{architecture} – Page 77

Top of the world

How quickly things change. When I began this blog in February, 2006 the Burj Khalifa in Dubai had been under construction for two years but wouldn’t be finished for another three; Google’s Maps was an ongoing thing but the company had yet to introduce their Street View. Now you can use the one to visit the other via the latest Street View tour which takes you up that monument to hubris at the heart of Dubai. One new feature is the addition of a scale showing the available floors: you can start at the ground floor then jump upwards having viewed a succession of expensively bland (and increasingly cramped) rooms and corridors. Google’s cameras always make places appear smaller than they are, but the effect when caught in a tiny space at the top of a very tall building gives the impression of being in a computer game where there isn’t much room to manoeuvre. Did you know there’s a Nando’s in the Burj Khalifa? I didn’t. If you’re wealthy enough you can eat multi-national cuisine while watching the dust storms blow in from the desert. They should have buried JG Ballard there. Welcome to the future.

The lifts on the ground floor.

The view from the 154th floor.

Weekend links 166

The Julian House cover art for the forthcoming collaboration between John Foxx and Belbury Poly (here renamed) has been revealed. Single no. 9 in the Ghost Box Listening Centre Study Series is now available.

• In addition to new Ghost Box records there’s more Hauntological (for want of a better term) cinema on the way this summer with the DVD/BR release of Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England. The potted description at Movie Mail is “a monochrome psychedelic trip into magic and madness set during the English Civil War”. Julian House has made a trailer. Meanwhile at Fangoria, there’s a PIF mixtape from The Advisory Circle. This accompanies an interview with John Krish, director of the most bizarre of the UK’s many strange and alarming public information films from the 1970s.

• More mixes: The hour-long OH/EX/OH show for The Geography Trip on Chorlton FM. “Expect slumber / tension / euphoria in almost equal measures.” It’s marvellous. At Self-Titled mag there’s DJ Food with O Is For Orange: Boards of Canada, Broadcast, The Books, etc.

• Tangiers is a computer game based on the fiction of William Burroughs. Jim Rossignol talked to Alex Harvey about the development of the project.

Walpurgisnacht (1917) by Amadeus. A drawing that could easily be from the late 1960s. If anyone knows the full name of the artist, please leave a comment. Via Beautiful Century.

• Rebecca J. Rosen asks “What would the night sky look like if the other planets were as close as the moon?”

• The mystery of Charles Dellschau and the Sonora Aero Club.

• The Surreal Cave Paintings Of Stockholm’s Metro Stations.

• At 50 Watts: More strange art from Marcus Behmer.

• Ry Cooder in 1970. Directed by Van Dyke Parks!

• The Post Office Tower: now you see it…

• At Little Augury: 99 Meninas.

• Sartori In Tangier (1982) by King Crimson | City Of Mirage (2010) by John Foxx

Weekend links 165

Cahill Expressway (1962) by Jeffrey Smart whose death was announced this week.

• “Russell Beale is awed by the beauty of the Roman silver Warren Cup showing men and youths making love, so startlingly erotic that the first time the British Museum was offered it in the 1950s, it turned it down flat. In 1999, when it came on the market again, the museum had to raise £1.8m to acquire it. ‘It’s just heaven, isn’t it?’ Russell Beale sighs.” Maev Kennedy on Same-Sex Desire and Gender Identity, a new exhibition at the British Museum.

• “The route to Tyburn Tree snaked through Holborn and St Giles, then went along Tyburn Road, today’s Oxford Street. It was dense with spectators.” Matthew Beaumont on the tiny memorial (Google view) for the estimated 50,000 people executed in the centre of London.

• Mixes of the Week: Bottoms Up by Staffan Lindberg for BUTT Magazine, and Electronic Ladyland, a collection of women with synths (and other instruments) from Bitch Media.

But the very thing that is valuable about diversity – the cultural and ideological clashes that it brings about – is precisely what many people fear. And that fear takes two forms. On the one hand you have the little Englander sentiment: immigration is undermining the national fabric, eroding our sense of British or Englishness, turning our cities into little Lahores or mini-Kingstons. And on the other you have the multicultural argument: that diversity is good, but it has to be policed to minimise the clashes and conflicts and frictions that diversity brings in its wake. And so we have to restrain speech, and police the giving of offence.

Kenan Malik on The Pleasures of Pluralism, The Pain of Offence.

• L’Empire des Lumières is a great title for Anne Billson’s blog about Belgium. Tram-wire covered streets are one of my favourite things.

• The Outer Church, 28 musical artists with an uncanny temperament collected by Joseph Stannard for Front & Follow.

• His Heavy Heart, a film by Alan Moore & Mitch Jenkins, is looking for Kickstarter funding.

• In 1997 Quentin Crisp wrote about “Ten Wonderful Gangster Movies” for Neon magazine.

• Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep redesigned for the Penguin Design Award, 2013.

• Out on DVD/Blu-Ray this month: The Curtis Harrington Short Film Collection.

• A billion-pixel panoramic view of the planet Mars from the Curiosity Rover.

• In the TLS: Robert Craft on Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring.

• Typophonic: Album cover typography.

• The Owl Theremin is a thing.

• LSD ABC

• Spring Rounds From The Rite Of Spring (1975) by Alice Coltrane | Revenge Of The Black Regent (1999) by Add N To (X) | Sore Ga Afrirampo (2010) by Afrirampo

The Modern Antiquarian

The stones of Callanish are explored again, this time by an energetic and erudite Julian Cope. The Modern Antiquarian was a 55-minute TV documentary produced by the BBC in 2000 as a spin-off from Cope’s book-length study of the ancient past of the British Isles, The Modern Antiquarian: A Pre-Millennial Odyssey Through Megalithic Britain (1998). Cope has always been a great enthusiast, blessed with a talent for communicating that enthusiasm in his own inimitable manner. Needless to say this film, which follows him while he visits some of his favourite neolithic sites, is nothing like the standard television approach to archaeology. Cope isn’t an academic (thank Odin) yet his book is 448-pages of deep investigation which involved visiting every one of the sites he was writing about; he’s also not that other television standby, the shallow audience proxy, he’s too well-informed for that. It would have been good if this one-off film had developed into a series but for its original screening it was shunted into a late-night slot where few people would have seen it. Cope then, as now, is probably too intense for a general audience.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Callanish panoramas
• Japrocksampler

Callanish panoramas

Photo by Serge (SEB) Bogdanov.

A post for the Summer Solstice. I’ve linked to panoramas of the Callanish standing stones before but these are more recent photos at 360Cities where the full-screen views are more immersive, especially if you have a large monitor. The stones are situated on the Isle of Lewis in north-west Scotland, and still tend to be overshadowed by the reputation of their more visible relations in the south of England. Stonehenge and Avebury may be more famous but they’re ruined cathedrals next to the Callanish stones which have survived four thousand years of harsh Atlantic weather very much intact by virtue of being so remote. In that respect they retain some of their original aura: anyone planning a visit has to really want to see these things, you can’t simply drive past them on the way to somewhere else.

Photo by Alan McLean.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive