{religion} – Page 10 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 442

Orgasm Addict (1977). Design by Malcolm Garrett; collage by Linder.

• RIP Pete Shelley, Buzzcock and Homosapien. Shelley is celebrated for being in the vanguard of Britain’s punk movement, of course. (Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch was the UK’s first independent single.) But he also loved Can, recorded an album of electronic drones (Sky Yen), and in 1983 successfully blended home-computer graphics with his own brand of superior electronic pop music. Related: Malcolm Garrett’s Buzzcocks band logo at Fonts In Use; B’dum, B’dum: Tony Wilson in 1978 talking to Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto about Buzzcocks and Magazine.

• Winter demands ghost stories so Adam Scovell suggests 10 great winter ghost films. Related: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas presents an A–Z of Women’s Horror Filmmaking.

• Carey Dunne on the rise of underground LSD guides for psychotherapy. Related: “Psychedelics change the perception of time,” says Shayla Love.

• Ex-Neu! guitarist Michael Rother receives the box-set treatment early next year when the Groenland label reissues his early solo albums.

• Jodorowsky, an exhibition devoted to the writer and director, will be staged at El Museo del Barrio, New York, from February next year.

• “From Georges Méliès to Bill and Ted, movie hells remain seriously in hock to the Judeo-Christian playbook,” says Anne Billson.

• The Owl’s Legacy, Chris Marker’s 13-part documentary series on Greek culture, receives its debut DVD release.

• Topic II (1989), a short film by Pascal Baes of pixilated dancers in the night streets of Prague.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 274 by Koray Kantarcioglu.

• We are the first humans to hear the winds of the planet Mars.

• Patrick Magee reads The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jean-Louis Trintignant Day.

• Mongolian biker rock: Wolf Totem by The HU.

• The Quietus albums of the year.

• Hell (2001) by Techno Animal ft. Dälek | Hell’s Winter (2011) by Earth | Hell A (2017) by The Bug vs. Earth

Weekend links 422

Wu Ming, a communist writing collective known for its historical fiction, sees Kolosimo as using pseudohistory as a tool to shake people from their belief that capitalist society is natural and transhistorical, opening minds to other possibilities for how humans can live. They regret that popular proponents of his theories today, like Graham Hancock and Erich von Däniken, are unable to recognize the political motivations behind his project: “Nothing of his radicality survives in today’s copycats… Every corner has been blunted, the heresy has become telegenic, but we know that the revolution will not be televised.”

The secret history of Marxist alien hunters by AM Gittlitz

I received the Sphere edition of Peter Kolosimo’s book as a Christmas present in 1974, and being 12 years old at the time took its theories fairly seriously. As a work of pseudohistory it’s as poor as the books of Erich von Däniken but I always liked the title, and it happens to be the place I first encountered the mysterious words “Popol Vuh”, a name that would acquire a very different significance a few years later. Kolosimo also joins Kenneth Grant in taking HP Lovecraft’s work as a thin fictionalisation of supposed fact. For a serious dismantling of Not of This World see this review (the first of three parts) by “skeptical xenoarchaelogist” Jason Colavito.

• The Archons are back: Erik Davis talks with Gnostic scholar Matthew Dillon about religious mourning, the Nag Hammadi library, sex-magick Jesus, the Gnostic Eden, David Icke’s lizards, and the power of the Archons as an allegory of contemporary technological and political power.

• Crystal Voyager (1973) is a surfing film by David Elfick that ends with a 23-minute sequence of slow-motion waves set to Echoes by Pink Floyd. Some of the same footage later appeared in the final scenes of Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977).

• Sweet artifice: “Dandies in the age of decadence favoured synthetics over nature, nowhere more so than in perfumery’s fabulous counterfeits,” says Catherine Maxwell.

• Now for a lampshade solo: Pascal Wyse on how the Radiophonic Workshop built the future of sound.

• Wilde about Paris: Alex Dean on the sex, drink and liberation of Oscar Wilde’s “lost” years.

• Bee in the City: the vanguard of an invading army from Planet Bee.

• Five books that most inspired Alexander McQueen.

• Colin Newman‘s favourite albums.

