The collected edition of Mick Farren’s DNA Cowboys trilogy is a fascinating social document. You can tell a lot about a time from its bobbins gonzo fantasy novels. And here we have a trilogy, steam written fuelled by drugs, coffee and an urge t[…]

Lame Secret Identities in Superhero Comics
There are plenty of unlikely villainous names – “You mean the Riddler is really Mr E. Nigma? Holy stupid fucking contrivances, Batman!” – but since a lot of them were probably created[…]

a born bystander’s deliberate legacy:
Ransome played chess with Lenin (and beat him). As a young geezaesthete in bohemian Chelsea, Ransome hung out with G. K. Chesterton’s brother, as well as future war-poet Edward Thomas. Ransome’[…]

Christian Marclay at the Barbican
This is a tremendously enjoyable show. There’s lots of work to see, and it’s very varied. Album sleeves painted over, a tuba and trumpet joined at the mouthpiece, photos of things to do with sound, a ludi[…]

BLOCK BLOG
3: In The Midst Of Death
Like many a regular Freakytrigger feature, my chronological, collecting reviews of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder novels has recently dried a touch. Not completely due to my own crapness: for the more basic pr[…]

Book ’em
Scrapbooking is the purview of sad old ladies with too much time on their hand. Its too cute, too chaotic, too colourful. The fonts are all wrong. They try to hard. There are too many accessories. They try to do things like make pompon[…]

Rediscovered thanks to Jess’s article which pointed me at web.archive.org. My old website from the 90s had a lot of crap on it, and it is embarassing to discover it still out there in the internet, when i thought it had all been lost in my move[…]

ANTARCTICA AND THE ARCTIC: THE COMPLETE ENCYCLOPEDIA
by David McGonigal and Lynn Woodworth
Sometimes all you need is a good coffee-table picture book — and this one is GREAT. Published just the other year, it might well be the hands-down slamb[…]

Rereading children’s books as an adult – those you haven’t looked at once since childhood – you sometimes slam into a particular contraction of response: a sort of ultra-localised Tom’s Midnight Garden Effect (TMGE), in […]

Finch
The problem with making words like boring, banal, decorative and pretty compliments, is that there is nothing left when a critic encounters awful spectacles like this: http://www.spencerfinch.com/[…]