Gengoroh Tagame – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 444

Visions Cosmiques—Improvisations Dédiées À L’équipage D’Apollo 8 (1969) by Jean Guillou. No designer credited.

• 50 years ago this weekend Apollo 8 was on its way to the Moon. Jean Guillou’s album of organ improvisations took the mission as its inspiration although his turbulent music seems more suited to the near-disaster of Apollo 13 than the weightless drift of space travel. The album has been out-of-print for decades but may be heard in full here and here. Related: the Discogs listing for the Philips’ Prospective 21e Siècle series of avant-garde music. Most of the other albums in this series remain unreissued, and are now very collectible, not least because of their metallic “Heliophore” sleeves.

• Christmas cheer be damned: the spook season extends from Halloween to the end of the year. At These Unquiet Things, Sarah Chavez offers a list of favourite seasonal vampires, witches and ghosts. For those who prefer something televisual that isn’t more MR James, The Lorelei (1990) is a feature-length supernatural drama written by Nick Dunning. And speaking of the unavoidable James, Sarah K Marr presents an annotated analysis of A Warning to the Curious embellished with her excellent photos of the area of the Norfolk coast where the story is set.

• At Bandcamp: Voltaic Liturgies: “A symbiosis of flesh, machinery and umbral cosmic mysticism” by Primitive Knot and The Wyrding Module; and In The Sunshine We Rode The Horses by Rowan : Morrison (Rowan Amber Mill with Angeline Morrison): “The album explores themes of our beautiful natural surroundings, and how the pursuit of profit guides us to learn ‘the cost of everything and the value of nothing’, paving the way for the scarring of the landscape with fracking, HS2, retail parks, and so on…”

• “Influential Manga Artist Gengoroh Tagame on Upending Traditional Japanese Culture”. Tagame is also a prolific gay porn illustrator, a part of his career the headline avoids although it is acknowledged in Anne Ishii’s interview.

• Mixes of the week: Dream Perception Mix by Moon Wiring Club, Strange Great Snow: A Conjuror’s Hexmas by Seraphic Manta, December’s Reverie by Cafekaput, and Secret Thirteen Mix 275 by CoH.

• On the Scary Thoughts podcast: Erik Davis on philosophical pessimism, cosmic horror, police procedurals, serial killers, gnostic notions, and Louisiana as featured in the first season of True Detective.

• Manuscripts, letters and other documents by HP Lovecraft are now digitised and available for browsing at Brown University Library.

• William Hope Hodgson—The Essex-born Master of Horror: a biographical essay by Peter Berresford Ellis.

• The best ambient releases of 2018 according to FACT.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Donald Sutherland Day.

• Sandspiel

• Rocket USA (1977) by Suicide | Ticket To The Moon (1981) by Electric Light Orchestra | From Ape to Apollo (1994) Thomas Fehlmann

Weekend links 369

Untitled painting by Serbian Surrealist Ljuba Popovic (1934–2016). I missed the announcement of Popovic’s death last year.

• Bryan Washington on the radical grace of Gengoroh Tagame: My Brother’s Husband and the tradition of gay manga. Where bara artists are concerned, I favour the work of Mentaiko Itto. Bruno Gmünder recently published a collection in English.

• At madrotter-treasure-hunt: Post punk from old tapes; “Some live recordings from concerts in Holland from Charles Hayward and from This Heat, Metabolist, Pere Ubu, Holger Hiller…”

• Dennis Cooper‘s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, music, art & internet of 2017 so far. (Thanks again for the nod to this blog!)

The Weird and the Eerie is an evocative and carefully-written short study in cultural aesthetics. Far from the familiar line-up of vampires, zombies, and demons, Fisher’s eclectic examples speak directly to one of the central themes of the horror genre: the limits of human knowledge, the metamorphic shapes of fear, and the blurriness of boundaries of all types. His simple conceptual distinction quickly gives way to reversals, permutations, and complications, ultimately refusing any notion of a monstrous or alien unhumanness “out there”; with Fisher, the unhuman is more likely to reside within the human itself (or as Lovecraft might write it, “the unhuman is discovered to reside within the human itself”).

