BUTT magazine – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 178

Pretty Pictures, a new book by designer Marian Bantjes, is out on October 1st.

• A writer admired by Angela Carter, Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Anthony Burgess, Jonathan Meades and Iain Sinclair; a “writer’s writer…[whose] best stories bear comparison with the Ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges”; a writer with an “unsettling quality to his writing, a whiff of brimstone that links him to fin-de-siècle occult figures such as HP Lovecraft—and even, at a further remove, Aleister Crowley”. David Collard explains why you may want to read something by Gerald Kersh (1911–1968), four of whose books are being republished.

• The Eccentronic Research Council and Maxine Peake pay homage to Delia Derbyshire’s The Dreams project with a new single out at the end of the month (Pye Corner Audio and Carol Morley appear on the flip). Ms Peake’s barm-cake reverie may be heard here.

• “Applying for grants, writing artist statements, showing up to openings—artists have to do far more than just make art if they want to find an audience for it.” Jen Graves on lies and deception in the art world.

The material does not make the work. The life does not make the art. Exactly the opposite. The work creates the material. The art creates the life. Did Trinidad exist before Naipaul? Did cargo ships exist before Joseph Conrad? Did Newark and the New Jersey suburbs exist before Philip Roth? Did women in playgrounds in New York City exist before Grace Paley? See how the writer invents the material? These places did not exist as literary subjects. They were invisible to literature. The magic of a great book is that it makes its own subject seem inevitable. The danger is, it makes the subject seem like the source of power in the work.

Phyllis Rose on life and literature.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 087, 40 minutes of original electronic music by Geistform (Rafael Martinez Espinosa).

• “You’ve Got This“, an It Gets Better-style video support campaign for people recently diagnosed with HIV.

• At Dangerous Minds: Babalon Working: Brian Butler’s trippy occult odyssey with Paz de la Huerta.

• Manfred Mohr‘s computer-created artwork, from the 1960s to the present.

• Robert Macfarlane on the strange world of urban exploration.

• Rick Poynor on Bohumil Stepan’s Family Album of Oddities.

• Oli Warwick talks to Martin Jenkins, aka Pye Corner Audio.

• The 384-page BUTT calendar for 2014 is now on sale.

• Pye Corner Audio: We Have Visitors (2010) | Toward Light (2011) | The Mirror Ball Cracked (2012)

Weekend links 165

Cahill Expressway (1962) by Jeffrey Smart whose death was announced this week.

• “Russell Beale is awed by the beauty of the Roman silver Warren Cup showing men and youths making love, so startlingly erotic that the first time the British Museum was offered it in the 1950s, it turned it down flat. In 1999, when it came on the market again, the museum had to raise £1.8m to acquire it. ‘It’s just heaven, isn’t it?’ Russell Beale sighs.” Maev Kennedy on Same-Sex Desire and Gender Identity, a new exhibition at the British Museum.

• “The route to Tyburn Tree snaked through Holborn and St Giles, then went along Tyburn Road, today’s Oxford Street. It was dense with spectators.” Matthew Beaumont on the tiny memorial (Google view) for the estimated 50,000 people executed in the centre of London.

• Mixes of the Week: Bottoms Up by Staffan Lindberg for BUTT Magazine, and Electronic Ladyland, a collection of women with synths (and other instruments) from Bitch Media.

But the very thing that is valuable about diversity – the cultural and ideological clashes that it brings about – is precisely what many people fear. And that fear takes two forms. On the one hand you have the little Englander sentiment: immigration is undermining the national fabric, eroding our sense of British or Englishness, turning our cities into little Lahores or mini-Kingstons. And on the other you have the multicultural argument: that diversity is good, but it has to be policed to minimise the clashes and conflicts and frictions that diversity brings in its wake. And so we have to restrain speech, and police the giving of offence.

Kenan Malik on The Pleasures of Pluralism, The Pain of Offence.

• L’Empire des Lumières is a great title for Anne Billson’s blog about Belgium. Tram-wire covered streets are one of my favourite things.

• The Outer Church, 28 musical artists with an uncanny temperament collected by Joseph Stannard for Front & Follow.

• His Heavy Heart, a film by Alan Moore & Mitch Jenkins, is looking for Kickstarter funding.

• In 1997 Quentin Crisp wrote about “Ten Wonderful Gangster Movies” for Neon magazine.

• Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep redesigned for the Penguin Design Award, 2013.

• Out on DVD/Blu-Ray this month: The Curtis Harrington Short Film Collection.

• A billion-pixel panoramic view of the planet Mars from the Curiosity Rover.

• In the TLS: Robert Craft on Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring.

• Typophonic: Album cover typography.

• The Owl Theremin is a thing.

• LSD ABC

• Spring Rounds From The Rite Of Spring (1975) by Alice Coltrane | Revenge Of The Black Regent (1999) by Add N To (X) | Sore Ga Afrirampo (2010) by Afrirampo

Keep Your Timber Limber

Untitled drawing by Tom of Finland.

