Jonathan Meades – Page 5

Weekend links 214

San Francisco Sound (1967). Art by Wallace Studio, Seattle.

• RIP gay porn pioneer Peter de Rome. BUTT posted de Rome’s surprisingly daring Underground (1972), a film in which two men have an unfaked sexual encounter on a New York subway train. That film and others are available on the BFI’s DVD collection. Related: Brian Robinson remembers a director of films whose supporters included Andy Warhol, William Burroughs and John Gielgud.

• “My stuff is implicitly critical of television as it is now,” explains Jonathan [Meades], “Television used not to be as openly moronic as it has become…” A lengthy and typically pugnacious Meades interview with Remy Dean.

• Thurston Moore remembers the Burroughs-themed Nova Convention staged in New York in 1978. William Burroughs 100—Nova Convention is a retrospective exhibition running at Red Gallery, London, next month.

How are we expected to take seriously…any work which appears to have engaged less than the whole passionate attention of its author? To be fobbed off, at the last, with something which we feel to be less true than the author knew it to be, challenges the importance of the whole art of writing, and instead of enlarging the bounds of our experience, it leaves them where they are.

Katherine Mansfield was also a book reviewer.

• JG Ballard’s Crash is reissued in August by Fourth Estate with an introduction by Zadie Smith. There’s a tantalising extract from the intro at the NYRB or you can read the whole thing if you’re a subscriber.

• “Between 1959 & 1980 Shirley Collins changed the course of folk music in England & America. Thirty years after disappearing, she’s back.”

• Photos by Anne Billson of one of the more attractive Parisian arcades. Related (in a flâneur sense): Christina Scholz‘s Vancouver dérive.

• “Why did Borges hate soccer?” asks Shaj Matthew. Related: George Orwell on the same subject.

• Mixes of the week: FACT mix 447 by Forest Swords, and Programme 13 from Radio Belbury.

• At Dangerous Minds: Roland Topor’s cheerfully violent illustrations from Les Masochistes.

• Rainy Day Psychedelia: Ben Marks on Seattle’s neglected 1960s poster scene.

• Strange Flowers looks at Oskar Schlemmer‘s Triadic Ballet designs.

• A Journey to Avebury: Stewart Lee interviews Julian Cope.

• It’s All Over Now (1963) by The Valentinos featuring Bobby Womack | It’s All Over Now (1964) by The Rolling Stones | It’s All Over Now (1974) by Ry Cooder

Weekend links 201

An illustration by John Kettelwell for The Story of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (1928).

• “The strain in everything I write, of not being taken with the bounteousness of humankind, was also the attitude of both my parents.” Jonathan Meades talking to James Kidd about his forthcoming memoirs.

• 7 Trumps From the Tarot Cards and Pinions (1969), and album of electronic music by Ruth White, is being given a limited vinyl reissue. Related: Ruth White—An American Composer.

• 82 minutes of Michael Moorcock talking in 1972 to Jean-Pierre Turmel, co-founder of the Sordide Sentimental record label.

If Verne’s protagonists often seem to stop short of revelation, it’s because the revelation is not meant to be known. Revelation has a way of putting man back at the front of the evolution chart, moving neatly toward a happily progressing future, out of the darkness and into the light. The characters who embark upon the Voyages Extraordinares move backward and forward and all about, spun around like blindfolded children trying to pin the tail on the donkey. The point of the adventure, after all, is not to have a conclusion; it is to get knocked off your feet.

Stefany Anne Golberg on Journey to the Center of the Earth at 150.

• Photographs of pre-Haussmann Paris by Charles Marville, and photographs by Amy Heiden of industrial ruins.

• Mixes of the week: FACT Mix 427 by Wild Beasts, and Secret Thirteen Mix 108 by Kangding Ray.

• Hear Italo Calvino read selections from Invisible Cities, Mr Palomar and others.

• William S. Burroughs in Dub conducted by Dub Spencer & Trance Hill.

• Cycles, Returns & Rebirth: Alexander Tucker on Derek Jarman.

• Harold Budd: the composer with no urge to make music.

• The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments.

• 80 minutes of Monolake playing live in 1999.

• At 50 Watts: Dyl’s Dance.

• Owls And Flowers (2006) by Belbury Poly | Learning Owl Reappears (2011) by The Advisory Circle | The Owls (2013) by Félicia Atkinson

Weekend links 199

Follow the Leader (London, 2011) by Isaac Cordal.

• “Brutalism is the decor of dystopian films, literature and comics, just as gothic is for horror.” Jonathan Meades‘ A-Z of brutalism.

• Vitaly Shevchenko on the urban explorers of the ex-USSR. Related: Photos by Vitaliy Raskalov from the top of the Shanghai Tower.

• Joe Banks reviews the throbbing, hissing, minatory pulses of the Black Mill Tapes 1–4 by Pye Corner Audio.

Walter Benjamin is the only one among the commentators who attempts to pin down the anonymous, evanescent quality of Walser’s characters. They come, he says, “from insanity and nowhere else. They are figures who have left madness behind them, and this is why they are marked by such a consistently heartrending, inhuman superficiality. If we were to attempt to sum up in a single phrase the delightful yet also uncanny element in them, we would have to say: they have all been healed.” Nabokov surely had something similar in mind when he said of the fickle souls who roam Nikolai Gogol’s books that here we have to do with a tribe of harmless madmen, who will not be prevented by anything in the world from plowing their own eccentric furrow.

Le Promeneur Solitaire: WG Sebald on Robert Walser

• Drink The New Wine, an album by Kris Force, Anni Hogan, Jarboe, Zoe Keating and Meredith Yayanos.

