{"id":21639,"date":"2022-06-04T19:30:47","date_gmt":"2022-06-04T18:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=21639"},"modified":"2025-09-24T21:14:01","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T20:14:01","slug":"weekend-links-624","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2022\/06\/04\/weekend-links-624\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekend links 624"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"griffiths.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

An alphabet designed by Ben Griffiths<\/a>. Via<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2022 “From the cellular to the galactic, via Paleolithic cave markings to the trace impressions left by drone photography on our mind\u2019s eye, incorporating dancing plagues, communist psychedelic witches, hyper-sexual fungi, chthonic descents, and skyward ascents, The Neon Hieroglyph<\/em> weaves together a series of painterly and poetic considerations on a feminized history of the rye fungus Ergot, the chemical basis of LSD.” Coming soon from Strange Attractor: The Neon Hieroglyph<\/em><\/a>, a book, LP and folio of prints by Tai Shani<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2022 “3rd From The Sun<\/em><\/a>\u00a0was the last album of Chrome\u2019s imperial phase, and it cemented their status as one of the most inhuman and superhuman rock bands that America ever produced. More people need to recognize.” Agreed. (previously<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u2022 “People often say, ‘How can you be so disciplined?’ It\u2019s easy. Otherwise, I would have to go work for somebody else!” John Waters<\/a> (again). Also here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’ve always thought that literature should be entertaining as well as instructive\u2014a very old-fashioned idea but one that I adhere to. When I set out to write in this way\u2014particularly in this way, a political way, if you want to call it that\u2014I intend to make a donation, to try to give something. There doesn’t seem to me to be any point in giving more misery or exacerbating unhappiness through some kind of hyper-intellectual, pyrotechnical writing about unhappiness and the shit that we all find ourselves in. That’s been done plenty. I think first of all that it doesn’t need to be done any more and second of all there’s a kind of reactionary aspect to it which is that the emphasizing of misery without any anti-pessimism, as you put it, would be simply seduction into inactivity and political despair. In other words, to do politics at all on any level, especially on a revolutionary or on an insurrectionary level, there has to be some anti-pessimism\u2014I won’t say optimism because that sounds so fatuous, futile; but anti-pessimism is a nice phrase. And there’s a deliberate attempt at that in the writing. Then again it’s a matter of my personality, I guess, inclined towards the notion of the healing laugh to some extent. We have an anarchist thinker in America, John Zerzan, who wrote an essay against humour which maybe is one of the things I was reacting against. Even if irony is counter-revolutionary which I think it might be to a certain extent I don’t see any way in which you could say that laughter itself is counter-revolutionary. This doesn’t make any sense to me unless you mean to get rid of language and thought altogether, which is just another form of nihilism. So as long as you’re going to accept culture on some level you’re certainly going to have to accept humour. And as long as you’re going to have to accept humour you might as well see humour as potentially revolutionary.<\/p>\n

Peter Lamborn Wilson<\/a> aka Hakim Bey, who died last month. Many of Wilson’s writings are available at The Anarchist Library<\/a>. From 2008: A poem for Leonora Carrington<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2022 “It\u2019s such a fundamental question,” says Midori Takada<\/a>, “why do humans need to make rhythm, and the space that structure creates?”<\/p>\n

\u2022 “14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture” by Ted Gioia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2022 A trailer for Earwig<\/em><\/a>, the new film from Lucile Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107, based on a story by Brian Catling.<\/p>\n

\u2022 New music: Aura<\/a><\/em> by Hatis Noit, and Warmth Of The Sun<\/em><\/a> by Pye Corner Audio.<\/p>\n

\u2022 At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…SE Hinton Rumble Fish<\/em><\/a> (1975).<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u201cHear tracks from the 1980s Peruvian electronic underground<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Intermittent Eyeball Fodder<\/a> at Unquiet Things.<\/p>\n

\u2022 West Tulsa Story<\/em><\/a> (1983) by Stewart Copeland | K\u00e1la\/Assassins Of Hakim Bey<\/em><\/a> (1997) by Coil | Neon Lights<\/em><\/a> (2000) by Se\u00f1or Coconut Y Su Conjunto<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An alphabet designed by Ben Griffiths. Via. \u2022 “From the cellular to the galactic, via Paleolithic cave markings to the trace impressions left by drone photography on our mind\u2019s eye, incorporating dancing plagues, communist psychedelic witches, hyper-sexual fungi, chthonic descents, and skyward ascents, The Neon Hieroglyph weaves together a series of painterly and poetic considerations … Continue reading “Weekend links 624”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: Weekend links 624","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,42,4,851,29,21,7,3,44,14,17,10],"tags":[12266,7345,3534,2272,3109,1954,12267,1812,731,124,8178,8784,2635,4222,12268,5305,3978,98,7094,7183],"class_list":["post-21639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-books","category-design","category-drugs","category-electronica","category-fantasy","category-film","category-music","category-painting","category-politics","category-psychedelia","category-typography","tag-ben-griffiths","tag-brian-catling","tag-chrome-group","tag-coil-group","tag-dennis-cooper","tag-hakim-bey","tag-hatis-noit","tag-john-waters","tag-leonora-carrington","tag-lsd","tag-lucile-hadzihalilovic","tag-midori-takada","tag-peter-lamborn-wilson","tag-pye-corner-audio","tag-se-hinton","tag-senor-coconut-y-su-conjunto","tag-stewart-copeland","tag-strange-attractor","tag-tai-shani","tag-ted-gioia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-5D1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21639\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}