Cthulhu – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 752

Captain Nemo by Alphonse de Neuville, from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1875) by Jules Verne.

• “…physical remoteness is a category of its own. It is an enhancer: It can make the glorious better and the terrible worse. The oceanic pole of inaccessibility distills physical remoteness on our planet into a pure and absolute form. […] Point Nemo is nearly impossible to get to and offers nothing when you arrive, not even a place to stand. It is the anti-Everest: It beckons because nothing is there.” Cullen Murphy explores the remotest place on Earth. A long and fascinating read, but no mention of Point Nemo’s dreaming tenant.

• More Bumper Book business: Smoky Man has posted the second part of his analysis of the book for (Quasi) (in Italian) which includes some comments from myself about the origin of the Moon and Serpent Magical Alphabet, and why the letter Q in the alphabet is assigned to Cthulhu. Elsewhere, Panini have announced an Italian edition of the Bumper Book for May next year, while at The Beat Steve Baxi reviewed the book from a philosophical perspective.

• At the BFI: David Parkinson on where to begin with Louis Feuillade. I’d suggest starting with Fantômas rather than Les Vampires but then I’m biased.

The combination of magic(k)al, ceremonial action, vivid colour and paradoxically serious camp in Jarman’s Super 8 films of the ’70s bears the influence of Kenneth Anger, but the differences between Jarman’s sensibility and Anger’s are more striking than the resemblances. Jarman’s vision is more materialist, austere and hermetic, and less sociological; where Anger identifies the glamour of American popular culture with the Will of the Crowleyan magician, Jarman situates the discovery of the cinematographic mechanism imaginatively within the history of alchemy. Anger cast rock stars as gods and adepts with the intention of harnessing the energy of their recognition; Jarman casts Fire Island, then in its heyday as a gay resort, as a desert defined by sculptural details and occupied by a single masked figure, in scenes that both recall his landscape paintings of the ’60s and ’70s and anticipate the design of his garden at Dungeness.

Luke Aspell on Derek Jarman’s hermetic film/painting, In the Shadow of the Sun

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “Visions of nuclear-powered cars captivated Cold War America, but the technology never really worked”.

• At The Spectator podcast: host Sam Leith talks to Michael Moorcock about 60 years of New Worlds magazine.

• At Public Domain Review: “Light from the Darkness” — Paul Nash’s Genesis (1924).

• At Bandcamp: “Disco godfather Cerrone’s enduring influence on dance music”.

• At Unquiet Things: The Art of Survival: Eyeball Fodder in Dark Times.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – November 2024 at Ambientblog.

• New music: The Laugh Is In The Eyes by Julia Holter.

• At The Daily Heller: The College of Collage.

• RIP jazz drummer Roy Haynes.

• Thermonuclear Sweat (1980) by Defunkt | Nuclear Drive (1982) by Hawkwind | Nuclear Substation (2005) by The Advisory Circle

Weekend links 748

• In Tate Britain yesterday afternoon I finally got a proper look at Frederic Leighton’s An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877). It’s been part of the Tate collection for years but I never used to see it there, my only sighting being a view through a glass door into a locked gallery where the exhibits were being rearranged. I put the statue into my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu in 1988 (see this post). Virgil Finlay also borrowed the pose for a Tarzan illustration in 1941.

• At Smithsonian magazine: See the first section of the largest-ever cosmic map, revealed in stunning detail by the Euclid space telescope.

• At The Daily Heller: Your Next Stop, The Twilight Zone. An interview with Arlen Schumer about the TV series.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on Punch and the Surrealists.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2024 at Ambientblog.

• New music: A House Where I Dream by Mattias De Craene.

• RIP Lillian Schwartz, pioneering computer animator.

• At Bandcamp: The Acid Mothers Temple Dossier.

• Where to start with Alan Garner.

• Jim Reid’s favourite music.

• The Twilight Zone (1963) by The Ventures | The Twilight Zone (1979) by The Manhattan Transfer | Twilight Zone (1998) by Helios Creed

Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion

It’s the “S” word again. I said at the beginning of this month that I was looking forward to seeing where this interest led, and here we are. My recent reading has included Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealist Women (1998), a comprehensive study that I’d dipped into in the past but hadn’t gone through properly until now. In the section devoted to activities since the 1960s Rosemont mentions a magazine, Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, which she produced with her husband, Franklin Rosemont, as part of their work with the Chicago Surrealist Group. Arsenal had more of an erratic schedule than most magazines, managing four issues that appeared in 1970, 1973, 1976 and 1989. I really didn’t expect there to be copies of such an obscure publication available anywhere but, once again, the invaluable Internet Archive has scans of the first three issues.

