Weekend links 668

escher.jpg

The Drowned Cathedral (1929) by MC Escher.

• “All Saints’ was the last of the seven parish churches to fall headlong into the waves. The drowned church was doomed to lie in a gulley not far out to sea, a habitat for sponges and crabs, and yet it lives on, unvanquishable; for—as the story of Britain’s lost cities, ghost towns, and vanished villages tells us—what has disappeared beneath the sea can rebuild itself in the mind.” Matthew Green explores the history of Dunwich, Suffolk.

• “Why do certain artists endure and become (dread word) ‘iconic’, while some are forgotten or sidelined or only grudgingly acknowledged?” Ian Penman talking to Jeremy Allen about his new book, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: A new edition of England’s Hidden Reverse, David Keenan’s study of the lives and music of Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93.

• “What is electronic music?” Daphne Oram, Desmond Briscoe and David Cain of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop are here to explain.

• “Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age Menorca (Western Mediterranean) from human hair analysis.”

• New music: Timespan by Majeure, and Microdosing by African Head Charge.

• “Future of Borges estate in limbo as widow doesn’t leave will.”

Arooj Aftab’s favourite albums.

Paperback Covers on Tumblr.

The Engulfed Cathedral (1974) by Tomita | Engulfed Cathedral (1981) by John Carpenter | La Cathédrale Engloutie (2003) by Sora

Weekend links 638

feherlofia.jpg

• After writing about Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics back in January, I left a comment expressing the hope that Arrow or Eureka might give us a Region B blu-ray of Son of the White Mare (aka Fehérlófia), Jankovics’s “psychedelic” animated feature from 1982. Fast-forward nine months to Eureka’s announcement that they’ll be doing exactly this in November. Watch the trailer. The release will include some of the director’s short films plus his first feature, Johnny Corncob (1973), a historical tale presented in the “groovy” style (previously) popularised by Yellow Submarine. If idle wishes can be granted so easily then I’ll hope again that Eureka might do the same for René Laloux’s second and third animated features, the Moebius-designed Time Masters (1982) (made in the same studio as Son of the White Mare) and the Caza-designed Gandahar (1987). Fingers crossed.

• “I don’t think anybody copies me, but Harmony Korine, Todd Solondz, Bruno Dumont, Gaspar Noé, I like those kinds of directors. They’re sometimes not funny at all. They’re very serious and eerily melodramatic. I just like movies that surprise me.” John Waters (yet again) talking to Conor Williams about films, writing and a prayer for Pasolini.

• “There is something profoundly haunting about a master artist’s last painting left unfinished upon its easel…” Kevin Dann on The Mermaid (1910) by Howard Pyle.

• At Bandcamp: Navigating the Nurse With Wound List: A Gateway to Far-Flung Sounds.

• “Juicy With Meaning”: Alex Denney chooses five essential films by David Cronenberg.

• Mix of the week: Discovering 1970s jazz fusion with Kerri Chandler.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Purgatory by Ken Hollings.

• Steven Heller’s font(s) of the month: Farandole & Lustik.

Dennis Cooper’s favourite albums.

• RIP Peter Straub.

White Horses (1968) by Jacky | Five White Horses (1968) by Sun Dragon | Ride A White Horse (2006) by Goldfrapp

Switched On again (again)

stereolab.jpg

The soundtrack for this weekend is the fifth volume in Stereolab’s Switched On series of compilation albums; the subtitle this time, Pulse Of The Early Brain, is another of those titles I won’t be surprised to encounter in an unlikely place at some point in the future. These albums are always very welcome for those of us who don’t bother collecting limited single releases. The main highlight of the new set is the Nurse With Wound collaboration from 1997, Simple Headphone Mind, a 12-inch which contained over 30-minutes of music. Heard in retrospect, these recordings push the group into territory that Tim Gane would explore in Cavern Of Anti-Matter, especially on the title track, a 10-minute groove that wouldn’t be out of place on a Brain release from 1972. (Maybe this is the Brain being alluded to in that subtitle?) Elsewhere on the compilation there’s the whole of the Lo Fi EP from 1993, an odd omission from previous collections (and which I already had but thanks anyway…), plus a number of previously unreleased recordings. The hard-to-photograph mirror packaging is designed by Vanina Schmitt.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Switched On again

Chance encounters on the dissecting table

maldoror2.jpg

In times of great uncertainty about our mission, we often looked at the fixed points of Lautréamont and De Chirico, which sufficed to determine our straight line.

