Illustration by Frank Utpatel from the 1947 Arkham House edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. “Presently I got hold of myself a bit, and marked out a pentacle hurriedly with chalk on the polished floor; and there I sat in it almost until dawn. And all the time, away up the corridor, the door of the [...]
01 First (1985). I’ve linked to so many publications at the Internet Archive I’m a little surprised it’s taken me this long to find something featuring my own work. Abrahadabra was a Dutch periodical covering subjects familiar to readers of the esoteric magazines of the 1980s (RE/Search, Rapid Eye, etc): Industrial music of the TG/Psychic [...]
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 [...]
Arriving in the post this week, a Christmas gift from Supervert, a chapbook featuring a new piece of writing that purports to be the unauthorised biography of American artist/photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. The premise is that the facts of the real Witkin’s life are far too mundane to account for his extraordinary photo tableaux so Supervert [...]
Among the Doublevision video releases I was writing about earlier this month there’s a notable omission from those which have been reissued on DVD: Derek Jarman’s In the Shadow of the Sun was the seventh release on the label, the 1980 version of a film which was compiled in 1974 using footage from his earlier [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Seven-inch sleeve design by Savage Pencil for Wrong Eye (1990) by Coil. • “Can you use sensory deprivation to explore ESP? And then make music from the process?” Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt of Matmos decided to find out for their new EP. Related: Occult Voices—Paranormal Music, Recordings of Unseen Intelligences, 1905–2007 at Ubuweb. Details [...]
So here it is at last, the stars are right, etc. I had the idea for a Cthulhu calendar after I finished the Cthulhoid piece in January and realised I had about eight or more different representations of everyone’s favourite dreaming alien monstrosity. In gathering them together I’ve alternated between old and new works to [...]
Ankle Deep, a pyrograph by Robert Sherer whose work is showcased at The Advocate. • “Bertrand Russell wrote in 1932, during another period of economic distress, ‘that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial societies is quite different from what always [...]
Prettiest Star (2004) by Timothy Cummings. • I Want Your Love, a feature film directed by Travis Mathews catches my attention for having been described as “the gay Shortbus” even though (as the director notes) Shortbus was pretty gay to begin with. • I’ve always found Hans Christian Andersen’s story of The Tinderbox—a tale of [...]
Funeral In Berlin (1981) by Throbbing Gristle. British artist and musician Val Denham was mentioned in yesterday’s post so I thought it worthwhile following up with a selection of the painter’s record sleeves. Denham’s art stood out for me when I first saw the cover of Throbbing Gristle’s Funeral In Berlin album. For its visceral [...]
It’s taken me a while to see this but the long search for a genuinely psychedelic feature film is over. That’s genuinely psychedelic not in the debased sense of a handful of garish or trippy visuals, but in the full-spectrum expanded-consciousness sense for which Humphrey Osmond invented the term in 1956: I have tried to [...]
Salammbô by Alastair (Hans Henning Voight) from Harry Crosby‘s Red Skeletons (1927). Dover published a new collection of Alastair’s drawings in September. “A Taste of Honey showed working-class women from a working-class woman’s point of view, had a gay man as a central and sympathetic figure, and a black character who was neither idealised nor [...]
If Jean Cocteau had made a horror film it might have resembled George Franju’s dreamy and disturbing body-horror masterwork Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960). I’ve not been able to trace the artist for this poster but it’s a good example of the diluted Surrealism which was still prevalent in poster graphics at this time. If [...]
The Figure 5 in Gold (1928) by Charles Demuth. It’s a little surprising to find I’ve been doing this for five whole years yet here we are. Having seen a number of blogs call it quits at the five-year point I should note that I don’t feel quite that exhausted although maintaining a discipline of [...]
Kenneth Grant by Austin Spare (c. 1951). Kenneth Grant, writer and occultist, died last month but the event was only announced this week. He’ll be remembered for the nine fascinating occult treatises he wrote from 1972 to 2002, and for continuing the work of Aleister Crowley as head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a position [...]
Coil, circa 1984. John Balance (left) & Peter Christopherson (right). Photo by Lawrence Watson. The depths of the night sky Reflects in his eye He says “Everything changes And everyone dies.” Coil, Blood From The Air (1986) Yes, everyone dies but you don’t always expect it this soon, six years after the sudden loss of [...]
Cover painting by Edgar Froese. I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge or lustre or name. HP Lovecraft, The Haunter of the Dark, 1935. It’s become traditional to do this each Halloween so here we go again with another [...]
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 [...]
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