The Secret Career of David Bowie’s Back-Up Singer

Nobody could do camp quite like Klaus Nomi. He left the downtown New York club scene speechless with soaring operatic vocals, dressed in his signature triangular vinyl tuxedo complete with smoke bombs, punk rock nuances and 1950s sci-fi sound effects. On any given night, you could have found a young Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring…

There might be a Secret Painting Hiding in that Old Book of Yours

Books can be magical things, but some as it turns out, may be more magical than others. They might look like ordinary old books, but they’re hiding a curious little secret in plain sight. A fore-edge painting is a scene painted on the edges of the pages of a book; invisible when closed. The technique…

The Overlooked Occult Movie Legend who holds Hollywood’s Darkest Secrets

As an artist and an outsider, Kenneth Anger was the West Coast’s answer to Andy Warhol – a California boy who hosted rituals for the Church of Satan in his San Francisco mansion, and introduced the Rolling Stones to the occult; a man who found a muse in Mick Jagger, but a bigger one in…

A Brief Compendium of Fascinating Archives to Explore

If there’s one thing we love, it’s sticking our nose where it doesn’t belong. Or at least, where others seldom dare to tread. Our jewel box of a planet is overflowing with secrets, stories, and forgotten treasures, and we like to try and keep a finger on the pulse of the best archives, vaults, and…

The Monstrous Film Set That Jumpstarted Hollywood

If you build it, they will come. And if they don’t, you’re screwed. Such was the case for Mr. D.W. Griffith, the infamous movie mogul behind the best worst movie ever made: the silent epic Intolerance (1916). Griffith became the emperor Los Angeles for the picture, creating a veritable city of 300-ft-tall Judean walls and…

Where they make the Machines from Jules Verne’s Dreams

Behind the walls of an old shipyard’s warehouse in Nantes, a French troupe of artisans has been welding and hammering and carving away at something unprecedented for twenty years, building a strange mechanical universe you thought only existed in the pages of a Jules Verne novel, or in the sketchbooks of Leonard Da Vinci. Celebrating…

If He likes the Way You Think, You Can Borrow his Private Island for Free

This time next summer, how would you feel about escaping to your own private island? Having the space to think, work on a few ideas … ya know, generally soak up all the inspiration that can be soaked from living on your own goddamn island for an entire week. Such an opportunity exists, friend, and…

The Vault

Hollywood’s Doom Book and other Tales of Blacklisting in American Cinema

Before we even knew it as “Hollywood”, the American film industry was a very different place, producing a surreal amount of extraordinarily liberal and raw movies that would give today’s rated-R movies a run for their money; featuring nudity, strong female characters, sex, drugs, violence, abortion and even homosexuality. But everything changed in the year…

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The Most Famous Band You’ve Never Heard Of

Whether you know it or not, you have definitely heard them play. Popular music of the 1960s was dominated by young bands like The Beach Boys, The Mamas & the Papas and The Monkees – bands that didn’t play their own records. Sometimes, the only members of famous bands to appear on their own records…

Where has the Dystopian Wonderland of Taxandria been Hiding all Our Lives?

Our dreams have always remained an ineffable, un-shareable experience – the kind of thing we can describe, but never quite convey to the fullest. Then, we saw Taxandria. The 1994 film by Belgium’s Raoul Servais is the closest we’ve felt to stepping inside a world that feels just as slippery, strange, and intuitive as our…