{ feuilleton }

The River Fountain, Place de la Concorde. (Eiffel Tower in the background.)
Yes, I’m inordinately fond of photographing things with the sun behind them but the cloudscape was especially attractive on this afternoon. There wasn’t as much visible water coming off the fountains as there had been previously but the spray was most welcome on a [...]

The Obelisk, Place de la Concorde.
I love the way the thin layer of tarmac in the Place has been worn away by the traffic to reveal the cobblestones beneath. The Paris Obelisk seems more impressive than Cleopatra’s Needle, not least because of its dramatic setting and the way it’s aligned with the Tuileries promenades and [...]

The 2006 Jack Trevor Story Grand Prix was decided on Friday afternoon at L’Horizon, rue St Placide in Paris. The sans precedent prize can be seen above. After much deliberation the judges decided that Mr Steve Aylett was a worthy recipient of this most ingenuous of literary awards. Mr Aylett now has to spend the [...]

77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno, Laforet Museum, Harajuku, Tokyo.
Brian Eno is in the latest Wire talking about his forthcoming DVD-ROM, 77 Million Paintings. He also mentions coining the term “generative music” in 1995 to a resounding silence. 77 Million Paintings continues the generative project:
This will be available later in the year as a DVD-ROM [...]

Photography by Eugène Atget (1857–1927).

For once the hyperbole about a new band is justified.
Through the Windowpane is a great album.

Thomas Pynchon – A Journey into the Mind of [P.] (2001)
Written and directed by Fosco Dubini
and Donatello Dubini
Music by The Residents
Language: English
Runtime: 96mins
“Things are not as they seem.” In US writer Thomas Pynchon’s case, this is a mantra, cornerstone to a life and labyrinthine oeuvre freighted with ceaseless speculation. In books like V. and Gravity’s [...]

I’ll be in Paris this week so some French-related postings are in order.
Michel Houellebecq’s HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (which I still haven’t read) has been in the news again recently, with a number of reviews appearing in UK newspapers and magazines, most of which present the by-now rather tired spectacle of reviewers [...]

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive

Cartoon by the wonderful Steve Bell.
I keep resolving to stop posting so much political stuff, there’s enough of that elsewhere and generally I’d prefer not to have the names, faces and actions of these miserable wretches polluting my web space. This was too good to miss, however. And this piece of polemic makes a [...]

New Thomas Pynchon novel to be released
Mysterious author’s first novel in almost a decade comes out in December
NEW YORK—Thomas Pynchon fans, the long wait is apparently over: His first novel in nearly a decade is coming out in December.
But details, as with so much else about the mysterious author of such postmodern classics as “V.” [...]

This new Savoy volume was an exhausting task, 608pp with illustrations on nearly every page. The book is another study of Savoy’s long career as publishers with many digressions examining the various maverick and often unsavoury characters that have fuelled David Britton’s books and the wider Savoy corpus, from real and imagined fascists to pulp [...]

Left: The scarce first edition of the Hamlyn novelisation. From the Coulthart library.
I realised some years ago that all my favourite films have great soundtracks, almost without exception. Something about the blend of drama and well-chosen music really excites me, so it’s no surprise that The Wicker Man would appeal, having as it does a [...]

The international committee to choose the winner of the Jack Trevor Story Memorial Cup has at last been selected. The jury consists of Mr John Coulthart (UK), M. Jean-Luc Fromental (France), Mr Michael Moorcock (UK), Mr Martin Stone (France) and Mr Jeff VanderMeer (USA) who will meet to confer in the course of the following [...]

Sparsely-attended but very worthwhile performance at the
Unitarian Chapel this evening by Steffen Basho-Junghans
(above) and Danny Saul (below).

Arthur magazine’s recent feature on life in the Middle East by Daniel Chamberlin was an excellent mix of travelogue/reportage. Iraq and the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict aside, the region was fairly peaceful last year. How quickly things change. This is from the latest Arthur email bulletin.
FROM ARTHUR CONTRIBUTING EDITOR DANIEL CHAMBERLIN:
Last summer I went traveling with [...]

Diminuto, 7″x5″x6″ (2004)
Antique hardware, bone, leather, cast painted glass eyes.

