{architecture} – Page 76

Tokyo details

Another enormous gigapixel panorama appeared this week, this one being a view from the Tokyo Tower by Jeffrey Martin. Some cities suit this detailed bird’s-eye view more than others. A similar panorama of Prague wasn’t as interesting for me as the view over London which appeared at the beginning of this year. Tokyo from this vantage may be an endless clutter of concrete and tarmac but it still yields some interesting details.

Tokyo’s Ginza district, and Chuo-dori Avenue, are locatable by these signs.

Further away there’s this cat-and-kitten sign.

While elsewhere Colonel Sanders proves inescapable. The Colonel’s Wikipedia entry contains this, er…nugget:

The Japanese Nippon Professional Baseball league has developed an urban legend of the “Curse of the Colonel”. A statue of Colonel Sanders was thrown into a river and lost during a 1985 fan celebration, and (according to the legend) the “curse” has caused Japan’s Hanshin Tigers to perform poorly since the incident.

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Alas Vegas Tarot cards

Back in February I bought a Wacom drawing tablet and said I’d show some proper results from its use later. For the past few months I’ve been working on this project using a combination of Wacom drawing and vector graphics. The initial brief from games designer James Wallis was for six Tarot-style card designs for his Alas Vegas role-playing game which has as its theme a fantasy extrapolation from Las Vegas and its gaudy mythology. The Kickstarter funding for the game turned out to be more successful than was anticipated so James asked me to expand the six cards idea into a full set of black-and-white Major Arcana designs.

This has been a fun series to work on although a number of the cards presented problems at first, the antique nature of the Tarot symbolism being a difficult thing to map across a very commercial American city. The symbolism from the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck was used as a rough guide although we deviated in a few places from the more traditional attributes. Las Vegas has changed over the years so rather than represent a single period of the city’s history there are references to different eras, from the huge casinos of today back to the buildings of the 50s and 60s with their distinctive “Googie” architecture. Notes for the cards follow below. The artwork can be seen at larger size here.

The Fool is usually a young man about to step off a cliff edge with a dog barking a warning at his heels, hence the dog on the sign.

Several of the cards convert the Tarot characters into cabaret acts. This one was pretty inevitable, and I’m sure it’s not the first time a stage conjuror has appeared on this card.

The chair is based on the 1965 “Ball Chair” design by Eero Aarnio (as seen in The Prisoner TV series), adapted here to resemble the Priestess’s crescent moon.

The style on this one is more 70s than 60s: patterned wallpaper (the hearts derive from the symbolism of The Empress, and from playing cards, of course), white rug, Kung Fu pyjamas.

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Weekend links 171

Jeune moine à la Grecque (1771) by Benigno Bossi. Via Monsieur Thombeau.

• Victoriana: The Art of Revival is an exhibition which will run throughout the autumn at the Guildhall Art Gallery, London. Some of my steampunk work will be included. Related: Rick Poynor on Soft Machine’s Dysfunctional Mechanism.

• “The egg glows and hovers in the middle of a field of mesmerizing color. The spell is broken when the guard finally says, “Everybody up off the floor.'” Morgan Meis on Aten Reign by the amazing James Turrell.

• Mix of the week: a “heatwave mix” of psychedelic songs compiled by Jaime Williams. Anything that includes Vacuum Cleaner by Tintern Abbey gets my vote.

Because sex is so compartmentalized — it’s often considered separate from the rest of life and hidden away — porn performers, who have sex publicly, are in a unique position to consider and talk about integrating private and public aspects of life.

Writer and porn performer Conner Habib on the issue of nomenclature in the porn business.

• Still Hopscotching: Peter Mendelsund posts some unused cover designs for Julio Cortázar.

• A Hymn For Megatron, an hour-long drone work, and a free download, by The Black Dog.

• Vagrancy and drift: Sukhdev Sandhu on the rise of the roaming essay film.

• A Flickr set of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson’s musical instruments.

“Whether flower-pressing in the garden, hallucinating in the summerhouse, fainting inside stifling sites of historical interest, pirouetting along the promenade, or even sea-cruise thalassophobia complications, barely a moment will pass that isn’t made all the sweeter by obsessively listening to Down to the Silver Sea.”

• The TM Research Archive: sate yourself on Swiss graphic design.

• A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell by Jorge Luis Borges.

• Words, sounds and robots from Sarah Angliss.

• Never Built Los Angeles

• Nautilus (2012) by Anna Meredith | Nature Of Light (2012) by Isnaj Dui | Popcorn (Ealing Feeder Mix) (2012) by SpacedogUK (Sarah Angliss)

La Tour Eiffel

Another Google visit to a very tall structure. The views from the Eiffel Tower may not reach as high as those of the Burj Khalifa but you are at least looking at one of the greatest cities in the world. These pictures were taken in June of this year on a particularly gloomy day, possibly the early morning judging by the lack of people or car traffic. The views above and below look down on the section of the 7th arrondissement that was the site of the Exposition Universelle in 1900. As with the Burj Khalifa you can choose which floor to navigate.

The Champ de Mars.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Henri Rivière’s Eiffel Tower
• Peter Eudenbach’s Eiffel Ferris wheel
• City of Light

Weekend links 168

Window to the Universe (1967) by Roberta Bell. From Summer of Love: Psychedelic Posters from SCMA currently showing at the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA.

• Sympathy for the Shoggoth: China Miéville’s Revolution of the Weird Tale, an essay by Christina Scholz which features one of my Cthulhu pictures among its embellishments. Related: “‘New Strange’ stories hold a chilling mirror to life” says Rick Kleffel discussing Robert Aickman and others. And speaking of Aickman (so to speak), Reese Shearsmith has recently recorded Aickman’s Cold Hand in Mine for Audible.

• An erotic alphabet book from the Soviet Union circa 1931, created to promote adult literacy. Who says porn can’t be educational?

• Angelystor is a new 39-minute composition by Phil Legard which he describes as “often heavy, Saturnine and melancholic”.

• James Ward’s postcards of the Post Office Tower. Related: film of the revolving restaurant at the top of the Tower in 1967.

•You Might Never Find Your Way Back: Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman by Nicholas Rombes.

Stone Garden (1967) by Wilfried Sätty.

• High Over Blue is “a mind-warping 20-minute freakout” by Moon Duo.

• Queer Visual Splendour: Jon Macy discusses his erotic comics.

• The Origin of the Pilcrow, aka the Strange Paragraph Symbol.

• Mix of the week: the Kranky 20th Anniversary Mixtape.

• Ten Amazing Cheeses and their Literary Counterparts.

• PingMag looks at the past and present of Ginza.

• Mind Gardens (1967) by The Byrds | The Garden (1981) by John Foxx | The Toy Garden (2006) by Helios