Moon Wiring Club – Page 6

Weekend links: 2012 edition

The Hand of Fate, Life magazine, October, 1912. Artist unknown.

• In Search of Barney Bubbles: the great graphic designer is profiled on BBC Radio 4, Monday, 2nd January. And speaking of album cover designers, Cool Hunting talked to Storm Thorgerson about his work.

• FACT mix 310 is a hugely eclectic two-parter from Moon Wiring Club. Grab it while it’s still available. And there’s also Solstmas 2011/2: The Final Countdown, a mix by El Minko Misterioso.

• One of the music events of the new year will be the release of Captain Beefheart’s Bat Chain Puller album. Pre-order it here.

In 1972, at the age of thirty-one, [Fred] Halsted released L.A. Plays Itself, a film which drew upon Kenneth Anger’s surrealist eroto-expressionism, and went way beyond Anger’s sublimated homoeroticism to explicitly portray gay male S/M sex. In 1969, when Halsted first decided to make a sexually explicit film, he decided to create a part for himself, and then be that part.

Halsted Plays Himself by William E. Jones reviewed at Lambda Literary

• Lunar Rover: An interview with Steve Moore and extract from Somnium.

• Battersea Power Station, a graveyard of architectural schemes.

Editors might admire a fine book, but are overridden by marketing and accounting departments who now have the final say. I know of a novel that wasn’t accepted by one publisher after the manuscript was first submitted to W.H. Smith, who said that it wouldn’t sell enough.

Jenny Diski on the state of fiction publishing in the UK

• EU copyright on James Joyce‘s works ended at midnight.

• Dressed to Kill: Dispelling the Myths of Men in Drag.

• The Geology of the Mountains of Madness

• Mandala of the Day

• Chomeography

• The Floppy Boot Stomp (1978 mix) by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band.

Weekend links 45

That essential journal of esoteric culture, Strange Attractor, announced a fourth number this week sporting a psychedelic cover which may be the work of Julian House (no credit is given on the SA site). As to the contents:

From Haiti and Hong Kong to the fourth dimension and beyond: discover the secrets of madness in animals; voodoo soul and dub music; ancient peacock deities; Chinese poisoning cults; the history of spider silk weaving; heathen mugwort magic; sentient lightning; Jesuit conspiracy theories; junkie explorers; Dali’s Atlantis; the resurgence of Pan (in London’s Crouch End); anarchist pirates on Madagascar; an ancient Greek Rip Van Winkle; French anatomical waxworks; Arthur Machen’s forgotten tales and Alan Moore’s unpublished John Dee opera.

Further details and the means to order a copy can be found here.

• Resonance FM’s Weird Tales For Winter has returned beginning with a presentation of The Gateway of the Monster, one of the better Carnaki tales by William Hope Hodgson. The story is read by Moon Wiring Club‘s Ian Hodgson (no relation) and the musical atmospheres are provided by The Advisory Circle. I ought to have posted this news yesterday since you’ll have missed the broadcasting of the first half but the second half will go out at midnight (UK time) on Monday. Details here, and the next release on the Café Kaput label in February will be the soundtrack, Music for Thomas Carnaki (Radiophonic Themes & Abstracts).

• The Keep Calm and Carry On Image Generator lets you work your own variations on the ubiquitous poster. It wouldn’t work for me, however, so I rolled up my sleeves and made my own. This may be good as a CafePress design, yes?

• Interplay is an album by John Foxx and The Maths due to be released on March 21st. As with last year’s collection of Foxx instrumental pieces, DNA, the package design is by Jonathan Barnbrook. John Foxx first came to prominence as the lead singer in Ultravox (do I need to say “of course”? Okay…“of course”) and Ultravox’s debut album was part-produced by Brian Eno. It’s been painfully obvious recently (and it pains me to say it) that Foxx’s DNA was a far more accomplished and engaging work than Eno’s recent collection of over-hyped instrumentals. Related: Barnbrook Design’s albums of 2010.

• Word Horde 2.0, “a substantial archive of manuscript material, correspondence, and books and printed matter, mostly signed” from the William Burroughs archives can be yours for $260,000. Related: William Burroughs’ Wild Boys photos. Also: Rudy Rucker on David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.

• “Nabokov described how ‘a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine with the purpose of exploring the Cenozoic era’ would encounter the following series of events in the evolution of these butterflies…” The Royal Society confirms that a contentious theory of Vladimir Nabokov’s concerning the descent of butterfly populations was accurate.

• The work of Gérald Bertot aka Thomas Owen, a Belgian author of weird fiction, is explored at A Journey Round My Skull.

