1,488 words
David Bowie
Blackstar
Columbia, 2016
Blackstar will inevitably serve as Bowie’s last will and testament whether he meant it to or not. Certainly the writing of much of the material would have preceded his awareness of his terminal illness and his confrontation with imminent death. (more…)
Jean Sibelius, 1865–1957
Jean Sibelius, 1865–1957
1,437 words
English original here
Tapiola est la dernière œuvre majeure composée par Jean Sibelius. Elle fut commandée par le chef d’orchestre de New York, Walter Damrosch, au début de 1926, et fut jouée pour la première fois le lendemain de Noël de la même année. Damrosch avait demandé un poème symphonique, le choix du sujet étant laissé au compositeur. Pour trouver l’inspiration, Sibelius se tourna, comme il le fit si souvent, vers le Kalevala, le recueil de folklore finnois qui transparaît si souvent dans son œuvre. (more…)
2,512 words
Katherine Beem and Andy Paciorek, eds.
Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies
Wyrd Harvest Press, 2015
The term “folk horror” is a relatively recent invention that can be applied to a wide range of artistic creations, not all of them belonging to the horror genre. It was popularized by the 2010 BBC TV documentary A History of Horror where the term was used to describe three horror films: Witchfinder General
1,297 words
Carolyne Larrington
The Land of the Green Man: A Journey Through the Supernatural Landscapes of the British Isles
London: I. B. Tauris, 2015
Is Britain the most mystical of all countries? It certainly seems that way to me, but then I’m irreparably biased. Whilst every human culture has its own folklore, the magic seems more potent, more alive, when it’s our own. “The myth is not my own, I had it from my mother,” as Coomaraswamy (quoting Euripides) would have it. (more…)
1,319 words
Jacqueline Yallop
Dreamstreets: A Journey Through Britain’s Village Utopias
London: Jonathan Cape, 2015
Dreamstreets tells the story of various ‘model villages’ that were built during the industrial revolution and beyond but it also tells a wider history of Britain through the nineteenth century. (more…)
2,293 words
Penda’s Fen was first broadcast in 1974 as part of the BBC’s long-running Play for Today series. Since then it has only been broadcast on TV once, in 1990 on Channel 4. It has never been released on video, DVD or BluRay but it has cropped up at various film festivals through the years. (more…)
1,120 words
Watching Carol Morley’s new film, The Falling, I found myself wondering, slightly obsessively, exactly which year it was set in. I settled on 1970 because the visual cues in the home of the main character, Lydia, suggested that strange point in time where hallucinatory sixties psychedelia ossified into lurid home furnishings. Subsequent googling revealed that it was set in 1969. (more…)
1,219 words
Savitri Devi
The Lightning and the Sun
Third Edition, Complete and Unabridged
Ed. R. G. Fowler
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2015
If Savitri Devi’s The Lightning and the Sun isn’t the most controversial book of the twentieth century then it must surely come close. (more…)
1,703 words
In the summer of 1969 the members of Fairport Convention were gathered together at a country house in Farley Chamberlayne in picturesque Hampshire. There they were to record their most celebrated album, Liege & Lief, the definitive statement in English folk-rock. The country retreat setting was partly therapeutic as the band had earlier that year been involved in a tragic road accident whilst on their way back from a gig in Birmingham. The drummer, Martin Lamble, and guitarist Richard Thompson’s girlfriend, Jeannie Taylor, were both killed. Clearly, the remaining members of Fairport were looking for a new musical direction as they sought to put the past behind them. (more…)
3,568 words
“It is a book of great truths,” I said.
“Yes, he replied, “of ‘truths’ which send men frantic and blast their lives. I don’t care if the thing is, as they say, the very supreme essence of art. It’s a crime to have written it, and I for one shall never open its pages.”
— The Repairer of Reputations, Robert W. Chambers
True Detective is widely considered to be one of the best TV series ever broadcast. (more…)
Andy Goldsworthy, Ice Ball
3,213 words
Andy Goldsworthy, Ice Ball
The English sculptor Andy Goldsworthy is a practitioner of Land art, a practice that seeks to create art from natural materials and settings. Other practitioners of Land art include Richard Long, Robert Smithson, and David Nash. Whilst there is this common element of setting art in (or creating it from) the landscape, there is also a particularly striking quality to Andy Goldsworthy’s work that sets him apart from other Land artists. In short, this particular quality of his work might be termed sacred or numinous. For this reason he is both lauded as a contemporary shaman and derided as a twee pastoralist. Neither extremity really reveals much about Goldsworthy’s art. (more…)
