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Der Tod als Erwürger (1851) by Alfred Rethel.
It’s a fact (sad or otherwise) that a substantial percentage of my music collection would make good Halloween listening but in that percentage a number of works are prominent as spooky favourites. So here’s another list to add to those already clogging the world’s servers, in no […]

Mrs Amworth.
Another great artist of the macabre and supernatural, Virgil Finlay was the one of the most talented and imaginative illustrators of his generation. Unlike older contemporaries such as Joseph Leyendecker, who became wealthy producing elegant yet often bland advertising art, much of Finlay’s best work was for pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Amazing […]

The Masque of the Red Death.
Halloween approaches so let’s consider the finest illustrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, Irish artist Harry Clarke. Aubrey Beardsley once declared “I am grotesque or I am nothing” yet even his grotesquery—which could be considerable—struggled to do justice to Poe. Clarke, the best of the post-Beardsley illustrators, found a perfect […]

“For a while there I was criticized as being the vice president for torture. We don’t torture. That’s not what we’re involved in.” Vice President Dick Cheney, October 24th, 2006.
“In the “war on terror”, the US administration has resorted to secret detention, enforced disappearance, prolonged incommunicado detention, indefinite detention without charge, arbitrary detention, and torture […]

More happy news from the Great Banana Republic Across the Water: the Dixie Chicks, who faced earlier censure and death threats for daring to criticise Generalissimo President Bush and the war in Iraq, have had their ad for movie Shut Up and Sing stopped by NBC who say they “cannot accept these spots as they […]

Marc by Jean-Philippe Guillemain.

Q: What do you get when you cross analogue synthesizers, samples from obscure public information films, the graphic design of Pelican Books, Arthur Machen, HP Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, CS Lewis, Hammer horror, the Wicker Man and the music from Oliver Postgate’s animated films for children?
A: the CD releases by artists on the Ghost Box label. […]

What’s a Google Bomb? Wikipedia explains. The Daily Kos site has set out this week to Google Bomb vulnerable Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections, hoping to get the numerous scandal stories associated with the GOP registering higher Google rankings than the candidates’ official sites. All that’s required is the placing of the list shown […]

The event booklet, designed by Neville Brody.
William Burroughs’ reading in the city of Manchester took place on the 4th of October, 1982, at Factory Records’ Haçienda club, as part of the Manchester “edition” of The Final Academy, a Burroughs-themed art event put together by Psychic TV (Genesis P Orridge & Peter Christopherson) and others. A […]

At Wikipedia.
At 120 Years of Electronic Music.
At Peter Pringle’s site.