• At 50 Watts: Illustrations by Fortuné Méaulle for Alphabet des Insectes by Leon Becker.

• Lawrence Gordon Clark, Master of Ghostly Horror. An interview by John D’Amico.

• Chapel Perilous: Notes From The New York Occult Revival by Don Jolly.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 107 by Ernestas Sadau.

• An Occult History of the Television Set by Geoff Manaugh.

• Was Ist Das? The Krautrock Album Database.

• First dérive of the year by Christina Scholz.

• John Waters’ Youth Manifesto.

• Gardens of Earthly Delights

• Psychedelic Folkloristic

• Water Music I / Here Comes The Flood / Water Music II (1979) by Robert Fripp & Peter Gabriel | After The Flood (1991) by Talk Talk | Flood (1997) by Jocelyn Pook

Weekend links 185

L’uomo che piantava gli alberi (2013) by Sofia Rondelli. Via Form Is Void.

• I’m looking forward to hearing the new album by Chrome Hoof, a band whose ambition and attitude makes many of their contemporaries seem lukewarm at best. Mick Middles gets to grips with Chrome Black Gold here. John Doran interviewed the group in 2010, a piece which includes a Chrome Hoof mix of tracks by other artists.

• Jay Roberts: “I was a young Marine scout sniper, definitely his type. And for a single, unforgettable afternoon, Orange County’s most notorious serial killer coaxed me into a place from which many didn’t escape.”

• Jonathan Meades: “Why I went postal … and turned my snaps into postcards.” “Meades isn’t your average architectural fanboy,” says Rachel Cooke who went to talk to him at his home in Marseille.

“Faced with a Nabokov novel,” Zadie Smith writes, “it’s impossible to rid yourself of the feeling that you’ve been set a problem, as a chess master sets a problem in a newspaper.” Certainly, while Humbert asks the reader “not to mock me and my mental daze”, the suspicion is that the power dynamic in his tale is a little different.

Tim Groenland on the difficulties of writing, publishing and reading Lolita.

• Cosmic Machine is a double-disc collection of French electronic music from the 1970s & 1980s. Justice enthuse about the music here where you can also preview the tracks.

• The Midnight Channel, Evan J. Peterson’s horror-poetry homage to the VHS era, is available now from Babel/Salvage. There’s a trailer here.

• “Our age reveres the specialist but humans are natural polymaths, at our best when we turn our minds to many things,” says Robert Twigger.

• Another musical Chrome: Richard Metzger on newly resurrected recordings by one of my long-time cult bands.

• Hermes Trismegistus and Hermeticism: An interview with Gary Lachman.

• A stunning set of photos of London in the sweltering summer of 1976.

• Pye Corner Audio live at The Outer Church, Madrid, November 2013.

• Judee Sill, the shockingly talented occult folk singer time forgot.

• Designer Jonathan Barnbrook answers twenty questions.

• Don’t trust the painting: Morgan Meis on René Magritte.

• Laurie Anderson’s farewell to Lou Reed.

• Philippe Druillet at Pinterest.

• The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny (1968) by The Mothers of Invention | March Of The Chrome Police (1979) by Chrome | Chrome (1981) by Debbie Harry

Weekend links 178

Pretty Pictures, a new book by designer Marian Bantjes, is out on October 1st.

• A writer admired by Angela Carter, Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Anthony Burgess, Jonathan Meades and Iain Sinclair; a “writer’s writer…[whose] best stories bear comparison with the Ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges”; a writer with an “unsettling quality to his writing, a whiff of brimstone that links him to fin-de-siècle occult figures such as HP Lovecraft—and even, at a further remove, Aleister Crowley”. David Collard explains why you may want to read something by Gerald Kersh (1911–1968), four of whose books are being republished.

• The Eccentronic Research Council and Maxine Peake pay homage to Delia Derbyshire’s The Dreams project with a new single out at the end of the month (Pye Corner Audio and Carol Morley appear on the flip). Ms Peake’s barm-cake reverie may be heard here.

• “Applying for grants, writing artist statements, showing up to openings—artists have to do far more than just make art if they want to find an audience for it.” Jen Graves on lies and deception in the art world.

The material does not make the work. The life does not make the art. Exactly the opposite. The work creates the material. The art creates the life. Did Trinidad exist before Naipaul? Did cargo ships exist before Joseph Conrad? Did Newark and the New Jersey suburbs exist before Philip Roth? Did women in playgrounds in New York City exist before Grace Paley? See how the writer invents the material? These places did not exist as literary subjects. They were invisible to literature. The magic of a great book is that it makes its own subject seem inevitable. The danger is, it makes the subject seem like the source of power in the work.

Phyllis Rose on life and literature.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 087, 40 minutes of original electronic music by Geistform (Rafael Martinez Espinosa).

• “You’ve Got This“, an It Gets Better-style video support campaign for people recently diagnosed with HIV.

• At Dangerous Minds: Babalon Working: Brian Butler’s trippy occult odyssey with Paz de la Huerta.

• Manfred Mohr‘s computer-created artwork, from the 1960s to the present.

• Robert Macfarlane on the strange world of urban exploration.

• Rick Poynor on Bohumil Stepan’s Family Album of Oddities.

• Oli Warwick talks to Martin Jenkins, aka Pye Corner Audio.

• The 384-page BUTT calendar for 2014 is now on sale.

• Pye Corner Audio: We Have Visitors (2010) | Toward Light (2011) | The Mirror Ball Cracked (2012)