HUPOMNEMATA

All this nice digital folk art about SARS is now compiled into an archive.

By the way, i’m still feeling sick (but it’s getting better). I spent the weekend in my bed reading the first two ‘Cheri Bibi’ books by Gaston Leroux (published in 1913). It’s cruel and bloody. And bloody funny too. Leroux has built for his ‘hero’ a fate worse than ‘Oedipus rex’, and very complicated, with changes of identity, doubles, crimes both real and fake, family bloodbaths,…

Cheri-Bibi drawn by Serge (aka Maurice Feaudiere or Feraudiere?) in 1929 (you can find another on this website about the history of the Cayenne prison). If anybody knows where i can find more info about Serge, I’m interested.

More info there.
It’s not much but that will have to do for today. Nothing interesting to tell : il spend a lot of time coughing and sneezing, with a little bit of fever, trying to read ‘the Golden Age’ by John C. Wright. Each time I try to read more than ten pages, I fall asleep. Seems to be a great book, though.

Japanese trucks

Fantagraphics, one of the best comics publishers around is going to disappear if they don’t find 80.000 $. So they want us to buy some books, now, rather than in two months time because it shall be too late. To find something worth buying shouldn’t be too difficult :

” Fantagraphics Books has just celebrated its 27th year publishing many of the finest cartoonists from all over the world as well as our flagship publication, the magazine people love to hate, The Comics Journal. We are proud of our long-term commitment to comics as an art form and our dogged determination to push excellence down everybody’s throats. This is all very well and good but it doesn’t mean much in the face of brute economics — and it’s the wall of brute economics that we’ve just hit, hard.”

Read the rest of their message to comics lovers throughout the world

“Waking up in a borrowed flat in Camden Town, Cayce Pollard, the heroine of Pattern Recognition, switches on an ‘Italian floor lamp’ powered by ‘British electricity’. She pours some water – ‘London tap water’, as she later notes – through ‘a German filter’ into ‘an Italian electric kettle’, and seeks out a bag of ‘imported Californian tea-substitute’. After a hasty Pilates session, she checks her watch – ‘a Korean clone of an old-school Casio G-Shock’ – and sees that it’s time for her meeting with Bernard Stonestreet, an ad exec in ‘a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser’. Cayce, by contrast, wears a ‘museum-grade replica of a US MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives’. Afterwards there’s lunch, ‘the food California-inflected Vietnamese fusion with more than the usual leavening of colonial Frenchness’. Then, shouldering a handbag ‘of black East German laminate, purchased on eBay’, she steels herself for a mind-blowing trip to the pullulating ‘logo-maze’ of Harvey Nichols.”

From a review of ‘Pattern Recognition’ by Gibson in the London Review of Books

Cats to become a rabbit should gather immediately now here. This is the hat and shawl for disguising oneself. This hat is made of soft boa cloth, and its lining cloth with a flower pattern is very cute. Since it can equip also with a hat and shawl on a piece of Velcro, attachment and detachment are easy!

see the rabbit

see more

Online musical steampunk in the techno museum.

Digital SARS folk art is piling up on boingboing.

HK Video recently started releasing (in France) dvd’s of Seijun Suzuki movies starring Joe Shishido.

“Shishido made his screen debut in the February 1955 release Keisatsu-ki (Police Report). Shishido initially played the role of a lover with a skinny face, but decided to puff up his cheeks by plastic surgery in an attempt to emerge as an impudent bad guy. This bold decision paid off when he won a major role in the 1958 Moeru Nikutai (Burning Flesh)”

This is the result of the surgery, one of the strangest face in film history. You can find a lot more info on this beautiful website. (including a before/after photograph and images from his cooking television show!)

At least in the United States.