In Memory by Caitlin Hackett who describes her astonishing drawings as “contemporary mythology”.
• David Lynch’s solo album, Crazy Clown Time has just been released so The Guardian last Friday let the artist/director/musician edit their G2 supplement. Xan Brooks tried to get Lynch to open up about his inspirations while elsewhere Lynch had a chat with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons. Of more interest to me was news that some of the deleted sequences from Blue Velvet have been discovered. I’ve known about these for years from a feature in Video Watchdog magazine but never thought we might get to see them. Related: a mixtape by David Lynch & musical collaborator/engineer ‘Big’ Dean Hurley.
• “Book jackets these days, for reasons I won’t unpack, seem to revel, overtly, in wit, conceptual deviousness, unusual clever or droll juxtapositions – we, as a professional community, seem to have elevated the visual bon mot above all other virtues.” Peter Mendelsund in a great post about certain problems in book design, starting with the very problematic question of what to do with Nabokov’s Lolita. Related: Covering Lolita, a gallery of covers through the ages which run the gamut of bad decisions.
• “For his sins Pinocchio is not only hanged but robbed, kidnapped, stabbed, whipped, starved, jailed, punched in the head, and has his legs burned off.” Nathaniel Rich goes back to Carlo Collodi’s original Pinocchio. Disney it ain’t.
Some of Berthold Wolpe’s Faber cover designs are now available as prints from wire-frame whose Pelham/Ballard prints were mentioned here recently. Related (and worth another visit): Faber 20th century classics at Flickr.
• Technical Vocabularies – Games for May, a small collection of poems by Alan Moore & Steve Moore, is now online with authorial permission. Alan’s Beardsley pastiche on the cover is a bonus.
• Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk says the group’s Virgin albums will be reissued next year by Mute. A new edition of The Crackdown? Yes, please.
• “Homo Riot can only think of six or seven street artists in the world who regularly feature gay themes in their work, and he knows all of them.”
• Rub Out The Words: Letters from William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick on the language virus theory of William Burroughs.
• L’exilé de Capri: the connections between Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen and Roger Peyrefitte explored at Strange Flowers.
• Flying cars and monorails: Soviet Russia in the 1960s also had a Gerry Anderson view of the future.
• Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You.
• Baby’s On Fire (1973) by Brian Eno | Baby’s On Fire (live, 1974) by Eno & The Winkies | Baby’s On Fire (live, 1976) by 801 | Baby’s On Fire (1998) by The Venus In Furs.
So that would be a total of four different babies on fire then?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxWjS_XCIQc
There are more cover versions but those are the ones I like (Eno was also in 801, incidentally). The original is still the best on account of Robert Fripp’s incredible guitar solo. After that I prefer the long version by The Venus in Furs (aka Radiohead & others) in Velvet Goldmine which soundtracks a reenactment of Bowie’s guitar-fellatio moment with Mick Ronson, Christian Bale masturbating to a photo of a gay kiss, and a polysexual orgy scene. What a film!
I’m going to have to try and find the DVD.I’ve never seen Velvet Goldmine :-( My life is empty
PS Love the Here Come Warm Jets album cover. Another album I must download to my iPod.
Digesting volume 2 of Samuel Beckett’s letters
http://www.amazon.com/Letters-Samuel-Beckett-1941-1956/dp/0521867940/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320585869&sr=1-2
and now news of a second Burroughs volume! The Word simply will not allow us to settle into the oft threatened “post-literary” world so desired by the Videodrome mindslaves.
Inevitable I suppose that an old carny like Burroughs would have seen through Timothy Leary immediately. Hard to convince people of the counterintuitive notion that, just as a case can be made that JFK was the worst thing that could have happened to the American space program, Leary’s antics set back serious study of the effects of hallucinogens on human consciousness twenty years if not further.
Especially look forward to the correspondence.with Paul Bowles.
Gabriel: There’s a lot of Here Come The Warm Jets in Haynes’ film. Bowie wouldn’t let him use any songs so he got some contemporary musicians to write very good pastiches. Around those you get tracks from Eno’s first album, the first Roxy Music album and a bit of Lou Reed with Satellite Of Love.
Stephen: I think I linked to a review of the first volume of Beckett’s letters. I always seem to miss out on collected letters, not sure why. Many favourite authors have their letters collected yet I don’t have any of them. This is clearly a mistake when I recently spent some time tracking down the source for an Oscar Wilde quote which was from a letter, not his published writings.