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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 [...]

Thanks be to YouTube for once more resurrecting moments of underground cinema which would otherwise be very difficult to see. Wavelength (1967) is Michael Snow’s experimental masterwork, a 45-minute zoom across a New York loft that ends on a photograph of waves that fills the screen. This recipe for ennui is not without incident: we [...]

One of A Pair of Peacocks (2012) by Feanne. • Jonathan Barnbrook reveals his package design for the new David Bowie CD. The Barnbrook studio has also designed the catalogue for the forthcoming V&A Bowie exhibition. And there’s more (don’t worry, it’ll be over soon): Jon Savage on When Bowie met Burroughs. • “Witches have [...]

Saint-Idesbald is a small, unremarkable seaside town on the Belgian coast situated between Ostend and the border with France. I spent a week there on a school camping holiday in the 1970s unaware that it was the home of the great Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux (1897–1994). I suppose you could make the argument that the [...]

Sine Fiction VI: Nova Express (2003) by Eucci. More Burroughsian music, and a selection that includes another interpretation of The Ticket That Exploded. Sine Fiction is a music project curated by Aimé Dontigny that commissions electronic artists to provide soundtracks to science fiction novels. The project has been running since 2000, and has so far managed [...]

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 [...]

Another gem at Ubuweb, and nothing to do with JG Ballard’s SF story of the same name, Piotr Kamler’s Chronopolis (1983) is a 50-minute animated science fiction film, albeit science fiction of a much more abstract variety than one usually finds in cinema. I’m generally exasperated by the way film and TV SF does little more [...]

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 [...]

Mala Reputación (1991) by Dogo Y Los Mercenarios. Cover art by Nazario Luque. Artist Nazario Luque was Spain’s first gay comic artist who’s also known for the drawing which appeared (without permission) on the sleeve of Lou Reed Live – Take No Prisoners in 1978. On his website Nazario says he’s been described as “Exhibicionista, solidario, [...]

La Jungle Nue (A Feast Unknown, 1974). Illustration de Alain Le Saux. Chute libre means “free fall” in French, and here refers to an imprint of French publisher Champ Libre that from 1974 to 1978 reprinted a series of science fiction titles under that name. The imprint is notable for a number of reasons, not [...]

“A recurrent rumour says that Chris Marker and the cat Guillaume-en-Egypt sank with the Titanic.” Photo credited to Wim Wenders. In our moments of megalomaniacal reverie, we tend to see our memory as a kind of history book: we have won and lost battles, discovered empires and abandoned them. At the very least we are [...]

Illustration and design by Karlheinz Dobsky. Above and below: samples from Die Lux-Lesebogen-Sammlung, an exhibition of booklets for young people published by Sebastian Lux from 1946–1964. All were designed and illustrated by Karlheinz Dobsky. • At The American Scholar: “Vladimir Nabokov’s understanding of human nature anticipated the advances in psychology since his day,” says Nabokov [...]

The Fox (1968). Design by Bill Gold, art by Leo & Diane Dillon. Mark Rydell’s The Fox may be regarded unfavourably now for its retrograde idea of a lesbian relationship but that’s still a great poster by the Dillons. Equally retrograde (well it was 1957) is Anders als du und ich, a film about wayward [...]

Kraken from Ernie Cabat’s Magical World Of Monsters (1992) at Monster Brains. “I think for a lot of people who don’t read pulp growing up, there’s a real surprise that the particular kind of Pulp Modernism of a certain kind of lush purple prose isn’t necessarily a failure or a mistake, but is part of [...]

From the Crystal Saga portfolio (1986) by Moebius. Via Quenched Consciousness. Moebius: A while ago, [science fiction] was filled with monstrous rocket ships and planets; it was a naive and materialistic vision, which confused external space with internal space, which saw the future as an extrapolation of the present. It was a victim of an [...]

The Arcimboldo Effect again. An undated postcard from the image section of A Virtual Wunderkammer: Early Twentieth Century Erotica in Spain. “I took George Clinton and Bootsy Collins to the Battle Station for the first time, and they left feeling like they’d just had a close encounter,” said the bassist and music producer Bill Laswell, [...]

The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures. How old is this world! I walk between two eternities. Denis Diderot, 1767 Ruins, as Diderot observed, are the memento mori of civilisations, a reminder that the apparent permanence of architecture is [...]

Another book design of mine (interiors only) which I completed last September for Tachyon and about which I had this to say at the time: Kafkaesque [is] edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly. It’s a collection of short stories either inspired by Franz Kafka, or with a Kafka-like atmosphere, and features a high [...]

Portrait of Dr. Ignacio Chavez (1957) by Remedios Varo (1908–1963) some of whose Surrealist paintings can be seen at Frey Norris, San Francisco, from 19th January. There’s also In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 29th January. The current crop [...]

left: The Hostage (1966); right: The Female Terrorist (1971). Both by Konrad Klaphek. No, I’m not suggesting that David Pelham’s paintings for the Ballard covers he designed in the 1970s are inspired by the earlier work of German artist Konrad Klaphek. But it’s tempting to think of Klaphek’s isolated objects as being intended for Ballard [...]