Jarboe – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 837

Tree Shadows on the Park Wall, Roundhay, Leeds (1872) by John Atkinson Grimshaw.

• “In many cases, the rules of physics that apply in a real scene appear to be optional in a painting; they can be obeyed or ignored at the discretion of the artist to enhance the painting’s intended effect.” An extract from The Visual World of Shadows by Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh, in which the authors examine some of the rule-breaking that takes place when artists are dealing with shadows in paintings. I mentioned this aspect of artistic licence in a recent interview, making the point that meticulously accurate light and shade is a tell-tale sign of AI art.

• Orson Welles’ unfinished film of Don Quixote is back in the news again. Welles spent twenty years shooting scenes when he had the time and the money, and I seem to have spent an equivalent time reading about attempts to release the film. Any assembled footage will lack Welles’ bravura editing but I’d still like to see it.

• Read an extract from Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers And The Reinvention Of Rock, 1984–994 by Simon Reynolds.

• Mixes of the week: King Tubby – The Heaviest Dubs – A DJ Mix by Mista Savona, and Bleep Mix #319 by Yu Su.

• “What makes music psychedelic?” James McKeown on the music of Terry Riley.

• At the BFI: Gayle Sequeira selects 10 great films about dinner parties.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Loopy.

• The Strange World of…King Tubby.

• Shadows (1967) by The Leather Boy | The Never-Deserting Shadow (1991) by Jarboe | Moon Shadows (2001) by Laraaji

Weekend links 746

Composition B (No.II) with Red (1935) by Piet Mondrian.

• “Red is practically faultless, save, perhaps, for one hard-to-get-excited-about foray into atmospheric free jazz (Providence), though the sprawling, epic roller coaster of emotion and dexterity that follows (Starless) surely makes up for any shortfall.” Patrick Clarke on 50 years of my favourite King Crimson album. I like Providence, the piece is part of a live performance in Rhode Island so the Lovecraft connection adds to the aura of doom that pervades the album; and the structure of the album’s second side—jazz improv followed by a multi-part, Mellotron-heavy epic—harks back to the group’s debut.

• “It’s important to challenge the common idea of an almost evolutionary procession, where modernist abstract art is somehow the climax, a new and perfectly original approach to the visual world, absolutely different from all that preceded it.” Hunter Dukes on the yellow rectangle that denotes silence in the Silos Apocalypse.

• The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy, an exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner, London. Meanwhile, at the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, there’s Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation.

• “I did not realize how much I had done. I am a serial polluter.” Ralph Steadman and his daughter, Sadie Williams, talking to Steven Heller about Steadman’s latest exhibition which is touring the USA.

• New music: Come Back To Me [Demo] by Broadcast; The Last Sunset Of The Year by Marcus Fjellström; Hexa by Cleared.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artists summon mythical creatures of the Echigo region for the 2024 Wara Art Festival.

• The Italian Art of Violence: Samm Deighan on the giallo cinema boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

• Gavin Friday’s favourite albums.

• Red (1991) by Jarboe | Red Earth (As Summertime Ends) (1991) by Rain Tree Crow | Red Sun (2012) by Anna von Hausswolff

Weekend links 676

Sleeve Study, from Kakitsubata (1998) by Paul Binnie.

• “London was not a project for me. It was the curse that never stops giving.” Iain Sinclair talking to Matthew Stocker about his new book for Swan River Press, Agents of Oblivion.

• The Ultimate DMT Breakthrough Replication Compilation, a video guide to the DMT experience by Josie Sims. Related: Kristen French on what hallucinogens will make you see.

• At Spoon & Tamago: A return to Tokyo Genso’s depictions of an urban Japan transformed by vegetation and neglect.

• New music: The Shell That Speaks The Sea by David Toop & Lawrence English.

• At Bajo el Signo de Libra: San Sebastián de Mártir a Icono Homosexual.

• Cosmic views from the Milky Way Photographer of the Year, 2023.

• Nakamura Mitsue makes a Noh mask from a single block of wood.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by Eleni Poulou.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Delphine Seyrig Day.

