Imaginary pinball machines of Hawkwind, The Stooges, Jim Jones, and more
If you’re as much of a pinball nut as I am, you’ll flip over these fantasy back glass illustrations by Charlie Fogel. Illustrator/cartoonist, Fogel has…
Games
‘Californium’: Finally, the ultimate video game tribute to the worlds of Philip K. Dick
When you go to the website for Californium, the first words you see are “If you find this world bad, you should see some of…
Hip Priest: The Fall’s Mark E. Smith used to do tarot card readings for drugs
The other day I was in the Rock Hall’s Library and Archives at the Tommy LiPuma Center for Creative Arts on Cuyahoga Community College’s Metropolitan…
‘The Ghetto Tarot’: Haitian artists transform classic tarot deck into stunning real life scenes
Death Welcome to the Ghetto Tarot, a project from award-winning documentary photographer Alice Smeets and a group of Haitian artists known as Atis Rezistans. The…
Lose all your money to an Ellen DeGeneres-themed slot machine
Ellen DeGeneres is so very likeable that nobody is going to mind at all that she stands to make a huge wad of moolah from…
Edward Gorey’s ‘anxious, irritable’ tarot card set is predictably perfect
Since he supplied us with a visual vocabulary for cutesy dread over many decades, perhaps it comes as no surprise that Edward Gorey designed a…
Hawkwind’s ‘Galactic Tarot’ deck, 1971
A couple of weeks ago Arthur’s Jay Babcock tweeted that he had stumbled upon a fascinating two-page Hawkwind spread while “trolling thru the online International…
The Surrealists’ tarot deck
In 1940 and 1941 André Breton, widely considered the founder of Surrealism, and a group of like-minded individuals (René Char, Oscar Dominguez, Victor Brauner, Max…
‘Juden Raus’: Nazi-era anti-Semitic board game where you deport the Jews
Who would have guessed that the Holocaust wouldn’t make for a perfectly peachy board game for the little German children of the Third Reich? As…
Witty, macabre playing cards comment on the fresh horrors of the Nazi concentration camps
These fascinating playing cards are the work of a Slovenian artist named Boris Kobe who was held by the Nazis as a political prisoner in…