Artist and writer, or writer and artist. Sometimes other things, too.
Author: Alistair
“Paris will become a winter garden; espaliered fruit trees on the boulevard. The Seine filtered and warm – an abundance of fake gemstones – a profusion of gilding – the houses lit up – the light will be stored, for there are bodies that have this property, such as sugar, the flesh of certain molluscs and Bologna phosphorus. The fronts of the houses will be made to be daubed with this phosphorescent substance, and their radiance will light the streets.”
Visions of a lovely biotech future Paris from Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished draft of Bouvard and Pécuchet, the novel he was working on when he died in 1880. I suspect he may have had more than one sip of the laudanum on the night he wrote this. If it was the 1980s instead of the 1880s I’d say Ecstasy. It has that kind of E’d up I LOVE YOU SO…
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I'm having a bit of a Videodrome-esque week.
Forthcoming engagements and appearances.
A recent visit to a Chinese supermarket led to a number of somewhat less than pragmatic purchases, including a pack of Hell Money. Alternatively known as joss money, it’s intended to be burned or otherwise offered to people and deities in the afterworld. Hence also the term joss sticks, AKA the incense burned before a shrine or altar. I guess the underlying idea is that the smoke carries the prayers up to the afterlife, and so by extension the burned money also travels the same way. You can get Hell (or joss) clothes, cars, and household appliances although they’re frowned upon by the authorities in mainland China as “vulgar” and “feudal”. You see loads of this kind of thing in places like Hong Kong, though. Fifty million HK$ is worth about four million British Pounds, nearly five million Euros or about $6.5 million US… and one typically offers them in…
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… always believe in your soul, etc. This post otherwise has nothing to do with Spandau Ballet.
In fact it’s a lovely, surreal image by Magnum photographer Hiroji Kubota of Burmese monks praying before the Golden Rock at Shwe Pyi Daw in 1978. I couldn’t discover exactly why it’s so venerated or who decided to paint it gold, but it’s a great example of a relatively small intervention turning a mundane object– in this case, a boulder– into a dramatic work of art. Maybe this photograph deceives with regard to how precarious and high up the rock is, but I don’t envy the person who gets to repaint this thing. Just imagine being the idiot who finally makes it topple off the precipice.
Just some splendid stills from thrillers (mostly) of the 1940s and 1950s, reproduced from ‘Film Noir’ (Alain Silver, James Ursini, Paul Duncan: Taschen). I love Film Noir. ‘Gilda’ is one of the best and most noirish. Above is Rita Hayworth doing a passive-aggressive musical number/striptease in a club to get back at her boyfriend and her ex-boyfriend for their machinations with each other and with her. As you do.
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Alistair Gentry 