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Weekend links 621

Holmes’s fog-horn apparatus, 1875.

• “Have scientists designed the perfect chocolate?” According to Betteridge, the answer would have to be “no”, even more so when the scientists only seem to have reinvented the Flake which Cadbury have been making since 1920. But the story does tell you something about “edible metamaterials” and even “edible holograms”.

• “In The Foghorn’s Lament, I talk about someone called The Fogmaster, who apparently used to do guerrilla foghorn performances…his ringtones are still available.” Jennifer Lucy Allan on foghorns past and present.

• “The story of Les Rallizes Dénudés is almost that of fan fiction. Fans know some basic details and the rest is conjecture and imagination.” Patrick St. Michel explores the occluded history of the Japanese rock band.

The Wharton completist may recognize some of the raw material for these stories in her earlier works. For instance, she used the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone in a 1912 verse play before finding its subtle final expression in “Pomegranate Seed,” in which the ghostly letters keep the New York lawyer figuratively tethered to the underworld. And a 1926 volume of poems contained an experimental riff on a dead woman returning home on All Souls’ Day, published over a decade before Wharton revisited the holiday in her final short story. The ghost story form transforms both these familiar materials and her evergreen themes: Once some donnée becomes a ghost story, what may have been just an amusing character study acquires a participatory element, since readers must meet her halfway in becoming scared. To do so involves truly contemplating what exactly it is in these texts—and it is never the literal ghosts—that elicits a chill.

Krithika Varagur on Edith Wharton’s ghosts

• Gaspar Noé’s favourite films. Elsewhere, Noé and Dario Argento talk about Noé’s latest feature, Vortex, while later this month Arrow are giving Enter the Void an overdue UK blu-ray release.

• Gay utopia: recent photographic portraits by Matthew Leifheit of Fire Island.

• Yogaville, 1993: more historic film of Alice Coltrane performing.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: The Maysles Brothers Day.

• Sugar Chocolate Machine (1967) by The Beatstalkers | Chocolate Machine (1993) by Sandoz | Chocolate Jesus (1999) by Tom Waits

Weekend links 615

Tesla does the Astro. Hunter Dukes at Public Domain Review examines the promotion of Nikola Tesla’s ideas via this famous photograph.

• Coming soon from Side Real Press: Kokain—The Modern Revue, a magazine produced in Vienna that ran for five issues during 1925. “Original copies are so rare that it scarcely appears in any of the literature relating to the Weimar period and its contents have remained almost entirely ignored and certainly untranslated. Until now.”

• “Magritte had gotten this far in life by refusing to obey anyone, and in a way his disobedience proved that he understood Surrealism better than the leader of the Surrealists.” Jackson Arn reviewing Magritte: A Life by Alex Danchev.

• “Go as far into your dream as possible and find your own unique voice.” Meredith Monk (again) talking to Elizabeth Aubrey.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley by Phil Baker.

• At Spoon & Tamago: The natural world springs to life in kirie paintings by Tamami Kubota.

• Antonia Mufarech on why sunflowers are Ukraine’s national flower.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Etienne-Louis Boullée’s unbuildable tombs.

• Mix of the week: I Can’t Go For That by The Ephemeral Man.

• New music: Triumph Of The Oak by The Lord.

• RIP Philip Jeck.

• Tesla (1997) by Jimi Tenor | Tesla (2011) by They Might Be Giants | Tesla Coil (2016) by Xhei

Weekend links 614

Uncredited cover art for the forthcoming Ghost Power, the debut album from the group of the same name, a collaboration between Jeremy Novak (Dymaxion) and Tim Gane (Stereolab, Cavern Of Anti-Matter).

• Objective correlatives: “In compiling the following list of influences and inspirations for my memoir, Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, I had a certain, specific range of aesthetic experiences in mind,” says Stephen Shore.

• “Smoking toad has been likened, in one guide to psychedelics, to ‘being strapped to the nose of a rocket that flies into the sun and evaporates.'” Kimon de Greef on The Pied Piper of Psychedelic Toads.

