A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Seashore by Moonlight (between 1660 and 1664) by Egbert van der Poel.
The moon in art. A wide-ranging theme so there’ll be more tomorrow.
Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1820) by Caspar David Friedrich.
Cornfield in Moonlight (c. 1830) by Samuel Palmer.
As a lifelong pedestrian, I have an abiding hatred of cars but I still enjoy watching this. C’était un rendez-vous is an 8-minute drive through the streets of Paris one early morning in 1976, the film being a single take shot by a camera attached to the front of Claude Lelouch’s Mercedes. (Sounds of a Ferrari engine were added later.) The director was at the wheel, and driving as fast as possible on a route that took him from a tunnel at Porte Dauphine to the front of the Sacré Coeur basilica in Montmartre. Along the way, numerous red lights are ignored, several pedestrians almost end up in hospital, and startled pigeons fly for their lives. In Ballardian terms, it’s a good example of unsafe auto-erotica. Via MetaFilter.
More of an oddity than an odyssey, discovered while browsing YouTube. Ron Hays Music Image: Odyssey is a 45-minute collection of video-synth graphics, animation and other effects made for Pioneer’s LaserDisc system in 1979. Among the visuals there’s slit-scan work from Con Pederson, creator of some of the effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, animation by John Whitney, rudimentary computer graphics, and some very of-their-time dance sequences with glowing women working out in a cosmic void.
Each sequence is set to a different piece of music provided by Wagner, Pachelbel, Frank Serafine, and Larry Fast aka Synergy. It’s difficult to imagine anyone paying money to watch this unless it was the only disc on sale; more likely it would have been playing in television shops as a promotional tool, although you can also imagine it being piped into the rooms of inmates of the Arboria Institute in Beyond the Black Rainbow. I used to own Games, the Synergy album from which Delta 1 is taken. Hearing that piece again makes me regret getting rid of the album several years ago.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive
Sunday by Amanda Elledge.
• Coming from Strange Attractor this November: The Moons at Your Door, an anthology of strange tales selected by David Tibet. “The Moons At Your Door collects over 30 tales, both familiar and unknown from: Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, DK Broster, AM Burrage, RW Chambers, Aleister Crowley, Sheridan Le Fanu, Elizabeth Gaskell, WW Jacobs, MR James, Vernon Lee, LA Lewis, Thomas Ligotti, Arthur Machen, Guy de Maupassant, Perrault, Thomas De Quincey, Saki, Count Stenbock, Montague Summers, HR Wakefield and Edith Wharton. The volume also includes extracts and translations by the author from Babylonian, Coptic and Biblical texts alongside poems and fairy tales.”
• Gay-rights activists give their verdict on Stonewall: “This film is no credit to the history it purports to portray”. The only surprise about this episode is that anyone expected Roland Emmerich to make a historically accurate film in the first place. Related: Edmund White’s first-hand report written a few days after the riots.
• “If you hate [Boom!], I hate you, and I could never be your friend or your boyfriend. Divine and I had seen Boom! right before we made Pink Flamingos, and it’s about Elizabeth Taylor, retired, writing her memoirs, which is what Pink Flamingos was too, in a way.” John Waters (again) gives Hayley Campbell some dating tips.
• “We moderns may too-often suffer from a mixing up of historical sequences, but better that, surely, than risk raising a population that is entirely not-arsed about its past.” Julian Cope explores the Celts: Art and Identity exhibition at the British Museum, London.
• “But I am talking about psychedelic music, and obviously some of that comes from early psychedelic rituals, which are all about losing yourself…and I did come back into the world in a different way.” Natasha Khan on her new musical project, SEXWITCH.
• At Dangerous Minds: Vincent Price teaches the dark arts on his 1969 album An Adventure in Demonology.
• A trailer for Salthouse Marshes, “a short, landscape obsessed ghost story” by Adam Scovell.
• Rare video of Young Marble Giants playing for 45 minutes in Vancouver, 1980.
• A collection of Ghost Box posters and flyers designed by Julian House.
• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 163 by Ssleeping desiresS.
• Ministry, a new photo series by Ellen Rogers.
• Julia Holter‘s favourite albums.
• Boom Stix (1962) by Curley & the Jades | Things That Go Boom In The Night (1981) by Bush Tetras | Boom! (1991) by The Grid
Given the year it was made, Crystals (1968) has unavoidable, if inadvertent, psychedelic connotations, especially when you see these iridescent forms blooming against vivid backdrops. The same can’t be said for the music that accompanies Herbert Loebel’s photography, however, so once again I’d recommend watching this with a soundtrack of your own choosing.