Underworld by Don DeLillo
You can’t help but be impressed by the scope and ambition of this book: it sets itself up as a (the?) Great American Novel of the second half of the 20th Century, starting with a famous 1951 baseball game* and trying t[…]

White Pride. Ryman before he discovered white on white
Robert Ryman is known as white on white, 30 years of painting nothing but white on white, the pure minimalist who concentrates not on the artists hand but on the nature of pigment and what that p[…]

BROWN WEDGE COMPETITION: Design a Bauhaus Dalek!!
(backstory of idea to be found in comments box HERE, viz stevem’s rather brilliant observation that – contra bauhaus precepts – form did NOT follow function when that davros was a-[…]

An in-depth, thoughtful, and ultimately wrong headed discussion on the lack of aging of characters in superhero comics. The article is based on the seeming paradox that Batman has been around for seventy odd years and yet has barely aged a jot.
Um. I[…]

The gaiety of the nation: “adds to the gaiety of the nation” is one of my favourite little phrases. I like it because it makes, quite succinctly, the case for frippery. I was about to invoke it in that notorious talking-shop the k-punk co[…]

I saw a juggler at Glastonbury. He was standing on a bicycle on a big pole, maybe 10 metres up, juggling a flaming torch and a club and I think a toffee apple. He looked like an ordinary sort of fellow, he said he’d been doing this since he was[…]

Liisa Lounila – “Popcorn”
Some months ago I went to see the Liisa Lounila show at the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery. I loved it: I went several times and dragged a few (un)fortunates along with me to see it. I didn’t write about i[…]

Dracula (Part One – England)
I don’t know why I hadn’t read Dracula. I like old-skool horror as much as the next weirdo, but I’d never even picked it up. A few weeks ago I was chatting about family trees to my girlfriend&#8217[…]

Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
I wasn’t at all sure whether I’d like Palahniuk. He wrote Fight Club, a clever film I liked, so he seemed worth a try, but I wondered if he might be just a smart cult author with nothing much to offer. But I enjoy[…]

BRUB! BRUB! BRUB![…]