The artwork for Closer was delivered to Factory Records two months before Ian Curtis’s suicide. Hyperreal Gothic statuary, tombstone typography: you can call this the “Premonition of Genius”, if you find any use for such ideas. Or y[…]

There aren’t many online pages about Robert Kanigher, and given that he died last year most of what Google turns up are obituaries. Entirely properly, these tend to stress his many worthy and creative achievements in comics and don’t writ[…]

A corollary about genre fiction (following from my Block-blog below): there are genre fans who are uninterested in the works admired by people who are more general fans of the medium, SF fans dismissive of Dick, Delany or Ballard and so on, for their[…]

Lawrence Block and the continuing unease of genre
Although it seems as if these days almost every literary commentator acknowledges that genre fiction can be as good as fiction in the literary mainstream, it’s just lip service. Nods are made to[…]

No comments on FT blogs anymore, so I have to explain myself a little. TTT’s purpose is to indulge myself and give you some download ideas for those spare file-sharing moments, so a little context won’t be a bad idea.
Sean Paul‘s &#[…]

What a good idea: Smoke is a London fanzine. Not a fanzine about dodgy London pop music but a fanzine about London itself. Perhaps it has pretensions to be a literary magazine, but it neatly sidesteps them by billing itself as ‘A London Peculia[…]

I’ve only just noticed – and not because of the reason you might imagine. Possibly what that Tom Ewing fellow thought, I would be head down in an alcoholic stupor coming up only for alka-seltzer when he pulled this fast one. One day I ret[…]

For Mentalists Only: Nostalgia site TV Cream’s rundown of the first 20 NOW albums. My first thought was that the greatest series of compilations in the world…ever! deserves a bit more than this finickity if comprehensive rundown, but then[…]

It was the best documentary series but it ruined factual TV: each ep of World at War ended with a cliff-hanger from Sir Larry – “Retribution would come… from THE SEA” – and then the picture faded to b&w benday dots […]

VERONICA GUERIN (by way of The General and When The Sky Falls)
In Veronica Guerin Cate Blanchett plays Joan Allen playing Sinead Hamilton in When The Sky Falls who is actually Veronica Guerin. Its okay, if that looks confusing there is a precedent fo[…]