{religion} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 841

Drawing Hands (1948) by MC Escher.

• New music: The World In Layers by mōshonsensu; The Rest Is My Ghost by Lawrence English; Rotostyles by Julien Ash & M.Nomized.

• At Public Domain Review: “The Persian Mâr-Nâmeh or, The Book for Taking Omens from Snakes” (1892).

• At Little White Lies: Sam Moore writes in praise of Hiroshi Teshigahara, “surveyor of the abyss”.

Paradoxically, art is useful only if it is allowed to remain entirely useless—that is, entirely free to go where it will. Wilde finds an ally here in Baudelaire, who followed his observation of the strangeness of the beautiful with a sharp rebuke to those who would subordinate artistic beauty to a utilitarian logic. Baudelaire asks:

“How could this necessary, irreducible, and infinitely varied strangeness…ever be controlled, amended, and corrected by Utopian rules conceived in some little scientific temple or other on this planet, without mortal danger to art itself?”

The privileging of utility over uselessness, of work over play, is the death of art—and the death of the given world in which our utilitarian spirit must be grounded if it is to have purpose and meaning.

JF Martel explores the ways in which art invented humanity

• Old music: Visions Of Sodal Ye by Mar-Vista.

• RIP Bill Oddie and Raoul Vaneigem.

• Martyn Ware’s favourite albums.

• The Last Museum

• Snake Rag (1923) by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band | Ananta Snake Dance (1980) by Suns Of Arqa | Snakes Crawl (1980) by Bush Tetras

Gargoyles, Chimeres, and the Grotesque in French Gothic Sculpture

Good books about gargoyles aren’t easy to find but this one, edited by Lester Burbank Bridaham, is better than many I’ve seen. Gargoyles, Chimeres, and the Grotesque in French Gothic Sculpture was published in 1930, and is mostly a collection of photographs, with the text kept to a minimum at the front of the book. The nature of the subject—eroded soot-stained sculptures seen against eroded soot-stained walls—doesn’t always help the photographer but the book makes up in quantity what it lacks in quality. There are many photographs here, often four to a page over 200 pages. Dover reprinted the book in a large-format edition in 2006.

These gargoyles and grotesques show very plainly the complete freedom under which the old craftsmen worked and the immense originality and variety that were the result. Here are hundreds of spontaneous creations, each as individual as possible, and not only this but many of them show a brilliancy of space composition and a fineness of line that would not shame a great sculptor. Craftsmen these, but also creative artists.

Ralph Adams Cram in the introduction

The authors divide their study according to subject: Last Judgments, Gargoyles of different ages, Chimeras (or hybrid creatures), and Heads. Gargoyles are often hybrid creatures, of course, but the broad difference between a gargoyle and a chimera in the architectural sense would be that gargoyles often serve a purpose as a waterspout whereas chimeras are solely decorative. Gargoyles are a good example of an architectural solution that evolved into an element of architectural style. Spouts were required to direct rainwater away from the lower areas of the building; decoration helped incorporate the spouts into the building’s structure then the decoration became a traditional part of the Gothic style. For a time, anyway. You don’t see many gargoyles among the buildings designed by the rather pious English revivalists in the 19th century, but the great French revivalist and restorer, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, enjoyed the grotesquery of the old cathedrals, and it’s he who was responsible for the famous chimeras that look down on Paris from the balconies of Notre Dame.

Continue reading “Gargoyles, Chimeres, and the Grotesque in French Gothic Sculpture”

Weekend links 830

Plakat Secesyjny (1971), a poster by Hubert Hilscher for an exhibition of Art Nouveau graphics.

• At Public Domain Review: Longitude by Way of Wounded Hounds: Kenelm Digby’s Sympathetick Powder (1669 edition). Two subjects familiar to readers of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.

• Miles Davis and group (Dave Liebman, Pete Cosey, Reggie Lucas, Michael Henderson, Al Foster, James Mtume) live in Stockholm in 1973. TV footage, 56 minutes.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects ten great films about forgers and fakes, while Kazuo Ishiguro compiles a list of his top ten train films.

• At Colossal: “Markus Brunetti’s monumental photos venerate European ecclesiastical landmarks”.

• Font Faces: Nick Shinn answers questions about being a type designer.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – May 2026 at Ambientblog.

• Milky Way photographer of the year 2026.

• New music: Chambers by Ruben.

