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Femme avec des fleurs (c. 1912) by Romaine Brooks. • “Boring people tend not to exile themselves to rocky islands, but even among the intriguing personalities we encounter in Capri, some individuals prove more extravagantly memorable than others.” Steve Susoyev reviews Pagan Light: Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri by Jamie James. • “The […]

Yet another fin de siècle journal which we can now see in its entirety, The Dial was a short-lived British publication which expired at a time when more prominent titles were being launched. The publishers were Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, a couple who were partners in life as well as art and publishing, and […]

Cover design by Jim Tierney; photo by Richard Corman. When so many current biographies are recounting the lives of those about whom we’ve already heard a great deal (see the new biography of Oscar Wilde by Matthew Sturgis), a book exploring the career of a previously undocumented yet worthwhile figure is especially welcome. Such is […]

Rawmarsh Road, Rotherham, 1975 by Peter Watson. • Steel Cathedrals (1985), a composition by David Sylvian (with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kenny Wheeler, Robert Fripp & others) was originally available only on the cassette release of Sylvian’s Alchemy: An Index Of Possibilities, and a video cassette where the music accompanied views of Japanese industry by Yasuyuki Yamaguchi. […]

• Julia Holter’s next album, Aviary, will arrive next month with a cover design bearing astrological symbols (a cryptic message?) and what looks like a grimoire page in the background, although I may be reading too much into this. Whatever the esoterics signify, the album is a double, and going by the sound of new […]

Wu Ming, a communist writing collective known for its historical fiction, sees Kolosimo as using pseudohistory as a tool to shake people from their belief that capitalist society is natural and transhistorical, opening minds to other possibilities for how humans can live. They regret that popular proponents of his theories today, like Graham Hancock and […]

This US TV programme isn’t the greatest quality, and it’s blighted throughout with a large watermark, but it’s a revelatory piece both for Aubrey Beardsley enthusiasts and Oscar Wilde aficionados. Camera Three was a CBS arts show which presented Aubrey Beardsley and His World on 12th March, 1967, as a preview for the Beardsley exhibition […]

The Temple of Love (1911–24) by Herbert E. Crowley. • My film viewing in the 1980s involved a considerable amount of backtracking: watching any film noir that turned up on the TV while chasing the early works of David Cronenberg, and various “New Hollywood” classics on television or at repertory cinemas (when such things were […]

Cover art by Alonso for a 1929 Spanish edition of The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde. • Major music news of the week is the announcement, after a hiatus of nine years, of a new Jon Hassell album. Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) will be released on Hassell’s new label, Ndeya, in June. Meanwhile, Paul Schütze […]

Ways Of Seeing will be the next release by The Advisory Circle on the Ghost Box label, and with metallic gold cover art by Julian House. • “The structure came to Argento while he was tripping on some good acid, a fevered dream logic piecing everything together. [...] ‘People came running out, screaming, telling people […]

Le Répit (La Mort allaitant une chauve-souris) (1895) by Valère Bernard. • Playhouse 90 presents Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. An American TV production from 1957 starring Boris Karloff, Roddy McDowall, Eartha Kitt and others; introduced by Sterling Hayden. It’s bizarre. Acidemic goes into the detail. • Erik Davis talks to occult writer and […]

With the running out of the year it’s time to start posting some of the things I’ve been working on for the past few months. This year has been an incredibly busy one with little breathing space between projects. Last month I mentioned not having enough time to put together a decent mix for Halloween; […]

Arcadia-24 (1988) by Minoru Nomata. • Dark Entries and Honey Soundsystem Records release a video of edited moments from gay porn film Afternooners to promote the release of the film’s electronic soundtrack by Patrick Cowley. The album, which is the third and final collection of Cowley’s porn soundtracks, is out now. • Emily Temple looks […]

The University of Heidelberg‘s scanning programme continues to be a source of delight for those of us without professional or financial access to rare book collections. Having recently made the entire run of Der Ochideengarten available, they’ve added scans of another journal that was on my list of magazines I’d been hoping would eventually turn […]

A reprint edition from 1909. In 1881 there arrived from Normandy a good-looking young man with an unfortunate habit of painting his face: Jean Lorrain. He spent five years of his life in Montmartre, five years that were also the most dazzling ones for the hill whose chronicler he became. A brilliant journalist with an […]

Since blogging here has become sporadic I find myself continually playing catch-up. Recent arrivals in the book department have included two art-related items that feature work of mine. The first is the catalogue for the Things To Come exhibition which ended last month at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel. When I posted photos […]

08-30-16 from the Everydays series by Beeple. • “Monsieur de Bougrelon is a unique character: loquacious, proud, a leftover from an earlier age, wearing garish outfits and makeup that drips. To his speechless audience, he waxes nostalgic about his life as an exile in Holland, as well as what he calls “imaginary pleasures” – obsessions […]

Untitled painting by Aleksandra Waliszewska. The artist is profiled by S. Elizabeth at Dirge Magazine. • “…from my point of view, the only thing to do with any genre, any medium, is pretty much to break it, to transcend it, to find out what its limits are, and then go beyond them, and see what […]

Mars (variant design): one of three new posters for NASA by Invisible Creature. • “If the point of Sade’s work was to marry sexual frustration and release to the practice of interpersonal violence, he could confidently gaze out on the landscape of our popular culture and declare it a fait accompli.” Hussein Ibish on The […]

My work has appeared in a couple of foreign collections recently, each approaching popular culture from very different directions. The volume above is called Steampunk Japan Fashion Book according to a German bookseller although the title may read differently to Japanese speakers. This was published at the end of last year, and features my ever-popular […]