Via Foxtongue.
Just a blue-haired, help underwater-smoking gayelle mermaid to brighten up your Monday morning. This illustration by Georges Leonnec appeared in risque French magazine La Vie Parisienne in 1926. The magazine was founded in 1863, ambulance relaunched just before World War I, and evolved from a mild-mannered society journal to an erotic magazine of humor, literature and scantily-clad damsels. Many more images from La Vie Parisienne can be seen here, here and here.
From Joseph Nanni and friends (the same twisted souls who brought us that Necronomicon infomercial) comes this important, potentially lifesaving message about Elder Sign:
Sure, this clip has been circulating on the internet for a while, but as everyone knows, flying polyp infestations are most rampant during the holiday season. If you suffer from “an overwhelming sense of dread brought on by the realization of your own insignificance in the universe” that’s possibly being compounded by Seasonal Affective Disorder, rancid egg nog or overexposure to Glenn Beck-parroting (read: polyp ridden) in-laws, you need Elder Sign now more than ever.
And possibly some *cough* stocking stuffers from the HPLHS Bazaar:
(ElderWear™: “Because you don’t want Shoggoths in your pants.”)
From 1995 to 1997, Sleep Chamber was my lullaby. Perhaps due to my taking the band’s name a little too literally, Sirkle Zero was on repeat every night. Soon after, Psychic TV entered orbit and the floodgates ov darkness were officially open.
Psychic TV testcard, used at beginnings of videos, performances, etc. Also my desktop. Also, I’m putting this on a T-shirt.
Yep, nostalgia abounds with the resurgence of darque music [and imagery, and the accompanying, deliberately lo-fi videos], that’s been steadily creeping forth over the past couple of years.
The video-playlist ahead began to take shape because all this new gloom–stuff is blowin’ up and the pioneers of dark/experimental/noise/etc. deserve re-visiting and acknowledgment more than ever. And because the music below has managed to remain visceral and electrifying and relevant as ever. Also, having all these videos in one place? AWESOME. A shamefully incomplete tribute, the playlist features Sleep Chamber, Coil, Swans, Psychic TV, Nurse With Wound, and MOAR. Add your favorites in the comments section to flesh this baby out!
Beloveds Rachel Brice, Mardi Love and Zoe Jakes –known collectively as The Indigo Belly Dance Company– are back on tour with their phenomenally lovely, lively, singularly delightful show Le Serpent Rouge. “The Indigo has created and defined a new style of belly dance, embracing the roots of middle eastern dance while incorporating an aesthetic reminiscent of early twentieth century cabarets and world’s fairs.”
They’ve got the fantabulous Crow Quill Night Owls with them again, as well as those rambunctious Gallus Brothers. (Several video clips of all the players are embedded in the playlist below.)
(With apologies to our Northwesternmost US readers) the tour actually kicked off yesterday in Seattle, but several more Le Serpent Rouge shows will be happening across the country this month. If you like timeless beauty, raucous laughter, joy and dance and song, this outfit ain’t to be missed.
More information via Bricey’s site after the jump.
Felled Forest Reliquary, 2010. Oil and egg tempera on shaped panel. 30 x 39 x 2 inches; 76 x 99 x 5 cm.
Madeline von Foerster, whose incredible work we’ve previously featured on the blog, and in Issue 02 of Coilhouse Magazine, has just completed a new series of paintings, called Reliquaries.
“This new series of artworks grows out of the artist’s fascination with reliquaries: the jewel-covered statues and treasure chests where remains of sainted persons – from bones, to scraps of clothing, to vials of blood – are enshrined. Old, beautiful, and mysterious, reliquaries often become objects of worship themselves. The impulse to preserve and make precious seems to represent a common human urge, spanning across many cultures, and not only confined to religion: we create reliquaries for vanquished cultures in our Natural History Museums, and living reliquaries, in the form of zoos, for animals all but extinct in the wild.”
The Red Thread, 2010. 48 x 62 inches. Oil and Egg Tempera on Panel.
Consistently, Madeline von Foerster’s oil and egg tempera compositions are technically masterful and emotionally powerful. And she keeps upping her game, refining her message. Viewing these most recent works, I’m haunted by something she said a couple of years ago in our interview for the magazine:
“I am incredibly pessimistic about the future of this earth. As E.O. Wilson describes, we are hurtling towards “The Age of Loneliness,” the coming time when half of the world’s species will be extinct, and all the magnificent wilderness denuded and torn. Till my dying breath I will rage and fight against that future, but I am only one person…”
She went on to explain that in spite of everything, she still has hope. In her loving depictions of endangered and extinct wildlife, that message of hope is clearly conveyed, along with urgency, and grief.
As jaw-dropping as these pieces appear onscreen, they must be even more astonishing in person, so German comrades, achtung: The Reliquaries series will be showing this winter at the Strychnin Gallery in Berlin, November 12th through December 18th.
Ex Mare, 2010. Oil and egg tempera on shaped panel. 30 x 39 x 2 inches; 76 x 99 x 5 cm.
Any form of inquisition into the meaning of this will be fruitless. Favour me, an’ you will, with eternal confinement in a gaol, and everything that I now relate will be repeated with perfect candour.
