Au Lion d’or (1965) by Mimi Parent.
• After the recent announcement of Jon Hassell’s health issues it’s good to see he has a new album on the way at the end of July. Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) follows the form of the first volume, Seeing Through Pictures (2018), in reworking elements of earlier recordings into new forms. Not remixes, more reimaginings, and a process that Hassell has been applying to his own work for many years, most notably on his collaboration with Peter Freeman, The Vertical Collection (1997). The latter is an album which is impossible to find today and really ought to be reissued, together with more scarcities from the Hassell catalogue.
• Death of a typeface: John Boardley on Robert Granjon’s Civilité, a type design intended to be the national typeface of France but which fell out of favour. It wasn’t completely forgotten however; I was re-reading Huysmans’ À Rebours a couple of weeks ago, and Civilité is mentioned there as being a type that Des Esseintes chooses for some of his privately-printed books.
• At Plutonium Shores: Kurosawa versus Leone in A Fistful of Yojimbo. Christopher Frayling makes a similar analysis in his landmark study, Spaghetti Westerns (1981), but I didn’t realise that Leone had based so many of his shots on Kurosawa’s film.
• More lockdown art: Seen from Here: Writing in the Lockdown is a collection of new writing edited by Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat. A PDF book whose sales will go to support the Trussell Trust, a UK food bank charity.
• The week’s culture guides: Ben Cardew on where to start with the back catalogue of Miles Davis, and Hayley Scanlon on where to begin with the films of Yasujiro Ozu.
• “We can no longer ignore the potential of psychedelic drugs to treat depression,” says Robin Carhart-Harris.
• At Dangerous Minds: Laraaji returns with a new album, Sun Piano, and a preview of the same, This Too Shall Pass.
• Mixes of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. XXI by David Colohan, and XLR8R Podcast 647 by The Orb.
• Penelope Rosemont on the humorous Surrealism of Mimi Parent.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jeff Jackson presents Free Jazz Day.
• The Golden Lion (1967) by Lomax Alliance | Dread Lion (1976) by The Upsetters | Gehenna Lion (1982) by Chrome
John, a belated thank-you for the inclusion on the Weekend roll call. I’m not sure my effort is worthy enough to stand alongside the brilliance of Dennis Cooper and the other regular Weekenders but thanks nonetheless. I’m blogging again after another prolonged period of inactivity, and while I don’t have much of a readership these days (those referrals are appreciated!), I’m enjoying the quiet, reflective space that blogging provides. I’ve been increasingly withdrawing from various social media platforms these past few months, and it’s made the virtual life a far more satisfying experience. I never truly got the hang of Twitter, so it was a pleasure to finally obliterate my account (delete seems too soft a word for it!). I’m sure my 23 followers won’t mind, I’m just relieved to be away from the aggressive, illiterate, narcissistic mob – if I never hear the word “f*ckwit” again it will be too soon. Thanks again for the mention.
You’re welcome, of course. If you’re looking for more readers then just keep doing what you do. There is an audience still for blogs despite the attention-drain of social media, especially for longer pieces of writing that have something worthwhile to say. One of the many problems with Twitter is the nature of the medium, the way it chops up thoughts into small pieces. This leads to the thread plague, with people writing mini essays in threaded tweets instead of writing a longer post elsewhere. One of the reasons I’ve stepped away from Twitter is that I could see myself doing this a few times, and each time I kept thinking that I should be writing a blog post instead.
The more important reason I’ve had for detaching from Twitter was the way it creates a kind of continual background static of opinions that you’re forced to pay attention to even if you’re reading past them. And the news, the news, the news, which never ends and will never end. I compared Twitter to a burning cafe; I’d go further and say that discussing anything there is like talking in a burning cafe while a group of jackals are fighting under the table, and every two minutes someone arrives to hit you in the face with a rolled-up newspaper. I decided I’d had enough last year, I was waiting for a convenient moment when I had the free time and felt prepared to deal with a WordPress upgrade. And here we are!