Many books on the horror genre are concerned with providing answers, using varieties of taxonomy and psychology to provide a therapeutic application to “our” lives, helping us to cathartically purge collective anxieties and fears. For Fisher, the emphasis is more on questions, questions that target the vanity and presumptuousness of human culture, questions regarding human consciousness elevating itself above all else, questions concerning the presumed sovereignty of the species at whatever cost – perhaps questions it’s better not to pose, at the risk of undermining the entire endeavour to begin with.

Eugene Thacker reviewing The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher. I’ve not read Fisher’s book yet (I’m intending to) but I was pleased to see one of my illustrations of R’lyeh accompanying the piece.

• At Dirge Magazine: Gwendolyn Nix on Twisted Labyrinths, Dark Mazes, and Ancient Methods of Reflection.

• Mixes of the week: XLR8R podcast 498 by Nicola Kazimir, and Secret Thirteen Mix 227 by Sculpture.

• AO Scott reviews Endless Poetry, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal self-portrait.

• Maze Of Love (1968) by The Dave Clark Five | Audiomaze (2000) by Tabla Beat Science | Into The Maze (2012) by Pye Corner Audio

Weekend links 222

A self-portrait by Nadia Wicker from her Projectie series.

• “And boy, did that Rain Parade sleeve look cool with its picture of the insouciant band sitting in front of large hot-house (or glass palace), the sky behind them tinted a sickly shade of apocalypse pink…” Joe Banks on the Rain Parade’s finest moment, Explosions In The Glass Palace.

• “…there are pleasures to be had from books beyond being lightly entertained. There is the pleasure of being challenged; the pleasure of feeling one’s range and capacities expanding…” Rebecca Mead on the pleasure of reading to impress yourself.

• “If Gengoroh Tagame performed the acts he drew in his comics he’d probably be dead or in jail,” says Zac Bayly, interviewing Tagame for BUTT.

Crime does not fascinate James Joyce as it fascinates the rest of us—the suggestion of crime dismays him. He tells me that one of his handicaps in writing Work in Progress is that he has no interest in crime of any kind, and he feels that this book which deals with the night-life of humanity should have reference to that which is associated with the night-life of cities—crime. But he cannot get criminal action into the work. With his dislike of violence goes another dislike—the dislike of any sentimental relation. Violence in the physical life, sentimentality in the emotional life, are to him equally distressing. The sentimental part of Swift’s life repels him as much as the violence of some of his writing.

Padraic Colum attended Joyce’s 47th birthday party.

• I’m currently reading The Wanderer, “a weird document” by Timothy J. Jarvis, which is officially published this week.

• The Changes, another remarkable children’s TV series from the 1970s, is out on DVD next week.

• Sir Richard Bishop has made all 14 of his solo albums available as free downloads.

• “How long do CDs last? It depends, but definitely not forever,” says Laura Sydell.

• “Readers absorb less on e-readers than on paper, study finds”

• Book designer Craig Mod wants to talk about margins.

• Mix of the week: a mix for The Quietus by Helm.

• Ozu’s passageways

• The Rain Parade: No Easy Way Down (BBC TV, 1984) | No Easy Way Down (studio, 1984) | No Easy Way Down (Tokyo, 1984)

Japanese gay art

An untitled drawing by Sadao Hasegawa from Japanese Gay Art, an English-language site with a substantial collection of works by Hasegawa and others, all of which are for sale. Examples run the spectrum from Gengoroh Tagame‘s beefcake S&M to Hideki Koh‘s delicate geisha boys. Something for everyone, in other words. There are also artist interviews, and a handful of articles about this area of the Japanese art world.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Gekko Hayashi: homoerotics and monsters
• The art of Ben Kimura
• The art of Goh Mishima, 1924–1989
• The art of Hideki Koh
• Secret Lives of the Samurai
• The art of Sadao Hasegawa, 1945–1999
• The art of Takato Yamamoto