The Wicker Man – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 173

Icarus (1974–75) by Lili Ország.

• The Cabaret Voltaire albums released on the Virgin label in the 1980s have suffered the same shoddy treatment on CD as other Virgin reissues, a situation to be rectified in November with an extensive revisiting of the CV back catalogue. The long-overdue reappraisal will also include the release of Earthshaker, a collection of previously unavailable recordings from the Virgin period.

• It’s that book again: Design Observer has the preface from Lolita — The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s novel in art and design, a book by John Bertram and Yuri Leving. At The Millions John Bertram talks to designer John Gall about the problems Lolita poses for cover designers.

• Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried (1972) has acquired legendary status over the years for the apparent tastelessness of its subject matter—a clown in Auschwitz—and the fact that its director/star has never allowed the film to be seen in public. This week some footage arrived on YouTube.

• Candy Bullets And Moon (1967), a one-off psychedelic collaboration between Don Preston and Meredith Monk.

• What’s the collective term for many bookshops? Whatever it is, there’s a lot of them in this Pinterest collection.

• At Dangerous Minds: Artist Gail Potocki’s exploration of Alice in Wonderland and the passing of time.

• Anne Billson on the late Karen Black and why horror movies deserve our respect.

• Tobias Carroll on the Surreal life and fiction of Leonora Carrington.

• More details emerge about The Wicker Man – The Final Cut.

• Issue 35 of Arthur Magazine is now available for order.

• Graphics, drawings and collages by Jan Svankmajer.

• Every film poster designed by Saul Bass.

• Cabaret Voltaire: Just Fascination (1983) | Sensoria (1984) | I Want You (1985)

Weekend links 170

Owl portrait by Iain Macarthur.

• “Ghost Box is a glance through a window seeing something running alongside our version of reality. Like, what if Paul McCartney had made records with the Radiophonic Workshop?” Ghost Box designer and Mr Focus Group, Julian House is interviewed.

• “…that book with the girl with the hatchet in her head…” Dave Tompkins remembers Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (1973), a formative influence of mine, and that of many other people, it seems.

• Salvador Dalí’s 1946 illustrated edition of Macbeth. Related: From Macbeth to the Wizard of Oz: New exhibition explores the erotic side of witchcraft.

I do not want to live in a world where the government and a select few conservative feminists get to decide what we may and may not masturbate to, and use the bodies of murdered women or children as emotional pawns in that debate. It is supremely difficult to achieve radical ends by conservative means. Feminists and everyone who seeks to end sexual violence should be very cautious when their immediate goals seem to line up neatly with those of social conservatives and state censors.

Laurie Penny on the recent Tory policy of attempting to limit online pornography.

• The Facebook page for The Wicker Man has details of the pursuit for a complete print of the film. A Blu-ray edition will be released in October.

• Anne Billson visited the Hotel Thermae Palace in Ostend, the columnated location of Daughters of Darkness.

• Kenneth Anger on how he made Lucifer Rising. The ICA in London is screening his films this weekend.

Roy Krenkel illustrates Tales of Three Planets by Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1964.

• The Electric Banana Blows Your Mind: The soundtrack library alter ego of The Pretty Things.

• Mix of the week: an ambient (in the 90s’ sense of the word) DJ set by Surgeon.

• Bernie Krause shares the happiest sounds he’s heard in nature.

• RIP Walter De Maria, sculptor and musician.

• Sexodrome by Asia Argento with Morgan.

• Metabolist: Identify (1980) | Curly Wall (1980) | Ymuzgo/Pigface (1981)

Weekend links 160

Collage by Jeneleen Floyd.

• “…slowly, block-by-block, pedestrians are starting to take back the streets.” Wayne Curtis on the hazards of being a pedestrian in a world of cars.

• Michael Hann looks back at LA’s Paisley Underground, and also talks to some of its key members.

• Meighan O’Toole interviews JL Schnabel about her Blood Milk jewellery designs.

My central thesis is that camp was always a kind of signifying practice invented out of necessity (both for survival and for sheer creative pleasure) by “queer” (in the classic sense) outsiders – fags, drag queens, transsexuals, deviants, sexual renegades – and that it was always by its very nature deeply political and committed: Some people dedicated their entire lives to it! Sontag’s interpretation always seemed a bit dismissive to me somehow.

The seldom unprovocative Bruce LaBruce talking to Mark Allen about camp in the 21st century.

• Studiocanal launches an appeal to find the lost materials of The Wicker Man.

• At Flickr: Tales from a Parallel Universe and London’s Lost Music Venues.

• Michael Wood tells us what we learn when we read Italo Calvino’s letters.

