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Black Sun (1953) by Alexander Calder. • “But Berlin Alexanderplatz transcends its genre elements, largely because of Döblin’s deep lack of hope about what can be expected of human beings.” Adam Kirsch on Alfred Döblin’s Berlin. • “I occasionally dream of finding books that do not seem to exist (yet), and sometimes remember their titles,” […]

The Miracle (Genet’s Dream) (2001) by Delmas Howe. • “Zachary Lipton, an assistant professor at the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, watched with frustration as this story transformed from ‘interesting-ish research’ to ‘sensationalized crap’.” Oscar Schwartz on how the media gets AI alarmingly wrong. • The Aesthetics of Science Fiction: what does SF […]

As promised last week, here’s my latest cover for Megan Derr’s gay fantasy series, Tales of the High Court. The first book wasn’t intended to have this many sequels so my initial cover design also wasn’t planned as something that might be a template for later volumes. The previous books (below) borrowed bits and pieces […]

Poster by Roman Cieslewicz for the 1963 Polish release of Vertigo. Via The Hitchcock Zone. • Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is sixty years old this year. It’s a film I’ve always found to be preposterous and very over-rated, despite the considerable strengths of its cast, production, etc; consequently, any claims to its being an unalloyed masterpiece […]

Czech poster for Robert Bresson’s Une Femme Douce (1969) by Olga Polácková-Vyletalová. There’s more about Polácková-Vyletalová’s striking poster designs (and this one in particular) at Mubi. See also the Polácková-Vyletalová collection at Terry Posters. • “I heard that in Japan the tendency is to hammer down the nails that stick out. I think that Haruomi […]

Poster for Steppenwolf (1974), a film directed by Fred Haines (his only one) based on the novel by Herman Hesse, and starring Max von Sydow and Dominique Sanda. No artist or designer credited. • “…in her 20s, she heard two elderly folk singers and was struck by their ‘gentle dignity’. It cemented her own philosophy: […]

London in 1898 was the most populous city in the world, a metropolis of “four million souls” as Arthur Conan Doyle continually reminds us in the Sherlock Holmes stories. The stereotypical representation of London in the 19th century is of a city wreathed in fog but the reality was closer to the dense smogs that […]

Taro Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun on the cover of an Expo ’70 guide. • Last week I was watching the restored print of Howard Brookner’s excellent William Burroughs documentary, Burroughs. Among the later scenes are shots of the writer visiting Britain in the autumn of 1982 for the Final Academy events, a visit also […]

TIME, June 21st 1968. Cover by Roy Lichtenstein. • “Forget the democratic processes, the judicial system and the talent for organization that have long been the distinctive marks of the US. Forget, too, the affluence (vast, if still not general enough) and the fundamental respect for law by most Americans. Remember, instead, the Gun. That […]

Le Répit (La Mort allaitant une chauve-souris) (1895) by Valère Bernard. • Playhouse 90 presents Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. An American TV production from 1957 starring Boris Karloff, Roddy McDowall, Eartha Kitt and others; introduced by Sterling Hayden. It’s bizarre. Acidemic goes into the detail. • Erik Davis talks to occult writer and […]

• “In the mid-Seventies the influential stop-motion animators, Stephen and Timothy Quay, embarked on a series of dark graphite drawings, conceived as imaginary film posters. They kept their first autonomous art project hidden for decades, allowing only a few glimpses to transpire in some of their animation classics such as Noctura Artificialia and Street of […]

Nocturnal Rome — Trajan’s Column (1934) by MC Escher. • Many eulogies this week for the late, great Mark E Smith. Strangers to the abrasive splendour of The Fall could do worse than begin with Geeta Dayal‘s list of ten best albums. At YouTube there’s a playlist of The Fall’s Peel Sessions, from 1978 to […]

Love is a Martyrdom (1965) by Stephanie Godwin. See Joscelyn Godwin’s Flickr pages for more. • David Shire’s synthesizer score for Apocalypse Now was the first music recorded for the film but was abandoned when Shire was fired due to other commitments. 39 years later, his score has been released by La-La Land Records. • […]

The Invisible World of Beautify Junkyards will be the next release on the Ghost Box label in March 2018. Design by Julian House. • Tantalising discovery of the week was Alphons Sinniger’s Eno (1974), a 24-minute film about post-Roxy Music Brian Eno which shows (among other things) the recording of Here Come The Warm Jets. […]

Art by Twins of Evil for the forthcoming blu-ray from Arrow Academy. • Images (1972), the film that Robert Altman made between McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Long Goodbye, is the closest the director came to outright horror. A disturbing portrait of mental breakdown, with Susannah York in the lead role, and photography by […]

From Doré (see last week’s post) to Robida, and a set of drawings I hadn’t seen before. Albert Robida is best known today for the illustrations from his books which present a humorous look at life in the future. But he was also a working artist, and enough of an expert on medieval French architecture […]

Arcadia-24 (1988) by Minoru Nomata. • Dark Entries and Honey Soundsystem Records release a video of edited moments from gay porn film Afternooners to promote the release of the film’s electronic soundtrack by Patrick Cowley. The album, which is the third and final collection of Cowley’s porn soundtracks, is out now. • Emily Temple looks […]

Night Out, Shibuya, a photograph by Yoshito Hasaka. One of a remarkable series. • Rixdorf Editions is a new publishing venture from Strange Flowers’ James Conway which “…aims to cast light on an era which is misunderstood to the extent that it is thought of at all. I speak of the German Empire, specifically the Wilhelmine […]

Male Nude, Leg Up (1952) by Horst. From a series of photo prints at Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art until 5th November. • At Bandcamp: “Tuareg guitar mixed with traditional rural folk”: Eghass Malan by Les Filles de Illighadad; “Pan dimensional spacecraft hover over ancient pyramids on worlds undreamed of”: Lemurian Dawn by Memnon Sa. • […]

Holger Czukay by Ursula Kloss, from the cover of Czukay’s Moving Pictures (1993). (The painting is a pastiche of Holbein’s portrait of Georg Gisze.) • RIP Holger Czukay. The obituaries have emphasised his role as the bass player for Can, of course, but he was just as important to the band as a sound engineer […]