Fantastical Tree (c. 1830) by Carl Wilhelm Kolbe.
• “It’s just a square and a semi-circle at the end of the day.” Pete Adlington navigates the rapids of high-profile cover design for the UK edition of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and The Sun. I’m not always keen on the minimal approach but the Faber edition is a better design than the equally minimal US cover whose circle in a hand makes it look like a reprint of Logan’s Run. Faber also produced a limited edition with the sun circle wrapped onto sprayed page edges.
• “‘With a mysterious smile on her lips,’ writes the Chilean film director Alejandro Jodorowsky, ‘the painter whispered to me, “What you just dictated to me is the secret. As each Arcana is a mirror and not a truth in itself, become what you see in it. That tarot is a chameleon.”‘” The painter referred to is the now-ubiquitous Leonora Carrington whose own Tarot deck is investigated by Rhian Sasseen.
• “‘Horror is an emotion,’ Douglas E. Winter tells us. I would respectfully like to amend that assertion. Horror is a range of emotions. And each of these moods, if they are to be successful, must be cultivated differently.” Brian J. Showers offers his thoughts on horror fiction.
• “You move from awareness of—and preoccupation with—how sounds affect our bodies, into how that might create a web of connection with the external world—with the natural world.” Annea Lockwood talking to Jennifer Lucy Allan about her career as a composer and sound artist.
• Gay cruising and its geography in cinema and documentary, a list of films by Mike Kennedy. Related: Shiv Kotecha on O Fantasma (2000), a film by João Pedro Rodrigues.
• Coming from Strange Attractor in June: Coil: Camera Light Oblivion, a photographic record by Ruth Beyer of the first live performances by Coil from 2000–2002.
• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on The Star Called Wormwood (1941), a strange novel by Morchard Bishop.
• At Unquiet Things: Ephemeral and Irresistible: The Spectacular Still-life Botanical Drama of Gatya Kelly.
• “Fevers of Curiosity”: Charles Baudelaire and the convalescent flâneur by Matthew Beaumont.
• 1066 and all that: Explore the Bayeux Tapestry online.
• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 311 by Arigto.
• New music: Terrain by Portico Quartet.
• Fever (1956) by Little Willie John | Fever (1972) by Junior Byles | Fever (1980) The Cramps
There is a great documentary on Leonora Carrington on Utube. It was made in 1992 by the BBC. Fascinating lady.
Er, yeah, that documentary is the subject of the post before this one…
Two thoughts:
Annea Lockwood is a treasure. Having her here in Bloomington for our Wounded Galaxies Festival was an honor and a treat. We marked the 50th anniversary of her Piano Burning by burning a piano on the IU campus, with hundreds of people in attendance. The mayor stopped by and stood there with his mouth hanging open, dumbstruck. It was an amazing evening.
Little Willie John’s “Fever” is superior in every way to Peggy Lee’s recording. His life was short and tragic, but his music is astonishing.
I was thinking myself when writing the above that Little Willie John’s version is still the best. That said, I was pleased when Katharine Bigelow put the Cramps version into Near Dark.
Piano burning seems to have been in the air in the late 60s. Jodorowsky’s first feature film, Fando y Lis, was shot in 1968, and features a burning piano in its early scenes. As far as I can tell there’s no connection between his film and Annea Lockwood’s piano, they both seem to have decided to do the same thing at the same time but for different reasons. Jodorowsky is more concerned with the startling image of a piano in flames rather than whatever sound it might make.
How could I have forgotten about Jodorowski’s burning piano?! Anita went into great deal of detail about her inspirations for the project (the first was finding two old pianos on a bank of the Thames), but never mentioned Fando y Lis. Of course, we both know that influences become uprooted, float free, and we no longer remember where they came from.