The cover of the first edition of this book is thrillingly of its time (1960), in a fine art context, but feels quite disconnected from the disillusioned Middle-American tale that unfolds within. Or, perhaps the inner turmoil and endless miasma of the main character, Rabbit Angstrom, are both appropriately reflected in the op-art sleeve. Either way, I’ve just re-read/finally finished this troubling, masterful book.

I was listening to this record today and as well as being an excellent jazz fusion LP by recently deceased trumpeter, Donald Byrd, it has a brilliant, cosmic sleeve. This whole blog could be dedicated to the sleeves of the Blue Note label, such is its mastery of the medium, but I suspect there are plenty of tributes out there. As Nick Cave sometimes says, “Google it!”

Madame Yevonde, Mrs Edward Mayer as Medusa, 1935

I have this photograph on my fridge! It astonishes me to think that it’s from 1935 – the colours are so modern and vivid, creating an unsettling image.

Captivating, world-weary interpretation.

Mesmerising song and mesmerising moves. I think this is what they call chutzpah.

I think I first saw this sleeve hung up in the Salsa Club in Newcastle. I fell for its modern, concrete curves and Larry Young’s hip dress sense. The music sounds like this.

This photograph by Bert Hardy shows engrossed browsers in HMV Oxford Street in 1958. I have spent a lot of my spare time doing the same thing, which only enhances this lovely image for me.

via this popular blog

Two of the most talented people you’ll ever see on the silver screen, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.

Marianne Faithfull “Broken English” from Ivan Blatny on Vimeo.

Bleak and mysterious and rough around the edges. Derek Jarman matches up to Marianne Faithfull.

I love the covers of the new, deluxe Fitzgeralds. Maybe this is my favourite book, too.

The fashions in this clip may be trapped in aspic but the joy of singing remains fresh and alive. Although this song sits on the borderline of a land called sentimental, Gladys Knight and her high-pitched Pips display a joyous example of control and release that looks effortless but requires such a degree of control that it leaves the technically impressive vocal acrobatics of today’s R&B ballad singers looking somewhat forced and emotionally cold.

I recently saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. I was so impressed by the two central performances by Joaquin Phoenix (whose contorted, bemused face you can see above) and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The film continues to have an afterlife in my mind and today I was watching the Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers musical Follow The Fleet when I heard the following song, also featured in The Master, albeit beautifully sung by Ella Fitzgerald. Both Phoenix and Astaire’s characters are sailors pining for lost loves.

I heard this song on an excellent mix by guitarist William Tyler. It has a depth of feeling that resonated with me and it perfectly captures a sense of perceived inertia and perpetual drift that can sometimes strike you down.

Angel Olsen – Acrobat (Official Music Video) from Toshadeva Palani on Vimeo.

Angel Olsen’s voice is old yet fresh, familiar yet jarring. I like it a lot.

Nick Goss, Don Van Vliet Lounge, 2012

Making a spectacle of the unspectacular. If in London, go see.

Well, that’s my most convoluted pun in a while… perhaps it does an injustice to this photograph and book, which I came upon in a bookshop in Frankfurt. Its luminous nature beguiled me.

Richard Diebenkorn, Seated Woman, 1968, lithograph

I was in Washington DC a couple of days ago and there was a beautiful Diebenkorn exhibition of his Ocean Park paintings. I was going to post something about it, but when searching for images I came across this print and I felt like I had to share it because it appears both hesitant and confident. The pose is very ambiguous and it draws me in.

Josef Albers, Portrait Study, 1918 (ca.), ink and pencil on paper.

The fluidity of ink is equal to the fluidity of the self, which is always shifting.

Yesterday, trapped on a bus, travelling for twenty-four hours in a heatwave with a broken air conditioning system, I watched Heartworn Highways, a documentary about a new breed of country singers, filmed by James Szalapski at the mid-point of the 1970s. I’ve had the soundtrack for a couple of years, which features fragments of dialogue, so watching the songs come alive via the warm colours of Szalapski’s film was an enlightening experience for me. Townes Van Zandt is already one of my favourite country/folk singers from that era and his self-destructive personality is on show in the film alongside this moving example of his musical ability, which is evidently too much for those present to bear.

I saw this Jean Painlevé short film with subtitles last night, which allowed me to focus on the powerful soundtrack. I was rocking out in the back row of the cinema! I got home and looked at the original soundtrack by Pierre Henry and it was great, but totally different from the post-rock noodling that I’d just heard, which was played by the brilliant Yo La Tengo. I’ve posted both so that you can mute the original and experience the same nature documentary wig-out that I did or enjoy the spooky original should you wish to do that.

Kraftwerk were more than a bit cool, weren’t they?
And also partially responsible for a memorable scene from the unsettling Fassbinder film, Chinese Roulette:

I stayed up late when I was young to watch this – It’s a wild and uncontrolled performance of a thundering, propulsive song. It’s like they’re straining to contain the noises inside them as the song roars along.

Gunta Stölzl, Collage made for the portfolio ’9 Years Bauhaus’, 1928

This collage really leapt out at me when I went to The Barbican’s Bauhaus: Art as Life exhibition. It feels full of joy and invention.

