{politics} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 753

Grow (1970) by Linda Brewer.Via.

• The week in work-related reviews: Raymond Tyler reviewed the Bumper Book of Magic at Religious Socialism, while James Palmer did the same at Foreign Policy. Meanwhile, Rob Latham at the Los Angeles Review of Books examined the legacy of the New Wave of science fiction with reviews of New Worlds 224, and The Last Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison’s long-delayed story collection.

• “Incline Press is a private fine press publisher in the UK, stubbornly printing with hand set, metal type on a collection of vintage machines, working with poets and artists to make limited edition books and ephemera.”

• New music: Horses In Your Blood, another dose of unhinged weirdness from Moon Wiring Club; The Source by Jon Palmer; and Ekkorääg by Tarotplane.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Rikki Ducornet The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade (1999).

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “Rare atlas of astronomy from the Dutch Golden Age goes on display in England“.

• Old music: Jon Savage’s Space, a space-themed compilation on Caroline True Records.

• At The Daily Heller: Berman’s Book Boom is a boon to graphic design’s legacy.

• At Public Domain Review: Christoph Jamnitzer’s Neuw Grotteßken Buch (1610).

• Mix of the week: A Dungeon Synth mix by Flickers From The Fen for The Wire.

• At Heavy Metal Magazine: The HP Lovecraft Art of John Holmes.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Laurie Anderson.

• I Can Hear The Grass Grow (1967) by The Move | Grow Fins (1972) by Captain Beefheart | The Growing (2011) by The Haxan Cloak

Magic Lantern: A Film about Prague

There are many documentary films about the city of Prague but Magic Lantern is the only one written and presented by playwright Michael Frayn. Very good it is too, a personal view of the city’s political and cultural history which takes in the usual names and subjects: Rabbi Loew and his Golem, Emperor Rudolf II, Rudolf’s alchemists, artists and scholars, photographer Josef Sudek, the ubiquitous Franz Kafka, puppets, automata, and so on. While Frayn discusses the Communist and post-Communist periods there’s a brief clip of Jan Svankmajer’s The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia.

Frayn’s film was directed by Dennis Marks, and broadcast in 1993 as part of the BBC’s long-running Omnibus strand. (There’s a further Svankmajer connection in the person of executive producer Keith Griffiths whose Koninck company produced this film at a time when they were also helping Svankmajer make his features.) Magic Lantern wasn’t the only film that Marks and Frayn made together, and not their first metropolitan essay either. Imagine a City Called Berlin (1974) is a portrait of the former capital of Germany during its Cold War isolation; there’s also The Mask of Gold: A Film about Vienna (1977), and Jerusalem: A Personal History (1984), all of which may be seen at The Dennis Marks Archive. My complaints about YouTube are copious enough to paper the walls of the Hradcany, but the site is at its best when it provides this kind of haven for television history that would be impossible to find elsewhere.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Golem, 1967
• Gustav Meyink’s Prague
• Stone Glory, a film by Jirí Lehovec
• The Face of Prague
• Josef Sudek
• Liska’s Golem
• Das Haus zur letzten Latern
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague

The Idea, a film by Berthold Bartosch

Having mentioned Frans Masereel in the previous post, here’s a short animated film based on one of Masereel’s wordless novels. Masereel’s The Idea (1920) concerns the birth and progress of radical thought in an illiberal society, with the troublesome conception embodied as a naked woman. When the idea escapes into the world the authorities try to cover her nakedness, but their efforts fail to prevent her image being disseminated by the printing press…

Berthold Bartosch was a Czech animator whose 25-minute adaptation of the book was released in 1932. Frans Masereel helped with the creation of the film in its early stages but he lost his patience with the slow pace of the animation process. Bartosch’s film is significant for being one of the first animated dramas to aim self-consciously at art rather than comedy or entertainment for children. Also significant is the score by Arthur Honegger whose use of the ondes Martenot is claimed as the first use of an electronic instrument for cinematic purposes. Bartosch’s animation technique brings to life cut-out figures in nebulous, layered compositions that anticipate the films that Yuri Norstein would be making decades later. It’s a shame that all the online copies of the film are so poor, it ought to be seen in better quality. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Destiny, A Novel in Pictures by Otto Nückel
• Crime and Punishment, a film by Piotr Dumala
• Walls, a film by Piotr Dumala
• The Nose, a film by Alexandre Alexeieff & Claire Parker
• Yuri Norstein animations
• Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward
• Frans Masereel’s city

Weekend links 729

Phosphorus and Hesperus (1881) by Evelyn De Morgan.

