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In which the sorely missed Arthur magazine returns to the world of print after a four-year slumber in Avalon. I was involved with the magazine from the outset so regular readers may recall many earlier posts about America’s most vital cultural bulletin: After a four-year sabbatical (faked death?), your beloved revolutionary sweetheart Arthur returns to [...]

Film and opera posters by Franciszek Starowieyski (see below). • At first glance, Jerzy Skolimowski’s new film, Essential Killing, sounds like Joseph Losey’s Figures in a Landscape (1970) reworked for our era of renditions, torture and war without end. The trailer is here; Sight & Sound liked the film and dismissed any Losey comparisons. The Quietus [...]

Laboratorium. More alchemical business which should be familiar to anyone who’s cracked open an occult history or two. Familiar as these illustrations often are, it’s only recently that we’ve been able to scrutinise their mysteries in detail thanks to the services of various libraries and online archives. These plates are from Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (1609) [...]

The Final Programme (1973). Philip Castle’s poster art implied the androgynous finale of Moorcock’s novel which the film itself evaded. They were musty-smelling 10p messages from the futuristic past, complete with cover designs (and content) that were unlike anything I’d seen before. I’m fairly certain that this was how I first came across Michael Moorcock, [...]

After last week’s post about Wilfried Sätty‘s illustrated Poe, I thought I’d follow it up with this 1970 interview from Man, Myth & Magic, a part-work publication which built weekly into a seven-volume “illustrated encyclopedia of the occult”. In the back of each issue there was a two-page feature, Frontiers of Belief, usually featuring more [...]

Red Quechquemitls (2010) by Sylvia Ji. • The Blackout Mix, a pay-what-thou-wilt 49-minute mixtape, “specially designed to accompany (or simulate) a human-plant interaction”. Art by Arik Roper, music selection by Jay Babcock. • An ode to the many evolved virtues of human semen: “the penis is capable of dispensing a sort of natural Prozac” says [...]

August 13th, 1967. More psychedelia of a sort although it’s arguable whether Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cosmic surrealism can ever be pigeon-holed so easily. Fabulas Panicas (Panic Fables) is a comic strip that Jodorowsky was writing and drawing for a Mexican newspaper in the late Sixties. The text is all in Spanish, of course, but going by [...]

I drew attention yesterday to the abraded look of the Taking Woodstock poster and mentioned a recent book design of mine which used a similar effect. This is that cover, created for a collection of Joe R Lansdale’s horror novels coming soon from Underland Press. Lansdale is known mainly for being the writer of the [...]

From Jay Babcock: One year ago I ran up my credit cards and borrowed money from friends and family in order to buy out my ex-partner in Arthur. Since then I have maxed out my personal and business credit cards to service that debt and to start up publication of Arthur again. We have worked [...]

LAist Interview: Jay Babcock from Arthur Magazine

Arthur #1–25. What is the vision behind Arthur? “The biggest underlying idea is that the culture drives everything else. Culture creates the metaphors and the landscape on which politics and economics and so forth take place. And so then you ask: What kind of culture are you making, or taking part in, or helping to [...]

The horoscope of Prince Iskandar, grandson of Tamerlane, the Turkman Mongol conqueror, by Imad al-Din Mahmud al-Kashi, showing the positions of the heavens at the moment of Iskandar’s birth on 25th April 1384. From the Wellcome Trust image collection. Considering the Wellcome Trust’s medical background, there’s a surprising amount of non-scientific material in its image [...]

James Campbell in The Guardian this weekend writes about the arrest fifty years ago of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for his publishing Allen Ginsberg’s paean to ecstatic drug use and gay sex, Howl and Other Poems. Ferlinghetti was arrested on charges of selling (or “peddling”, as these prissy turns of phrase always have it) literature likely to [...]

Glykon and Asmodeus by Alan Moore (1994). Alan’s lengthy 2003 interview with Arthur magazine is now online if you missed it the first time, wherein he “gives Jay Babcock a historical-theoretical-autobiographical earful about the connection between the Arts and the Occult”. And his equally lengthy piece on the history of pornography from Arthur #25 is [...]

Several disparate pieces of news worth mentioning recently, so here they are gathered together. • Some of my Lovecraft art is to be featured in a lavish limited edition volume from Centipede Press. Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft Centipede Press is now accepting pre-orders. A unique art book available in a cloth slipcase edition and [...]

JUST IN TIME FOR THE SCHOOL YEAR — ARTHUR MAGAZINE LAUNCHES NEW ALBUM TO BENEFIT COUNTER-MILITARY RECRUITING CAMPAIGNS “Let’s help give youth a balanced view of what military service REALLY means,” says Arthur editor Jay Babcock. With wars raging across the Middle East and prospects for peace dimming, the youth of America have wised up [...]

Long, Strange Trip for a Hypnotic Film By James Gaddy August 27, 2006 The New York Times IT TOOK 38 years, but Ira Cohen’s cult film, The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, which was first screened in 1968 at the high point of the psychedelic hippie head rush, is now commercially available. Given the close calls, [...]

The New York Times finally gets hip to the new folk/weird America thing. Arthur receives a passing mention. Summer of Love Redux By WILL HERMES Published: June 18, 2006 ASA IRONS of the Vermont musical collective Feathers is stroking his beard. It is formidable beard; a biblical beard. He and his band mates—who mainly operate [...]

Later today, boys and girls… Jay Babcock’s interview with Godsmack (a big band in America, apparently…) about the use of their music in ads for the US military caused quite a stir earlier this month after the band had a hissy fit and put the phone down on him. I posted the interview here and [...]

Boston band Godsmack are a bigger deal in America than here, their latest album having gone to no. 1 in the Billboard charts this week. The band like to play concerts for the US military and have allowed their songs to be used in recruitment ads in the past but seemed to get rather flustered [...]