Lupe, 11″x6″x16″ (2005)
Antique hardware, brass, bone, glove leather, painted wood ball, glass eyes.
Gorgeous stuff, reminds me of some of Jan Svankmajer’s sculptural works (which are possibly an inspiration) but with an added dimension of Victorian playfulness.
Via Boing Boing.

“The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is cheap in the Orient.” General William Westmoreland, commander of US military operations during the Vietnam War, speaking in Hearts and Minds (1974).
Yahoo News, Mon Jul 17, 2006, 4:47 PM ET
UNITED NATIONS (AFP) – US Ambassador John Bolton said there [...]

It’s the same every year, the weather gets hot (30C today) and out come the Main CDs, although the march of progress has meant importing them into iTunes this time round. For some reason Main’s Hz collection (6 EPs, later a double-disc set) is especially suited to warm temperatures, partly due to remembrance of them [...]

Alaska Melting, vinyl-only release
by my favourite electronic artist.

The Netherlands celebrate four hundred years of Rembrandt’s genius.
While looking around for links I noticed this story for the first time:
Margaret S. Livingstone and Bevil R. Conway, neurobiologists at Harvard Medical School, say Rembrandt’s many self-portraits reveal that his eyes are focused in slightly different directions, depriving him of the “stereo” effect that makes vision [...]

The Garden of Instruments
by Paul Schütze and Kevin Pollard.

Poster design by Albin Grau.
Friedrich Murnau’s Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922) isn’t the first horror film but it’s certainly the first truly effective one which is why it’s been so influential over the years, inspiring a remake by Werner Herzog (1979), the vampire’s appearance in Salem’s Lot (1979), Coppola’s Dracula (1992), and a fictionalised [...]

Manikins (1951).

Male Nude (1954).
Good gallery of his often enigmatic paintings here.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Wasted talent
John Patterson
Friday July 14, 2006
The Guardian
If you’re making a serious movie about drugs, it doesn’t hurt to assemble a cast that knows whereof it collectively speaks. And for his adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick’s unsettling 1977 masterpiece about drugs, fractured identity, paranoia and betrayal, Richard Linklater has found a quartet that [...]

Hajime Emoto creates very convincing imaginary creatures, all with a slightly desiccated appearance, that range from the strikingly demonic (like the example above) to more mundane fish, amphibians and plant life. Site is Japanese-only but that don’t let that prevent you from browsing.
Via The Nonist.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

New York Series, 57th Street, 8 Hours (2005).
Atta Kim: On-Air
International Center of Photography
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street, New York
June 9 through August 27, 2006
This exhibition presents a selection of recent works from the ON-AIR Project by the Korean contemporary artist Atta Kim (born 1956). For these large-scale, visually spectacular color photographs, Kim [...]

Photography by Ekmel Ertan & Murat Germen.

Some of the honourees of America’s National Design Awards tell the President’s wife why they won’t be attending a special gala breakfast at the White House.
Dear Mrs. Bush:
As American designers, we strongly believe our government should support the design profession and applaud the White House sponsorship of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. And as [...]

Love by Hassan Massoudy.
Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East
The British Museum
18 May–3 September 2006
Room 35
Admission free
Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East is an exhibition based largely on the collections of the British Museum complemented by a number of loans. It demonstrates the imaginative ways in which artists across the [...]

These are people after my own heart as this is something I’ve been doing for years with jukeboxes. Usually the challenge was to find the weirdest thing in the whole selection of records which would often be a B-side of some sort. “Wyatting” seems a rather unfair name for something that’s annoying people (although if [...]

In the vestibule, candles are arranged in the shape of the constellation Aquarius.
Hotel Tressants in Menorca
ArchitectureWeek
21 January 2004
When Italo Calvino wrote his 1972 novel about magical cities based on places he imagined Marco Polo might have visited, he was probably not thinking specifically of the Spanish island of Menorca (Minorca).
The city of Sophronia is made [...]

Photo of JLB by Pepe (José María) Fernández.
At the ever fabulous Ubuweb.
Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man (2000)
260MB (AVI)
Directed by Philippe Molins
Written by Alberto Manguel
Runtime: 47mins
Language: English
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Borges in Performance