{technology} – Page 34 – { feuilleton }

Zeppelinology

Robe dans le style Zeppelin, Berlin, vers 1930.

So after you’ve donned your very best Zeppelin dress (and grabbed a pair of binoculars)…

…you can head on over to the Zep Diner for lunch.

Try some of the Zeppelin Bread: it’s light as air!

Afterwards (if it’s not too early) you can relax with a martini prepared in a Hindenburg shaker…

…whilst listening to Billy Murray singing a song about his (male) sweetheart, Come Take A Trip In My Airship, and browsing colour photographs of the Hindenberg interior.

(Thanks to Thom for starting the ball rolling with his new Paris/Berlin tumblr!)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vickers Airship Catalogue
• The Air Ship
• Dirigibles
• The Airship Destroyer
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls

David Bowie’s cigaretted fingers and bulging silver crotch point the way to the future. This summer sees the fortieth anniversary of the Ziggy Stardust album’s release. The Melody Maker ad above can be found with a wealth of other Ziggy-related material at the very thorough Ziggy Stardust Companion site. For me the definitive artefact isn’t the album itself but DA Pennebaker’s film of the final concert from the 1973 tour; the songs really come alive and Bowie’s performance is overwhelmingly electric. Related: Cracked Actor, the BBC documentary from 1975 about Bowie’s post-Ziggy life on and off the stage.

• The week in books: Amanda Katz described the remarkable history of a single copy of The War of the Worlds by HG Wells then asked “Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books?” | Bosnian novelist Aleksandar Hemon in The Browser’s FiveBooks interview put Blood Meridian on his list. | “Call me the greatest American novel”: Christopher Buckley on Moby-Dick. | The Brit Lit Map.

• For another anniversary, the Alan Turing centenary, there’s The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing (part two here) and Breaking the Code (1996), Derek Jacobi playing the tragic genius in a biographical drama.

• Commissioner of Sewers (1991) a William Burroughs documentary by Klaus Maeck in which the author reads some of his work and endures a Q&A session with surprising equanimity.

• Music, flesh and fantasy: When Mati Klarwein’s hyperactive paintings stole the psychedelic show.

• Move Over Casio: Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 Portable Synth Looks Cool, Does Everything.

• A retrospective of art by Madge Gill (1882–1961) at The Nunnery, London.

• “Art is unavoidably work”: Terre Thaemlitz interviewed.

• A trailer for Document: Keiji Haino.

• WB Yeats, Magus

• Pathétique 1 (1994) by Fushitsusha | Pathétique 2 (1994) by Fushitsusha.

Stonehenge

The trilithons of Stonehenge as they appear in Google Earth, a view that few people these days are allowed to experience since visitors are kept to a small path that runs around the monument. Thirty years ago this week, on the day of the Summer Solstice, I was fortunate to be present at the small Stonehenge Free Festival that was taking place in a field across the road. English Heritage always opened up the stones for the Solstice so I got to stand in the centre of the circle and watch a couple of improvised hippie weddings taking place. (Every now and then I wonder whether those couples are still together.) The festival had been staged annually since 1972 and, unlike the walled and ticketed Glastonbury Festival, was a thoroughly anarchist affair: people simply turned up, stayed for a week or so then left. That changed in 1985 when someone at English Heritage decided that the festival wasn’t going to happen; police cordoned off the area and the resulting conflict put an end to the festival for good.

One of Google Earth’s army of diligent model-makers, Tom Harvey, is responsible for the 3D view of the stones. These work better than many of the 3D buildings in Google Earth which often look painfully isolated in otherwise flattened cityscapes. Stonehenge also suits this treatment better than most of Britain’s other ancient monuments which tend to be smaller stone circles or mounds of earth. There is a Silbury Hill but nothing for nearby Avebury as yet.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Stonehenge panorama
• Born again pagans

Weekend links 110

Til Eulenspiegel by Urban Janke. From Twenty Postcards of the Wiener Werkstätte at 50 Watts.

