Thom Ayres

Weekend links 132

La Hora del Fantasma (no date) by Joaquim Pla Janini.

• Many of the art links featured here are tips from Thom Ayres, so it’s only right to point to his new album project which he’s funding through Kickstarter and embellishing with his own nature photography.

• Anne Billson is another writer beguiled by Philippe Jullian’s masterwork, Dreamers of Decadence. And thanks to Ms Billson for drawing attention to the insane opening of Crime Without Passion (1934).

• Does this fake ad for The Necronomicon use one of my Cthulhu pictures? Possibly. Get the picture for yourself in this year’s Cthulhu calendar. (My thanks to everyone who’s bought a copy so far.)

To break the ice, I talk about books: he is delighted to discover that I have read his beloved Denton Welch, also J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment With Time. I have found them in my old school library, and know both have been a tremendous influence on him in different ways. Knowing of his interest I also mention that I have just read Colin Wilson’s The Quest For Wilhelm Reich, published the year before. He likes Wilson, he says, jokes that “the Colonel” with his cottage in Wales in Wilson’s Return of the Lloigor and his own Colonel Sutton-Smith from The Discipline of DE are one and the same. On something of a roll, I mention Real Magic by Isaac Bonewits, and he acknowledges that it has “some good information” – but is much more enthusiastic about Magic: An Occult Primer by David Conway [years later I would discover that Burroughs & Conway had in fact exchanged letters on various subjects pertaining to magic, occultism, and psychic phenomena – but that is decidedly another story!]

Matthew Levi Stevens recalls The Final Academy and an encounter with William Burroughs thirty years ago.

• Locomotif: A short survey of trains, music & experiments: Gautam Pemmaraju on Kraftwerk, Pierre Schaeffer, Luigi Russolo and others.

• A flip-through of The Graphic Canon, volume 2. Wait to the end and you’ll see a couple of my Dorian Gray pages. Imprint has a review of the book.

• Julian Bell reviews two new books about Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.

• Alan Moore talks to The Occupied Times about art, education and anarchism.

• Colin Dickey reviews Vilém Flusser’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise.

Las Parcas II (1930) by Joaquim Pla Janini.

• Michael Newton reviews A Natural History of Ghosts by Roger Clarke.

• Golden Age Comic Book Stories revisits the work of Sidney Sime.

• Front Free Endpaper asks “What’s in an inscription…?”

• Mormon Missionary Positions

• Amateur Aesthete

• Ghosts (1981) by Japan | Ghosts (2008) by Ladytron | Ghosts (2012) by Monolake.

Weekend links 121

Title spread for The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011) edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.

I was surprised this week to find myself nominated as Best Artist in the World Fantasy Awards. The results will be announced at the World Fantasy Convention in November. Among the books nominated for Best Anthology is the Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities for which I provided title page designs and some illustrations. Editors Ann & Jeff are well-represented (and ought to win for their landmark The Weird anthology), and I’m pleased to see Mark Valentine receive a nod for his excellent Wormwood magazine. Mark and Roger Dobson published my first Lovecraft adaptation, The Haunter of the Dark, in a large-format edition under their Caermaen imprint in 1988.

I remember having a conversation with my father about it. I told him what I’d really have liked to find, in my exhaustive search of the canon, was a gay superhero. You know: fucking dudes, saving the world. Never mind the fact that superheroes, with their notoriously contour-hugging apparel, are usually assumed gay by default. I wanted something that had existed, something from history. My father considered my criteria.

“I think what you want is Gore Vidal.”

Henry Giardina on Gore Vidal’s Bully Republic at the Paris Review.

• Appreciations and memorials for the late Gore Vidal continue to surface: “He was punk rock with a traditional, smooth exterior. But there was nothing traditional about him, not really. He defied singular category,” says Aaron Tilford at Lambda Literary. “Jokes course through Vidal’s entropy-heavy commentaries like a warm, reviving current. They, more than the barbs to which they form a counterpoint, are what make his essays a continuing pleasure to read,” says “J.C.” at the TLS.

• “Winterson’s opposition to strict realism is less an artistic critique than a cultural one. She uses the term ‘realism’ to describe an entrenched way of viewing the world, which it is the writer’s duty to challenge.” Hannah Tennant-Moore on Jeanette Winterson at n+1.

• The Ghosts of Bush by Robin The Fog: “A final hauntological perambulation around the hidden corners of Bush House, Aldwych, London, June 2012”.

• “For everything that is not shown, the filmmaker counts on the power of imagination of his viewers.” Lebbeus Woods on Chris Marker and La Jetée.

• Joseph Burnett on “Rainbow Ambiguity: Defying conservatism in mainstream LGBT culture”.

• Leigh Brackett book and magazine covers at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• BLDGBLOG visited the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London.

• Stilled Life: A collection of photography by Thom Ayres.

• Underground subversion: Stickers on the Central Line.

• Andrei Codrescu on five favourite Fantastical Tales.

• Vangelis performs an analogue synth freakout for Spanish TV in 1982 | Oro Opus Alter, a track from the forthcoming album by Ufomammut | New World, a track from the forthcoming album by The Irrepressibles. Can’t wait.

Weekend links 101

Kraken from Ernie Cabat’s Magical World Of Monsters (1992) at Monster Brains.

