Transglobal Underground – { feuilleton }

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 571

Habit d’Astrologue (c. 1700) by Gerard Valck.

• “The Appointed Cloud begins with the high-pitched, keening sound of many bagpipes noisily playing at once—and then the music slowly coalesces, approaching a peaceful, tranquil hum. This gives way to fast-paced repetitive pulses, reminiscent of the minimalist works of composers such as Terry Riley and Philip Glass. Then the bagpipes join in once more, in a ferocious swarm of energy.” Geeta Dayal on the music of Yoshi Wada.

• “How can we conceive of the time of climate change, the time of planetary death? The House on the Borderland tried to conceive of exactly this a century ago. Yes, the narrator’s acts are fruitless. He gets haplessly carted about the universe to witness the end of time, which never really ends, is always at the edge, nearing an asymptote, on the borderland.” Namwali Serpell journeys through space and time with William Hope Hodgson.

• The Bureau of Lost Culture: DJ Food hosts a podcast discussion with Tony Bennett, founder and publisher of Knockabout Comics.

• Mixes of the week: Isolated Mix 111 (plus interview) by Ian Boddy, and a Wire mix (plus interview) by Teresa Winter.

• Fantastic visions and unknown worlds: Edwin Pouncey on Van Der Graaf Generator’s sleeve art.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Sculptor Kenichi Nakaya reconfigures ubiquitous Japanese rural crafts.

• My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields: “We wanted to sound like a band killing their songs.”

• At Wormwoodiana: More earth mysteries are explored in Northern Earth magazine.

• New music: Black Horses Of The Sun by Dave Bessell.

• The Exotica Project: One Hundred Dreamland 45s

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Hans Richter Day.

• Mdou Moctar‘s favourite music.

• Earth Floor (1985) by Michael Brook | Earth Tribe (1993) by Transglobal Underground | Earth Lights (2012) by Belbury Poly

Weekend links 498

The Sentinel 280, a car design by Syd Mead from 1964.

• “Boris Dolgov did not exist. The man who bore that name may have existed, but there never was a man in the United States with that name until 1956, too late for Weird Tales.” Teller of Weird Tales on the mysterious identity of a magazine artist.

• Saying goodbye to 2019 also meant saying farewell to Vaughan Oliver, Neil Innes and Syd Mead. Related: Vaughan Oliver at Discogs; I’m The Urban Spaceman; a look back at Syd Mead’s vehicle designs.

• Lanre Bakare on how ambient music became cool. (Again. This begs the question of when it became uncool, especially when a ten-year-old Brian Eno piece about “the death of uncool” is being quoted.)

Westerners interpreted the peyote experience very differently from the practitioners of the peyote religion, where the focus was “ritual, song and prayer, and to dissect one’s private sensations was to miss the point”. Writers such as Havelock Ellis, who published an essay on his peyote experiences in the Lancet in 1897 (it’s likely that he also administered the substance to his friends W.B. Yeats and Arthur Symons), instead tended to focus on its visual effects. Ellis described “the brilliance, delicacy and variety of the colours” and “their lovely and various textures”. Peyote reached Europe in tandem with the X-ray, cinema and electric lights, Jay notes, and “nothing delighted the eye of the mescal eater so much as the new electrical sublime”.

Emily Witt reviewing Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic by Mike Jay

• Peter Bradshaw takes on the thankless task of ranking Federico Fellini’s feature films.

• Geoff Manaugh on when Russia and America coöperated to avert a Y2K apocalypse.

• “Music is an ideal medium for interstellar communication,” says Daniel Oberhaus.

• Keith Allison on Karel Zeman, a creator of remarkable cinematic fantasies.

• Japanese Designer New Year’s Cards of 2020.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Vera Chytilová Day.

• 2020 in public domain.

• Sentinel (1992) by Mike Oldfield | Sentinels (2001) by Cyclobe | Sentinel (2004) by Transglobal Underground

Weekend links 386

Lynd Ward again, and one of his illustrations for Frankenstein (1934).

