Bookmark: Italo Calvino

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I’ve been re-reading Invisible Cities this week so the discovery of an interview in English with its author was most welcome. Bookmark was a BBC series about writers that ran throughout the 1980s; each programme usually lasted for 50 minutes but this episode from 1985 only devotes 25 minutes to Calvino’s life and work. Considering Calvino’s stature, and the scarcity of English interviews, this seems like a missed opportunity but Calvino says at one point that he dislikes talking even in his own language. The presenter/interviewer (whose name has eluded me) gives a précis of the most celebrated works, and also talks to Calvino’s very adept translator, William Weaver. If you’re familiar with If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller there’s a fascinating moment when Calvino goes through the hand-written manuscript showing the tiny diagrams he used to keep track of the narrative threads. Watch it here.

Update: The presenter/interviewer was Ian Hamilton.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Bookmark: Mervyn Peake
Crossed destinies revisted
Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino
Tressants: the Calvino Hotel

TV Wipeout revisited

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TV Wipeout, as detailed in an earlier post, was a one-off “video magazine” compiled and released on VHS by Cabaret Voltaire in 1984. This was the fourth title on the Cab’s own Doublevision label which was easily the best of the UK’s independent video labels at the time. Many of the other Doublevision releases have either been reissued on DVD or can be found online but TV Wipeout has remained elusive, in part because it contains material that would offend YouTube’s copyright restrictions. Cabaret Voltaire’s deal with Virgin Records enabled them to pad the running time with music promos and trailers for some of the films on Virgin’s own video label.

Back in 2012 I was able to find some of the more popular items but not the obscurities, a situation that’s now resolved by this YouTube playlist which has uploaded the entire cassette as a series of separate items. Most of the previously missing pieces will only be of interest to completists—some of them are scratch-video creations that look very dated today—but if you’re like me, and have waited over 30 years to see this thing in its entirety, it means your curiosity can now be assuaged. A couple of items by Cabaret Voltaire and Japan are still missing but they’re easily found elsewhere.

Update: As noted in the comments, the Japan clip was missing due to an oversight, and is now in place. I’m still getting a message saying the Cabaret Voltaire video is “blocked in your country on copyright grounds” so that must be UK-specific.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Cabaret Voltaire on La Edad de Oro, 1983
Doublevision Presents Cabaret Voltaire
Just the ticket: Cabaret Voltaire
European Rendezvous by CTI
TV Wipeout
Seven Songs by 23 Skidoo
Elemental 7 by CTI
The Crackdown by Cabaret Voltaire
Network 21 TV

Weekend links 263

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Dancing Horse (1972) by Tadashi Nakayama.

• The Wounded Galaxies Festival of Experimental Media takes place in Bloomington, Indiana, on October 7–11, 2015. The event is an offshoot of the earlier Burroughs Century, and the phrase “wounded galaxies” is one of Burroughs’ own. It’s also the partial title of Wounded Galaxies Tap At The Window, the most recent album by Cyclobe who will be performing at the festival. Cyclobe’s Stephen Thrower will be in London later this month for the launch of his new book, Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco, and a screening of Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (1971).

• Gallery sites showcasing erotic art are often coy about the details of the work they’re exhibiting. That’s not the case with Artists Space, NYC, whose Tom of Finland: The Pleasure of Play is running from June 14–August 23, 2015.

• “I just loved the songs, and I didn’t mind the age in their voices, and I didn’t mind the fact that they were unaccompanied, it didn’t matter.” Shirley Collins talking to Ben Graham about her love of English folk music.

The more important question is what do we do with psychedelia now? I think the drugs themselves and the experiences they produce in individuals and for society are too important and vital to be pigeon-holed and taken hold of by a bloodthirsty media that always aims to reduce all experience to a few simple straplines for improved consumerism.

Dr Ben Sessa talking to Barnaby Smith about psychedelic drugs. Breaking Convention 2015, the Third International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness, takes place at the University of Greenwich next month.

