Weekend links 746

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Composition B (No.II) with Red (1935) by Piet Mondrian.

• “Red is practically faultless, save, perhaps, for one hard-to-get-excited-about foray into atmospheric free jazz (Providence), though the sprawling, epic roller coaster of emotion and dexterity that follows (Starless) surely makes up for any shortfall.” Patrick Clarke on 50 years of my favourite King Crimson album. I like Providence, the piece is part of a live performance in Rhode Island so the Lovecraft connection adds to the aura of doom that pervades the album; and the structure of the album’s second side—jazz improv followed by a multi-part, Mellotron-heavy epic—harks back to the group’s debut.

• “It’s important to challenge the common idea of an almost evolutionary procession, where modernist abstract art is somehow the climax, a new and perfectly original approach to the visual world, absolutely different from all that preceded it.” Hunter Dukes on the yellow rectangle that denotes silence in the Silos Apocalypse.

The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy, an exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner, London. Meanwhile, at the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, there’s Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation.

• “I did not realize how much I had done. I am a serial polluter.” Ralph Steadman and his daughter, Sadie Williams, talking to Steven Heller about Steadman’s latest exhibition which is touring the USA.

• New music: Come Back To Me [Demo] by Broadcast; The Last Sunset Of The Year by Marcus Fjellström; Hexa by Cleared.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artists summon mythical creatures of the Echigo region for the 2024 Wara Art Festival.

• The Italian Art of Violence: Samm Deighan on the giallo cinema boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

Gavin Friday’s favourite albums.

Red (1991) by Jarboe | Red Earth (As Summertime Ends) (1991) by Rain Tree Crow | Red Sun (2012) by Anna von Hausswolff

Weekend links 743

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Icebergs and the aurora borealis in the Arctic. From the Illustrated London News, 13 October 1849.

• The week in award-winning photographs: Winners and finalists from the Ocean Photographer of the Year Awards; and winners and finalists from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year.

• A new layer of mystery is added to The Voynich Manuscript with the discovery of additional writings revealed by multispectral imaging. Lisa Fagin Davis explains.

• At Swan River Press: Helen Grant talks to John Kenny about her new collection of stories, Atmospheric Disturbances, a book whose cover design I discussed here.

Some in Hollywood were taken aback by Huston’s screenwriting choice to bring Melville to the big screen. After all, to adapt a profoundly complex literary novel, he had given the nod to a man known for writing science fiction. Perhaps no one was more surprised by Huston’s choice than Bradbury himself. Huston had read the most recent book Bradbury had sent him, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and the lead story was all it took.

“The Fog Horn” is a tale about two lighthouse keepers who, late one November night, are paid a visit by a beast that has surfaced from the depths after hearing the lonely call of the lighthouse’s foghorn. Bradbury’s love of dinosaurs had led him to write the story, and it was this love that led Huston to believe he was the right man to adapt Moby-Dick. In reading “The Fog Horn,” Huston stated in his 1980 autobiography An Open Book, he “saw something of Melville’s elusive quality.”

Sam Weller on how Ray Bradbury came to write the screenplay for John Huston’s adaptation of Moby-Dick

• At Public Domain Review: Kirsten Tambling on the life and art of Gottfried Mind (1768–1814), a Swiss artist known as “The Raphael of Cats”.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Tentacle-inspired leather accessories handcrafted by Cokeco.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – September 2024 at AmbientBlog.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Rig Solid.

Solid State Survivor (1979) by Yellow Magic Orchestra | All That Was Solid (1996) by Paul Schütze | From A Solid To A Liquid (2006) by Biosphere

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How They Met Themselves (1860) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

• At Igloo magazine: Justin Patrick Moore interviews inventor and electronic music composer Don Slepian about his life and work.

• At The Washington Post (archived link): Michael Dirda in praise of weird fiction, horror tales and stories that unsettle us.

• At The Daily Heller: Tina Touli’s explosively twirling typography. Steven Heller’s font of the month is Doublethink.

• At Colossal: Dreams and memories form and dissipate in Tomohiro Inaba’s delicate iron sculptures.

• At Unquiet Things: Jerome Podwil’s captivating cover art.

• New music: Strangeness Oscillation by 137.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Craig Baldwin’s Day.

Brìghde Chaimbeul’s favourite albums.

Penguin Series Design

Double Image (1971) by Joe Zawinul | Double Flash (1999) by Leftfield | Double Rocker (2001) by Stereolab

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

Weekend links 734

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Illustration by Frank Mechau for The Love of Myrrhine and Konallis (1926) by Richard Aldington.

• At A Year In The Country: The Delaware Road: “A surreal post-war Albion and Quatermass meets Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”

• At Colossal: Rajesh Vora photographs the unique Punjabi tradition of adorning homes with sculptural water tanks.

• At Unquiet Things: The fragile eternity of Margaretha Roosenboom’s floral still lifes.

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Illustration by Frank Mechau for The Love of Myrrhine and Konallis (1926) by Richard Aldington.

• New music: Damaged by Ghost Dubs, and Selene by Akira Kosemura & Lawrence English.

• At Public Domain Review: Allison C. Meier on The Dance of Death across centuries.

• RIP Shelley Duvall. Related: Anne Billson on Shelley Duvall: her 20 greatest films.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Galerie Dennis Cooper presents…Félicien Rops.

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

Eno Williams’ favourite records.

Two Sisters (1967) by The Kinks | All Your Sisters (1996) by Mazzy Star | Two Sisters (2017) by Gel-Sol