• Train To Ranchipur (1959) by The Markko Polo Adventurers | One Train Load Of Dub (1974) by Tommy McCook & The Observers | Sunstroke / Mind Train (1992) by Sun Dial

Weekend links 827

Dante in his Study with Episodes from the Inferno (1978) by Tom Phillips.

• “This set, featuring two of the surviving members of Cabaret Voltaire, is as clear and powerful as any of the live albums the group released while Richard H. Kirk was alive.” Derek Walmsley, reviewing what we’ve been told will be the last ever Cabaret Voltaire album. I can also vouch for its excellence but then I’m not what you might call an impartial listener. My copy arrived in the post only a couple of hours before Boards Of Canada made the announcement they’d been teasing for the past two weeks—the new BOC album, Inferno, will be released at the end of May—a coincidence that felt vaguely significant. “How random is random?” as William Burroughs used to say. It’s tempting to describe the moment as the passing of a creative torch but I doubt either of the groups would agree. Boards Of Canada’s approach to electronic music has always been very different to that of Cabaret Voltaire: less aggressive, more melodic, more pastoral, more concerned with memories and the past than with the present or the near future. But the promotional videos for Inferno are reminiscent of the scratch videos that Cabaret Voltaire were creating in the 1980s: degraded VHS assemblages collaged from TV broadcasts and home-movie footage, visual equivalents of a tuning dial running through the shortwave radio spectrum. Then there’s the latest BOC album art which, when taken with details from the teaser video, foregrounds the same fascination with American bastardisations of Christianity that the Cabs were referring to in Sluggin’ Fer Jesus and The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord. I’ll leave it to others to play with the interpretations that can be brought to an album title like Inferno. We’ll no doubt be seeing a great deal of journalistic musing around this and related issues before and after the end of May.

• Jiří Barta’s Expressionist animated adaptation of the Pied Piper story, Krysař (1985), has turned up in high definition at YouTube. Ignore the credit for Wilfred Jackson, an American animation director who had nothing to do with Barta’s film.

• At Public Domain Review: Magic by return of post: Allan Johnson explores the history of those mail-order occult outfits whose ads fill out the pages of the early American pulps.

• Visual Music: a lecture by Simon Reynolds describing the use of electronic music as a soundtrack for abstract cinema.

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel selects 10 great Brazilian horror films.

• There’s more intermediate eyeball fodder at Unquiet Things.

• Your Name in Landsat

• FruitierThanThou

• Disco Inferno (1976) by The Trammps | Inferno (Main Title Theme) (1980) by Keith Emerson | Om Riff From The Cosmic Inferno (2005) by IAO Chant From The Cosmic Inferno

Weekend links 822

Untitled (2013) by Fred Tomaselli.

• The latest book from A Year In The Country is Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968–1995, an exploration of “a shadowland of terrestrial TV hidden in plain sight across the unmediated and unmarketed corners of the internet”.

• New music: After The Rain, Strange Seeds by The Leaf Library; Music For Intersecting Planes by Leila Bordreuil + Kali Malone.

• RIP airbrush artist Philip Castle. Steve Mepstead talked to Castle in 2011 about his work for Stanley Kubrick and others.

Strassman began to see patterns in these encounters and created a typology: aliens; guides and helpers; clowns, jokers and jesters; elves and dwarves; or reptilian or insect-like figures. Variations and outliers notwithstanding, this spectrum remains remarkably consistent with DMT studies today. Strassman also looked into the historical literature and found similar descriptions as far back as Szára, who wrote that one of his subjects reported meeting “dwarfs or something.” Forty years later and a continent away, one of Strassman’s participants put it succinctly: “That was real strange. There were a lot of elves.”

A long read by Joanna Steinhardt on the history and nature of hallucinated spirit guides and “self-transforming machine elves”

• Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Ben Cardew on the pivotal role of Stereolab’s Super-Electric.

• At Colossal: Pejac transforms basic graph paper into detailed, trompe-l’œil tableaux.

• Sixty finalists from the 23rd Annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest.

• At BLDGBLOG: The landscape architecture of auroras on demand.

• Mix of the week: Float V mix by DJ Food.

• We Have Always Been Here (1995) by ELpH vs Coil | 5-Methoxy-N,N-Dimethyl- (5-MeO-DMT) (1998) by Time Machines/Coil | Machine Elves (2024) by Polypores