{architecture} – Page 86

Exposition Universelle photochroms

Grand entrance.

Every time I think I’ve said enough on this subject something else turns up. I’ve linked before to the Brooklyn Museum’s tinted photographs of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 but these photochom prints at the Library of Congress are so sharp, detailed and subtly hued they make all other views seem crude in comparison. If you’ve seen earlier views of the exposition buildings then everything here is very familiar, albeit more lifelike than anything you’ll find elsewhere. In addition to the greater veracity, the Library of Congress also makes many of its pictures available as high-quality files. These prints and the few minutes of film footage is the closest you’ll get to this event without a time machine.

Champs de Mars.

Le Chateau d’eau and plaza.

The Palais Lumineux.

Continue reading “Exposition Universelle photochroms”

Borobudur panoramas

Photo by Ursula & David Molenda.

Panoramas of Borobudur, the Buddhist monument in Magelang, Central Java, which lay undisturbed and overgrown for centuries until restoration began following the British occupation of the island in the 19th century. The bell-like structures are stupas, many of which contain statues of the Buddha in different symbolic postures. The entire monument is a complex three-dimensional map of the Buddhist cosmology: pilgrims ascend from the lowest level reading the bas-reliefs and visiting each Buddha in turn. Wikipedia has a detailed account of both the history of the monument and its meaning as a piece of religious architecture.

Photo by Ursula & David Molenda.

Photo by Lanang Lintang.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive

Weekend links 130

Sarah and Writhing Octopus (New Wave Series, 1992) by Masami Teraoka.

Strange Flowers continues to push all my buttons. For a while now I’d been intent on writing something about the strange (unbuilt) temples designed by German artist/obsessive naturist Fidus (Hugo Höppener) but I reckon James has done a better job than I would have managed. Also last week he wrote about Schloss Schleißheim, a palatial estate outside Munich with connections to Last Year in Marienbad and another eccentric, pseudonymous German artist: Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt).

• The circus poster that inspired John Lennon’s Sgt. Pepper song Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite! has been reproduced as a limited edition letterpress print. Related: Wikipedia’s page about Pablo Fanque (1796–1871), “the first black circus proprietor in Britain”.

• The first two volumes of The Graphic Canon, both edited by Russ Kick, are reviewed at Literary Kicks. I’ve not seen either of these yet but volume 2 contains my interpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Related: the second book previewed at Brain Pickings.

You only have to read [Alan Bennett’s] diaries to see that, underneath the wit and humour and sandwich-filled pottering around old churches, there is a deep resentment at what has happened to England in his lifetime and an instinctive distrust, sometimes amounting to deep loathing, of most politicians. Listening, for instance, to Alan Clark and Kenneth Clarke talking on the radio about the arrest of General Pinochet in 1998, he writes: “Both have that built-in shrug characteristic of 80s Conservatism, electrodes on the testicles a small price to pay when economic recovery’s at stake.”

Michael Billington on Alan Bennett: a quiet radical

• Hauntologists mine the past for music’s future: Mark Pilkington draws a Venn diagram encompassing Coil, Broadcast, the Ghost Box label, Arthur Machen, MR James, Nigel Kneale, Iain Sinclair and others.

• Hell Is a City: the making of a cult classic – in pictures. The mean streets of Manchester given the thriller treatment by Hammer Films in 1959. The film is released on DVD this month.

• The Function Room: The Kollection, Matt Leyshon’s debut volume of horror stories, has just been published. The cover painting is one of my pieces from the 1990s.

• New Worlds magazine (now apparently known as “Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds“) has been relaunched online.

A drawing from Anatomy (part 1), a series by Alex Konahin.

• The forthcoming Scott Walker album, Bish Bosch, will be released on December 3rd. 4AD has a trailer.

• Cormac McCarthy Cuts to the Bone: Noah Gallagher Shannon on the early drafts of Blood Meridian.

• The Velvet Underground of English Letters: Simon Sellars Discusses JG Ballard.

• Michelle Dean on The Comfort of Bad Books.

• The typewriter repairers of Los Angeles

• Cats With Famous People

• Marienbad (1987) by Sonoko | Komm Nach Marienbad (2011) by Marienbad | Marienbad (2012) by Julia Holter.

(Thanks to Ian and Pedro for this week’s picture links!)

Views of Old Manchester

I’ve always been curious about the history of the places I live in so for a while I was reading a lot about the history of Manchester, mostly via small booklets published by the City Council. The drawings in this Internet Archive discovery are familiar from some of those publications which tended to recycle the same few views. Manchester’s history dates back to the Roman occupation of Britain but the city never received the kind of detailed artistic attention that London inspired.

Views of Old Manchester is dated 1885 but its antiquarian publishers use the old-fashioned (and somewhat anachronistic) medial “s” in their text. The drawings are from Jackson’s Views of Manchester Streets (1822) and James’s Views (1825), and show a variety of Dickensian buildings many of which had been demolished by the time this small book was published. The only recognisable structure to contemporary eyes is the tower of the Cathedral. For an idea of how Market Street looks today, Flickr has plenty of recent views while mcrarchives has photos dating back to the 19th century.

Map of Manchester, 1650.

Top of Market Street (Built about 1550).

Continue reading “Views of Old Manchester”

Weekend links 129

Daughters of Maternal Impression by Arabella Proffer.

A genre’s landscape should be littered with used tropes half-visible through their own smoke & surrounded by salvage artists with welding sets, otherwise it isn’t a genre at all.

M. John Harrison, incisive as ever, on what he memorably labels “Pink Slime Fiction”. Elsewhere (and at much greater length) Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost the Future by Jonathan McCalmont, and a two-part Paul Kincaid interview here and here.

• “Once upon a time, in almost every city, many rivers flowed. Why did they disappear? How? And could we see them again? This documentary tries to find answers by meeting visionary urban thinkers, activists and artists from around the world.” A trailer for Lost Rivers, written and directed by Caroline Bâcle. Related (and mentioned here before), London’s Lost Rivers: A Walker’s Guide by Tom Bolton.

• Ghosts in the Machine: “Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, a recent exhibition was imagined as a Wunderkammer simultaneously tracing and questioning the relationship between people and technology.” And in Istanbul a Wunderkammer of a different kind: Rick Poynor looks at Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence.

• “There’s a vast territory still to be explored…” Bristol duo Emptyset (James Ginzburg & Paul Purgas), many of whose releases I’ve designed, talk about their music. Tracks from their new EP on the Raster-Noton label can be heard here. You’re going to need bigger speakers.

• “I liked doing it one time but I don’t want to become the gay porn soundtrack guy.” Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance talking to Sir Richard Bishop about one of his more unusual commissions.

Double Vision (2009) by Bonnie Durham.

• FACT mix 349: Silent Servant puts together a great selection of music old and new with the emphasis on the grit of the early Industrial era.

• Read Joyce’s Ulysses line by line, for the next 22 years, with Frank Delaney’s podcast.

• Borges and the Plain Sense of Things, an article from 2006 by Gabriel Josipovici.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins on Equus and seeing your inspirations come full circle.

• At Pinterest: A few nice paintings of men

• Spunk [arts] magazine

• Derelict London

• Ritualistic Bug Use (2009) by Pink Skull | Demiurge Variations (2012) by Emptyset | Utopian Disaster (End) (2012) by Silent Servant.