Weekend links 765

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An Ideal Life (1950) by Leonor Fini.

• “…there has not been anything like a general, systematic discussion of what other, semantically different kinds of languages there can be, and the philosophical consequences of this. If reality has a certain structure, it would be a miracle if familiar languages contain all the resources to capture this structure.” Matti Eklund on the potential nature of alien languages.

• “As cats evolved from feral ratters into beloved Victorian companions, a nascent pet-food economy arose on the carts of so-called ‘cat’s meat men’. Kathryn Hughes explores the life and times of these itinerant offal vendors, their intersection with a victim of Jack the Ripper, and a feast held in the meat men’s honour, chaired by none other than Louis Wain.”

• Kinoteka, the UK’s Polish Film Festival, revealed its 2025 programme this week. Among the events will be a screening of the new Quay Brothers film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (extract), at BFI Imax in London. Also in London (and with free entry), Swedenborg House will be hosting an exhibition of the Quays’ film decors.

• In a recent comment here I said that some of Charles Williams’ metaphysical novels were like John Buchan thrillers with an occult twist. At Wormwoodiana G. Connor Salter investigates the possible connections between the two writers.

Alice Coltrane & Carlos Santana, 1974: Lossless downloads of previously unissued recordings from the Illuminations album and a live set with John McLaughlin at San Francisco’s Kabuki Theater.

• “‘The Köln Concert is the hit he wants to disown’: why Keith Jarrett shunned two new films about his unlikely masterpiece.”

• New music: Shards by Tim Hecker; and Some Other Morning by Memory Effect.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – February 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At Colossal: Outdoor light installations by Lachlan Turczan.

• Galerie Dennis Cooper presents…Paul Laffoley.

Cat’s Eye (1977) by Van Der Graaf | Cat’s Eye (2015) by Patrick Cowley | No Cat’s Eyes (2017) by The Belbury Circle

Weekend links 749

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Fantastic Sea Carriage (1556) by Johannes van Doetecum the Elder & Lucas van Doetecum, after Cornelis Floris the Younger.

• “Preiss and McElheny have acknowledged the influence of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941), which offers a brilliant, brain-scratching disquisition on bibliotecas as conduits both of infinity and meaninglessness. I also found myself thinking of Arthur Fournier, in D. W. Young’s documentary The Booksellers (2019), who spoke of ‘the psychic dreaming that paper allows.'” Sukhdev Sandhu on The Secret World, a film by Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny about the books collected by Christine Burgin.

• Most people know Burt Shonberg’s paintings—if they know them at all—from their appearance in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films. But Shonberg had a career outside the cinema, something explored in Momentary Blasts of Unexpected Light: The Visionary Art of Burt Shonberg, an exhibition currently running at the The Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.

Warriors (1996), an ad for Murphy’s Irish Stout directed by the Quay Brothers. Samurai warriors in an Irish pub scored to the theme from Yojimbo.

The Grand Jeu group have been neglected, at least in English-speaking history, from the general consciousness of “Surrealism” but they remain among its most interesting dissidents. The teenage Simplistes, led by [René] Daumal and [Roger] Gilbert-Lecompte, collectively experimented with consciousness and investigated wildly syncretic modes of destroying and recombining selves: diverse hermetic and occult systems, extrasensory perception, trances and somnambulism, mediumistic practice and collective dreaming.

[…]

The Grand Jeu was a project of paradox: artistic and ascetic, indulgent and severe, political, and mystical, ecstatic and negating, egoistic and selfless, graceful and violent. It sought to continually weave between collectivity and individuality, of art and life, multiplicity and unity, fed by a brew of political radicalism, inspired by Rimbaud’s germinal poetics of revolt and illumination, a utilitarian embrace of occult traditions and ideas, drug experimentation, Hindu sacred texts (Daumal would become an expert in Sanskrit) and some of Bergson’s philosophy. They were, in their own words, “serious players.” It was a mad mix, and in retrospect, clearly doomed to a short life—so, it turned out, were most its members.

Gus Mitchell on the “experimental metaphysics” of the Grand Jeu

• At Smithsonian magazine: Lanta Davis and Vince Reighard on the sculpted monsters and grotteschi that fill the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo, Italy.

• At Bandcamp: George Grella compiles a list of “spooky sounds and spooky music, things to haunt nights and dreams”.

• At Colossal: Kelli Anderson’s amazing pop-up book, Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape.

• “The play that changed my life: Jim Broadbent on Ken Campbell’s electrifying epic Illuminatus!

• DJ Food browses some of the many album covers designed by the versatile Robert Lockhart.

Winners of the 2024 Nikon Photomicrography Competition.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 873 by Andy Graham.

• The Strange World of…Lou Reed.

• The Internet Archive is back!

Warriors (1990) by Jon Hassell | Red Warrior (1990) by Ronald Shannon Jackson | Bhimpalasi Warriors (2001) by Transglobal Underground

Weekend links 742

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Thunderstorm (1959) by Blair Rowlands Hughes-Stanton.

• “To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence,” says SF writer Ted Chiang. A New Yorker essay which has received a fair amount of attention over the past week, with good reason. As someone who found his name on the list of artists whose work was allegedly being fed into Midjourney, I suppose I have a vested interest in the arguments. (Good luck to any machine trying to imitate my “style”. I don’t have one.) Too much of the discussion, however, has been very poor which is why this is the first time I’ve linked to such a piece here.

• “After going their own way for much of the 20th century, mathematicians are increasingly turning to the laws and patterns of the natural world for inspiration. Fields stuck for decades are being unstuck. And even philosophers have started to delve into the mystery of why physics is proving ‘unreasonably effective’ in mathematics, as one has boldly declared.” Ananyo Bhattacharya on why physics is good at creating new mathematics. Having recently finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s final novel, Stella Maris, this was all very timely.

