Category: Uncategorized (Page 275 of 1086)

 

‘At the most elementary level, language behaves like gears and teeth locking and moving forward. A word has meaning, the reader decodes the word’s meaning, and then reads the next word. Other elements like punctuation, capitalization, paragraph breaks, and quotation marks further assist the reader in how the text will be interpreted. H by Philippe Sollers has none of these prompts.

‘In standard reading practice, words become sentences, sentences become paragraphs, and ink on the page becomes narrative. It is such a common practice, we think nothing of it when reading the daily newspaper, a bestseller, or a website. H throws this relationship into flux. The text flows, the words flooding the page, with no period or paragraph break in sight. Written in 1973, Sollers wrote this avant-garde text in the middle of a personal ideological crisis. The former Maoist and founder of Tel Quel abandoned his Leftist ideology and converted to Catholicism. This crisis took place after he witnessed the violent excesses of Mao’s Chinese Cultural Revolution.

‘The challenge for the reader is parsing this ideological conversion story amid the word-flood that fills page after page. H reads like an amalgamation of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses, Lucky’s nonsensical monologue from Waiting for Godot, and the disintegration of identity from the last pages of The Unnameable. Sollers thrusts the reader into a strange linguistic borderland, straddling sense and nonsense.

‘During this literary engagement, the reader and the author toggle between collaboration and antagonism. In the non-blurb blurb on the back cover, Sollers explains that ‘Beyond the automatism, a calculation is at play, keeping watch, criticising, departing at once from all the points of history. This calculation is uttered by masses in the discontinuous unity of its sections. It adjusts, strikes, whispers, shouts, marks, deletes, tallies, signals the moving absence which is nevertheless addressed, talked to, with all the background language.He goes on, saying, “That’s it, then, relax, it’s clear. Stay with the meaning, it’s simple. They are two, here, in the night. Tempo.” The two being author and reader.

Part of the joy and the challenge presented by H is finding one’s groove with the text. The “discontinuous unity” will at first confront the reader, attacking her sensibilities in the vain attempt to discover a linear narrative or intellectual through-line. But as more and more words get consumed by the reader, a relaxation sets in. A kind of numbness or hypnosis pacifies the reader. Then, as if by some alchemical reaction, sentences and phrases start appearing. These phantom sentences begin to create fragments of narrative.

‘But even these nebulous narrative fragments appear and disappear with a frustrating randomness. The text will build into an extended set-piece and the, just as suddenly, evaporate in a mishmash of random words or nonsense terms.

‘The ephemeral narratives take on different forms, different tonal registers. Everything from high- to low-culture is evoked. A confessional narrative as Sollers struggles with the empty promises of Maoism. This might become a more formal meditation, a historical genealogy of the Left since Karl Marx, only to turn into a nonsensical dadaist inventory of words. The inventory might mutate into a long pornographic tableau, penetrations and vulgarity. And so on. For 172 pages.

‘Regular notions of reading practice become moot when confronting a text like this. I myself began reading it, had other reviewing duties, and then returned to the text after a long absence. It felt like dipping into a lake after a long winter. At first it was strange and alienating, then I got back into the groove of things. Because of the text’s avant-garde nature, I didn’t need to remember characters or plot. The verbal static began to take on new forms.

‘Sollers also created a text that avoid a uniform interpretation. Because there are no paragraph breaks or punctuation, any reader can separate where a sentence or phrase begins or ends. As with Finnegans Wake or The Cantos, despite any authorial premeditation in execution, a certain amount of ambiguity develops. The way I read H will differ than how another person reads H. Equus Press kept academic machinery to a minimum, only italicizing words that were in English in the original French version. Sollers drops in Chinese, German, Italian, Latin, and other languages. Citations explaining these foreign phrases would slow down the reader and impose an interpretive framework. I just went with the flow, letting the sight and sounds of those foreign tongues echo off the unending textual flood. If you really want to know what these words mean, there’s always Google Translate. For me, it didn’t seem necessary.’ — The Driftless Review

 

___
Further

Philippe Sollers Site
PS @ Wikipedia
#philippesollers hashtag on Instagram
Philippe Sollers : “It’s called strategy, my dear friend”
Philippe Sollers’ “Nombres:” Structure and Sources
PHILIPPE SOLLERS: interview and photography by OLIVIER ZAHM
The Novels of Philippe Sollers: Narrative and the Visual
‘What is the Meaning of the Avant-garde’s Death?’
DVD: ‘Jean-Luc Godard / Philippe Sollers: The Conversation’
‘The Body Comes Out of the Voice’
‘Loving Kristeva: a Memoir’, by Phillipe Sollers
David Platzer on Philippe Sollers
Philippe Sollers @ goodreads
Nodality or Plot Displaced: The Dynamics of Sollers’s H
Polysemantic Brush Strokes of Garden Green under Gray Clouds of Synchronicity

 

____
Extras

Philippe Sollers – Interview (1988)

Julia Kristeva & Philippe Sollers – Du mariage considéré comme un des beaux-arts

Philippe Sollers : Enfance et jeunesse d’un écrivain français

Philippe Sollers “Le Nouveau”

 

______
Interview

 

David Hayman: Can you summarize the developments that led up to the sort of fiction now called the New-New Novel?
Philippe Sollers: The last 50 years produced three important literary movements in France beginning with the Surrealist period between 1920 and 1930. Then Existentialism dominated the post-WW II period, and during the decade of thesixties, we had the so-called Nouveau roman. These three movements werevery differendy constituted. We could say that Surrealism popularized, explicated, and publicized the big break (coupure) which occurred at the end of the 19th century with Mallarme and Lautreamont. I believe that the essential elements of the crisis we are still living through derive from those experiments on language in literature. Surrealism simply took note of the remarkable literary events of that period. The Surrealists discovered and publicized Lautr?amont, who would not have been read and perhaps not even published without Breton and Aragon in 1920. It was they who copied down the poems at the Bibliotheque Nationale. So you see they performed a belated exhumation under rather strange circumstances. Almost 50 years after Lautreamont wrote Les Chants de Maldoror the Surrealists made their discovery and extrapolated their theory using what they thought they understood of psychoanalysis, of language, of automatic writing, etc. There you have one of the areas of inquiry (problematiques).

Sartre’s work derives in a sense from Surrealism. He became famous during a time of upheaval, the Second World War. Recognizing the irrationalistic limits of Surrealism, he tried to relocate the problem of literature within a conceptual field which is, in my view, more consistent with 19th-century Naturalism. He turned against the Surrealists’ irrationalistic inflation while espousing a more realistic or naturalistic conception which he called the literature of engagement (litterature engage) or evidential literature (la litt?rature du t?moignage). His movement was regressive after Surrealism but, more importandy, it lacked or rather overlooked what are for us extremely decisive experiments, those carried out under th? inspiration of Surrealism by people like Artaud and Bataille. Clearly, if we consider the problematics developed by Sartre at that moment, we see that he wanted to bypass Mallarme, to avoid in-depth interpretations of poetic language, and above all to limit the possible influence of Artaud or Bataille. Or at any rate, he failed to recognize how fundamental their experiments were. I believe that it was a rather hollow, empty moment, but we can justify it in the light of the disruption caused by the Second World War, and above all by the already perceptible displacement of the European cultural scene toward the United States . . . toward a decentralization of world history, an unfocusing. (I should of course have spoken of the other movements of the twenties, Futurism, Dada, etc. But this is just a schematic overview.)

But then, during the fifties and sixties (we might speak half-seriously of a Hegelian thesis, antithesis, and synthesis), with the New Novel, there is an apparent return to literary experimentation, to the problem of language in literature. To my mind, this is a rather feeble and didactic phenomenon, a movement which harks back to but fails to take into account the experiments of Mallarme and Lautreamont and above all the decisive and fundamental linguistic experiments of Joyce. The Nouveau roman came to rather academic conclusions about the most noteworthy experiments with language in the 19th and 20th centuries. Take, for example, the case of Joyce. Within the French context, a context still xenophobic and nationalistic, the major movements almost completely overlooked Joyce. Breton, you know, condemns Joyce, saying that in the end he returns to the arbitrary, but really he had no right to say that.

DH: You know Joyce had similarly unkind things to say about the Surrealists …
PS: Yes, of course the feeling was mutual. But what counts is that the appearance of a phenomenon as important as Joyce collides in France with two other phenomena. First, there was that critical censor, the NRF,* with its neoclassical and bourgeois conception of literature: Gide, Valery, etc. . . . Proust! I am alluding to a conception or rather to a syntax, to a way of writing sentences, making them unfold, a conception anchored in French classical rhetoric. So, there was no chance of really understanding Joyce’s contribution in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. But there was also what we could call the Surrealist refusal, the failure to understand that Joyce goes beyond the problematics of automatic writing, of the marvelous or of the simple occult, that is, beyond the domain of Surrealism. And we can see that Existentialism could hardly have been aware of the great new continent opened by Joyce since it harked directly back to 19th-century Naturalism. The space-time, the Einsteinian side of Joyce, was not perceived by Sartre in its modernity, as a seismic shudder within language itself. The same goes, I think, for the Nouveau roman. Even if there is a sort of modernity within the problematics of language, we can’t think of the Nouveau roman (excluding Beckett, who is himself a post-Joycean) as truly aware of Joyce’s contribution.

DH: Let’s talk about the problems of the novel to which you referred earlier.
PS: It seems to me that for a century now language has been undergoing a revolution. For one thing, we are increasingly aware that there can no longer be purely national languages. The isolation of different languages and of different nations each with its language is being severely tested. We see a sort of intercultural movement of which I think a writer like Joyce is the deepest sort of exemplar. He grasped the situation radically, understanding that we were entering a new world of which he tried to write the gospel, at once ironic and serious. Which means he understood that the definition of the human subject through his language and in history was entering an unprecedented phase of transmutation. We would save a good deal of futile talk if we were to accept Joyce’s project as fundamental; for I think Joyce understood that we were beginning to reshape the relations between man and language and history. That’s the central issue. People still perceive the problem of literature in 19th-century terms.

Repeatedly, we’ve seen literary errors committed, great errors, occasionally tragic ones (like . . . Socialist Realism). Such errors are a function of metaphysical suppositions dating from the last century. They’re still fixed by ideology despite the progress made by the sciences, despite historical growth, despite the shocks experienced by our species, even, I’d say (and this is the strangest fact), despite the revolutions that have occurred within the other arts. Traditionally, we stick to archaic literary ideologies even while painting and music are in full cataclysmic bloom. All of this suggests that what happens in the spoken language, a language made up of words, syllables, phonemes, etc., is something very dangerous. That’s why it is so carefully regulated, changes are so brutally suppressed. As opposed to what happens simply visually or audibly, that which is charged with significance in language is watched over, subjected to limitations . . .

DH: Perhaps we can return once more to history, to contemporary history and particularly the history of the Tel Quel group and of novelists who do not belong to the group but who nevertheless are doing something similar to what you are doing.
PS: People talk only about the literary aspects of Tel Quel, though Tel Quel, as you know, has a number of other sides. It’s a sort of dialectical machine. According to its subtide, it treats literature, philosophy, science, politics. There is a whole dynamic history to be written some day, not now, since we are still in process. The point is that these several aspects interrelate. The originality of the review, like that of certain others which have the same concerns, lies in the awareness that we must put literature within a general context of development, a context at once historical, political and philosophical. Further, we must locate literary practice at the very center of these several disciplines, these several realities. At the end of the 20th century we are abandoning the idea that literature has to be written by “maudit,” an individual set apart and seemingly enclosed by his creative concerns, one who can see the outside only through certain very narrow apertures. I am perhaps a bit naive, but I feel we must not encourage the belief in the outcast creator, in the necessary tragedy of literary creation. It is precisely in this area that we must leave Romanticism behind.

To get back to literature, I think there have been a great many things of rather unequal value done in the past five or six years, but these works constitute a creative study whose prime concern is to X-ray our culture as it has existed these 2,000 years. Clearly, what we have is an attempt to achieve in literature an enormous anamnesis. There you have the project that was already preoccupying Joyce. That is, we are abandoning the rather cramped vision of those who preached Naturalism, psychological fiction, description of a limited social milieu within a given historical period. Of course, this sort of writing is still being done. It still sells, if you will. But in fact it is dead. The publications of the Tel Quel group attempt to approximate a language which could be prodigiously retroactive, one which would have the analytic capacity to penetrate the history of humanity viewed as a sort of great myth. I think this project prolongs and subsumes that of Mallarme, Joyce, etc. It is an attempt to unify history through the unnumbered strata of civilizations, cultures and languages

DH: But you aren’t trying to fix or fossilize them.
PS: Quite the contrary, we’re trying to analyze them, that is, in a sense to dissolve them, to dissolve the frontiers, the compartments,

 

___
Book

Philippe Sollers H
Equus Press

‘Philippe Sollers’ groundbreaking 1973 novel, H, was inspired by the May 1968 Paris student/worker uprising, and, in its own right, performs a revolt against much that’s been (and still is) taken for granted in the belles lettres.

‘Described as “a music that is inscribed in language, becoming the object of its own reasoning” (Julia Kristeva) and as an “unpunctuated wall of words, an extremely active […] mass of language” (David Hayman), H does away with plot, character and setting–and, on the typographical level, with punctuation, capitalisation, or paragraph breaks–in order to attempt what Sollers himself called “an external polylogue.”

‘The text performs an infinite fragmentation of subjectivity into a plethora of ventriloquized voices where “words turn round and come back, producing a material fullness of pleasures” and “everything is organized into a splendid series of irrelevancies” (Roland Barthes). It is this fulness of H, this “suffocation” it produces, that might be, with Barthes, termed its “beauty.”

‘Accommodating a vast range of tonalities, attitudes, modes, and ideologies, H makes a case in point of how a literary work should function according to Sollers: “A work exists by itself only potentially, and its actualization (or production) depends on its readings and on the moments at which these readings actively take place.”’ — Equus Press

Excerpt

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, once you settle on the right take to use, you, or I should say I, basically forget about the more individually exciting one. It just goes into storage. Strange, but yeah. You just think about the film as a whole basically. I guess you can tell love that I’d like Donner Party, and merci, but it’s hard to choose. Love explaining to me why Michael Douglas deserved the Cannes Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement award, G. ** A, Hi. No, I’ve never been especially interested in Madonna’s music. I was kind of interested for a while in seeing what lengths she would go to next to stay notorious. Yes, ‘Suzume’ is playing here, and I definitely want to see it. Sure, a Welcome post, yes. Just send me the appropriate stuff when the time becomes right. I actually find Letterboxd reviews pretty useful, at least for blog post making. Zac and I are around and here for the near-duration, so just let us know when and how you want to arrange things. We should know better what the post costs are going to be in a week or so. Thanks! ** Jack Skelley, Jackpan! Great news about Kim’s award, and about your convo with her obviously. Hook me/us up when … Uh, I think the soonest I’ll get back to LA is Halloween. I’ll be in the editing room until then, pretty sure. Re: missing FOKAPALOOZA, drat. I hope it goes without saying that I’d be chuffed to do a ‘welcome to the world post’ for FOKA if you want. Speaking of, I just got my copy in the mail yesterday! Love like a bristling pinecone, me. ** Misanthrope, Me too, obvs. Cool. I seem to have had pretty good luck with dentists, and with car mechanics too, actually. Must be my million dollar smile. ** David Ehrenstein, I’m with you on the scale model excellence, but not on the movie itself. ** Bill, The DbT guy makes them individually by hand, which doesn’t help punters like us, but semi-explains the cost, I guess. Oh, I so wish I knew what the story is on the Addams Family Dark Ride-ette. I looked and looked when I found those pix, and I found zip about it. I’ve read something by Matthew Cheney, but I can’t remember what. Huh. ** _Black_Acrylic, I think you’re right! ** M., Greetings, M. Hm, no, I don’t think I ever think about being that small. I’m quite tall, so maybe that’s why? Not that I think about even bigger either. When I was a little kid I had a recurring nightmare about a sentient apartment building that had legs and was walking around looking for people to crush including me, but I was normal sized in the dream. Close though, maybe? ** Nick., Hey, Nick.! Belated very happy birthday to you, sir! Glad you had a blast. Everything has felt kind of unreal to me since I stopped shooting our film, which is weird because this is real and that kind of wasn’t. I’m good. A guy I’ve been friends with for quite a while revealed to me the other day that he’s FtM trans, and I’d had no idea that’s the case. That was unexpected, and cool. I never met Keith Haring, so, sadly, no stories. I think I saw him in the distance at an art gallery opening once, but that’s it. I did meet and have a strange encounter with Jean-Michel Basquiat once, but that’s not the same thing. Enjoy the chain. Sorry I can’t embellish it, but it probably is pretty self-embellished. Good to see you. ** Darbz, Hey, hey! Bored with a stomach ache, hugs. Sync! No real incentive for going to Japan other than just wanting to go there. I wouldn’t say Tokyo is pretty, really, well, in parts it is, but it’s pretty wild looking and acting. Definitely go there when you get the chance. Definitely. I’m happy the weird rehab place is doable and maybe even a pleasure sort of. You sound good. I don’t know if my grandmother was an imperfect taxidermist or if this just happens in taxidermy in general, but all of the taxidermy animals she gave our family eventually rotted away. Every single one. So, no, they no longer exist sadly. Oh, I was super excited when she gave them to us. Like I may have said, I was really into making Haunted Houses in our basement, and they were the big stars of it. She was really nice. I honestly think she’s probably why I decided to become an artist. Hm, I don’t think I have any strong opinion about stuffed animals. I’m cool with them. I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it. I don’t think I had any when I was a kid, just taxidermy animals. I want to have something in which I can hide my secret stash and carry around with me. I’m going to give that some thought. Big up today! ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. I’m pretty alright today so far. I’ll avoid ‘EfT’ like the plague, thank you. Actually, you picked my favorite Efteling ride: Droomvlucht. It’s amazing. One of the best rides anywhere ever. Are you acquiring a tan the old fashioned way, or are you lying prone under artificial light? One time when I was in high school I wanted to be tan for my first day back at school after summer vacation, and I sat under a tanning light to tan myself, but I didn’t know what I was doing, and I put the light too close to my face, and the next day at school my face starting blowing up like a balloon and blistering, and I had to be taken to a hospital. So don’t do that. Day of days to you! ** Okay. Philippe Sollers died last week, and I was reminded of how great his early novels are, including the one I’m spotlighting today. Have a gander. See you tomorrow.

* (restored)

_____________
A Canadian guy named Joe has been digging out the basement of his house using nothing but radio-controlled scale model construction equipment… since 1997. At an average rate of eight or nine cubic feet of earth moved each year, the process has been absolutely glacial. But what do you expect when every morning he drives his little excavator on its transport truck down to the basement, unloads it, and then uses it to dig out the basement walls. Then Joe uses the excavators to load R/C trucks and they work their way up a spiral ramp to the basement window where the soil gets dumped outside. Then, once it’s outside, he uses bulldozers to consolidate the pile of excavated dirt.

 

______________
Tom McKenzie tweeted an image after finding a model of the Taj Mahal made from toast at the end of his street near Queens Road Peckham station.

 

_____________
The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety Research Center, a $40 million hangar of destruction in South Carolina, is where experts can destroy full scale scale model houses with rainstorms, hail, tornadoes and wildfire. The 21,000 square foot test chamber is as tall as a six-story building, and big enough to accommodate nine 2,300 square foot model homes at the same time.

 

_____________
There are two things that are incredibly difficult to represent in scale — water and flight — but difficult doesn’t mean impossible. A Tamiya 1/350 King George by Chris Flodberg, is my pick as best build of the year. I have never seen the action of water captured as realistically as Chris has done on this model. You can practically hear the sound of the water rushing over the deck of the ship. You can see the ship being tossed from side to side over the waves. Just an amazing example of scale modeling.

 

_____________
‘Peter Csákvári is a Hungarian food photographer, journalist, miniature artist, and cookbook author. He used to be a chef for 10 years but knew he always wanted to end up as a food photographer. Tiny Wasteland was born when he worked on a tiny island called Herm in the English Channel on a boring rainy day when he played with his macro lens.’

 

_____________
Emilio Ruiz del Río was responsible for many of the special effect foreground miniatures for David Lynch’s film Dune. These pictures are from his personal collection, and were kindly supplied by his son-in-law.

 

_____________
Phil Collins saved Mark Lemon’s scale model of the Alamo from being lost to history. Visitors to San Antonio can see the model at the History Shop on E. Houston Street. Narration by the rock star helps walk you through the story of the historic battle.

 

____________
A skilled German has hand-carved a life-sized replica of the classic 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL ‘Gullwing’, the sports car with the flip-up doors. The model is made not partly, but entirely of wood, and features all the intricate detail you might expect, including the wheels, tyres, M-B star, steering wheel, cockpit instruments, even the headlights – though these won’t light up unless you set fire to the creation.

 

_____________
A 75-meter-long ice pool at Aker Arctic Technology Inc’s ice laboratory, in Helsinki, Finland. The company specializes in the design, testing, evaluation, simulation and development of icebreakers.

 

______________
Walt Disney proudly recapping where Disneyland was in 1966. Check out the working “It’s a Small World” scale model clock.

 

_____________
For the film Speed 2: Cruise Control, a full-scale mock-up of the ship’s bow, known as the “rail ship” was placed a top a rail and propelled into the set constructed in Marigot.

 

____________
An investment forum in Sochi presented the scale model for the new ski resort “Logo-Naki.” All went well until the guests noticed the tiny figures having sex, crashed skiers, dead animals run over by cars, and several suicides.

 

_____________
The Iowa State University’s Tornado/Microburst Simulator can generate a translating microburst-like jet (6.0 ft diameter) and a tornado-like vortex (4.0 ft diameter) for model testing, in order to understand the effects of tornados on buildings and other structures.

 

______________
If there ever was such a thing as a dream job, it would be a lifelong Marvel comic book fan getting to work on The Avengers live action film. Well, that’s me. I helped build the model set for the Thor/Loki confrontation on a rocky cliff dubbed The Promontory. The following are progress photos from start to finish. It also is an example of many big budget movie sets these days that are a small section of real surface that get extended digitally.I was one of a crew of sculptors sent to Albuquerque, NM to be part of set construction.

 

______________
After leaving this page and stepping back into the build environment, it shocks how much the building across from you, with its cheap-looking touches of faux masonry or abundant technical supplies, starts to evoke similarities with this so called “horrific, dystopian, retro past aesthetic” concert hall by Isaïe Bloch. What or who influenced this project? IB: Ship dismantling, collapse, Ferropolis, postmodernism, Juliaan Lampens, Filip Dujardin, Robert Gilson, Étienne-Louis Boullée, Gehard Demetz. Whose work is currently on your radar? IB: Abhominal, kokkugia, Preston Scott Cohen, former Studio Prix students.

 

_____________
Martin Müller is a aeroplane modelling genius. He made this perfectly functional Airbus A310-200 at a 1:22 scale and flew it during an indoor airshow in Leipzing, Germany, three years ago.

 

_____________
In the film Cleopatra (1963), when Cleopatra arrives in Rome, you can see the shadows of the movie set scaffolding on the black sphynx.

 

_____________
Archaeological dig begins to unearth scale model of one of World War One’s bloodiest battlefields created by German prisoners of war.

 

______________
Isengard – Lord of the Rings

 

______________
A company specializing in creating custom props, mnfx, created these scale model works for Trex Decking & Railing as part of a marketing campaign. This scale model decks were constructed using actual Trex decking material that was milled down into 1:12 scale pieces and assembled into the models you see below.

 

______________
This is the world’s largest shake table earthquake simulator in Miki City, near Kobe, Japan. Measuring approximately 65 feet by 49 feet, the table can support 1:1 scale building experiments weighing up to 2.5 million pounds, like the million-pound seven-story condominium below, subjected to a simulated 6.7 magnitude earthquake.

 

_____________
Film director Ron Howard has had the movie set created in order to film scenes for Angels and Demons, the prequel to The Da Vinci Code, after the Vatican banned filming in its grounds.

 

______________
Adam Savage Builds a Huge Scale Model of the Hedge Maze From Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

 

_____________
Jim Casebere ‘Falling House with Fire’, 2012

 

_____________
‘Dan Polydoris is a lifelong toy collector and writer. All the way back in 2010, he started a website called Death By Toys which he intended to be a place for him to write about his toy news and to showcase the occasional custom action figure he created. As time went by, his batches began to sell out faster and faster. Eventually, he began really focusing on making custom action figures and it paid off.’

 

_____________
Alec Garrard, 78, has dedicated a massive 33,000 hours to constructing the ancient Herod’s Temple, which measures a whopping 20ft by 12ft. The pensioner has hand-baked and painted every clay brick and tile and even sculpted 4,000 tiny human figures to populate the courtyards. “I’ve always loved making models and as I was getting older I started to think about making one big project which would see me through to the end of my life,” he said. “I have an interest in buildings and religion so I thought maybe I could combine the two and I came up with the idea of doing the Temple. I’d seen one or two examples of it in Biblical exhibitions, but I thought they were rubbish and I knew I could do better.” He says his wife Kathleen thinks he is mad. “She wishes she’d married a normal person”.

 

______________
Where Eagles Dare set model, MGM British (Borehamwood) – Backlot (1968)

 

_____________
The Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division’s newly renovated “Indoor Ocean”, called the Maneuvering and Seakeeping Basin (MASK) facility, helps the Navy to understand extreme maritime circumstances. MASK was built in 1962, and it’s still the Navy’s biggest wave pool: 360 feet long, 240 feet wide, and holds approximately 12 million gallons of water.

 

____________
Addams Family Dark Ride model kit

 

____________
Free Shipping 1/6 Scale Movie Action Figure Model Toys Head Sculpt Accessories For 12″ Action Figure Model

 

_____________
Scott Weaver’s piece, made with over 100,000 toothpicks over the course of 35 years, is a depiction of San Francisco, with multiple ball runs that allow you to go on “tours” of different parts of the city.

 

________
‘Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist uses just about every pre-CGI trick in the book to create a tale of a family being driven to madness by a very upset spirit. The film’s climax features the Cuesta Verde house—built on top of an Indian burial ground, in case you forgot—imploding and being sucked into another dimension. To pull it off, Hooper had a six-foot-long model replica of the house constructed. That process took four months, and then they destroyed it by attaching metal wires to various points inside and pulling it down through a funnel. The sequence was shot at 15 times normal speed to perfect the effect.’

 

______
Dubailand

 

_____________
Walthers Cornerstone Skyview Drive-In Model Kit: Actually Watch & Hear Your Favorite Movies on the Big Screen Any Time! Simply Slide Your Tablet into the Screen to Bring Your Drive-In to Life – Remove at Any Time. Works with Most 7″ Tablets including Apple(R) Ipad mini, Amazon(R) Kindle Fire, Samsung(R) Galaxy Tab 2.0 and Many More (sold separately). Compatible with Tablets up to 7-7/8 x 5-5/16″ (20 x 13.4 cm) and from 9/32 to 15/32″ (0.7cm to 12mm) Thick . Enjoy Full Sound Quality from Your Tablet Through Open Ports in Rear of Screen.

 

_____________
Dry Ice and LEDs Make Drifting RC Cars Look Even More Realistic

 

_____________
Wes Anderson is fond of using mind-numbingly detailed models in his movies that stand in for his larger set pieces. For The Grand Budapest Hotel, that meant a scale replica of the hotel with a working funicular.

 

_____________
The largest small-scale model ever built, representing 41% of the US in miniature, was the Mississippi River Basin Model Waterways Experiment Station, located near Clinton, Mississippi. It was a large-scale hydraulic model of the entire Mississippi River basin, covering an area of 200 acres. The model was built from 1943 to 1966 and in operation from 1949 until 1973. In 1964, the site was opened to visitors for self-guided tours, and facilities included an assembly centre, 40 ft observation tower, operation observation room, and elevated platforms, drawing about 5000 visitors a year. The cost of maintaining the site as a tourist attraction was too high, so the model was abandoned and became overgrown.

 

_____________
The Haunted Mansion

 

_____
Storefronts

 

______________
Long before the cast and crew of Zabriskie Point ever reached Carefree, a luxurious new housing development in the Arizona desert near Phoenix, the local citizens knew something out of the ordinary was happening in their parts. Over the weeks they had noticed a house being built several hundred yards off the main highway. As its form became more definite, they were astonished to see that it was an exact duplicate of the newest and most talked about dwelling in the Phoenix area, the $400,000 home of Carl Hovgard, tax research expert and founder of the Research Institute of America. However, they soon learned that only the exterior was being duplicated. The interior was just a skeleton. The mock-up was built in eight weeks by an MGM construction crew. A good deal of the material used in the original house was incorporated including a concrete slab roof, individually cast concrete blocks and stone for the entire front of the house. It cost more than $100,000. But its life was short. Filled with dynamite and gallons of gas and benzine, the house was guarded carefully and the exact time of the explosion was revealed to no one. Still, many local people lined the highway in front of the house in the late afternoon of demolition day. In ten seconds two-and-a-half-months’ worth of work vanished although it took hours for the fire to completely die out. There were, miraculously, no injuries and all 17 cameras operated perfectly. Michelangelo Antonioni would have two hours of footage from which to choose a few seconds for his crucial scene.

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! One of the strange and interesting things about editing a film is that we might have a take of a scene that’s by far the best one, where the performances are the most exciting, but it doesn’t fit into the flow of the film because it would stand out too much, so we have to use a less good one that works better. Really strange to have to make that choice. Wow, things even you can’t stomach, ha ha. You and love picked maybe the second best quote, I say. Love making Macron’s next interviewer ask him about his comb over, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, I was trying to figure out who in the world would hire cash_couple, but you’re right, a a Pre-Raphaelite painter, of course! Let me know how the Don Paterson book is. ** David Ehrenstein, I think Hockney is living here in France. He’s in the media here all the time. He’s busy painting awful landscape paintings of the French countryside and earning tons of money. That actor is either very dead or he pulled off one hell of a vanishing act. ** A, I like ‘Perfect Blue’. I’ve never watched ‘Deathnote’ strangely. My favorite anime I’ve seen in recent years is ‘Your Name’. I always highly recommend ‘Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space’. It’s insane. Nope, I haven’t seen Brent Corrigan act. Well, “act”. I did a blog post about David Decoteau. Me, I’ll always prefer films that could end up in the Criterion Collection when/if Criterion is in a daring mood. My weekend was okay, not eventful. I haven’t seen Zac yet. Quite possibly today. Oh, yeah, cool about the King Kong thing. My guess is we’ll start editing at the weekend at the earliest. Anyway, it’s not like we’ll be in prison when we start. Just seeing the acronym JT still makes my blood sort of boil. ** Jack Skelley, Skedaddley! Nice review! My ‘son’ knows his shit. Everyone, the great Jack Skelley’s legendary novelistic masterpiece ‘Fear of Kathy Acker’, very soon to be (re)published by Semiotext(e), got a excellent review that I recommend you read as an appetite whetter. Here. ** Misanthrope, I think I told you I had a root canal last year which involved three visits, tons of x-rays, two operations, etc., and the whole thing cost $30. Well, maybe 2/3 of them are brothers. I mean, it’s not impossible. ** Bill, I do have a bad habit of only including the bad escort reviews. But that’s mostly because the good ones are so boring. Didn’t know that Lane book came back. I never read that one. Off to the races I go. ** Darbs, Hi, Darbs! And now it’s Tuesday! How weird! I spilled very hot coffee on my hand the last time I was in Tokyo, and my hand swole up and looked like Mickey Mouse’s hand the whole time I was there. I may have mentioned that my grandmother was a taxidermist. She was always giving my family taxidermy animals, and our house was full of stuffed wolves and gila monsters and birds and lions and stuff. Cool revelation about your book maybe needing to be a comic book! How’s it going? No, I never read comics, or not since I was a kid. I made a graphic novel some years back with the artist Keith Mayerson. It’s called ‘Horror Hospital Unplugged’, and I’m actually really proud of it. Talk to you as soon as you see fit. xo. ** Steve Erickson, I don’t know if I’m in the mood to reassess Merchant-Ivory at the moment. But it’s an interesting idea. Yes, I saw that about the Udo Kier shebang at AFA! Fun! And you wrote about it! Everyone, The great Anthology Film Archives is doing a Udo Kier retrospective, which is obviously very enviable re: you NYC ensconced folks, and, anyway, Mr. Erickson wrote about it, so go find out what the scoop is here. Interesting about Rough Trade. LA’s great Amoeba had to move as well, but it seems just as great and pretty much the same in its new digs. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi. I’m A-okay. I’m pretty sure I’ll go see ‘Superstar’, yes. I’m a massive Disneyland obsessive, but fellow Disney obsessive friends warded me off seeing ‘Escape from Tomorrow’ for the reasons you state. So I skipped it. Being obsessive, that was hard though. Theme parks are possibly my biggest obsession. Well, them and home haunts. I’ll travel all over the world just to visit them. If I had to choose, I’d say Efteling in Holland is my favorite amusement park. It’s so great. It was a big influence on Disney -> Disneyland. You should go someday if you ever get the chance. Have a day of days! ** Kettering, Hi. Well, Zac and I are kind of like overgrown kids, so it is a little like what you imagine. Wait, you’re currently driving somewhere for two days? I hope it’s worth it, or I hope you like road trips. I sure do. ** Right. One of the ‘things’ that I have a thing for is scale models, so I decided to restore this old, old post about them. Simple enough. See you tomorrow.