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Ai No Corrida poster design by Egil Haraldsen (2001). • “Back then, publishing an interview with Félix Guattari alongside little chats with rough trade and street walkers was unheard of — it still is for the most part.” BUTT on Kraximo, a queer Greek magazine of the 1980s. • 13 books for 2013: A selection [...]

Yet more revenant TV drama. Seems like everything turns up if eventually so long as you’re prepared to wait. I’d looked for this film a couple of times after writing about TV director David Wheatley. The Magic Toyshop (1987) was a feature-length Granada Television adaptation of Angela Carter’s 1967 novel, with Wheatley directing and Carter [...]

Japanese poster (1982). At The Quietus Steve Earles looks back at John Carpenter’s visceral and uncompromising The Thing which exploded messily onto cinema screens thirty years ago. It’s always worth being reminded that this film (and Blade Runner in the same year) was considered a flop at the time following bad reviews and a poor [...]

Halloween in Austin, Texas this year will look and sound like this. • “Blade Runner will prove invincible“: Philip K Dick’s letter of praise to the film’s producers. Related: one of the Blade Runner designers, Syd Mead, has recently styled New York’s Bar Basque and Foodparc. • “I decided to go into fields where mathematicians [...]

Kieran at Sci-Fi-O-Rama was in touch recently asking me to contribute a paragraph about a favourite Roger Dean picture for this feature about the artist. The following splurge of polemic was the result, something I’d been intending on writing for a while. Since so many words would have overwhelmed the other contributions it’s being presented [...]

These days I still wear T-shirts but only under other clothes, I’m no longer happy with the T-shirt as an item on its own. (It doesn’t help that my arms are so skinny they always look awkward depending from a pair of short sleeves.) The irony is that I’ve spent a lot of time over [...]

Stalker (1979). Among the new documentary films being shown at the Sheffield (UK) Doc/Fest is Igor Mayboroda’s Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side Of “Stalker”.  Behind the unwieldy title there lies an exploration of the troubled genesis of one of my cult artefacts, Andrei Tarkovsky‘s 1979 science fiction film, Stalker, a personal adaptation by the [...]

The definitive Blade Runner | The final director’s cut.

Forever Changes (1967) by Love. Art by Bob Pepper, design by William S. Harvey. Following yesterday’s post about Philip K Dick covers (and Erik Davis’s appraisal of the DAW cover), I decided to check out Bob Pepper’s work a bit more and it quickly became obvious I should have joined the dots with this particular [...]

The Bradbury Building, 304 South Broadway, Los Angeles. This looks like an old photograph but it actually dates from 1989 and comprises part of the Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990 archive that the UCLA Library has recently made public. The Bradbury Building (constructed in 1893) was one of the few places I insisted [...]

I am an artist. Now the pictures are not made by artists. They are made by companies and produced by multinationals. The art in the picture is lost. Now when artists make pictures, they make them for museums. But museums, for me, are cemeteries. Alejandro Jodorowsky. More from the About-Bleeding-Time Dept. (emphasis on “bleeding” in [...]

The oft-despised concept album of the 1970s doesn’t come more demented than 666, a double disc set by Greek group Aphrodite’s Child released in 1972. The group featured Vangelis and Demis Roussos among their number (Roussos later turned up on Vangelis’s score for Blade Runner) and this is about the only thing they’re now remembered [...]

Continuing the Blade Runner theme, many cities are increasingly coming to resemble Ridley Scott’s vision of future Los Angeles. This is Shanghai now, from a Flickr pool. If anywhere is going to look like Blade Runner in 2019, it’s a good bet it’ll be a Chinese city.

Blade Runner concept painting by the great Syd Mead. Several reliable news sources are reporting that Blade Runner is to finally receive a decent DVD release. In September of 2006, Warner Home Video will release a restored and remastered version of the Blade Runner 1992 Director’s Cut for a special four month limited release, in [...]