Orgasm Addict (1977). Design by Malcolm Garrett; collage by Linder.
• RIP Pete Shelley, Buzzcock and Homosapien. Shelley is celebrated for being in the vanguard of Britain’s punk movement, of course. (Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch was the UK’s first independent single.) But he also loved Can, recorded an album of electronic drones (Sky Yen), and in 1983 successfully blended home-computer graphics with his own brand of superior electronic pop music. Related: Malcolm Garrett’s Buzzcocks band logo at Fonts In Use; B’dum, B’dum: Tony Wilson in 1978 talking to Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto about Buzzcocks and Magazine.
• Winter demands ghost stories so Adam Scovell suggests 10 great winter ghost films. Related: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas presents an A–Z of Women’s Horror Filmmaking.
• Carey Dunne on the rise of underground LSD guides for psychotherapy. Related: “Psychedelics change the perception of time,” says Shayla Love.
• Ex-Neu! guitarist Michael Rother receives the box-set treatment early next year when the Groenland label reissues his early solo albums.
• Jodorowsky, an exhibition devoted to the writer and director, will be staged at El Museo del Barrio, New York, from February next year.
• “From Georges Méliès to Bill and Ted, movie hells remain seriously in hock to the Judeo-Christian playbook,” says Anne Billson.
• The Owl’s Legacy, Chris Marker’s 13-part documentary series on Greek culture, receives its debut DVD release.
• Topic II (1989), a short film by Pascal Baes of pixilated dancers in the night streets of Prague.
• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 274 by Koray Kantarcioglu.
• We are the first humans to hear the winds of the planet Mars.
• Patrick Magee reads The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jean-Louis Trintignant Day.
• Mongolian biker rock: Wolf Totem by The HU.
• The Quietus albums of the year.
• Hell (2001) by Techno Animal ft. Dälek | Hell’s Winter (2011) by Earth | Hell A (2017) by The Bug vs. Earth
I was glad to see CARNIVAL OF SOULS, EVENT HORIZON, and, my personal favourites, Lucio Fulci’s films mentioned in the Hell article. What I love about THE BEYOND, in particular, is how it can be seen, on one level, as an allegory about art, and how it can save the world; the artist hopes to stave off the apocalypse through his paintings, but he is killed by an ignorant mass, and, after death, becomes as murderous and evil as his executioners and imbued with demiurgic powers. I am in the minority, but I consider Fulci superior to Argento when it comes to an emotional level; unlike the latter, Fulci has always struck me as a man exercising his demons, channelling his anger and bitter melancholy through his violent, nightmarish films, but that is just my opinion. I respect Argento, and consider INFERNO my favourite, but his films, to me, lack the feeling that make Fulci and Bava and Soavi’s films compelling.
”Feeling is the third dimension of art; without it we get mere surfaces, however interesting these surfaces may be.”
— David Lindsay