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Those who were wishing a few years ago that steampunk would crawl into a hole and quietly die must be gnashing their teeth at the way the sub-genre continues to flourish. (See Pinterest for examples from the increasingly wild world of steampunk fashion.) If anyone reading this is visiting Seoul in the next couple of […]

Figuras Miticas: Bailarin II (1954) by Leonora Carrington. • The 26th Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalists have been announced. Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam; Gay City: Volume 5 made the LGBT Anthology list, so congratulations to editors Evan J. Peterson & Vincent Kovar, and everyone else involved. I illustrated and designed the cover of that volume […]

Arriving in the post this week was a catalogue for a Maison & Objet exposition of design and decoration which includes one of my paintings among the listed “Inspirations“. The event was held in Paris at the end of January but I’ve been so busy for the past few of months I forgot to see […]

It wasn’t so very long ago that occult artist Marjorie Cameron (1922–1995) was visible only as a silent and enigmatic presence in films by Kenneth Anger and Curtis Harrington. Previous posts here have catalogued the resurrection of interest in her life and work which now includes a book of poems by husband Jack Parsons, embellished […]

Before he directed his first feature, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Alain Resnais had distinguished himself with a succession of short documentary films. His half-hour history of the Holocaust, Nuit et brouillard (1955), has always been the most prominent of these, although as a history it’s since been superseded by Claude Lanzmann’s exhaustive Shoah (1985). Toute […]

Last Year in Marienbad (1961). Via. In our age of cultural plenitude it can be salutary to remember the time when many things were easy to discover but often impossible to experience; albums, books, and especially non-American films could all-too-frequently exist as rumours, referenced but always out of reach. Two films in particular dogged me […]

An illustration by John Kettelwell for The Story of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (1928). • “The strain in everything I write, of not being taken with the bounteousness of humankind, was also the attitude of both my parents.” Jonathan Meades talking to James Kidd about his forthcoming memoirs. • 7 Trumps From the Tarot Cards […]

Éditions Gallimard, France, 1960. Yesterday’s post proved popular so it seemed worthwhile taking another look at the book which birthed Planète magazine. The main problem The Morning of the Magicians presents for an art director is how to encapsulate such wildly diverse contents in a cover design. To judge from the examples here, most people […]

Untitled etching by Etsuko Fukaya, 2005. • “By the time Scorsese met Powell, in 1975, the British director had fallen on hard times and was largely ignored by the UK film establishment.” A London office used by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is given the Blue Plaque treatment. • Ambient reminiscences at The Quietus: Wyndham […]

Something for people living in the Thames Archipelago formerly known as London (okay, it’s not that bad but give it a couple of years…): Paul Schütze adds to the list of his polymathic accomplishments with the launch of a book, a new series of prints, and a perfume (or aroma) at Maggs Gallery. Details below. […]

Follow the Leader (London, 2011) by Isaac Cordal. • “Brutalism is the decor of dystopian films, literature and comics, just as gothic is for horror.” Jonathan Meades‘ A-Z of brutalism. • Vitaly Shevchenko on the urban explorers of the ex-USSR. Related: Photos by Vitaliy Raskalov from the top of the Shanghai Tower. • Joe Banks […]

My thanks once again to Sidney Blackmore for sending me this new publication from The Beckford Society. Conversations with Beckford reprints in facsimile Cyrus Redding’s memoirs of William Beckford, a series of essays which were published in 1844 after Beckford’s death. Of particular interest to this folly enthusiast is a chapter entitled The Tower of […]

The Raising of Ganymede (1886) by Gustave Moreau. The story of the love between Zeus, king of the gods, and Ganymede, the handsome son of the Trojan king, goes back at least three thousand years and its roots disappear into the prehistoric neolithic. (more) Hylas (1846) by HW Bissen. Not for us only, Nicias, (vain […]

William Burroughs, New York, 1953. Photo by Allen Ginsberg. Lonely lemur calls whispered in the walls of silent obsidian temples in a land of black lagoons, the ancient rotting kingdom of Jupiter – smelling the black berry smoke drifting through huge spiderwebs in ruined courtyards under eternal moonlight – ghost hands at the paneless windows […]

Bum (1966) by Pauline Boty. • Eleanor Birne on Pauline Boty, “the only prominent female Pop artist among a generation of famous men”. Ken Russell’s Pop Art documentary, Pop Goes the Easel (1962), which features Boty, may be seen here. Two years later Boty was back with Ken Russell playing the part of the prostitute […]

Vimeo swarms with Burroughs-related films, many of which might not have been made had it not been for the profusion of recordings of the author reading his work. This short from 2010 is one of the better examples, a combination of live-action film and animation by Greig Johnson that crams a considerable amount of invention […]

Gerrit van Dijk’s combination of live-action sequences and rotoscoped animation is tangentially related to William Burroughs, it being Burroughs who popularised the deathbed ramblings of New York gangster Arthur “Dutch Schulz” Flegenheimer with a “fiction in the form of a film script” also entitled The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1970). Flegenheimer was gunned down […]

Something from 1994 I found in an old sketchbook. Ink on paper with no preliminary drawing. Happy birthday, Bill. To celebrate the Burroughs centenary I could have put together several very different mixes of Burroughs-related music—there’s been a lot of it, and he was blessed with some excellent collaborators—but in the end decided on a […]

Andre Perkowski’s Nova Express describes itself as “a 3-hour experimental epic adaptation of the novel by William S. Burroughs… with Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Phil Proctor, Peter Bergman, Jürgen Ploog, and Anne Waldeman”. The technique is relatively simple, if laborious: a large quantity of copyright-free film & TV footage, animation and visual material is matched […]

The Burroughs Centenary approaches, and this month sees the 30th anniversary of this Burroughs-related item. Decoder is a low-budget feature film from 1984 written by Klaus Maeck, and directed by Jürgen Muschalek (aka Muscha). Despite the constraints of budget and casting—many of the actors are amateurs—Decoder is truer to the techno-anarchist strand of Burroughs’ fiction […]