Weekend links 774

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Fish and Octopus (Colourful Realm of Living Beings) (circa 1765) by Ito Jakuchu.

• At Aeon: “Could extraterrestrial technology be lurking in our backyard—on the Moon, Mars or in the asteroid belt? We think it’s worth a look.” Ravi Kopparapu and Jacob Haqq Misra explain.

• At Smithsonian magazine: The first confirmed footage of the Colossal Squid. Only a baby one, however, so not very colossal.

• The eighth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

Less than six months later, Lindsay signed an executive order that effectively turned the city into a movie set. The new Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting was designed to cut through existing red tape and facilitate location filming. Script approval was centralized in a single agency. A production now needed but a single permit to shoot on the streets; a specific police unit would remain with the filmmakers as they moved from location to location. Thus, Lindsay created the necessary conditions for the tough cop films, bleak social comedies, and gritty urban fables that captured the feel of New York in the late sixties and early seventies—the cinema of Fun City.

J. Hoberman explores New York City’s popularity as a film location

• Mixes of the week: A mix for The Wire by John King; and DreamScenes – April 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At Colossal: Water droplets cling to fluorescent plant spines in Tom Leighton’s alluring photos.

• At the BFI: Alex Barrett on Carl Theodor Dreyer’s unmade film about Jesus.

• Anne Billson ranks 20 films starring Julie Christie.

Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (1964) by Paul Sawtell | Das Boot (1981) by Klaus Doldinger | Ambient Block (Sequenchill/Mission Control #2/Lost In The Sea) (1993) by Sequential

Weekend links 757

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The Breath of Creation (c. 1926–34) by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn.

• At Wormwoodiana: “…Gresham was well-read enough to know that while magic can be more than a MacGuffin in a fantasy story, neither fantasy nor thriller fiction lets magic unsettle readers much. […] Even when it is good, the supernatural is never safe in a Williams story. Not conventional fantasy by half.” G. Connor Salter on William Lindsay Gresham’s enthusiasm for Charles Williams’ novels.

• At Harper’s Magazine: Christopher Tayler reviews Lawrence Venuti’s translations of Dino Buzzati’s Il deserto dei Tartari (now titled The Stronghold) which was published last year, and The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories which will be out in January.

Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2024. Thanks again for the link here!

• The Approach to J.L. Borges: A Borgesian pastiche in homage to the creator of Ficciones by Ed Simon.

• “HP Lovecraft meets Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser”: an essay from 1992 by Fritz Leiber.

Can performing live on The Old Grey Whistle Test in January, 1974.

• DJ Food says “Let’s have some psychedelia”.

• RIP Zakir Hussain.

Creation Dub 1 (1977) by Lee Perry & The Upsetters | Threat To Creation (1981) by Creation Rebel/New Age Steppers | Theme from ‘Creation’ (1992) by Brian Eno

Weekend links 746

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Composition B (No.II) with Red (1935) by Piet Mondrian.

• “Red is practically faultless, save, perhaps, for one hard-to-get-excited-about foray into atmospheric free jazz (Providence), though the sprawling, epic roller coaster of emotion and dexterity that follows (Starless) surely makes up for any shortfall.” Patrick Clarke on 50 years of my favourite King Crimson album. I like Providence, the piece is part of a live performance in Rhode Island so the Lovecraft connection adds to the aura of doom that pervades the album; and the structure of the album’s second side—jazz improv followed by a multi-part, Mellotron-heavy epic—harks back to the group’s debut.

• “It’s important to challenge the common idea of an almost evolutionary procession, where modernist abstract art is somehow the climax, a new and perfectly original approach to the visual world, absolutely different from all that preceded it.” Hunter Dukes on the yellow rectangle that denotes silence in the Silos Apocalypse.

The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy, an exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner, London. Meanwhile, at the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, there’s Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation.

• “I did not realize how much I had done. I am a serial polluter.” Ralph Steadman and his daughter, Sadie Williams, talking to Steven Heller about Steadman’s latest exhibition which is touring the USA.

