Vladimir Nabokov – Page 9

Weekend links 94

Mateo (2011), carved wood sculpture by Bruno Walpoth.

“Dennis Potter’s [The Singing Detective] is 25 years old but still feels avant garde,” says Stephen Armstrong. No fucking kidding, I watched the DVDs again last weekend. Potter’s drama featured non-linear flashbacks, song-and-dance hallucination sequences, an intertextual sub-plot, and a central character who was vitriolic, misanthropic, misogynist and covered from head-to-toe in flaking skin. This wasn’t exiled to an arts channel ghetto but was primetime viewing, Sunday evenings on BBC 1. • Related: “Is Dennis Potter’s singalong noir miniseries the all-time pinnacle of television drama? Graham Fuller thinks it is.”

• American band Earth are using Kickstarter to fund their next project, Wonders from the House of Albion, an LP/CD/DVD/book combining their music with “field recordings from various megalithic and other sites of human/fairy encounters across the UK, also the use of ritual and folkloric magical practices”. Dylan Carlson & Adrienne Davies discuss their work here.

…sort of like Nabokov’s objection to Our Lady of the Flowers, which he saw as a masterpiece but thought, “Why isn’t this book about women?” Nabokov hated homosexuality and was very edgy around it, partly because his own brother was homosexual and his uncle. And he believed that it was hereditary, so he was always nervous about it.

Edmund White chooses five favourite gay novels. Related: a dance adaptation by Earthfall of Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys.

• “The Belbury Tales is the kind of record you feel should have come out on Vertigo around ’73, but never actually did.” Belbury Poly‘s Jim Jupp on ploughman’s lunches, prog rock and avoiding “Clarkson/Wakeman territory”.

• Morbid Curiosity: The Richard Harris Collection, an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center exploring “the iconography of death across cultures and traditions spanning nearly six thousand years”.

• Geoff Dyer’s Zona, an exegesis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, is officially out at the end of this month. The book is reviewed here and here.

• “Through a blurry electronic prism“: MetaFilter traces a history of analogue video synthesis.

• Dylan Ricci‘s wonderful photography of the male body has moved to a new location.

• Infinite Forest by Studio a+i, a design for an AIDS memorial in New York City.

• Susan Cain discussing “the power of introverts” at Scientific American.

• Strange Flowers on that icon of Middle Eastern music, Umm Kulthum.

• Ewan Morrison on “The self-epublishing bubble”.

• Winter Sleep (2007) by Valgeir Sigurdsson feat. Dawn McCarthy | Black (2008) by Ben Frost with Valgeir Sigurdsson, Sam Amidon & Sigrídur Sunna Reynisdóttir | Unbreakable Silence (2011) by Ben Frost & Daníel Bjarnason

Weekend links 92

Untitled etching by Briony Morrow-Cribbs.

• An interview with author Paul Russell whose new novel, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, concerns the gay brother of the celebrated Vladimir.

• Joseph Cornell turns up again in a report at Strange Flowers about Locus Solus, an exhibition in Madrid devoted to the work of Raymond Roussel.

• Night of Pan: 42 seconds of occult freakery by Bill Butler featuring Vincent Gallo, Twiggy Ramirez plus (blink and you miss him) Kenneth Anger.

• Jan Svankmajer talks (briefly) about his new film Surviving Life. A subtitled trailer is here; the very different Japanese trailer is here.

• Cormac McCarthy turns in his first original screenplay. I’d rather he turned in a new novel but any new Cormac is better than none at all.

• Barnbrook show off another design for the latest CD from John Foxx & The Maths.

• Melanie McDonagh asks “Where have all the book illustrators gone?”

• Congrats to Evan for getting his poetry in the New York Times.

• Margaret Atwood on writing The Handmaid’s Tale.

• Subliminal Frequencies: An Interview With Pinch.

• The (Lucas) Cranach Digital Archive

• The M.O.P. Radionic Workshop

• Music promos of the week from the Weird Seventies: All The Years Round (1972) by Amon Düül II, and Supernature (1977) by Cerrone.

Weekend links 83

In Memory by Caitlin Hackett who describes her astonishing drawings as “contemporary mythology”.

• David Lynch’s solo album, Crazy Clown Time has just been released so The Guardian last Friday let the artist/director/musician edit their G2 supplement. Xan Brooks tried to get Lynch to open up about his inspirations while elsewhere Lynch had a chat with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons. Of more interest to me was news that some of the deleted sequences from Blue Velvet have been discovered. I’ve known about these for years from a feature in Video Watchdog magazine but never thought we might get to see them. Related: a mixtape by David Lynch & musical collaborator/engineer ‘Big’ Dean Hurley.

• “Book jackets these days, for reasons I won’t unpack, seem to revel, overtly, in wit, conceptual deviousness, unusual clever or droll juxtapositions – we, as a professional community, seem to have elevated the visual bon mot above all other virtues.” Peter Mendelsund in a great post about certain problems in book design, starting with the very problematic question of what to do with Nabokov’s Lolita. Related: Covering Lolita, a gallery of covers through the ages which run the gamut of bad decisions.

• “For his sins Pinocchio is not only hanged but robbed, kidnapped, stabbed, whipped, starved, jailed, punched in the head, and has his legs burned off.” Nathaniel Rich goes back to Carlo Collodi’s original Pinocchio. Disney it ain’t.

Some of Berthold Wolpe’s Faber cover designs are now available as prints from wire-frame whose Pelham/Ballard prints were mentioned here recently. Related (and worth another visit): Faber 20th century classics at Flickr.

• Technical Vocabularies – Games for May, a small collection of poems by Alan Moore & Steve Moore, is now online with authorial permission. Alan’s Beardsley pastiche on the cover is a bonus.

• Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk says the group’s Virgin albums will be reissued next year by Mute. A new edition of The Crackdown? Yes, please.

• “Homo Riot can only think of six or seven street artists in the world who regularly feature gay themes in their work, and he knows all of them.”

• Rub Out The Words: Letters from William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick on the language virus theory of William Burroughs.

• L’exilé de Capri: the connections between Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen and Roger Peyrefitte explored at Strange Flowers.

• Flying cars and monorails: Soviet Russia in the 1960s also had a Gerry Anderson view of the future.

• Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You.

• Baby’s On Fire (1973) by Brian Eno | Baby’s On Fire (live, 1974) by Eno & The Winkies | Baby’s On Fire (live, 1976) by 801 | Baby’s On Fire (1998) by The Venus In Furs.

Weekend links: Apocalypse not now

The Kurtz compound prior to destruction. An Apocalypse Now storyboard, one of a number which will be included among the extras on the Blu-Ray release of Francis Coppola’s film when it appears in the UK next month. The film is given a new cinema release on May 27th.

Radio broadcaster Harold Camping, a man denounced by fellow Christians as a false prophet, achieved one thing at least this week by making himself and his followers a global laughing-stock after the Rapture failed to materialise. I would have put money on him blaming those terrible gays somewhere along the way, such complaints being so common among a certain brand of American fundamentalist that you could write their sermons for them. Sure enough, here’s the old fool blathering about “lespianism” and describing the beautiful city of San Francisco as a cesspool. Shall we chalk this up as another victory for the gays, Harold? Related: No dogs go to heaven.

The internet has always been a home for ridicule but occasions like this bring out the wags in droves. The Oatmeal showed us how God is managing the Rapture using a Windows Install Wizard, and also pointed to a selection of sarcastic tweets. Meanwhile, this page has a comprehensive catalogue of previous apocalypse dates; the biggy is next year, of course.

Burroughs himself was no stranger to prosecution. In 1962 he was indicted on grounds of obscenity. Naked Lunch was not available in the US until 1962 and in the UK until 1964. The writer Norman Mailer and the poet Allen Ginsberg had to defend the book in court before the ruling could be reversed. In Turkey, it is now our turn to stand up for the novel.

Turkish writer Elif Shafak criticising the paternalism of the Turkish state in trying to protect its people from troubling novels. Related: William Burroughs publisher faces obscenity charges in Turkey.

• An A–Z of the Fantastic City by Hal Duncan. “This guidebook leads readers and explorers through twenty-six cities of yore (Yore, while included, is one of the shorter entries).” Illustrated by Eric Schaller.

• The creepiest Alice in Wonderland of all, Jan Svankmajer’s semi-animated Alice (1988), receives a very welcome re-issue on DVD this month. With Brothers Quay extras and other good things.

Robert E Howard’s sinister magus from the Conan stories, Thoth-Amon, as depicted by Barry Windsor-Smith. From a portfolio of five Robert E Howard characters, 1975.

• What is computer music (or does it matter)? Related: A History of Electronic/Electroacoustic Music (1937–2001), 511 (!) downloadable pieces.

• Unearthly Powers: Surrealism and SF: Rick Poynor explores the Tanguy-like strangeness of Richard Powers.

• Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s search for a kool place.

• The Library of Congress National Jukebox.

• Vladimir Nabokov’s butterflies.

• Amy Ross’s Wunderkammer.

• Rapture (1981) by Blondie | Apocalypse (1990) by William Burroughs | Rapture (2000) by Antony and the Johnsons.

Weekend links 51

James Bidgood’s luscious and erotic micro-budget masterpiece Pink Narcissus (1971) receives a screening at the IFC Center Queer/Art/Film festival, NYC, on Monday. The film is presented by Jonathan Katz, curator of the Hide/Seek gay art show whose controversial history was recounted here in December. The NYT ran a short piece about Bidgood, now 77 and not the first artist to be disappointed by his past work; they also have a Bidgood slideshow. Hide/Seek, meanwhile, is now a touring exhibition.

• Related: the delightful Drew Daniel of Matmos (and Soft Pink Truth) posing in a jockstrap at the Club Uranus, San Francisco circa 1990; he also used to go-go dance wearing a fish.

• The Isle of Man may have one of the oldest parliaments in the world but its laws have often been out of step with its neighbour across the Irish Sea. This week the island joined the rest of the UK in granting civil partnerships to its citizens. Now the name whose punning appeal so delighted James Joyce doesn’t seem as inappropriate.

• Howard Jacobson: “The novelist Yukio Mishima posed pointing a Samurai sword to his chest and ultimately had himself beheaded in public. This is what’s called taking your art seriously.”

The Realm of the Queen of the Night (1974) by Wolfgang Hutter from Zauberflote at 50 Watts.

The revelatory operations of the chance encounter lie at the heart of le merveilleux (“the marvelous”)—the Surrealist conception of beauty. You find something marvelous in the world (an object, an image, a person, a place) that corresponds, like a piece clicking into a puzzle, to a deep inner need.

Slicing Open the Eyeball: Rick Poynor on Surrealism and the Visual Unconscious by Mark Dery.

• Boy from the Boroughs: Alan Moore interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid; Michael Moorcock interviewed at Suicide Girls.

• Illustrations from Quark, the anthology of speculative fiction edited by Samuel Delany & Marilyn Hacker in 1970.

• The Residents, sans masks, filmed at their San Francisco home in the 1970s.

• Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor played on a glass harp.

• What art can do for science (and vice versa).

• You can never have too much Virgil Finlay.

• Lydia Kiesling reviews Lolita.

• Alain Resnais film posters.

• Red Mug, Blue Linen.

• No GDM (dub version) (1979) by Gina X | L. Voag’s Kitchen (2004) by Soft Pink Truth.