David Lynch – Page 6 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 347

Dream Animal (1903) by Alfred Kubin.

• The week in Finland: A set of Finnish emojis includes icons for notable cultural exports such as Tom of Finland and Moominmamma. Tove Jansson’s creations have received fresh attention this month with the debut release of the electronic soundtrack music for The Moomins, an animated TV series made in Poland in 1977, and first broadcast in the UK in 1983. Andrew Male talked to Graeme Miller and Steve Shill about creating Moomins music with rudimentary instrumentation.

• Russian company Mosfilm has made a new copy of Andrei Tarkovsky’s science-fiction masterpiece, Stalker (1979), available on their YouTube channel. Tarkovsky’s films have been blighted by inexplicable flaws in their home releases, as Stalker was when reissued on a Region B Blu-ray last year. The new Mosfilm upload looks better than my old DVD so for the moment this is the one I’ll be watching.

• Before straight and gay: the discreet, disorienting passions of the Victorian era. Deborah Cohen reviews A Very Queer Family Indeed by Simon Goldhill. Related: Kevin Killian reviews Murder in the Closet: Essays in Queer Clues in Crime Fiction Before Stonewall, edited by Curtis Evans.

• “How many graphic designers owe their introduction to typography to a teenage encounter with the typefaces and lettering found on album covers?” asks Adrian Shaughnessy.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 210 by Ascion, FACT Mix 587 by Seekersinternational, and The Séance, 4th February 2017.

• Pankaj Mishra on Václav Havel’s lessons on how to create a “parallel polis”. Related: The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel.

• Hans Corneel de Roos on Dracula‘s lost Icelandic sister text: How a supposed translation proved to be much more.

• “I live outside the world in a universe I myself have created, like a madman or a holy visionary.” — Michel de Ghelderode.

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art makes 375,000 images of public art freely available under Creative Commons Zero.

• Richard H. Kirk on Thatcherite pop and why Cabaret Voltaire were like The Velvet Underground.

• Emily Gosling on what David Lynch’s use of typography reveals (or doesn’t).

• White Noise Sounds of Frozen Arctic Ocean with Polar Icebreaker Idling.

• John Gray on what cats can teach us about how to live.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Day of the Mellotron (Restored).

• The Warburg Institute Iconographic Database.

• Sastanàqqàm by Tinariwen.

• Tanz Der Vampire (1969) by The Vampires of Dartmoore | Dracula (1983) by Dilemma | Vampires At Large (2012) by John Zorn

Weekend links 325

08-30-16 from the Everydays series by Beeple.

• “Monsieur de Bougrelon is a unique character: loquacious, proud, a leftover from an earlier age, wearing garish outfits and makeup that drips. To his speechless audience, he waxes nostalgic about his life as an exile in Holland, as well as what he calls “imaginary pleasures” – obsessions with incongruous people, animals, and objects. These obsessions are often sexual or border on the sexual, leading to shocking, surreal scenes. Monsieur de Bougrelon also enthuses over his beautiful friend Monsieur de Mortimer, making this novella one of the rare works of the nineteenth century to broach homosexuality in a meaningful way, years before Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet.” Monsieur de Bougrelon (1897) by Jean Lorrain will receive its first English publication by Spurl Editions in November.

• “…The Future seems in retrospect to have been no more than a spectacle, created by the optimistic few for the optimistic many, the readily gulled multitudes who had faith in technological seers just as an earlier generation had had faith in Great Men.” Jonathan Meades reviews Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture by Douglas Murphy.

• In the Woods & On the Heath is a collection of 48 pieces of erotic prose and poetry by 24 writers, all of them illustrated by Van Rijn.

Borneman was widely read in European literature and, once settled in London, wasted no time bringing himself up to speed with developments in English-language writing, discovering a particular affinity with Hemingway and Joyce, not to mention American crime writers such as Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett. This presumably explains the distinctive, sometimes highly eccentric style of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor, which despite being set in an English film studio of the 1930s (which evokes images, perhaps, of genteel musical comedies performed in perfect RP accents), combines laconic, hardboiled dialogue with extended stream-of-consciousness passages, all filtered through the skewed phraseology of someone whose acquisition of English was still, to some extent, a work in progress.

Jonathan Coe on the mysteries of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor, a novel by “Cameron McCabe” (Ernest Borneman)

• How Oscar Wilde paved the way for gay rights in the arts. Wilde will be honoured with a major exhibition in Paris later this month.

• Noisy Rain is a free online publication dedicated to “artists working with the male figure and homo-eroticism”.

• Dennis Cooper’s blog returns. The truth about Google’s deletion of the Blogspot account has finally emerged.

• Peel Away The Ivy by The Pattern Forms will be release number 26 on the Ghost Box label in October.

• Glam Rock & Yorkshire Occult: Ben Myers on his novel Turning Blue.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 195 by Jake Meginsky.

• At Phantasmaphile: Unarius: We Are Not Alone.

• Blokdust is a browser-based musical instrument.

• Official trailer for David Lynch: The Art Life.

• Future Dub (1994) by Mouse On Mars | Future Proof (2003) by Massive Attack | Future Past Perfect pt 01 by Carsten Nicolai

Weekend links 323

Mescaline Woods (1969) by Gage Taylor.

