{architecture} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 810

Image of a Spherical Black Hole with Thin Accretion Disk (1979) by Jean-Pierre Luminet. Via.

• “I would be willing to bet that every student of fantastic fiction has at some point in his or her career read a book with the name EF Bleiler printed on its cover.” Brian J. Showers of Swan River Press talked to EF Bleiler in 2005.

• “James Webb Space Telescope confirms 1st ‘runaway’ supermassive black hole rocketing through ‘Cosmic Owl’ galaxies at 2.2 million mph.”

• “You have to be ready to see it”: Abel Ferrara and Catherine Breillat on why Pasolini’s Salò is a gift that keeps giving.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Kosten Koper presents…Bill Nelson: Acquitted By Mirrors (1982–1987).

• At Skurrilsteer: Ongoing research into the life, work and legacy of Edward James.

• At The Daily Heller: All that jazzy record cover design.

• Cygnus X-1 (1977) by Rush | Blackhole Dropout (1979) by Tod Dockstader | The Competition Of Supermassive Black Holes And Galactic Spheroids In The Destruction of Globular Clusters (1999) by Jah Wobble

Weekend links 809

Atlantis by Sarah Hubacher.

• Regular readers will know Leigh Wright from his Wyrd Daze creations which I’ve linked here many times in the past. (The same goes for his frequent Mixcloud compilations.) Leigh’s wife died recently which means he now has to return to the UK from Canada where he doesn’t have permanent resident status. His request for help is here.

• Melinda Gebbie’s Greatest Fits: “Ranging from painting, illustration, Comix, portraiture, eroticism and so much more, this fully illustrated and beautifully presented book is a glimpse into the unique mind of a woman forged in the fire of counterculture.”

• At The Daily Heller: Adrian Wilson’s collection of elaborate vintage fabric stamps is explored in a two-part feature here and here.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – December 2025 at Ambientblog, and ASIP – Reflection on 2025 at A Strangely Isolated Place.

• Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2025. Thanks again for the link here!

• At Colossal: “Field Kallop meditates on universal patterns through bold chromatic compositions.”

• “Scientists discover massive underwater ruins that may be a lost city of legend.”

• New music: The King In Yellow by Blarke Bayer.

• RIP Rob Reiner.

• Atlantis (1955) by Les Baxter | The Atlantis Healing Harp (1982) by Upper Astral | A Man For Atlantis (2000) by Broadcast

Weekend links 808

Comets from Meyers Konversationslexikon (1885–90).

• At The Daily Heller: Steven Heller reviews A Life in Ink, a new monograph about the art of Ralph Steadman. Heller is full of praise for Steadman, and discusses commissioning his work for The New York Times. But in his bewilderment at Steadman’s lack of a knighthood he seems unaware of the degree to which state honours are frequently refused by Britons, especially those who position themselves in opposition to the established order. Americans are obsessed with awards and “halls of fame”, and appear to regard Britain’s state honours as something like the Oscars with a royal seal, rather than what JG Ballard once described as “a Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up the top-heavy monarchy.” If Steadman has deliberately shunned the honours list he’d be joining a venerable company.

• “In mid-19th century Italy, two eccentric aristocrats set forth on parallel projects: constructing ostentatious castles in a Moorish Revival style. Iván Moure Pazos tours the psychedelic chambers of Rochetta Mattei, optimised for electrohomeopathic healing, and Castello di Sammezzano, an immersive, orientalist fever dream.”

• New music: Ithaqua by Cryo Chamber Collaboration is this year’s installment in the Lovecraft-themed album series (previously) from Cryo Chamber. Also this week: Analog 2025 by Various Artists; and Flux (music for a performance by still still / Marta & Kim) by Rutger Zuydervelt and Lucija Gregov.

For all their bravura and maximalism, Powell and Pressburger understood the power of leaving things out, building into their films chasms that the mind must leap, gaps that the imagination must fill. Like Joan Webster, we discover that we don’t want things to be made too easy. We want to catch our own fish rather than have them delivered, to swim in the ocean rather than in a pool.

Imogen Sara Smith on I Know Where I’m Going, one of the films from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s golden decade, the 1940s

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: In the Days of the Comet by HG Wells.

• At the BFI: David Parkinson selects 10 great Sherlock Holmes films and TV adaptations.

• Winning entries for the Capture The Atlas Northern Lights Photographer of the Year.

• Books and original drawings by Austin Osman Spare on sale at Gerrish Fine Art.

• At Unquiet Things: The art of Chie Yoshii.

• Kohoutek-Kometenmelodie (1973) by Kraftwerk | Cometary Wailing (1981) by Bernard Xolotl | Kometenmelodie Part 1 (1994) by 300,000 VK

Sphinxes

Bei den Pyramiden (1842) by Leander Russ.

A horde of sphinxes from NYPL Digital Collections and Wikimedia Commons, a pair of sites I was searching through last week. I was looking for a very particular kind of sphinx, not the Great Sphinx that sits near the Pyramids at Giza. What I wanted was something smaller and less ruined, like the sentinels that proliferated during the fads for Egyptian art and design in the early 1800s and the 1920s. My search was satisfied eventually, the results of which will be revealed in the next post.

Approach of the Simoom. Desert of Gizeh (c. 1846–49) by David Roberts.

As for the Great Sphinx, I enjoy seeing artistic representations of the monument, especially those which place the creature in a dramatic setting. Older depictions tend to look bizarre or even comical, especially the ones made during the centuries when the figure was little more than a head protruding from the drifting sands. The photographs I prefer are those that show the Sphinx in the 19th century before all the restorations began, when the creature was another half-buried fragment of antiquity, not something that seems to have just been removed from a box in a museum.

The Sphinx and Great Pyramid, Geezeh (1858–1859).

The Questioner of the Sphinx (1863) by Elihu Vedder.

The Sphinx by Harry Fenn (1881–1884). “Called by the Arabs “Father of terrors.” It faces the east, and is hewn out of the natural rock.”

Continue reading “Sphinxes”

Weekend links 800

Plate 43 from Los Caprichos: The sleep of reason produces monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos) (1799) by Francisco Goya.

• At Senses of Cinema: An interview with Jacques Rivette from 2001 in which the director passes judgment on a variety of feature films, old and new. Having read a couple of Cocteau-related books recently, I was pleased to see his comments about the importance of Cocteau’s example for his own film-making. Via MetaFilter.

• “Why is sleep, which literally occurs daily on a planetary scale, so often taken for granted, and not only by most people but even by scientists? Perhaps because its essence, its key property, is to be elusive, out of sight?” A long read by Vladyslav Vyazovskiy on the nature of sleep.

• “Often one cannot be sure if an object in a Welch picture is drawn from life or from other depictions of it, in sculpture, porcelain, woodwork or embroidery.” Alan Hollinghurst on the paintings and drawings of Denton Welch. (Previously.)

• At Colossal: Sinister skies set the scene for derelict buildings in Lee Madgwick’s surreal paintings.

• New music: The Mosaic Of Starlight Slips Back Like The Lid Of An Opening Eye by Paul Schütze.

• At Public Domain Review: Charles le Brun’s Human-Animal Hybrids (1806).

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel chooses 10 great French horror films.

• Winners of the 2025 Photomicrography Competition.

• RIP Diane Keaton.

• Sleep (1981) by This Heat | Sleep (1995) by Paul Schütze | Sleep (2006) by DJ Olive