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Step Up (2014) by Angelica Paez. • Lots of attention this week for Kevin Martin whose latest album as The Bug, Angels And Devils, is out now on Ninja Tune. The previous Bug release, London Zoo (2008), was a fierce collection that stood apart from the Grime pack not only for its guest vocalists but […]

The saintly cephalophores may be reconciled to their martyrdoms but none of them decapitated themselves, unlike Chinnamasta, the self-decapitating Tantric goddess. The most common representations show her sitting or standing on a copulating couple while blood from her neck spouts into the mouth of her severed head and the mouths of her attendants, Dakini and […]

Martyrdom of Saint Denis, Saint Eleutherius and Saint Rusticus by Pierre II Mignard. Consider this an addendum to an earlier post about decapitations in art history. What I didn’t know then was that decapitated saints have their own “cephalophore” category if they’ve been recorded as going for a post-decapitation stroll; a case of “take up […]

The last time I wrote about the animated films of Alexandre Alexeieff & Claire Parker the only copies available were low-grade things on YouTube which have long-since vanished (one of many reasons I don’t embed YT players in these posts). Happily a new copy of The Nose (1963) has appeared that’s not only better quality […]

The world isn’t exactly starved of books about William Morris but William Morris and His Work (1899) is the first I’ve seen that gives an opportunity to study the creation of some of the Morris company’s florid textile designs. Those that follow obvious repeating patterns (like the bird designs below) don’t appear technically challenging but […]

American illustrator Everett Henry (1893–1961) created several maps based on classic American novels but The Virginian and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn lack the epic, globe-trotting qualities of Moby-Dick, one of the few novels where almost every scene takes place in a different part of the world. The linear nature of the voyage also aids […]

I probably should have posted this when the Monty Python reunion shows were in progress since the first time I saw it was as the support film for a screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1974. The Case of the Mukkinese Battle-Horn (1956) is one of the few film outings for The […]

A self-portrait by Nadia Wicker from her Projectie series. • “And boy, did that Rain Parade sleeve look cool with its picture of the insouciant band sitting in front of large hot-house (or glass palace), the sky behind them tinted a sickly shade of apocalypse pink…” Joe Banks on the Rain Parade’s finest moment, Explosions […]

Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964). A selection of the better ones. Last week I was rewatching Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates and was curious to see how it had been advertised. Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors is also known as Wild Horses of Fire (or Horses of Fire), after the novelette by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky […]

I’ve written a few things in the past about the covers of the gay pulps but decent source material—never mind the books themselves—has often been difficult to find. So it’s been good to stumble across the huge trove of covers at LibraryThing where diligent collectors have tagged and archived some very scarce publications. These are […]

Poème, scénario, interprétation, musique: Don Cherry Poème dit par Antony Braxton Deuxième flûte jouée par Karl Berger Réalisation: Jean-Noël Delamarre, Natalie Perrey, Philippe Gras, Horace Image: Jean-Noël Delamarre, Horace Montage: Natalie Perrey Photographies: Philippe Gras In which jazz trumpeter Don Cherry materialises in Paris to prowl the streets, joust with the gargoyles of Notre Dame, […]

If you’re an obsessive cineaste there’s a good chance you maintain a mental list of the films you’d like to see, the films you’d like to see again, and the films you’d like to see reissued on DVD. The vagaries of distribution and ownership often conspire to make older films fall out of sight even […]

Savoy • Savoy • Savoy: The first wave of book covers pinned to the Beardsley wallpaper of the Deansgate office. I often feel I’m in a minority in never having been desperate to see my work in a gallery. We are, after all, living in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (thanks, Walter), and the idea […]

Your Generation (1977) by Generation X. Design by Barney Bubbles. Continuing an occasional series about the work of particular artists or designers being used on record sleeves. El Lissitzky (1890–1941) is an interesting candidate in this area since his pioneering abstractions have greatly influenced subsequent generations of graphic designers. As a result of this you’re […]

Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall) (1946) by Joseph Cornell. • Having been a Bernard Szajner enthusiast for many years it’s good to see his music receiving some belated reappraisal. David McKenna talked to Szajner about his Visions Of Dune album (which is being reissued by InFiné next month), laser harps, The (Hypothetical) Prophets, […]

Searching for old photos of the Boi de Vincennes turned up some startling images from another exposition that I’d not come across before. The Paris Colonial Exposition filled a corner of the city’s largest park with a variety of exhibits and pavilions intended by the government of the day to show the colonial enterprise in […]

