The city that never ends

This Monday doesn't begin with a brisk walk along the shoreline with a coffee in my hand and a backpack full of computer stuff as was intended.

Instead it begins by my desk with the glamour of flat traveling, fueled by left over chanterelle pizza, through a snippet of the vast and weird landscape of Swedish author, designer and artist Eric Ericson (info in Swedish - info in English).

Would you like to slowly cruise through the 21 meters long drawing that is his Panorama Pocket, click here.

From the back of the book (my translation):

"How big can a city get? If you go through Los Angeles, Tokyo or Kairo, you get a sensation that the city never ends. The city seems to continuously keep on going."

Mind you, this pocket is old news, it's from 2005 and as far as I know out of print.
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Fun for the Swedish speakers:
My friend Jocke keeps on banging out the best web.
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Announcement:
This weekend skerriethings.com was registered.
A new flag with the Ella Empire logo loosely pushed down into earth.

To be continued.
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Monday Hello!
It's a lot of Monday today.

Here be monsters

Pictures from Domenico Gnoli's Bestiaro Moderno o Cos' è un mostro (1968).

This is my laziest blog post to date, since all my images (but one) stem from the same blog post. If I encourage you all to visit the now inactive Giornale Nuovo, maybe I'll be spared an eternity in blog hell?

I love inspiration from the world of bestiaries, especially now after the discovery of of cryptozoology. - An illustrator in the realm of Edward Gorey, Lewis Carroll and Piero Fornasetti is a treat. - The Latin meaning of monster is to warn. The monster is not what you warn for, the monster is the warning for worse things to come. - These images remind me of this book that I crave since years back. - The images ties the blushingly pink world of map dragons together with the black and white of this blog.

See?
I had to do it.

(The images link to their original locations.)

HC SVNT DRACONES

Olaus Magnus' Carta Marina shows Scandinavia in a rather different light than the guidebooks normally do. Here be dragons, my friends, in the sea and in Lapland. In Finland there is a big snake problem and in the east the bears are climbing the trees.

Click to enlarge. The amount of detail is worthwiledly sweet.

Lindorm dearest

Sitting in the sun by the allotment gardens, we saw lindormen try to renew its grasp of the world. It's a good thing to see as it means good luck, and the Glenn and I weave manyfold plans.

Wikipedia my friend, tells me:

"The belief in the reality of a lindorm, a giant limbless serpent, persisted well into the 19th century in some parts. The Swedish folklorist Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius collected in the mid 19th century stories of legendary creatures in Sweden. He met several people in Småland, Sweden that said they had encountered giant snakes, sometimes equipped with a long mane. He gathered around 50 eyewitness reports, and in 1884 he set up a big reward for a captured specimen, dead or alive. Hyltén-Cavallius was ridiculed by Swedish scholars, and since nobody ever managed to claim the reward, it resulted in a cryptozoological defeat."

Cryptozoology: The study of hidden (legendary) animals.
Loveliness. Why didn't the study counsellor of my suburban school tell me of this career path?

Treat

Have you already watched Spike Jonzes beautiful short I'm here,
or can I bring this treat into your life?

It's free online for your pleasure.

PS. Over at Meryl Smith's blog, the woman who made the rats for I'm here,
I find the tackiest Halloween costume ever. Yes. It did make me laugh.

In my cave

Sitting in my cave, a-squat and at peace, I think of Daniel Ellsberg's advice to Henry Kissinger in the documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America:

"Henry, you're about to get a lot of clearances higher than top secret that you did not know existed. That's gonna have a sequence of effects on you.

First a great exhilaration for getting all this amazing information that you didn't know even existed. And the next phase is you'll feel like a fool for not having known of any of this.

But that won't last long.

Very soon you'll come to think that everyone else is foolish.
What would this expert be telling me if he knew what I knew?

So in the end you stop listening to them."

Great advice.
With information comes responsibility and power - or/and corruption and lies. Just take a pick.

On SVT Play until the 30th of June.

Today my thoughts go out to space

It seems the future made my yesterday hopes for "blunt, graphic, black and white" come true. What could be prettier than the 20's silent film style drama Jupiter takes yet another hit from Science News on Vimeo:

"The object in question"

- this tiny speck of light -

"hit Jupiter with a force equivalent to a few thousand nuclear bombs, and left a scar the size of the Pacific Ocean" BBC News informs.

Now imagine that.

(The image links to its original location.)

Informant

This morning I long for blunt, graphic, black and white patterns, I want repetition and nonsense. I content myself with this handsome graph from Information is Beautiful - good name - and look toward the future, for right now my vision is impaired by a tiny throbbing thunderbolt by my temple.

Stop it, you!

(The image links to its original location.)

Yes! We're so Swedish!

On this the National Day of Sweden I celebrate by reading the Färgfabriken exhibition Building Blocks magazine, an exhibition where children come up with ideas for houses and architect bureaus attempt to realize them.

(I blogged about this exhibition ever so slightly once before.)

Here are some ideas from Lili, Nina, Erykah, Miriam, Mustafa, Ketcho, Latavia and Jamal at Friars Primary in London:

Sweetie House: On top of the house there's a giant lookout cherry.

Big Globe House: The shape of the rooms are those of the continents. There is a cat called Broccoli and an Africa bed with an Egypt shaped pillow.

Balloon House: The windows blow bubbles.

Sing Out Mansion: "My dog is called Doodle doo, he's my slave and his fur collects information and finishes my homework."

Happy Sweden day to us all!

In my tree house

I can't remember how this post originally came about, but there's something very lovely fairytale:y with the idea of sleeping in your own safe homemade indoors wild nighttime forest.

Me and the Glenn sleep - he actually sleeps as I post - in a golden hallway under the cheapest of chandeliers, surrounded by shoes and doors.

Our forest.

I digress.

(The pics link to their original locations.)

Yayoi Kusama was right

"One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my imagination, I was frightened. I knew I had to run away lest I should be deprived of my life by the spell of the red flowers. I ran desperately up the stairs. The steps below me began to fall apart and I fell down the stairs straining my ankle."

- Yayoi Kusama has said Wikipedia tells me.

The invasion of the polka dots, and ultimately the annihilation of the world, has begun in the forest. Summer is here.