Weekend links 310

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Parkland (2012) by Dean Monogenis.

• “The Story Behind the Planet’s Most Influential Road Map of ‘Weird Music’“. Gustavo Turner investigates the enduring influence of The Nurse With Wound List. Related: A Discogs list of links to all the NWWL discographies, and a recommended listening guide by Ultima Thule.

Tokyo Melody: Un film sur Ryuichi Sakamoto (1985) by Elizabeth Lennard features Sakamoto at work on Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia, together with Akiko Yano, Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi.

• “We wanted to fuse the aesthetics, histories and values of witchcraft, the traditional ideas with a contemporary edge,” says editor and creative director of Sabat magazine, Elisabeth Krohn.

There is a very seductive and very dangerous demon: the demon of generalities. He captivates man’s thought by marking every phenomenon with a little label, and punctiliously placing it together with another, similarly carefully wrapped and numbered phenomenon. Through him a field of human knowledge as changeable as history is turned into a neat little office, where this many wars and that many revolutions sleep in folders – and where we can pore over bygone ages in complete comfort. This demon is fond of words such as “idea”, “tendency”, “influence”, “period”, and “era”. In the historian’s study this demon reductively combines in hindsight the phenomena, influences and tendencies of past ages. With this demon comes appalling tedium – the knowledge (utterly mistaken, by the way) that, however humanity plays its hand or fights back, it follows an implacable course. This demon should be feared. He is a fraud. He is a salesman of centuries, pushing his historical price list.

Vladimir Nabokov in a previously unpublished lecture, On Generalities

• More Tom Phillips: 20 Sites n Years, a film by Jake Auerbach & David Thorp about the artist’s long-term urban photography project, is showing at Camberwell College of Arts next month.

• Mixes of the week: Sass In Pocket by Abigail Ward, Near Mint, 17th May 2016 by Robin the Fog & Hannah Brown, and Secret Thirteen Mix 184 by Andi Stecher.

• Grey Dog Tales talks to Brian J Showers of Swan River Press about horror and supernatural fiction.

• “Magic mushrooms lift severe depression in clinical trial.” But their use is still illegal in the UK.

• “Your brain does not process information, and it is not a computer,” says Robert Epstein.

Cliff Martinez’s theme for Nicolas Winding Refn’s forthcoming The Neon Demon.

Diamanda Galás, Still Wild and Primal, Returns to the New York Stage.

Janae Corrado on the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin.

Alastair Gee on gay home movies from the 1940s on.

People Laugh At Me (Coz I Like Weird Music) (1980) by The Instant Automatons | Weird Caravan (1980) by Klaus Schulze | Call It Weird (1983) by Xymox

Weekend links 225

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Still from The Shaman-Girl’s Prayer (1997), a video piece by Mariko Mori. This page has pictures of Mori’s futuristic/cosmic performances, films & environments.

Time Out of Mind (1979) was a BBC TV series about science fiction writers, five short films concentrating on Arthur C. Clarke, John Brunner, Michael Moorcock, Anne McCaffrey and an sf convention. I was only interested in the Moorcock film at the time, not least because it featured a short clip of Hawkwind playing Silver Machine, and inserted scenes from the film of The Final Programme (1973) between the interviews. The Moorcock episode is less about his books than about New Worlds magazine and the so-called New Wave of sf in general, so you also see rare footage of M. John Harrison in a Barney Bubbles “Blockhead” T-shirt talking then ascending a limestone cliff, and bits of interviews with Brian Aldiss and Thomas Disch. Ballard isn’t interviewed but is present via a scene from the Harley Cokeliss film Crash! (1971) in which Gabrielle Drake slides in and out of a car while someone reads Elements of an Orgasm from The Atrocity Exhibition.

• “…there happened to be a book on Ritual Magick that talked about John Dee and summonings and Dr. Faust and all that kind of stuff. So then obviously at that age, too, I read HP Lovecraft and then Michael Moorcock and what they call fantasy literature. Through HP Lovecraft I discovered Arthur Machen, and I think that sort of percolated down inside…” Dylan Carlson of Earth talking to Steel for Brains. The Wire has the vinyl-only track from the new Earth album, Primitive And Deadly, and a track from Carlson’s solo album, Gold. Related: Artwork by Samantha Muljat, designer/photographer for the new Earth album.

Phantasmaphile has details of the next two issues of deluxe occult magazine Abraxas. Issue 6 includes a major feature on Leonora Carrington while Luminous Screen is a special issue devoted to occult cinema.

• More Broadcast: Video of a performance at Teatro Comunale di Carpi, March 2010 (part 2 here), and “constellators and artifacts” at A Year In The Country.

• “Petition demands return of ‘Penis Satan’ statue to Vancouver.” There’s an uncensored photo of the contentious statue here.

• Literary Alchemy and Graphic Design: Adrian Shaughnessy on James Joyce’s writings among graphic designers.

• Frank Pizzoli talks to John Rechy about “the gay sensibility”, melding truth and fiction, and his literary legacy.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 127 by Roberto Crippa, and FACT Mix 459 by Craig Leon.

Alan Moore has finished the first draft of his million-word novel, Jerusalem.

• Crazy pavings: Alex Bellos on Craig Kaplan’s parquet deformations.

Noise Not Music: “Live recordings, obscure cassettes and more…”

Pylon of the Month

Zoot Kook (1980) by Sandii | Rose Garden (1981) by Akiko Yano | Telstar (1997) by Takako Minekawa