No, not the dreadful singer from The Monkees but he of the undersea locker and also the new villain in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Bill Nighy plays this splendidly-designed character, with the assistance of some CGI to get those tentacles working. I’ve still not seen the first film but the look of [...]
So Much Fire to Roast Human Flesh A benefit album curated by Josephine Foster “All profits from sales of this compilation will be distributed to specific counter-military recruitment and pacifist organizations and programs. We hope to assist them in their efforts promoting peace and non-militarism in the United States. “All of the musicians represented here [...]
Before Stanley Kubrick’s first self-financed feature, Fear and Desire, there came two documentary shorts: Flying Padre and Day of the Fight. The latter is probably the best, not least for the way it connects to the noir ambience of the period (boxing dramas such as Body and Soul and The Set-Up) and points towards Kubrick’s [...]
In the days before colour photography most magazine covers were created by illustrators (as the New Yorker still is), a situation that’s left behind a rich legacy of wonderful artwork often far more stimulating than any of the magazine contents. This site has a great collection of early Vogue covers that show an amazing amount [...]
Glass Stonehenge: Monument for the Year 2001 (1986) by D Bush and A Khomyakov. “The sheet of heavy glass laying on the row of stones is carrying the next row, etc.” Russian Utopia is a repository of 480 unbuilt architectural projects from the last 300 years of Russian history. I love seeing designs for unrealised [...]
Left and below: End Around (2006). Neon light, fluorescent light, and space. GRIFFIN is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by internationally acclaimed artist James Turrell. The exhibition will constitute the American debut of the artist’s Tall Glass series with three new works, along with End Around, a new work from his Ganzfeld [...]
One of my favourite contemporary designers, Jonathan Barnbrook, discusses design responsibility over at PingMag.
767 Fifth Ave. New York, NY 10153 The design seems to owe something to IM Pei’s Louvre Pyramid, among other things.
Photography by Luc Olivier.
This year sees the 20th anniversary of the publication of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. This landmark comic book, one of the few to deserve the designation “graphic novel”, remains a particular favourite of mine, and one that still excites today for its consummate command of the comics medium. The following is a [...]
Left: The Arch-Evil by Messerschmidt, c. 1770. The Artist Estranged by Lorenz Eitner “TO BE IN PRESSBURG and not to visit the famous sculptor Messerschmidt would be a disgrace to the connoisseur of art,” wrote a traveller in the early 1780s, still under the fresh impression of the “Egyptian Heads,” which the unpredictable artist had [...]
The current atmosphere of fundamentalist belligerence brings out my inner pagan. Happy Midsummer!
Christian Matzke writes to inform me that his short film, Dunwich, based on two HP Lovecraft stories, The Dunwich Horror and The Terrible Old Man, is in production, and that he and co-director Sarah Tarling used my Dunwich Horror adaptation as inspiration. I’m very pleased to hear this, of course, and look forward to seeing [...]
Or how to turn desert into downtown Los Angeles in only 14 years… 1991. 2005.
The Terminator The lubki (sing. lubok), simple printed pictures coloured by hand and often called broadsides, popular prints, folk prints, folk etchings, or folk engravings, are a vivid and fascinating page in the history of Russian culture. Folk prints were known in many other countries (in the Far East as early as the eighth century [...]
So 2.5 million people party in Brazil’s gay parade (below). Meanwhile, in that bastion of freedom to the north, it transpires that the Pentagon still regards being gay as a mental illness. Illegal wars, torture and imprisonment without trial are perfectly sane behaviour, no doubt. I wonder what the Pentagon thinks of the gay British [...]
From one record to another, as São Paulo shows North America a thing or two by staging the world’s largest gay pride parade, with an estimated 2.5 million people in attendance. More pictures and links at Made In Brazil.
‘Adele Bloch-Bauer I‘ (1907) by Gustav Klimt. A dazzling gold-flecked 1907 portrait by Gustav Klimt has been purchased for the Neue Galerie in Manhattan by the cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder for $135 million, the highest sum ever paid for a painting. The portrait, of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist and [...]
Skater Brian Joubert by François Rousseau.
The New York Times finally gets hip to the new folk/weird America thing. Arthur receives a passing mention. Summer of Love Redux By WILL HERMES Published: June 18, 2006 ASA IRONS of the Vermont musical collective Feathers is stroking his beard. It is formidable beard; a biblical beard. He and his band mates—who mainly operate [...]
