Sergei Parajanov – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 793

Shinagawa, Tokyo Tower (Tokaido Station 1) (1967) by Sekino Jun’ichiro.

• “The historical figures who interested [Cormac] McCarthy the most, judging by the number of books he owned about them, were Albert Einstein (114 books), Winston Churchill (88) and James Joyce (78). Architecture is the dominant subject in the collection, with 855 books. The human being whom McCarthy most admired, Dennis confirms, was Ludwig Wittgenstein. The team catalogued a staggering 142 books by or about the philosopher, with a high proportion annotated.” Richard Grant for Smithsonian Magazine reports on the cataloguing of Cormac McCarthy’s personal library.

• The Real City of the Future: a long read by Charles T. Rubin taking in William Gibson’s urban fictions and Paolo Soleri’s towering Arcologies.

• At Colossal: “Atmospheric oil paintings by Martin Wittfooth illuminate nature’s timeless cycles.”

• Old music: White Souls In Black Suits by Clock DVA, receiving its first reissue since 1990.

• At the BFI: Carmen Gray on where to begin with Sergei Parajanov.

• At Ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon: The art of Sekino Jun’ichiro.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Unica Zürn Day (restored and expanded).

• New music: Imploded Versions by The Bug vs. Ghost Dubs.

• The Strange World of…Van Morrison.

• Dev Hynes’ favourite albums.

• Carnival Of Souls (1989) by David Van Tieghem | All Souls (1989) by Opal | The Cult Of Souls (2011) by The Wounded Kings

Hon by Yasmine Hamdan

If you’ve seen Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive, you may remember the scene near the end where the film stops for a moment in Tangier so that Yasmine Hamdan, a Lebanese singer, can perform one of her songs. I’ve got the soundtrack CD which includes Hal, the song she sings, but despite my predilection for Middle Eastern music I’ve been remiss in chasing down the albums that she’s released since. Hon is a new Yasmine Hamdan song, her first in a while if the YT comments are correct (her last album was in 2018), with an animated video credited to Khalil. The video is a wholly animated piece which is one reason why it’s featured here; as I’ve said in the past, I lost patience with the live-action video format years ago but still like those that use animation provided the technique is well-deployed.

The song itself is a political one, you might say inevitably so given the singer’s background and the state of current events. No prizes for guessing what the “tiny country with a gaping wound” refers to. Khalil’s animation uses its variety of collaged objects to spell out Arabic words. Is one of these a fleeting reference to the opening shots of Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomengrates? Maybe. The link to the song came via Animation Obsessive, a favourite Substack which teaches me something new with every post. The latest instalment concerns Robert Sahakyants, an Armenian animator described as a Soviet hippy, or the closest you could get to such a thing in the Soviet Union of the 1970s. That’s another lead to go chasing after.

Weekend links 751

The Treasures of Satan (1895) by Jean Delville.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Là-Bas, the celebrated account of Satanism in fin-de-siècle France by Joris-Karl Huysmans.

• New music: Chronicle by Arc, and The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 by Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz (linked here before but that was for the pre-release).

• Fabulous Animals (1975), a six-part British TV series about cryptozoology presented by David Attenborough (!).

• At Colossal: “Colour and repetition form optical rhythms in Daniel Mullen’s geometric paintings“.

• At Public Domain Review: Anton Seder’s The Animal in Decorative Art (1896) turns up again.

• Unseen scenes from Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.

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

• Fanzine covers selected by DJ Food.

• Mark Webber’s favourite records.

• Satan Side (1972) by Keith Hudson | Satan Is Boring (1986) by Sonic Youth | Sataan Is Real (1991) by Terminal Cheesecake

Weekend links 733

Armenian postage stamps for this year’s Sergei Parajanov centenary.

• At Criterion.com: David Hudson on 100 Years of Sergei Parajanov. The director is honoured with postage stamps and endless plaudits but when do we get blu-ray releases of more of the films that created all this attention in the first place?

• Steven Heller helps round off a noir-themed week with a look back at New York, the city where letterers never sleep. See also Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York.

• New music: Natur by KMRU; Associated Tone Services by Associated Tone Services; The Berklee Sessions by Scanner & Neil Leonard.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Hyper realistic pencil drawings of metallic objects by Kohei Ohmori.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: You are there: Les Cabarets du Ciel et de l’Enfer.

• Chris Corsano’s favourite albums.

• Signs by Daniel McKee.

• RIP Robert Towne.

• Ciel Ouvert (1985) by Yello | Ciels Ténébreuse (1990) by :Zoviet*France: | Monter Au Ciel (1994) by Transglobal Underground

Weekend links 616

Illustration by Virgil Finlay for The Face in the Abyss by A. Merritt; Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1940.

• “The pier was completely outside of the gallery system, which David loved of course. People were just working on the walls, nothing was for sale, nothing could really be bought, although people were coming in and trying to chip things off the walls.” Cynthia Carr on the love letters and legacy of David Wojnarowicz.

• “In pursuit of Pure Form, the Polish artist known as “Witkacy” would consume peyote, cocaine, and other intoxicants before creating pastel portraits.” Juliette Bretan on the artful intoxications of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz.

• Kino Kyiv: Christopher Silvester compiles a list of notable Ukrainian films. I’ve not seen all of these but Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors is a great favourite.

Onscreen for nearly the entire runtime, [Laura Dern] pulls off the remarkable feat of being in total control of a scenario organized by undermining her identity, obliterating her characterization, and so scrambling the distinction between Nikki and Susan that one eventually comes to view Inland Empire not as a maze to exit, a puzzle to solve, an ouroboros to gawk at, but rather as both a generalized treatise on the enigma of acting and a very specific, exquisitely perverse mash note to one of Lynch’s most formidable collaborators.

Nathan Lee on Laura Dern, David Lynch and Inland Empire. I’ve always thought Dern’s exceptional performance might have been recognised more widely if Lynch hadn’t filmed most of it on low-grade video.

• New music: Golden Air by Sun’s Signature, a new project from Elizabeth Fraser and Damon Reece.

• Miranda Remington explores The Strange World of…Stomu Yamash’ta.

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

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Labyrinthine.

• Labyrinth (2010) by Chrome Hoof | Labyrinths (2018) by Jonathan Fitoussi / Clemens Hourrière | The Seventh Labyrinth (2019) by Pye Corner Audio