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I wouldn’t be surprised if these have been linked all over but I hadn’t come across this site before, Czech posters from the Cold War period when promotional material for Hollywood films was home-produced. This makes for some surprising results as with the psychedelic confection for Dumbo shown above. Elsewhere there’s a Piranesian collage for [...]

Windy Day. More of Zdravkovic’s beautifully-coloured paintings at Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy‘s Flickr pages while the Adonis Art Gallery, London, has originals for sale. Nebojsa Zdravkovic was born in Belgrade in 1959, he trained in the best art schools and graduated with a Masters Degree. He is now a member of the Association of Serbian Fine [...]

Mary Ellen Bute. Last week I noted the appearance at Ubuweb of Mary Ellen Bute’s little-seen Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. News comes this week of an exhibition of her abstract films at sketch, London. sketch presents the first gallery survey exhibition of abstract film by Mary Ellen Bute (b. Houston, Texas 1906, d. [...]

New Byrne and Eno imminent | Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

Wordle is a Java-based web toy which generates random arrangements of words from any text input. This is the result after pasting in the opening of the “Sirens” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses and playing around with the colour and font settings. Fun, but as far as web-based toys go I prefer the abstractions of Bomomo. [...]

JG Ballard. Autòpsia del nou mil·lenni is an exhibition at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona which takes the work of everyone’s favourite Shepperton resident as its theme. The exhibition runs to November 2nd, 2008 and the website includes a blog where Spanish readers can explore the “Univers Ballard”. For Anglophones, curator Jordi Costa [...]

The Golden Apples of the Sun, the first release on Arthur Magazine‘s Bastet label has been one of my favourite compilations of recent years. Golden Apples was/is one of those landmark music anthologies that appear from time to time and seem to fix a moment perfectly as they capture a sudden flourishing of new music, [...]

Sex, rebellion, wealth… the unseen Hadrian

left: Hanging (2004); Judging (2004). San Francisco artist Jason Driskill paints, writes and creates his own digital artwork and video, often with himself as the main model. This multi-disciplined approach is a rare thing among artists predominantly concerned with gay themes, despite the example set by significant forebears such as Jean Cocteau and Derek Jarman. [...]

Amorality Tales | The NYT gets belatedly hip to Moorcock’s Elric.

The sculpture known as Antinous Mondragone (c.130 AD). The planned British Museum exhibition I mentioned in January, a major examination of the Emperor Hadrian’s life and influence, opens today and runs to 26 October, 2008. Hadrian means more to Britons than most Roman Emperors on account of the still-extant wall which bears his name, built [...]

Manhattan Skyline: I. South Street and Jones Lane, Manhattan. March 26, 1936. I love Berenice Abbott’s photographs of New York in the 1930s which capture the city in transition from a world of 19th century brownstones to the more familiar high-rise skyline. Dover Publications produced their own collection of her photos which I used as [...]

“It had not been able to support the dazzling splendour imposed on it…” It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that [...]

Arthur #30 descends from the aether shortly looking as splendid as ever. Impatient types or those outside the US (who can, of course, still subscribe) may download the PDF version here.

Over the rainbow | Marina Warner on The Wizard of Oz from book to screen to stage.

Bailarina (2007). A work from Walmor Corrêa‘s 2007 Memento Mori series. Previously on { feuilleton } • The art of Ron Pippin • Custom creatures • Polly Morgan, fine art taxidermist • Cryptozoology • Insect Lab • The art of Jessica Joslin • The Museum of Fantastic Specimens

A very modern emperor | Mary Beard on Hadrian.

Evening: Fall of Day by William Rimmer (1869–70). This curiously sexless figure is a good example of a work by an artist whose reputation may not have been as elevated as many of his contemporaries but who nonetheless created an image which speaks to future generations. Rimmer (1816–1879) was an American artist who produced a [...]

Delia Derbyshire, Doctor Who composer, has legacy restored

Lost tapes of the Dr Who composer | More Delia Derbyshire.

Ubuweb continues to come up with the very obscure goods. Mary Ellen Bute’s Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is the kind of thing you would have been lucky to see on television even in the days when non-Hollywood fare was screened regularly. Joyce is almost the definitive example of the unfilmable author although that [...]

