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Weekend links 853

Ghost Rider (detail, 1973) by Bruce Pennington.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Dez Bollardian. My own font of the month is Nosferatu, a design by Sarah Salome Deletain and Jules Durand loosely inspired by the lettering on the German intertitle cards from FW Murnau’s Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens.

• The week in photography: Winners of the Nikon 2026 Microphotography Competition; Winners and finalists of the American Meteorological Society 2026 Photo Contest; The Lion Nebula as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid Infrared Instrument).

• New music: The Larsen Pipes 01 with Reza Mirjalali by The Larsen Pipes; Bound To Substance by Dodenskald & Wilted Perch.

Their career itself can be seen as a kind of collage, in the way it brought elements from different places and periods together into the present. Their music was too eclectic to be comfortably of the moment. Futuristic jams like 1980’s Western Mantra shared a dynamic with the electronic funk then taking shape in New York and London, but was too fragmentary and generally weird for all but the strangest dancefloors. So the Cabs were sometimes too ahead of the curve for their own good, and while they were acknowledged as electronic music pioneers, they never parlayed that stature into consistent success and remained forever outsiders—where they were probably happiest.

Derek Walmsley talks to Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson about the end of the Cabaret Voltaire project

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Panic: Visions Of The Horned God In The English Country Garden by Sara Hannant.

• At the BFI: Ruby McGuigan on where to begin with Billy Wilder.

• At Unquiet Things: The art of Hannah Flowers.

• RIP Tom Skerritt.

• (Ghost) Riders In The Sky (1961) by The Ventures | Ghost Rider (1969) by Musical Doctors | Ghost Rider (1977) by Suicide

Li’l Factory

My thanks to David Polfeldt at Li’l Factory for generously sending me copies of the first four books from his new publishing imprint. Li’l Factory is based in Sweden but publishes in English, and describes its mission thus:

Li’l Factory is focused on publishing odd stories that find no other home. The authors may be young and looking for their first breakthrough, or they may be veterans sitting on material that is rejected by trad publishers. Li’l Factory aims to make a string of beautiful books that reach breakeven and gives the author a boost to continue their work.

All the books published so far are science fiction, the first three of these—Burns by David Polfeldt, Brain Fruit by Stephen Oram, and Mimeograph by Eira A. Ekre—being short stories presented as standalone works. The fourth book—Into the Great by Elliot Blake—is novel length. At the time of writing I’ve only read the first three so it wouldn’t be fair to attempt a review of the quartet, but I can tell you that Burns deals with the solitary existence of a self-aware space probe searching for alien life; Brain Fruit is an account of a three-way act of symbiosis in which a bee, an insect and a fruit have to work together as a single organism in order to advance their evolution; and Mimeograph concerns a near future in which replication machines (“Mimes”) have become so skilfully attuned to the needs of the people they serve that they start to remake the world, with increasingly dramatic consequences. Of the three I preferred Mimeograph, probably because it shades into horror in its second half, as apocalyptic science fiction tends to do.

One thing all the books have in common is the care taken over their presentation, a combination of quality materials, good design and expert typesetting. Publishing books in this manner is always a brave and commendable act; brave because I know from my own experience with small publishers how hard it can be to flourish in a difficult market. But David Polfeldt is off to a good start, and the formatting and design could easily catch the attention of readers who like to collect books when they’re presented like this. His imprint isn’t concerned solely with science fiction either, the submissions page of the Li’l Factory website mentions that fantasy would also be welcome. The submissions window is currently open for anyone with a homeless (and suitable) manuscript. As for what might count as suitable, the taste references are a useful guide.

Salvator Rosa’s witches

Self-portrait (1650).

Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.

HP Lovecraft, from The Colour Out of Space

My recent reading has included some of ETA Hoffmann’s stories, ostensibly his weird tales although there hasn’t been anything especially weird about the ones I’ve read so far. One of these, Signor Formica, is a novella-length piece with Italian artist Salvator Rosa (1615–1673) as the main character, a story that adds a layer of fiction to the rumours and apocrypha the artist accumulated like so many coats of varnish. Hoffmann has Rosa arriving in Rome where he spends little time painting and much more time operating as a highly proficient agent of vengeance for a younger artist. The real Rosa was proficient enough without anyone having to exaggerate his accomplishments. In his early life he trained as a musician; in the years when he was struggling to sell his paintings he worked as an actor, and had some success as a writer of satirical plays. The theatrical side of Rosa’s career is one that Hoffmann exploits in his story.

The Witches’ Sabbath (c.1635/1654).