“I think for a lot of people who don’t read pulp growing up, there’s a real surprise that the particular kind of Pulp Modernism of a certain kind of lush purple prose isn’t necessarily a failure or a mistake, but is part of the fabric of the story and what makes it weird. There’s a big default notion that ‘spare,’ or ‘precise’ prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose.” China Miéville at Weird Fiction Review expressing an opinion that few in the literary world ever articulate, never mind agree with. Far more common is (to pick a recent example) Ursula K Le Guin dismissing Cormac McCarthy for “pretentious prose”.

• “Militant feminist scientists brainwash a research subject to assassinate the Welsh Minister of Prostitution. Meanwhile World War III is being fought and the USA has been invaded.” The IMDB précis for Taking Tiger Mountain (1983), a feature film directed by Tom Huckabee from a script by William Burroughs, and featuring a 19-year-old pre-Aliens/Near Dark Bill Paxton. The director discusses the film’s production at Screen Slate and attends a rare screening at Spectacle, Brooklyn, NYC, today (March 25th). YouTube has a three-minute clip. Surprising this has remained buried for so long. When can the rest of us get to see it?

• Prestel have published the catalogue for In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States. AnOther previewed some of the contents. The exhibition runs at the LACMA, Los Angeles, until 6th May.

…gays only make up about 3% of the population so we spend our whole lives “translating” straight movies, books, ballets into gay terms and studying the heterosexuals around us—we know much more about them than they know about us, just as blacks know a lot about whites but whites know virtually nothing about blacks.

Edmund White (again) interviewed by Frank Pizzoli at Lambda Literary Review.

• New on Caroline True Records: Jon Savage’s “Fame”, Secret History of Post-Punk 1978–81. “Some of it doesn’t sound like anything that has happened since,” says Savage. Indeed. FACT has the track list which I was pleased to see includes Chrome among the usual suspects. Hear a 12-minute promo mix at Soundcloud.

The Colossi of Memnon by Jules Guerin. From Egypt and its Monuments (1908) by Robert Hichens at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• Gay Life Stories, “a colourful compendium of same-sex love through the ages” by Robert Aldrich. Reviewed here. Related: Alice Dreger asks “Are straight people born that way?”

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins created a series of designs for a Washington DC performance of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. Follow their evolution in reverse order at his blog.

• Hocus Pocus: Margaret Eby on the brief epistolary relationship between Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle.

• Rick Poynor on more cover designs for JG Ballard’s Crash.

• London, city of dreams and rivers, caught on Polaroid.

• Photo prints by Thom Ayres for sale at Society6.

• B*tches in Bookshops

• Meet You In The Subway (1979) by Chrome | New Age (Version III) (1980) by Chrome | Danger Zone (1981) by Chrome | Firebomb (1982) by Chrome.

Mr Ayres is a blogger at Form is Void, an occasional commenter on these pages and also a photographer with a keen eye for detail and the occasional outbreak of alarming taxidermy. I especially like the architectural pieces, and I never tire of seeing rusted surfaces and flaking paintwork (one of the best things about growing up in a seaside town). There’s a lot more to be seen here, and at Thom’s Flickr pages.

Continue reading “Thom Ayres”

Weekend links 50

Invisible Light by Margo Selski.

The Glass Garage Fine Art Gallery has an online collection of paintings by Margo Selski, many of which feature her cross-dressing son, Theo. Coilhouse profiled artist and model earlier in the week. Some of these paintings mix oil with beeswax which is something I’ve not come across before.

• The Periwinkle Journal‘s first issue will be available online, free, from March 22nd until mid-June, featuring work by filmmaker and artist Hans Scheirl (Dandy Dust), artwork and collages by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, a 7-page colour comic by Mavado Charon, artwork by Timothy Cummings, artwork and installations by Cody Chritcheloe/SSION, photos by Megan Mantia, Science-Heroes by Peter Max Lawrence, an illustration portfolio by Diego Gómez, selections from the queer photography pool on Flickr, reviews and other stuff. More later.

• The Quietus wanted to remind us that this year is the 25th anniversary of the NME‘s C86 compilation tape, a collection that sought to capture a moment of ferment but which inadvertently inspired too much dreary sub-Velvet Underground pop. I’d rather celebrate the 30th anniversary of the NME‘s C81 compilation, a far more diverse collection and musically superior. If you want to judge for yourself, both tapes can be downloaded here.

Machine in the Garden — Our Island Shall Know Abundance Without End by Margo Selski.

• Rick Poynor continues his exploration of Ballardian graphics with a piece about the paintings of Peter Klasen. Related: Where Will It End? JG Ballard interviewed by V. Vale & introduced by Michael Moorcock (Arthur No. 15/March 2005).

In his autobiography, Miracles of Life, JG Ballard suggested that illustrated versions of The Arabian Nights helped prepare him for surrealism.

Robert Irwin, author of The Arabian Nightmare, on the illustrators of The Arabian Nights.

• Another Coulthart cult movie surfaces, Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (1970), out of circulation for many years but newly restored by the BFI. A re-release is scheduled for May so I’m hoping now that a DVD release will follow soon after.

• Thom Ayres’ photostream at Flickr, and more long-exposure photos.

• Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts, number 5, volume 8.

• Nicolas Roeg: “I don’t want to be ahead of my time.”

• MetaFilter looks at the films of René Laloux.

• The Eerie covers of Frank Frazetta.

• Indie Squid Kid.

• Requiem (for String Orchestra) by Toru Takemitsu.