JG Ballard – Page 5 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 421

The Death of American Spirituality (1987) by David Wojnarowicz.

• Dau: “Art imitating life on an unprecedented scale”. Siddhant Adlakha on a colossal Russian feature-film project that sounds like a real-life equivalent of Synecdoche, New York. Adlakha’s piece, which claims that Dau is finished, was written a year ago but there’s still no sign of the film itself. Wikipedia has more details and links.

• Metropolis Magazine from Phantasm Press is a facsimile republication of the 32-page theatre programme produced for the UK premier of Fritz Lang’s feature film.

• Children Of The New Dawn is a preview of the score for Mandy by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. From last year: The Drowned World (live) by Jóhann Jóhannsson.

• Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ’Round the World (1848) by Benjamin Russell & Caleb Purrington is the longest painting in North America.

• “This summer, there is only one book to take to the Terminal Beach”: Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe by Simon Sellars.

• “La série des Fredi en trois volumes est une étude sincère et consciencieuse de l’inversion sexuelle.”

• “The Book was Mallarmé’s total artwork, a book to encompass all books,” says Sylvia Gorelick.

• At BLDGBLOG: Graphic Inferno, art by Rico Lebrun based on Dante’s Divine Comedy.

• Mixes of the week: XLR8R Podcast 549 by Hólmar, and FACT Mix 661 by Kelly Lee Owens.

• “Dealing with creative block? A deck of cards might help,” says Abigail Cain.

• The Instagram account archiving exquisite interiors from vintage porn.

• Polish composers report from Outer Space

• Wind From Nowhere (1994) by Uzect Plaush | Slolooblade : The Drowned World (1994) by Mo Boma | Inner Space Memorial for JG Ballard (2014) by Janek Schaefer

Weekend links 379

Male Nude, Leg Up (1952) by Horst. From a series of photo prints at Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art until 5th November.

• At Bandcamp: “Tuareg guitar mixed with traditional rural folk”: Eghass Malan by Les Filles de Illighadad; “Pan dimensional spacecraft hover over ancient pyramids on worlds undreamed of”: Lemurian Dawn by Memnon Sa.

• Songs of Discomposure: Quietus writers pick their most disturbing pieces of music. Also at The Quietus: John Foxx on his collaborations with Harold Budd and Ruben Garcia.

• Eros In Arabia, the first album by Richard Horowitz, has been deleted since 1981, and is consequently very difficult to find. Freedom To Spend are reissuing it next month.

• JG Ballard—The Interview Concordance. A companion to the concordance of Ballard’s published works. Some of the interviews may be found here.

• At Dangerous Minds: The Male Figure: Bruce of Los Angeles and the perfection of midcentury beefcake.

• Mixes of the week: XLR8R Podcast 508 by Jennifer Cardini, and Secret Thirteen Mix 231 by Alex XIII.

• Post Punk: a set of postage stamp designs by Dorothy for punk and post-punk bands.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Kanban: The exquisite art of historic Japanese store signs.

• At Greydogtales: Photography of the Folk Horror Revival.

• The Spomenik Database

• The Secret Life Of Arabia (1977) by David Bowie | Arabian Knights (1981) by Siouxsie And The Banshees | Arabiant (2002) by Radar

Weekend links 366

Dandelion (2009) by Tomoko Kashiki.

• “Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style guide, lightly modernizes them, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to take advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.”

• Obscenity and the Arts, a previously unpublished essay by Anthony Burgess, will appear in book form later this year via Pariah Press.

• Mixes of the week: VF Mix 97: Talk Talk by The Last Dinosaur, and Secret Thirteen Mix 225 by Janek Schaefer.

Rub any two writers together and similarities will show. No two writers, however different, are completely different. Here’s a crucial instance: Lovecraft and Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, even though neither had the slightest formal training in the subject. And it is via this interest that the two intersect in an unexpected way. They are connected, through time and space, by that most humble of architectural events: the corner, the junction between two walls. What Lovecraft and Ballard did was to make the corner into a place of nightmares — and in doing so, they reveal its secret history.

Will Wiles in a long and rewarding essay, The Corner of Lovecraft and Ballard

• Dungeons Deep, Forests Dark – A beginner’s guide to Dungeon Synth by Daniel Pietersen.

• Alex Ross on Joséphin Péladan, the Symbolists and the occult roots of Modernism.

• Cooling the Tube: engineering heat out of the [London] Underground by IanVisits.

• Caroline on the mysteries of Pye Corner: Flames, poltergeists and bodysnatchers.

• The Saint of Sin City – Tony Kail Visits Las Vegas’ Santuario de la Santa Muerte.

