“Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about am[…]

Imagine YOU have been appointed (time-travelling) decider on the 1997 multi-artist version of Perfect Day?
Who would you keep? Who would you drop? Who would you draft?
Assume you have all the budget you could possibly need, and all the persuasive […]

Michele Kirsch is a friend from NME days; Mama K’s True Stories began as a column devised for City Limits in the mid 80s. It suited her writing style — and the need for it perhaps marked the accelerated dwindling in that time of the range of […]

“Unless we can somehow recycle the concept of the great artist so that it supports Chuck Berry as well as it does Marcel Proust, we might as well trash it altogether” — Robert Christgau
“But rock criticism does something even more interes[…]

FIRST OF ALL: look away now, there be massive spoilers in this discussion.
SECOND OF ALL: look away now if you are Christopher Tolkien, nothing here will lift yr spirits.
THIRD OF ALL: look away now if you routinely despise Tolkien and all works, viz[…]

or “Lytton must be exterminated when it is convenient”
… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community, and crossposted at FT.
In which 5IVE and disgruntled[…]

As a kid I had a couple of picture books which visualised sound — natural and orchestral — as lines and brightly coloured abstract shapes and star-bursts. I loved them (and should look them out and scan some pages) but of course you couldn’[…]

I don’t really know who east sky/taktophoto is (or are)*: but his/her/their tumblr republishes sets of images gathered from all over the place (always linked to, generally captioned as per the original, never commented on). The images can be hy[…]

As a kid I only read British comics (Beano, Dandy, Topper, Beezer, Sparky et al), and never graduated to — or really understood — Marvel or DC. They were too vast in conception to catch up with, I felt: too big a universe, filled with too[…]

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