Arsenal proves to be a curious mix of the kind of material you’d expect from a Surrealist publication—poetry, essays, drawings, collages, significant quotes—together with chunks of Marxist politics and Freudian business that seem to have strayed in from another magazine. The latter material isn’t so unwarranted, being a reflection of André Breton’s original concerns, but committed Marxists of whatever stripe have never had much time for Surrealist art-creation and game-playing, while Freud himself was nonplussed by Breton’s attempts to interest him in the activities of the Parisian Surrealists. Breton casts a long shadow here; the Rosemonts had met him in Paris in the mid-60s, and many of the articles (also their combative attitudes) have a Bretonian cast.

Elsewhere, Arsenal breaks new ground with a Surrealist appraisal of blues musicians, music being a form that Breton and Louis Aragon had dismissed in the 1920s as “too confusing” for incorporation into the Surrealist project. The magazine also reprints a couple of comic strips, including a page of Little Nemo in Slumberland which may be the first acknowledgement from inside Surrealism of Winsor McCay’s dream-worlds as Surrealist precursors. And after posting Breton’s musings about “The Great Transparent Ones” these mysterious beings surface once again. Not only the Great Transparent Ones but also HP Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones in a piece by Franklin Rosemont about the Cthulhu Mythos. Rosemont draws attention to the obvious similarity between the names of Breton and Lovecraft’s beings, while also noting Lovecraft’s prowess as a transcriber of dreams. In doing so he complains about Lovecraft circumscribing his imagination by resorting to the story structures of the pulp magazines. Lovecraft was never a member of any avant-garde literary circle, however, unlike Clark Ashton Smith, who also receives further mention in these pages; if it wasn’t for Weird Tales we never would have heard of HP Lovecraft and there wouldn’t be a Cthulhu Mythos. This fault-picking is typical of many other pieces in the magazine, the book reviews in particular where a kind of petulant bad temper is the predominant tone. You probably can’t expect much else from a magazine that names itself after a store of weapons but the cumulative effect makes it seem that the road to the Marvellous must be paved with razor blades and broken glass. To their credit, the editors did print in the third issue some of the negative reviews they received for the previous two, including the inevitable dismissals from hardline Communists. Despite all this I’d still like to see how things developed (or came to an end) in the fourth and final issue.

• Further reading: I Could Dream In French: An Interview With Penelope Rosemont.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• First Papers of Surrealism
• The original Cabaret Voltaire
• View: The Modern Magazine

First Papers of Surrealism, 1942

As I was saying a couple of weeks ago, Surrealism will be 100 years old this year, if you mark the movement’s birth from the first manifestoes (there were two different ones) published in October 1924. Surrealism doesn’t really have a definite beginning, however, either in 1924 or earlier on; the movement evolved over several years, with different factions competing for followers while squabbling over intentions. After a great deal of ferment the manifestoes from the opposed groups led by Yvan Goll and André Breton were a declaration that something substantial had been happening that required definition. I’m not sure why all of this interests me as much as it does just now, but I’m looking forward to seeing where the interest leads. Don’t be surprised to see more posts on the subject in the coming months.

So, then… Fast-forward to 1942 and First Papers of Surrealism, an exhibition of paintings staged in New York City by the Coordination Council of French Relief Societies in October of that year. The exhibition was curated by André Breton with the assistance of Marcel Duchamp, Breton having recently arrived in the United States after escaping from Nazi-occupied France together with a small group of Surrealist artists, some of whom were represented in the show. Duchamp’s main contribution was His Twine, an installation of a large quantity of string threaded around the exhibition space through which the visitors had to peer in order to see the paintings. Duchamp also invited a group of children to play ball games inside the gallery on the opening night. This wasn’t the first Surrealist exhibition to be held in New York—Julien Levy had introduced the city to the latest art movement at his own gallery in 1933, and had been showing Surrealist paintings and Joseph Cornell’s artworks in the years that followed—but First Papers on Surrealism was an important event, with many major artists represented.

What you see here are pages from the exhibition catalogue, a publication which is more like one of the smaller Surrealist magazines than a mere list of the pictures on display. Marcel Duchamp designed the die-cut cover (those holes make me wonder whether these were also originally threaded with string), while the catalogue interior contains an intriguing collection of quotes, captions, photographs and illustrations. Breton’s “Great Transparent Ones” raise their invisible heads again, while the artists and curators are all depicted in a series of “compensation portraits” which stand in for an absence of suitable photos.