• Mix of the week, or possibly the entire year: The Deep Ark, 167 tracks (over 8 hours of music), most of which are from the electronic deluge of the early 1990s. The download link may not work for all browsers—it didn’t for one of mine—but it is active. Via Simon Reynolds who has more about the Deep Ark project.

• At Nautilus: Betsy Mason on the use of stage magic to investigate animal behaviour. “By performing tricks for birds, monkeys, and other creatures, researchers hope to learn how they perceive and think about their world.”

• At The Daily Heller: Mad and the Usual Gang of Idiots. Meanwhile, Mr Heller’s font of the month may prove useful for this election season, a Jonathan Barnbrook design named Moron.

Looking back, you can see a pattern in those eras in which interest in telepathy boomed. Coined by Myers and his fellow psychical researchers in the 1880s, telepathy gained traction because it was formulated inside a moment of scientific and technological revolution, where uncanny transmissions proliferated across the visible and invisible spectrum, seeming to collapse the natural and the supernatural together. In the 1970s, telepathy returned, if under different names, as part of another moment of crisis. The Cold War arms race was an essential part of this, feeding a strange supplemental world of fantasy technologies, from mind control to brainwashing, and playing on an all-too-widespread psychological paranoia around being seen, infiltrated and manipulated by invisible agents.

Roger Luckhurst looks back at a century of psychic research

• New music: Portable Reality Generator by Field Lines Cartographer, and Sublime Eternal Love by Chrystabell and David Lynch.

• Coffee and Chocolates for Two Guitars: Robert Fripp interviewing John McLaughlin in July, 1982.

• Paintings by Ithell Colquhoun currently showing at the Ben Hunter gallery, London.

• At Public Domain Review: Eye Miniatures (ca. 1790–1810).

• ESP (1965) by Miles Davis | ESP (1990) by Deee-lite | ESP (2002) by Comets On Fire

More Surrealist Subversion

It looks like I’m still in the Synchronicity Zone. This PDF of the fourth and final issue of Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion turned up when I was searching for something that had nothing to do with Surrealism in general or the Chicago Surrealist Group in particular; inside there are yet more wolves and mentions of anarchy, although the two aren’t directly connected this time. The fourth number of Arsenal was published in 1989, thirteen years after the third issue, and at 230 pages is the most substantial number of all. Substantial and easily the best of the four, with a wide range of textual and visual material, and less concern with the aesthetic and political arguments of the distant past. There are some impressive collage pieces in this issue, as well as examples of work by painters that were unknown to me which I’ll be following up later.

The editorial tone is generally less belligerent than the earlier issues although Franklin Rosemont is still lobbing verbal grenades at the cultural figures who managed to upset him. As I said in January, you can’t expect much else from a magazine that names itself after a store of weapons. Elsewhere in the issue the writers attempt to compensate once again for André Breton’s dismissal of music as a vehicle for Surrealism although none of the discussion goes very far. The blues and jazz musicians mentioned are all dead ones, and mostly seem to be celebrated for their “liberatory” existence rather than any overtly Surrealist qualities in their music. The attitude seems to be: This music/person is liberatory; Surrealism is liberatory; therefore this music/person is Surrealist. The only reference to the vast ocean of popular music comes with a one-page eulogy to Bob Marley of all people, the safest choice in any discussion of Jamaican music. Reading this you wouldn’t know there was a whole world of deeply weird and very influential dub music out there. I’d argue that there’s more Surrealism in King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown or any number of Lee Perry singles than in the whole of the Marley discography. An opportunity was missed in this issue and the earlier numbers of Arsenal to show the ways in which music—especially the popular variety, not compositions for the concert hall—has been continually Surrealist from the rock’n’roll era to the present day. But this discussion is only a small percentage of the whole journal. If it fails here it leaves an opening for more detailed exploration elsewhere.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Werewolf of Anarchy
• Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion