A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Surrealism
The Basket of Bread (1926) by Salvador Dalí.
Happy new year. 02026? An affectation via the Long Now.
The Cello Player (1926) by Edwin Dickinson.
Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926) by Otto Dix.
The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Eluard and the Artist (1926) by Max Ernst.
The Musician’s Table (1926) by Juan Gris.
Image of a Spherical Black Hole with Thin Accretion Disk (1979) by Jean-Pierre Luminet. Via.
• “I would be willing to bet that every student of fantastic fiction has at some point in his or her career read a book with the name EF Bleiler printed on its cover.” Brian J. Showers of Swan River Press talked to EF Bleiler in 2005.
• “You have to be ready to see it”: Abel Ferrara and Catherine Breillat on why Pasolini’s Salò is a gift that keeps giving.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Kosten Koper presents…Bill Nelson: Acquitted By Mirrors (1982–1987).
• At Skurrilsteer: Ongoing research into the life, work and legacy of Edward James.
• At The Daily Heller: All that jazzy record cover design.
• Cygnus X-1 (1977) by Rush | Blackhole Dropout (1979) by Tod Dockstader | The Competition Of Supermassive Black Holes And Galactic Spheroids In The Destruction of Globular Clusters (1999) by Jah Wobble
Cover art by George Wilson for The Twilight Zone #45, September 1972. Via.
• At Public Domain Review: Thea Applebaum Licht on the history of art within art, or cabinets of curiosity and paintings within paintings.
• The final 2025 catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.
• At Smithsonian Mag: See the “Mona Lisa of Illuminated Manuscripts,” a 600-Year-Old Bible covered in intricate illustrations.
It’s amazing, the number of people out there who love everything about queer life except for queer sex, who would prefer that sex and sexual orientation live in entirely different zip codes, that they exist as non-overlapping magisteria; it’s so much safer that way. Who wants gay sex polluting their enjoyment of the abstraction that is Being Gay?
That is what gay love is, now, in the collective imagination of American commerce: a set of identity relations projected onto bored and indifferent celebrities who will half-heartedly play along with the idea because doing so moves units and, anyway, what does it cost them? The more that sexual orientation slouches to the point of pure abstraction, the less effort it takes. Anyone and anything can be gay, now, because gay is just a set of pompous liberal cultural signifiers that have no earthly material relation to homosexuals.
“I miss when homoeroticism was erotic,” says Freddie deBoer. I’ve made similar complaints myself over the years. For some genuinely erotic homoeroticism, see the latest auction link above.
• At Ultrawolveunderthefullmoon: Illustrations for Edmund Weiss’s Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt.
• DJ Food’s latest harvestings of psychedelic ephemera may be seen here.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Bruce Connor’s Day.
• The Strange World of…David Lynch.
• RIP Udo Kier and Tom Stoppard.
• Menergy (1981) by Patrick Cowley | Eros Arriving (1982) by Bill Nelson | Erotic City (“Make Love Not War Erotic City Come Alive”) (1984) by Prince & The Revolution
November (1879) by John Atkinson Grimshaw.
• As usual, the first links in November are heavy with the spirit of Halloween. At the BFI: Zombies in the Lake District: how locations from The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue look today; Adam Scovell looks back at one of the more curious zombie films of the 1970s, a Spanish/Italian production directed by Jorge Grau in and around my home city. Also at the BFI: Georgina Guthrie selects 10 great erotic horror films.
• “We must recognise that reality without mystery is impossible.” In a recently digitised film clip, René Magritte is interviewed (in French) by Belgian TV in 1961.
• The Italian edition of The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is out now from Panini. Thanks to Smoky Man for posting photos!
• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Short Fiction by Saki.
• At Smithsonian Mag: Elizabeth Djinis explains how an Italian town came to be known as the “City of Witches”.
• New music: The Whole Woman by Anna von Hausswolff ft. Iggy Pop; Forces, Reactions, Deflections by Scanner.
• RIP Jack DeJohnette, jazz drummer; Prunella Scales, actor; Peter Watkins, film-maker.
• Algiers November 1, 1954 (1965) by Ennio Morricone | November Sequence (2011) by Pye Corner Audio | Richter: November (2019) by Mari Samuelsen
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Plate 43 from Los Caprichos: The sleep of reason produces monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos) (1799) by Francisco Goya.
• At Senses of Cinema: An interview with Jacques Rivette from 2001 in which the director passes judgment on a variety of feature films, old and new. Having read a couple of Cocteau-related books recently, I was pleased to see his comments about the importance of Cocteau’s example for his own film-making. Via MetaFilter.
• “Why is sleep, which literally occurs daily on a planetary scale, so often taken for granted, and not only by most people but even by scientists? Perhaps because its essence, its key property, is to be elusive, out of sight?” A long read by Vladyslav Vyazovskiy on the nature of sleep.
• “Often one cannot be sure if an object in a Welch picture is drawn from life or from other depictions of it, in sculpture, porcelain, woodwork or embroidery.” Alan Hollinghurst on the paintings and drawings of Denton Welch. (Previously.)
• At Colossal: Sinister skies set the scene for derelict buildings in Lee Madgwick’s surreal paintings.
• New music: The Mosaic Of Starlight Slips Back Like The Lid Of An Opening Eye by Paul Schütze.
• At Public Domain Review: Charles le Brun’s Human-Animal Hybrids (1806).
• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2025 at Ambientblog.
• At the BFI: Anton Bitel chooses 10 great French horror films.
• Winners of the 2025 Photomicrography Competition.
• RIP Diane Keaton.
• Sleep (1981) by This Heat | Sleep (1995) by Paul Schütze | Sleep (2006) by DJ Olive