Tom of Finland’s beefy clones arrive within cruising distance of Buckingham Palace this week as part of an exhibition of drawings at the ICA. Keep Your Timber Limber is subtitled Works on Paper, and features contributions from eight artists old and new: Judith Bernstein, Tom of Finland, George Grosz, Margaret Harrison, Mike Kuchar, Cary Kwok, Antonio Lopez and Marlene McCarty.

Keep Your Timber Limber (Works on Paper) explores how artists since the 1940s to the present day have used drawing to address ideas critical and current to their time, ranging from the politics of gender and sexuality, to feminist issues, war and censorship. Stretching from fashion to erotica, the works can all be viewed as being in some way transgressive, employing traditional and commercial drawing techniques to challenge specific social, political or stylistic conventions.

The piece below by Cary Kwok isn’t one of those on display; according to BUTT magazine he’ll be showing a new series of his Biro fantasias. All the more reason to get to the ICA if you can. The exhibition runs to September 8th, 2013.

Pole Dance (2005) by Cary Kwok.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Weekend links 143

Ai No Corrida poster design by Egil Haraldsen (2001).

• “Back then, publishing an interview with Félix Guattari alongside little chats with rough trade and street walkers was unheard of — it still is for the most part.” BUTT on Kraximo, a gay Greek magazine of the 1980s.

• 13 books for 2013: A selection of forthcoming titles at Strange Flowers which so closely aligns with my preoccupations that I worry he’s reading my mind.

• “The Macaulay Library is the world’s largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings.”

• A free BitTorrent Robert Anton Wilson audio and video pack. See also the RAW files at the Internet Archive.

The Pangu Building, Beijing, January 12th, 2013. Blade Runner arrives six years early.

• Wired celebrates 100 years of Edward Johnston’s typeface for the London Underground.

• Borges’ translation of Ulysses. Or of the last page of Ulysses as a translation of Ulysses.

• 0181, a new album by Four Tet, can be heard in full at SoundCloud.

• The Edge question for 2013: “What should we be worried about?”

• JG Ballard documentaries at Ubuweb.

• Unlocking Dockstader.

• RIP Nagisa Oshima.

• Ai No Corrida (1980) by Quincy Jones | Empire Of The Senses (1982) by Bill Nelson | Forbidden Colours (1983) by David Sylvian & Riuichi Sakamoto

Weekend links 139

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (2012) by Lesley Barnes. She also has peacock wrapping paper.

Big thanks to Dennis Cooper for including this blog in his favourite music, fiction, poetry, film, art & internet lists for 2012. Lots of good company there. One benefit of end-of-year lists is the way they suggest things to look for in January.

• “…the best pictures of dicks that I’ve ever seen…” Rudy Rucker reviews Malcolm McNeill’s The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here and Observed While Falling, out at last from Fantagraphics. Rucker notes that William Burroughs’ text is still only available in out-of-print editions in which case you’ll need a book dealer. Elsewhere, Burroughs: The Movie has cleared 50% of its restoration Kickstarter goal but still needs supporters.

• Julia Holter has been a recurrent presence in these posts since the release in March of her acclaimed second album, Ekstasis. FACT has an alternate version of the album’s opening song, Marienbad, one of the extra tracks on the recent UK reissue.

Suttree’s saga carried me down, down, down to the bottom of a heightened surrogate reality, a nadir where the rarest jewels of clarity are found. The fourth time through the novel I arrived at a state of barometric equipoise, a balancing between my mental state and Suttree’s. Then, as he descended again, I began to rise. There was a hypnotic poetry to his fall — his life disintegrated, then the fragments disintegrated, then those fragments followed suit ad infinitum.

Jim White on the life-preserving qualities of Suttree by Cormac McCarthy.

• “An 18-year-old boy who discovers he has a fetish for the aged gets a job in a nursing home and develops an intimate relationship with one particular old man.” Gerontophilia, a proposed film by Bruce LaBruce, is looking for funding.

• Can’t wait for this: Groenland Records announces Who’s That Man?, a four-CD set of music produced and performed by Conny Plank. FACT has a track list.

• At BUTT magazine: Pink Courtesy Phone Mix by Richard Chartier, a great selection of electronica old and new.

• Another end-of-year list: Volumes 1 & 2 of The Graphic Canon are in NPR’s Indie Bookseller best of 2012 selection.

• The Nightmare Paintings: art by Aleister Crowley currently touring Australia.

• Christmas with Monte: Colin Fleming on the ghost stories of MR James.

• “The war on drugs is a war on human nature” says Lewis Lapham.

• Alan Moore: why I turned my back on Hollywood.

• More electronica: Chris Carter discusses synths.

• Saul Bass poster sketches for The Shining.

• At Pinterest: The Pan Within.

• Ah Pook Is The Mayan God Of Death (1975) by William Burroughs | Panic (1985) by Coil | Light Shining Darkly (1992) by Coil.