{psychedelia} – Page 54 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 97

Illustration by Ermanno Iaia. Hard to believe that Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) is only now appearing on DVD in the UK. Arrow Films release a dual-format edition at the end of this month.

• The week in perfume: Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez is reviewed by Emily Gould (“this is a golden age of perfume criticism”) and prompts a meditation on the art and process of scent from Rishidev Chaudhuri.

• Electrical Banana by Norman Hathaway & Dan Nadel is “the first definitive examination of the international language of psychedelia, focusing on the most important practitioners in their respective fields”.

• Sacred Monsters is a forthcoming collection of essays and criticism by Edmund White. Related: Colm Tóibín from 1999 reviewing A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods.

• Medium, a video by Clayton Welham and Sam Williams for Emptyset whose imminent release (also entitled Medium) I’ve designed. Related: Dave Maier on music versus noise.

• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy: the face of US presidential contender Rick Santorum rendered as a collage of (mostly) gay porn. More provocation: All Dead Mormons Are Now Gay.

• Coilhouse discovered a rough copy of Bells of Atlantis (1952), an experimental film which features Anaïs Nin, input from Len Lye and an electronic score by Louis & Bebe Barron.

• “The idea that we should have but two options when it comes to our gender presentation, male or female, has always felt ludicrous to me,” says LaJohn Joseph.

Bely paints “a universe of strange manifestations” which drifts across Apollonovich’s consciousness every night before he falls asleep. We are even shown congeries of images that are shards of events which took place that day for the senator: “all the earlier inarticulacies, rustlings, crystallographic figures, the golden, chrysanthemum-like stars racing through the darkness on rays that resembled myriapods”

Malcom Forbes on Andrei Bely’s masterwork, Petersburg (1916).

• RIP Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press books and the Evergreen Review.

• The Brothers Quay will be at work in Leeds city centre this May. Lucky Leeds.

• Warm Leatherette, a short film by Analogue Solutions.

• Cormac McCarthy, Quantum Copy Editor.

• The importance of being axonometric.

• Always Crashing In The Same Car (1977) by David Bowie | Crash (1980) by Tuxedomoon | Crash Dance (1983) by Yello.

Weekend links: 2012 edition

The Hand of Fate, Life magazine, October, 1912. Artist unknown.

• In Search of Barney Bubbles: the great graphic designer is profiled on BBC Radio 4, Monday, 2nd January. And speaking of album cover designers, Cool Hunting talked to Storm Thorgerson about his work.

• FACT mix 310 is a hugely eclectic two-parter from Moon Wiring Club. Grab it while it’s still available. And there’s also Solstmas 2011/2: The Final Countdown, a mix by El Minko Misterioso.

• One of the music events of the new year will be the release of Captain Beefheart’s Bat Chain Puller album. Pre-order it here.

In 1972, at the age of thirty-one, [Fred] Halsted released L.A. Plays Itself, a film which drew upon Kenneth Anger’s surrealist eroto-expressionism, and went way beyond Anger’s sublimated homoeroticism to explicitly portray gay male S/M sex. In 1969, when Halsted first decided to make a sexually explicit film, he decided to create a part for himself, and then be that part.

Halsted Plays Himself by William E. Jones reviewed at Lambda Literary

• Lunar Rover: An interview with Steve Moore and extract from Somnium.

• Battersea Power Station, a graveyard of architectural schemes.

Editors might admire a fine book, but are overridden by marketing and accounting departments who now have the final say. I know of a novel that wasn’t accepted by one publisher after the manuscript was first submitted to W.H. Smith, who said that it wouldn’t sell enough.

Jenny Diski on the state of fiction publishing in the UK

• EU copyright on James Joyce‘s works ended at midnight.

• Dressed to Kill: Dispelling the Myths of Men in Drag.

• The Geology of the Mountains of Madness

• Mandala of the Day

• Chomeography

• The Floppy Boot Stomp (1978 mix) by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band.

Flamboyant excess: the art of Steven Arnold

Invitation to Yin and Yang by Steven Arnold.

“Less is NOT more, MORE is more, less is less.”

Steven Arnold

Thanks to Monsieur Thombeau for pointing the way to The Steven Arnold Archive, a respository of biographical and career detail about Steven Arnold (1943–1994):

…a California-based multi-media artist, spiritualist, gender bender, and protégée of Salvador Dalí. His work consisted of drawings, paintings, rock and film posters, makeup design, costume design, set design, photography, and film.

Arnold’s work with outrageous performance troupe The Cockettes seems to receive more attention today than his other creations so it’s good to see the balance being redressed. It was a surprise, for instance, to find he’d drawn a poster in 1967 for The Matrix club, San Francisco. Similar works are mentioned but the site doesn’t have any examples and I’ve yet to see any elsewhere.