• “Julio Mario Santo Domingo was a collector and visionary who filled his homes and warehouses with the world’s greatest private collection related to the subjects of drugs, sex, magic, and rock and roll: a library of more than 50,000 items…” Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo by Peter Watts catalogues some of the artefacts.

• “His vision of Gay Liberation was deeply, and uniquely, inflected by his study of, and belief, in anarchism.” More on the late Charles Shively: Michael Bronski remembers a pivotal figure in the gay liberation movement.

• William Friedkin’s Sorcerer was released on region-free blu-ray a couple of years ago but it’s being reissued again in the UK for its fortieth anniversary. Julian House has created a series of designs for the insert.

• Electronic musician and podcaster Marc Kate talks to Erik Davis about nihilism, horror movies, New Age music, and transmuting Nazi black metal into the ambient soundscapes of his latest album, Deface.

• “Beware the polished little man“: an extract from The Guesthouse at the Sign of the Teetering Globe by Franziska zu Reventlow which is available now from Rixdorf Editions.

• Another welcome blu-ray release, Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates appears later this month in a special edition from Second Sight.

• Mixes of the week: FACT mix 626 by Sharp Veins, XLR8R Podcast 515 by Sammy Dee, and Secret Thirteen Mix 236 by Beta Evers.

• The Witch Wave with Pam Grossman is a podcast for bewitching conversation about magic, creativity, and culture.

• Call me by the wrong name: Benjamin Lee on Hollywood’s perennial attempts to straight-wash gay films.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Ronald Firbank Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926).

• Zoë Lescaze reviews Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years by Christopher Frayling.

• Angry Optimism in a Drowned World: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.

• Stewart Smith on The Strange World of…Linda Sharrock.

• Colors (1969) by Pharoah Sanders | Frankenstein (1972) by The Edgar Winter Group | Pomegranate (2001) by Transglobal Underground

Weekend links 209

Soundcarriers poster by Julian House.

A new release on the Ghost Box label is always a welcome thing but Entropicalia by The Soundcarriers, out on May 20th, is one I’m especially looking forward to. Julian House has made a video for new song Boiling Point, and there’s also the poster above which can be downloaded at larger size here. The Ghost Box Guest Shop has a couple of new additions including the recent Man Woman Birth Death Infinity album by Raagnagrok.

• “It’s a funny time to be making music, because we’re a generation of people who make music with screens instead of with ears.” Ben Frost talking to Tristan Bath.

• At Dangerous Minds: You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess, a rare glimpse of Yello live in concert, 1983.

Our movements about London are closely circumscribed, and while we may imagine ourselves to be free, the truth is that the vast majority of our journeys are undertaken for commercial imperatives: we travel either to work or to spend. All about us during our daily existence we are presented with buildings we cannot enter, fences we cannot climb and thoroughfares it would be foolhardy to cross. We are disbarred from some places because we don’t have the money — and from others because we don’t have the power. The city promises us everything, but it will deliver only a bit.

The place-hackers draw our attention to how physically and commercially circumscribed our urban existence really is. […] As more and more international capital flows into London, so public space is increasingly eroded — it’s just too valuable for us ordinary folk to paddle about in any more.

Give the freedom of the city to our urban explorers, says Will Self. Related: Robert Macfarlane accompanied urbexer Bradley Garrett on a night-time jaunt.

• Black Sabbeth: Metal band Gonga covering a classic with Portishead’s Beth Gibbons on vocals.

• Pelican books take flight again; Paul Laity on the resurrection of the non-fiction imprint.

• Finland’s homoerotic stamps are an ocular feast for women, too, says Nell Frizzell.

• “I guess you could say I am a Pagan.” Kenneth Anger on the occult.

• “How much gay sex should a novel have?” asks Caleb Crain.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 112 by Kyoka.

• The Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock

• Zombi’s Guide to Goblin

• Decadence Comics

• Zombie Warfare (1979) by Chrome | Escape From The Flesheaters (Zombie) (1979) by Fabio Frizzi | Zombie’ites (1993) by Transglobal Underground