• “…if someone opens a door or if sunlight falls on them they shoot off the grid and suddenly you have a roomful of what sounds like sick bagpipes.” Will Gregory on the physicality of Moog synthesizers.

• Mixes of the week: The Necromancer-Queens of Neverland, an exotic collection by SeraphicManta, Secret Thirteen Mix 156 by Asusu, and an Ornette Coleman playlist.

• “In 2015, the thought of anything as incendiary as Scum or Made in Britain turning up on TV just seems bizarre.” Danny Leigh on the great Alan Clarke.

• More psychedelia: ‘Art That Transcends‘, my article for Communication Arts, has been posted on the magazine’s website.

Phantasmaphile recommends Thus Were Their Faces, a collection of short stories by Silvina Ocampo.

Earth filmed playing live in Brooklyn, NY, September 24, 2014. The full set, and a great performance.

• At Dangerous Minds: “How Far Will You Go?” Meet Smokey, the outrageously gay 70s cult rockers.

Peter Strickland on six films that fed into The Duke of Burgundy.

Things I Found In Records

Christopher Lee sings!

Polly On The Shore (1970) by Shirley & Dolly Collins | The Quiet Joys Of Brotherhood (1972) by Sandy Denny | The Banks of Red Roses (1988) by June Tabor

In the Mind’s Eye

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One of the posts last December concerned a short TV film by Alan Garner, To Kill a King, the final entry in the Leap in the Dark series which the BBC ran from 1973 to 1980. Each half-hour episode concerned the supernatural, presented in either drama or documentary form, which for me would have meant prime viewing but I don’t recall ever seeing the series. The Garner film was a strange piece of drama whereas In the Mind’s Eye (1977) is a documentary about ghosts presented by writer Colin Wilson. The film is almost more interesting for its production details than its subject, the Phantom Vicar of Ratcliffe Wharf, an alleged spectre whose murderous life is shown in a piece of unconvincing dramatisation. The Phantom Vicar was the invention of writer Frank Smyth who needed a supernatural story for the Frontiers of Belief section of Man, Myth and Magic during its publication as a part-work in the early 1970s. Smyth and friend describe hatching the tale then we hear a number of subsequent reports which show the story quickly became an East End legend. Between the interviews you get to see bits of the docklands area before the spirits of old London had been exorcised by redevelopment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
To Kill a King by Alan Garner
Dreaming Out of Space: Kenneth Grant on HP Lovecraft
MMM in IT
Terror and Magnificence

Owls and flowers

1: The pattern

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2: A novel by Alan Garner

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The Owl Service (1967). Cover design by Kenneth Farnhill.


3: A Granada TV serial

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The Owl Service (1969). Eight episodes, written by Alan Garner, directed by Peter Plummer.


4: A diversion

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Chapter 8 of The Owl Service.

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Gillian Hills as Alison in The Owl Service.

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Gillian Hills (left) as Sonietta in A Clockwork Orange (1971).


5: A single by Pram

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The Owl Service (2000) by Pram. Cover art by Mary Jo Bole.


6: Ghost Box

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The Owl’s Map (2006) by Belbury Poly. Design by Julian House.

Track 1: Owls And Flowers

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As The Crow Flies (2011) by The Advisory Circle. Design by Julian House.

Track 11: Learning Owl Reappears


7: A group

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The Owl Service.


8: A Folio Society edition

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The Owl Service (2013) by Alan Garner, illustrated by Darren Hopes.


9: Twelve audiological pathways

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In Every Mind: Transmission Resonances, Volume 1 (2015) by A Year In The Country.

Transmission Resonances: Volume 1 takes as its wellhead the continuing reverberations of the 1969 cathode ray version of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service.

It pushes open the attic door from whence the scratching descends and travels to places that surprised, intrigued and even delighted our good selves when it was being shaped on our own particular audiological potters wheels.

Previously on { feuilleton }
To Kill a King by Alan Garner
Red Shift by Alan Garner