And I haven’t seen the Cockettes film, Luminous Procuress (1971) either. Salvador Dalí unsurprisingly responded with enthusiasm to its atmosphere of androgynous weirdness:

Luminous Procuress is an altogether extraordinary, individualistic phantasmagoria. It was filmed entirely in San Francisco over a two-year period, and describes the adventures of two wandering youths in San Francisco who visit the home of a mysterious woman, the Procuress. She is an elegant emblem of sorcery, her vivid features glowing under bizarre, striking maquillage, and one is not certain who she is or where she intends to lead the protagonists. Although the language she speaks is vaguely Russian, it appears that the Procuress has psychic powers. She discerns a sympathetic response to her on the part of the youths, and by magical means, conducts them through fantastic rooms, on a psychic journey… (more)

Definitely one for the future viewing list. Meanwhile, one of Arnold’s tableaux photos, The Advantages of Modern Marriage, is currently on display in Cruising the Archive: Queer Art and Culture in Los Angeles, 1945–1980 at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles. The exhibition runs to April 1st, 2012.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• James Bidgood

Weekend links 86

Salammbô by Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt) from Harry Crosby‘s Red Skeletons (1927). Dover published a new collection of Alastair’s drawings in September.

“A Taste of Honey showed working-class women from a working-class woman’s point of view, had a gay man as a central and sympathetic figure, and a black character who was neither idealised nor a racial stereotype.” RIP Shelagh Delaney. Related: Shelagh Delaney’s Salford (1960), directed by Ken Russell, and all 47 minutes (!) of The White Bus (1967), Lindsay Anderson’s strange, pre-If…. short, written by Shelagh Delaney, filmed in and around Manchester.

Since birth I’ve craved all things psychedelic, the energy and beauty of it. The pleasure… […] But in the US the exploration of consciousness and its powers—or really any curiosity about anything at all—is actively discouraged, because the system is so corrupt that it depends on people being virtually unconscious all the time. Burroughs cracked that code long ago. Spirituality here equals money; no one seems to be able to think, never mind explore their own consciousness.

Laurie Weeks: Making Magic Out of the Real

• Ian Albinson shows us The Title Design of Saul Bass while Ace Jet 170 has a copy of the new Bass monograph.

• Kris Kool (1970) at 50 Watts, Philip Caza’s lurid, erotic, psychedelic comic strip.

Götz Krafft by EM Lilien from a collection at Flickr.

• Serious Listeners: The Strange and Frightening World of Coil.

• The Octopus Chronicles, a new blog at Scientific American.

• We now live in a world where there are Ghost Box badges.

• Kilian Eng interviewed at Sci-Fi-O-Rama.

• Dalí Planet

• Bedabbled!

• A Taste of Honey (1962) by Acker Bilk | A Taste of Honey (1965) by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass | A Taste of Honey (Moog version) (1969) by Martin Denny.

Weekend links 81

Black Cat on a Chair (1850–1860) by Andrew L Von Wittkamp.

• “A little bit of acid, lots of weed, and too much Castaneda and I was ready to move from the magical realm of Middle Earth into a world that was much stranger than any involving hairy dwarves and white wizards…” Too Much to Dream by Peter Bebergal, “a psychedelic American boyhood”.

This year’s Booker prize isn’t about the power of the new – there’s no experiment with form or strangeness of imagination. The winner may get on the bedside tables of middle England, but that’s not as important as changing the way that even one person dreams.

Jeanette Winterson throws the cat among the pigeons.

• 50 Watts continues to show us things you’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere: illustrations by TagliaMani from a new edition of Les Chants de Maldoror, and War Is a Verb, collages by Allan Kausch.

• Don’t go in the swimming pool! Coilhouse directs us to Fantasy: music by French outfit DyE with a weird and nasty animation by Jérémie Périn.

• Ace album cover designer and photographic Surrealist Storm Thorgerson is having another exhibition at IG Gallery, London.

• The Art of Leo and Diane Dillon, an art and illustration archive.

• John Turturro reads a short story by Italo Calvino.

• Spaceport America by Foster + Partners.

• Your Body of Work by Olafur Eliasson.

• Wonder-Cat cures all ailments.

• Blogging Moby-Dick.

• Krazy Kat (1927) by Frankie Trumbauer & His Orchestra with Bix and Lang | Pussy Cat Dues (1959) by Charles Mingus | Katzenmusik 5 (1979) by Michael Rother | Big Electric Cat (1982) by Adrian Belew | Purrfect (1996) by Funki Porcini.