Category: {cities}

Cities

On the move

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Le Stryge by Charles Méryon (1853).

“These writings, which deal with the Parisian arcades, were begun under a clear sky of cloudless blue that curved over the arcade; even so they are covered with a dust hundreds of years old by the millions of pages in which the fresh wind of diligence, the heavy breath of the scholar, the storm of young zeal and the slow gentle breeze of curiosity rustled. For the painted summer sky, which looks down from the arcades to the study of the Parisian Bibliothèque Nationale, has spread its dreamy, lightless cover over them.”

Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk.

Off to Paris again for a week to explore some of Walter’s arcades.

Jeff on Bldgblog

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Ambergris by Scott Eagle.

Jeff VanderMeer is interviewed by the excellent Bldgblog, discussing “English cathedrals, ‘fungal technologies’ and architectural infections, the Sydney opera house, Vladimir Nabokov, ‘The Library of Babel,’ Monsanto, giant squids and geological deposits, nighttime walks through Prague, and even urban security after the attacks of 9/11”. The interview includes some of my designs for City of Saints and Madmen and provides a great insight into Jeff’s work, avoiding the usual discussions about contemporary fantasy writing for something far more interesting and thought-provoking.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• An announcement redux

Karel Plicka’s views of Prague

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Bridge Street, from Prague in Pictures (1940).

A shame there isn’t more of Plicka’s atmospheric photography on the web, his views of Prague present the city the way we usually imagine it from the stories of Kafka and Gustav Meyrinck. This site features a very small selection from the 220 plates that comprise his Prague in Pictures book. Taschen have published a collection of Atget’s famous photographs of Paris; the “Ansel Adams of Czechoslovakia” is overdue for a similar reappraisal.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Atget’s Paris
• Barta’s Golem

Giant mantis invades Prague

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Viriconium comes to life… Or should that be VR-conium? 360º panorama of this event.

A giant praying mantis invaded Old Town Square in Prague today at 8:15 pm to the delight of hundreds of human onlookers, and a few horses too. The humanoid invaders, on extended springy legs, drove their giant insect through the Old Town amid fireballs and deep heavy funk grooves. The police stood by, trying to direct the bug to more peaceful environs, as many of the grumpier tourists nearby were rather put off their expensive goulash and roasted duck.

The Letni Letna circus theater festival has come to Prague again! If you are in the area, the giant bug will be making another appearance, as well as plenty of other slightly perverse and zany acts.

Via Boing Boing.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Paris III: Le Grande Répertoire—Machines de Spectacle

20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips

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Tom Phillips has long been one of my favourite contemporary artists and he’d certainly be my candidate for one of the world’s greatest living artists even though the world at large stubbornly refuses to agree with this opinion. Phillips’ problem (if we have to look for problems) would seem to be an excess of talent in an art world that doesn’t actually like people to be too talented at all (unless they’re dead geniuses like Picasso) and a lack of the vaunting ego that propels others into the spotlight.

Phillips is predominantly a painter but a restlessly experimental one. On my journey through the London galleries in May I visited the National Portrait Gallery, a rather dull place mostly filled with pictures of the rich and famous by the rich and famous. There were two Tom Phillips works on display in different rooms, inadvertently showing his artistic range: one, a fairly standard (if very finely detailed) portrait of Iris Murdoch, the other a computer screen showing a portrait of Susan Adele Greenfield which manifested as an endlessly-changing series of 169 processed drawings and video stills. One work was static and traditional, the other fluid, contemporary and unlike anything else in the building.

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