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Stop-Motion Happening with The Focus Groop is a new album by The Focus Group (now a Groop, apparently, à la Stereolab), and the next release on the Ghost Box label. Design, as always, by Julian House. • At Dennis Cooper’s: Sypha presents…Voyager en Soi-Même: a Tribute to JK Huysmans’ Là-Bas. Related: Henry Chapront’s illustrations for […]

The Constant Drumbeat of Terrible News (no date) by Allison Sommers. • Nadia Khomami on Gay UK: Love, Law and Liberty, an exhibition at the British Library. Related: Simon McCallum‘s potted history of LGBT characters on British screens. Elsewhere: writer and philanthropist Chuck Forester on gay sex in the 1970s. • The Panic Fables: Mystic […]

A mural for Forest For The Trees, 2016, by Yoshi47. • “Who’s the real cunt?” Andrew O’Hagan on the Daily Mail‘s hypocrisies, Little England bigotries and omni-outrage in a review of Mail Men: The Unauthorised Story of the ‘Daily Mail’, the Paper that Divided and Conquered Britain by Adrian Addison. • Deutschlandspiegel 198/1971: a short […]

The Future Vol.2 (2016) by f1x-2. • One of the notable things about the reaction to the original series of Twin Peaks was the way in which Americans were astonished that something so outré could be allowed on television. Here in the UK the response was a little more subdued; we had, after all been […]

Man, Myth & Magic #1, January 1970; McCall’s, March 1970. The announcement last week of the death of British character actor Geoffrey Bayldon prompted some discussion here about the typeface used for the titles of Bayldon’s TV series from the early 1970s, Catweazle. This was a humorous drama in which the actor portrayed a warlock […]

Threshold (2008) by Roku Sasaki. • A previously unseen interview with Angela Carter from 1979 in which she talks to David Pringle about her evolution as a writer, literary influences and genre fiction. • Among the highlights in the latest edition of Wormwood there’s Doug Anderson on Panacea by Robert Aickman, a “vast unpublished philosophical […]

For the past week I’ve been reading the Strange Attractor Press edition of England’s Hidden Reverse by David Keenan, a book that’s not only a handsome volume in its own right but is also an excellent chronicle of the post-Throbbing Gristle Industrial scene in Britain from the late 70s to the present. There’s too much […]

People or, indeed, things in the Los Angeles area may be interested in the Thing Group Art Show which opens this Saturday at Creature Features in Burbank. The gallery will be displaying prints and original artwork from the forthcoming The Thing: Artbook including a print of my own contribution. Some of the prints are for sale, […]

Table-Tipping Workshop at Rev. Jane’s House, Erie, Pennsylvania, 2014 by Shannon Taggart. • Canadian electronic musician Sarah Davachi talks to Erik Davis about analogue synthesizers, reverberating cathedrals, attention spans, and her ambient drone album All My Circles Run. • Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind may now be released by Netflix. (I’m restraining […]

Herald on Griffin (1516-1518) from The Triumphal Procession of Emperor Maximilian I series by Hans Burgkmair the Elder. • My design and illustration work for Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling continues to gain favourable comments, a novelty when reviewers often pass over the visual component of the books under their consideration. One of the most […]

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 […]

Transition H50 (2016) by Jessica Eaton. • One of my weekend posts in 2012 contained details about Taking Tiger Mountain, a low-budget feature film put together in 1983 by Tom Huckabee using footage originally shot in Tangier and Wales in the 1970s. Huckabee’s film is a strange “experimental” work of science fiction, based in part […]

The Masque of the Red Death (1932) by John Buckland Wright. • Thanks to MeadesShrine I’ve been working my way through Jonathan Meades’ television essays so this is timely: The Plagiarist in the Kitchen, an “anti-cookbook” by the man with forthright opinions. • “‘Decopunk’ deserves to be bigger than Steampunk,” says Sam Reader. I consider […]

Dream Animal (1903) by Alfred Kubin. • The week in Finland: A set of Finnish emojis includes icons for notable cultural exports such as Tom of Finland and Moominmamma. Tove Jansson’s creations have received fresh attention this month with the debut release of the electronic soundtrack music for The Moomins, an animated TV series made […]

Red Queen (no date) by Jo Brocklehurst. • Happy birthday to Kenneth Anger, 90 years old this week. In 2008 Anger was interviewed by Nicolas Winding Refn at the National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen. • “Fabeness be to the Auntie, and to the Homie Chavvie, and to the Fantabulosa Fairy”. “Church ‘regret’ as trainees hold […]

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 […]

Axiom Dub – Mysteries Of Creation (1996), a Bill Laswell production. Art by James Koehnline. • As noted earlier, the great Bill Laswell has made some of his sprawling back catalogue available at Bandcamp, news of which has prompted Vinyl Factory to put together a recommended listening guide. Judging by the comments I’m not the […]

Sidhe, the white people of the Tuatha Dé Danann (1954) by Leonora Carrington. • January brings a wealth of recommended-reading lists for the new year, together with the feeling that many of those lists are merely clones of each other. Not so the recommendations at Strange Flowers which also includes links to forthcoming events such […]

La femme et le pantin (1909) by Ángel Zárraga. • RIP John Berger. Berger’s essential TV series on art, Ways of Seeing (1972), is at YouTube and Ubuweb; “Such freedom is unthinkable today,” says series director Mike Dibb; the book of the series was designed by Berger and Richard Hollis; ways of seeing Ways of […]

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 […]