Cover art by Tim White for Weaveworld (1987) by Clive Barker.
• Another week leading with obituaries but that’s where we are just now. Among others, we had film maker Bruce Baillie, cartoonist Mort Drucker, lesbian/gay rights activist Phyllis Lyon, film director Nobuhiko Obayashi, artist Tim White, and music producer Hal Willner. Related to the last: Hal Willner’s Vanishing, Weird New York.
• Open Door is a new recording by Roly Porter from his forthcoming album, Kistvaen. I designed the CD and vinyl packaging for this one.
• From 1995: Peter Wollen on dandyism, decadence and death in Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg’s Performance.
• “Fear, bigotry and misinformation—this reminds me of the 1980s AIDS pandemic,” says Edmund White.
• David Lynch wants you to meditate, maybe make a lamp during self-isolation.
• “Weird tale” by Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett discovered.
• Behind the iron curtain, the final frontier: Soviet space art in pictures.
• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 301 by Asher Levitas.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Raymond Queneau, Party Animal.
• Oren Ambarchi Archive at Bandcamp.
• Japan’s Tourism Poster Awards.
• Hal Willner produces: Juliet Of The Spirits (1981) by Bill Frisell | Apocalypse (1990) by William S. Burroughs | The Masque Of The Red Death (1997) by Gabriel Byrne
I have always seen PERFORMANCE as a quintessentially Decadent film; had it been published as a book in the 1890s, it would have been a John Lane title alongside THE GREAT GOD PAN and THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY.
I trust that you are keeping well and safe this year? Self-isolation and hermitry are no issue for an introvert such as myself, but I do see this pandemic as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it had made our realise how precarious and regimented our society is, allowed us to spend more time with our families; but on the other, it is killing people and isolating the already addled elderly. It is frustrating that this epidemic, and the lockdown, coincides with the beginning of spring, but I am accustomed to the blind cruelty and possible meaningless of the universe.
Hi Liam. There’s definitely something of Huysmans in Performance, with Turner creating his own world inside the house. “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.”
Little has changed for me, thanks. I work from home for people who are often in other countries, and I don’t go out much at the best of times. I’m worried more about people I know, and the general economic situation. I’m also missing not walking around in the spring. I live in a leafy suburb so I always like seeing the leaves and flowers return.