André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 1928

1: The metaphor, 1869

maldoror.jpg

You can’t read the history of Surrealism for very long before encountering some variation of the most famous line from Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont/Isidore Ducasse: “beautiful as a chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”. Translations vary, as do misquotations; the page above is from the Alexis Lykiard translation where you can also read the surrounding text. The context of the description is seldom mentioned when the quote is used, and reveals that the words are describing the attractiveness of an English schoolboy living with his parents in Paris. The insipid Mervyn is stalked, seduced and finally murdered by the villainous Maldoror. Lautréamont’s metaphor, like so much else in the book, carries a sting in its tail.


2: The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, 1920

ray.jpg

Man Ray, like Mervyn, was a foreigner living in Paris when he created this artwork. The “enigma” may be taken as referring both to the wrapped object (a sewing machine sans umbrella) as well as to the mysterious author of Les Chants de Maldoror, who died at the age of 24 after writing his explosive prose poem, and about whose life little is known. I first encountered Ducasse’s name in art books showing pictures of this piece which is one of the earliest works of Surrealist art. For a young art enthusiast the enigma was more in the name itself: who was this Ducasse, and why was he enigmatic? The original of Man Ray’s piece was subsequently lost, like many of his pre-war sculptures, but may be seen inside the first issue of La Révolution Surrealiste. Editions of the work that exist today are recreations made in the 1970s.


3: An illustration for Les Chants de Maldoror, 1934

dali3.jpg

Salvador Dalí created 30 full-page etchings and 12 vignettes for an illustrated edition of Lautréamont’s work published by Skira in Paris in 1934. Dalí must have seemed an ideal match for a book whose prose descriptions offer copious atrocities and mutations but, as with many of Dalí’s illustrations, the pictures owe more to his obsessions than to Lautréamont’s text, and could easily be used to illustrate something else entirely. Plate 19 does, however, feature a sewing machine.


4: Electrosexual Sewing Machine, 1935

dominguez.jpg

A Surrealist painting by Oscar Dominguez which emphasises the sexual nature of Lautréamont’s metaphor, or at least the Freudian interpretation of the same. Breton and company took the sewing machine for a female symbol, while the umbrella was male; the dissecting table where their encounter takes place is, of course, a bed.

[In Electrosexual Sewing Machine] the dissection appears to be under way. There is a strange abusive surgery being undertaken, the thread of the sewing machine replaced with blood which is being funnelled onto the woman’s back. The plant itself may even echo de Lautréamont’s umbrella. Domínguez has taken one of the central mantras of Breton’s Surreal universe and has pushed it, through a combination of painterly skill and semi-automatism, in order to create an absorbing and haunting vision that cuts to the quick of the movement’s spirit. (via)


5: Sewing Machine with Umbrellas in a Surrealist Landscape, 1941

dali4.jpg

More from Dalí who was hired by Fritz Lang to create images for a sequence of drunken delirium in the film Moontide. The commission arrived four years before Dalí’s work for Hitchcock on Spellbound, and if successful might have even dissuaded Hitchcock from hiring Dalí, but Lang left the film once shooting had begun, and his replacement, Archie Mayo, disliked the artist’s contributions. This surviving concept painting seems lazy compared to the Spellbound sequences (which were also trimmed by the ever-interfering David O. Selznick): the colonnade is a bald swipe from De Chirico, while the umbrella-bedecked sewing machine makes clumsy and literal use of the Lautréamont metaphor which is better left as a provocative collision of verbal imagery.


