{ feuilleton }

It’s unlikely that many people have been crying out for yet another Donovan compilation but that’s what EMI released earlier this month. Breezes of Patchouli (His Studio Recordings 1966–1969) is the prime psychedelic material, and for me looks tempting since I only have one of those albums. The latest Shindig! magazine gives the collection a [...]

One of A Pair of Peacocks (2012) by Feanne. • Jonathan Barnbrook reveals his package design for the new David Bowie CD. The Barnbrook studio has also designed the catalogue for the forthcoming V&A Bowie exhibition. And there’s more (don’t worry, it’ll be over soon): Jon Savage on When Bowie met Burroughs. • “Witches have [...]

Seven and Seven Is (1967), a single by Love. Celebrating seven years of this here blawg with a bunch of sevens. But first, the stats which (according to WordPress’s own meter) say “This blog was viewed about 2,300,000 times in 2012″. The caveat there is that many people visit these pages simply to see a [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

1. The Arms of the Art I have something of an obsession with the plates of the allegorical alchemical text known as the Splendor Solis, hence another post on the subject. This new entry is partly a bookmark for my own convenience, and also a pointer for those who keep arriving here searching for these [...]

Flannery O’Connor with one of her many peacocks. When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until [...]

Tuesday’s bookplate post included a rather mild example by Franz von Bayros (1866–1924), the greatest pornographic artist of his generation. Quite by accident I found a substantial collection of his work earlier this week that includes more bookplates. Von Bayros is far better known today than he would have been during his lifetime when his [...]

Flower Me Gently (2010) by Linn Olofsdotter. Yes, this is one of those lazy end-of-year retrospectives, a look back at all the artists whose work was highlighted in the weekend posts for 2011. Thanks to BibliOdyssey, Form is Void and 50 Watts for so often pointing the way. Blasphemous Rumours (2009/2010) by Ryan Martin. The [...]

A peacock. Photograph by Vidhya Narayanan. Posted at the Weird Fiction Review in the past week, The Weird (or Étrange) Questionnaire is Éric Poindron’s Weird (or Étrange) riposte to the Proust Questionnaire. I’d read the post, and seen Jeff VanderMeer’s answers to the questions, but wasn’t planning on answering it myself until Neddal Ayad wrote [...]

May–September 1970, Ladbroke Grove: Ken asked me what would most upset an English audience. Louis XIII dining al fresco, carelessly shooting peacocks on the lawn between courses. “Impossible,” said Ken. “How would you do that?” “Make some dummies, stand them on the lawn and detonate them.” “No, you’d have to shoot real peacocks. It wouldn’t [...]

Regeneration (2011) by Toshiyuki Enoki. Via. • HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the art exhibition that caused such a fuss last year at the Smithsonian Institution, opens at the Brooklyn Museum, NYC, on November 18th. Among the events associated with the show is a screening of James Bidgood’s lusciously erotic Pink Narcissus. David [...]

Cartouche with Macabre Symbols and a Hairy Skull (no date). Some macabre things for a macabre month. Jacopo Ligozzi was a Mannerist artist, and the date of his birth here is the most commonly cited one, some sources give later years. The excesses of Mannerism—distorted figures, sensational subject matter, grotesquery in general—used to be regarded [...]

More from American illustrator and designer Will Bradley (1868–1962) from the height of his Beardsley period circa 1894–95. These are from a collection by Edward Penfield entitled Posters in Miniature (1897) in which Bradley’s work receives more attention than some of his better-known contemporaries. Half of these designs are familiar, the rest I hadn’t seen [...]

The Peacock Room (1876–1877). More Japonism courtesy of the Google Art Project where it’s possible to pan around this view of Whistler’s Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery of Art. There’s only one view, unfortunately, it would have been good to see the reverse angle or, better still, a full panorama. The Princess from the [...]

Peacock Apocalypse (detail) by Julie Evans in collaboration with Ajay Sharma. Here at { feuilleton }, home of the curly bracket affectation, your correspondent is still surprised to find his postings the subject of a critique by Rick Poynor in the latest edition of Eye magazine, the international review of graphic design. I haven’t seen [...]

Every man and every woman is a star by Sveta Dorosheva. • Matt Taylor (illustration) with Gregg Kulick and Paul Buckley (design) provide new Penguin covers for John Le Carré. I love the look which seems inspired by Daniel Kleinman’s title sequence for Casino Royale even if it doesn’t quite suit the shabby world of [...]

Neutron Drip (2011) by Amrei Hofstätter. • The Lavender Scare is “the first feature-length documentary film to tell the story of the U.S. government’s ruthless campaign in the 1950s and ’60s to hunt down and fire every Federal employee it suspected was gay”. A film by Josh Howard based on the book by David K [...]

Cover design by James Iacobelli. The sequel to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases is published next week in the US but we have permission to write about it before the official release. The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities is a chunky hardback of 320 pages with a host [...]

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. There’s yet another frustrating jump in the numbers here, from volume 16 to volume 18 which covers the period from April to September 1906. Inside there’s more rectilinear interior design from the Wiener Werkstätte (above) as well [...]