Continue reading “First Papers of Surrealism, 1942”

The Great Drone Ones

Cover by Simon Heath with Nicolas Crombez.

October, as I’ve noted before, is drone month, and this year I finally decided to catch up with the most recent instalments in the series of Lovecraft-themed albums that Cryo Chamber have been releasing each year since 2014. I’m still waiting for the discs to arrive—the Shoggoth Mail has been taking its time to slither here from Kracow—but Bandcamp happily assuages any impatience by offering immediate downloads. All of these albums are a collaborative effort between a varying roster of Cryo Chamber artists, with the contributions being blended together to create disc-long tracks (usually two discs to an album) that offer audio portraits of the gods or beings of the Cthulhu Mythos. The contributors do their best to maintain a consistent mood (and, where necessary, the same key) so there aren’t any of the abrupt exchanges you often get in music mixes. As to the identity of the groups or individuals involved, I could name names but as I’m not familiar with their work outside these releases there’s not much I can say about them.

Covers by Simon Heath.

Lovecraftian music used to be little more than one-off tracks on rock albums but, as with Lovecraftian illustration, there’s a lot more fully-realised material to be found today. One of the things I like about the Cryo Chamber albums is that they’re wholly instrumental (the “Cthulhu fhtagn” intonation on Cthulhu is a rare exception), and with each piece being an hour or more in length I find them very amenable as soundtracks for illustration sessions. Cryo Chamber specialises in a variety of dark ambient music that’s more evocative than the abstract equivalents produced by artists like Thomas Köner: Gothic doom and apocalyptic science fiction are recurrent themes. Since cosmic horror tends to be a blend of Gothic doom and apocalyptic science fiction it was almost inevitable that one or more of HP Lovecraft’s monstrous extraterrestrials would eventually raise its tentacles somewhere in the Cryo Chamber discography. This type of music is a better match for weird fiction than most of the rock music derived from Lovecraft’s stories, in part because it resembles the kinds of atmospheric timbres that you find on the better horror soundtracks. There’s more substance here than Köner’s “grey noise” but rhythm is minimised or omitted altogether, and there’s a general avoidance of overt musicality. One of the precursors of the Cryo Chamber sound, Lustmord, established the form in 1992 with The Monstrous Soul, an album that quotes liberally from Jacques Tourneur’s The Night of the Demon while borrowing track titles (IXAXAAR, The Daathian Doorway) from Kenneth Grant’s eldritch occult philosophies.

Covers by Simon Heath.

The Cryo Chamber Collaborations began with Cthulhu, the only single-disc release, and one which I seem to play the most. Subsequent releases have dealt with Lovecraft’s other Mythos gods—Azathoth (2015), Nyarlathotep (2016), the only three-disc release), Yog-Sothoth (2017) and Shub-Niggurath (2018)—before working through the extended Mythos with albums devoted to Hastur (2019), Yig (2020), Dagon (2021) and Tsathoggua (2022). Some of the albums are more sonically illustrational than others: Cthulhu and Dagon evoke the oppressive chasms of the oceanic deep, while Nyarlathotep, Hastur and Yig offer intimations of the Middle East, justified in the case of Nyarlathotep’s pharaonic aspect, less so for the others. Yog-Sothoth, meanwhile, features a succession of chiming tones like those produced by Tibetan bowl gongs. Lovecraft’s fiction tells us little about the actual nature of Yog-Sothoth aside from vague references like the one in The Horror in the Museum, a story co-written by Lovecraft and Hazel Heald, in which we read of “a congeries of iridescent globes…stupendous in its malign suggestiveness.” Not an easy thing to represent in music yet the Yog-Sothoth album has its own mood and character which sets it apart from the others in the series. The most recent release, Tsathoggua, honours Clark Ashton Smith’s loathsome toad god with swathes of abrasive noise and repeated eruptions of a cthonic bass tone like those used by Deathprod on the baleful Treetop Drive.

Now that the Cryo Chamber series has made use of all the primary deities of the Mythos cycle, plus some of the secondary ones, I’ve been wondering where it may go next. There are many minor deities (or entities) created by the generations of writers that followed Lovecraft’s lead (see this list for details) but few of the names of these beings have the authority of Lovecraft’s nomenclature. They also lack the textual reinforcement that the Mythos gives to entities that would otherwise have been limited to mentions in only one or two stories. I suppose we’ll find out whether the label will be continuing the series soon enough. The albums as they currently stand run for over 18 hours in total. That’s almost enough to soundtrack the entirety of Halloween.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Daikan by Thomas Köner
• Cosmic music and cosmic horror
• Drone month
• Hodgsonian vibrations