Brian Eno – Page 15 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 155

Poster design by Mishka Westell for this month’s Austin Psych Fest. Billy Gibbons’ pre-ZZ Top psychedelic outfit, The Moving Sidewalks, surprised everyone by reforming for a New York gig last month, their first performance together in 44 years.

• Pye Corner Audio played the Boiler Room, London, last week, and remixed a track from FC Judd’s Electronics Without Tears. Also on the latter is Chris Carter who talks about his own remix (and the “Radiophonic” Mr Judd) here.

• Tom Bianchi’s Fire Island Pines, Polaroids of New York’s gay enclave from 1975–1983. Related: In Conversation with the Violet Quill: Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White.

• From 2011: Sex, prison and lost ligatures: The story of Herb Lubalin’s Avant Garde typeface. Related: The ITC Avant Garde Gothic group at Flickr.

• Music reissues: Tape Works 1981–1982 by Laughing Hands is out now, and Scott Walker’s early solo albums will be reissued in the summer.

Drugs and the Mind (ii), a cover design from 1957 by Eric Fraser (1902–1983) whose illustrations and designs are in exhibition at the Chris Beetles gallery, London.

• At Ubuweb: William S. Burroughs + Brion Gysin + Genesis P-Orridge – Cold Spring Tape (1989).

• The World According to John Coltrane, an hour-long documentary.

• Neko Font: for when you need a word made of cats.

• Fuck yeah, Sarah Bernhardt

• Sordid Spheres!

• 99th Floor (1967) by The Moving Sidewalks | Over Fire Island (1975) by Brian Eno | Ledge (1980) by Laughing Hands

Weekend links 146

A Chinese postage stamp celebrating the Year of the Snake.

• Cyclopean is a collaboration from Burnt Friedman, Jono Podmore and Can founding members Jaki Liebezeit, and Irmin Schmidt. The Quietus has a preview of all the tracks from their forthcoming EP. Great stuff.

• Ten Things You (Possibly) Don’t Know About Kraftwerk. Related: a Speak & Spell emulator, and Atomium, a new single by Karl Bartos.

• In 1975 Barney Bubbles designed an inner sleeve for Hawkwind’s Warrior on the Edge of Time album, and this scarce recipe booklet.

• “We should all use language carefully. That is an obligation on the literate. But carefully doesn’t mean fearfully,” says Jenny Diski.

• Faber’s car-crash of a cover design for the 50th anniversary edition of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath caused an outbreak of parodies.

• At Strange Flowers: Ancient dreams and antique corruptions, Salomé via Gustave Moreau and Huysmans.

• FACT Mix 368 is a very varied collection of recent music and older pieces curated by Holly Herndon.

• At Ubuweb: eleven out-of-print recordings of Harry Bertoia’s sound sculptures.

• Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno in conversation at Interview magazine.

• Michael Chabon on Wes Anderson’s Worlds.

• Snake Rag (1923) by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band | Rattlesnake Shake (1969) by Fleetwood Mac | Snakes Crawl (1980) by Bush Tetras | Ananta Snake Dance (1980) by Suns of Arqa | Snakeblood (2000) by Leftfield

Weekend links 134

Technological mandala 02 (The beginning) (2012) by Leonardo Ulian.

• The Yellow Magic Orchestra really were the Japanese equivalent of Kraftwerk in 1978. I’d not seen this video for Firecracker before. Same goes for the Technopolis and Rydeen videos. Related: YMO’s synth programmer, Hideki Matsutake, showing off his modular Moog on a Japanese TV show.

• Sra is the final book in the Aedena Cycle by Moebius. It’s never been translated into English but Quenched Consciousness has just finished posting the entire book in an unofficial translation.

• “It’s better to have a small amount of good comics, than a big amount of mediocre comics.” Dutch comic artist Joost Swarte interviewed.

• From 2007: The Strange Lovecraftian Statuary of Puerto Vallarta (Thanks, Ian.) Related: More art by Alejandro Colunga.

A novelty mechanical clock barometer in the form of a steam engine (c. 1885).

• The MR-808: a room-size TR-808 drum machine by Moritz Simon Geist with real instruments played by robot hands.

• “Shoot us and dig the grave; otherwise we’re staying.” The women living in Chernobyl’s toxic wasteland.

• Hotel Room Portraits 1999–2012 by Richard Renaldi, a new photo exhibition at Wessel + O’Connor.

• Lane’s Telescopic View of the Opening of the Great Exhibition, 1851.

• “I’m the target market, and I don’t like it!” A Creative Catharsis.

• Brian Eno’s new ambient album, Lux, is released on Monday.

• Collages by Sergei Parajanov.

