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The Green Knight Arrives by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Part of a series based on the theme of Gawain and the Green Knight. • RIP Don Buchla, inventor of the Buchla Electronic Musical Instrument (or simply Buchla to aficionados). The early Buchlas were produced contemporaneously with the Moogs but never achieved an equivalent popularity. Morton Subotnick was […]

Palm Night (2016) by Nick Liefhebber. • “Gortner includes reference to the little known Hollywood ‘sewing circles’ (code word for lesbian communities) of which Marlene became a part. This group included Ann Warner, Lili Damita, Claudette Colbert, and Dolores del Río.” Walter Holland reviewing Marlene, a “novelization” of the life of Marlene Dietrich by CW […]

Avebury Kite (2006) by David Alderslade. • “Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann, author of Mephisto, was one of the first in Germany to write gay novels and plays.” Walter Holland reviews Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann by Frederic Spotts. • The Pale Brown Thing, a shorter/alternate version of Fritz Leiber’s supernatural […]

Sphinx (2015) by Lupe Vasconcelos. • I’ve been reading my way through Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels for the past couple of weeks, and may well progress to some of her other books once I’m finished. Highsmith had a long career so there’s a lot to read on the web. Catching my eye this week were […]

Parkland (2012) by Dean Monogenis. • “The Story Behind the Planet’s Most Influential Road Map of ‘Weird Music’“. Gustavo Turner investigates the enduring influence of The Nurse With Wound List. Related: A Discogs list of links to all the NWWL discographies, and a recommended listening guide by Ultima Thule. • Tokyo Melody: Un film sur […]

One of ten new stamps designed by The Chase for the Royal Mail’s Shakespeare celebrations. • “I basically had this problem with bombast and intensity. And I started to feel like it was a nuclear arms race.” Tim Hecker talking to Rick Moody about loud sounds, Icelandic elves and Minimalism. Hecker’s new album, Love Streams, […]

The Gathering (2015) by Kristen Liu-Wong. • Tom of Finland’s house in Echo Park, Los Angeles, “is a trove of homoerotic masterpieces“. The house and its former owner are celebrated in Tom House, a book by Michael Reynolds with photos by Martyn Thompson. Related: Tom House exposed by Rizzoli. • “Underlying the heightened nature of […]

Mars (variant design): one of three new posters for NASA by Invisible Creature. • “If the point of Sade’s work was to marry sexual frustration and release to the practice of interpersonal violence, he could confidently gaze out on the landscape of our popular culture and declare it a fait accompli.” Hussein Ibish on The […]

1: The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) by Salvador Dalí. 2: Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943) by Salvador Dalí. 3: The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: Challenging Constructs of Mind and Reality (1971) by Joseph Chilton Pearce.

The Royal Mint celebrates 400 years of William Shakespeare with new £2 coins. The “Tragedies” design gives Britain the Gothiest coin of all time. • “I hate successful films that travel on an easy wave of ‘good taste’: for me, that is simply anti-culture.” Cinematographer Luciano Tovoli talks to Alexandra Heller-Nicholas about photographing Dario Argento’s […]

Tyrrhenian Sea and Solstice Sky by Danilo Pivato. Danilo Pivato’s marvellous photograph of the December sun was NASA’s winter solstice photo of the day for 2014, although it actually dates from 2005. (And they’d also posted it twice before.) The multiplicity of heavenly bodies makes me think of the Hipgnosis cover for Harmony of the […]

Fathomless Sounding (1932) by Gertrude Hermes. • Over at Greydogtales (“weird fiction, weird art and even weirder lurchers”) I talk about art, design, the writing of this blog, and I also reveal more about my ongoing Axiom project. The latter currently stands at two novels, a couple of half-finished stories and a few pieces of […]

Les Hanel I by Pierre Molinier. There’s more at The Forbidden Photo-Collages of Pierre Molinier. • Western anti-hero Josiah Hedges, better known as Edge, was the creation of prolific British author Terry Harknett. The famously violent Edge novels, credited to “George G. Gilman”, were ubiquitous on bookstalls in the 1970s. They were Harknett’s most successful works, […]

Behind by Lisa Wassmann. • “Without space art, nobody would know what Mars would look like.” Artist David A. Hardy talking to Nadja Sayej about a life spent painting the cosmos and—briefly—working for Hawkwind. Visions of Space, an exhibition of astronomical art, is at the Wells & Mendip Museum throughout November. • Mixes of the […]

Scott Bartlett was the director of OffOn (1967), one of the key works of psychedelic cinema, and an earlier example of experimental film making use of video effects. Similar effects may be seen in Bartlett’s follow-up, Moon 69, which subjects footage from the NASA archives to a variety of processing techniques, especially solarisation. The copy […]

Given the year it was made, Crystals (1968) has unavoidable, if inadvertent, psychedelic connotations, especially when you see these iridescent forms blooming against vivid backdrops. The same can’t be said for the music that accompanies Herbert Loebel’s photography, however, so once again I’d recommend watching this with a soundtrack of your own choosing.

Beautiful Void: Holy Void II (2015) by Andy Diaz Hope. • “Feeling like a woman. Looking like a man.” Rick Poynor on the cover art for Nightclubbing by Grace Jones. Related: A One Man Show, Jean-Paul Goude’s essential film of Jones’ 1982 tour where many of the songs are better than their album versions. • […]

No Passing (1954) by Kay Sage. • More Lovecraftiana: She Walks In Shadows, an illustrated all-woman Lovecraftian anthology, will be published in October. Related: “The octopus genome and the evolution of cephalopod neural and morphological novelties“, a study that’s been filtering through the press as “Do octopuses have alien DNA?” • “The right to ‘subject […]

This is the kind of Victorian book I enjoy a great deal, something that might be regarded as a Wunderkammer in paper form: not an encyclopedia, and not a science text-book but containing the kinds of articles you’d find in both. The chief attraction is the engraved illustrations, of course, although the articles themselves are […]

A City on Pluto (1940) by Frank R. Paul. Related: Paul’s predictions about life on other planets. • 23 Skidoo’s Peel Session from September 16th, 1981. Only 18 minutes of music but I’m thrilled for its being unique material that’s never been given an official release. There are many more Peel Sessions at the uploader’s […]