{ feuilleton }

Mouse Heaven: Minnie and Mickey.
Kenneth Anger’s paean to Disney rodent memorabilia, and one of his most recent works, turns up at the Grey Lodge. Mouse Heaven is a distinctly minor piece, an awkward mix of film and video which juxtaposes shots of mouse figurines with a song-based soundtrack. Scorpio Rising this isn’t but the editing […]

The paranoiac-critical gaze: Dirty Dalí.
I finally managed to see this fascinating documentary this week. Since my TV broke down some time ago I refused to waste money buying another, partly for the reason that films such as this are increasingly rare and most of them have been shunted to minority channel BBC 4 which […]

Harlan Ellison.
“You have somebody who is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.”
Neil Gaiman on Harlan Ellison, and so say all of us. The quote comes from a trailer for Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a new documentary about Ellison’s life and work which, as far as I can tell, has yet to […]

Jeremy Brett in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.
A few words of praise for Jeremy Brett is his role as the world’s greatest detective, for my money the definitive screen Sherlock Holmes. I’ve spent the past few weeks working my way through the complete run of TV adaptations that Granada Television produced from 1984 […]

Hardly a week passes without the religious right in America getting their knickers in a twist over some new iniquity, a condition so commonplace that new outbreaks are barely worth acknowledging. However, this week’s storm in a teacup caught my attention for being art-related.
If there’s one thing certain American Christians have in common with Muslim […]

Mitch Hewer, aka gay character Maxxie in the Channel 4 TV series Skins, as photographed by Kai Z Feng. Almost the Flandrin pose; maybe he can lose his jeans next time…
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

My battered 1973 Gollancz hardback. Cover illustration by David Smee.
It may be all Harry Potter starter homes crowding the imaginative landscape these days but the lush fields of the early Seventies bred a peculiar brand of wizardry and wild romance, something I was reminded of recently by reviews of a new compilation of psychedelic […]

Heavenly Love and Earthly Love by Giovanni Baglione (1602–1603).
Chiaroscuro\, Chia`ro*scu”ro\, Chiaro-oscuro\, Chi*a”ro-os*cu”ro\, n. [It., clear dark.] (a) The arrangement of light and dark parts in a work of art, such as a drawing or painting, whether in monochrome or in colour. (b) The art or practice of so arranging the light and dark parts as […]

Cormac McCarthy’s appearance on Oprah’s Book Club—his first television appearance ever—was screened last week. You can watch it online for free on her site although you need to register first. The interview is presented in chunks and only lasts for about twenty minutes but it was worthwhile for all that, even if it is chopped […]

Non-Brits may not be aware that The South Bank Show is a long-running arts programme (or “show”, as Americans prefer) and the last bastion of cultural broadcasting on the otherwise completely moribund ITV channel. Over the years the SBS has produced some great documentaries and this one from 1985 is particularly good, capturing artist Francis […]