• “I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that before there was language there was music,” says Meredith Monk.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Obsolete Spells – Poems and Prose from Victor Neuburg and the Vine Press.

• “…scepticism is not simply about knowledge or language. It is a way of life,” says Nicholas Tampio.

• Life during wartime: Jonathan Wright on Radio Tisdas and the roots of Tinariwen.

• Mix of the week: A Hallow Ground mix for The Wire.

• Volunteers rally to archive Ukrainian web sites.

• The Strange World of…Ahmed Abdul-Malik.

• I Put A Spell On You (1965) by Nina Simone | Cast A Spell (1969) by The Open Mind | Spinning A Spell (1970) by Mystic Siva

Weekend links 604

Poster by Chris Ware for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010).

• “He is a proponent of “slow cinema,” which is to say, movies that inspire reflection because they are unhurried but fluid, clear but framed by mystery.” Hilton Als on the metaphysical world of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

• “You could take off your clothes and lay in the sun, nude, with other guys looking for sex, right in Manhattan. And the police didn’t care. It was safe…” Stanley Stellar on his photographs of New York’s “Gay Piers”.

• At Wormwoodiana: An interview with RB Russell who talks about his new book, Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography.

• New music: Mysterium by Held By Trees; A Journey by Hinako Omori; Waves by The Soundcarriers.

• Get some cosmic perspective with an updated version of Charles & Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten.

• You Cut Your Hair and Made a Friend: Richard Conway on Ladytron’s 604 and Light & Magic.

• At Unquiet Things: The Tawdry Technicolor Horrors of Vicente B. Ballestar.

• Alexis Petridis compiles a list of the late James Mtume’s greatest recordings.

• Steven Heller’s Font of the Month is Valvolina.

• Slow Motion (1978) by Ultravox | Slow And Low (1995) by Tetsu Inoue | Slow Burning Ghosts (1996) by Paul Schütze

Weekend links 601

The Innocents (1961), one of the great cinematic ghost stories.

• “Out of the many adaptations, Jack Clayton’s [The Innocents] is considered the benchmark. The film celebrated its 60th anniversary this year, having premiered in London on the 24th of November, 1961. Considering the sheer number of competitors to Clayton’s version, it is telling of the film’s qualities that it still stands far and above its many peers. In fact, it is difficult to see James’s story without those stark black-and-white images of the film coming to mind, as well as its stunning central performance by Deborah Kerr. Suffice to say, 60 years on, James’s screen ghosts still haunt.” Adam Scovell on the many adaptations of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

• “I wanted to turn sex into art because art makes sense of life.” Jack Fritscher talks to photographer Rick Castro about gay S&M fetishes, Drummer magazine, Robert Mapplethorpe, and his BDSM porn studio, Palm Drive Video.

• “Fela was a very good human resources manager.” Lemi Ghariokwu, creator of over 2,000 album covers, talks to Nathan Evans about his time working for Fela Kuti.

I’ve been approached several times to ‘make an NFT’. So far nothing has convinced me that there is anything worth making in that arena. ‘Worth making’ for me implies bringing something into existence that adds value to the world, not just to a bank account. If I had primarily wanted to make money I would have had a different career as a different kind of person. I probably wouldn’t have chosen to be an artist. NFTs seem to me just a way for artists to get a little piece of the action from global capitalism, our own cute little version of financialisation. How sweet—now artists can become little capitalist assholes as well.

Brian Eno on the fool’s-goldrush du jour

• At Vimeo: The Snail on the Slope, a film of generative processes by Vladimir Todorovic based on the strange science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

• At Dangerous Minds: an exploration of Eight Songs for a Mad King by Peter Maxwell Davies, “one of the most insane pieces of music ever written”.

• “This is how one ought to see, how things really are.” Ido Hartogsohn on Aldous Huxley’s mescaline experiments.

• Always an essential guide: The Wire magazine’s releases of year.

• The end of December brings us Alan Bennett’s diary at the LRB.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Ryoji Ikeda Day.

• Innocenti (1992) by Brian Eno | Innocent Square [excerpt] (2011) by Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøm | First In An Innocent World (2016) by The Pattern Forms