6: “As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella…”: Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, 1976

core.jpg

A painting by Philip Core, part of a series in which well-known cultural figures (eg: Harold Pinter and Joe Orton) encounter each other in rooms that reflect their works. Core wrote a biography of Andy Warhol, so maybe he knew something that I don’t, but I’d be very surprised if the Pop artist ever played a game of chess in his life, never mind being proficient enough to win so many pieces from the chess-obsessed Duchamp. As for Marcel, he’d raise an eyebrow at that wrongly positioned chess board…


7: Nurse With Wound, 1979

nww1.jpg

Lautréamont infects another medium. Steven Stapleton’s music group/art project has been infused from the outset by a pranksterish Dada/Surrealist spirit, so the purloining of the metaphor for the title of the first Nurse With Wound album is entirely fitting.

nww2.jpg


8: L’Ombrello E La Macchina Da Cucire, 1995

battiato1.jpg

Unlike this album by the very prolific Franco Battiato which Discogs describes as “experimental”. The first piece on the album uses the same title as the album, and is anything but experimental, especially compared to the improvised racket created by Nurse With Wound.

battiato2.jpg


9: Maldoror, 2003

friedlander.jpg

A jazz album by Erik Friedlander which I haven’t heard but which takes its track titles from phrases by Lautréamont.

Do other examples exist? No doubt they do, but the more recent uses of Lautréamont’s words only demonstrate how over-familiarity dulls an effect that was once shocking and original.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Santiago Caruso’s Maldoror
Jacques Houplain’s Maldoror
Hans Bellmer’s Maldoror
Les Chants de Maldoror by Shuji Terayama
Polypodes
Ulysses versus Maldoror
Maldoror
Books of blood
Magritte’s Maldoror
Frans De Geetere’s illustrated Maldoror
Maldoror illustrated

Weekend links 410

hog.jpg

William Hope Hodgson’s final Carnacki mystery, The Hog, received its first magazine publication in January 1947. The cover art by AR Tilburne may not have been originally created for Hodgson’s tale but it complements the story’s atmosphere of febrile dread.

• It’s still April so that means it’s still the month that saw the 100th anniversary of the death of William Hope Hodgson, bodybuilder, manacler of Harry Houdini, and the author of several novels of weird fiction that continue to entrance new generations of readers. The edition of Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland that I illustrated for Swan River Press would have been on sale this month but print problems have caused delays with the run as a whole; anyone interested is advised to contact the publisher for news. • Meanwhile, Jon Mueller (composer of the book’s accompanying soundtrack CD) and myself talked to Swan River Press about the attractions of Hodgson’s novel. • More Hodgsoniana: Greydogtales acknowledged the Hodgson centenary via a discussion with Hodgson scholar Sam Gafford, while Michael Dirda reviewed the new edition of The House on the Borderland and another SRP title, The Scarlet Soul (whose cover I also designed), for The Washington Post.

• “From the ashes of countless decayed Modernities comes Neo-Decadence, a profaned cathedral whose broken stained glass windows still glitter irregularly in the harsh light of a Symbolist sun. Behind this marvellously vandalised edifice, a motley band of revellers picnic in the graveyard of the Real, leaving behind all manner of rotting delicacies and toxic baubles in their wake.” Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology edited by Daniel Corrick & Justin Isis is published this month by Snuggly Books, an imprint whose catalogue of new books and first-time translations will be of interest to anyone who comes here for Decadence, Symbolism or anything related. Related to the above: A Neo-Decadence Day at Dennis Cooper’s.

• “Witches are change-makers. They’re transgressive beings who dwell on the fringes of society, and so they’re the perfect icon for rebels, outsiders, and rabble-rousers, especially those of the female persuasion.” Pam Grossman talks to Grimoire about witchcraft and related arts.

• Mixes of the week: Resident Advisor Podcast 621 by Grouper, and Bacchus Beltane 5: The Owl Service by The Ephemeral Man.

• Back in black: Publisher/translator James Conway and designer Cara Schwartz on the cover designs of Rixdorf Editions.

• I was talking again this week at The Writer’s Corner where JKA Short asked me about working as an illustrator.

All Gates Open: The Story of Can by Rob Young is published next week. The Wire has an extract.

• Delusional Albion: Brad Stevens on how foreign directors saw Britain in the Swinging Sixties.

• “There’s no book I love more than Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature,” says Olivia Laing.

Eden Tizard on Soliloquy For Lilith, the drone album by Nurse With Wound.

Owls (1969) by Ruth White | Decadent & Symmetrical (1995) by ELpH vs Coil | The Owls (2013) by Félicia Atkinson