Strange Things Are Happening, 1988–1990

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A NOTICE TO OUR PUBLIC…………
It’s now a shade over twenty years since Rolling Stone was launched, complete with a brave new broadside on its interests and purposes.

So we too now announce our aims and prejudices and strive to clear a path laying bare our hopes and inspirations. Strange Things will deal from the heart and feature items that we would wish to find on offer. Music, from whatever era, will always be the core, with in-depth studies of a sound or an individual, or a laugh and a picture whenever the situation arises. There will be discographies, reviews, rare photographs; there will be threads or themes across several issues or even, instead, a one off appreciation.

That aside, there will be literature, film and television; cult curiosities or mainstream geniuses. In short, the boundaries are limitless. Over the next few issues the tale of Greenwich Village will unfold; so too the life and work of Richard Brautigan. Frantic new pop will sit beside English folk-rock, the Silver Surfer will meet the San Franciscan scene and white Chicago Blues will rock with Thunderbirds. “Whatever Fits” is our new motto – we’re there wherever strange things are happening.

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The enigma of Desiderio

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Explosion in a Church.

“Enigma” or “mystery” are the words usually associated with “Desiderio” (or even “Monsù Desiderio”), due to years of misattribution that made two obscure painters of the same period with similar styles appear to be a single artist.

Until some fifty years ago, the identity of François de Nomé (ca. 1593–after 1634) was hidden by confusion with another contemporary painter from the Lorraine, Didier Barra (called “Monsù Desiderio”), whose work was at times disturbingly similar. In the 1930s, when the Surrealists were searching for forerunners, there was a revival of interest in Nomé, a painter most noted for fantastic architectures, eerily lit night scenes of the ruins of cities, and of catastrophic visions. He has continued to fascinate the modern mind for fifty years.

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