It is very fitting that I saw an article on Boing Boing about a new issue of Steampunk Magazine being released after my last post on the work of Bruce McCall. Nothing says Faux-Nostalgia like Steam Punk; that is the achingly sentimental yearning for a future that never happened. In case you don't know Steampunk is a genre where modern inventions like computers and the information age happened in the age of Steam, during the height of the Industrial Revolution. Check it out, it's a really great magazine.
London Rooftops, by Raphael-Lacoste
This is a genre that I have liked, mainly because Victorian London is such a rich place for the modern imagination to play. From Marry Poppins to From Hell the place is a fascinating place. Coal darkened skies cast long shadows on cobble stone streets lit by flickering gaslight. Every twist in the street could lead to a knife wielding barber or into the comforting embrace of the Dawes, Tomes, Mousely, Grubbs, Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, only Tuppence required as entry.
In my imagination Victorian London is a place of squalor on one side and great wealth and absurd tradition on the other. A place on the cusp of modernity, where aristocrats and plutocrats ruled over squalid slums. Not in excessive greed, more with excessive pomp and a certitude of their own righteousness. A time that seemed the sun would never set on the British Empire, then the trenches, artillery and machine guns of Verdun wiped that world away in one fell swoop. It was a tragic period in many ways, as the immortal works of Dickens and Shaw remind us, the distance between us and then is long enough for a bit of romanticism to flourish. And you can read more of that in Steampunk.
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on Apr 14th, 2009 at 6:33 am
just realized you had a blog.
it will be fun to check in on it every now and again. just looking back at several of your doodles!
on Apr 14th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Great, I hope you like the doodles, I need to figure a better way to get that organized. Thanks!
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on Apr 20th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
I hadn’t seen Steam Punk before, it’s brilliant.
There is something fascinating about Victorian England and I picture the same kind of thing as you Devlin. Did you like the look of the recent Sweeney Todd movie?
Obviously it was quite stylised in terms of colours but I thought it really captured the squalor and the wealth in quite a beautiful way.
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on Apr 21st, 2009 at 12:29 am
Jennifer, I really loved the look of Sweeny Todd, the acting was great, set design, costuming were fantastic. The musical portion I wasn’t that fond of, which is too bad, being a musical and all.
The opening credits were brilliant! In a gory sort of way. I am glad you mentioned Sweeny Todd that is sort of the archetypal modern view of that period. You are right about the colors, I love films where the art director is give more freedom with their color palate. One film set across the channel but in a similar time period as Sweeny Todd that used color in very interesting ways: Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. I guess the end of the 19th Century gave artists (impressionists) of the time and modern film makers a freer hand to experiment with color. Maybe it’s the absinthe and coal soot, we’ll blame (or praise) the green fairy and Burt the chimney sweep.