Again I say I do not know anything at all about it, which is probably why I am making it the subject of this narrative. It is true that I have been for 18 years his closest friend and that we have been seen by reputable witnesses near Greenwood, NY, Sleepy Hollow by the Hudson, Mt. Auburn, Cambridge, Mass., and Grant’s Tomb, Manhattan, but that we possessed tastes mutually morbid or a predilection for graveyards I must strenuously deny.
I seem to remember a weird evening in November. The place was, of course, a cemetery; over the fence peered an inquisitive, waning, crescent moon, and on the fence a vulture and his vulturine, a raven and a couple of cormorants remained couchant.
Thus opens Falco Ossifracus, a short, witty H.P. Lovecraft parody written by fellow amateur journalist Edith Miniter. Published under the nom-de-plume “Mr. Goodguile,” the piece first appeared in Miniter’s zine, The Muffin Man, in 1921. The piece lampoons Lovecraft’s meandering, loquacious writing style and obsession with the macabre, though sadly it is not a parody of Cthulhu Mythos, and the setting remains confined to a graveyard. Lovecraft described the effort as “a highly amusing parody” in his memoir of Miniter, in which he also credited her as the source of the Whipoorwill legend from The Dunwich Horror while praising her “sharp insight, subtle wit, rich scholarship, and vivid literary force.”
Of their relationship, Lovecraft scholar Chris Perridas wrote, “one suspects a pre-Sonia romantic attachment by HPL of Miniter, though obviously never acted upon.” But if this hubristic letter to a friend in which Lovecraft brags about the ladies in his life (“Hell, how the cats fight!”) is to be believed, the affection appears to have been entirely one-sided.
Falco Ossifracus can be found in the Miniter short-story anthology Dead Houses, available from Hippocampus Press. Reprinting the entire story would be copyright infringement, and getting the book is recommended. Several more choice quotes, below:
For a more modern take on the H.P. Lovecraft parody (of which there’ve been several throughout the ages), see @_hp_lovecraft_ on Twitter.
A trailer for those who appreciate moving images of complex, obsolete machines doing their thing. Linotype: The Film is a look at the Linotype printing machine. Invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler it revolutionized typesetting upon it’s arrival in 1886, allowing for a much smaller number of workers to set type. Calling to mind an enormous typewriter, its inner-working are best left to Wikipedia:
The Linotype machine operator enters text on a 90-character keyboard. The machine assembles matrices, which are molds for the letter forms, to a line. The assembled line is then cast as a single piece, called a slug, of type metal in a process known as “hot metal” typesetting. The matrices are then returned to the type magazine from which they came. This allows much faster typesetting and composition than original hand composition in which operators place down one pre-cast metal letter, punctuation mark or space at a time. – The name of the machine comes from the fact that it produces an entire line of metal type at once, hence a line-o-type.
Directed by Douglas Wilson, the trailer for Linotype features some top-notch machine porn, shot by Brandon Goodwin with some excellent sound by Jess Heugel as well as looking at the people who adore these mechanical relics. Just my kind of movie.
Update: Wilson has set up a Kickstarter to help fund the project. If you enjoyed the trailer you can donate a couple of dollars to help get this bad boy made and get some cool swag in return.
Via DRAWN!
Elaine Comparone is the Tony Iommi of Baroque harpsichord, and you’re about to get your face rocked off, Rameau style.
Via Darla Teagarden, who says, “imagine running through a house of mirrors in Greece circa 1927 after smoking hashish while wearing tiny shoes.” (Perfect!)
Comparone claims Rameau’s shredding piece of music was inspired by Homer’s Polyphemus. Other scholars suggest that the French composer was representing the BRVTAL brothers Arges, Brontes, and Steropes –Cyclopean blacksmiths who forged lightning bolts for Zeus– and that the insanely manic percussive runs are meant represent the giants busy at work, hammering and forging thunderbolts. Either way? MMM\m/ETAL.
A fascinating look into the work of David A. Smith, who makes decidedly intricate embossed glass signs. It’s almost frighteningly meticulous work, and Smith makes it look easy in a way that only someone with years of experience and copious talent can. Simply beautiful.
Via Bioephemera (Welcome back, Jessica. We missed you.)
At 1,300 feet, this structure of iron, glass and steel would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower. Designed in 1919 by Vladimir Tatlin, the building – officially called The Monument to the Third International – was planned to be erected in St. Petersburg as the headquarters of the Comintern. The tower was designed to contain twin spirals tapering upwards and encasing a cube-shaped lecture hall, a smaller pyramid for executive meetings, and a cylinder housing an information center, delivering bulletins and manifestos via radio, telegraph and loudspeaker.
Each part of the building would rotate at a different speed. The cube was proposed to rotate and complete 360˚ after 365 days, the pyramid would complete a full 360˚ rotation every month, and the cylinder would complete its rotation within 24 hours. There were also plans to build an open-air screen on the cylinder, and for the cylinder to project messages onto the clouds. The building was never constructed due to financing and structural concerns, though an interesting build effort took place in 2006.
There’s also this short film by Lutz Becker. The first YouTube comment below the video captures it perfectly: it’s “mad, impossible, brutal, audacious and beautiful.”
[image via]