I Live in Shock (1955) by Mimi Parent.
• At Public Domain Review: “Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare (1922) is at turns obtuse, grotesque, and moralizing—and sought to provoke the obscenity trial of the century. Only it didn’t, quietly vanishing instead. Colin Dickey rereads this failed satire, finding a transcendent rhythm pulsing beneath the novel’s indulgent prose.”
• “There are no surprises when a pallet of CDs arrives at my office, but when a pressing plant alerts me to a shipment of records headed my way I start to worry.” John Brien, head of Important Records, on the problems involved in the manufacture of vinyl albums.
• The sixth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).
They were building a vast alternative religion with a lack of dictates but no shortage of rituals and icons. They’d pass through the end of the world to get there first; the next album was based on a vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse slaughtering their animals and constructing a earth-gouging machine from their jawbones, demonstrating they weren’t quite intending to settle down yet. It would take them far from mainstream culture, and indeed mainstream gay culture given their repeated disdain for sanitised queerness, and into enigmatic territory. Having scared away most fans of synth pop and industrial with provocation, and the weak and tyrannical with ambiguity, they were unencumbered and “allowed to mature in the dark”, sustained by a cult following (you rarely encounter a tepid fan of Coil, most are acolytes).
Darran Anderson looking back at Coil’s debut album, Scatology
• At Smithsonian Magazine: See 15 winning images from the Close-Up Photographer of the Year Competition.
• At The Daily Heller: How did pink become a colour? Meanwhile, Steven Heller’s font of the month is Vibro.
• New music: Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds by Lawrence English.
• SciURLs: A science news aggregator.
• Shackleton’s favourite albums.
• RIP Marianne Faithfull.
• The Pink Panther Theme (1963) by Henry Mancini | The Pink Room (1988) by Seigen Ono | Pink (2005) by Boris