• Of Ancient Memory (The Oblivion Seekers) (1994) by Jarboe | Oblivion (2001) by Lustmord | Oblivion (2004) by Redshift

Weekend links 480

Tadanori Yokoo (1974) by Tadanori Yokoo and Will van Sambeek. A poster from the Colourful Japan exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

• The first decade of space-rock pioneers Hawkwind is explored by Joe Banks in Hawkwind: Days of the Underground — Radical Escapism in the Age Of Paranoia, coming soon from Strange Attractor Press. I created the wraparound cover for this one, and will be talking about it here in a later post. Those interested in the book should note that the special edition hardback will include an extra book, plus a print and postcards. Limited to 500 copies so don’t wait around.

• “What we look for in our formative years can be very different from the demands we make later as analytical adults, and it was certainly more important to me that representations of gayness were complex or colourful than that they were positive, whatever that meant.” Ryan Gilbey on 50 years of Midnight Cowboy.

• Mixes of the week: Through A Landscape Of Mirrors Vol. II – France I by David Colohan, and As Imperceptibly As Grief The Summer Lapsed Away by Haunted Air.

If we imagine the material world about us having a concealed component of the fictional and the fantastic, visions buried in its stones and mortar waiting for their revelation, then we may suppose that 18th-century Lambeth was a teeming hub of such imaginal biodiversity. Bedlam alone could account for this ethereal population boom, but then nearby was the Hercules Buildings residence of William Blake, which can have only added to the sublime infestation.

Alan Moore on the visionary art of William Blake

• At the Internet Archive: Ten issues of Ed Pinsent’s The Sound Projector Music Magazine (1996–2002), with bonus Krautrock Kompendium.

• “Like many dictators Franco considered himself an artist.” Jonathan Meades on how fascism disfigured the face of Spain.

• Occulting Disk is a new album from the master of unnerving doomscapes, Deathprod, which will be released in October.

• Making MAD: Chris Mautner on the beginning and end of MAD magazine.

• John Margolies’ photographs of roadside America.

• Fair Sapphire by Meadowsilver.

• Jarboe‘s favourite music.

• Theme from Midnight Cowboy (1969) by John Barry | Astral Cowboy (1969) by Curt Boettcher | Dayvan Cowboy (2005) by Boards Of Canada

Weekend links 199

Follow the Leader (London, 2011) by Isaac Cordal.

• “Brutalism is the decor of dystopian films, literature and comics, just as gothic is for horror.” Jonathan Meades‘ A-Z of brutalism.

• Vitaly Shevchenko on the urban explorers of the ex-USSR. Related: Photos by Vitaliy Raskalov from the top of the Shanghai Tower.

• Joe Banks reviews the throbbing, hissing, minatory pulses of the Black Mill Tapes 1–4 by Pye Corner Audio.

Walter Benjamin is the only one among the commentators who attempts to pin down the anonymous, evanescent quality of Walser’s characters. They come, he says, “from insanity and nowhere else. They are figures who have left madness behind them, and this is why they are marked by such a consistently heartrending, inhuman superficiality. If we were to attempt to sum up in a single phrase the delightful yet also uncanny element in them, we would have to say: they have all been healed.” Nabokov surely had something similar in mind when he said of the fickle souls who roam Nikolai Gogol’s books that here we have to do with a tribe of harmless madmen, who will not be prevented by anything in the world from plowing their own eccentric furrow.

Le Promeneur Solitaire: WG Sebald on Robert Walser

• Drink The New Wine, an album by Kris Force, Anni Hogan, Jarboe, Zoe Keating and Meredith Yayanos.

• At 50 Watts: Illustrations by Fortuné Méaulle for Alphabet des Insectes by Leon Becker.

• Lawrence Gordon Clark, Master of Ghostly Horror. An interview by John D’Amico.

• Chapel Perilous: Notes From The New York Occult Revival by Don Jolly.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 107 by Ernestas Sadau.

• An Occult History of the Television Set by Geoff Manaugh.

• Was Ist Das? The Krautrock Album Database.

• First dérive of the year by Christina Scholz.

• John Waters’ Youth Manifesto.

• Gardens of Earthly Delights

• Psychedelic Folkloristic

• Water Music I / Here Comes The Flood / Water Music II (1979) by Robert Fripp & Peter Gabriel | After The Flood (1991) by Talk Talk | Flood (1997) by Jocelyn Pook