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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 [...]

Sarah and Writhing Octopus (New Wave Series, 1992) by Masami Teraoka. Strange Flowers continues to push all my buttons. For a while now I’d been intent on writing something about the strange (unbuilt) temples designed by German artist/obsessive naturist Fidus (Hugo Höppener) but I reckon James has done a better job than I would have [...]

David Bowie’s cigaretted fingers and bulging silver crotch point the way to the future. This summer sees the fortieth anniversary of the Ziggy Stardust album’s release. The Melody Maker ad above can be found with a wealth of other Ziggy-related material at the very thorough Ziggy Stardust Companion site. For me the definitive artefact isn’t [...]

Illustration by Ermanno Iaia. Hard to believe that Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) is only now appearing on DVD in the UK. Arrow Films release a dual-format edition at the end of this month. • The week in perfume: Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez is reviewed by Emily Gould (“this is a [...]

Sin título (monstruas) (2008) by Marina Núñez.    • Salon asks Christopher Bram “Is gay literature over?” Bram’s new book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, is reviewed here. • Robert Montgomery is profiled at the Independent as “The artist vandalising advertising with poetry.” In addition to aesthetics, McCarthy noted a deeper link [...]

Untitled etching by Briony Morrow-Cribbs. • An interview with author Paul Russell whose new novel, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, concerns the gay brother of the celebrated Vladimir. • Joseph Cornell turns up again in a report at Strange Flowers about Locus Solus, an exhibition in Madrid devoted to the work of Raymond Roussel. [...]

Canon de Chelly — Navaho (1904) by Edward Sheriff Curtis. A few pictures from the substantial Flickr collection belonging to San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts. Many of these are views of the western states of the USA from a time when photographers were documenting the vanishing world of Native American tribes. A couple of [...]

Film and opera posters by Franciszek Starowieyski (see below). • At first glance, Jerzy Skolimowski’s new film, Essential Killing, sounds like Joseph Losey’s Figures in a Landscape (1970) reworked for our era of renditions, torture and war without end. The trailer is here; Sight & Sound liked the film and dismissed any Losey comparisons. The Quietus [...]

From the video for I See, So I See So by Broadcast. • RIP Trish Keenan of Broadcast. Tributes here and here. The Broadcast/Focus Group collaboration …investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age was The Wire‘s album of the year for 2009. Joseph Stannard interviewed Trish Keenan and James Cargill in October of that year. [...]

A poster design by Yusaku Kamekura. More here, via A Journey Round My Skull. First of all this week, there’s a new interview posted which I gave last year to Crows ’n’ Bones magazine. The replies skate around the usual subjects (Cthulhu et al) and you also find out why I don’t think design and [...]

Last man standing: what Cormac McCarthy made of my adaptation of The Road

Hollywood’s Favourite Cowboy | Cormac McCarthy and The Road.

American inferno | David Vann on the malign magnificence of Blood Meridian.

Cormac McCarthy wins lifetime achievement award | The PEN/Saul Bellow award.

Continuing from yesterday’s post, these nameless characters were sketches for a proposed comic strip that writer Jamie Delano and I were planning in the mid-Nineties. We had a feeling that the long-neglected pirate genre was due for a revival and talked about a revisionist take on buccaneering which would dispense with the Robert Newton antics [...]

left: Vintage International (US), cover design by Susan Mitchell (1993). right: Picador (UK) reprint (2008). After the Oscars success of No Country for Old Men it’s understandable that Cormac McCarthy’s publishers would want to reprint all his works. His books still appear under the Picador imprint in the UK and they’ve been reissued recently in [...]

A shot rang out… | Cormac McCarthy is “simply the greatest living novelist writing in English” says Jason Cowley. Absolutely.

Exploiting Sound, Exploring Silence | Sound design for the Coen Brothers.

‘We’ve killed a lot of animals’ | The Coens again, discussing That Film.

CM, JC & EC photographed by Eric Ogden. First an Oprah interview, now a feature in TIME; the famously reclusive Cormac McCarthy is almost becoming gregarious. The TIME piece is only a short sit-down between CM and the Coen Brothers which serves to promote the forthcoming film of No Country for Old Men but it’s [...]