expositions – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Balloon parade

Emergency Third Rail Power Trip (1983) by The Rain Parade.

Another minor piece of album-cover detective work. A couple of years ago I was looking for dirigible pictures for a steampunk book I was working on, and in the searching came across the original of the photo used on the cover of the Rain Parade’s neo-psychedelic debut album. I didn’t want pictures of round balloons, however, and since I was ripping through a number of websites I neglected to bookmark the page. I’ve still not seen the photo since—which I recall was in a landscape ratio with more balloons to the left—but I’m fairly sure I’ve identified the event as being the balloon race that took place in the Bois de Vincennes, Paris, in October 1900.

The significance of the cover photo for this blog is that the balloon race in question was one of the Olympic Games competitions being held that year in tandem with the Exposition Universelle, an event which has been fairly thoroughly explored in earlier postings. Needless to say, balloon racing was later discontinued as an Olympic sport. The picture above shows another view of the “Parc Aérostatique”, while from the map below one can determine that the people in the foreground of the album cover photo are standing on the velodrome parapet.

The picture below from L’Illustration magazine might have made a better cover shot for Emergency Third Rail Power Trip if it was suitably cropped and coloured. If I turn up the errant photo at a later date I’ll post it here. As for the album itself, it was reissued on CD in 1992 together with its follow-up, Explosions In The Glass Palace, a mini-album that remains the pinnacle of the Rain Parade’s studio recordings.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Balloons in the Grand Palais

The world of the future

Pages from the Official Souvenir Program for the Seattle World’s Fair, 1962. Very typical corporate design by RT Matthiesen and Associates but not bad for all that. The pages give an overview of the exposition, punctuated by ads from its sponsors, while the text sets forth the purpose of the event which was intended to give a taste of life in the new Space Age. NASA’s Project Mercury missions were ongoing during the time the fair was being planned so the ethos of the event was very much tied to the obsessions of the time, obsessions fuelled by Cold War competition and a desire for an automated future. The technocratic side of things is to the fore in the booklet which trots out the usual utopian vision of life in “Century 21” as being one of short working-hours, a great deal of leisure, personal air-cars, and revolving houses. My childhood encyclopaedias were filled with this sort of thing which has only given me a lifelong suspicion of any kind of wild futurology, positive or negative. Those books were also filled with pictures of monorails, and the Seattle exposition had a monorail all of its own which I’m pleased to see is still running today.

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Space Needle USA

That observation tower again. Previous posts here have exhausted the Paris Exposition Universelle as a subject so it’s time to look elsewhere, and the Century 21 Exposition which was held in Seattle in 1962 seems as good a place to start as any. If you’re interested in old expositions then it’s always good to find a decent site devoted to them, and the site for the Seattle event is particularly useful. Space Needle USA is one of the many pieces of documentary ephemera available to browse and download, a 76-page commemorative booklet by Howard Mansfield devoted to the design and building of the tower:

The Space Needle, a modernistic totem of the Seattle World’s Fair, was conceived by Eddie Carlson as a doodle in 1959 and given form by architects John Graham Jr., Victor Steinbrueck, and John Ridley. When King County declined to fund the project, five private investors, Bagley Wright, Ned Skinner, Norton Clapp, John Graham Jr., and Howard S. Wright, took over and built the 605-foot tower in less than a year.

Good to see some of the alternative designs, one of which isn’t so different to one of the designs proposed in the 19th century for a London tower that would rival the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

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Gare d’Orsay to Musée d’Orsay

Gare d’Orsay, coupe transversale (1898). Plan de Victor Laloux.

The Google Art Project is currently featuring a slideshow history of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, showing the museum’s evolution from the world’s first all-electric rail terminal to its current status as a major repository of 19th-century art. The Gare d’Orsay was built to bring visitors to the Exposition Universelle of 1900, an event regular readers should be familiar with by now, a connection which only compounds the interest I have in the place. (See this recent post and the links below it for more on the subject.)

Projet A.C.T. Architecture (Renaud Bardon, Pierre Colboc, Jean-Paul Philippon). Coupe perspective générale, Octobre 1979.

The Trial.

In addition to the building being one of the few structures remaining from the exposition, its dishevelled splendour provided Orson Welles with a fantastically evocative (and cheap!) set for his 1962 film of The Trial. It’s surprising to read that people objected to this, believing the spaces to be too large. The disjunction of space in Welles’ film is one of its great strengths, as is the confusion of architectural styles and detail. Much of this was improvisation imposed by necessity—money not being available for the sets that were planned—but it makes the film all the more labyrinthine and disorienting.

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Weekend links 186

One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack (2004) by Wangechi Mutu.

I wouldn’t be so bold as to call Benjamin Noys’ contribution to the recent The Weird conference at the University of London a highlight, but it was a surprise to find Lord Horror in general and the Reverbstorm book in particular being discussed alongside so many noteworthy offerings. Noys’ piece, Full Spectrum Offence: Savoy’s Neo-Weird, is now available to read online, a very perceptive examination of the tensions between the Old Weird and the New.

• Le Transperceneige is a multi-volume bande dessinée of post-apocalypse science fiction by Jacques Lob & Jean-Marc Rochette. Snowpiercer is a film adaptation by Korean director Bong Joon-ho featuring John Hurt, Jamie Bell, Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton. Anne Billson calls the director’s cut an “eccentric masterpiece” so it’s dismaying to learn that the film is in danger of being hacked about by the usual rabble of unsympathetic Hollywood distributors.

• This month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Public Domain Review posted some of the paintings mentioned in Swann’s Way (or The Way by Swann’s as the latest translation so inelegantly has it).

• How the Paris World’s Fair brought Art Nouveau to the Masses in 1900: a huge picture post about my favourite exposition.

• Mix of the week: “Sport of Kings” Mix by Ricardo Donoso. Related: Paul Purgas on five favourite records.

• Ernst Reichl: the man who designed Ulysses. Related: Hear all of Finnegans Wake read aloud over 35 hours.

• “Why does Alain de Botton want us to kill our young?” A splendid rant by Sam Kriss.

• Love’s Secret Ascension: Peter Bebergal on Coil, Coltrane & the 70th birthday of LSD.

• Malicious Damage: Ilsa Colsell on the secret art of Joe Orton & Kenneth Halliwell.

• Just Say No to the Bad Sex Award, or the BS Award as Tom Pollock calls it.

• Lauren O’Neal’s ongoing PJ Harvey Tuesdays: One, Two, Three and Four.

• Neville Brody on the changing face of graphic design.

• A Brief History of the London Necropolis Railway.

• Des Hommes et des Chatons: a Tumblr.

• At Pinterest: Androgyny

• Virgin Prunes: Pagan Lovesong (vibeakimbo) (1982) | Caucasian Walk (1982) | Walls Of Jericho (live at The Haçienda, Manchester, 1983; I’m in that audience somewhere)