• Echoes (1969) by Leon Thomas | Echo Waves (1974) by Ash Ra Tempel | Not Of This World (1988) by Danzig

Carl Larsson’s Angel of Death

I’ve known the work of Swedish artist Carl Larsson (1853–1919) for many years via a collection of drawings and paintings of the artist’s family and home life, light works created between bouts of more serious painting. The interiors in the At Home series are especially good, meticulously rendered watercolours which today resemble the kinds of delineations found in Continental comic books. Less familiar is the work Larsson created prior to these drawings.

Dödens Engel (The Angel of the Death) is a book-length religious poem by Johan Olof Wallin inspired by the cholera epidemic of the 1830s, the same epidemic that Poe writes about in The Sphinx. Larsson illustrates every page of this edition from 1880, deploying the full range of traditional death symbolism: skulls, hourglasses, scythes, extinguished torches and so on.The sombre imagery makes a striking contrast with the pictures of Larsson’s home life yet the painting for which he hoped to be remembered, Midvinterblot (1915), is equally doom-laden, a huge canvas that depicts a king preparing to sacrifice himself to spare his people from famine.

Continue reading “Carl Larsson’s Angel of Death”

John Aarts’ Lucifer

The Lucifer in question being the principal character in a play of the same name by Dutch poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679). I confess that I hadn’t heard of this work before even though it’s well-known in the Netherlands, and may also have influenced Paradise Lost. The version linked here is an American reprint of an earlier edition from 1898 that was the first English translation of the play. The graphics by John Aarts appear to be wood engravings but I’m not certain of that, matters not being helped by the present invisibility of Mr Aarts. In addition to a suite of full-page illustrations there are many embellishments in the nascent Dutch Art Nouveau style. And unlike many books that repeat the same two or three vignettes there’s a lot of variation throughout so it’s worth seeing the book as a whole.

Continue reading “John Aarts’ Lucifer”

Weekend links 372

Battistero della Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo (2017) by Mattia Mognetti.

• “Mumbo Jumbo: a dazzling classic finally gets the recognition it deserves.” Jonathan McAloon on Ishmael Reed’s unique novel being reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic.

• Amanda Gefter talks to Donald D. Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, about “the evolutionary argument against reality”.

• Geeta Dayal on composer Raymond Scott. A new compilation, Three Willow Park, collects more of Scott’s electronic music from the 1960s.

Nagle critiques the follies of campus identity politics and social media liberalism not from the right, but as a left-leaning feminist. As she elucidates point after reasonable point, it feels as if a grown-up has finally entered the room. Like Mark Fisher, the Marxist critic who was savaged by his putative comrades for decrying “the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism” of the online left, Nagle has no sympathy for Twitter/Tumblr liberalism’s “cult of fragility and victimhood mixed with a vicious culture of group attacks, group shaming, and attempts to destroy the reputations and lives of others”. It is reassuring to find a self-described feminist disdaining the “hysterical” liberal call-out culture, and acknowledging that it has produced “a breeding ground for an online backlash of irreverent mockery and anti-PC”. Without joining the forces of reaction or losing sight of the vileness of the alt-right, she writes of “the deep intellectual rot of contemporary political progressivism”; “the moral self-flattery of … a tired liberal intellectual conformity”; and “the hysteria and faux-politics of liberal Internet culture”.

Rob Doyle reviewing Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle

• Mixes of the week: XLR8R Podcast 501 by Ryan Elliott, and ReMelodiya vol. 1 by Laurent Fairon.

• Sumit Paul-Choudhury on the slime mould instruments that make sweet music.

• The Wire Salon: an audience with photographer and writer Val Wilmer.

• Simon McCallum‘s list of 10 great lesser-known British LGB films.

• Zaria Gorvett on the ghostly radio station that no one claims to run.

• S. Elizabeth reposted her Coilhouse interview with me from 2010.

• “Boys are selling sex in Japan. Who is buying?” Boys For Sale

• At Spoon & Tamago: Ando Tadao’s Hill of Buddha.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Gisèle Vienne Day.

• Sun Ra is now on Bandcamp.

• Shaolin Buddha Finger (1994) by Depth Charge | Atomic Buddha (1998) by Techno Animal | Psycho Buddha (2001) by Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.