{ feuilleton }

An amazing tabletop synthesizer with some fantastic demonstration videos here. Via Boing Boing. The reactable is a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular [...]

left: Sperman (2007) by Cary Kwok; right: Here Cums the Spider (2007) by Cary Kwok. NSFW, as if you need to be told. It’s almost a commonplace of contemporary art that there are so many artists around today, producing such a volume of work, that any newcomer (as it were) has to find a niche [...]

Björk: ‘I had a little bit of cabin fever.’ Talking about Volta.

Design by Germano Facetti with a detail from Europe after the Rain by Max Ernst. Is this the start of a new meme? Ace Jet 170 features a number of posts about the history of Penguin and Pelican book cover design. (I won’t link to any specific page as the site is full of other [...]

40th Street Shop by Jack Delano (1942). Locomotive Dreams by Jack Delano (1942). Just two of many marvellous antique photographs available from the Juniper Gallery that can be viewed in high-res versions. A variety of prints are available from each picture.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1937). • The legacy of Guernica (the event) • Echoes of Guernica (the painting)

Björk‘s sixth studio album is released on May 7th and features contributions from Antony Hegarty and Chris Corsano, among others. Previously on { feuilleton } • Trinity rendezvous • Chris Corsano again • Chris Corsano • Jack Rose in Manchester

So I finished The Road finally, relishing its ash-strewn bleakness at my own sluggish pace. It’s worth noting (since I missed the event) that McCarthy’s novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for best fiction earlier this month, and deservedly so, I’m sure. As if that wasn’t enough, we’re also awaiting the bizarre spectacle of the [...]

By an odd coincidence my work manifests in two different forms in Finland this month. Above is the Finnish reprint of ‘King Squid’ by Jeff VanderMeer, part of his City of Saints and Madmen fantasy novel which I designed as a self-contained work. SF magazine Tähtivaeltaja has produced this as a supplement to their latest [...]

Lindsay Anderson‘s masterpiece, If…., is finally given a DVD release in the UK in June. Anderson’s film—about the dramatic resistance to authority of three boys at an unnamed British school—was made in 1968 but I didn’t get to see it until (as I recall) 1977. I was 15 at the time and feeling increasingly desperate [...]

The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger (1533). Vanitas by Franciscus Gysbrechts (no date).

How the Spectrum began a revolution 25 years of home computing.

More French weirdness, and another Bertrand… The Necrophile (dedicated to Sergeant Bertrand) (1964–65). The Eagle, Miss… Adam and Eve. • A site about Jean Benoît • Another site about Jean Benoît And speaking of the lonesome necrophile, Bret Wood’s film, Psychopathia Sexualis, features a shadow puppet rendering of the case of Sergeant Bertrand and his [...]

A monthly global image composite from Nasa’s Earth Observatory project, showing topographic and bathymetric shading.

Guest List: Patrick Wolf Patrick’s favourite things du jour.

Live Performance in the Age of Supercomputing Robert Henke discusses his art.

The first question has to be “Bertrand who?” but you won’t receive an answer here since information is scarce (see below). Bertrand’s erotic surrealism first appeared in the late Sixties, going by the dates in collections of his work. Some of his paintings and drawings crept into the underground mags of the period then turned [...]

If only Philip K Dick was still around John Patterson explains.

A solidly gay day for secondhand books with the discovery of two relatively obscure items by gay artists. Philip Core is probably more well-known as a writer than a painter, author of The Original Eye: Arbiters of Twentieth Century Taste and the masterful Camp: The Lie that Tells the Truth (both 1984 and both out [...]

We tend to think of cinema as quintessentially 20th century and a modern medium. But the modern medium was born in the 19th century, of course, and the heyday of the Silent Age (the Twenties) was closer to the fin de siècle Decadence (mid-1880s to the late-1890s) than we are now to the 1970s. This [...]

High-res scans of The Voynich Manuscript on Flickr. Via Boing Boing. Previously on { feuilleton } • The Codex Seraphinianus • 20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips • The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones • Surrealist cartomancy • The Atlas Coelestis of Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr

Yellow Submarine art direction and character design by Heinz Edelmann. No dedicated website, unfortunately. XTC (among others) swiped the style for the sleeve of their excellent 1989 album, Oranges & Lemons. Update: Edelmann is ambivalent about being known as the Yellow Submarine designer but he talked to Baltimore’s 21st Century Radio about working on the [...]