Emergency Third Rail Power Trip (1983) by The Rain Parade. Another minor piece of album-cover detective work. A couple of years ago I was looking for dirigible pictures for a steampunk book I was working on, and in the searching came across the original of the photo used on the cover of the Rain Parade’s […]

Searching around for artwork by Frieda Harris turned up a few examples I hadn’t seen before including the marvellous painting above which is unfortunately untitled and undated. Harris is very familiar to Aleister Crowley aficionados and those with an interest in the Tarot via her paintings for the Thoth Tarot deck, a project that she […]

More hallucinations without drugs. A short but sweet piece of fractal kaleidoscopy which isn’t far removed from the DMT visions in Enter the Void. I could watch a lot more of this. Via Boing Boing. Previously on { feuilleton } • The Flow III • Chris Parks

Not the musician but the book of “Essays in Light” published by Aleister Crowley in 1907. I’ve been familiar with this for years but only via the many reprints. It was only recently that I discovered the striking cover design of the first edition which, we’re told, was designed by Crowley himself during a hashish […]

Hallucinations without drugs: Deep water freediving exposes its practitioners to a form of narcosis, which induces several symptoms, among which a feeling of euphoria and levity that earned this phenomenon its nickname of “raptures of the deep”. The short film relates the interior journey of Guillaume Néry, the apnea world champion, during one of his […]

Untitled painting by Aleksandra Waliszewska. • Ben Wheatley’s forthcoming film of High-Rise by JG Ballard now has its own Tumblr. This will no doubt be spoilerific so I won’t keep on visiting but it’s there if you require it. More Ballardianism: “Worshipping the Crash” at BLDGBLOG. • “Aickman wandered through the sixties fantasy landscape like […]

The soul leaves the body. Drawn by intense light, the spirit discovers its twin self, its feminine side…its guide in the beyond. Inspired by the myths of the afterlife, this allegorical dance piece illuminates the soul’s quest by exploring movement and the human body in new and astonishing ways. An evocation of the origins of […]

More from the pose that keeps on giving. Big thanks to Lance for sending the photos above and below which identify the Flandrinesque figure from post no. 22 not as a sculpture from Hermosa Beach but a memorial statue in the Cimetière d’Ixelles, Brussels. The eternal hazard of web photos is the erroneous or missing […]

The Call of Cthulhu (1988): in the upper half there’s the big sun from Bob Peak’s poster for Apocalypse Now, in the lower half a radical reworking of Arnold Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead. In 1990, shortly after the first season of Twin Peaks had finished showing in the US, Video Watchdog magazine ran […]

Portrait of Jean Genet II (1950) by Leonor Fini. Artworks depicting Genet or based on his work are more plentiful than I thought. These are some of the better examples. It’s good to know that the great Leonor Fini was one of the earliest portraitists; in addition to painting two pictures of Genet she also […]

Flowers (1986) by the Lindsay Kemp Company. Photos by Maya Cusell. Weidmann appeared before you in a five o’clock edition, his head swathed in white bands, a nun and yet a wounded pilot fallen into the rye one September day like the day when the world came to know the name of Our Lady of […]

Querelle de Brest (1947) by Jean Genet. Cover design by Jean Cocteau. This weekend’s viewing was Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982) which is marvellous in its new Blu-ray transfer, and a great improvement on the muddy picture of the earlier DVD release. The film is still only the briefest sketch of Genet’s novel (although Genet biographer Edmund […]

Grendel Monster (2013) by Anna & Elena Balbusso. • Rick Poynor looks at the Guide de la France mystérieuse (1964), a fantastic (in every sense) doorstop of a volume whose collage alphabet by Roman Cieslewicz can be seen on the cover of Carnival In Babylon (1972) by Amon Düül II. • Boolean mathematics, Charles Howard […]

Twelve Months of Flowers: August (no date) by Jacob van Huysum. The eighth month in paintings. Alan Bennett is a British artist, not to be confused with the well-known British playwright of the same name. There is, however, a slight connection between playwright and Henry Scott Tuke: Bennett’s BBC film Portrait or Bust (1994) involves […]

left: Dummy head by Dick Smith for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1961); right: Cover art by Michel Atkinson (aka Michel) for The Unquiet Grave (1963). Cinema in the 1970s would have been very different without Dick Smith‘s makeup artistry. Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man (1970). Marlon Brando in The Godfather (1972). Linda Blair […]