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So imagine this; you are one of, let’s say, nine-thousand or so fans who came to see Black Sabbath at the International Amphitheater on November 25th, 1976 in Chicago. Perhaps like some die-hard Sabbath fans, you weren’t super-jazzed with the band’s seventh album Technical Ecstasy, but like any devout headbanger, you go to the show because Black Sabbath still fucking rules. What you are not expecting is a mind-blowing performance by Sabbath’s opening act, funk ‘n’ roll outfit

“It kept me from eating it if it was framed on the wall” - Mark Mcloud on his amazing collection of LSD Blotters On October 6, 1966 (aka ‘The Day of the Beast’ in psychedelic circles) California banned the possession of LSD. Two years later the law went nationwide. Mark McCloud did as anyone of vision might: he began buying loads of blotters, sheets of paper infused with LSD, for consumption. Eventually his San Francisco home filled with thousands of LSD tabs. Over time the a

Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (1942) doesn't just evoke a certain stripe of mid-century, after-hours, big-city American loneliness; it has more or less come to stand for the feeling itself. But as with most images that passed so fully into the realm of iconhood, we all too easily forget that the painting didn't simply emerge complete, ready to embed itself in the zeitgeist. Robin Cembalest at ARTnews has a post on how Edward Hopper "storyboarded" Nighthawks, finding and sketchin

François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, is the principal representative of the Age of Enlightenment. He fought passionately against dogmatism of any kind, advocated free speech, was censored, imprisoned and exiled multiple times. His 18th-century wits are far from archaic even today. The ridicule of organised religion and Leibniz’s philosophy of Optimism, as presented in Candide, is entertaining and punchy. To a modern reader, Candide is no less exciting and sharp th

Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky loved painting the sea. A Crimean native, he was born in Feodosia, a port town, and thus had great waters as a constant companion. This 19th century Russian Armenian painter had real knack for depicting waves. Light and translucent, they perfectly capture the essence of the real thing. Many of these paintings featured a human element, too, with ships showing the struggle between man and nature. During his career, Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky

Hardit Singh Malik was born into a well-to-do Sikh family on 23rd November 1894 in the bustling city of Rawalpindi in West Punjab, pre-partitioned India (now in Pakistan). He grew up in the family's old mansion in a joint family arrangement consisting of his father and his three brothers, and their families along with their servants. Hardit Singh’s father was a major influence in his early days. He worked as a contractor who took on major contracts building railroads and brid

Want to see what kind of work goes into turning a masterful photograph into an iconic print? Pablo Inirio, the master darkroom printer who works at Magnum Photos‘ New York headquarters, has personally worked on some of the cooperative’s best-known images. A number of his marked-up darkroom prints have appeared online, revealing the enormous amount of attention Inirio gives photos in the darkroom. Sarah Coleman of The Literate Lens writes that Inirio’s tiny darkroom has many

Ansel Adams is widely considered the most popular and the most influential landscape photographer in history. “Few bodies of work transcend the museum and enter the wider public consciousness, but Adams’s has done,” the art book publisher, Phaidon, has observed. “His black-and-white images of vast, sparse and distant landscapes adorn calendars, fridge magnets and countless other gift shop items. His prints sit in doctors’ surgeries and dentists’ waiting rooms not just in t

Steve Vistaunet’s Pinterest is a treasure-trove of photos of exuberant cassette spine designs from the gilded age of the mix-tape, ranging from the hand-drawn to early desktop publishing experiments.

Death is a natural part of life, but for some reason, when it happens to our favorite figures in the entertainment world, it’s almost impossible to believe. John Lennon, Jim Morrison and Elvis Presley are just a few music legends whose deaths shocked the world, but to remind us of just how memorable an impact they had, artists Jean-Marie Delbes and Hatim El Hihi have recreated a number of iconic album covers with dearly departed band members removed.

Some shots you don’t think ‘Right, I’ve just done a defining image.’ It becomes that, because it’s the picture that’s associated with the artist at the moment.” “I don’t shoot for the gallery wall,” Kevin Cummins told Mike Gibson at Square Mile, discussing his 2015 exhibit, Disclosure, a celebration of his 40 years of rock photography. “I shoot for the following week’s or month’s magazine. That’s got to be the reason for doing it, or you’re not doing your job. Some shots you

One of the key and most chilling moments in the film Jaws comes when Shaw's character Quint delivers a harrowing four-minute monologue about the time he battled tiger sharks in the water after the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by the Japanese Navy and sank at the end of World War II. Shaw's impassioned delivery of the monologue is often credited with humanising the characters in the film and bringing them together. But, Shaw being Shaw, actually filming the iconic moment was

It started with the Sex Pistols. Specifically, with the Sex Pistols’ June 4, 1976, show at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England. The concert now ranks as one of the most influential performances of all time, up there with Woodstock. But the audience, not the band, made the show famous. Around 30 or 40 people showed up (although thousands would later claim to have attended), and rumour has it that the crowd included the guys who would go on to start bands like the

If I was ever confronted with my likeness in a museum I would freak.