• Techno City (1984) by Cybotron | Techno Primitiv (1985) by Chris & Cosey | Techno Dread (2008) by 2562.

The Catherine Wheel by Twyla Tharp

The music links this weekend were all related to my favourite Talking Heads period, 1979–1982, which not only encompasses the release of the band’s Fear Of Music and Remain In Light albums but also saw the individual group members produce some great solo records. I’d been playing one of these, the first Tom Tom Club album, all week while the sun was out. Now the temperature has dropped again, and we’re back to this summer’s default setting of perma-rain, the music doesn’t feel quite so appropriate. In 1981 while Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz were exercising their funk muscles David Byrne was recording My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts with Brian Eno. The score Byrne produced immediately prior to this for the Twyla Tharp Dance Company often sounds like My Life… avant la lettre, with similar musicians (Eno included), sounds and rhythms. This is one reason I favour Songs From The Broadway Production Of “The Catherine Wheel” over Byrne’s subsequent solo albums.

The Catherine Wheel was a seventy-two minute dance film choreographed and directed by Twyla Tharp. The film was part-produced by the BBC and as far as I’m aware was only ever broadcast the once in Britain in 1983. Byrne’s score runs continuously as on the CD and cassette versions, the vinyl release being a re-sequenced editing of the tracks favouring the handful of songs. In dance terms the film was very innovative for the time, employing some subtle video effects and a couple of sequences where a duet is danced with a wire-frame CGI figure. A long end sequence, The Golden Section, predates The Catherine Wheel, and was apparently the origin of the project. Since I hadn’t seen any of this in nearly thirty years my search for Tom Tom Club videos at the weekend made me wonder whether YouTube had any Catherine Wheel clips, only to find that the entire film can be viewed here ~~in a recording from Italian TV~~. (That copy was removed, link now goes to another one.) I’m so familiar with Byrne’s album it’s been fascinating seeing this again, especially since I only saw it on a small black-and-white TV originally and recalled very little of the performance. All the music works well enough on its own but seems completed when heard in this context, especially during The Golden Section. The film is also available on DVD from Kultur so this is another item for the shopping list.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Moonlight in Glory
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Weekend links 119

The BFI’s recent DVD release of Peter de Rome’s gay porn films has been mentioned here a couple of times already but I only bought a copy this week. It’s a remarkable release for a number of reasons, not least for showing how much attitudes towards pornography in Britain have changed in recent years. De Rome’s films are explicit enough to ensure that in the 1970s and 1980s anyone caught selling them in the UK might have been imprisoned. That you can now buy them uncut from a high street shop on a disc packaged with the usual care by the British Film Institute means another small part of our iniquitous past has gone for good. Among the extras there’s a documentary with the 88-year-old director discussing his work. This week he talked to BUTT magazine who also have one of his shorter films from the DVD, Hot Pants, on their site.

• “Reading this book, it is hard not to feel that the largest mental health problem – the really crazy thing – is society’s attitude to drugs in general and LSD in particular…” Phil Baker reviews Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain by Andy Roberts.

• “Loved by aristocrats and immortalized in literature, Denham Fouts remains virtually unknown in his own hometown.” Richard Wall on The World’s Most Expensive Male Prostitute.

The very etiology of rabies is mythic: once the bite heals and the virus has traveled to the brain, “the wound will usually return, as if by magic, with some odd sensation occurring at the site.” Then there’s the fact that no definitive diagnosis can be made without taking a biopsy of the sick animal’s brain, leaving only one gory solution: decapitation.

Rabies is horror’s muse. In almost all iterations of the genre, those we most trust suddenly turn strange: a boyfriend morphs into a wolf at midnight, a fiancé turns out to be harboring a mad first wife in the attic, a friend is bit by a zombie and goes berserk.

Alice Gregory reviews Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy.

• The Horror of Philosophy: Erik Davis talks to Eugene Thacker about Lovecraft, medieval mysticism, and thinking the world-without-us.

• Eagle Scouts Returning Our Badges: A Tumblr for those protesting the current anti-gay stance of the Boy Scouts of America.

• His Father’s Best Translator: Lila Azam Zanganeh on the late Dmitri Nabokov.

• Les Liaisons dangereuses: illustrations by Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt).

• Andrea Scrima looks at Robert Walser’s Der Spaziergang (The Walk).

• 10 Great Places to Meet Lesbians If You Have a Time Machine.

• Jesse Bering in Scientific American asks “Is Your Child Gay?”

• As Above, So Below (1981) by Tom Tom Club | Genius Of Love (1981) by Tom Tom Club | Mea Culpa (1981) by Brian Eno & David Byrne.