As mentioned earlier, I designed the jacket for this excellent biography of Donald Cammell some time ago. The book is reviewed in today’s (London) Times by Barry Miles. Quite a performance review by Barry Miles DONALD CAMMELL: A Life on the Wild Side by Rebecca and Sam Umland FAB Press, £24.95 hardback, £16.95 paperback; 304pp [...]
(left) “Mechanical Head (Spirit of Our Age)” by Raoul Hausmann. ‘Dada’ at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took Over the Asylum By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN Published: June 16, 2006 NOW is as good a time as any for a big museum to take another crack at Dada, which arose in the poisoned climate of World War [...]
Finally, signed prints of some of the pictures from my book, The Haunter of the Dark, are available for purchase. More details in Oniomania.
Va-va-voom! Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Orson Welles’s great Touch of Evil (1958) both came at the end of the film noir cycle in the late 1950s. Both films look into the dark heart of American life during that decade, with Aldrich tackling nuclear paranoia and Welles dealing with racism towards Latin-Americans and political and [...]
Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, 1920. Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn. Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips. Horrid! And gold flushed more. A husky fifenote blew. Blew. Blue bloom is on the. Goldpinnacled hair. A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile. Trilling, trilling: Idolores. Peep! Who’s [...]
It was ten years ago today that the IRA exploded a 3,300lb bomb in the centre of Manchester. Pictures below show the destruction in Corporation Street and the way the street looks now after several years’ rebuilding. 200 people were injured as police tried to evacuate the area. I was several miles away at the [...]
Robert Fripp’s 1979 album, Exposure (DGM0601), was intended to form part of a trilogy together with Peter Gabriel’s second solo album and Sacred Songs, by Daryll Hall. Fripp produced all three albums and also plays on all three. As things turned out, the scheme was too much for “dinosaur” (Fripp’s term) record company executives, they [...]
“Gangsters is arguably the most unusual series ever shown on British television. Produced by BBC Pebble Mill between 1975 and 1978, what began as a tough and uncompromising attempt to depict Birmingham’s underworld had by the end of its run become a fully fledged work of…what?” What indeed… Along with The Prisoner, my favourite British [...]
“We don’t hear Sandy Denny on the radio these days. Her records, few that they are, don’t fit the current formats, don’t send the programmers into paroxysms, don’t have listeners voting in. She couldn’t be considered for Sixties, Seventies hit nostalgia; she never had hits. Rock album stations? Never sold enough albums. Even Nick Drake [...]
Shalimar (1978) by the incredibly prolific RD Burman. Fabulous soundtrack for a crazy Bollywood movie. 01 Title Music 2:51 02 One Two Cha Cha Cha 5:36 03 Hum Bewafa Hargiz Na Thay 4:11 04 Countess Caper (Music) 3:51 05 Naag Devta 4:19 06 Aaina Wohi Rehta Hai 6:28 07 Baby Let’s Dance Together 2:34 08 [...]
Pablo Picasso, Vallauris, France, 1954 by Arnold Newman.
This Heat: Out of Cold Storage (6 CD box and book), on ReR. The complete official lifetime releases of This Heat: This Heat, Deceit, Health and Efficiency, Made Available and Repeat, re-mastered and re-packaged, with a substantial (48pp) book of interviews, recollections, information, documents and photographs in a sturdy box, PLUS a new CD of [...]
Students at the University of Heidelberg take a break from their studies while smoking opium. From Before Prohibition: Images from the preprohibition era when many psychotropic substances were legally available in America and Europe. Via Boing Boing.
WAR IS PEACE Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949 “I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.” George W. Bush, June 18, 2002 George Orwell’s classic novel was published fifty-seven years ago today. There’s little reason to remind anyone of its prescience or the ubiquity of the neologisms Orwell [...]
Antinous Mondragone (c.130 AD). Antinous: the face of the Antique Main Galleries, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds Exhibition: 25.05.06 – 27.08.06 The Emperor Hadrian’s young lover was Antinous, a beautiful youth who drowned mysteriously in the Nile before his 20th birthday. The Emperor, in his grief, commissioned busts and statues of his beloved, and as the [...]
See Kley’s amorous centaurs, racing snails and battling ogres here. Die Belastungsprobe. The Engineer’s Dream.
June 26 Bassacs (2005) and others at the Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.
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