Misc.

https://fantasticmetropolis.com/i/wall interview by Michael Moorcock with Alan Wall

Look at the Romanesque ivories in the V and A. They really are astonishingly beautiful. Reliquaries, gospel covers, crucifixes, portraits of the saints: every item is pitched at a level of spiritual intensity, and fashioned by a craft that is only possible through spiritual intensity, which we now find remarkable, though to some extent it must then have been routine, in the way that an icon painter’s work is routine; in the way that daily meditation for a Buddhist monk is routine. Interesting how banal we have made the word routine. Routine merely implies the necessity of repetition. To be always craving the new is to be condemned to triviality. You can’t learn anything, in the arts or out of them, without routine.

Even the ivories made for pure leisure and enjoyment, like the Lewis chessmen, are beautiful.

Move on six or seven hundred years and check what’s on the ivory counters: billiard balls, shaving brushes, some expensive women’s combs. Elaborate bindings for expensive notebooks to be filled with expensive trivialities in exquisite copperplate script. Can’t help but make you ponder for a while on the gifts of time.
*
Commerce and Art? For me it always brings to mind an image of Holborn Viaduct, built to facilitate trade and public intercourse, supported by those cast-iron Victorian virtues, which passes over Farringdon Street. Farringdon Street then runs south to Ludgate Circus, a crossroads named for mythic King Lud, founder of London.

* Always liked Holborn Bridge. Something very comforting about the warmth of its red paint. That part of London is a bottomless quarry of memory and mischief.

Music [favourites]: Beethoven, Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt, Arvo Pärt, Gillian Welch.

 

https://fantasticmetropolis.com/i/aylett-interview

Rick Klaw: For our readers out there, can you explain vimana?
Steve Aylett: These are spaceships and weird flying machines described in the ancient Vedic literature of India. Some are described in quite a bit of technical detail, and the drawings which late-19^th^ and early 20^th^ century scholars created from these descriptions are quite beautiful. Strange spaceships with veined sails.