Own a copy of Arthur #7 (October 2003) with my swirling cover pic featuring cosmic jazz maestro Sun Ra. Lots of good stuff inside, details here.
• Spinetingler Magazine announced their nominees the 2010 Spinetingler Award this week. Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch is one of the titles in the Best Novel category while my cover for Jeff’s book is in the Best Cover category.
• A Journey Round My Skull posted the results of the Raymond Roussel illustration contest. Entrants were asked to read Roussel’s story Bertha, The Child-Flower then create a picture based on that.
• Has Dottie got legs? The New Criterion on the poetry of Dorothy Parker.
• The gays: Fuck Yeah Hot Weird Guys, more from the Tumblr hall of mirrors; Simon Callow reviews Gay Icons Through the Ages by Tom Ambrose; Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art is open again with a new exhibition at a new location in Lambertville, NJ; some things never change: “Secret tape reveals Tory backing for ban on gays.”
• “Make the inaccessible exciting.” Colin Marshall interviews Chris Bohn, editor of music magazine The Wire.
• More music: Jon Savage’s brief history of Krautrock. The new Soul Jazz compilation, Deutsche Elektronische Musik, is released next week.
• Sage of the Apocalypse; Samuel R Delany’s Dhalgren comes to the stage in New York.
• Further Penguin fetishism: “Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain.”
• Yes, they’re out there, the Clients From Hell. For a palliative there’s Herbert W Kapitzki’s elegant poster designs from the 1960s.
• Song of the week: House of Glass (1967) by The Glass Family.
Sorry if I missed it but John the first thing I thought of when I saw your amazing Sun Ra cover is POSTER!
Any chance?
Thanks, Stephen. There are some small-sized posters and other items available at CafePress.
What food for thought! So many links.
As the bratty (gay) American, the secret Tory tape doesn’t vex me much. We argue about this all the time– is there a difference between a large corporation discriminating against gays (or anyone else) and a small, in-home business doing the same? Sure, it’s insulting to turn away same-sex couples from a B&B, but if people don’t want me in their home because I have red hair or smell like lemons, let them discriminate.
The difference between here and many US states (I think) is that here it’s illegal to have a business that discriminates in this way, large or small. People can’t choose their sexuality or skin colour, whereas they can choose whether or not to turn their home into a business. If they do the latter then they have to accept that discrimination laws now apply to them in a way they wouldn’t do if their home remained private.
I agree that anywhere which would take that attitude towards gay people (or blacks and Irish, as was often the case here in the 1970s) wouldn’t be somewhere I’d want to stay anyway. I’m more annoyed about the way this shows recent Tory assertions that they’re no longer the anti-gay party to be nonsense. Same goes for their MPs in the European Parliament.