Uh… WOW. Just… wow. You see incredible stuff coming up for auction every single day on eBay, of course, but this is something extra, extra special: twelve drawings—twelve really good ones, too—in a sketchbook by the “divine draftsman” of the occult, British artist Austin Osman Spare, a contemporary and ‘frenemy’ of Aleister Crowley.

From the eBay listing:

Executed between April and May 1925, ‘A Book of Automatic Drawings’ is Spares most highly finished early sketchbook. Created in what was a particularly dark and turbulent period of his life, the books comprises twelve full page drawings and four pages of calligraphic titles, signatures and other devices.

Originally produced for publication, but due to the high costs of printing and the failure of his magazine ‘The Golden Hind’ it was sold unpublished to Spare’s great patron Pickford Waller. After his death in 1930 the sketchbook passed to his daughter Sybil. The book remained in her collection until the late 1960s, when it was then placed in auction. The book then reappeared in the early 1970s in a Hammersmith Gallery where it was then purchased jointly by Roy Curtis-Bramwell and Ian Kenyur-Hodgkins. Together they arranged a reproduction of the work (which unfortunately never did the sketchbook much justice), where the book went next is unknown, but it was purchased by a private collector in the early 1980s and remained in his collection.

Three days left on the auction.
 

 

 

 
Thank you kindly, Alex Burns!

 
Artist and illustrator Mark Dawes has designed this fabulous poster of one of my favorite actors, Charles Gray, in his unforgettable role as the Crowley-inspired villain Mocata, from The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride).

Adapted by Richard Matheson from Dennis Wheatley’s classic, occult novel, the film starred Christopher Lee as the Duc du Richelieu, who pitted his wits against Satanist Mocata (Gray), for the souls of Simon (Patrick Mower) and Tanith (Nike Arrighi).

Mark has a brilliant selection of work over at his Illustrated Blog, which myself and Mocata will you to check out….
 

 
With thanks to Mark Dawes!
 

 
These days Richard Butler, the seemingly ageless front man of the Psychedelic Furs, considers himself more a painter who sometimes sings with a rock group and not so much a singer who paints.

As you can see from the work, he’s not “dabbling” in art. I’ve seen some of Butler’s paintings in person and he’s quite accomplished. They look great even on a computer screen, but in person they’re really dazzling. He’s perhaps the only rock/art crossover of high artistic merit to come along since Don Van Vliet (unless of course you rate Ronnie Wood or Paul Stanley as painters).
 

 

 

 
Imagista’s Michael Williams interviewed Butler in his home studio in Beacon, New York for this delightful video portrait. Click thru to Imagista for Rob Howard’s photos of Butler and his work space.

Richard Butler’s “ahatfulofrain” show will run from April 18 - May 25 at the Freight + Volume gallery in New York City.
 

 
Ballet skate decks by Manhattan-based photographer Henry Leutwyler.

In ballet and skateboarding, fearlessness rules. No half-measures or marking the trick. Just passion, grit and blood.

And if you’re wondering as to whether or not ballerinas’ feet and toes are all gnarled-up like that in real life… they are. A simple Google image search shows you what years of dancing can do.

Via The World’s Best Ever

 
This piece, “The Sex Life of Robots” was one of the few segments that I didn’t personally—control freak that I am—produce in the Disinformation TV series, it was produced and shot by Doug Stone and edited by Nimrod Erez. As you’ll see, it arrived a little polished gem and was one of my favorite things in the entire series.

The character you’re going to meet here, animator Mike Sullivan will be a familiar face to a certain percentage of DM readers for his roles in both Robert Downey Sr.‘s Greasers Palace (he played Lamy “Homo” Greaser) and the low-budget early 80s slasher flick Madman. Mike was also a special effects technician on one of the Star Trek films, worked in the art department of early SNL and did many of the “Foto Funnies” strips found in the National Lampoon magazine during its heyday.

Today Sullivan runs his Cloud Studios from a dusty loft on 26th Street and 6th Ave in NYC, near the site of the weekly 6th Ave Flea Market, which he scours for Barbie and GI Joe dolls to modify and put through perverse paces for his perpetual work-in-progress magnum opus, “The Sex Life of Robots.”

Mike’s work has been covered in several publications and exhibited in museums. You can visit his website where a few of his beautiful one-of-a-kind robot porno stars are for sale.

NSFW or apparently Virgin Air: A few months back this segment was featured on the in-flight Boing Boing channel and there were some complaints. I was pleased to see that the show was still a lil’ controversial after more than a decade.
 

 
J. G. Ballard once said, if by some terrible calamity all art from the 20th century was destroyed except for the work of one artist, then it would be possible to recreate all of the century’s greatest artistic developments if that artist was Eduardo Paolozzi.

Deliberate hyperbole, but there is an essence of truth here, as Paolozzi produced such an incredible range and diversity of art that it has been difficult for critics and art historians to classify him. He began as a Surrealist, before becoming the first Pop Artist—a decade before Warhol put paint on canvas. He then moved on to print-making, design, sculpture and public art to international success.

