{ feuilleton }

The Frog with Rabbit Ears (1891). La matière de l’étrange, an exhibition of ceramic grotesques by Jean Carriès is currently running at the Petit Palais, Paris, through to January 27th, 2008. Carriès doesn’t feature in any of my books about eccentric or fantastic artists which I find surprising, his work is very peculiar by 19th [...]

Two dragonflies (1904). Art Nouveau insect jewellery by Lucien Gaillard (1861–1933). Perfume bottle (?) (c. 1923). Moth pendant (1900). And while we’re on the subject, a display of precious stones and metals has opened at London’s Natural History Museum in a new gallery they’re calling The Vault. Previously on { feuilleton } • Wesley Fleming’s [...]

The Dynamiter: More New Arabian Nights (Longmans, London; 1914). I’ve mentioned before that I’m a sporadic collector of the Tusitala Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s works, 35 small blue volumes published by Heinemann, London in 1924. I’ve found 15 of them so far and today turned up another one, volume 25, Virginibus Pueresque and Other [...]

Peter Reed from a 1977 photo shoot for After Dark magazine. The Flickr page this is from also has photos of the dancer by Robert Mapplethorpe (no longer…see below), while the After Dark pools have a wealth of scanned material ranging from the sexy to the iniquitous, with hair and fashion crimes aplenty. David Meyer [...]

“Everything about her was white.” Illustration by Edmund Dulac for The Dreamer of Dreams by Queen Marie of Roumania (1915). A major exhibition of British fantasy illustration opens at the Dulwich Picture Gallery this Wednesday, running to February 17th, 2008. Considering the huge resurgence of popularity in fantasy for children I’m surprised none of the [...]

The (Electric Seance) concept was inspired by the discovery that many early pioneers and inventors of electrical apparatus and radiophonic equipment believed that they could use their inventions to contact ‘the other side’. Scott Johnston This month’s issue of The Wire has Birmingham group Pram on the cover. Inside they discuss working with filmmaker Scott [...]

Refreshing The Wire | Redesigned website for the music mag.

top left: The Foreign Correspondent; right: Lifeboat. bottom left: To Catch a Thief; right: North by Northwest. Watching Alfred Hitchcock’s remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much this evening I realised I’d missed the director’s customary cameo appearance, and furthermore didn’t remember which scene it was supposed to be in. One of [...]

It’s always nice when something you’ve worked on turns up in the post and there’s been a double helping of that this week with the arrival of the Chaoticum CD and the catalogue for the Maison D’Ailleurs exhibition. Since both of these are either partly or wholly connected to HP Lovecraft, their simultaneous arrival is [...]

I posted the text of William Burroughs’ Thanksgiving Prayer last year as there wasn’t a copy of Gus Van Sant’s film version available anywhere. YouTube has now filled that gap. Previously on { feuilleton } • William Burroughs gives thanks • The Final Academy • William Burroughs book covers • Towers Open Fire

Mad about the boy | The Ancient Greeks having a gay old time.

Watching the Kenneth Anger DVDs last week (which really are superb, by the way, and should be on the Christmas shopping lists of anyone interested in underground cinema) had me hunting around for more of the kind of period imagery one sees in his Scorpio Rising (1964) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), imagery that’s erotic [...]

Cover painting: Holy Grove by Gage Taylor (1975). Book purchase of the week was this American collection of what we have to call “hippy art” (or “California Visionary Art”, as its creators preferred) published by Pomegranate Publications in 1977. I’d seen this circa 1979 and many of the pictures inside were used by Omni Magazine [...]

So then, where were we? There’s a few things to catch up with… First up, a recent design of mine for CD and vinyl has been released this month, Underwater Dancehall by Pinch, an acclaimed dubstep album from Bristol. I was very pleased at the way this came out, not least because of the excellent [...]

Okay, we’re back at last. There’s still a few things to sort out due to encoding issues that resulted from the database crossover–there may be stray ???s here and there for a while–but I’ll attend to those as I go along. I’ve never tried moving a database from one server to another before so I’m [...]

Hello Dolly (1969); The Sting (1973). Murder on the Orient Express (1974); Barry Lyndon (1975). Thanks are due for today’s post to Sebastiane who reminded me of the poster art that Richard Amsel produced through the Seventies up to the mid-Eighties. Together with Bob Peak, Amsel was a major exponent of the illustrated poster, a [...]

left: Jangal Mein Mangal (1972); centre: Shalimar (1978); right: Jaani Dushman (1979). Three examples of the art of the lurid from this site which has a huge selection of Indian poster art from the Fifties on. I still haven’t seen Shalimar but I’ve been playing the great soundtrack by India’s Ennio Morricone, Rahul Dev Burman, [...]

The magic kingdom | Edward James and Las Pozas again.

A few servings of iTunes jelly. I’ve spent the past week or so enjoying the delights of Leopard, the 10.5 iteration of Apple’s OS X operating system, but have only just noticed the new Visualizer patterns in the latest version of iTunes. I don’t use the Visualizer much, especially since the introduction of Front Row, [...]

A slight return to the Lovecraft art exhibition that’s now running at Maison d’Ailleurs, the museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys in Yverdon-Les-Bains, Switzerland. As mentioned last month, An Exhibition of Unspeakable Things: Works inspired by HP Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book includes my large digital work based on the lines “Mirage in time—image of [...]

Herbert List’s Beautiful Young Men | Photographic allure from the Thirties at Slate.

left: Museum Box #1; right: Arch Angel (no dates). Raccoon Kit With Lenses (no date). • Kimberley Brooks interview • Ron Pippin at Obsolete Previously on { feuilleton } • Custom creatures • Polly Morgan, fine art taxidermist • The sculpture of Christopher Conte • Pierre Matter’s cyborg sculpture • Cryptozoology • Insect Lab • [...]

Situla—Fassbinder Homage. Two samples from a Querelle-themed series based on Fassbinder’s film of Genet’s erotic fantasy. Exterface is Julien and Stéphane in Paris whose luscious, saturated tableaux make them seem a contemporary equivalent of James Bidgood, while the picture below may have been referring to the poster Andy Warhol produced for Querelle. Via MiamiGlen. Previously [...]

left: Histoire du Livre LES EMAUX BYZANTINS (“Byzantine Enamels”) AW Zwenigorodskoi, 1898. right: PUTESHESTVIE TSESAREVICHA NA VOSTOK (“Journey to the Orient of Tsarevich Nicolas II”), 1893–1897. Beautiful and very expensive rare books at Russianartandbooks.com. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The book covers archive

“Callie” and “Frank” by artist Elaine Benjamin, both of whom are for sale and come with their own biographical epiphanies. Previously on { feuilleton } • Dada at MoMA

Malcolm in the middle | John Patterson talks to Malcolm McDowell.