• Photographs of Art Nouveau architecture by Keiichi Tahara.

• A stream of the new Porter Ricks album, Anguilla Electrica.

• Jasper Sharp on 100 years of Japanese animation.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 197 clocks.

• On The Corner [Take 4] (1972) by Miles Davis | Corner Crew Dub (1976) by Augustus Pablo | Empty Avenues And Dark Corners (Pye Corner Audio Mix) (2013) by John Foxx and the Belbury Circle

Weekend links 361

The Future Vol.2 (2016) by f1x-2.

• One of the notable things about the reaction to the original series of Twin Peaks was the way in which Americans were astonished that something so outré could be allowed on television. Here in the UK the response was a little more subdued; we had, after all been spoiled for years by The Prisoner, Sapphire and Steel, and numerous odd and challenging dramas by Dennis Potter and others. Pre-dating all of these was The Strange World of Gurney Slade (1960), a six-part series starring Anthony Newley that was unprecedented in its Surrealism. Andy Murray looks back at the series, and at the rest of Newley’s career.

• Andrew Dickson on Peter Ackroyd whose latest book, Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day, is published later this month.

• Alyona Sokolnikova on a Soviet vision of the future: the legacy and influence of Tekhikia – Molodezhi (Technology for the Youth) magazine.

You know who weren’t cops? All the radicals and queers and artists and dreamers that were there while I grew up, my mom and dad’s old friends from New York and the wider bohemian world, the actors and the drag queens and the dilettantes and the ex junkies and the current junkies, the kind of queer people who wouldn’t get caught dead getting married, the people who actually made the “old New York” of the myth into what it was. They were smart and they were funny and they were tougher than I can imagine and they were possessed of an existential commitment to the idea that life is complicated and so we shouldn’t be quick to judge. They were tolerant, in the true sense, even while they were tireless advocates for actual justice. […] Now we’re Rudy Giuliani, trying to get offensive art pulled off the walls. Now we’re the book burners. Now we’re the censors. Now we attack the ACLU for defending free speech. Now we screech about community morals. Now we’re the prison camp screws. That’s us. Me, I could never be one of the good ones. Never. I can never live up to that ideal. I know I’m not good enough. I know when the judgment day comes, I go down. And so I decline. You can decline, too.

Planet of Cops by Freddie deBoer, or how inflexible morality makes everyone a cop

• Mixes of the week: FACT Mix 601 by Dark Entries, Secret Thirteen Mix 221 by Eli Keszler, and XLR8R Podcast 490 by Ben Lukas Boysen.

• At Dangerous Minds: Punk, Patti Smith, William Burroughs & capitalism: A “conceptual conversation” with RE/Search’s Vale.

• Emily Wells on the strange, irreverent worlds of Down Below and The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington.

• Rick Poynor on Mike Halliwell’s montages based on JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition.

• “Why are the British so scared of cannabis?” asks Professor David Nutt.

• Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (1978) by Arthur Evans.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jacques Rivette Day.

• Designing Penguin Modern Classics

• Future Dub (1994) by Mouse On Mars | Future Proof (2003) by Massive Attack | Future (2004) by Alva Noto

Weekend links 354

The Dolly, Dolly Spy (1968).

• As mentioned previously, Concrete Desert is a musical collaboration between The Bug (Kevin Martin) and Earth’s Dylan Carlson inspired, they say, by Los Angeles and the fiction of JG Ballard. Martin & Carlson talked to Patrick Clarke at The Quietus about the album’s creation. Elsewhere, Kevin Martin compiled a list for Bleep of ten musical influences on the album, and Dylan Carlson had a Fireside Chat with Red Bull Music.

• Phil Legard of Xenis Emputae Travelling Band and Hawthonn has released a new EP, Hesperian Garden, featuring compositions derived from the Monas Hieroglyphica of John Dee.

• More Ballard: Mike Holliday maps the evolution of Crash, a novel which is published in a new “Collector’s Edition” by Fourth Estate next week.

• Teleplasmiste “bridge the oscillation gap from deep listening ambient music and the heaviest of doomy drones,” says Richard Fontenoy.

• David Barnett on Adam Diment, “the superstar spy novelist who vanished for four decades”.

• The queer art underground of 1980s London as photographed by David Gwinnutt.

• A sculpture of a Buddhist deity made from 20,000 beetles.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 483 by Jane Fitz.

• RIP Gilbert Baker, designer of the rainbow flag.

• Rubber Dolly Rag (1930) by Uncle Bud Landress with Georgia Yellow Hammers | Voodoo Dolly (1981) by Siouxsie and the Banshees | Cosmic Funky Dolly (2003) by Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.