Name that Aesthetic: The Romance and Ruins of Lost Civilizations

If it took you this long to identify one of the most epic genres of art history, welcome to the club. We must have skipped class that day. The aesthetic: a lost civilization – its crumbling and vaguely familiar architectural forms dramatically lit by a sunset backdrop, and in the foreground, a congregation of folks…

How to Host the Olympic Games on a Shoestring Budget

As the countdown for the Paris Summer Olympics has begun and the excitement for the international extravaganza of athletic prowess mounts, few will now remember a past games that had a rather more frugal approach to the sporting proceedings. Compared to the multi-millions spent on the current games the 1948 London Olympics was the make-do-and-mend…

Artist of the Week: Harlem’s Horace Pippin

Horace Pippin was an artist who was gifted with the ability to express his work with an unrefined social realism and dreamlike playfulness of touch that in reality, would mask a darker narrative. The grandson of African American slaves and a decorated World War One veteran who was registered as disabled after being wounded in…

A Brief Compendium of Lost Albums, Stolen Songs and Unreleased Music

If there is anything that can make a strident music fan salivate in anticipation, it’s the idea of an unreleased track or lost album from a favourite band. It’s like catnip for the musicologist and can become like a biblical quest for a lost chalice of sound for the collector of rare grooves and scrapped…

Django’s Journey: The Making of the Nomadic King of French Swing

Django Reinhardt was a legendary jazz musician and considered by some the greatest guitarist who ever lived, even more so when you find out he did it all with two fingers. He began as a nomadic busker before becoming a virtuoso and then a romanticised Parisian sepia memory, who still calls out in rolling arpeggios…

Let’s Entertain the Theory of the Tartarian Empire for a Moment

What do you mean you’ve never heard of the lost civilization of Great Tartaria? It’s only one of the weirdest architectural conspiracy theories going. It seems there has been a monumental cover-up to hide the truth from us all about an ancient empire that’s hiding in plain sight all around us – or so a…

The Enchanting Genius of a Quietly Forgotten Midcentury Maximalist

Let us take a look inside the classical grandeur and neo-romanticism that flows through the oeuvre of Emilio Terry. A maximalist from the school of more is most definitely more; Terry was an artist, architect, interior decorator, and darling of French society. Parisian born, he would mix in the elite circles of artists and aristocrats,…

Paul Is Dead: The bizarre conspiracy that became part of The Beatles phenomenon

‘’Those freaks was right when they said you was dead” spat John Lennon in the 1971 song ‘How Do You Sleep?’ It was a venomous retort to his ex-bandmate Paul McCartney in an ongoing feud after the break-up of The Beatles. But what he meant by these caustic lines is a little more outré. These…

The Real Ziggy Stardust who Lost his Career to Acid

In 1966, David Bowie had a chance encounter with Vince Taylor an early exponent of the British Rock and roll scene. Taylor had been a leather-clad, chain-wielding rocker from the 1950s, a combination of Elvis, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent. What now stood before Bowie in London’s West End was a bedraggled, wide-eyed religious zealot…

A Breezy Hike through Laurel Canyon’s 1960s Music Mecca

Imagine popping out for groceries and running into The Doors frontman Jim Morrison or Canadian rocker Neil Young, maybe scoring an invite to Joni Mitchell’s house for dinner or a BBQ at Jimi Hendrix’s. If you’d lived in a small community in the Hollywood Hills in the 1960’s, the idea wasn’t so far-fetched. Throw on…