Rob Long’s Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke purports to be a no holds barred insiders look at being an American TV sit-com writer. Wait a second, does that mean there are holds barred, soft-soap stories of the tricksy world of American TV developmen[…]

Finally finished Dominic Sandbrook’s history of the late 50s and early 60s, Never Had It So Good. For a massive book – 700 pages covering only 7 years – it still feels a bit insubstantial in places, but it was an entertaining read. […]

On the face of it, this is a simple philistinic story about an American kid who stuck his used chewing gum on an expensive painting. Singlehandedly the unnamed child became either
a) a disgrace
b) the bright new artist in the style of Jake & Din[…]

Put The Book Back On The Shelf (no really – this is a comic shop, not a library)
THE BELLE & SEBASTIAN COMIC.
Read it and feel all sensitive.[…]

This very odd 3-issue miniseries by Gerard Jones and Mark Badger came out in 1995 – as a Batman story it falls a little flat, mostly because you can guess who the villain is very quickly. The plot – surrounding a Charlie Parker analogue w[…]

I was living in upstate New York in 1984, a happily budding nerd for sf among other things. Star Wars had come out when I was six and some years on my tentative explorations into actually reading sf had led to Asimov, Herbert and others. So I joine[…]

As befits a program with a ridiculously wide remit as The Culture Show, its quest for best of British design seemingly thrives of category error. How exactly can we compare and contrast Grand Theft Auto with the Mini? Except in as much as it would be[…]

Yek/Sue Williams
The question about how political abstraction can be, esp. in relations to painting keeps popping up, an unsolvable corundum in western art history, related to what subject the viewer is extracting. Two relatively recent examples poi[…]

The Mighty Thor is one of the luckiest characters in comics history. He had the good fortune to be first published at the dawn of the ‘Marvel era’, and has been firmly hitched to Marvel’s starry wagon ever since. Why “good for[…]

NAM JUNE PAIK 1932-2006
Last time I was in New York, in 1994, interview Phill Niblock for this, we left his studio for a meal when we were done, and as we were crossing the road — somewhere in Chinatown, I forget where — Niblock pointed, […]