Strange Attractor – Page 8

Weekend links 147

Bestia Apocalypsi (2000) by Konstantin Kalynovych.

• A funding page for Better Things: The Life and Choices of Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Maria Paz Cabardo’s documentary film about the late comic artist and illustrator.

• Phantasmaphile’s Pam Grossman has declared 2013 to be the Year of the Witch.

• At WFMU: The Space Ghost Coast To Coast Sonny Sharrock Tribute Episode.

I think that mass culture is idiotic. I always have. Even things that are the sort of trendy new whatevers, it’s always about money and sex and nothing else.

Laurie Anderson on music for dogs and Obama.

• It’s that…thing…again. Clive Hicks-Jenkins on his new Mari Lwyd designs.

• Rick Poynor’s Dictionary of Surrealism and the Graphic Image.

• “Why do gay porn stars kill themselves?” asks Conner Habib.

If you’re staycationing in Scarfolk this year you’ll be pleased to hear the town now has 20% less rabies. Above: The 1972–73 prospectus for scarecrow and wicker man biology at Scarfolk Technical College. Related: A Day At The Seaside. I guessed the source even without the cryptic comments. Can you?

• Laurie Spiegel designed a T-shirt for The Wire magazine.

• Julia Holter covers Chiamami Adesso by Paolo Conte.

• Strange Attractor has two new Austin Spare prints.

• Forgotten Women Designers and Illustrators.

• RIP Alan Sharp, a sharp screenwriter.

• “Can You Pass the Acid Test?”

• Sonny and Linda Sharrock live at WKCR 03/21/74 | Many Mansions (1991) by Sonny Sharrock | Ghost Planet National Anthem (1993) by Sonny Sharrock

Weekend links 128

Seven-inch sleeve design by Savage Pencil for Wrong Eye (1990) by Coil.

• “Can you use sensory deprivation to explore ESP? And then make music from the process?” Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt of Matmos decided to find out for their new EP. Related: Occult Voices—Paranormal Music, Recordings of Unseen Intelligences, 1905–2007 at Ubuweb. Details of the original CD release can be found here.

• Gorgeous Gallery: The Best in Gay Erotic Art is a new book by David Leddick featuring the work of contemporary gay artists. Howard G. Williams has a review at Lambda Literary.

• Trip or Squeek by Savage Pencil, a book collection of the artist’s comic strips for The Wire magazine, forthcoming from Strange Attractor Press.

The novels of the middle period are Burgess’s most vital because it was in these that he forged what we might now recognize as the Burgessian – the antic puns and wordplay, the etymological digressions, the opacity, the glamorous pedantry, the tympanic repetitions, and an alliterative, assonantal musicality that makes every sentence seem vivid and extrovert: “Seafood salt with savour of seabrine thwacking throat with thriving wine-thirst”; “the lucent flawlessness of the skin, of the long fleshly languor that flowered into visibility”; “he was in a manner tricked, coney-caught, a court-dor to a cozening cotquean”. This is Burgess’s description of an Elizabethan brothel: “He entered darkness that smelled of musk and dust, the tang of sweating oxters, and, somehow, the ancient stale reek of egg after egg cracked in waste, the musty hold-smell of seamen’s garments, seamen’s semen spattered, a ghost procession of dead sailors lusting till the crack of doom”.

Ben Masters on A Clockwork Orange and its creator, fifty years on

• A streaming album for the beginning of autumn, the self-titled debut by Eraas, available in a range of formats at Bandcamp.

• “How Collecting Opium Antiques Turned Me Into an Opium Addict.”

• Ted Hughes reads from Crow. Related: Raptors by Leonard Baskin.

• Janitors of Lunacy: Jonny Mugwump remembers Coil.

Back in June I suggested Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ paintings as potential artwork for Penguin’s Modern Classics series. Last week Clive revealed that Penguin will be using one of his painted maquettes for a new edition of Equus next year.

• 150 Years of Lesbians and Other Lady-Loving-Ladies

• Color Sound Oblivion: a Coil/TG/related Tumblr.

• Tune in, psych out: the new black psychedelia.

• The Hills Are Alive (1995) by Coil | QueenS (2012) by THEESatisfaction | Goldblum (2012) by Oddience.

Weekend links 107

Le Faune (1923) by Carlos Schwabe.

• “When I recently attended a conference in China, many of the presenters left their papers on the cloud—Google Docs, to be specific. You know how this story ends: they got to China and there was no Google. Shit out of luck. Their cloud-based Gmail was also unavailable, as were the cloud lockers on which they had stored their rich media presentations.” Ubuweb’s Kenneth Goldsmith on why he doesn’t trust the Cloud.