The Cliff House in a storm by Tsunekicki Imai (c. 1900). The Cliff House Project has a wealth of information and ephemera about the late Victorian incarnation of the Cliff House restaurant in San Francisco. There were several Cliff Houses but the one built by Adolph Sutro in 1896 was the most spectacular, partly for [...]

Time, June 21st 1968. Cover by Roy Lichtenstein.

“Freak out baby, the bee is coming!” The L.S. Bumble Bee, a single by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Decca F 12551, February 1967. Mistakenly included on some Beatles bootlegs in the Seventies, about which Dudley Moore commented: Regarding The L.S. Bumble Bee, Peter Cook and I recorded that song about the time when there [...]

left: event poster by Hapshash & the Coloured Coat. right: International Times 14-Hour Technicolor Dream special issue, April 1967. The ICA goes psychedelic, baby. Lucky Londoners get to gorge themselves on this lot next Saturday. 2007 is a year of many anniversaries: twenty years since Acid House, thirty since the release of Never Mind The [...]

Return of the local bookshop An antidote to the watering-down of Waterstone’s.

More monumental relics from the former Soviet Union. In March last year I posted some pictures from a film by Takehiko Nagakura who used CGI to show how St Petersburg would look if Vladimir Tatlin’s enormous Monument to the Third International had been built. Architectural megalomania didn’t abate with the collapse of that project and [...]

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man is a long-overdue look at one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in rock history. The film will explore his music and career, from his early days as a jobbing bass player on the Sunset Strip, to mega-stardom in Britain’s swinging 60s pop scene as lead singer of The [...]

Not before time. Thanks to Jay for the tip. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: TIM BUCKLEY My Fleeting House Documentary featuring rare performance and interview footage spanning his entire career My Fleeting House is first-ever DVD collection of performances of Tim Buckley. This essential DVD features rare live performances from various television shows and interview footage spanning [...]

Mid-Sagital Skull Bisection (2007). Hand casted acrylic resin with vintage watch parts. Articulated Singer Insect (2005). Antique mechanical parts and vintage Singer sewing attachment. Lots of other great creations at the artist’s site. Via Boing Boing. Previously on { feuilleton } • Pierre Matter’s cyborg sculpture • Insect Lab • The art of Jessica Joslin

No, not Pirates of the Caribbean III although that film will be with us soon and is certain to contain at least one of the above ingredients. The dubious delights of exploitation cinema have been put back on the map recently by Grindhouse, the double feature from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, but garish melodrama [...]

Arthur II: The Resurrection The Once and Future Magazine.

Gary Oldman as Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears (1987). Ken: At least you can say you’ve sat in the same chair as TS Eliot. Joe: Yes, I’m never going to wipe my bum again. Gay playwright Joe Orton receives a welcome renewal of attention this month with a showing of films at the [...]

top: Apocalypse Now (1979), Camelot (1967). bottom: The Comfort of Strangers (1990), The Black Stallion (1979). Bob Peak was one of the top Hollywood poster artists of the Sixties and Seventies. His site has a fairly extensive gallery which includes sketches and unused artwork. Movie poster art now is invariably the product of anonymous Photoshop [...]

Cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier produced the cover for this new novel. See a larger copy at Toby Litt’s site. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The book covers archive

The Seven Words: “It is finished!” (1912). Photographer and publisher Fred Holland Day (1864–1933) enjoyed the iconography of Easter enough to stage his own crucifixion tableau with friends, as well as producing a series of seven pictures based on Christ’s last words, of which the final poignant number is shown above. His 1898 crucifixion is [...]

The Sopranos begins its final season tonight. Below, Annie Leibovitz swipes from Delacroix in an earlier cast photo for season 5. The Barque of Dante by Eugène Delacroix (1822).

Blogs mark the first 10 years

Chrome: Firebomb single (1982). I seem to have spent the past twenty-five years introducing people to Chrome. The world remains stubbornly resistant to their splendour, so here we go again… Chrome were a San Francisco rock band born in the mid-Seventies, primary members Damon Edge and Helios Creed, ostensibly part of the punk thing but [...]