John – Page 549 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 113

Wunderkammer (2011) by Emma Leonard.

As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like. Did I expect I would be living in such a world of wonders? Of course. Everyone did. Do I feel cheated now? It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them.

A quote from Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit, an essay by David Graeber. Related: Another World: David Graeber interviewed by Michelle Kuo at Artforum.

• Constellation, a series of portraits by Kumi Yamashita: “This body of work consists of three simple materials that, when combined, produce the portraits: a wooden panel painted a solid white, thousands of small galvanized nails, and a single, unbroken, common sewing thread.”

• Nicole Rudick at The Paris Review on the history of psychedelic art. Related: The psychedelic art and design of Keiichi Tanaami. Also Manifesting the Mind: Footprints of the Shaman, a two-hour documentary about psychedelic drugs.

• Already mentioned here, The Lost Tapes, a 3-CD collection of previously unreleased recording by the mighty Can, is out on Monday. There’s a preview of ten of the tracks here.

• “I can’t think of anybody who would have a good word to say for centipedes…” Duncan Fallowell (a Can associate for many years) interviewed William Burroughs in 1982.

• Herb Lubalin: American Graphic Designer and the Herb Lubalin Study Center’s Flickr sets.

• Strange Flowers goes to the movies with everyone’s favourite Bavarian king, Ludwig II.

• The Sphinx’s Riddle: The Art of Leonor Fini at the Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco.

• More Teutonica: A Spacemusic Primer by Dave Maier.

• Van Dyke Parks: return of a musical maverick.

• Forty Posters for Forty Years at Pentagram.

• Donovan’s Colours (1968) by Van Dyke Parks | Sailin’ Shoes (1972) by Van Dyke Parks | Clang Of The Yankee Reaper (1975) by Van Dyke Parks.

James Joyce in Reverbstorm

A post for Bloomsday with a handful of the many and varied appearances of James Joyce in the forthcoming Reverbstorm book. Ulysses was published ninety years ago this year. Among the usual commemorations BBC Radio 4 will be dramatising the entire novel throughout the day.

But as before the lightning the serried stormclouds, heavy with preponderant excess of moisture, in swollen masses turgidly distended, compass earth and sky in one vast slumber, impending above parched field and drowsy oxen and blighted growth of shrub and verdure till in an instant a flash rives their centres and with the reverberation of the thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent, so and not otherwise was the transformation, violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the word.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

TS Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

Continue reading “James Joyce in Reverbstorm”

Arrow by The Irrepressibles

I’ve kept wondering when we’d hear more from The Irrepressibles following the release of their wonderful Mirror Mirror album. Here at last is a new song, Arrow, from a forthcoming album, Nude. Lyrical allusions to Saint Sebastian accompany two naked guys wrestling until…well, go and see. (Thanks to Thom for the tip!)

Directed & choreographed by Jamie McDermott
Camera Person: Kate Perring
Filmed at Studio 7, Alston Works, London.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Los Bikers by Dënver
• The Lady Is Dead and The Irrepressibles

Animating Piranesi

Piranesi Carceri d’Invenzione (2010).

When Peacay at BibliOdyssey linked to this short film by Grégoire Dupond I thought it might be one I hadn’t seen before but it turns out I have, and I mentioned the exhibition it was produced for in 2010. No matter, it’s worth drawing attention to again since Monsieur Dupond makes an impressive job of sending a virtual camera through the vast spaces of Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione, joining several of the etchings into a series of contiguous chambers.

The Sound of the Carceri (1998).

Dupond’s film uses Bach’s Cello Suite #2 as a musical accompaniment. As noted earlier that choice probably came from Yo-Yo Ma’s Inspired by Bach (1998) in which Bach’s six solo cello suites are performed in different settings. Suite #2 was The Sound of the Carceri directed by François Girard which places the cellist inside a CGI rending of one of Piranesi’s Careri etchings. YouTube has a copy here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Carceri, thermae and candelabra
• La Tour by Schuiten & Peeters
• Set in Stone
• Piranesi as designer
• Vedute di Roma
• Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons

The Fourth Dimension

This post ought to have followed the one about Tango since it concerns another experimental film by Zbigniew Rybczynski. The Fourth Dimension was made in 1988 and like many of the director’s films uses a single effect to create striking results. In this case the effect involves photographing people and objects one narrow line at a time. When the lines are combined then shifted slightly the objects seem to bend and twist like melting plastic. This is the kind of semi-analogue technique which has now been made redundant by computer animation but Rybczynski gives his compositions a quasi-Surrealist quality, reinforced by the Magritte-like windows in some of the rooms.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tango