Born in Edinburgh, to an Italian family in 1924, Paolozzi spent much of his childhood at his parent’s ice cream parlor, where he was surrounded by the packaging, wrapping and cigarette cards that later inspired his Pop Art. This early idyll of childhood was abruptly ended when Italy declared war on Britain in 1940. Paolozzi awoke one morning to find himself, along with his father and uncles, incarcerated, in the city’s Saughton Prison, as undesirables, or enemies of the state. Paolozzi was held for 3 months, but his father and uncles were deported to Canada on the ship HMS Arandora Star, which was torpedoed by a U-boat off the north-west coast of Ireland. The vessel sank with the loss of 630 lives.

Considered psychologically unsuitable for the army, the teenage Paolozzi studied at the Edinburgh School of Art, in 1943, before finishing at the Slade School in London, which he found disappointingly conservative in its approach to art.

After the war, Paolozzi moved briefly to Paris where he visited some of the century’s greatest artists, then resident in the city—Giacometti, Braque, Arp, Brâncuşi, and Léger. In his youthful boldness, Eduardo had telephoned each of these artists after discovering their numbers in the telephone directory. He was greeted as an equal, he later claimed, most probably because the war had just ended. The experience taught Paolozzi much, and emboldened his ideas. On his return to London, Paolozzi presented a slide show of adverts and packaging, which was the very first Pop Art.

Paolozzi developed his distinctive collages and multiple images of Marilyn Monroe long before Warhol and even Richard Hamilton, the artist with whom he showed at the now legendary This Is Tomorrow exhibition, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956.

Paolozzi eventually tired of his association with Pop Art, as it limited his incredibly diverse artistic vision. The same year as This Is Tomorrow, he played a deaf mute, with fellow artist Michael Andrews, in the first major Free Cinema movie Together by Lorenza Mazzetti.

By the late 1950s, he had moved on to industrial print-making,  before producing an incredibly awe-inspiring range of designs for buildings, sculptures and public art—from his mosaic for Tottenham Court Road tube station to the cover of Paul McCartney’s Red Rose Speedway, through to such epic sculptures Newton, outside of the British Library, Vulcan, Edinburgh, and Head of Invention, Design Museum, London.

In 1984, Paolozzi conceived and produced a brief strange and surreal animation 1984: Music for Modern Americans, which was animated and directed by Emma Calder, Susan Young and Isabelle Perrichon, and based photocopies of Paolozzi’s original drawings.
 

 
You know when you get fanatically obsessed by a certain song and you can play it over and over and over again, nonstop, on repeat? Well, in my case, you can add a couple of dozens “overs” to get a sense of how often I’ve recently played “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” the duet between Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue from his 1996 Murder Ballads album.

To say I’ve been playing the shit out of this song (and Murder Ballads, one of the best albums in Cave’s nearly unbroken string of musical masterpieces) for the past few days would be an understatement (just ask my wife!) but chances are that if you’ve read this far, it’s about to be stuck in your head, too.

Not to rhapsodize too much about something you can simply hit play and experience for yourself, although it’s Cave’s song and well, totally his thing, it’s Kylie who shines here. Dig how perfect her performance is. She hits it so hard and so flawlessly that you can only imagine the junkie prince of darkness jumping for joy in the recording studio when they laid this performance to tape.

He’s great, he’s Nick fucking Cave, of course, but it’s Kylie the astonishing who steals the show here. Her vocal performance as Cave’s victim sounds so pure and innocent that it gives me goosebumps. According to Cave, they did no more than three takes.Why mess with perfection?
 

 
First the stunning music video directed by Rocky Schenck. The imagery is based on the mid-19th century painting, “Ophelia” by Sir John Everett Millais, completed between 1851 and 1852. The painting depicts Hamlet‘s Ophelia singing in a river as she dies, and currently resides in the Tate Britain:
 

 
For her 2012 orchestral album, The Abbey Road Sessions, Minogue and Cave teamed up again to record this version of the song:
 

 
More Nick and Kylie after the jump…

 
There’s really not that much to say about this, but, uh, holy crap you can actually see the five o’clock shadow setting in! It’s all in the details…

“Spock” by Schell Sculpture Studio. Damn this is good!

 
Below, a medley of notable Spock quotes from all 80 original episodes of Star Trek:
 

 
Via Ian Brooks

 
This drawing appeared in Hunter Davies’ 1968 authorized biography The Beatles. I’m not sure why John Lennon was imagined as William Howard Taft, though? It’s perplexing. I thought the walrus was Paul?

Unfortunately, I can’t find who the artist was for this. If anyone knows, I’ll update the post with proper credit.

Update: The artist was Michael Leonard. Thank you, Dan Schwartz! 

Below, Hunter Davies talks about his time spent with the Beatles:

 
h/t Retronaut

 
Spotted in Smithfield, Ireland.

Via BuzzFeed