• Rorschach Audio by Joe Banks is “essential reading for everyone interested in air-traffic control, anechoic chambers, artificial oxygen carriers, audio art, bell-ringing, cocktail parties, cognitive science, communications interference, compost, the death penalty, Electronic Voice Phenomena, evangelism, evolutionary biology, experimental music, ghosts, the historiography of art, illusions of sound and illusions of language, lip-reading jokes, nuclear blast craters, predictive texting, singing hair, sonic archives, sound design, steam trains, tinnitus, the Turing Test, Victorian blood painting, visual depth and space perception, ultrasonic visual music, ventriloquism, voices and warehouse fires and robberies.”

• “Freud did not understand female sexuality. Klimt did. Klimt’s women please themselves. The realization that women have an independent sexual life was an insight in art.” Eric Kandel discusses his new study The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present.

• Three new books already mentioned here receive further attention: Stan Persky on Christopher Bram’s Eminent Outlaws : The Gay Writers Who Changed America. | Matthew Aquilone on Paul Russell’s The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov. | Karin L. Kross on the new translation of the Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic.

The creative writing moment/movement baffles me and it intrigues me. What does it signify, all this creative longing? And why through language? Specifically fiction, poetry, memoir? […] The crazy part of it is that we are breeding professional, competent, homogenised writers who will go on to teach writing that is professional, competent and homogenised. The intriguing part of it is whether this movement towards creativity and self-expression is really the start of a kind of Occupy – that it could be dangerous and confrontational, not homogenised at all.

Dangerous? But then they won’t get published and win awards and get film deals and… Jeanette Winterson prepares to teach creative writing at Manchester University.

• The Underground New York Public Library is a visual library featuring the Reading-Riders of the NYC subways.

• Hob by No Man: “Constructed from soundtrack noises from both version of Quatermass and the Pit.”

• Stephen Thrower talks about his soundtrack music for The Erotic Films of Peter De Rome.

• John Waters surprises everyone by hitchhiking across the US.

• Sounds & the City: An interview with Julia Holter.

• The Dead Dream of the Dirigible.

• Meditation (1979) by Edward Artemyev.

Weekend links 107

Le Faune (1923) by Carlos Schwabe.

• “When I recently attended a conference in China, many of the presenters left their papers on the cloud—Google Docs, to be specific. You know how this story ends: they got to China and there was no Google. Shit out of luck. Their cloud-based Gmail was also unavailable, as were the cloud lockers on which they had stored their rich media presentations.” Ubuweb’s Kenneth Goldsmith on why he doesn’t trust the Cloud.

• “I’m a poet and Britain is not a land for poets anymore.” A marvellous interview with the great Lindsay Kemp at Dangerous Minds. Subjects include all that you’d hope for: Genet, Salomé, David Bowie, Ken Russell, Derek Jarman, The Wicker Man and “papier maché giant cocks”.

• “As early as the 1950s, Maurice Richardson wrote a Freudian analysis which concluded that Dracula was ‘a kind of incestuous-necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match’.” Christopher Frayling on the Bram Stoker centenary.

• Björk gets enthused by (among other things) Leonora Carrington, The Hourglass Sanatorium and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s YouTube lectures.

• Before Fritz Lang’s Metropolis there was Algol – Tragödie der Macht (1920). Strange Flowers investigates.

David Marsh recreates famous album covers using Adobe Illustrator’s Pantone swatches.

• New titles forthcoming from Strange Attractor Press. Related: an interview with SAP allies Cyclobe.

• 960 individual slabs of vinyl make an animated waveform for Benga’s I Will Never Change.

• An exhibition of works by Stanislav Szukalksi at Varnish Fine Art, San Francisco,

• Keith Haring‘s erotic mural for the NYC LGBT Community Center is restored.

• The Situationist Times (1962–1967) is resurrected at Boo-Hooray.

• Doors Closing Slowly: Derek Raymond‘s Factory Novels.

• Will Wilkinson insists that fiction isn’t good for you.

• More bookplates at BibliOdyssey and 50 Watts.

• The Top 25 Psychedelic Videos of All Time.

• Flannery O’Connor: cartoonist.

• RIP Adam Yauch.

• Their finest moment: Sabotage (1994) by Beastie Boys.

Category: {technology}

Zeppelinology

Weekend links 114

Stonehenge

Weekend links 110

Weekend links 107