Smoky Man – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 755

A painting by Ed Emshwiller for the cover of Fantastic Stories of Imagination, July 1962, illustrating The Singing Statues by JG Ballard .

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: my comments about the creation of the book’s cover and magical alphabet have been posted at Alan Moore World. At (Quasi), Smoky Man (in Italian) looks at other parts of the book, and includes my answers to his questions about the creation of The Soul, a character originally planned for a comic strip that Alan Moore and I were working on. I’ve been trying recently to find the first sketches I made of The Soul back in 2000 or 2001, without success. If I do find any of them I’ll post them here.

• New music: Juk-Shabb by Cryo Chamber Collaboration is this year’s installment in the Lovecraft-themed album series (previously) from Cryo Chamber. Also this week: Xerrox Vol. 5 by Alva Noto; Nocturne (Soundtrack for an Invisible Film) by Avi C. Engel; and Cat Location Conundrum by Moon Wiring Club.

• Code: Damp: An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms by Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, being “an alternative occult and esoteric history of England told through one of its most popular cultural forms: the comedy sitcom”.

…the joy of art isn’t only the pleasure of an end result but also the experience of going through the process of having made it. When you go out for a walk it isn’t just (or even primarily) for the pleasure of reaching a destination, but for the process of doing the walking. For me, using AI all too often feels like I’m engaging in a socially useless process, in which I learn almost nothing and then pass on my non-learning to others. It’s like getting the postcard instead of the holiday.

Brian Eno at Boston Review

• “The typographic choices that Godard made were thematic and not only chosen for their stylistic properties.” Arijana Zeric looks inside the design world of Jean-Luc Godard.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: The Stammering Librarian: Essays by Timothy D’Arch Smith, edited by Edwin Pouncey & Sandy Robertson.

• At Public Domain Review: Fantastic Planet: The Microscopy Album of Marinus Pieter Filbri (1887–88).

• At the BFI: Michael Brooke offers suggestions for where to begin with Guy Maddin.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Dennis Bovell.

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

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

• Fantastic Cat (1996) by Takako Minekawa | Fantastic Analysis (2001) by Mouse On Mars | Fantastic Mass (2016) by Time Attendant

Weekend links 752

Captain Nemo by Alphonse de Neuville, from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1875) by Jules Verne.

• “…physical remoteness is a category of its own. It is an enhancer: It can make the glorious better and the terrible worse. The oceanic pole of inaccessibility distills physical remoteness on our planet into a pure and absolute form. […] Point Nemo is nearly impossible to get to and offers nothing when you arrive, not even a place to stand. It is the anti-Everest: It beckons because nothing is there.” Cullen Murphy explores the remotest place on Earth. A long and fascinating read, but no mention of Point Nemo’s dreaming tenant.

• More Bumper Book business: Smoky Man has posted the second part of his analysis of the book for (Quasi) (in Italian) which includes some comments from myself about the origin of the Moon and Serpent Magical Alphabet, and why the letter Q in the alphabet is assigned to Cthulhu. Elsewhere, Panini have announced an Italian edition of the Bumper Book for May next year, while at The Beat Steve Baxi reviewed the book from a philosophical perspective.

• At the BFI: David Parkinson on where to begin with Louis Feuillade. I’d suggest starting with Fantômas rather than Les Vampires but then I’m biased.

The combination of magic(k)al, ceremonial action, vivid colour and paradoxically serious camp in Jarman’s Super 8 films of the ’70s bears the influence of Kenneth Anger, but the differences between Jarman’s sensibility and Anger’s are more striking than the resemblances. Jarman’s vision is more materialist, austere and hermetic, and less sociological; where Anger identifies the glamour of American popular culture with the Will of the Crowleyan magician, Jarman situates the discovery of the cinematographic mechanism imaginatively within the history of alchemy. Anger cast rock stars as gods and adepts with the intention of harnessing the energy of their recognition; Jarman casts Fire Island, then in its heyday as a gay resort, as a desert defined by sculptural details and occupied by a single masked figure, in scenes that both recall his landscape paintings of the ’60s and ’70s and anticipate the design of his garden at Dungeness.

Luke Aspell on Derek Jarman’s hermetic film/painting, In the Shadow of the Sun

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “Visions of nuclear-powered cars captivated Cold War America, but the technology never really worked”.

• At The Spectator podcast: host Sam Leith talks to Michael Moorcock about 60 years of New Worlds magazine.

• At Public Domain Review: “Light from the Darkness” — Paul Nash’s Genesis (1924).

• At Bandcamp: “Disco godfather Cerrone’s enduring influence on dance music”.

• At Unquiet Things: The Art of Survival: Eyeball Fodder in Dark Times.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – November 2024 at Ambientblog.

• New music: The Laugh Is In The Eyes by Julia Holter.

• At The Daily Heller: The College of Collage.

• RIP jazz drummer Roy Haynes.

• Thermonuclear Sweat (1980) by Defunkt | Nuclear Drive (1982) by Hawkwind | Nuclear Substation (2005) by The Advisory Circle

Weekend links 750

Cover art by Edward Gorey, 1964.

