Cartoonist David B. is 'an exceptionally gifted artist who...reveals hidden truths inexpressible in another medium'. Quite a claim - but what think you? In earlier installments of these BD reviews I have tended to focus on psychedelic science fiction, the bizarre, or indeed the barely coherent. I like that type of ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Daniel Kalder
It's Monday morning: when better to meditate on one of life's four-letter words? Work: it consumes vast amounts of our time, and each one of us must come to some kind of accommodation with it early on in life. If we have too much work we complain, if we don’t have ... Read More...
Does The Lone Star State want to go it alone? As you may have noticed, following the recent re-election of Barack Obama, many Americans got a bit upset. Indeed, they were so upset that they did what people do nowadays whenever they are outraged: they went on the Internet and grumbled ... Read More...
Never mind Juliet's, we don't overlook the more humble balcony... On a recent visit to Istanbul I stayed in an apartment looking out on the Bosphorus. Every morning I’d get up and see the sun sparkling on the surface of the water as birds circled languidly overhead. At night it was ... Read More...
Today we enjoy some samples from around about 4000 years of Russian rock. What it lacks in groove it makes up for in lyrical folkiness... Among the titans of Russian rock, few are more legendary than Boris Grebenshikov, founder and sole constant member of the group Akvarium. This year he has ... Read More...
Looking for more bande dessinée lunacy? Then read on... Recently I reviewed The Incal, the epic psychedelic space opera from the all-round holy madman Alejandro Jodorowsky and French comics master Moebius. It is, as I said, good to a consciousness-scrambling degree. But Jodorowsky has many other works available in English, and ... Read More...
They called him Iron Felix - but did he have a soft spot? Daniel Kalder discovers the tender side of the man who established Russia's first concentration camp... When I lived in Moscow I regularly frequented an antique shop on Malaya Nikitskaya Street that had a small selection of English books. ... Read More...
What will our grandchildren think of this weird custom? Earlier this week the directors of the Bayreuth Festival got into a kerfuffle with the Russian bass-baritone Yevgeny Nikitin when a German TV show revealed that he has a swastika tattoo on one of his man-boobs. This was a problem because Nikitin ... Read More...
An unlikely - and frankly quite anachronistic - revenge of the mummy. Recently there’s been some blather about removing Lenin from Red Square and inserting him into a hole in the ground. Yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it. About once a year some Russian public figure suggests burying the ... Read More...
Last week's post featuring the classically awful Dracula AD 1972 has inspired some fond bad movie reminiscences. Well, mostly fond... One of the stranger aspects of human nature is our capacity to take delight in things that are awful. For instance, in my late teens I embarked upon an intense study ... Read More...
