All Life Here: The raw, disturbing and often political artwork of Jan Pötter
‘Doppelte Portion.’ At his graduation exhibition, German artist Jan Pötter was asked by one of his fellow students if this was the kind of work…
Politics
The ‘Confessions’ of Karl Marx (or these are a few of his favorite things)
Karl Marx always looked like he had birds nesting in his beard or maybe a smorgasbord of food debris clogging up his grizzled follicles from…
Bloody Thursday: Killer cops and the Battle for the People’s Park, 1969
BLAM!!! Fifty years ago, the rules of engagement changed. On Thursday May 15th 1969, police opened fire with shotguns on mostly peaceful, unarmed student demonstrators…
Laibach’s nightmarish new short film, ‘So Long, Farewell’: a Dangerous Minds premiere
Photo by Ciril Jazbec The Sound of Music ends with the von Trapp family’s escape from the Nazis through the Alps, crossing from annexed Austria…
A short film on the making of Mark Stewart’s ‘Learning to Cope with Cowardice’ (a DM premiere!)
Mark Stewart and the Maffia live in Kentish Town, 1986 (Photo by Beezer) Last month, when Mute brought out a double-LP reissue of Mark Stewart’s…
Test Dept returns with the new video ‘Landlord’ (a DM premiere)
Test Dept’s new album, ‘Disturbance’ Next week, the London-based activist industrial group Test Dept, forgers of the “Stakhanovite sound,” will release their first new album…
Oliver Reed as a prototype Alex from ‘A Clockwork Orange’ in ‘These are the Damned’
At one point Ken Russell was the favored director for a movie version of A Clockwork Orange supposedly starring the Rolling Stones. What Russell would…
‘Qaeda, Quality, Question, Quickly, Quickly, Quiet’: Learning the alphabet with George W. Bush
I remember watching George W. Bush deliver the State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, on the TV of a tiny barroom in…
Thomas Jefferson on buggery, sodomy and bestiality
‘Thomas Jefferson’ by N. C. Wyeth “Ideas of justice are as timeless as fashions in hats,” the philosopher John Gray writes. Consider a bill submitted…
Cholera sucks: The beautiful, brutal honesty of vintage Chinese public health propaganda
Out of all the “things” that have developed over the last few centuries, public health and hygiene propaganda is probably one of the most fascinating.…