• The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles’ unfinished film from 1972, may finally be given a release.

• Jon Savage celebrates Roy Harper and his extraordinary Stormcock album.

• Philip Pullman wants the Tory philistines to leave our libraries alone.

• Rick Poynor takes a dérive through the arcades of Paris.

• Space music new and old.

• Young Savage (1977) by Ultravox | Clicktrack (2010) by John Foxx & Jonathan Barnbrook.

Weekend links 38

Arriving in the post this week was Lovecraft Black & White, an Italian book whose contents are spelled out in the title, black-and-white illustrations based on the work of the Providence master. Among the featured works is my 1999 rendering of Azathoth. There’s more about the book here and here.

Also on the work front, one of the books I designed interiors for a couple of months back was The Search for Philip K. Dick, a sombre biography and memoir by Anne R. Dick, the author’s third wife. Ms Dick discussed the book with the NYT a few days ago. The design was mostly straightforward layout but I did make a quick ASCII portrait of PKD from one of Anne Dick’s photos.

• Farewell, the documentary film about Lady Grace Drummond-Hay’s flight around the world in the Graf Zeppelin, can be viewed here.

• “I personally think that the pages look better on the iPad than they do in real life.” Artist Tom Phillips again on the Humument iPad app.

• The Birds Are Flying Elsewhere: singer/songwriter Linda Perhacs. Related: Parallelograms – A Short Film About Linda Perhacs.

• St Eia, guitar improvisations by Zali Krishna, “Keywords: jazzgazing; entropy circus; st ives; cornwall; psychogeography”.

• Moon Wiring Club and DD Denham: music for children, by children. Related: Moon Wiring Club’s Jayston Mix.

The 1970s was another country, they did things differently there. One of a number of illustrations for science textbooks by Phil Kirkland at A Journey Round My Skull.

• “Fellatio has become a recurrent theme in your work hasn’t it, I say.” Alan Bennett sheds some inhibitions.

• Talking To The Sci-Fi Lord: Regenerations & Ruminations With Michael Moorcock.

• Time and the Gods (1906) by Lord Dunsany, illustrated by Sidney Sime.

• City of Silence, a calendar for 2011 by Thom Ayres.

• Scientists glimpse universe before the Big Bang.

• Photography by Josef Sudek (1896–1976).

• Aurora photo gallery, November 2010.

• The Last Tuesday Society.

• Parallelograms (1970) by Linda Perhacs | Six AM (1979) by Thomas Leer & Robert Rental | Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart (1989) by Julee Cruise.

Weekend links 3

It’s a curious feeling when a drawing which is nearly 26 years old makes it out into the world. The image above is the cover of a new 7″ single release, Dominion of Avyaktam by metal band Orator, the picture being something I drew in 1984 entitled Mahakala after the Tibetan deity which it depicts. The inspiration was the cover of another recording, a Nonesuch Explorer album, Tibetan Buddhism – Tantras Of Gyütö: Mahakala, and also the track Mahakala by 23 Skidoo from their 1983 album The Culling is Coming. The skull is drawn from a real one I was given. Looking at this today none of the elements seem to work together—and the landscape stuff looks like a lazy way of filling in space—but it’s nice to see it find a home. Dominion of Avyaktam is out now on the Legion of Death label.

• Surprise of the week: two books I’ve worked on were nominated for Nebula Awards, Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch, and Kage Baker’s The Hotel Under the Sand whose interior I designed.

• More music: a recording of Paul Schütze’s Third Site played live in 1999 (with Clive Bell, Raoul Björkenheim, Simon Hopkins & Thomas Köner’s voice) is now available as a free download on his website. More Schütze: Paul Schütze & Simon Hopkins playing a set at the Horbar in Hamburg on December 28, 2009.

• The incredible pinscreen animations of Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker are finally available on DVD. Also new to DVD, Alan Bennett at the BBC, a four-disc set of some of his TV plays including a particular favourite of mine, his Kafkaesque drama The Insurance Man.

• More Ghost Box business: Jon Brooks aka The Advisory Circle has a blog. And Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp was interviewed recently by Peter Bebergal at Mystery Theater. Related (forgot to mention this last week): The ASDA Mix, a great mixtape of spooky retro weirdness by Moon Wiring Club available for free at The Wire.

• The trailer for Mellodrama, a documentary about the Mellotron by Dianna Dillworth.

• The Parajanov Festival will be screening some of the director’s films in London and Bristol.

• Lots of weird and wonderful exhibits at the ~Wunderkammer~.