One day I really will have exhausted this subject but for the moment here’s another look at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. I’d downloaded this photo album months ago from the excellent resources at the University of Heidelberg then promptly forgot all about it. The book is of interest for the variety of views [...]
I’m generally indifferent to panoramic views of cities, especially London where the sprawl lacks the distinct contours of Manhattan or the Napoléonic severity of Hausmann’s Paris. This view is different, however, being a 320 gigapixel panorama of the capital seen from the top of the BT Tower. This view is currently the world’s largest panoramic [...]
Lower Manhattan (1999) by Lebbeus Woods. RIP Lebbeus Woods, an architect and illustrator frequently compared to Piranesi not only for his imagination and the quality of his renderings but also for the way both men built very little from a lifetime of designs. Lots of appreciations have appeared over the past few days including this [...]
I’ve always been curious about the history of the places I live in so for a while I was reading a lot about the history of Manchester, mostly via small booklets published by the City Council. The drawings in this Internet Archive discovery are familiar from some of those publications which tended to recycle the [...]
Boutique art nouveau, 45 rue st. Augustin (2e arr, 1904–05). Despite being reasonably familiar with Eugène Atget’s celebrated photos of Paris, this picture of a very elaborate Art Nouveau façade is something I’d not seen until now. The photo is part of the George Eastman House collection of Atget prints, and is unusual for showing [...]
Transmitter Crowbar Discharge Unit, Bates Linear Accelerator. Photo by Daniel Jackson from his Dark Machines series. The language we use for writing about art is oddly pornographic: We know it when we see it. No one would deny its distinctiveness. Yet efforts to define it inevitably produce squeamishness, as if describing the object too precisely [...]
Detail from Assassination in the Night (c. 1600?) by Monsù Desiderio. Yesterday’s post looked at some of the past cover designs for M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books. This post makes a few suggestions for how they might be presented in the future. Since these are mostly covers that I’d like to see they’re not necessarily [...]
The Pastel City (New English Library, 1971). Illustration by Bruce Pennington. There are writers’ writers, of course, and M. John Harrison is one of those. He moves elegantly, passionately, from genre to genre, his prose lucent and wise, his stories published as sf or as fantasy, as horror or as mainstream fiction. […] His prose [...]
The films shot by the Edison company at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 were featured here a couple of years ago. These screen grabs are from better quality footage made by Edison’s French rivals, Auguste and Louis Lumière, who had the advantage over the Americans in also having their films screened as one of [...]
Shot By Both Sides (1978). Design by Malcolm Garrett. Art: La Chimere regarda avec effroi toutes choses (1886) by Odilon Redon. The first two albums by British post-punk band Magazine have been soundtracking the inner landscape here for the past couple of weeks. Looking at some of their cover art on Discogs reminded me that [...]
The Arcimboldo Effect again. An undated postcard from the image section of A Virtual Wunderkammer: Early Twentieth Century Erotica in Spain. “I took George Clinton and Bootsy Collins to the Battle Station for the first time, and they left feeling like they’d just had a close encounter,” said the bassist and music producer Bill Laswell, [...]
Midtown Manhattan by Constantine A. Anderson. Yesterday’s link to a Domus article, The importance of being axonometric, features an interview with map and chart collector Michael Stoll whose Flickr account has some wonderful samples from his archives. Among the many city charts there are several maps of New York in various axonometric projections including this [...]
It may have been a thankless task for an artist of the 18th century attempting to compete with Piranesi’s matchless Views of Rome but that didn’t stop people trying. These aquatints by James Mérigot date from 1798, and can be found in a British book dating from 1815, A Select Collection of Views and Ruins [...]
At the Mountains of Madness (1979) from Halloween in Arkham by Harry O. Morris. • Golden Age Comic Book Stories always pulls out the stops in the run up to Halloween. In addition to a wonderful collection of Harry O. Morris collages, Mr Door Tree has also been posting Virgil Finlay’s illustrations for Edgar Allan [...]
Despite appearances I’m still doing bits of design and layout work for various musicians. In the past week I’ve been trying to reorganise this sprawling website a little so it’s easier to add new work quickly and easily. One recent job was more layout than design, a CD and vinyl package for a Roly Porter [...]
The Exposition gateway. In a blizzard of work this month I finished another project with a Victorian theme (not more Steampunk!) which I won’t reveal just yet as I dislike spoiling the surprise for publishers. Part of the preparation involved yet more trawling through scanned volumes at the Internet Archive, looking this time at British [...]
The Kurtz compound prior to destruction. An Apocalypse Now storyboard, one of a number which will be included among the extras on the Blu-Ray release of Francis Coppola’s film when it appears in the UK next month. The film is given a new cinema release on May 27th. Radio broadcaster Harold Camping, a man denounced [...]
Passage Bourg l’Abbé, Paris. Photo by FlickrDelusions. Cours et passages à Paris, the perfect Flickr pool for anyone who shares my fetish pour les passages couverts de Paris. Previously on { feuilleton } • Arcades panoramas • Arcades • Passage des Panoramas • Passages 2 • Passages
The London broadsheets have been in a ferment for the past few days over a forthcoming exhibition at the V&A, The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900 which opens on April 2nd. The Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones wrote a piece pointing out the French associations of the British Aesthetes in which he mentions the Hôtel [...]
Re-reading Alfred Kubin’s strange fantasy novel Die Andere Seite (The Other Side) this week, I found myself suffering the same frustration as when I bought the book, namely that the illustrations in the Dedalus edition are very poor reproductions. When this new translation appeared in 2000 there wasn’t any convenient way to see better copies [...]
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