Gustav Meyrink – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 278

El Hotel Satina (2006) by Oscar Sanmartin.

• Andrew Kötting’s By Our Selves is “a melancholy, maverick film” says David Jays. With Toby Jones following in the footsteps of poet John Clare, Iain Sinclair in a goat mask, and Alan Moore warning about the “vision sump” of Northampton.

• “Shunga means ‘spring pictures’. They depict sometimes spectacular sexual contortions and come imbued with the power of taboo. For years they have largely been out of sight—until now.” Related: shunga prints at Ukiyoe Gallery.

• “Who else could link Smokey Robinson and JG Ballard, Iggy Pop and Josephine Baker, James Bond and Stephen Sondheim, Gary Numan and Johnny Cash, Tricky and Tom Moulton…” Grace Jones is the best, says Joe Muggs.

Ballardian space – what he called “inner space” to differentiate it from the science fiction that concerned itself with distant planets and space rockets – is in fact a fusion of inner and outer space. There is no “out there” totally separate from his characters; just as there is no exclusively private, isolated inner life. His most psychologically fulfilled characters look to transcend their physical surroundings, however hostile, by embracing them.

Chris Hall on High-Rise by JG Ballard

• “In March 1984, Jorge Luis Borges began a series of radio ‘dialogues’ with the Argentinian poet and essayist Osvaldo Ferrari, which have now been translated into English for the first time.”

• “I came up with a couple of tunes, literally in my bedroom. People think of bedroom recordings as a modern, laptop invention. It wasn’t.” Daniel Miller on the accidental success of Mute Records.

• “It was in Prague that I first awoke.” Strange Flowers on Gustav Meyrink’s life in Prague.

• At 50 Watts: Stencilled ornament and illustration by William Addison Dwiggins.

• Mix of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. X by David Colohan.

• Wyrd Daze, Lvl2 Issue 4, is free and brimming with the weird.

• Mythology, a new series of drawings by Howard Hardiman.

• Spike Jones is the best, says MetaFilter.

• Peacocks at National Geographic.

• Warm Leatherette (1980) by Grace Jones | Warm Leatherette (1998) by Chicks On Speed | Warm Leatherette (2013) by Foetus

Walpurgisnacht

Walpurgisnacht (1917) by Amadeus.

April 30th gives me an opportunity to repost this drawing by “Amadeus” which could easily have come from an underground magazine of the late 60s. The works below are some of the many Faust-related illustrations at GoetheZeitPortal, a great resource although it helps if you can read a little German to navigate. This page has more Hexentanz scenes, while the complete series of Franz Xaver Simm’s academic illustrations may be seen here. Over at 50 Watts there’s Stefan Eggeler’s illustrations for Gustav Meyrink’s Walpurgisnacht (1917).

Walpurgisnacht (1897) by Albert Welti.

Walpurgisnacht (1899) by Franz Xaver Simm.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Luis Ricardo Falero, 1851–1896
• Weel done, Cutty-sark!

Weekend links 197

Posters by Jay Shaw for Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England which receives a US release this month.

• Alvin Baltrop’s Gay New York: “the clandestine activities taking place under New York piers between 1975 and 1986”. AnOther samples some of the work on display at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. Meanwhile, BUTT has some shots from Texas Porno Road Trip, a photo series by Mike McLeod. Related: HBO will show you anything but a male erection, says Justin Moyer.

• “[Robert] Desnos quickly proved himself to be one of the most gifted in these experiments – eventually known as ‘the period of sleeping fits’. He was capable of writing, speaking, drawing and composing entire fantastical narratives.” Eugene Thacker on the Surrealist séances of the 1920s.

• “It’s history, not a viral feed,” says Sarah Werner. A complaint about the way the ongoing decontextualisation of images is both pernicious and potentially lucrative.

His prose is a palimpsest of echoes, ranging from Eliot’s Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night (lines like “Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium” are Burroughsian before the fact) to Raymond Chandler’s marmoreal wisecracks and Herbert Huncke’s jive. I suspect that few readers have made it all the way through the cut-up novels, but anyone dipping into them may come away humming phrases. His palpable influence on JG Ballard, William Gibson, and Kathy Acker is only the most obvious effect of the kind of inspiration that makes a young writer drop a book and grab a pen, wishing to emulate so sensational a sound. It’s a cold thrill.

Peter Schjeldahl reviews Call Me Burroughs by Barry Miles.

• “Dance music was born in LGBT communities, but has this been forgotten?” Luis-Manuel Garcia on an alternate history of sexuality in club culture.

• Avant-Grade Hallucinogens: the Poetics of Psychedelic Perception in Moving Image Art by Stuart Heaney.

• No Condition Is Permanent: weekly radio shows from Count Reeshard at LuxuriaMusic and iTunes.

• The Golem: where fact and fiction collide. David Barnett on 100 years of Gustav Meyrink’s novel.

• Don’t Let Harlan Ellison Hear This: Nick Mamatas on a great writer.

• Mix of the week: the Ela Orleans Mix at A Sound Awareness.

• Amon Düül II playing live on French TV, 1971 & 1973.

• A soundmap of London canals and minor rivers.

• The Peculiar Underworld of Rare-Book Thieves.

• At Pinterest: William Burroughs and Phalluses.

• Architecture of Doom

• Hallucinations (1967) by Tim Buckley | Phallus Dei (1969) by Amon Düül II | Hallucinations (In Memory of Reinaldo Arenas) (1994) by Paul Schütze

Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe

Halloween approaches. Edgar Allan Poe illustrators are legion—some of the better ones appeared here a couple of years ago (see the links below)—but I’d not seen these lithographs by Hugo Steiner-Prag (1880–1945) before. Steiner-Prag was an ideal illustrator for Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem so it’s a pleasure to see him addressing Poe’s poems. All the prints are from a collection at the Google Art Project which includes one of the Golem illustrations plus a set for The Tales of Hoffmann.

Spirits of the Dead.

The Sleeper.

To Zante.

The Raven.

Continue reading “Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe”

The art of Leonidas Kryvosej

Andel západního okna.

Leonidas Kryvosej is a contemporary Czech Surrealist whose work I’d known for a while from an exhibition catalogue. I’d always wanted to see more so it’s a pleasure to discover a substantial set of paintings on the website he shares with Lucie Hrusková. A biographical note tells us that:

Leonidas Kryvosej was born 14th May, 1957 in Moravská Trebová. He lives in Ondratice near Prostejov. He has been a member of the surrealist group in Sternberk (later A.I.V) since 1986. Since 1997 a member Czech and Slovak surrealist group.

Most of the text on the site is Czech-only but the green painting above was one of the catalogue works whose English title, The Angel of the Western Window, we can no doubt assume is borrowed from Gustav Meyrink’s occult novel about Elizabethan magus John Dee. Occultism and alchemical symbolism seem to fuel Kryvosej’s art, and I like the profusion of wings and mutated bird-like creatures. There’s a lot of work on his gallery pages, all of it worth seeing for anyone who favours this kind of imagery.

Note: I’ve had to remove the caron accents from this post since either WordPress or the encoding I’m using has a problem with them. Apologies to Czech readers.

Ptací hra.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive