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Labyrinth (Westminster) by Mark Wallinger. A mandatory post, this one, seeing as how it combines two continual sources of interest: labyrinths and the London Underground transport system. Transport for London commissioned artist Mark Wallinger to create something for the 150th birthday celebrations of the Tube, the result being a series of 270 different labyrinth designs, [...]

First editions of Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). I like Peter Mendelsund’s book cover designs so it’s good to find the designer given the opportunity to provide new covers for James Joyce. Mendelsund’s blog post announcing the news mentions nothing about his intentions, instead we have a reminiscence about Ireland à la Molly Bloom, [...]

Something I was working on last August when I was putting together new pictures for the Cthulhu calendar, I’d actually forgotten about this until this week. The idea was to do something that was more of an abstract design than the rest of the art; having got this far I was undecided whether I wanted [...]

I ought to have mentioned this last week since a plan of the lost labyrinth of Versailles appears in the William Henry Matthews book. The labyrinth was completed for Louis XIV in 1677, and is unusual for being a series of paths without a central focus, and also a very ornamental affair containing thirty-nine fountains [...]

Parc del Laberint d’Horta, Barcelona by Valentin Arfire. Continuing the maze and labyrinth theme, a selection of panoramas at 360Cities. Panoramic photography helps when viewing these constructions at a distance, especially when the camera is centrally positioned. The selection may be small but it shows how universal the urge is to build these things, with [...]

This book, Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of their History and Developments (1922) by William Henry Matthews, would have been very useful a couple of years ago when I was working on the cover design for Mike Shevdon’s The Road to Bedlam and required a labyrinth diagram. The one I used, a plan of [...]

Until watching Antoine Bourseiller’s film, the only interview I’d seen with Jean Genet was the one filmed by the BBC in 1985 in which a tetchy and evidently irritated Genet made a fool of interviewer Nigel Williams, and compared the whole experience to a police interrogation. (Williams and his interview are memorialised in Iain Sinclair’s [...]

“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 [...]

A brief homage by Sam Scott Schiavo to Genet’s masterwork of homoerotic cinema Un Chant d’Amour (1950). Genet’s film works so well, and is so closely tied to his artistic obsessions, it’s difficult to approach but it’s good to see it still wields an influence. For comparison the original film can be watched at Ubuweb. [...]

A suspended fluid photograph from Demersal, a series by Luka Klikovac. • “Soon, Mr. Lachman was writing occult music. His song “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear,” which appeared on Blondie’s 1977 album Plastic Letters, was an example.” Gary Lachman: from Blondie to Swedenborg. • Neil Krug’s cover art for the new Scissor Sisters [...]

The Breamore Miz-Maze, Hampshire. Photo by Jim Champion. As part of the work-related research this week I was looking for designs of old turf labyrinths. It turns out I have two pages of the things in a book I’d earlier considered dropping into Oxfam so that particular volume may have gained a reprieve. Before I [...]

Jean Genet… ‘The Courtesy of Objects’ is an exhibition by Anglo-French artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz currently running at The Gallery at Norwich University College of the Arts. Chaimowicz presented a show entitled Jean Cocteau in Norwich last year; this new exhibition will include “works on paper, theatrical props, furniture, slide projections, documentation and an imaginary [...]

Jean Genet is never far away, this photo being from a Querelle-themed feature for Schön magazine. The model is Sebastian Sauve, the photographer is Dimitris Theocharis, and it’s no surprise that all the clothes are by Jean Paul Gaultier. Homotography has the rest of the series while the photographer has plenty of other fine work [...]

“Victorian” isn’t really the correct term for the products of 19th century America but then “19th century” covers rather a lot of ground. Mr BibliOdyssey’s most recent post is a stunning collection of title pages from fire insurance maps of the late 19th and early 20th century. Rather than repost any you ought to go [...]

Miracle of the Rose (1965). Photo by Jerry Bauer, design by Kuhlman Associates. [William Burroughs is] without a doubt…the greatest American writer since WWII. There are very, very few writers in his class; I think Genet is about the only one whom I’d put in the same category. All the British and American writers so [...]

Untitled (1963). One of a small number of pictures from a recent exhibition of work by American photographer Emil Cadoo (1926–2002) whose nude studies and often homoerotic themes were controversial in America of the Fifties and Sixties but welcomed in France, as was often the case at that time. In April 1964, all 21,000 copies [...]

top left: David Pelham’s classic design (1972); top right: photography by Lionel F Williams (Eye) and SOA / Photonica (Cogs) (1996). bottom left and right: photography by Véronique Rolland (2000 & 2008). In April this year I wrote about James Pardey’s excellent site devoted to book covers from the Penguin science fiction range. I’m often [...]

The Drought, 1968; design by Richard Hollis, photography by Dr. J Comroe. James Pardey contacted me earlier this week announcing his site devoted to Penguin Books’ science fiction covers. I posted some of my own dishevelled copies a while back and this news gives me an excuse to throw up another Ballard cover. Pardey’s site [...]

A curious short film over at Ubuweb by Chris Marker, John Chapman and Frank Simeone, depicting driftwood sculptures at the shore of San Francisco Bay which resemble the remnants of some Ballardian cargo cult. The film was made in 1981 and the sculptures look weathered and dated enough (rainbow stripes; what appears to be a [...]

I’ve never been all that keen on Alan Aldridge‘s brand of psychedelic art but it’s worth noting here the (London) Design Museum retrospective which runs from 10 October to 25 January, 2009. Aldridge’s work as a designer and illustrator for Penguin Books in the Sixties impresses me more than his subsequent illustrated Beatles lyrics and [...]