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Weekend links 725

Springtime in Paris (1923) by Georg Kretzschmar.

• I’ve been asked to mention that the tribute book put together for Alan Moore’s 70th birthday, Alan Moore: Portraits of an Extraordinary Gentleman, is still available. As before, the book features contributions from many well-known comic artists, a foreword by Iain Sinclair, and this piece of my own.

• “I never posted any lecture of mine on Tumblr, even though Tumblr would seem to have plenty of elbow-room for hour-long, learned, European public lectures (with many lecture slides).” Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling.

• Reading the Signs: John Kenny in conversation with Mark Valentine about Mark’s new collection Lost Estates.

There remains something suspect about blotter, a stain that is both a blessing and a curse. As the blotter producer Matthew Rick, who started selling sheets as non-dipped ‘art’ collectables at festivals in 1998, puts it: ‘[B]lotter is the last underground art form that’s going to stay underground, simply because you’re creating something that looks like and functions like a felony.’ In other words, blotter is ontologically illicit; it is, as Rick says, ‘drug paraphernalia by its very existence’.

Erik Davis (again) on LSD and the cultural history of the printed blotter

• At Colossal: Uncanny phenomena derail domestic bliss in Marisa Adesman’s luminous paintings.

• Standing stones, urban hellscapes and male nudes: Andrew Pulver on Derek Jarman’s Super-8 films.

• “ [breaking news] An anomaly on earth has brought the cats to over 150 meters. Please be patient.”

• At We Are The Mutants: Alien Renaissance: An interview with illustrator Bob Fowke.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…René Crevel My Body and I (1926).

• At Public Domain Review: The Little Journal of Rejects (1896).

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

• RIP Steve Albini.

• Sandoz In The Rain (1970) by Amon Düül II | Bon Voyage Au LSD (2001) by Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. | Careful With That Sheet Of Acid, Eugene (2019) by Jenzeits

The Debutante, a film by Elizabeth Hobbs

The Debutante is an 8-minute animated adaptation of a short story by Leonora Carrington, a tale of bestial havoc wreaked by a hyena on an aristocratic dinner-dance. This wish-fulfilling fantasy, which Carrington wrote in the 1930s, is one of the author’s more popular pieces of fiction. The story has been anthologised many times, notably by Angela Carter in 1986 who included it in Wayward Girls & Wicked Women: An Anthology of Stories. Elizabeth Hobbs illustrates the piece with hand-painted rotoscoping, a technique which many people will associate with the Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds sequence in Yellow Submarine although this is by no means the earliest or only example of the form. It’s a useful process for stories which require the blending of the fantastic with the mundane.

Another hyena encountering the English aristocracy may be found in Esmé by Saki, the first story in his essential Chronicles of Clovis collection. Saki shared Leonora Carrington’s anarchic impulses when presented with ennervating upper-class rituals. Enough of his stories feature wild animals and eruptions of chaos in country houses that I wonder whether there was any Saki influence upon The Debutante. I’d guess not—Leonora Carrington possessed more than enough wayward imagination of her own—but whatever the answer, Saki remained fascinated (or appalled) by the aristocracy and their absurdities, while Leonora followed her debutante heroine to a welcome exile from their world.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist survival kit
• Leonora Carrington and the House of Fear

Symmetry, a film by Philip Stapp

Symmetry (1966) is a PIF (public information film) by Philip Stapp (1908–2003), an American animator who made a number of other films in this vein while also working on group projects like the Halas and Batchelor adaptation of Animal Farm. Orson Welles used to compare actors to cherry pickers: they all follow the harvest. The same might be said about animators, many of whom have to work on advertising films instead of any personal projects they may be nurturing. PIFs would seem to offer more creative freedom to judge by this example which wordlessly demonstrates different types of symmetry using animated figures. Stapp animated the film with Jean Williams. The music was by Gene Forrell.

Spell Blanket

Design, as before, by Julian House.

The trees full of new leaves
offering green tears to the earth
to be picked and split
for the tell of green of
what’s fair and unfair
and between the twigs, cassette tape drapes
his silent songs let melody
loose in layers of heartache

The trees are indeed full of new leaves just now. The lyrics for I Want To Be Fine, one of the songs on Spell Blanket, twine into a different shape the words which had earlier appeared as half of Royal Chant on the Broadcast and Focus Group album, Witch Cults Of The Radio Age. Spell Blanket has been a delightful surprise, or a pair of surprises, the first being the CD packaging which emulates the facsimile vinyl sleeves that the Japanese love so much. If people are going to keep releasing CDs then this is the way to go. As for the music, demos are seldom very promising material, the kinds of things that appear as bonus tracks on reissued discs. I’d have bought this one anyway but didn’t expect it was going to be so good or sound so finished in comparison to the demos offered by Stereolab, for example, on their recent album reissues. James Cargill apparently took his time preparing the material for Spell Blanket and its companion collection, the yet to be released Distant Call. His care shows in the sequencing which balances very short sketches with longer compositions to create a collection that feels closer to a proper album than I expected. The general tone is light and unavoidably poignant when you know that these are among the last songs we’ll hear from Trish Keenan. Will Salmon reviewed the album for The Quietus.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Through The Gates Of Yesterday

Weekend links 724

Dr Faustus Conjuring Mephistopheles (1928) by Eric Ravilious.

• Materialising in July from a cloud of sulphurous smoke: The Devil Rides In – Spellbinding Satanic Magick & The Rockult 1967–1974. Cherry Red Records, home of the well-sourced, well-researched multi-disc compilation, might have been channelling my inner desires with this one, a Sabbath-esque soundtrack to the Occult Revival. I ordered it faster than you can say “Hail Satan!”

• A Series of Headaches: Shakespeare’s First Folio meets the London Review of Books. “In this film, letterpress printer Nick Hand pulls apart the whole process, from making ink from crushed oak galls to heaving the levers of a replica Jacobean press, and shows how we produced our own (almost) authentic version of the LRB circa 1623.”

• Alan Moore will be subject to greater attention than usual in October. In addition to the forthcoming Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, the month will also see the publication of The Great When, the first novel in his Long London series. Bloomsbury now has cover art to go with their description of the novel.

• Mad Dogs & Englishmen: Faust On Virgin Records: An extract from Neu Klang: The Definitive Story of Krautrock by Cristoph Dallach, “the first comprehensive oral history of the diverse and radical movement in German music during the late 60s and 1970s.”

• Alien life is no joke: Adam Frank on combating “the giggle factor” in the search for extraterrestrial life.

• At Colossal: Lauren Fensterstock’s Cosmic Mosaics Map Out the Unknown in Crystal and Gems.

• New music: Ritual (evocation) by Jon Hopkins; Time Is Glass by Six Organs Of Admittance.

• At Unquiet Things: The Gentle, Jubilant Visual Poetry of Tino Rodriguez.

• At Retro-Forteana: Colin Wilson, Philosopher of the Paranormal.

• DJ Food on Jeff Keen’s Amazing Rayday Comic collages.

At Dennis Cooper’s: Alan Clarke Day.

• Krautrock (1973) by Faust | Krautrock (1973) by Conrad Schnitzler | The Kraut (2007) by Stars Of The Lid