Teenage Lightning (Les Éclairs au-dessous de quatorze ans) (c. 1925) by Max Ernst.
• “There has never been another director who has lain in wait for us with the same wrath or disgust. He is so complicated that finally he became the very thing he was nervous of admitting, a true artist best measured in the company of Patrick Hamilton, Francis Bacon, or Harold Pinter. He saw no reason to like us or himself.” David Thomson on why Alfred Hitchcock’s films still feel dangerous.
• New music: “Habitat, an environmental music collaboration by Berlin based composer Niklas Kramer and percussionist Joda Foerster, is inspired by the drawings of Italian architect Ettore Sottsass. Each of the eight tracks represents a room in an imaginary building.”
• “You could describe Lambkin’s work as a rich sort of ambient music, but largely without the synthetic textures that ambient music often possesses.” Geeta Dayal reviews Solos, a collection of recordings by Graham Lambkin.
• Tom of Finland: Pen and Ink, 1965–1989 is an exhibition at the David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, which runs to 1st May. The website includes a virtual tour.
• More revenant gay art: Bibliothèque Gay reviews a new Spanish translation of Baiser de Narcisse by Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen.
• Introducing Ark Surreal: “Surreal collages by Allan Randolph Kausch. Some cute and sweet, others dark and intriguing.”
• At Artforum: Albert Mobilio on Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery, and Imagination in American Realism.
• At Spoon & Tamago: Shizuoka is installing monuments inspired by their plastic model industry.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jordan Belson Day.
• RIP Bertrand Tavernier.
• Teenage Lightning 2 (1991) by Coil | Teenage Lightning (1992) by Skullflower | Teenage Lightning (Surgeon Remix) (2001) by Coil
I’m sure everyone knows of at least one artist whose work is celebrated but that for whatever reason you just can’t connect with. Alfred Hitchcock is mine. Over the years I’ve tried. I really have. But I don’t get it. The only one of his films that I admire is Notorious because it features Ingrid Bergman at her most luminous, and Claude Rains who in my opinion steals the whole movie.
I’m in the pro-Hitchcock camp, obviously, but I understand the dissents. Some people find his films too carefully managed, the way Spielberg’s were until he started to loosen up and expand his style. I enjoy the artificiality and the formalism: Rear Window is a big favourite.
I had a home Hitchcock season a couple of years ago, watching blu-rays of almost everything he’d done from The Lady Vanishes onward. It was fascinating watching his work evolve in this way, as well as reinforcing the sense that the world in his films is almost entirely a malevolent and paranoid one. He shares with David Lynch an ability to find menace in the mundane.