Hoffmann says surprisingly little about Rosa’s paintings—a familiarity on the part of his readership seems to be taken for granted—but Signor Formica had me looking them up again, especially the more grotesque examples of which there are many to choose from. Rosa was somewhat ahead of his time in both his subject matter and its handling, providing an artistic link between the late Mannerists and the Romantics of the 1800s who would find much to admire in his dark and violent depictions of witches and the bandits of Southern Italy. The bandit pictures were especially popular in the 1800s but since we’re now in the Season of the Witch it seems fitting to look at Rosa’s witches, or those that are visible in the murk of his shadowy canvases. Rosa’s streghe are a fearsome lot, as are the nameless creatures who attend their ceremonies. The monsters you find in older paintings can often seem more comical than frightening but there’s little that’s comical about these snapping assemblages of slaughterhouse remains.

Scenes of Witchcraft: Morning (c.1645–49).

Scenes of Witchcraft: Day (c.1645–49).

Scenes of Witchcraft: Evening (c.1645–49).

Scenes of Witchcraft: Night (c.1645–49).

Continue reading “Salvator Rosa’s witches”

Weekend links 852

Heaviness of Sleep (1938) by John Armstrong.

• Suntup Editions are reprinting two stories by Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan and The White People will be presented together in a single volume, with corrected texts printed in letterpress. The book will also feature eight tipped-in lithographs by Flora McLachlan, and an afterword by Henry Wessells.

• “While it mines much of the same material found throughout the horror genre, The Shout belongs to a parallel cinematic lineage—more art-house than grindhouse.” Leo Goldsmith on Jerzy Skolimowski’s film adaptation of the short story by Robert Graves.

• The week in Borges: “I seeded my dreams and this story emerged”: Poet Will Dowd let Jorge Luis Borges speak to him in his sleep. And Nick James reviews Life of Jorge Luis Borges, a 323-minute documentary directed by Mariano Llínas.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “Venetian artist Canaletto merged fantasy and architectural detail in this previously unseen sketch”.

• Devil in the detail: 100 years on, FW Murnau’s Faust scrapbook reveals the secrets of his silent masterpiece.

• At Public Domain Review: Rudolf Kalvach’s Wiener Werkstätte postcards (1907).

• At the BFI: Alex Ramon chooses 10 great black-and-white films of the 2020s.

• At Colossal: Winners of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026.

• Mix of the week: A Samhain Mixtape at The Invisible College.

• New music: Sleep Machines by O Yuki Conjugate.

• Kali Malone’s favourite albums.

• ∞ Infinite Jungle

• Ordinary Sleep (1994) by Jessamine | First Sleep (2002) by Cliff Martinez | Black Sleep Part I (2008) by Jasper TX

Futuro – A New Stance for Tomorrow

Writing about Evoluon a couple of years ago I mentioned my affection for all those one-off Space-Age constructions with suitably science-fictional names: Evoluon, Skylon, Atomium, Space Needle… You could add Futuro to this list, a micro-building in comparison to the latter pair, with a similar flying-saucer styling as Evoluon. Futuro wasn’t a one-off design, however, but a prefabricated dwelling intended for mass production. The original plan by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen was for a plastic ski lodge that would be light, easy to assemble and quick to heat. The prototype he built in 1968 caught the imagination of investors, and other uses were soon proposed. The ski-lodge idea was thwarted by planning regulations but the Futuro was modestly successful all the same, and might have been a much bigger success in the United States if the oil crisis of 1973 hadn’t raised the cost of the plastics used in its construction. Enough Futuros were sold before production ended that many of them are now scattered around the world, some in better condition than others (see The Futuro House for details). One of the early models was bought in 1971 by the mayor of Todmorden, a small town in Yorkshire, which yielded the photograph below.

There’s no mention of the Todmorden Futuro in Mika Taanila’s short documentary film, Futuro – A New Stance for Tomorrow, but we do get to see many of the others in photographs, brochures, magazine features and period footage. Taanila made his film in 1998 when Matti Suuronen and some of the people who worked with him or helped promote the Futuro were still around to be interviewed.

The film isn’t greatly informative—we learn very little about the design or construction processes, or about potential drawbacks or problems—it’s more a snapshot of an era when industrial design was proposing radical solutions with new materials, plastics in particular. I find the whole idea of the Futuro inherently attractive, and I’d like to know why we don’t see more general-purpose architecture of this kind. Buildings with curved walls have never been popular as housing—furniture is difficult to site, and you can’t easily hang pictures or mirrors on a curved surface—but they can serve other purposes. The Futuro, like other buildings of its kind, gestures to a future that still hasn’t arrived.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Day of Expo 70
• Impressions of Expo 67
• Expositiana
• Evoluon
• The world of the future
• Space Needle USA