Weekend links 754

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The Remains of Minotaur in a Harlequin Costume (1936) by Pablo Picasso. Via.

• At Rarefilmm: Long Live the New Flesh: The Films of David Cronenberg, a TV documentary from 1987 which includes contributions from Martin Scorsese and Stephen King. I wrote about this one years ago but at the time the only available copy was chopped into 10-minute segments.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Delinquent Elementals: A Pagan News Anthology, edited by Phil Hine & Rodney Orpheus.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine explores the possible influence of the Sherlock Holmes stories on Arthur Machen’s early fiction.

Perhaps there was a Super-Sargasso Sea in the upper atmosphere into which were carried objects from earth—frogs, fish, leaves—and from which they later rained. Perhaps the universe was a living thing, rains of blood its bleeding. Perhaps in 1903 the earth, in its orbit about the sun, passed through the remains of a world destroyed in an interplanetary dispute, the particles falling as rains of dust and redness. Perhaps humanity was controlled. “I think we’re property”, Fort wrote. Or, perhaps not; so skeptical he could not accept even his own authority, he had given up theorizing. “We have expressions: we don’t call them explanations: we’ve discarded explanations with beliefs.”

Joshua Blu Buhs on how Charles Fort came to write The Book of the Damned

• More Alan Moore: “Magic is not this big, spooky, dark thing that’s full of nightmares,” he tells Séamas O’Reilly at the Irish Times.

High-resolution images of 14,000 woodblock illustrations and letterforms free to use at the Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp.

• New music: Music For Bus Stations by Rod Modell; and Between Soil And Sky by Tarotplane.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Denton Welch In Youth is Pleasure (1945).

• At the Quietus: The Strange World of…Irena and Vojtech Havlovi.

Apollo Explorer

Pagan Love Song (1959) by Martin Denny | Pagan Lovesong (Vibeakimbo) (1982) by Virgin Prunes | Pagan Sun Temple (2022) by Hawksmoor

Telepathic Heights by Hawksmoor

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No designer credited but probably the work of Adrian Self.

Too much unanticipated website wrangling has set my work back this week, but in the meantime I’ve enjoyed listening to more of the mostly-electronic music of Cabaret Voltaire (inevitably), plus the mostly-electronic music of Hawksmoor (James McKeown), whose latest album, Telepathic Heights, arrived a few days ago. According to the promotional copy this one “follows a path along the electronic skyways first created by the German/Krautrock electronic pioneers of the 1970s such as Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Roedelius and Michael Rother”. And so it does to an extent, although Hawksmoor’s buzzing timbres and synthesized rhythms are closer to those created by The Human League on their first two albums, Reproduction and Travelogue, a percussive pulse which an early reviewer of the League’s music compared to steamhammers in a mineshaft. The early League records, and the first album by Marsh & Ware as the B.E.F., Music For Stowaways, have always been cult items round here, so anything that approaches them is liable to catch my attention. Hawksmoor’s other albums push further buttons of interest with subjects that include Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches (no surprise there), JG Ballard’s Concrete Island and The Crystal World, the psychogeography of Milton Keynes, and Old Weird Britain. I’m looking forward to seeing what future paths this 21st-century Hawksmoor chooses to follow.

Telepathic Heights is out now on Soul Jazz.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Talking time: Cabaret Voltaire interviews
Serious houses: The Lud Heat Tapes, 1979
German gear
Old music and old technology
A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score

Weekend links 678

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Interior of a Cathedral (1921) by Wenzel Hablik.

• The inevitable Cormac McCarthy features: “Cormac McCarthy took us beneath the surface,” says Kevin Berger at Nautilus magazine, publishers of McCarthy’s essay about the origins of language. At The Paris Review, three writers reminisce about reading McCarthy’s fiction.

• At Bajo el Signo de Libra: Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003). “Su obra examina las implicaciones políticas y socioculturales de la homosexualidad en la India.”

Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2023 so far. Thanks again for the link here!

• New music: Telepathic Heights by Hawksmoor, and Golden Apples of the Sun by Suzanne Ciani & Jonathan Fitoussi.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – June 2023, and isolatedmix 121: Oslated & Huinali Showcase mixed by S-Pill.

• At Unquiet Things: Crystal Castles and Harmonious Heavens: Wenzel Hablik’s Glittering Utopias.

• At Public Domain Review: Wonder and Pleasure in the Oude Doolhof of Amsterdam.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Exploring Tokyo’s Hidden Shrines.

• At Aquarium Drunkard: Bush Tetras interviewed.

Ben Chasny’s favourite albums.

• RIP Glenda Jackson.

Utopiat No. 1 (1973) by Utopia | Utopia (2000) by Goldfrapp | Utopia (2013) by Brown Reininger Bodson