• Fragments of a Portrait: Francis Bacon and David Sylvester in 1966.

• An extract of a live session from Adrian Sherwood and Pinch.

• In Baba Yaga’s Hut: Amelia Glaser on Russian folk tales.

• Buckminster Fuller Book Covers from the 1970s.

• A Century of Proust.

• The Real World (1982) by The Bangles | With A Cantaloupe Girlfriend (1982) by The Three O’Clock | Medicine Show (1984) by The Dream Syndicate | No Easy Way Down (live in Tokyo, 1984) by The Rain Parade

Children of the Stones

“Pretty phantasmagorical!” says precocious teenager Matthew when he and his father drive into the fictional village of Milbury in the opening scene of Children of the Stones. Matthew’s father is a scientist whose work requires a three-month stay in a village built in the centre of a series of ancient ramparts and stone circles. Once settled they find many of the villagers to be blandly cheerful, while Matthew discovers that his maths skills at the local school pale beside younger children who can solve complex equations with ease. Omnipresent characters in the village are Hendrick, a retired astronomer who owns the local manor house and acts as village squire, Margaret, a newly-arrived archaeologist who knows the history of the stones, and Dai, a vagrant poacher who lives outside the circle, and who seems eager to remain free of the Stepford-like happiness afflicting his neighbours.

Matthew (Peter Demin).

Matthew’s “phantasmagorical” epithet is directed at the neolithic mound outside the village but could easily apply to the whole of this seven-part serial which I watched again recently. It was an HTV production first broadcast in early 1977 and I’d not seen any of it since that time. A mystery serial for children involving pagan history, folk rituals and an undercurrent of science fiction wasn’t such a surprising thing in the 1970s, this was a decade when a popular interest in the occult and the paranormal was more prevalent than at any time before or since. Children’s television reflected adult trends which is why we got to see an adaptation of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, the occult adventure series Ace of Wands (with its hero named “Tarot”), The Tomorrow People (which occasionally strayed from science fiction to science fantasy) and others (see an earlier post, Occultism for kids). Children of the Stones was the most complex of all of these, a well-crafted drama with similarities to Nigel Kneale’s TV plays, The Wicker Man and The Prisoner. With a slight change of emphasis it would have worked just as well as a serial for adults. The best children’s serials of the period were usually adaptations of novels; Children of the Stones was an original work for television, written by Jeremy Burnham & Trevor Ray, and directed by Peter Graham Scott.

Adam (Gareth Thomas), Margaret (Veronica Strong) and Hendrick (Iain Cuthbertson).

Continue reading “Children of the Stones”

Weekend links 107

Le Faune (1923) by Carlos Schwabe.

• “When I recently attended a conference in China, many of the presenters left their papers on the cloud—Google Docs, to be specific. You know how this story ends: they got to China and there was no Google. Shit out of luck. Their cloud-based Gmail was also unavailable, as were the cloud lockers on which they had stored their rich media presentations.” Ubuweb’s Kenneth Goldsmith on why he doesn’t trust the Cloud.

• “I’m a poet and Britain is not a land for poets anymore.” A marvellous interview with the great Lindsay Kemp at Dangerous Minds. Subjects include all that you’d hope for: Genet, Salomé, David Bowie, Ken Russell, Derek Jarman, The Wicker Man and “papier maché giant cocks”.

• “As early as the 1950s, Maurice Richardson wrote a Freudian analysis which concluded that Dracula was ‘a kind of incestuous-necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match’.” Christopher Frayling on the Bram Stoker centenary.

• Björk gets enthused by (among other things) Leonora Carrington, The Hourglass Sanatorium and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s YouTube lectures.

• Before Fritz Lang’s Metropolis there was Algol – Tragödie der Macht (1920). Strange Flowers investigates.

David Marsh recreates famous album covers using Adobe Illustrator’s Pantone swatches.

• New titles forthcoming from Strange Attractor Press. Related: an interview with SAP allies Cyclobe.

• 960 individual slabs of vinyl make an animated waveform for Benga’s I Will Never Change.

• An exhibition of works by Stanislav Szukalksi at Varnish Fine Art, San Francisco,

• Keith Haring‘s erotic mural for the NYC LGBT Community Center is restored.

• The Situationist Times (1962–1967) is resurrected at Boo-Hooray.

• Doors Closing Slowly: Derek Raymond‘s Factory Novels.

• Will Wilkinson insists that fiction isn’t good for you.

• More bookplates at BibliOdyssey and 50 Watts.

• The Top 25 Psychedelic Videos of All Time.

• Flannery O’Connor: cartoonist.

• RIP Adam Yauch.

• Their finest moment: Sabotage (1994) by Beastie Boys.