{ feuilleton }

Collage by Jeneleen Floyd. • “…slowly, block-by-block, pedestrians are starting to take back the streets.” Wayne Curtis on the hazards of being a pedestrian in a world of cars. • Michael Hann looks back at LA’s Paisley Underground, and also talks to some of its key members. • Meighan O’Toole interviews JL Schnabel about her [...]

“Pretty phantasmagorical!” says precocious teenager Matthew when he and his father drive into the fictional village of Milbury in the opening scene of Children of the Stones. Matthew’s father is a scientist whose work requires a three-month stay in a village built in the centre of a series of ancient ramparts and stone circles. Once [...]

Le Faune (1923) by Carlos Schwabe. • “When I recently attended a conference in China, many of the presenters left their papers on the cloud—Google Docs, to be specific. You know how this story ends: they got to China and there was no Google. Shit out of luck. Their cloud-based Gmail was also unavailable, as [...]

Johnny Trunk of Trunk Records reissued the soundtrack to The Wicker Man in 1997. Mr Trunk’s latest delve into the cultural past is Own Label: Sainsbury’s Design Studio, a book from Fuel examining the supermarket chain’s packaging design of the 1960s and 1970s. Creative Review shows some examples while I have to note the uncanny [...]

Sometimes it pays to have an unusual name… Ritual is a 1967 novel by David Pinner which has been claimed on many occasions to be the original source for the story which Anthony Shaffer wrote as The Wicker Man. An illustrator named Peter Edwards was responsible for the cover graphic and possibly the hand-drawn type [...]

“A trap for dere Santa”. From How to be Topp by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle (1954). That time of year again. Here at { feuilleton } we prefer to acknowledge the solstice-based traditions that pre-date the usurping rituals of Middle Eastern sky gods. The old pagan business of lighting fires and creating artificial light [...]

Der Tod als Erwürger (1851) by Alfred Rethel. It’s a fact (sad or otherwise) that a substantial percentage of my music collection would make good Halloween listening but in that percentage a number of works are prominent as spooky favourites. So here’s another list to add to those already clogging the world’s servers, in no [...]

Q: What do you get when you cross analogue synthesizers, samples from obscure public information films, the graphic design of Pelican Books, Arthur Machen, HP Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, CS Lewis, Hammer horror, the Wicker Man and the music from Oliver Postgate’s animated films for children? A: the CD releases by artists on the Ghost Box [...]

The great Hal Willner is doing his eclectic thing again. A marvellous collection of folk ballads. Nice cover as well, from Howard Pyle’s celebrated pirate paintings. Disc: 1 1. Cape Cod Girls—Baby Gramps 2. Mingulay Boat Song—Richard Thompson 3. My Son John—John C. Reilly 4. Fire Down Below—Nick Cave 5. Turkish Revelry—Loudon Wainwright III 6. [...]

This marvellously lurid 250pp tome turned up in the post today, something I was looking forward to seeing as I wrote 30 of the reviews within, as well as some longer essays on Dracula, Lovecraft and a brief history of occult cinema. Nice layout, lots of colour and some great photos, many of which I [...]

Left: The scarce first edition of the Hamlyn novelisation. From the Coulthart library. I realised some years ago that all my favourite films have great soundtracks, almost without exception. Something about the blend of drama and well-chosen music really excites me, so it’s no surprise that The Wicker Man would appeal, having as it does [...]