The ‘gwai have gone and done it with their new album The Hawk Is Howling. We’ve been waiting a while but this is their masterpiece, consolidating on the promise of everything since Mr Beast, jettisoning all traces of filler and delivering nothing but the best instrumental rock album of all time. To these ears it [...]
Tarzan Retired: the art of Miroslav Tichy
Necessity breeds invention, and rarely was this maxim so applicable as in the case of Miroslav Tichý. He absolutely HAD to take pictures of the women that haunted his dreams, so he made his own camera. Using junkyard scrap, cardboard, sellotape and plexi glass, he created a device for capturing unique and ethereal images of [...]
The Road
The Road represents for me the end of fiction. There’s nothing else beyond it as far as I’m concerned, and with very few exceptions I’ve found I can’t even read fiction anymore. There just doesn’t seem to be any point – the same tired old cliches trotted out, the same weary prose, the same implausibly [...]
Borough Satyr: the art of Austin Osman Spare
“Life is haunted – I see faces of the so-called dead everywhere…” – Austin Osman Spare
Austin Osman Spare, now there’s an artist. Born 30th December 1886, two years before Jack the Ripper’s rampage through the streets of Whitechapel – an enraged mob’s stone throw away from the Spare’s cramped home near Smithfield Market. His precocity [...]
Ghost World
I read the first collected edition of Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World in 1998 and ten years on it remains one of my favourite comics. It was the first time I felt that this idea of comics “maturing” (remember that?) might actually happen. There’d been the false starts in the late 80’s and the brief triumph [...]
