Blue Öyster Cult – Page 2

Blue Sky Noise (2010) by Esao Andrews.

• Franz Xaver Messerschmidt is the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to the 18th-century sculptor. Related: an earlier post about the artist’s work.

• How are the team behind War Horse planning to follow up their smash hit? With a gay love story performed by puppets. Related: Achilles (1995) by Barry JC Purves.

• More great posts at A Journey Round My Skull: Czechoslovakian Expose VI and Black Cradle of Bright Life, fifteen works by the Macedonian artist Vangel Naumovski (1924–2006).

• Top 10 Anti-Gay Activists Caught Being Gay. Related: “Fuck your feelings,” in which columnist Dan Savage gets righteously impatient when a correspondent complains. As Savage says, people who use their faith as a stick to beat gay people contribute to an atmosphere of intolerance in which kids are bullied for being gay (or appearing to be), or transgender, or merely different, and kill themselves as a result. Over the past couple of weeks there’s been an upsurge of US media attention to the most recent suicides; Savage inaugurated the It Gets Better project in order to help. Also related: God Loves Poetry.

Meigh (2010) by Esao Andrews.

• Antony Hegarty enthuses about Shoot Yer Load, one of the scurrilous 12″ singles released by my Savoy colleagues in the 1980s. Antony and the Johnsons have a new album out, Swanlights, on Secretly Canadian.

• When the future of music was a rainbow hued parabola: book designer John Gall collects old synthesizer manuals.

• Fantastic Memories (1944) by Maurice Sandoz, illustrated by Salvador Dalí.

• Urban optometry: life as a London crane operator at BLDGBLOG.

• Today is 10/10/10 which means it’s Powers of Ten Day.

• These New Puritans: a band like no other.

• Art Nouveau: a virtual exhibition.

• Diaghilev: Lord of the dance.

• Flaming Telepaths (1974) by Blue Öyster Cult; Flaming Telepaths (2005) by Espers.

The Cliff House in a storm by Tsunekichi Imai (c. 1900).

The Cliff House Project has a wealth of information and ephemera about the late Victorian incarnation of the Cliff House restaurant in San Francisco. There were several Cliff Houses but the one built by Adolph Sutro in 1896 was the most spectacular, partly for the lack of other buildings around it but mostly for its typically Victorian take on a Gothic style which gave it the nickname “the Gingerbread Palace.”

I’d never seen this building before until comics writer Tom Veitch sent me a picture postcard of it in the early Nineties. Given its age I’d always assumed it must have been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake but it turns out that the building survived that disaster only to perish in a fire the year after. The Cliff House site has many wonderful photographs, nearly all of which convey the impression that the building was about to slide into the sea at any moment—or maybe set sail if the tide was up. There’s also a short piece of film from 1903 showing a slow pan around a throng of beach revellers which eventually comes to light on the house. Long-vanished buildings often possess an air of unreality in photographs; this one seems more unreal than most due to its unlikely appearance.

Update: Nephilim2038 reminds us that Blue Öyster Cult used Imai’s photograph of the Cliff House on the cover of their Imaginos album in 1988. This seems to have eluded my attention despite my having a CD-single from that album (although in truth I bought it for Don’t Fear The Reaper which was included as a bonus track).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passages 2
• Hungarian water towers
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Atget’s Paris

Tag: Blue Öyster Cult

Weekend links 33

Adolph Sutro’s Gingerbread Palace