Weekend links 746

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Composition B (No.II) with Red (1935) by Piet Mondrian.

• “Red is practically faultless, save, perhaps, for one hard-to-get-excited-about foray into atmospheric free jazz (Providence), though the sprawling, epic roller coaster of emotion and dexterity that follows (Starless) surely makes up for any shortfall.” Patrick Clarke on 50 years of my favourite King Crimson album. I like Providence, the piece is part of a live performance in Rhode Island so the Lovecraft connection adds to the aura of doom that pervades the album; and the structure of the album’s second side—jazz improv followed by a multi-part, Mellotron-heavy epic—harks back to the group’s debut.

• “It’s important to challenge the common idea of an almost evolutionary procession, where modernist abstract art is somehow the climax, a new and perfectly original approach to the visual world, absolutely different from all that preceded it.” Hunter Dukes on the yellow rectangle that denotes silence in the Silos Apocalypse.

The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy, an exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner, London. Meanwhile, at the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, there’s Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation.

• “I did not realize how much I had done. I am a serial polluter.” Ralph Steadman and his daughter, Sadie Williams, talking to Steven Heller about Steadman’s latest exhibition which is touring the USA.

• New music: Come Back To Me [Demo] by Broadcast; The Last Sunset Of The Year by Marcus Fjellström; Hexa by Cleared.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artists summon mythical creatures of the Echigo region for the 2024 Wara Art Festival.

• The Italian Art of Violence: Samm Deighan on the giallo cinema boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

Gavin Friday’s favourite albums.

Red (1991) by Jarboe | Red Earth (As Summertime Ends) (1991) by Rain Tree Crow | Red Sun (2012) by Anna von Hausswolff

In Germany before the war

1: Fritz Haarmann (1879–1925)

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Arrow shows Haarmann’s attic residence in Rote Reihe, Hanover.

Haarmann was one of several serial murderers haunting Weimar Germany, variously nicknamed “the Butcher of Hanover”, “the Vampire of Hanover”, “the Wolf Man”, etc. for his sexual assault, murder and dismemberment of at least 24 boys and young men between 1918 and 1924. Haarmann also sold meat on the black market which led to rumours that some of the mince and other produce he sold was human flesh.

2: M (1931), a film by Fritz Lang.

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Thea von Harbou’s script for M is based in part on the Haarmann case although Lang’s child-killer is shown preying on girls rather than boys. Peter Lorre is superb in his first major role as the murderer, while Lang’s use of the new sound technology is remarkably inventive when compared to his stagey contemporaries in Hollywood.

3: M (1953), a film by Joseph Losey.

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Lang’s masterwork reworked as a Los Angeles film noir by Joseph Losey before McCarthyism sent him to Europe. This is one noir I still haven’t seen even though a major sequence takes place in that cult location, the Bradbury Building.

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