• Plenty of Halloween fallout as usual this week, but then Halloween here is a state of mind rather than a single day’s celebration. Leading off with an article by Smoky Man for Italian readers (and for auto-translators) at (Quasi), the first in what will be a series of reviews of each section of the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. I’ve been helping with this, answering questions about the book’s production. I may post my answers here at a later date but for the moment I’m happy to keep them exclusive. In other Moon and Serpent news, the Bumper Book was reviewed by Sam Thielman in the New York Times last weekend, and also subjected to a deeper exploration by Joe McCullough for The Comics Journal.

• Michael Atkinson explores the psychosocial dread at the heart of Japanese horror. One of the films I watched for Halloween was Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s brilliantly unnerving Pulse, a film which turns up again in Anne Billson’s evolution of horror in ten revolutionary films.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Short Fiction by Frank Belknap Long, a collection of science fiction and horror stories which opens with Long’s contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos, The Hounds of Tindalos.

Paracelsus’ quasi-scientific, quasi-magical worldview would profoundly influence scientists for centuries to follow. As historian Violet Moller puts it in her new book Inside the Stargazer’s Palace, “To our rational, orderly, 21st-century minds the 16th-century map of knowledge appears messy, a paradoxical and confusing place where magic was studied alongside geometry, people searched obsessively for the philosopher’s stone and astrology was fundamental to many areas of life.” But in this mixed-up cauldron of magic and nature, real science was forged.

Dale Markowitz on how the occult gave birth to science

• New music: Of Nature & Electricity by Teleplasmiste, and Tristitiam Et Metus Tradam Portare Ventis by Philippe Blache (Day Before Us).

• Adam Scovell dares to look inside Dario Argento’s dungeon-like museum of horror memorabilia, Profondo Rosso.

• At Little White Lies: Tyler Thier on Stan Brakhage’s autopsy film, The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Keisuke Oka’s Arimaston Building in Tokyo, made entirely by hand.

• At Bandcamp: George Grella on the pioneers of musique concrète.

• At Unquiet Things: Marci Washington’s midnight revelations.

• Typo 8: The International Journal of Prototypes.

• RIP Teri Garr.

• Pulse (1972) by Agitation Free | Pulse State (1991) by The Future Sound Of London | Pulse Detected (2021) by The Grid/Fripp

A Wizard with a Pen

The wizard is Mr Alan Moore who celebrated his 70th birthday last month. This piece is my contribution to Alan Moore: Portraits of an Extraordinary Gentleman, a birthday book put together by Smoky Man, curator of the Alan Moore World blog:

This 150-page volume contains short essays, memories and portraits by 50+ contributors including Gary Spencer Millidge (cover), Iain Sinclair (foreword), Peter Hogan (afterword), Paul Gravett, Russell Willis, John Coulthart, Koom Kankesan, Gene Ha, Zander Cannon, Hilary Barta, Jacen Burrows, Eduardo Risso, Hunt Emerson, and more…

100% of the net profits proceed from this book are to be donated to the NGO Doctors Without Borders. (more)

The book is a print-on-demand production via Amazon so anyone interested in a copy should click the above link which will direct you to a regional outlet. I’d have preferred the printing to have avoided Bezos’s feudal empire but the decision wasn’t mine to make.

As for the artwork, after spending the past couple of years looking for examples of the style I refer to as “the groovy look” I’d been itching to do something similar myself. Alan happens to enjoy this look as well—see all those Promethea covers, especially the one for issue 16 which nodded to Peter Max. Alan also likes the Beatles’ psychedelic years so my portrait is a riff on the Yellow Submarine art style: small head, big feet, and the same Kabel typeface they used for the film titles. The garment pattern is the Art Nouveau wallpaper design by André Morisset that I resurrected last year, and which I’ve been using in another project that’s yet to see the light of day. More about that later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• 32 Short Lucubrations Concerning Alan Moore
• Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore
• The Blake Video
• The Cardinal and the Corpse
• Mapping the Boroughs
• Art is magic. Magic is art.
• Alan Moore: Storyteller
• Alan Moore: Tisser l’invisible
• Dodgem Logic #4

32 Short Lucubrations Concerning Alan Moore

One of my few comic strips that isn’t either a Lovecraft adaptation or part of the Lord Horror mythos is a five-page piece I produced in 2003 for Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman. This was a book compiled by Smoky Man to honour Alan’s 50th birthday, for which my strip was one of many other comics, one-off portraits and contributions by different artists and writers. The book is out of print so Smoky has been posting extracts (with permission) on his blog. My strip may now be seen in full here.

I got the idea for this one from Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1994), a feature-length portrait of the celebrated pianist which evaded the clichés of the biopic by addressing its subject through self-contained sequences in a variety of modes: dramatic reconstruction, interviews with Gould’s friends, documentary material, a spectrographic display from the playback of one of his Bach recordings, even a short piece of animation. My strip is less ambitious but it combines factual trivia about Alan Moore with personal reminiscences plus significant historical details connected with his birth date, 18th November, 1953. It was fun to put together, and a reminder that comic strips can be used for more than just telling stories.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore
• The Blake Video
• The Cardinal and the Corpse
• Mapping the Boroughs
• Art is magic. Magic is art.
• Alan Moore: Storyteller
• Alan Moore: Tisser l’invisible
• Dodgem Logic #4