Vladimir Nabokov – Page 8

Weekend links 119

The BFI’s recent DVD release of Peter de Rome’s gay porn films has been mentioned here a couple of times already but I only bought a copy this week. It’s a remarkable release for a number of reasons, not least for showing how much attitudes towards pornography in Britain have changed in recent years. De Rome’s films are explicit enough to ensure that in the 1970s and 1980s anyone caught selling them in the UK might have been imprisoned. That you can now buy them uncut from a high street shop on a disc packaged with the usual care by the British Film Institute means another small part of our iniquitous past has gone for good. Among the extras there’s a documentary with the 88-year-old director discussing his work. This week he talked to BUTT magazine who also have one of his shorter films from the DVD, Hot Pants, on their site.

• “Reading this book, it is hard not to feel that the largest mental health problem – the really crazy thing – is society’s attitude to drugs in general and LSD in particular…” Phil Baker reviews Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain by Andy Roberts.

• “Loved by aristocrats and immortalized in literature, Denham Fouts remains virtually unknown in his own hometown.” Richard Wall on The World’s Most Expensive Male Prostitute.

The very etiology of rabies is mythic: once the bite heals and the virus has traveled to the brain, “the wound will usually return, as if by magic, with some odd sensation occurring at the site.” Then there’s the fact that no definitive diagnosis can be made without taking a biopsy of the sick animal’s brain, leaving only one gory solution: decapitation.

Rabies is horror’s muse. In almost all iterations of the genre, those we most trust suddenly turn strange: a boyfriend morphs into a wolf at midnight, a fiancé turns out to be harboring a mad first wife in the attic, a friend is bit by a zombie and goes berserk.

Alice Gregory reviews Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy.

• The Horror of Philosophy: Erik Davis talks to Eugene Thacker about Lovecraft, medieval mysticism, and thinking the world-without-us.

• Eagle Scouts Returning Our Badges: A Tumblr for those protesting the current anti-gay stance of the Boy Scouts of America.

• His Father’s Best Translator: Lila Azam Zanganeh on the late Dmitri Nabokov.

• Les Liaisons dangereuses: illustrations by Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt).

• Andrea Scrima looks at Robert Walser’s Der Spaziergang (The Walk).

• 10 Great Places to Meet Lesbians If You Have a Time Machine.

• Jesse Bering in Scientific American asks “Is Your Child Gay?”

• As Above, So Below (1981) by Tom Tom Club | Genius Of Love (1981) by Tom Tom Club | Mea Culpa (1981) by Brian Eno & David Byrne.

Weekend links 117

Illustration and design by Karlheinz Dobsky.

Above and below: samples from Die Lux-Lesebogen-Sammlung, an exhibition of booklets for young people published by Sebastian Lux from 1946–1964. All were designed and illustrated by Karlheinz Dobsky.

• At The American Scholar: “Vladimir Nabokov’s understanding of human nature anticipated the advances in psychology since his day,” says Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd, and An Unquenchable Gaiety of Mind: “On visits to Cambridge University late in life, Jorge Luis Borges offered revealing last thoughts about his reading and writing,” says George Watson.

• The British Library releases The Spoken Word: “A rare collection of recordings featuring the American writer William S Burroughs and the British-born artist Brion Gysin.” Related: Interzone – A William Burroughs Mix by Timewriter.

• Charting the Outlaws: Christopher Bram (again) talking to Frank Pizzoli about his recent study Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America.

• The BBC asks “Where are you on the global fat scale?” I’ve always been thin but was still surprised to find my BMI at the very bottom of the scale.

The “otherness” of Ballard, his mesmeric glazedness, is always attributed to the two years he spent in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai (1943–45). That experience, I think, should be seen in combination, or in synergy, with the two years he spent dissecting cadavers as a medical student in Cambridge (1949–51). Again the dichotomy: as a man he was ebulliently social (and humorous), but as an artist he is fiercely solitary (and humourless). The outcome, in any event, is a genius for the perverse and the obsessional, realised in a prose style of hypnotically varied vowel sounds (its diction enriched by a wide range of technical vocabularies). In the end, the tensile strength of The Drowned World derives not from its action but from its poetry.

Martin Amis on The Drowned World by JG Ballard.

• The Chickens and the Bulls: “The rise and incredible fall of a vicious extortion ring that preyed on prominent gay men in the 1960s.”

• It’s that Zone again: Jacob Mikanowski on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Geoff Dyer’s Zona.

• Scans of the rare film programme for London screenings of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Illustration and design by Karlheinz Dobsky.

• “The web is a Library of Babel that could go the way of the Library of Alexandria.”

• Fila Arcana: alchemy- and occult-themed embroidery by Mina Sewell Mancuso.

• A Very Edgy Alice In A Very Weird Wonderland: illustrations by Pat Andrea.

• Malka Spigel reveals a new track from her third solo album.

• John Martin and the Theatre of Subversion.

