Recently in Victoriana Category
One of my favorite Victorian/Math critique novellas, Flatland (complete text) is being turned into an animated flick (again.) With the vocal talents of Martin Sheen as A. Square [] and that Veronica Mars girl as Hex, a Hexagon (very classy lady.)
There is a site with a fun trailer here that sets up the story of class warfare and Dickensian ghost stories...
100 megs. 32 minutes. Fuck you youtube. Taking it down in a few days as to not moider Steven's/Stephen's bandwidth for all who seek the glory,
Remember when Sam and Dylan were so into Victoriana? I mean, there's even a catergory on this blog for Victoriana. What happened, guys? Remember how you were going to start dressing like Victorian gentlemen (who, by the way, only wear silk, anything else would be below them). You really fell off on that, huh? It's always disappointing to find that your friends became temporarily obsessed with something just becauseCostume National had a collection inspired by it.
Let's face it, you guys just love fashion and want to look like hot guys that all the chicks want to bang. I suggest finding out who makes this beautiful watch and starting there.
I noticed there's a Victoriana Catergory over there on the right, and it reminded me of this awesome site, Madam Talbot's Victorian Lowbrow. It features the work of Ashleigh Talbot; hand-illustrated pen-and-ink artwork that is just incredible. There is tons of work on this site, subjects ranging from vampires to Lizzie Bordon to sidehows to devils to tombstone art to witches to folk tales to skeletons. Every illustration can be purchased here in poster form. She's also got creepy little dolls she made and sells creepy old stuff, like vintage doll eyes, books about magic so old they're falling apart, and a stuffed and mounted piranha. A bit comic booky, a bit Edward Gorey, and bit graffiti artist, her stuff is exquisite. I'm totally jealous.
http://www.madametalbot.com/
It's visionary architecture week over at my one of my favorite wierd historical blogs, http://kirchersociety.org/, and boy are they posting some bad ass stuff. Be sure to check out the post on insane french architect Jean-Janques Lequeu. Check out the rest of the stuff too becuase, well its all frickin awesome.
In reference to Sam's Paganini post, I wanted to post about the badass composer Berlioz. In fact he loved the composer so much that he gave him an open ended 20000 frances. "My dear friend", wrote Paganini in his accompanying letter, "with Beethoven now dead who could revive him if not Berlioz?" Loved the motherfucker.
So if Paganini was the first rock star, that makes Berlioz the first rock stars idol. For more on Berlioz...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlioz
I'm a sucker for wierd historical connections and this is one of the best. It is a story of a chess playing automaton called the turk, (which was in fact a fake...) touched on the lives of Ben Franklin, Charles Babbage, Anton Mesmer and eventually led to Alexander Graham Bell seeking out Harry Houdini. It makes me feel like history is just one big club of famous figures who hung out together and acted like badasses. Sweet.
http://www.robmacdougall.org/archives/2005/01/turk_182.php
