{technology} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 755

A painting by Ed Emshwiller for the cover of Fantastic Stories of Imagination, July 1962, illustrating The Singing Statues by JG Ballard .

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: my comments about the creation of the book’s cover and magical alphabet have been posted at Alan Moore World. At (Quasi), Smoky Man (in Italian) looks at other parts of the book, and includes my answers to his questions about the creation of The Soul, a character originally planned for a comic strip that Alan Moore and I were working on. I’ve been trying recently to find the first sketches I made of The Soul back in 2000 or 2001, without success. If I do find any of them I’ll post them here.

• New music: Juk-Shabb by Cryo Chamber Collaboration is this year’s installment in the Lovecraft-themed album series (previously) from Cryo Chamber. Also this week: Xerrox Vol. 5 by Alva Noto; Nocturne (Soundtrack for an Invisible Film) by Avi C. Engel; and Cat Location Conundrum by Moon Wiring Club.

• Code: Damp: An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms by Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, being “an alternative occult and esoteric history of England told through one of its most popular cultural forms: the comedy sitcom”.

…the joy of art isn’t only the pleasure of an end result but also the experience of going through the process of having made it. When you go out for a walk it isn’t just (or even primarily) for the pleasure of reaching a destination, but for the process of doing the walking. For me, using AI all too often feels like I’m engaging in a socially useless process, in which I learn almost nothing and then pass on my non-learning to others. It’s like getting the postcard instead of the holiday.

Brian Eno at Boston Review

• “The typographic choices that Godard made were thematic and not only chosen for their stylistic properties.” Arijana Zeric looks inside the design world of Jean-Luc Godard.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: The Stammering Librarian: Essays by Timothy D’Arch Smith, edited by Edwin Pouncey & Sandy Robertson.

• At Public Domain Review: Fantastic Planet: The Microscopy Album of Marinus Pieter Filbri (1887–88).

• At the BFI: Michael Brooke offers suggestions for where to begin with Guy Maddin.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Dennis Bovell.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by KMRU.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Gigafly.

• Fantastic Cat (1996) by Takako Minekawa | Fantastic Analysis (2001) by Mouse On Mars | Fantastic Mass (2016) by Time Attendant

Weekend links 752

Captain Nemo by Alphonse de Neuville, from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1875) by Jules Verne.

• “…physical remoteness is a category of its own. It is an enhancer: It can make the glorious better and the terrible worse. The oceanic pole of inaccessibility distills physical remoteness on our planet into a pure and absolute form. […] Point Nemo is nearly impossible to get to and offers nothing when you arrive, not even a place to stand. It is the anti-Everest: It beckons because nothing is there.” Cullen Murphy explores the remotest place on Earth. A long and fascinating read, but no mention of Point Nemo’s dreaming tenant.

• More Bumper Book business: Smoky Man has posted the second part of his analysis of the book for (Quasi) (in Italian) which includes some comments from myself about the origin of the Moon and Serpent Magical Alphabet, and why the letter Q in the alphabet is assigned to Cthulhu. Elsewhere, Panini have announced an Italian edition of the Bumper Book for May next year, while at The Beat Steve Baxi reviewed the book from a philosophical perspective.

• At the BFI: David Parkinson on where to begin with Louis Feuillade. I’d suggest starting with Fantômas rather than Les Vampires but then I’m biased.

The combination of magic(k)al, ceremonial action, vivid colour and paradoxically serious camp in Jarman’s Super 8 films of the ’70s bears the influence of Kenneth Anger, but the differences between Jarman’s sensibility and Anger’s are more striking than the resemblances. Jarman’s vision is more materialist, austere and hermetic, and less sociological; where Anger identifies the glamour of American popular culture with the Will of the Crowleyan magician, Jarman situates the discovery of the cinematographic mechanism imaginatively within the history of alchemy. Anger cast rock stars as gods and adepts with the intention of harnessing the energy of their recognition; Jarman casts Fire Island, then in its heyday as a gay resort, as a desert defined by sculptural details and occupied by a single masked figure, in scenes that both recall his landscape paintings of the ’60s and ’70s and anticipate the design of his garden at Dungeness.

Luke Aspell on Derek Jarman’s hermetic film/painting, In the Shadow of the Sun

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “Visions of nuclear-powered cars captivated Cold War America, but the technology never really worked”.

• At The Spectator podcast: host Sam Leith talks to Michael Moorcock about 60 years of New Worlds magazine.

• At Public Domain Review: “Light from the Darkness” — Paul Nash’s Genesis (1924).

• At Bandcamp: “Disco godfather Cerrone’s enduring influence on dance music”.

• At Unquiet Things: The Art of Survival: Eyeball Fodder in Dark Times.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – November 2024 at Ambientblog.

• New music: The Laugh Is In The Eyes by Julia Holter.

• At The Daily Heller: The College of Collage.

• RIP jazz drummer Roy Haynes.

• Thermonuclear Sweat (1980) by Defunkt | Nuclear Drive (1982) by Hawkwind | Nuclear Substation (2005) by The Advisory Circle

Leaving the Cafe

A good café. Budapest, 1930.