• Olafur Eliasson: Little Sun at Tate Modern.

• Meanwhile, back in 1972: Mahavishnu Orchestra live at the BBC (30 mins), and the complete performance of the MC5 on Beat Club (29 mins).

Weekend links 99

From the Crystal Saga portfolio (1986) by Moebius. Via Quenched Consciousness.

Moebius: A while ago, [science fiction] was filled with monstrous rocket ships and planets; it was a naive and materialistic vision, which confused external space with internal space, which saw the future as an extrapolation of the present. It was a victim of an illusion of a technological sort, of a progression without stopping towards a consummation of energy. But we’ve completely changed that vision. It’s been a sharp, radical change, and somewhat brutal.
HM: Why brutal?
Moebius: Because all those beautiful projects we believed in are gone. But the real sense of science fiction is the discovery that the voyage is interior, and the real energy, the rockets of the past, is what is contained in people’s spirits.
HM: One doesn’t have to read other people’s visions then, one can make the discovery oneself?
Moebius: Well, that, and also the fact that the “new planet” of old science fiction is right here: it’s the Earth.

The Moebius Interview by Diana K. Bletter, Heavy Metal, August 1980.

RIP Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, one of the great artists of the 20th century. My approach to drawing comics was almost wholly derived from the illustrational style of the French, Belgian and other artists being published in Heavy Metal magazine in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Many of the stories were appearing in English for the first time, and for me they revitalised a medium in which (undergrounds aside) I’d lost all interest. It wasn’t only the exceptional artwork that was attractive. The narratives of Moebius, Druillet, Bilal and co. presented a more sophisticated approach to science fiction and fantasy than the simple-minded fare filling the superhero titles or the pages of 2000 AD. Moebius’s work was wittier, sexier and far more imaginative than any American comics I’d seen up to that time. Some of the stories read like graphic equivalents of New Worlds-era science fiction so it came as no surprise to find Moebius drawing a strip called The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius (the title was later amended at Moorcock’s request) while Druillet in his September 1980 Heavy Metal interview mentioned enjoying books by William Burroughs, Michael Moorcock and Thomas Disch, and singled-out Ballard’s Crash as a favourite novel. Without the examples of Druillet and Moebius (and the intoxicating inspiration of the October 1979 issue of Heavy Metal) I wouldn’t have spent 17 months adapting The Call of Cthulhu as a comic strip.

Hasko Baumann’s 2007 documentary, Moebius Redux: A Life in Pictures (some of which can be seen on YouTube) is a good place to start when trying to appraise Jean Giraud’s extensive career. The film is now available on DVD.

Update:
• The hour-long cut of Moebius Redux has been posted to Vimeo
• An obituary by Kim Thompson at The Comics Journal
• The Moebius posts at But Does It Float

From Les Yeux du Chat (1978) by Jodorowsky & Moebius. Via Quenched Consciousness.

• “Naked Lunch,” Ballard wrote later, “was a grenade tossed into the sherry party of English fiction.” The criss-crossing careers of JG Ballard and William Burroughs are examined in detail at RealityStudio. Related: The Discipline of D.E. (1982) by Gus Van Sant and The Unlimited Dream Company (1983) by Sam Scoggins.

• Dr John’s forthcoming album, Locked Down, has been produced by The Black Keys‘ Dan Auerbach. Those of us who favour the Doctor’s voodoo-inflected early albums are hoping this might mean he gets groove back after wandering for years in an MOR swamp. One of the new recordings, Revolution, sounds promising.

I don’t think sexuality is fixed anymore. I think more from the gay male side than the lesbian side, there is often a wish for things to be fixed. I heard Lady Gaga’s Born This Way and I don’t know why they like it. Maybe, they need more certainty than girls do. For me, it’s like why do you care anyway? Maybe you were, maybe you weren’t. What’s the big deal? I can’t connect to that emotionally, so it baffles me.

Jeanette Winterson talks to Sassafras Lowrey.

• “In [Jacob’s Room], [Virginia] Woolf makes the subject matter not Jacob himself but the ways in which we know and don’t know each other – the gaps in our knowledge.” Alexandra Harris on Modernism in art and literature.

• The Northwest Film Forum in Seattle hosts Magick in Cinema on 5th April, an evening of occult-themed short films which includes a rare screening of Curtis Harrington’s Wormwood Star.

• John Bertram’s Lolita cover competition from 2009 is due to appear in June as a book-length study entitled Recovering Lolita. Bertram previews the contents here.

• “Erotic fiction is having a steamy renaissance and its hottest authors are women.”

• LSD helps to treat alcoholism.

• The other Moebius (Dieter): News (1980) by Moebius & Plank | Tollkühn (1981) by Moebius & Plank | Conditionierer (1981) by Moebius & Plank.

Weekend links 98

The Arcimboldo Effect again. An undated postcard from the image section of A Virtual Wunderkammer: Early Twentieth Century Erotica in Spain.

