“WATSON: THE NEEDLE!”

“WATSON: THE NEEDLE!”
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND COCAINE By Mike Jay – http://mikejay.net/ Cocaine was the great pharmaceutical success story of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In a few short years, it went from a minor item in specialist catalogues to a major seller in a huge range of preparations in high-street...
July 1st, 2010 | Arts | Read More

Botticelli’s love drug

Botticelli’s love drug
A new discovery suggests that Botticelli’s masterpiece Venus and Mars shows the effects of a hallucinogenic plant – but is the real drug the painting itself? From the Guardian by Jonathan Jones The Florentine Renaissance weaver of floral fantasies Sandro Botticelli is a magical artist. Just to...
June 1st, 2010 | Arts | Read More

Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief

Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief
Gerald Blanchard could hack any bank, swipe any jewel. There was no security system he couldn’t beat. Illustration: Justin Wood The plane slowed and leveled out about a mile aboveground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard...
April 23rd, 2010 | Arts | Read More

Entangled

Entangled
Time is not what it seems… When a drug overdose causes Leoni, a troubled teen from twenty-first-century Los Angeles, to have a near-death experience, her soul is lifted from the modern world and flung into a parallel time 24,000 years in the past. There her fate becomes entangled with that of Ria,...
April 8th, 2010 | Arts | Read More

THE MACHINE STOPS

THE MACHINE STOPS
Anybody who uses the Internet should read E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. It is a chilling, short story masterpiece about the role of technology in our lives. Written in 1909, it’s as relevant today as the day it was published. Forster has several prescient notions including instant messages...
March 22nd, 2010 | Arts | Read More

MUSHROOMS IN WONDERLAND

MUSHROOMS IN WONDERLAND
Was Alice in Wonderland and Victorian fairy art and lore in general inspired by actual experiences with mind-altering fungi? The first well-documented hallucinogenic mushroom experience in Britain took place in London’s Green Park on 3 October 1799. Like many such experiences before and since,...
March 1st, 2010 | Arts | Read More

ADVENTURES IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION

ADVENTURES IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION
THE TIME MACHINE AND THE BIRTH OF CINEMA In October 1895, the twenty-nine year old H.G.Wells was in the first flush of his fame and success. The Time Machine, serialised the previous year, had appeared in book form over the summer, and was heading for the Christmas bestseller lists on the back of reviews...
February 11th, 2010 | Arts | Read More

KISS ME / KILL ME

KISS ME / KILL ME
If our understanding of the mechanisms of the world could fit in a library, then ideally ‘Love’ would be a single fat volume on a plinth of its own. Where it would actually be found is printed on a sticker on an interminable shelf in the Reference section. Manuals would be archived chronologically,...
January 28th, 2010 | Arts | Read More

Avatar – A mythic masterpiece for our troubled time

Avatar – A mythic masterpiece for our troubled time
In the Avatar film, James Cameron, the maker of Titanic, has taken the new computerized, digital, 3-D technologies to a new astounding level of brilliance and mastery. It’s a story of adventure, space exploration and the wonders of evolution on alien worlds, echoing the best of the Star Wars series;...
January 13th, 2010 | Arts | Read More

Is Psychedelia ‘The New Black’?

Is Psychedelia ‘The New Black’?
Strolling down Kensington High Street last week, for a brief moment I could have sworn I was in San Francisco, circa 1973. By Candida Balfour for The Evening Standard. The windows of American Apparel heaved with neon T-shirts and trippy prints, while Empire of the Sun’s heady synth came...
January 12th, 2010 | Arts | Read More
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