Michael Moorcock – Page 20

Weekend links 24

Delta-Wing (2009) by Chloe Early.

• “Feted British authors are limited, arrogant and self-satisfied, says leading academic”. Stating the bleeding obvious but it still needs to be said, apparently, especially when the announcement of the Booker list this year caused the usual confusion when Amis Jr. and McEwan weren’t included, as though the mere existence of their novels makes them prize-worthy. And as someone pointed out, the word “male” is missing from that headline.

• Hero of Comic-Book World Gets Real: Alan Moore again, in the NYT this time. Related: a review of Unearthing live.

• Announcing The Hanky Code by Brian Borland & Stephen S Mills, a 40-poem book to be published next year by Lethe Press. For an explanation of the Hanky Code there’s this, and there’s also an iPhone app.

• Folk—the ‘music of the people’—is now hip again, says (who else?) Rob Young who can also be heard on the archived podcast here. Related: the folk roots of Bagpuss. Related to the latter: The Mouse Mill.

An endpiece from The Firebird and other Russian Fairy Tales by Boris Zvorykin.

• ‘Yes’ to Catastrophe: Roger Dean, Prog and SF. A lengthy and thoughtful analysis of Roger Dean’s early work.

• Into the Media Web, the enormous Michael Moorcock book which I designed, is officially published this week.

• Cassette playa: in praise of tapes. I’ve complained about tapes in the past but people continue to find them useful. Some technologies die harder than others.

• Boy BANG Boy: “Quiet moments made suddenly very loud with the attitude and opinion of what it means to be a young male in an impossibly diverse world.” An exhibition opening at Eastgallery, London, on August 5th.

• Empty your heart of its mortal dream: Alfred Kubin’s extraordinary novel, The Other Side.

• Ghostly and Boym Partners devise a new way to deliver digital music.

• Besti-mix #27: a great selection by producer Adrian Sherwood.

• Agnostics are troublemakers. Amen to that.

• RIP Harry Beckett.

• Acousmata.

• Let Us Go In To The House Of The Lord by Pharoah Sanders (live, 1971): Part 1 | Part 2

Weekend links 21

A poster by Kazumasa Nagai.

• Franco Maria Ricci creates the world’s largest maze. “The former publisher said he first confided his ambition to Jorge Luis Borges, who characteristically told him the world’s largest maze already existed and was called a desert.” Related: Mirror, Mask, Labyrinth, a review of two new collections of Borges’ poetry.

• FACT mix 164 is a dubstep collection by Pinch and a promotion for the Dark Matter compilation which I designed earlier this year.

• One of the monuments of 20th century music, Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, is released in another new (and expensive) edition next month by Sony. Nice packaging, and there’s a vinyl edition included, but these things always come across as a cyncial attempt to milk the hardcore fans one more time. And have you noticed how all vinyl releases are now described as “audiophile”? If the big record companies had shown this much dedication to quality in the 1980s when they were jobbing out sub-standard vinyl pressings their reputation might be slightly higher today.

• More Gysin: Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, and the secret life of a building on the Bowery. And Ubuweb’s page of Gysin sound works and recordings.

• Michael Moorcock: “I think I preferred my own imagination”. A two-part interview about the cover designs for Moorcock books.

• The Pansy Project: “Artist Paul Harfleet plants pansies at the site of homophobic abuse, he finds the nearest source of soil to where the incident occurred and generally without civic permission plants one unmarked pansy. The flower is then photographed in its location and posted on his website, the image is entitled after the abuse … The Pansy Project also marks locations where people have been killed as a result of homophobic attack”

• This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. Jim Rossignol’s book is available as a free download.

• Lost London. Also, the Victorian Catacombs of South London.

• Dedalus Books had its Arts Council grant reinstated.

• ’Zine Lutefisk: fashion/art/escape.

• Time Will Show The Wiser (1968) by Fairport Convention | She Moves Through The Fair (1969) by Fairport Convention | She Moved Through The Fair (1994) by Jam Nation.

Weekend links 17

Aladdin Sane (1973). Cover photo by Brian Duffy who died this week.

• Among the obituaries this week: artist Louise Bourgeois; poet and partner of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky; film director Joseph Strick, a man who dared to film James Joyce’s Ulysses; photographer Brian Duffy.

• The dustbin of art history: “Why is so much contemporary art awful? We’re living through the death throes of the modernist project—and this isn’t the first time that greatness has collapsed into decadence.” Admirable sentiments but galleries and dealers have far too much invested in the corrupt edifice to let it collapse any time soon.

• Edinburgh film festival to screen ‘lost and forgotten’ British movies including the director’s cut of Jerry Cornelius film The Final Programme.

Delectable Bawdville burlesque boy Chris “Go-Go” Harder. Via EVB who have more pics.

• Homobody by Rio Safari, “a scrappy diy zine about queerness”. Obliquely related: Lizzy the Lezzie, animations at the Sundance Channel.

• Richard Norris aka Time and Space Machine puts together a psychedelic mixtape for FACT. Fab stuff.

• Diamanda Galás has a message for critics: “Stick to reviewing plant life and leave the Witches alone.”

• Brion Gysin: Dream Machine will be the first US survey of Gysin’s work in NYC next month.

• Geeta Dayal’s study of Another Green World by Brian Eno reviewed at Ballardian.

• For type-heads: font anatomy wallpaper by Sigurdur Armannsson.

• If it was my home: visualising the BP oil disaster.

• Antony Gormley’s Breathing Room III.

• The Paris Review has a new blog.

• Bizarre juxtaposition of the week: John Martyn’s sublime Small Hours with, er… The Clangers.

Passage 13

Ed Jansen writes again with news that no. 13 of his Dutch-language web magazine Passage is now online:

Number 13 of Passage contains stories about the Buddha Machine, a strange little box that emits music, then there is ‘Escape from the dollhouse?’, which is about the art of Hans Bellmer, surreal and strangely erotic, ‘The Skeleton that Climbed in Through the Window’ tells the equally strange and sad story of the life of Unica Zürn, companion of Bellmer and ‘Nomads of the Timestream’ is of course about the work of Michael Moorcock. This collection begins and ends with two sides of a story about the version of the visit of Odysseus to the Underworld, by Ezra Pound.

The customary eclectic mix, in other words. The Buddha Machine section is a nice overview of recent ambient music machines. I love the ad art for Zhang Jian’s Short-Wave of Bengal Bay.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passage 12
• Gristleism
• Passage 11
• Buddha Machine Wall
• Passage 10
• God in the machines
• Layering Buddha by Robert Henke

Into the Media Web by Michael Moorcock

Here at last is the book I spent a good part of last year designing. Into the Media Web is a huge volume as befits a huge talent, 720 pages of Michael Moorcock’s non-fiction spanning fifty years of his career from his days writing for sf and fantasy fanzines, through to journalism, reviews and articles for major newspapers and magazines. Moorcock expert John Davey did an amazingly thorough job of compiling, editing and annotating it all, and it’s been a considerable pleasure to design such an important collection. Alan Moore provided the substantial introduction. Savoy Books haven’t announced a price yet but it’s going to be about £45 since it’s another limited edition and weighs a ton. Into the Media Web makes a fine companion to last year’s The Best of Michael Moorcock from Tachyon, also edited by John Davey (with Ann & Jeff VanderMeer) and whose interior I also designed. Details about Into the Media Web‘s design follow below.

The dust jacket is matt white with a spot UV layer which picks out the titles and lines in gloss.

Continue reading “Into the Media Web by Michael Moorcock”