“I took George Clinton and Bootsy Collins to the Battle Station for the first time, and they left feeling like they’d just had a close encounter,” said the bassist and music producer Bill Laswell, who met Rammellzee in the early 1980s and remained one of the few people who saw him regularly.

Rammellzee’s Work and Reputation Re-emerge

• Also in the NYT: China Miéville on Apocalyptic London: “Everyone knows there’s a catastrophe unfolding, that few can afford to live in their own city. It was not always so.” Reverse the perspective and find Iain Sinclair writing in 2002 about Abel Ferrara’s The King of New York: “A memento mori of the century’s ultimate city in meltdown.”

• The Inverted Gaze: Queering the French Literary Classics in America by François Cusset. Related: Glitterwolf Magazine is asking for submissions from LGBT writers/artists/photographers.

• The vinyl releases of Cristal music by Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet continue to be scarce and unreissued. Mark Morb has a high-quality rip of the group’s No. 4 EP here.

• Henri’s Walk to Paris, the children’s book designed by Saul Bass in 1962, is being republished. Steven Heller takes a look.

As the critic Jon Savage points out, even rock’n’roll’s very roots, the blues, contained a weird gay subculture. The genre was home to songs such as George Hannah’s Freakish Man Blues, Luis Russell’s The New Call of the Freaks, and Kokomo Arnold’s Sissy Man Blues. “I woke up this morning with my pork grindin’ business in my hand,” offers Arnold, adding, “Lord, if you can’t send me no woman, please send me some sissy man.”

Straight and narrow: how pop lost its gay edge by Alexis Petridis

• David Pelham: The Art of Inner Space. James Pardey interviews the designer for Ballardian.

• BBCX365: Johnny Selman designs an entire year of news stories.

• Sarah Funke Butler on Nabokov’s notes for Eugene Onegin.

• Leslie S. Klinger on The cult of Sherlock Holmes.

• How piracy built the US publishing industry.

• SynthCats

• The Light Pours Out Of Me (1978) by Magazine | Touch And Go (1978) by Magazine | Motorcade (1978) by Magazine | Feed The Enemy (1979) by Magazine | Cut-Out Shapes (1979) by Magazine.

Weekend links 94

Mateo (2011), carved wood sculpture by Bruno Walpoth.

“Dennis Potter’s [The Singing Detective] is 25 years old but still feels avant garde,” says Stephen Armstrong. No fucking kidding, I watched the DVDs again last weekend. Potter’s drama featured non-linear flashbacks, song-and-dance hallucination sequences, an intertextual sub-plot, and a central character who was vitriolic, misanthropic, misogynist and covered from head-to-toe in flaking skin. This wasn’t exiled to an arts channel ghetto but was primetime viewing, Sunday evenings on BBC 1. • Related: “Is Dennis Potter’s singalong noir miniseries the all-time pinnacle of television drama? Graham Fuller thinks it is.”

• American band Earth are using Kickstarter to fund their next project, Wonders from the House of Albion, an LP/CD/DVD/book combining their music with “field recordings from various megalithic and other sites of human/fairy encounters across the UK, also the use of ritual and folkloric magical practices”. Dylan Carlson & Adrienne Davies discuss their work here.

…sort of like Nabokov’s objection to Our Lady of the Flowers, which he saw as a masterpiece but thought, “Why isn’t this book about women?” Nabokov hated homosexuality and was very edgy around it, partly because his own brother was homosexual and his uncle. And he believed that it was hereditary, so he was always nervous about it.

Edmund White chooses five favourite gay novels. Related: a dance adaptation by Earthfall of Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys.

• “The Belbury Tales is the kind of record you feel should have come out on Vertigo around ’73, but never actually did.” Belbury Poly‘s Jim Jupp on ploughman’s lunches, prog rock and avoiding “Clarkson/Wakeman territory”.

• Morbid Curiosity: The Richard Harris Collection, an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center exploring “the iconography of death across cultures and traditions spanning nearly six thousand years”.

• Geoff Dyer’s Zona, an exegesis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, is officially out at the end of this month. The book is reviewed here and here.

• “Through a blurry electronic prism“: MetaFilter traces a history of analogue video synthesis.

• Dylan Ricci‘s wonderful photography of the male body has moved to a new location.

• Infinite Forest by Studio a+i, a design for an AIDS memorial in New York City.

• Susan Cain discussing “the power of introverts” at Scientific American.

• Strange Flowers on that icon of Middle Eastern music, Umm Kulthum.

• Ewan Morrison on “The self-epublishing bubble”.

• Winter Sleep (2007) by Valgeir Sigurdsson feat. Dawn McCarthy | Black (2008) by Ben Frost with Valgeir Sigurdsson, Sam Amidon & Sigrídur Sunna Reynisdóttir | Unbreakable Silence (2011) by Ben Frost & Daníel Bjarnason