Cover art by Mike Hinge.
• “[The Family] is an unforgettable fusion of journalism and poetic prose that still holds up precisely because it has no use for category, for genre, or for being anything other than its own unique, obsessive self.” Sarah Weinman on how Ed Sanders wrote the definitive account of the Manson murders.
• “The best-known detail of Sartre’s bad trip is Simone de Beauvoir’s anecdote of him being haunted for weeks after by lobster-like creatures scuttling just beyond his field of vision.” Mike Jay on Jean-Paul Sartre (and Walter Benjamin) under the influence of mescaline.
• The MGM film of The Wizard of Oz had its US premiere 80 years ago today. Of Oz the Wizard is a cut-up of the entire film by Matt Busy which rearranges every piece of dialogue (and all the credits) alphabetically.
• “The screenwriter Nagisa Oshima complained that Mishima’s suicide ‘failed to satisfy our Japanese aesthetic’ because it was ‘too elaborate.'” Anna Sherman on Yukio Mishima in Ichigaya.
• “Anarchists don’t like restrictive labels, including the word ‘anarchism’.” Terry Eagleton reviewing The Government of No One by Ruth Kinna.
• At Strange Flowers: Schloss Zwickledt, home of artist and author Alfred Kubin.
• More French music: Zeuhl collection, a list of recommended listening.
• Caro C on Janet Beat, a pioneer of British electronic music.
• John Boardley on pomp, type and circumstance.
• 10 Goth cheeses and what to pair with them.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Peter Sellers Day.
• Longing, Love, Loss by Majeure.
• The Lobster (1968) by Fairport Convention | Death Valley 69 (1985) by Sonic Youth | Return To Oz (2004) by Scissor Sisters
You had to figure Sartre would see the lobsters.
The Janet Beat recordings are pretty terrific. Sounds like the soundtrack from a terrific SF movie that never got made. Am I to understand there will be a hardcopy release? I would like to have that.
All my literate life I’ve heard the story of the infamous Mishima suicide but have never read a word. IS he a beautiful writer? Where do I begin?
I’m in the same position with Mishima, I know a great deal about his life–I watched the excellent Paul Schrader film again recently–but haven’t read any of his novels. I’ve had a copy of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion sitting on a shelf for ages. I don’t know jow well writing that the Japanese find beautiful survives translation (the writer of the article above to be a Japanese speaker). The prose of Temple… doesn’t seem particularly striking compared to notable Anglophone stylists such as Nabokov or Cormac McCarthy or (on my reading stack at the moment) Angela Carter. John Hurt reads passages from Mishima’s writings in this TV documentary:
http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2016/01/06/the-strange-case-of-yukio-mishima/
I imagine a release for Janet Beat’s music will be forthcoming at some point. The works of her contemporaries like Daphne Oram have been given a lot of attention in recent years, and there’s a definite demand for anything that involves older forms of electronics.