• The soundtrack to The Man Who Fell to Earth will be released for the first time next month in a double-disc set (CD & vinyl). This isn’t, as some people have hoped, David Bowie’s unheard music for the film, but a collection of the pre-existing songs and other pieces, plus the original compositions by John Phillips. Consequence of Sound has a track list.

• At Scream Addicts: Joe R. Lansdale talks about the only film adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House that you need to see: the 1963 version directed by Robert Wise.

• The new wave of new age: How music’s most maligned genre finally became cool by Adam Bychawski.

• Transmissions From The Abyss: Dark ambient music for the perfect headspace by S. Elizabeth.

• Jason Farrago reviews Art Aids America, an exhibition at the Bronx Museum, New York.

• Curse Go Back: a limited reissue of tape experiments by William Burroughs.

• Samuel Wigley on Notorious at 70: toasting Hitchcock’s dark masterpiece.

• Toyah Willcox remembers working with Derek Jarman on The Tempest.

• “Why are musicians so obsessed with David Lynch?” asks Selim Bulut.

• Read the original 32-page programme for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

• David Parkinson chooses 10 essential films starring Oliver Reed.

• Mixes of the week: The Sounds of the Dawn NTS radio shows.

• Keith Haring envisions Manhattan as a kingdom of penises.

• Frank Guan on Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, 25 years on.

• Honky Tonk Pts 1 & 2 (1956) by Bill Doggett | I’ve Told Every Little Star (1961) by Linda Scott | I’m Deranged (1995) by David Bowie

Weekend links 302

Nymphs of Bacchus by Lozzy Bones.

• “[Jonathan Meades] has a horror of explanation and an even greater one of manifestos, the artless moron’s medium of choice.” The writer turns artist with an “exhibition of Treyfs and Artknacks” at Londonewscastle.

• Robert Aickman: Author of Strange Tales is a 50-minute introduction to the writer and his works by RB Russell and Rosalie Parker.

• A second volume of Cosmic Machine: A Voyage Through French Cosmic & Electronic Avantgarde will be landing in May.

• Amelia Mangan talks to Kattomic Energy about her horror fiction, and mentions these pages in passing. (Thanks!)

• The Interpretation of Screams: AS Hamrah on David Lynch: The Man from Another Place by Dennis Lim.

• “People thought we were on drugs – and we were!” Minimalist musician Tony Conrad interviewed.

• Two 1975 Buchla concerts by Suzanne Ciani are released for the first time by Finders Keepers.

• Inspiration from above and below: The strange world of… Sunn O))).

• At Dangerous Minds: HR Giger’s ads for the Pioneer Corporation.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: New Queer Cinema (1985–1998).

• Graphic Stamps, a history by Iain Follett and Blair Thomson.

• Ramsey Campbell’s “Thirteen Novels on the Edge of Horror”.

• The occult artwork of David Chaim Smith.

• Easter Woman (1980) by The Residents | Easter Parade (1984) by The Blue Nile | Easterfaust (2014) by The Cosmic Dead

Weekend links 283

Behind by Lisa Wassmann.

• “Without space art, nobody would know what Mars would look like.” Artist David A. Hardy talking to Nadja Sayej about a life spent painting the cosmos and—briefly—working for Hawkwind. Visions of Space, an exhibition of astronomical art, is at the Wells & Mendip Museum throughout November.

• Mixes of the week: Something Beautiful Happened by Cafe Kaput; Autumn Vybes: Mist, Mystery and Motion by Abigail Ward; and Secret Thirteen Mix 166 by Ron Morelli.

• More Ghost Box: Two new singles in the Other Voices series will be released next month. And the label is profiled in the latest issue of Electronic Sound magazine.

It breaks my heart when one writer tells another what she can or cannot do. I once knew a woman, a professor of literature, who said that Flaubert had no right to write Madame Bovary because he was a man. Such dangerous foolishness! This is just another form that dogmatic thinking takes. And it seems to me that the imagining mind—which is also a profoundly human mind—must be unfettered, boundless. To write from the perspective of another’s world demands a generous and a rigorous leap of the spirit; it demands empathy and mindfulness. Writing is so much about subverting dogmatisms of all kinds, above all the ones that insist you cannot go there! You must not say that! Writers need to go anywhere, to take anything on. And the only rule is to do it well.

Rikki Ducornet in a retrospective feature at Dennis Cooper’s blog

• “Horror at its best has always existed outside the mainstream,” says Brian Ennis in another celebratory piece about Thomas Ligotti.

• Alan Clarke & David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen receives another cinema screening next week at the Sallis Benney Theatre, Brighton.

• “[David] Lynch’s films abound with gnomic pronouncements and incantations,” says Dennis Lim.

• Stars of the Lid play a tremendous hour-long set at St. Agnes Church in Brooklyn.

• Drawn in Stereo: a book of music-related art and illustration by Michael Gillette.

• At Dangerous Minds: Only the coolest people get to sit in the wicker peacock chair.

• Everything Is Erotic Therefore Everything Is Exhausting by Johanna Hedva.

• Moon Mist (1961) by The Out-Islanders | River Mist (1989) by Brian Eno | Black Mist (Long Version) (2013) by Pye Corner Audio