Rory Doherty – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 815

A photograph by FR Yerbury of St George’s-in-the-East, London. From Nicholas Hawksmoor (1924) by HS Goodhart-Rendel.

• “Sixty years later, the Spectacle saturates us in ways the Situationists never imagined. Online platforms structure our personal relationships; algorithms nudge us toward the platform owners’ preferred choices. ‘Intelligence’ is embedded into everything from our phones to our kitchen appliances. But back in the Sixties, the Situationists saw the physical environment of the city as an expression of the mass society created by consumerism and governed by the Spectacle, and they felt power closing in around them: ‘All space is occupied by the enemy. We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops—the geometry.'” Hari Kunzru takes a psychogeographical dérive through the streets of London, encompassing the Hawksmoor churches, Iain Sinclair’s own peregrinations, Alan Moore’s Sinclair-influenced script for From Hell, Arthur Machen and more. (No mention of Alan’s ongoing Long London series, however, the first book of which is a deep dive into Machen territory.) Kunzru could be accused of being 30 years too late with his piece but for younger readers and many Americans these paths are worth retracing.

• Enemies from Venus!: “The only surviving fragment of a Dutch science fiction series for children from the mid-sixties (that never was).” CGI animation by Ernst-Jan van Melle in the style of black-and-white puppet shows like Fireball XL5, Space Patrol, etc.

• “If this is a horror story, it’s a horror story about being desperate for love, and about the vulnerability, loneliness, and difficulty in understanding other people that might drive this state.” Olivia Laing on Jonathan Glazer’s second feature film, Birth.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great British heist films.

• At The Daily Heller: Posting Posters about Fellini.

• RIP Sly Dunbar; James Sallis; Catherine O’Hara.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Peter Whitehead’s Day.

• The Strange World of…Toumani Diabaté.

• New music: Errata by WF 98.

• Birth (1971) by Keith Jarrett | Birth (1995) by Howie B | Birth (2013) by Roly Porter

Weekend links 801

The Magic Circle (1886) by John William Waterhouse.

• The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic has just been published in France by Editions Delcourt. A preview here shows how carefully they’ve managed to translate and reletter my page designs.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Algernon Blackwood’s stories of John Silence, occult detective.

• Relevant to some of my recent reading: The Necronomicon Wars, an examination of the many attempts to give life to HP Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire.

Altered States is tremendously exciting to watch—and not only during its psychedelic interludes when goat Jesus is being crucified and writhing red figures are toppling, Hieronymus Bosch–like, into hell and abstract splotches give the impression of cells endlessly dividing or murky membranes dissolving and beautiful women stare into Magritte skies and waves of lava crash as though the molten core of humanity itself were erupting. Even in its quieter moments, it is a beautiful film, with Hurt’s every appearance shot by cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth to emphasize his character’s alien otherworldliness.

Jessica Kiang explores the creation of Ken Russell’s flawed but fascinating psychedelic feature, Altered States

• A new catalogue of lots at another After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.

• Tarot decks through the ages: a video showing some of the cards from Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection.

• More psychedelia: Neuroscientist Grigori Guitchounts asks “What is your brain doing on psychedelics?”

• At the Daily Heller: Ryan Hughes has published a weighty collection of his typeface designs.

• Old music: Caged (25th Anniversary Edition) by Ian Boddy & Chris Carter.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great Technicolor melodramas.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: The Old School Horrors of Terence Fisher.

• Photographs from the 2025 Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

• Ambientblog celebrates 20 years of existence.

• RIP Dave Ball.

• Necronomicon (1970) by Les Baxter | Liriïk Necronomicus Kahnt (1975) by Magma | Necronomicon–The Magus (2004) by John Zorn

Weekend links 797

Bloomsbury Roofs (no date) by J. Elspeth Robertson.

• “Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge…are only offshoots of a huge central corpus of mad experimental writing, prose and poetry and just research notes. Pages and pages and pages of this lunacy.” Iain Sinclair describing to Robert Davidson the genesis of his influential poem/book Lud Heat. Related: Serious houses: The Lud Heat Tapes.

• At Criterion Current: Deeper into Robert Altman, a look at five lesser-known films from the director’s expansive filmography. Good to see Quintet receiving some attention, a science-fiction film that’s not without flaws but is still closer to the written SF of the 1970s than the decade’s box-office hits.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Short Fiction, by Charles Beaumont.

• Mix of the week: Ambient Focus 26.06.21 by Kevin Richard Martin aka The Bug.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty chooses 10 great films set in 1970s America.

• At Colossal: Frédéric Demeuse’s photos of ancient forests.

• RIP Claudia Cardinale and Danny Thompson.

• New music: If the Sun Dies by Greg Weeks.

• The Strange World of…Rafael Toral.

• Silver Forest (1969) by Organisation | A Forest (1980) by The Cure | A Forest In The Sky (2024) by Hawksmoor

Weekend links 787

Noonday Heat (1903) by Henry Scott Tuke.

• It may still be summer but the Halloween film reissues are already being announced. This year Radiance Films is presenting two features by Belgian director Harry Kümel: the lesbian vampire drama Daughters of Darkness (UHD+BD | BD), and Malpertuis, Kümel’s adaptation of the Jean Ray fantasy novel. This week I’ve been watching Polish animated films on Radiance’s just-released Essential Polish Animation.

• At Colossal: Dennis Lehtonen documents a pair of immense icebergs paying a visit to a small Greenland village.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: ShoreZone, nine short stories by dramatist David Rudkin.

The problem is that the extraterrestrials that xenolinguists claim to seek are often beings imagined to have technologies, minds or languages similar to ours. They are projections of ourselves. This anthropomorphism risks blinding us to truly alien communicators, who are radically unlike us. If there are linguistic beings on planets such as TOI-700 d or Kepler-186f, or elsewhere in our galaxy, their modes of communication may be utterly incomprehensible to us. How, then, can xenolinguistics face its deficit of imagination?

Perhaps by re-engaging its speculative origins. Through the mode of thought characteristic of science fiction, the science of alien language might yet learn to open itself to every conceivable degree of otherness, even the possibility of beings that share nothing with us but the cosmos.

Eli K P William on problems in xenolinguistics

• DJ Food’s latest foray into pop psychedelia is a look at the psych influence on the teen romance comics of the late 1960s: part 1 | part 2 | part 3.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – July 2025 at Ambientblog, and Bleep Mix #305 by Adam Wiltzie.

• “The hot tar splashed everywhere.” Dale Berning Sawa on Derek Jarman’s Black Paintings.

• At Unquiet Things: Meet your friendly neighbourhood art book author & book seller.

• Winners of the 2025 Big Picture natural world photography competition.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty chooses 10 great heatwave films.

• The closest images ever taken of the Sun’s atmosphere.

• Kae Tempest’s favourite records.

• Heat (1983) by Soft Cell | Heatwave (1984) by The Blue Nile | Heatwave (1987) by Univers Zero