• “…our films obey musical laws. Of course, you can never tell people how they should watch a film. But the musical element provides a narrative of its own.” Thus the Quay Brothers, in the news again with their forthcoming feature film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. The quote is from a recent interview with Xan Brooks. Meanwhile, Alex Dudok de Wit posted another interview from 2019, originally published in French, now made available in English for the first time.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine announces a new book of his essays, The Thunderstorm Collectors.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 28 books that either faked ingesting LSD or did.

• At Public Domain Review: Antiquities of Mexico (1831–48).

• At Print mag: Kelly Thorn’s Tarot of Oxalia.

USC Optical Sound Effects Library

Strange Thunder (1987) by Harold Budd | Sweet Thunder (1991) by Yello |  Studies For Thunder (2004) by Robert Henke

Weekend links 736

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South Polar Map of Jupiter by the Cassini spacecraft, 2000.

• “A ghostly train journey on a forgotten branch line transports a son, Jozef, visiting his dying Father in a remote Galician Sanatorium. Upon arrival Jozef finds the Sanatorium entirely moribund and run by a dubious Doctor Gotard who tells him that his father’s death, the death that has struck him in his country has not yet occurred, and that here they are always late by a certain interval of time of which the length cannot be defined. Jozef will come to realise that the Sanatorium is a floating world halfway between sleep and wakefulness and that time and events cannot be measured in any tangible form.” The Quay Brothers have finished their third feature film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, a combination of live action and animation which is being premiered next month at the Venice film festival. No sign of a trailer as yet but the curious can prime themselves by watching (or rewatching) the Quays’ Street of Crocodiles—their first adaptation of Bruno Schulz—or Hourglass Sanatorium, the first screen adaptation of Schulz’s stories by Wojciech Has.

• “No one is sure when the tremendous whirl—the largest and longest-lived storm in our current solar system, with a diameter wider than planet Earth and wind speeds of more than 260 miles per hour—began. Or why it’s red. Or even who first observed it…” Katherine Harmon Courage on Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

• New music: Bórdice by Nestor, and Nightfall by Trentemøller, the latter with a video swiping shots from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. Nice song but musicians really need to stop plundering independent film-makers when they want some visual embellishment.

• At The Daily Heller: Steven Heller talks to Drew Friedman about Friedman’s new book of caricatures, Schtick Figures.

• Mixes of the week: A mix for The Wire by Miaux, and Isolatedmix 127 by David Douglas & Applescal.

• DJ Food’s latest psychedelic trawl is a collection of book covers, puzzles, etc, designed by Peter Max.

• At Unquiet Things: Vic Prezio’s Gothic book covers.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Morgan Fisher Day.

Jupiter (1990) by NASA Voyager Space Sounds | Jupiter! (Feed Your Head Mix) (1994) by System 7 | Jupiter Collision (2002) by Redshift

Twilight, a film by György Fehér

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There’s a Thomas Ligotti story—you’ll have to forgive my not recalling the title—in which the world is suffused in an inexplicable and persistent twilight, a condition that you see manifested for real in this remarkable film by György Fehér. Twilight was released in 1990 but for a long time hasn’t been easy to see. Second Run announced their region-free blu-ray edition a couple of months ago, another film which, like Son of the White Mare, is a restoration presented by the National Film Institute of Hungary. The new disc arrives with filmed appreciations by the Quay Brothers, Peter Strickland and others. Mention in the publicity of the Quays, Strickland and Béla Tarr, who the film credits as a consultant, was enough to make me order this without knowing anything further.

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A seasoned detective investigates a series of child murders, succumbing to an all-consuming and tragic obsession with the case, finding empty solace in his quest for vengeance. What emerges is not a crime story, but a harrowing venture through the darkness of the human soul.

Twilight unfolds with breathtaking cinematography and haunting sound design, allowing the mystery to emerge in tantalisingly atmospheric and meditative fashion.

A police procedural, then, but not one like any you’ve seen before. The narrative is reduced to a skeletal trace, subsumed, like Ligotti’s world, by the twilight atmosphere. Tarr’s films are an obvious reference here; Fehér’s investigation takes place in the same misty, rain-sodden rural nowhere as Sátántangó (which Fehér helped produce), and shares with Tarr’s epic a similar approach to shot duration and camera movement. Fehér was a cinematographer before he became a director, so the shots may be long but they’re also mesmerising and perfectly choreographed. The film is placeless and also rather timeless, in that it’s evidently set in the past but the antique quality might equally be the product of an isolated backwater. All the cars and phones and typewriters look old, while the men wear big coats and big hats; the atmosphere isn’t so much film noir as film gris. (Fehér followed Twilight with an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice which I now have to see.)

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There’s a lot more I could say about this but I hadn’t really intended to write a review. I ought to note, however, the three musical cues which sustain the sombre visuals, and which repeat throughout: the opening chords from Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle; the opening chords of Brüder Des Shattens—Sohne Des Lichts by Popol Vu, which are slowed and muted to create a Thomas Köner-like drone; and (very surprisingly) the last minute or so of Hello Earth by Kate Bush, which seems to have been used mainly for the song’s borrowing of Tsintskaro, a Georgian folk song which most people know either from The Hounds Of Love or from its earlier appearance in the plague scenes in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu. I recognised the Bush track immediately, and was a little disconcerted at first, but the music is as muted as the other pieces, and subtly looped to create a refrain which contrasts with Bartók’s ominous overture, something we may take as a leitmotif for the murdered girls.

As I was saying only a couple of weeks ago, “it’s a big cinematic world out there, and ‘world cinema’ is more than just a few shelves in an entertainment store”. It is indeed. Consider this Exhibit A.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Cremator by Juraj Herz