• New music: Come Back To Me [Demo] by Broadcast; The Last Sunset Of The Year by Marcus Fjellström; Hexa by Cleared.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artists summon mythical creatures of the Echigo region for the 2024 Wara Art Festival.

• The Italian Art of Violence: Samm Deighan on the giallo cinema boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

Gavin Friday’s favourite albums.

Red (1991) by Jarboe | Red Earth (As Summertime Ends) (1991) by Rain Tree Crow | Red Sun (2012) by Anna von Hausswolff

Ritual by Jon Hopkins

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My music listening for the past week has comprised alternations between various Hawkwind albums and this, the latest release from Jon Hopkins. Ritual is so good I’ve been trying not to overplay it, a 40-minute composition divided into eight connected parts which is sufficiently beatless to be described as ambient, although the ambient tag usually refers to music that drifts quietly in the background. Ritual may work at low volumes but it generates an intensity that warrants immersion in its field of sound, especially on The Veil/Evocation where a slow and increasingly powerful detonation emerges from the boundless spaces. The album has been promoted with a pair of videos, a typical constituent of any high-profile release but one which in this case spoils the flow of the album where the music only fades to silence at the very end. The second video by UON Visuals does at least communicate something of Hopkins’ transcendent reach, an extension of the cover art into a glittering psychedelic vortex.

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Ritual, Part II: Palace by UON Visuals.

It took me a while to get round to Hopkins’ brand of electronic music, mainly because his early releases don’t distinguish themselves very much from similar explorations of the post-techno landscape. Opalescent was his first album in 2001, a release that I now own but might not have bothered with if his work hadn’t improved a great deal over the past two decades. The discography gets really interesting with Singularity in 2018, an album whose thumping four-four rhythms continued the trend of previous releases but now with a distinct flavour of their own. The same goes for Hopkins’ use of the piano which, being classically trained, he plays with considerable skill. Music for Psychedelic Therapy followed Singularity, an unexpected swerve into ambient territory which abandoned any relation to the dancefloor for a kind of throwback to the better class of New Age albums being released in the 1980s, with natural sounds—wind, rain, bird and animal calls—mixed into the music. The New Age connection was reinforced by the final track which features a platitudinous monologue from the late Ram Dass, the American mystic formerly known as Richard Alpert who was one of the early promoters of psychedelic therapy in the 1960s along with his erstwhile colleague, Timothy Leary. I’d consider the album a perfect one if it wasn’t for this coda. With a few exceptions (William Burroughs, for one), I’ve never liked lengthy spoken-word pieces on otherwise instrumental albums, and Ram Dass seems especially out of place when he spent the latter part of his life proclaiming the virtues of meditation and Hindu-derived mysticism over psychedelic voyaging. The latest album applies the power of Singularity to the ambient spaces of Music for Psychedelic Therapy. It’s the best thing Hopkins has done to date. I can’t wait to hear what he does next.

Frank C. Papé’s The Well of Saint Clare

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I was asked recently if I’d ever written anything about British illustrator Frank C. Papé (1878–1972). The answer was no for two reasons, the first being that where book illustration is concerned I like to be able to point to whole books, and until recently there hasn’t been much of Papé’s work available in complete editions. The second reason is that Papé’s illustration is often broadly comic, to a degree that had he been born a generation or two later he might have been drawing humorous comic strips or editorial cartoons. Papé was very adept on a technical level but his drawings aren’t always to my taste so I’ve never spent much time looking for his books.

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The first of those caveats has been ameliorated by recent uploads at the Internet Archive which include this volume, one of several Anatole France editions with Papé illustrations. The Well of Saint Clare (1928) is a collection of religious stories set in the medieval era. The book appeared a few years after Papé had illustrated James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, a quasi-medieval fantasy which was the subject of a celebrated obscenity case in the USA. Anatole France’s satires were almost as contentious for a time—the Vatican put his books on their prohibited list—which leaves me wondering whether Papé had a natural inclination for risqué material or whether his publishers pushed him in this direction. Probably a little of both.

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