Jah Wobble – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 688

Ascending to the Cathedral, Barcelona (1938/1960) by Kati Horna.

• The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith. Related: a four-and-a-half-hour walkthrough of Stray, a game in which you help a cat escape from a deteriorated robot-filled housing complex.

• Quote of the week: “The true master requires the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” Thus Vladimir Nabokov at Lawrence Weschler’s Wondercabinet.

• New music: Orion Nebula by Christian Wittman, and Chthonic by Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci.

Chapter by chapter, Flaubert lampoons his poor pair, who fail at discipline after attempted discipline: landscape architecture, anatomy, history, literature, phrenology, religion, even love, and on and on. In each pursuit, they never lose the optimism or the hubris of thinking they can put their knowledge to work in the world. When they become interested in pedagogy, they adopt a pair of abandoned children who are at turns mystified by and contemptuous of their efforts to improve their well-being. The fruit trees fail, the novel is abandoned, a cat is boiled alive, the children cause scandals.

David Schurman Wallace explores the hazards of distraction with a detour through Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet

• At AnOther: Peter De Potter’s new book explores the erotic performance of social media.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Hobart LaRoche presents…15 experimental video games.

• Take a look at a book chronicling the albums of Island Records.

• At Colossal: Gabriel Schama’s laser-cut plywood reliefs.

• Orion (1986) by Metallica | Shades Of Orion (1993) by Shades Of Orion | Orion (2001) by Jah Wobble and Bill Laswell

Weekend links 633

A blueprint by Buckminster Fuller for the first geodesic dome.

• “That opening sequence on the train, it’s got the dynamic of a wonderful pop video. It’s one of the world’s greatest actors who understood the power of small gestures.” Jah Wobble enthusing about Roy Budd, Michael Caine, and Mike Hodges’ baleful revenge drama, Get Carter.

• One of the BFI’s Halloween releases this year will be The Ballad of Tam Lin (1971), the blu-ray debut of a cult film that blends folk horror with modish melodrama. Direction by Roddy McDowall, music by Pentangle, and a cast that includes Ava Gardner and Ian McShane.

• New from A Year In The Country: Cathode Ray And Celluloid Hinterlands, a book exploring weird film and TV, not all of which is from the over-ploughed folk-horror furrows.

The whole notion of the Diggers kind of evolved out of the anarchism thing. And also there was more than a little social conscience. Because, by now, in ‘66, people started to come to the Haight Ashbury from all over. And that was when, in ‘66, it was still, really… Before the “Summer of Love,” it really was the Summer of Love. The “Summer of Love” [in 1967] was Life Magazine’s version. That’s what created the homeless on the streets and all that shit, because so many people came with absolutely no understanding of what they were about.

The role of the Diggers in this period was an outlaw, romantic, feed-the-people, anarchist, ‘Who’s in charge?—YOU ARE’, that kind of thing. That line in Apocalypse Now when he gets to the bridge and the little string of Christmas lights are hanging and he gets to one guy who’s guarding one end of the bridge and he says, Who’s in charge here? He says, I thought you were. And that’s so true. That is so true. Then Grogan, whenever anyone would ask, where’s Emmett Grogan… anyone could say “I’m Emmett Grogan.” So you could deflect a lot of shit.

Harvey Korspan of the San Francisco Diggers talking to Jay Babcock in another installment of Jay’s verbal history of the hippie anarchists

• “Buckminster Fuller patented the geodesic dome on June 29, 1954. Two decades later, it was everywhere in science fiction.”

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Harry Mathews Tlooth (1966).

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by Cheri Knight.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Bangel.

• Tam Lin (1969) by Fairport Convention | Young Tambling (1971) by Anne Briggs | Tamlane (2016) by Dylan Carlson & Coleman Grey

Weekend links 590

Understanding Mu (1970) by Hans Stefan Santesson. Cover art by Ron Walotsky. Via.

• “I have never believed Chariots of the Gods?—it takes faith, so what I mean is that I’ve never believed in it—but it has still held my affection for decades.” Patrick Allington on ancient aliens, unidentified aerial phenomena, and the unhinged pleasures of speculative nonfiction. I still have a stash of paperbacks in what I call “The Crank Box”, a collection of the more far-out titles that proliferated in the 1970s in the wake of the bestselling (and very egregious) Erich von Däniken. There aren’t many books about ancient astronauts or flying saucers in the box because they were so plentiful, I was always on the lookout for more outlandish volumes: lost continents, yes, but not the all-too-common Atlantis; Lemuria or Mu were more like it. So too with Hollow Earths and mysterious realms as detailed in Shambhala: Oasis of Light by Andrew Tomas, or The Lost World of Agharti: The Mystery of Vril Power by Alec MacLellan. The attraction wasn’t that any of this speculation might be true, more that these books operate as bargain-basement equivalents of the Borges conceit in which metaphysics is regarded as a branch of fantastic literature. Weird fiction by other means.

Collecting these books was a fun thing to do in the 1980s when the crank publications of the previous decade had washed up on the shelves of secondhand bookshops. The shine began to wear off in the 1990s when the emergence of the internet empowered a new breed of hucksters (and worse) pushing all of this stuff as though it was “hidden knowledge”. It’s hard to get excited about a battered paperback brimming with pseudo-science and pseudo-archaeology when similar ideas proliferate on YouTube channels catering to credulous hordes.

• Absolutely elsewhere (and linked here on a regular basis): An archive of the endlessly fascinating Absolute Elsewhere, a website created by the late RT Gault in order to present “a bibliography of visionary, occult, new age, fringe science, strange and even crackpot works published between 1945 and 1988”. The listings are accompanied by an informed, sceptical and often enlightening commentary, and also include a fair amount of weird fiction. Mr Gault had the right attitude.

