{cities} – Page 35 – { feuilleton }

How to disappear completely

Talking to a friend recently about Photoshop reminded me of this picture experiment I made a couple of years ago. The photo above was a Prague street scene (no other details known) that I cut from a newspaper. I liked the atmosphere of the narrow street but couldn’t help wondering how it would look without all those people standing there. After some diligent copying and pasting I ended up with the version you see below. You can view it at a larger size here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Atget’s Paris

Monsieur Chat

Who or what is the mysterious, grinning yellow cat? Wikipedia explains:

M. Chat (also known as Monsieur Chat and Mr Chat) is the name of a graffiti cat that appeared in Paris and other European cities in the months and years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The graffiti appeared most frequently on chimneys, but has been sighted in other places such as train platforms as well. It has also made appearances at political rallies. The originator of the street art remains anonymous.

The yellow cartoon cat is characterized by its large Cheshire Cat grin. The cat is most often portrayed in a running pose, but has also been variously depicted waving signal flags, bouncing on a ball, sporting angel wings, and waving in greeting at the entrance to a train station. It is sometimes accompanied by the tagline M. CHAT in small letters.

A shame I didn’t discover this phenomenon before I went to Paris last year, the city is cluttered with reproductions of Théophile Steinlen’s Chat Noir poster so it would have been fun to look for a more subversive animal. I found the wary creature below near the gardening market on the Ile de la Cité.

French filmmaker Chris Marker is famously a feline aficionado so it’s no surprise that he’s made a documentary entitled The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chats perchés) examining the appearance of M Chat through the twin lenses of his video camera and his political concerns. A French site, Monsieur Chat (et autres…), similarly documents occurrences of the mysterious animal and this is their page about Marker’s film. Finally, there’s a Flickr pool although with fewer photographs than one might hope.

Via City of Sound.

Update: Monsieur Chat’s creator revealed (in French).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sans Soleil

Metropolis posters

Fritz Lang’s masterpiece via some of its posters, all from 1927.
This site is a great source of information about the film.

Designer: Heinz Schulz-Neudamm.
As of 2005, the world’s most expensive film poster, selling for $690,000.

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Angels 2: The angels of Paris

Los Angeles, despite being the City of Angels, has few angels on display outside its cemeteries, whereas European cities are full of them. These are some of the ones that caught my attention in Paris this year.

Saint Michael (1860) by Francisque-Joseph Duret in the Place Saint-Michel.

More statues of Saint Michael. The one on the left is by Emmanuel Frémiet (1897), in the Musée D’Orsay. On the right is a detail from the roof of the Sacre Coeur.

Continue reading “Angels 2: The angels of Paris”

The Jantar Mantar

Fran Pritchett’s site has a wealth of photos of Indian architecture, including many old views of temples and a substantial section devoted to Jaipur’s fascinating Jantar Mantar.

The Jantar Mantar is a collection of architectural astronomical instruments, built by Maharaja Jai Singh II at his then new capital of Jaipur between 1727 and 1733. It is modelled after the one that he had built for him at the then Mughal capital of Delhi. He had constructed a total of five such observatories at different locations, including the ones at Delhi and Jaipur. The Jaipur observatory is the largest of these.

The name is derived from yantra, instrument, and mantra, for chanting; hence the ‘the chanting instrument’. It is sometimes said to have been originally yantra mantra, mantra being translated as formula, although there is limited justification for this since in traditional spoken Jaipur language, the locals obfuscate the written Y syllable as J.

The observatory consists of fourteen major geometric devices for measuring time, predicting eclipses, tracking stars in their orbits, ascertaining the declinations of planets, and determining the celestial altitudes and related ephemerides. Each is a fixed and ‘focused’ tool. The Samrat Jantar, the largest instrument, is 90 feet high, its shadow carefully plotted to tell the time of day. Its face is angled at 27 degrees, the latitude of Jaipur. The Hindu chhatri (small domed cupola) on top is used as a platform for announcing eclipses and the arrival of monsoons.

Built of local stone and marble, each instrument carries an astronomical scale, generally marked on the marble inner lining; bronze tablets, all extraordinarily accurate, were also employed. Thoroughly restored in 1901, the Jantar Mantar was declared a national monument in 1948.

An excursion through Jai Singh’s Jantar is the singular one of walking through solid geometry and encountering a collective weapons system designed to probe the heavens.

The instruments are in most cases huge structures. They are built on a large scale so that accuracy of readings can be obtained. The samrat yantra, for instance, which is a sundial, can be used to tell the time to an accuracy of about a minute. Today the main purpose of the observatory is to function as a tourist attraction.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Garden of Instruments