I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before! My favourite poet, Frank O’Hara, reading Having A Coke WIth You in his apartment in 1966. His poems blend flippancy with poignancy; the profound with the casual. I think it’s always instructive to see or hear a poet reading their own work, especially someone whose work relies on the rhythm and music of conversational speech.

You can hear William Carlos Williams reading this poem here at the Open Culture website. It has a beautiful melody to it.

The Three Graces by William Carlos Williams

We have the picture of you in mind,
when you were young, posturing
(for a photographer) in scarves
(if you could have done it) but now,
for none of you is immortal, ninety-
three, the three, ninety and three,
Mary, Ellen and Emily, what
beauty is it clings still about you?
Undying? Magical? For there is still
no answer, why we live or why
you will not live longer than I
or that there should be an answer why
any should live and whatever other
should die. Yet you live. You live
and all that can be said is that
you live, time cannot alter it–
and as I write this Mary has died.

Lyonel Feininger, Villa on the Shore, 1921

This woodcut is one of many great prints by Feininger that are included in a book I have. I couldn’t find a good enough image of his little watercolour and pen drawings of sailboats so I chose the more graphic stylings of his earlier work, which are equally strong and showcase his ever-present command of line.

Mark Hollis’s only solo album after Talk Talk is a minimalist masterpiece. I would love to eventually find this amount of space and control in the music I make. I could’ve picked any song from this album as evidence, but I’d forgotten how good this one is, probably because it’s so understated, even on a record of numerous slow wonders. Just before the two-minute mark, Hollis’s voice does something unexpected and the song begins to shift subtly before returning to its sparse, pastoral groove. Restraint enables release and it is such a powerful device.

Paul Buchanan’s voice and music is unfeasibly melancholy and beautiful as you can hear in this complementary video. In a recent Guardian article he said, “You work and work and work and have the life that you have, and once in a while, sometimes once in a decade, you see a few things you’ve got and think, yes, that’s authentic.” I think that’s an admirable attitude in a world where popular song is often churned out, devoid of any specific emotion or ‘soul’.

Lauren Marsolier, Transition -part 3, 2009 – 2012

Lauren Marsolier, Transition -part 3, 2009 -2012

Lauren Marsolier, Transition -part 2, 2007 – 2009

These images and others like them feel like a series of absences and withheld information, but also in the subtle collage of seemingly seamless elements, they are also about adding something and reinvention: haunting and smooth – a new reality.

via It’s Nice That

Hey! What if the Byrds had made lo-fi, ’80s indie-pop produced by Ariel Pink in his bedroom? I’d like to think it’d sound similar to Catwalk.

I saw this film in a somnolent state on a small hotel TV screen recently, late at night. It seemed emblematic of a certain strand of mid-1970s cinema subsequently dubbed ‘New Hollywood’. Not much happened in the film but it’s circuitous nature allowed me to reflect on the characters’ motives and the context of an era where the American Dream had begun to unravel in the eyes of many counter-cultural figures, including, presumably, the director Bob Rafelson. You can see it in the run-down hotels and the bleak vaudeville settings for this intriguing non-drama about suspicion and mental deterioration.

John Griffiths book cover for Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud, 1962.

I saw in The Guardian that Penguin book illustrator John Griffiths had died and it seemed appropriate to share one of his striking covers. There’s a bit of debate going on currently about the differing merits of e-books versus physical books but, whatever your opinion, I think that there’s something magical about the physical properties of individual books especially when encased in wonderful jackets such as this one. Print, tactility and the need for illustration are factors that should not be underestimated because they help to emphasise that individuality.

This sequence is taken from the film La cicatrice intérieure (The Inner Scar) made by Phillipe Garrel and starring Nico. This song is from the stark and brilliant album ‘Desertshore’. It was screened as part of the AV festival in Newcastle and I missed it so I thought I’d post this up to vaguely console myself.

This cassette sleeve is the most fantastic thing I’ve seen today and there’s a whole bunch of great artwork and warped African pop on a blog called, appropriately enough, Awesome Tapes from Africa. You can listen to Woubeshet Feseha here.

Eugene Richards, Corinth, North Dakota, January 2006

Richards’s photographs of this period are like American Gothic short stories, with their town names suggesting an unseen narrative.

This cosmic disco makes me unfeasibly happy!

Käthe Kollwitz, Self-portrait, circa 1904

A good portrait or self-portrait says a lot about a person, even if it’s just the viewer projecting their opinions on the image. I saw this lithograph in Köln the other day and was very moved.

I love this record and I love Robert Wyatt. When I first heard him, as a teenager, I didn’t know what to make of him, but his music is genuine and humane; I persevered and soon became enraptured. Rock Bottom is like the sea that it speaks of, deep and seemingly unfathomable, but ever-changing and capable of rare and pure beauty. Today I read this amazing Pitchfork interview and listened to samples of Wyatt’s favourite music and I felt I had to share it with someone/everyone!

Her voice is a force of nature. The arrangement is full-on Bond theme. That’ll do me.

Matthias Heiderich, selections from Favourite Places 2, 2011

I found this photographer via 2 or 3 Things I Know. His images are extremely crisp and pleasurable, generally, so it’s interesting to see that sharp quality dissipate into mist and mystery. See more here.