Blade Runner’s Fallen Angels
The film Blade Runner is hugely successful, but what does it mean? As the makers hint, the key is to watch it through the eyes of William Blake and his mythology of liberation.
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Author: Andy Wilson
Blake and the Mad Crew: The Ranters and the Historians
While A L Morton thought Blake may have read the work of the Ranter, Abiezer Coppe, modern historians say there is no evidence of Blake being familiar with Ranter texts. How much do Blake’s ideas overlap with The Ranters? I look at the Justification of the Mad Crew (1650) to compare.
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William Blake as a Revolutionary Poet
Few could deny that William Blake supported the radical politics of his time, yet revolutionary ideas were not an adjunct to his visionary genius, but the living heart of it as a poet.
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Serge Arnoux’s Mirror of Blake
An analysis of the recently discovered engravings by Serge Arnoux illustrating William Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’, with a discussion of surrealism and Blake, and the impact of Moravianism on Blake’s idea of faith, sexuality, freedom and religion.
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Fruit Flies Like a Banana
Excerpted from the book Faust: Stretch Out Time, an essay about how great music helps us escape Urizenic time, dead time. “Out of time, into space” (William Burroughs)
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The Heptones: Mystery Babylon
Thy purpose & the purpose of thy Priests & of thy Churches
Is to impress on men the fear of death; to teach
Trembling & fear, terror, constriction: abject selfishness.
Mine is to teach Men to despise death & to go on
In fearless majesty annihilating Self, laughing to scorn
Thy Laws & terrors
The Tyger and Violence
The Tyger is potentially the Led Zeppelin of Blake poems — brash, bombastic and unnervingly successful. It is supposedly the most anthologised poem in the English language — stadium poetry, if you like. Your children will probably come across it at school. Along with the Parry’s version of Jerusalem, this is the Blake that people know.
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Mike Pence, Ecological Disaster, and Blake’s The Fly
At the televised Vice-Presidential debate last week with Kamala Harris, Mike Pence spectacularly ignored the fly that came to rest very publicly on his head. This act of wilful ignorance crowned Pence’s role at the side of Donald Trump as ‘the man who pretended not to notice‘.
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Andy Wilson: The Brilliant New Hercules
Two years after inventing relief etching, the printing method best suited to recording late 18th century revolutionary free improv visions, William Blake & his wife Catherine moved to 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, London. For the next ten years at the Hercules, according to James Joyce, “Elemental beings and spirits of dead great men often came to the poet’s room at night to speak with him about art and the imagination.”
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Andy Wilson: Faust: Stretch Out Time 1970-75
“There is no group more mythical than Faust” (Julian Cope) “When the Germans do something, they don’t fuck around” (Jean-Hervé Péron): A book about the band Faust, the legendary krautrock group. Fully illustrated, it contains reviews all of the group’s records from the period 1970-75 as well as recounting the rise of krautrock and its relation to the social upheavals of the ’60s.
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