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Illustration by Alfred Pearse for The Horror of Studley Grange by Clifford Halifax & LT Meade. Via<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2022 The Haunting<\/em> at 60: Guy Lodge<\/a> asks “Is it still one of the scariest films ever made?” I say yes but then it’s always been a favourite. Also, Robert Wise is something of a cult figure in this house, not for his big-budget directing jobs on The Sound of Music<\/em> and Star Trek: The Motion Picture<\/em>, but for his RKO horror entries (The Curse of the Cat People<\/em> and The Body Snatcher<\/em>), his film noir (Born To Kill<\/em>, The Set-Up<\/em>, Odds Against Tomorrow<\/em>), and two smaller science-fiction films from different decades, The Day the Earth Stood Still<\/em> and The Andromeda Strain<\/em>. All this and he also edited Citizen Kane<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u2022 “This show makes an irrefutable case for her technical mastery while also affirming her as a first-rate fabulist whose disparate influences\u2014chivalric romance, medieval architecture, tarot, psychology, astronomy, and much more\u2014cohere into a visionary whole.” Jeremy Lybarger<\/a> reviewing Science Fictions<\/em>, the retrospective devoted to the art of Remedios Varo.<\/p>\n \u2022 New music: Improvisation On Four Sequences<\/em><\/a> by Suzanne Ciani; Incorporeal<\/em><\/a> by Hidden Horse; Atlas<\/em><\/a> by Laurel Halo; Infinito (Version)<\/em><\/a> by Moritz von Oswald.<\/p>\n While Ballard\u2019s more outwardly conventional books may give us solider, more stable realities, what these realities often present…is a child (or childlike figure) frolicking against a backdrop provided by the destruction of an older order of reality that the world previously took for granted. It\u2019s a cipher for his oeuvre as a whole: endlessly playing among the ruins, reassembling the broken or \u201cfound\u201d pieces (styles, genres, codes, histories) with a passion rendered all the more intense and focused by the knowledge that it\u2019s all\u2014culture, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization\u2014constructed<\/em>, and can just as easily be unconstructed, reverse engineered back down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled together in the first place. To put it in Dorothean: In every context and at every level, Ballard\u2019s gaze is fixed, fixated, on the man behind the curtain, not the wizard.<\/p>\n Tom McCarthy<\/a>: JG Ballard’s Brilliant, Not \u201cGood\u201d Writing<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u2022 At Public Domain Review: Behold the Nebulous Smear: \u2018Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi\u2019s Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars<\/em><\/a> (ca. 1430).<\/p>\n \u2022 At Unquiet Things: Shake, Shiver, and Shriek: The Haunted Gothic Nightmares of George Ziel<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2022 Winners of Nature TTL Photographer of the Year 2023<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2022 The Strange World of…Gavin Bryars<\/a><\/p>\n \u2022 Watch The Stars<\/em><\/a> (1968) by Pentangle | Stars<\/em><\/a> (1983) by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno | Kelly Watch The Stars<\/em><\/a> (1997) by Air<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"