• New music: Raum by Tangerine Dream, a preview of the new album, Probe 6–8, which will be released next year; new/old music: a reissue of Marine Flowers (Science Fantasy) by Akira Ito.

• “He had been honest about himself, and shockingly honest about his parents, but about his work he had spun me a tale.” Carole Angier on the elusive WG Sebald.

• At The New Criterion: Two stray notes on Moby-Dick by William Logan; on contemporary reviews of Moby-Dick and Melville’s journey on the Acushnet.

• “Perhaps what’s most extraordinary about Kollaps is that it was made at all.” Jeremy Allen on Einstürzende Neubauten’s thrilling debut album.

• At Culture.pl: a podcast about Czech film director Vera Chytilová and her masterpiece of Surrealist anarchy, Daisies.

• At Perfect Sound Forever: Part 2 of a Jon Hassell tribute which talks to friends and musical collaborators.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…William S. Burroughs The Ticket That Exploded (1962).

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine unearths a medieval recipe for gingerbread.

• Mix of the week: Death’s Other Dominion by The Ephemeral Man.

• MU-UR (2000) by Coil | Mu (2005) by Jah Wobble | Mu 1 (2015) by Acronym

Weekend links 558

• One of the earliest posts here concerned The Suite of the Most Notable Things Seen by Cavaliere Wild Scull, and by Signore de la Hire on Their Famous Voyage from the Earth to the Moon (1776) by Filippo Morghen, a series of prints which depict the fantastic inhabitants, fauna and flora of the Moon. Morghen shows the Earth’s satellite to be a tropical place very similar to 18th-century conceptions of the New World or the Far East. Back in 2006 you couldn’t see copies of the prints as large or as detailed as this set at The Public Domain Review.

• “Last Call preserves the poignant irony that the trust and vulnerability that once made gay bars synonymous with gay community were also vectors of death, both in the form of murder and, later, HIV/AIDS.” Jeremy Lybarger on Elon Green’s study of the murders of four gay men in New York City in the 1990s.

• “No one in American letters ever pushed back against power over such a long time as [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti,” says John Freeman. Related: Ferlinghetti’s travel journals.

• New music with literary associations: Invisible Cities by A Winged Victory For The Sullen, and Star Maker Fragments by TAK Ensemble & Taylor Brook.

• Old music with no literary associations: The first of the forthcoming releases of live recordings by Can will be a 1975 Stuttgart concert.

• “The 120 Days of Sodom: France seeks help to buy ‘most impure tale ever written'”.

• The Joy of Circles: Vyki Hendy looks at some recent concentric cover designs.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Sculpted sushi made entirely from natural polished stones.

• My Hungry Interzone: Brian Alessandro on coming out and reading Naked Lunch.

• Andy Thomas maps Jah Wobble’s interdimensional dub.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 684 by Ben Bondy.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jim Jarmusch Day.

• Circles (1966) by Les Fleur De Lys | Circles (1970) by Blonde On Blonde | Carry On Circles (2006) by Tuxedomoon

Weekend links 502

The Byrds (1967) by Wes Wilson.

• RIP Wes Wilson, one of the first of the San Francisco psychedelic poster artists of the 1960s, and also one of the more visible thanks to the popularity of his compressed type designs, some of which were derived from a style developed by Alfred Roller for the Vienna Secession circa 1900. When Playboy magazine wanted a cover that reflected the psychedelic art trend in late 1967 it was Wilson they called. Related: Wes Wilson’s posters at Wolfgang’s.

• “In the ’70s, New Age music offered listeners, trapped in the urban rat-race, audio capsules of pastoral peace to transform their homes into havens. Today the Internet and social media form a kind of post-geographic urban space, an immaterial city of information whose hustle ‘n bustle is even more wearing and deleterious to our equilibrium.” 2010–19: Back To The Garden: The Return Of Ambient And New Age by Simon Reynolds.

• “This pointed-finger symbol goes by many names: mutton fist, printer’s fist, bishop’s fist, pointer, hand director, indicule, or most unimaginatively as ‘a hand’. Scholarly consensus has pretty much settled on the word ‘manicule’, from the Latin maniculum, meaning ‘little hand’.” John Boardley on the typographic history of the pointing hand.

• Tales Of Purple Sally (1973) by Alex. All instruments by Alex Wiska apart from bass by Holger Czukay, and drums by Jaki Liebzeit. The latter pair also produced the album. Related: Jah Wobble talking to Duncan Seaman about working with Czukay and Liebeziet.

• “On Jan 25, 2020, tired of negative film lists on Twitter, I asked people for ‘obscure [or] underseen films you adore and think more people should know about.’ This was the result.”

• Flash Of The Spirit by Jon Hassell & Farafina “hails from a time when the possibilities of music seemed less well-defined, and borders felt more open,” says Geeta Dayal.

• The Art Of Computer Designing: A Black and White Approach (1993) by Osamu Sato. There’s more of Sato’s print work at the Internet Archive.

• At the Morgan Library: Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect. Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

• New from Strange Attractor: Inferno: The Trash Project: Volume One by Ken Hollings.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Storm de Hirsch Day.

• Celeste by Roger Eno & Brian Eno.

• Ben Watt‘s favourite music.

• The Inferno (1968) by The Inferno | Inferno (1990) by Jah Wobble’s Invaders Of The Heart | Inferno (1993) by Miranda Sex Garden