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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 […]

The House by the Canal (1945) by Algernon Cecil Newton. • RIP Tobe Hooper. Black Hole Reviews recounts the troubled history of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in Britain, a film that was given a short-lived cinema release then banned for 20 years. Elsewhere: Who sampled from Tobe Hooper’s films? Tucktonia, a model village whose […]

It’s safe to say that I wouldn’t have paid much attention to illustrations from a toy catalogue from 1880 if I hadn’t recognised the pictures from their fleeting appearance in Jan Svankmajer’s Jabberwocky (1971). One sequence in Svankmajer’s animated film has a battalion of toy soldiers emerging from the sleeves of a boy’s sailor suit. […]

Presenting my cover for the third book in Megan Derr’s gay fantasy series, Tales of the High Court. Since this cover follows a pattern established with the first book in the series, The High King’s Golden Tongue, I’ve posted volumes one and two below for comparison. In my post about the series last year I […]

Battistero della Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo (2017) by Mattia Mognetti. • “Mumbo Jumbo: a dazzling classic finally gets the recognition it deserves.” Jonathan McAloon on Ishmael Reed’s unique novel being reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic. • Amanda Gefter talks to Donald D. Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, about […]

Piazzetta San Marco by Moonlight (no date) by Friedrich Paul Nerly. • RIP Heathcote Williams (Guardian obit, NYT obit): poet, playwright, actor, artist, anarchist, stage magician, and no doubt many other things besides. Being a product of the counter-culture, and one of Britain’s foremost anti-establishment writers (his polemics against the Royal Family were unceasing), Williams […]

Art Nouveau is never far from these pages or from my own work, as has been the case this week when work-related research turned up this recent addition to the scanned books at the Internet Archive. Hector Guimard is best known today for his entrances to the Paris Metro not all of which survived the […]

Dandelion (2009) by Tomoko Kashiki. • “Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style guide, lightly modernizes them, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to take advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.” • Obscenity and the Arts, a previously […]

An urban scene from Yotsuba&! by manga artist Kiyohiko Azuma. • The resurgence of interest in Alice Coltrane’s music is very welcome even if she joins for the moment the list of those artists (usually women: see Leonora Carrington) tagged by editors as “lost”, “forgotten”, “unrecognised”, etc. Alice Coltrane was only ever lost if you weren’t paying […]

Die Buecher der Chronika der drei Schwestern (The Books of the Chronicles of the Three Sisters) is a German fairy tale set down by Johann Karl August Musäus, and presented here in a 1900 edition illustrated by Heinrich Lefler and Joseph Urban. Lefler and Urban were brothers-in-law who worked as set designers as well as […]

The Critics (1927) by Henry Scott Tuke. • Geeta Dayal talks to ambient musician Midori Takada about Through The Looking-Glass (1983), an album being reissued this month by Palto Flats/We Release Whatever The Fuck We Want Records. • Jacob Brogan reviews The Abominable Mr. Seabrook by Joe Ollmann, a graphic biography of writer, occultist, explorer […]

Presenting my latest cover for Angry Robot books, and the third cover I’ve done for Carrie Patel. The Song of the Dead is a sequel to Carrie’s two previous novels in the Recoletta series, The Buried Life and Cities and Thrones. For the new volume I maintained continuity by keeping the architectural frame while changing […]

Wasted Alice (2017) by Sonia Lazo. • Brian Eno: “We’ve been in decline for 40 years—Trump is a chance to rethink.” An equivocal headline, and the usual misinterpretation from the hard-of-thinking, prompted Eno to issue a clarification. More Trumpery: Jonathan Meades wonders what kind of wall “The Lout” might want to build. Related: almost all […]

Fly Carefully (1969) by Stanislaw Zagorski. • Video of Tuxedomoon live in San Francisco, Rotterdam and Paris, 1983 (or try this copy), and a late-night German TV broadcast from 1985. The first Tuxedomoon album, Half-Mute, has been reissued by Crammed Discs with an accompanying album, Give Me New Noise: Half-Mute Reflected, featuring cover versions of […]

Untitled (2011) by Roger Hiorns. Photograph by Kate Green. • “Most surprising and troubling of all is the status of a series of new paintings, also depicting naked male bodies. The figures look archaic, painted using latex and molten and folded plastic. They have sex with each other and with themselves. Extra penises float about, […]

At the mountains of madness, fragment I (2014–16) by Céli Lee. • Spirits of Place, edited by John Reppion: new writings from Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir, Vajra Chandrasekera, Maria J. Pérez Cuervo, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Kristine Ong Muslim, Dr. Joanne Parker, Mark Pesce, Iain Sinclair, Gazelle Amber Valentine and Damien Williams. • “Are we […]

Visit in Night (1951) by Toshiko Okanoue. • Rhythms of the World: Bombay and All That Jazz; a 60-minute BBC documentary featuring Trilok Gurtu, L. Shankar, Don Cherry, Alice Coltrane, Zakir Hussain and others. The quality of the full-length copy is a little rough so it’s worth noting the six-part version here. • Adam Scovell […]

The Expectation (1936) by Richard Oelze. • Richard Oelze, 1900–1980 is an exhibition of paintings and drawings at the Michael Werner Gallery, London, which runs until January 2017. More Surrealist works by Oelze may be seen at But Does It Float and Ubu Gallery. • Will McMorran on the problems of translating the Marquis de […]