No Passing (1954) by Kay Sage.
• More Lovecraftiana: She Walks In Shadows, an illustrated all-woman Lovecraftian anthology, will be published in October. Related: “The octopus genome and the evolution of cephalopod neural and morphological novelties“, a study that’s been filtering through the press as “Do octopuses have alien DNA?”
• “The right to ‘subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism’ is the bedrock of an open, diverse society,” says Kenan Malik in his TB Davie Memorial Lecture.
• Sunn O))) with Attila Csihar at the Berlin Heimathafen. Related: Here’s what you missed at Sunn O)))’s sold out Berlin gig.
Caillois is fascinated by these “beveled buildings,” truly abundant in the Fifteenth, along with an unusually high incidence of blind walls, false façades, and merely ornamental windows, each beloved of his phantoms. In the parts of the arrondissement developed during the postwar period, Caillois’s attention is drawn instead to the ventilator shafts and drainage grates that dot the streets. These structures, built to clear away rainwater or aerate underground garages, have a secret function, according to him. Noting their uncanny similarity to some of the settings in the Weird Tales of HP Lovecraft, he speculates that they may have been constructed to provide the entry points for an extraterrestrial invasion of our planet.
Ryan Ruby on Roger Callois and the phantoms of the Fifteenth Arrondissement
• “I’m really into big moments,” says Julia Holter whose new album, Have You In My Wilderness, is released next month.
• Adrian Utley talks to Peter Zinovieff, co-inventor of the EMS synthesizer. Related: What the Future Sounded Like.
• “Tarkovsky’s Solaris is the anti-2001: A Space Odyssey,” says Marissa Visci.
• Mix of the week: Gizehcast #17 by Rutger Zuydervelt.
• Modernist architecture on film.
• The Call of Ktulu (1984) by Metallica | Cthulhu Dawn (2000) by Cradle of Filth | Cthulhu: A Cryo Chamber Collaboration (2014) by Various Artists
P.Z. Myers gave a good introduction to the Octopus-genome report:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/08/14/friday-cephalopod-its-not-really-an-alien/
Aye yi yi will it ever be possible for a “critic” to appreciate SOLARIS and Tarkovsky without dissing 2001 and Stanley Kubrick? Do I really have to choose? I do hate the Art police.
The funny thing is that Stanislaw Lem’s artistic point of view is much closer to Kubrick’s than it is to Tarkovsky’s. Neither Kubrick or Lem were what I would call raging humanists but to say that Kubrick was only concerned about technology is not smart but a pretty facile reading.
I noticed in Arthur Clarke’s memoir that when Kubrick was looking for a science fiction project (that would eventually become his unproduced version of A.I.) he asked Clarke for some suggestions. Clarke writes he sent Kubrick some of Lem’s work thinking he would find Lem sympathetic. Too bad nothing ever came of it.
I agree, actually, I rate them both, and I’ve had both films on DVD for years.
To reverse Visci’s argument, I’d note how advanced Kubrick’s film is as a piece of cinema: no one today would be allowed to film the final 20 minutes the way he did and expect a major studio to pay millions of dollars for it. And the film is almost a silent one in the sense of what dialogue there is being superfluous to the storytelling. One flaw in Tarkovsky’s films is that people won’t stop talking: they’re always arguing, reciting poetry, philosophising. It’s a very Russian attitude (and it’s also how AT was himself if you read his diaries) but I have to be in the mood for that side of his work.