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The Time Machine (1960). The turning over of the calendar from one year to the next makes this day the ideal moment to write something about HG Wells’ celebrated story. Having re-read The Magic Shop before Christmas I decided to refresh my reading habit—lapsed these past months due to pressure of work—by revisiting more of [...]

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (2012) by Lesley Barnes. She also has peacock wrapping paper. The most popular post of the year was one I made last December featuring all the artists whose work had appeared throughout 2011 in the weekend links posts. (The surge of views occurred early in January when it was [...]

The Old Weird Britain of folk tales, folk songs and pagan ritual has been a recurrent theme for the past couple of months so here’s another post on the subject. The music of Phil Legard’s Xenis Emputae Travelling Band is steeped in British folklore but mostly sidesteps songs in favour of drones and improvised soundscapes. [...]

Thanks to Callum for pointing the way to a beautiful set of playing cards designed by Picart le Doux. • Of cigars and pedants by Houman Barekat, in which Vladimir Nabokov has a problem with Henry James. Tangentially related: Post-Punk’s Nabokov: Howard Devoto and Magazine, live from Berlin, 1980. (Given A Song From Under The [...]

Here in Britain there’s no Thanksgiving so turkey as a seasonal meal is a Christmas dish. Turkey also has another meaning which the OED can supply: 6.6 U.S. slang. a.6.a An inferior or unsuccessful cinematographic or theatrical production, a flop; hence, anything disappointing or of little value. This post concerns the latter—turkeys for the turkey [...]

The ideal follow-up to yesterday’s post would have been David Wheatley’s 1979 film for the BBC’s Omnibus series dramatising the life and works of the Brothers Grimm. This week was the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Grimm’s Children’s and Household Tales; I’ve never seen Wheatley’s Grimm film which—for the moment—remains unavailable. There [...]

Yet more revenant TV drama. Seems like everything turns up if eventually so long as you’re prepared to wait. I’d looked for this film a couple of times after writing about TV director David Wheatley. The Magic Toyshop (1987) was a feature-length Granada Television adaptation of Angela Carter’s 1967 novel, with Wheatley directing and Carter [...]

The Magic Shop (1964). I discovered this TV adaptation by accident while looking for something else (more about the something else tomorrow). The Magic Shop is a 45-minute drama directed by Robert Stevens in 1964 for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Writer John Collier adapted a script by James Parish that’s loosely based on the short [...]

Another gem at Ubuweb, and nothing to do with JG Ballard’s SF story of the same name, Piotr Kamler’s Chronopolis (1983) is a 50-minute animated science fiction film, albeit science fiction of a much more abstract variety than one usually finds in cinema. I’m generally exasperated by the way film and TV SF does little more [...]

It’s those calendars again. I’ve had requests recently to put my Lewis Carroll-themed psychedelic designs back on sale but the past few months have been pretty work-heavy, and since I deleted the original product pages it was going to require some effort to make new ones. This weekend I finally found the time to tackle [...]

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (2012) by Lesley Barnes. She also has peacock wrapping paper. Big thanks to Dennis Cooper for including this blog in his favourite music, fiction, poetry, film, art & internet lists for 2012. Lots of good company there. One benefit of end-of-year lists is the way they suggest things to [...]

Arriving in the post this week, a Christmas gift from Supervert, a chapbook featuring a new piece of writing that purports to be the unauthorised biography of American artist/photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. The premise is that the facts of the real Witkin’s life are far too mundane to account for his extraordinary photo tableaux so Supervert [...]

Older illustrated books often suffer at the hands of owners or a certain breed of iniquitous antique dealer who razor out their colour plates in order to frame them as prints. The Internet Archive has two copies of The Year’s at the Spring; An Anthology of Recent Poetry (1920) edited by Lettice D’Oyly Walters, and illustrated [...]

Details from Caresses aka The Caress (1896), the most famous painting by Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff which can now be explored in detail at the Google Art Project. Caresses was one of Khnopff’s more enigmatic works although the term is a relative one when it comes to an oeuvre in which enigma is the default [...]

Yesterday’s film was no doubt approved by Ry Cooder in part because of this early Les Blank documentary, a 30-minute portrait of blues singer Lightnin’ Hopkins and his friends and neighbours in Centerville, Texas. The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins is dated 1968, and captures a group of aging blues musicians and a community for [...]

Someone told me once they didn’t like Ry Cooder, a sentiment I’d place in the same category as saying you don’t like, say, chocolate: as an attitude it’s within the bounds of possibility but it requires a considerable effort of sympathetic imagination to appreciate. Let’s Have A Ball is a 90-minute Ry Cooder concert film [...]

It remains a fact that the most popular posts here are the sex-related ones. The post about Clayton Cubitt’s Hysterical Literature project continues to rack up views despite having been written about at greater length on far more popular sites; this weekend Facebook users were flocking to see the phallic plaster casts (why now?). One [...]

Heartsick (2011) by Kelly Durette. • Now that Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch album is out and causing the usual consternation, the spotlight-shy singer/composer has been doing a surprising amount of promotional interviews. Simon Hattenstone talked to him for the Guardian at the end of last month; this week it was John Doran’s turn at The [...]

Something spotted whilst browsing issues of Photoplay magazine at the Internet Archive, a photo showing the US dirigible ZR1 drifting over the Cosmopolitan Studios in 1923 during the filming of Yolanda. I don’t doubt that the ZR1 really did fly over Hollywood although it looks here to be at an odd perspective (it’s also being [...]

This week’s posts reminded me that I have a copy of the HR Giger Tarot set published by Taschen under their Evergreen imprint in 2000. The set is Taschen’s reworking of Giger & Akron’s Baphomet Tarot der Unterwelt set from 1994, and I recall this being one of the last things Taschen created with Giger [...]

Walpurgis (1969) by The Shiver. An inevitable follow-up to yesterday’s post, this continues an occasional look at album cover art by people better known for their work elsewhere. Giger’s album covers fall into two categories: those with some direct involvement from the artist and those which are merely reuses of pre-existing paintings. The former category [...]

Another artist documentary only this time the artist concerned is a full participant and co-creator. Giger’s Necronomicon was filmed from 1972 to 1976 and functions as a taster for the first book collection of the artist’s work, also called Giger’s Necronomicon, which was published a year later. JJ Wittmer was the co-director. The paintings are [...]

I’m still playing catch-up with the generation of gay artists who came to prominence in the 1970s or early 1980s. Many of them worked for American magazines which were seldom seen over here: both Mel Odom and George Stavrinos provided illustrations for Blueboy while Stavrinos was popular enough to be given the cover treatment from [...]

Susan Sontag, Tony Curtis and Stan Brakhage all shared an appreciation for the work of American artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972), and all appear in a 44-minute documentary Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box made by Robert McNab for the BBC in 1991. Susan Sontag was also the subject of one of Cornell’s collages, something she [...]

Self-portrait by Jon Jacobsen from his Home series. • Steven Arnold: Cabinet of Curiosities is “a retrospective exhibition of this groundbreaking yet under-recognized queer artist at the ONE Archives Gallery & Museum in West Hollywood. The exhibition celebrates Arnold’s radical imagination, presenting many of his tableaux vivant photographs alongside never before exhibited drawings, sketchbooks, paintings [...]

Photo by Kate Simon. Howard Brookner’s 86-minute documentary Burroughs: The Movie (1983) has been mentioned here on several occasions, and with good reason since it’s the best film anyone has made or will make about William Burroughs and the Beat circle he emerged from in the 1950s. Brookner’s documentary is a model film biography, opening with [...]