M15, The Whirlpool Galaxy photographed by Martin Pugh. The overall and deep space winner of Astronomy Photographer of the Year, 2012.
• The Final Academy, the series of William Burroughs-themed events that took place in London and Manchester in 1982, will be celebrated at the Horse Hospital, London, on 27th October. Academy 23, a publication edited by Matthew Levi Stevens, will include my report on the Manchester Haçienda performances.
• “Architects are the last people who should shape our cities,” says the thrillingly pugnacious Jonathan Meades in a piece from his new writing collection Museums Without Walls. Andy Beckett reviews the book here.
• Ex-Minimal Compact singer/bassist Malka Spigel talks about her new album, Every Day Is Like The First Day, which can be streamed in full here.
What’s new about the current acknowledgments page is that it’s unsolicited—it appears like an online pop-up ad, benefiting no one but the author and his comrades. This is surely why these afterwords are often so garrulously narcissistic and strewn with clichés. The most radical experimentalist adheres to the most mindless acknowledgments-page formula; the most stinging social critic suddenly becomes Sally Field winning an Oscar.
Sam Sacks at the New Yorker on the blight of novelists’ acknowledgments pages. DG Myers at Commentary Magazine piles on.
• Another streaming album: Composed by Jherek Bischoff. Try Insomnia, Death & The Sea featuring Dawn McCarthy.
• Film of Lindsay Kemp being interviewed in 1977 about his production of Salomé.
• Electronic Performers (2004): a video by Machine Molle for the song by Air.
One of a series of Beardsley-like drawings by Djuna Barnes posted at Strange Flowers. The resurgent Ms. Barnes is mentioned three times in this Terry Castle review of All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen.
• Fictitious Dishes, meals from novels photographed by Dinah Fried.
• Life, the Dinosaurs & Everything: Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino.
• The Baby Died: Morbid Curiosities found in Old Newspapers.
• Portishead’s Adrian Utley gives a tour of his synth collection.
• Minimal Compact: Babylonian Tower (1982) | Not Knowing (1984) | When I Go (1985) | Nil Nil (1987).
I used to really like Minimal Compact but haven’t thought of them in years. Thanks for reminding me!
Hooray for Cohen & Barnes, and for slagging off acknowledgements pages – even the academic ones make me gag.
Always at least one cheer for Calvino – addicted since hearing a review of Weaver’s translation of If on a winter’s night a traveler on Kaleidoscope (I suppose it must have been) – though I’ve never been a fan of Cosmicomics. Perhaps it is time to read it again.
Apologies for the uncharacteristic gush. Either I’m sickening for something or it is the psychoactive scent of roasting beetroot.