated by Lauren Elkin & Charlotte Mandell). Related: Jean Cocteau speaks to the year 2000.

• Void Beats / Invocation Trex by Cavern of Anti-Matter has been one of my favourite music releases this year. Tim Gane talks about the inadvertent origin of the group, and there’s also the welcome news of a reissue for the scarce first album, Blood Drums.

• Pauline Oliveros: 1932–2016; Geeta Dayal looks back on the life of US composer Pauline Oliveros, including reflections from, amongst others, Betsey Biggs, Fred Frith, Terry Riley, and Morton Subotnick.

• The relaunched Jayde Design website is selling copious Moorcock publications and ephemera, back issues of New Worlds magazine, and much else besides, including rare works of my own.

• New from Mute Records: Richard H. Kirk #7489 (Collected Works 1974–1989) and Sandoz #9294 (Collected Works 1992–1994).

• Drawings by Austin Osman Spare are on display for the next two weeks at the Atlantis Bookshop, London.

• The Architecture of the Overlap: Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, scanned in three dimensions.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 201 by Félicia Atkinson, and FACT mix 579 by Jenny Hval.

• “No one has the slightest idea what is and isn’t cultural appropriation,” says Fredrik deBoer.

• I’m never keen on end-of-year lists but I’ll read any list that John Waters writes.

• “The Driller Killer and the humanist behind the blood and sickening crunch”.

• More Lovecraft: Stories to make you say UGH! by Pete Von Sholly.

• Alan Moore talks to Stewart Lee.

• At The Mountains Of Madness (1968) by H.P. Lovecraft | Mountains Falling (2001) by Bluebob | Mountains Crave (2012) by Anna von Hausswolff

Weekend links 333

Time Out (London), no. 2403. No illustrator or designer credited.

• October isn’t all about the dark, there’s also psychedelia: Ned Raggett reviews a new collection of British psych, Let’s Go Down And Blow Our Minds: The British Psychedelic Sounds of 1967, while Floodgate Companion, a forthcoming collection of art by Robert Beatty, is previewed here.

• Mixes of the week (aside from my own, of course): Samhain Seance 5: Invasion of the Robot Witch by The Ephemeral Man, Thee Finders Kreepers Halloween Spezial, and Secret Thirteen Mix 199 by Blue Hour.

• “No diggin’ ‘ere!” Adam Scovell revisits the ghostly locations of the BBC’s A Warning to the Curious, and presents a short film based on the same.

• Stanley Kubrick’s film of The Shining has lost its shine through endless quotation and over-familiarity, says Anne Billson. Hard to disagree.

• Between Ballard’s Ears: in which two short stories by JG Ballard—Track 12 and Venus Smiles—are dramatised in binaural sound.

• John Carpenter talks to Adam Woodward about remakes, his love of early synthesisers and why nostalgia works in mysterious ways.

• Next month at the British Library: Brion Gysin: A Centennial Invocation with Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair, Barry Miles and others.

• Peter Bebergal on the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross, “a shadowy medieval brotherhood that probably didn’t exist”.

• Until The Hunter, a new album by Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions, is streaming here.

• San Fran-disco: Geeta Dayal on how Patrick Cowley and Sylvester changed dance music forever.

• A small portion of Bill Laswell‘s vast back catalogue is now on Bandcamp.

• At MetaFilter: The strange history of books bound in human skin.

• Italian composer Fabio Frizzi remembers 50 years of cult horror.

• Matthew Cheney on the strange horrors of Robert Aickman.

• Jóhann Jóhannsson’s favourite records

• Dark Start (1995) by ELpH vs Coil | Darkstalker (2000) by Bohren & Der Club Of Gore | Dark (2012) by Moritz Von Oswald Trio

Weekend links 316

Stasis, the second album by Pye Corner Audio for the Ghost Box label, will be released at the end of August. Design, as always, is by Julian House.

• “In the modern internet world you have what I talk about as the ‘War of the Certain’: people insisting that their absolutist viewpoint, in 140 characters, is exactly the right way to think, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is terrible. If you’ve grown up reading Robert Anton Wilson this is awful. Having all of these certain people with no nuance or doubt, and no understanding of multiple-model agnosticism, is not going to go anywhere good.” Writer John Higgs talking to Ben Graham about RAW, Discordianism and related matters. A related matter: Higgs talks to Alan Moore about virtual-reality mysticism, creating a new counterculture, reinventing magick, and the eternal nature of time.

• Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon is out this month so features and interviews are proliferating. I’ve been avoiding them for the usual spoiler-shunning reasons, but this was worth noting: Refn’s mood-establishing playlist for the production. More Neon Demon: Cliff Martinez talks about working with Refn.

• ” ‘Paint me like one of your French girls” takes on a whole new meaning in Nicole G. Albert’s book Lesbian Decadence: Representations in Art and Literature in Fin-De-Siècle France,” says Rachel Wexelbaum.

The decaying low-baroque tableau of conjugal tenderness, features eaten away by the syphilis of time, played so well, on an anvil of whitewashed cement, alongside a municipal bowling green, that it became the provocation for a pedestrian expedition testing the Brexit boundaries of a timeless mead-hall England, before the fleet of plundering Papist Normans came sailing over the horizon. Just as tabloid gangs of Albanian drug-trafficking white slavers were now reputed to be sneaking ashore on Romney Marshes, at Deal and Camber Sands, on their Rigid Inflatable Boats, kayaks and leaking air mattresses. Could anyone bring themselves actually to cast a vote for Brexit, a commodity that sounds like a cereal bowl of Nordic cattlecake manufactured from wood shavings with an added ingredient to purge the bowels?

Iain Sinclair and company head south in turbulent times

• At Dangerous Minds: a video recording of Psychic TV live in Manchester, 1983 (I’m in the audience but up on the balcony so you won’t see me), and an interview with dub maestro Adrian Sherwood.

• The Columbia Years, 1968–1969: fabled recording sessions by Betty Davis are to receive an official release by Light In The Attic.

• We’re Here Because We’re Here – Jeremy Deller’s silent commemoration of the soldiers of the Somme.

• Inside Las Pozas, Edward James’ Surrealist Garden in the Mexican Jungle.

• The body as amusement park: A history of masturbation by Barry Reay.

• Nicholas Olsberg on the mirage of an ideal metropolis.

• The Strange World of…David Toop

• Static Electrician (1994) by ELpH | Static (1998) by Redshift | Static (2001) by Monolake