The Hood Ornament Flickr pool features an impressive range of antique car mascots from the age when motor vehicles were emblazoned with mythological motifs and pedestrian safety was an afterthought. Most of them tend to be Art Deco-styled but a few display the florid elegance of Art Nouveau, a design trend that was being eclipsed [...]

Gas and Dust of the Lagoon Nebula by Fred Vanderhaven. The Pink Lagoon, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. This beautiful cosmic cloud is a popular stop on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius. Eighteenth century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged the bright nebula as M8, while modern day astronomers recognize the Lagoon Nebula as [...]

I wrote recently about John Selwyn Gilbert’s television play, Aubrey, an hour-long drama concerning the artist Aubrey Beardsley. That play was only screened once in 1982 and, like most one-off studio works of the period, is unavailable on DVD. John Osborne’s 1976 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray is a welcome exception to this [...]

Is it curtains for critics? | Blogging barbarians at the gate, thin end of wedge, sky falling, etc.

James Joyce by Wyndham Lewis (1921). Wyndham Lewis: Portraits is an exhibition running at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until October 19, 2008. I’m still slowly reading my way through Ulysses so here’s Lewis’s sketch of Joyce, a drawing I’ve always liked for its curving lines. The exhibition notes mention Joyce as one of the [...]

Library of the lost | Iain Sinclair on Wyndham Lewis.

Miller Blues Band/Mother Earth/Bukka White by Alton Kelley & Stanley Mouse (1967). I already had this piece roughed out before discovering that psychedelic artist Alton Kelley died last month, something that doesn’t seem to have been reported very widely. I posted the picture above last October then in January this year wrote something about San [...]

It’s not giving too much away to let fans of tentacular horror know that Frank Darabont’s film of The Mist, currently fogging up UK cinema screens, contains these questing things among its torments. The Mist is based on a 1980 novella by Stephen King and the film has a decent King pedigree for once, with [...]

CBS 73059; construction by Karenlee Grant, photo by David Vine (1972). A1 Timesteps (13:50) A2 March From A Clockwork Orange (7:00) B1 Title Music From A Clockwork Orange (2:21) B2 La Gazza Ladra (5:50) B3 Theme From A Clockwork Orange (1:44) B4 Ninth Symphony: Second Movement (4:52) B5 William Tell Overture (1:17) B6 Country Lane [...]

Der jüngste Tag (2004). At first glance Norbert Bisky‘s paintings aren’t so different from those of other artists with a similar complement of shirtless boys, until you notice curious details such as severed heads and limbs or hanging figures. I’ll be surprised if Dennis Cooper isn’t a fan. The bland style, rendering innocuous what might [...]

Thomas Disch, Novelist, Dies at 68

Banned TS Eliot portrait goes on show | Too phallic for 1938, apparently.

“What sort of criticism is it to say that a writer is pessimistic? One can name any number of admirable writers who indeed were pessimistic and whose writing one cherishes. It’s mindless to offer that as a criticism. Usually all it means is that I am stating a moral position that is uncongenial to the [...]

Making us all imbeciles | (UK) censors were once sent packing. But now they’re back.

No.06 | N 53°25’23.6″ E 09°52’50.2″ Nationalpark Harburger Berge, Germany (2005). It isn’t clear whether Lightmark refers to artists Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke or their work. Either way their photographs are truly stunning; go and look at them all. Previously on { feuilleton } • Maximum Silence by Giancarlo Neri

The enemy armada advances. More silent cinema only this is the genuine article, The Airship Destroyer, a short by Walter R Booth from 1909. The picture quality is remarkably pristine for the year and the film itself, showing England invaded by unspecified enemy airships, presciently anticipates the real invasion by German Zeppelins a few years [...]

In honour of the great news that a print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has been discovered containing scenes long-believed to have been lost, here’s a link to my favourite Guy Maddin film, The Heart of the World. Maddin’s short is six minutes of frenetic genius which references Metropolis in passing although it owes far more [...]

Back to the future | Yellow Magic Orchestra interviewed.

Photography by Antimo Cimino.