I have a new shop portal page, a deliberately low-maintenance affair which links to Etsy (where a few problems still need addressing), Redbubble (a brand new account), and the page here for Skull Print T-shirts. All the former links to CafePress have been removed. I’d been wanting to move away from the unsatisfying CafePress service for some time but before doing this I needed to arrange suitable replacements. Last weekend I finally disentangled my website from CafePress, something that involved stripping links from more pages than I expected, after which I closed my account there.

I opened an account at CafePress in May 2001 so I must have been one of the first users of their print-on-demand service. This was always a sideline not a business, a convenience for people who wanted something of mine on a print or T-shirt without having to pay the costs demanded by high-end printers like the one I use for the Etsy prints. My earnings from this were minimal at best, usually $50 a year. The rare exception was when my Alice in Wonderland calendar received a mention at Boing Boing during the time when that site had a substantial readership. After a short-lived spike of interest things returned to the usual $50 a year but even this meagre sum began to decline when the pandemic hit in 2020, becoming so sporadic it became evident there was little reason to keep the account open at all.

Beyond the meagre earnings there were others reasons for shutting things down. The front end of the site has always been dominated by the CafePress brand, while the back end, where sellers have to upload artwork and maintain their “shops”, never improved very much from its crudely designed beginnings, something I suspect was a legacy of CafePress having been one of the earliest successful print-on-demand outlets. After I’d got in the habit of putting together a new calendar each year they went and removed that product format, changing it to one that didn’t suit my work at all. And in later years they developed a bad habit of plastering your artwork on products you hadn’t approved of, so I’d find something of mine layered across a shower curtain, say, with no thought given (because none had been applied) as to whether the artwork or its ratio suited such a thing.

I’ve only been with Redbubble for just over a week so I’ve no idea whether I’ll earn anything from their service either but the seller process is a lot quicker and easier to set up than CafePress. As before, this is mainly for people who’d like a print of something at a reasonable price. I still have to add more designs so I’m open to requests. I used to have T-shirts available at CafePress but from now on I’ll only be doing these through Skull Print, a genuine small business who I’m happy to support. I’ll be adding more designs to the T-shirt page as well.

In other consumer news, the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is now on sale in the USA and Canada, with the UK edition being officially published tomorrow. Take a look if you see it in a shop somewhere, it’s a beautiful thing.

Weekend links 742

Thunderstorm (1959) by Blair Rowlands Hughes-Stanton.

• “To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence,” says SF writer Ted Chiang. A New Yorker essay which has received a fair amount of attention over the past week, with good reason. As someone who found his name on the list of artists whose work was allegedly being fed into Midjourney, I suppose I have a vested interest in the arguments. (Good luck to any machine trying to imitate my “style”. I don’t have one.) Too much of the discussion, however, has been very poor which is why this is the first time I’ve linked to such a piece here.

• “After going their own way for much of the 20th century, mathematicians are increasingly turning to the laws and patterns of the natural world for inspiration. Fields stuck for decades are being unstuck. And even philosophers have started to delve into the mystery of why physics is proving ‘unreasonably effective’ in mathematics, as one has boldly declared.” Ananyo Bhattacharya on why physics is good at creating new mathematics. Having recently finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s final novel, Stella Maris, this was all very timely.

• “…our films obey musical laws. Of course, you can never tell people how they should watch a film. But the musical element provides a narrative of its own.” Thus the Quay Brothers, in the news again with their forthcoming feature film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. The quote is from a recent interview with Xan Brooks. Meanwhile, Alex Dudok de Wit posted another interview from 2019, originally published in French, now made available in English for the first time.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine announces a new book of his essays, The Thunderstorm Collectors.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 28 books that either faked ingesting LSD or did.

• At Public Domain Review: Antiquities of Mexico (1831–48).

• At Print mag: Kelly Thorn’s Tarot of Oxalia.

• USC Optical Sound Effects Library

• Strange Thunder (1987) by Harold Budd | Sweet Thunder (1991) by Yello | Studies For Thunder (2004) by Robert Henke

Weekend links 741

The Empty Mask (1928) by René Magritte.

• A Walk Across Northampton: Iain Sinclair and John Rogers wander the streets in search of significant historical locations before ending up at the home of the local magus, Alan Moore. I recently illustrated a new piece of writing by Iain Sinclair but can’t talk about that just now. Later.

• New music: The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 by Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz, and Through Other Reflections by The Soundcarriers.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine reviews Joseph Hone’s The Book Forger: the true story of a literary crime that fooled the world.

• At Colossal: Across rural Europe, Ashley Suszczynski photographs remarkable and ancient masked traditions.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Poetry by WB Yeats.

• At Unquiet Things: Maggie Vandewalle’s enchanted autumns.

• Richard Norris’s favourite albums.

• Tapedeck.org

• Preludes For Magnetic Tape (1966–76) by Ihlan Mimaroglu | Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy (1995) by Stars Of The Lid | Those Tapes Are Dangerous (1997) by The Bug