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Weekend links 371

• My cover design for the Doug Murano-edited story collection, BEHOLD! Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders, appeared here last December but a repost is in order since the book has been published this week by Crystal Lake. Back in December I didn’t have a list of the featured authors but I do now: Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, Lisa Morton, Brian Kirk, Hal Bodner, Stephanie M. Wytovich, John Langan, Erinn L. Kemper, John FD Taff, Patrick Freivald, Lucy A. Snyder, Brian Hodge, Kristi DeMeester, Christopher Coake, Sarah Read and Richard Thomas. The foreword is by Josh Malerman, and the interior illustrations are by Luke Spooner.

• “How do you memorialize an artist who refused to remain identical to himself? How do you remember one of the great philosopher-artists of memory?” Ben Lerner on the elusive Chris Marker.

• Diabolical Fantasia: The Art of Der Orchideengarten, 1919. A welcome reprinting of art from the German magazine of weird fiction compiled by Thomas Negovan. (Previously)

• Coming in September: Conny Plank: The Potential of Noise, a documentary by Reto Caduff and Stephan Plank about the great record producer.

• The Roman Roads of Britain mapped by Sasha Trubetskoy in the style of Harry Beck’s London Tube Map.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Julia Kristeva Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980).

• Ian Shank on the trove of erotic Roman art that scandalized Europe’s royals.

• At Haute Macabre: Biblio-alchemy: The Liquid Library of Annalù Boeretto.

• What makes a French film noir? Andrew Male has some suggestions.

• David Shariatmadari on how 1967 changed gay life in Britain.

• Mix of the week: Gated Canal Community Radio.

• A Gallery of Moods by Mlle Ghoul.

• Loe And Behold (1970) by Sir Lord Baltimore | Behold The Drover Summons (1983) by Popol Vuh | Beholding The Throne Of Might (2014) by The Soft Pink Truth

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng

Once again I’m a little behind with putting new pieces of work on these pages, a consequence of the reduced rate of posting and the delay between finishing various works and them being announced by publishers.

Under the Pendulum Sun is a fantasy novel by Jeannette Ng whose cover was revealed this week by Angry Robot. I was very pleased with the way this one turned out so it’s good to see it being given a positive reception. Jeannette’s novel is a dark hybrid of Gothic drama and fairy story, the main characters being a pair of Victorian missionaries attempting to bring the Gospel to Arcadia, a very real and very sinister fairyland. The model is that of the Victorian missionary heading into what were regarded as the benighted places of the world then finding themselves and their beliefs subverted by the alien culture they were hoping to enlighten. It’s a clever concept, and the novel is filled with strange invention, so much so that I had to scale down the amount of things I wanted to get into the cover. This often happens with inventive novels (the ones I’ve done for KW Jeter suffered from this), you find yourself with enough material for three or more covers but only the one cover to contain everything.

There’s no need for me to go into any detail about the art and design when I did that earlier for the cover reveal at Fantasy Faction. The book itself will be published at the beginning of October.

Weekend links 365

Il Fascino Della Morte (1988) by Albin Brunovsky.

• One of the forthcoming books featuring my cover art is Behold! Oddities, Curiosities, & Undefinable Wonders, a story collection due to be published next month by Crystal Lake Publishing. Bleeding Cool talked to editor Doug Murano about the collection and its contributors.

• Six episodes of Tom Keating on Painters, a TV series from 1983 presented by Britain’s most well-known art forger. In six further episodes Keating examines the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

• Opening at the Guggenheim, NYC, at the end of this month: Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897.

The most potent form of gatekeeping is religion. When certain beliefs are deemed sacred, they are put beyond questioning. To challenge such beliefs is to commit blasphemy. The accusation of cultural appropriation is a secular version of the charge of blasphemy. It’s the insistence that certain beliefs and images are so important to particular cultures that they may not appropriated by others.

In Defence of Cultural Appropriation by Kenan Malik

• Mixes of the week: FACT Mix 605 by Anthony Parasole, and Secret Thirteen Mix 224 by Fanny Kaplan.

• Artist Tom Phillips at 80: “I’m still reading books. Nothing changes and everything changes.”

• Negative Chambers is a new album by Yair Elazar Glotman and Mats Erlandsson.

• “Pornhub is the Kinsey Report of our time,” says Maureen O’Connor.

• “Postmodernism is dead. What comes next?” asks Alison Gibbons.

• Cat Street View

• Mystic Eyes (1965) by Them | Mystical Dream (1965) by The Roland Kirk Quartet | Mystic Green (1985) by Rain Parade

The Thing Group Art Show

People or, indeed, things in the Los Angeles area may be interested in the Thing Group Art Show which opens this Saturday at Creature Features in Burbank. The gallery will be displaying prints and original artwork from the forthcoming The Thing: Artbook including a print of my own contribution. Some of the prints are for sale, as mine will be, so Coulthart collectors (I know there’s one or two out there) should head to Magnolia Boulevard.

The publishers of The Thing: Artbook, Printed In Blood, have requested that the artists refrain from showing their contributions until the book is launched in July. I can show this Thing head, however, a manifestation that I couldn’t fit into my final composition. Even before I began work on my piece I suspected that many of the other artists would be doing their own versions of favourite moments from the film, an accurate prediction as it turns out. So my intention was to try and show some of the nastiness that might be occurring between the filmed scenes, to which end I produced a number of sketches of fanged heads. The one below would have worked better attached to a body (or at least some limbs) but I was running out of time so it was left aside. The Thing: Artbook may be pre-ordered here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Things

Weekend links 351

Herald on Griffin (1516-1518) from The Triumphal Procession of Emperor Maximilian I series by Hans Burgkmair the Elder.

• My design and illustration work for Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling continues to gain favourable comments, a novelty when reviewers often pass over the visual component of the books under their consideration. One of the most recent examples is in the latest edition of Locus Magazine; this can only be read in full by subscribers but the Tachyon Tumblr has an extract.

• Paul La Farge on the complicated friendship of HP Lovecraft and Robert Barlow. Related: The Night Ocean, a short story by Barlow & Lovecraft. Meanwhile, Lovecraft enthusiasts are still raising money for a Providence statue (spot my art and design work in the photo of the Lovecraft Art and Sciences Council).

• At The Quietus this week: Children Of Alice talk to Patrick Clarke about audio collage and English Surrealism, Lottie Brazier enters The Strange World of Annette Peacock, and Manuel Göttsching tells Robert Barry how Ash Ra Tempel became the loudest band in Berlin.

• “Mind the doors!” Eight reviewers pick ten films featuring the London Underground. Not a bad list but choosing a Doctor Who film while ignoring the great Quatermass and the Pit (1967) is an error.

• Mixes of the week: Swedenborgian Hobos by acephale, Secret Thirteen Mix 214 by Fabio Perletta, and a mix for NTS by Six Organs Of Admittance.

• More Surrealism: Leonor Fini, Surrealist Sorceress, a lecture by Dr Sabina Stent, will take place at Treadwell’s Bookshop, London, on 19th May.

• “Michael Chapman’s road-weary guitar resonates with a new generation,” says Joel Rose.

• A Journey Round my Room (1794), a book by Xavier de Maistre.

• Lyrical Nitrate (1991), a film by Peter Delpeut.

• The Sorcerer (1967) by Miles Davis | Impressions Of Sorcerer (1977) by Tangerine Dream | Venom Sorcerer (2014) by Cultural Apparati