{ feuilleton }

Renaissance (2006), directed by Christian Volckman.

L’abattoir.
From ‘Visionary Art in France’, The Visionary Review, Fall 2004:
Poumeyrol shares with Margotton a fascination for the interior landscape, where dimly illuminated grottos resonate with the remains of past epochs. And yet, his barren and abandoned spaces are often redolent with signs of the artists’ own lost memories.
In his early works, Jean-Marie Poumeyrol was recognized [...]

Photographed by Philippe Halsman in 1947, one of Halsman’s many Dalí portraits.

This prescient out-of-print volume from 1970 is available as a free PDF download here. Also at the essential ubu.com. (Thanks to Jay for the tip!)
From the original back jacket copy:
“Today when one speaks of cinema, one implies a metamorphosis in human perception,” writes the author of this extraordinary book. “Just as the term ‘man’ is [...]

Seven Songs by 23 Skidoo, FM 2008, 1982.
Since I made a post earlier about bad album design, it’s only right to redress the balance somewhat. Neville Brody has long been a favourite designer and something of an influence since it was looking at his work during the 1980s that made me think seriously about design [...]

Herbert List, photographer, 1903–1975.
Update: Herbert List’s Beautiful Young Men at Slate.

The world is over-stuffed with bad design, from food packaging to tv graphics and awful websites, but it’s fun to be reminded now and then just how bad things can get when all aesthetic considerations are thrown to the winds. The Museum of Bad Album Covers features some of the choicest examples from the music [...]

Edward James by René Magritte, La Reproduction Interdite (1937).
Art collector Edward James (1907–1984) was a characteristically English eccentric, a kind of 20th century equivalent of William Beckford or Horace Walpole, who was captivated by Surrealism in the 1930s and became a lifelong devotee of the movement. Much of his inherited wealth was spent supporting artists [...]

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Owen Jones’ landmark study of the world’s decorative history was published in 1856. I have a facsimile edition from the 1980s and it’s a beautiful volume even besides its value as a reference work. Now illuminated-books.com has made high-res scans of the pages available for free. They do the same for a number of other [...]

Film, 170mb, MPEG
Film (1965)
Directed by Alan Schneider
Written by Samuel Beckett
Buster Keaton: The Man
Nell Harrison: Passerby
James Karen: Passerby
Duration: 20 minutes

HDR photos of Tokyo. This page explains HDR.

Coming to cast a giant shadow across your fuzzy warbles on the May 8th. The progression that runs from Scott 4 to Nite Flights to Climate of Hunter to Tilt is here continued in a quite extraordinary manner, leaving Scott looking down on the rest of the music world from very rarefied heights indeed. Impossible [...]

Genet’s gay classic at Ubuweb.
Un Chant D’Amour, 1950, 269 mb (AVI)
Packed with shots of full frontal hard ons, masturbation, and extreme close ups of sweaty feet, armpits and thighs, Jean Genet’s only film is confrontingly explicit. Though no sex takes place, the erotic factor of Un Chant D’Amour is off the scale, and makes for [...]

Portrait of Charles Henri Ford in Poppy Field by Pavel Tchelitchew (1933).
View magazine was an American periodical of art and literature, published quarterly from 1940 to 1947 with heavy emphasis on the Surrealist art of the period. The jaw-dropping list of contributors included: Pavel Tchelitchew, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, André Masson, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, [...]

George Platt Lynes, photographer, 1907–1955.

Exterior and interior views by Thomas Bowles, 1754.
This was one of the most popular places of entertainment in the 18th century. The Rotunda was vast and features included tiered boxes, a fireplace in the centre and an orchestra pit and the diameter was said to be greater than the Coliseum in Rome. Everyone in society [...]

From Ansel Adams’ Lost Los Angeles Found.

“I went down to the Chelsea Drug Store,”
“To get your prescription filled…”
The Rolling Stones, You Can’t always Get What You Want, 1969
How much Stanley Kubrick trivia can you stand? One of the delights of DVD over VHS tape is the ability to step frame by perfect frame through any given film sequence without the picture [...]

From his Hidden Cities series.

Hidden Cities I: The Ministry (2003).

Hidden Cities II: Embarkation for Cythera (2004).

Hidden Cities III: Continuum (work in progress) (2005).
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Favourite book by favourite author in favourite film; does intertextuality get any more heavenly? When are Warner Brothers going to do the right thing and release this on DVD?

Rex Whistler photographed by Cecil Beaton.
British artist Reginald John “Rex” Whistler isn’t heard of much these days, partly because he died young, partly because his work was decorative, rather than gallery-oriented, but mostly because his art, although very much of its time, went against the grain of prevailing Modernist trends. Indeed, he’s so poorly discussed [...]

Photography by John Andresen.

Music by Massive Attack, design by Tom Hingston, photography by Nick Knight.

Downtime over the weekend was caused by a database server malfunction at the web host end. I lost a couple of posts as a result although nothing major, thankfully.