• “I’m a poet and Britain is not a land for poets anymore.” A marvellous interview with the great Lindsay Kemp at Dangerous Minds. Subjects include all that you’d hope for: Genet, Salomé, David Bowie, Ken Russell, Derek Jarman, The Wicker Man and “papier maché giant cocks”.

• “As early as the 1950s, Maurice Richardson wrote a Freudian analysis which concluded that Dracula was ‘a kind of incestuous-necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match’.” Christopher Frayling on the Bram Stoker centenary.

• Björk gets enthused by (among other things) Leonora Carrington, The Hourglass Sanatorium and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s YouTube lectures.

• Before Fritz Lang’s Metropolis there was Algol – Tragödie der Macht (1920). Strange Flowers investigates.

David Marsh recreates famous album covers using Adobe Illustrator’s Pantone swatches.

• New titles forthcoming from Strange Attractor Press. Related: an interview with SAP allies Cyclobe.

• 960 individual slabs of vinyl make an animated waveform for Benga’s I Will Never Change.

• An exhibition of works by Stanislav Szukalksi at Varnish Fine Art, San Francisco,

• Keith Haring‘s erotic mural for the NYC LGBT Community Center is restored.

• The Situationist Times (1962–1967) is resurrected at Boo-Hooray.

• Doors Closing Slowly: Derek Raymond‘s Factory Novels.

• Will Wilkinson insists that fiction isn’t good for you.

• More bookplates at BibliOdyssey and 50 Watts.

• The Top 25 Psychedelic Videos of All Time.

• Flannery O’Connor: cartoonist.

• RIP Adam Yauch.

• Their finest moment: Sabotage (1994) by Beastie Boys.

Schütze and Unstable at Maggs Bros

Maggs Bros. Ltd, London, hosts two events soon featuring { feuilleton } friends and cohorts. First up is Paul Schütze with Air Into Light, a showing of eighteen of his photo prints with musical and perfume accompaniment. Paul has been making perfume a subject of particular concern recently. The combination of sound and scent is still little explored despite Scriabin’s ambitious plans for his apocalyptic Mysterium. Air Into Light opens on 12th March.

Chaos (2001) by Joel Biroco.

Unstable is a Strange Attractor event which will run from 8th May to 8th June, 2012 presenting new and old work by Battle of the Eyes (Chris Long & Edwin Pouncey), Joel Biroco, Julian House and Cathy Ward. Maggs Bros. has a page with exhibition details here including a PDF catalogue.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Strange Attractor Salon

Weekend links 93

One of a series of tremendous designs by Malika Favre for a new Penguin edition of the Kama Sutra.

• New interviews: “…Americans — mired in individualism — prefer to think in terms of identity than in terms of roles and masks. An American would never have called a novel Confessions of a Mask.” Nicholas Currie, better known via his Momus mask. | “The horror in music comes from the silence,” says John Carpenter. | “It’s dangerous to be an artist. That’s what we talk about in Naked Lunch — and it’s dangerous on many different levels. Politically it can be dangerous, but psychologically it can be quite dangerous too. You make yourself very vulnerable. You put yourself out there and of course you open yourself up to criticism and attack.” David Cronenberg at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

• New books: Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, a Joycean memoir by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot. | A stack of new works from Strange Attractor including a collection of Savage Pencil‘s Trip or Squeek comic strips. | Robert Irwin’s Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights. A shame about the high price on the latter but I’m sure it looks wonderful.

• The Blu-ray release of Wings (1927), William A. Wellman’s silent drama about air aces during the First World War, has prompted renewed attention for the passionate relationship between its two male leads, especially this deathbed scene which is tagged as the first same-sex kiss in cinema. That’s arguable, of course, but it’s certainly a touching moment.

• From 2009: Searching the Library of Babel, a list of all the stories in all 33 volumes of The Library of Babel, a 1979 Spanish language anthology of fantastic literature edited by Jorge Luis Borges.

• Lots of newpaper attention in the past week for the not-so-fresh news that magic mushrooms could help fight depression. Nature went into the detail of the latest studies.

• French group Air have written the score for a rare colour print of Le voyage dans la lune (1902) by Georges Méliès. Air’s YouTube channel has extracts.

• From 1989: The Merchant of Shadows by Angela Carter.

• Will Hunt on the Ghost River of Manhattan.

• Selected Letters of William S. Burroughs

• Sexy Boy (1998) by Air | Surfing On A Rocket (2003) by Air | Mer Du Japon (2007) by Air.