A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Horror and electronica so frequently intersect on film that you’d expect there to be more musical collisions between the two beyond obvious candidates such as Aphex Twin and the Ghost Box people. Kurt d’Haeseleer’s video for Mika Vainio & Franck Vigroux heads in this direction without being too generic, coming across like a collision between Under the Skin and the micro-budget videos made by Cabaret Voltaire in the early 80s. Watch it here. (Via FACT)
The title translates as Oh, I Can’t Stop!, and the camera shows 10 minutes of unstoppable momentum beginning with a stealthy creep through woods on the outskirts of a Polish city, and quickly evolving into a hurtling flight through streets, yards and buildings. The viewer is left to guess at the identity of the point-of-view but given the sounds of destruction the thing produces it’s evidently large and heavy. When you start to think you’ve got the measure of this film it speeds up even more. Oj! Nie moge sie zatrzymac! was made in 1975, a few years before Rybczynski’s Oscar-winning Tango. Watch it here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Fourth Dimension
• Tango
Alchemy: The Telnomic Process of the Universe (1973).
Another week, another incomparable artist gone. This small selection of Laffoley’s unique art and sculpture manages to combine references to (among other things) alchemy, William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, HP Lovecraft, Mark of the Vampire, and Night of the Demon. And this is only a fraction of his work. Richard Metzger has a memorial post at Dangerous Minds together with more paintings and some video links. There’s more at the official website and Kent Fine Art. It’s good to read that the University of Chicago Press will be publishing The Essential Paul Laffoley in March, 2016.
The Death and Life of Monsieur Sebastian Melmoth: Au Théâtre du Grand Guignol (2001–2003).
The Solitron (1997).
Apocalypse (Homage to Tangerine Dream) (1981).
It’s not every day you find a painting dedicated to the doyens of German electronica. This and other works by Scottish artist Neil Douglas Brown are in public galleries in Britain which means they’re also online at the BBC’s Your Paintings site. The pictures that combine nebulous figures, blank backgrounds and lines/arrows show an obvious Francis Bacon influence but that’s no bad thing, and Brown isn’t the only artist to explore this territory. There’s more of his work at the official website.
The Indictment (1976–77).
Fallen Man (1977).
Les Hanel I by Pierre Molinier. There’s more at The Forbidden Photo-Collages of Pierre Molinier.
• Western anti-hero Josiah Hedges, better known as Edge, was the creation of prolific British author Terry Harknett. The famously violent Edge novels, credited to “George G. Gilman”, were ubiquitous on bookstalls in the 1970s. They were Harknett’s most successful works, and are still collectible today; if you’re interested there are 61 of them to search for. Amazon Originals have just launched Edge as a new TV series although anything for a mass audience is unlikely to retain the exploitative qualities of novels that often sound like pulp precursors of Blood Meridian.
Related: Terry Harknett discusses the creation of the Edge series at Drifter’s Wind; Ben Bridges on Harknett’s career, including a look at the writer’s many other Western and thriller novels; Bill Crider on Edge, Harknett and the British group of Western novelists known as “The Piccadilly Cowboys”.
• Boyd McDonald’s queer-eye film guide, Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (1985), has been republished by Semiotext(e) in an expanded edition. Related: True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell by William E. Jones.
• “Zdenek Liska’s music thrived in unrealities,” says David Herter in a lengthy appraisal of the great Czech film composer (whose name would be accented if the coding of this blog would play nicely with diacritics).
• “…a film that plumbs the dark recesses of all our imaginations: dangerous, glorious, absurd, vivid and terrifying by turns.” Charlotte Higgins on her favourite film, The Red Shoes (1948).
• Art Forms from the Abyss, a new collection of illustrations by Ernst Haeckel for the report of the HMS Challenger expedition (1872–76). Related: Silentplankton.com
• “The biggest kick I ever get is to find myself pursuing some group of images without knowing why,” says M. John Harrison in conversation with Tim Franklin.
• “Plots didn’t interest him much. They were just pegs on which to hang characters and language.” Barry Day on Raymond Chandler.
• At Dirge Magazine: S. Elizabeth delights in the dark decor of Dellamorte & Co.
• Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd selects his ten favourite Nabokov books.
• Mix of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. XIII by David Colohan.
• Take me to the cosmic vagina: inside Tibet’s secret tantric temple.
• Pour Un Pianiste (1974) by Michèle Bokanowski | 13’05” (1976) by Michèle Bokanowski | Tabou (1992) by Michèle Bokanowski