Roy Lichtenstein Retrospective, Hayward Gallery, London
Pop Art sways to the whims of fashion. One minute it’s equipped with a Hoxton fin, the next it dresses like Chris Eubank. Judging from the hoards of people, it’s back in vogue again.[…]

Heartwood by James Lee Burke
I wrote an item months ago suggesting that genre writers in general, taking crime as a good example, are still undervalued by the literary critics and academics, and by extension by most readers. Then I was especially tal[…]

The Best-Selling Artist In The World…Ever!: Profile of Annie Vollotton, named as such by the folks in the HarperCollins PR department. She did the very distinctive illustrations for the Good News Bible, my unwelcome companion for much of my sch[…]

In the future, EVERY BLOG will be THIS famous* FOREVER
*(Fame = ppl you never knew carefully explain to other like folk every last meaningless private atom of stuff you wrote to you yrself alone)[…]

The Marriage of Figaro, Hackney Empire
Whole cities have been built in the time it has taken to refurbish Hackney Empire. It has reopened to muted fanfare aware that a big gap in the outer brickwork doesn’t add to its aesthetic value. Inside, h[…]

Q: What do 76 blowjobs look like?
A: A Slowdive EP cover.
Jason Salavon deals in the art of the average – taking a series of images (photos or film stills) and rendering them composite. The results point up the use and futility of the notion of[…]

“I Created Blog, The Thing That Should Not Be!”. Via Pearls That Are His Eyes, another awesome comics resource in the form of the MONSTER BLOG. (NB it’s not actually in any sense a blog, it’s just a website. Also they should h[…]

Ryan McGinley finds new vices.
This months issue of Vice is called the Travel Issue, and for that reason it has three pages of photos of swim suits. They are done by a variety of photographers, but they all look like McGinley.
The casual nudity, th[…]

Fans of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon should check out Garry Wills’s Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, if only for Part Two, ‘A Scientific Paper’. It’s not a novel – it’s filed […]

I’m not an instinctive fan of the works of Anton’ Gaud’. I find much of his work excessive and overwrought, and I just can’t get to the sense of awe others do. What’s more, a look at the facade of the Sagrada Familia dem[…]