How many times have you heard John Willmot, Vladimir Nabokov, St. John of the Cross, Johnny Thunders, Karl Marx , Paul Gauguin, Philip Larkin and Dylan Thomas all referenced in one song? On the surface this song is about pure unabounded joy and love, but scratch just a little under the surface and you soon see it's Cave's lament to his battle with writers block. They teach you in creative writing programs not to write about writing, because writing about writing, and writing

The history of science, like most every history we learn, comes to us as a procession of great, almost exclusively white, men, unbroken but for the occasional token woman—well-deserving of her honours but seemingly anomalous nonetheless. “If you believe the history books,” notes the Timeline series The Matilda Effect, “science is a guy thing. Discoveries are made by men, which spur further innovation by men, followed by acclaim and prizes for men. But too often, there is an u

October 1991, King George’s Hall, Blackburn. The Black Crowes are in Shangri-La. That’s singer Chris Robinson’s description of the bubble of earthly – and earthy – paradise the band conjure up on stage every night. All funky grooves and whirling-dervish soul wrapped in candles and nets full of twinkly Christmas lights, tonight’s Shangri-La is materialising in front of a sold-out audience of 3,500, most of whom surely own a copy of the band’s multimillion-selling debut Shake Y

Vintage album covers are reunited with their original shoot locations in this satisfying series. Shot by Alex Bartsch, everything is aligned for a seamless collage of past and present. Most of these albums covers were for reggae projects making music between 1967 and 1987. The covers were shot around London and give a short tour of the city back then. "The image on a record cover usually remains within defined borders, instantly recognisable as a record cover, but not so much

'Harlem Square' first appeared in 1985, 21 years after Cooke’s untimely death at age 33— murdered, under murky circumstances, at a LA motel in December 1964. Just under two years prior, on January 12, 1963, Cooke had been at the top of his game, taking the stage at Miami’s Harlem Square Club to deliver a powerhouse 39-minute set that anticipated the harder-edged black R&B looming just around the decade’s corner, presaging the later work of artists like James Brown, Al Green,

Delve deep into the 1968 home recordings that planted the seeds for the band’s classic self-titled double LP “We are going in with clear heads and hoping for the best,” an optimistic Paul McCartney announced as sessions for the Beatles‘ new album lurched forward in the late spring of 1968. “We had hoped this time to do a lot of rehearsing before we reached the studios … but, as it happens, all we got was one day.” But the day in question, sometime toward the end of May, would

The social role of the writer changes from generation to generation, but at no time in the history of literary culture have novelists and poets faced more competition for the attention of their readers than they do today. Before visual media took over as the primary means of storytelling, however, many writers enjoyed the measure of fame now given to film and pop music stars. Or at least they did in the age of Charles Dickens, whose tireless self-promotion and populist sentim

Sir Richard Francis Burton’s obituary described him as “one of the most remarkable men of his time” and he certainly lived up to that distinction. A linguist, soldier, explorer, spy, and author (among many other things), Burton lived a life of almost unparalleled adventure that spanned nearly five continents and seven decades. Richard Francis Burton was born in Devon, England in 1821. He got his first taste of adventure at a very young age, travelling around the world with hi

The Doors had crammed several lifetimes into just five years as band, and by late 1970, the psychic toll of Jim Morrison’s addiction and legal hassles threatened to overwhelm the group. Any attempts at making an album under these conditions should have met with unmitigated disaster, but on L.A. Woman – the final Doors LP released during Morrison’s lifetime – the band succeeded almost in spite of themselves. Self-produced and recorded in their private rehearsal space, the albu

This is just a small colection of people that have had impossibly interesting lives and ones that aren't commonly known about, but should absolutely be remembered. Mary Fields, Black Mary, and ‘Stagecoach Mary’ (1832-1914) are all one of the same person. Mary was born a slave in Hickman County Tennessee and moved to the Great Falls, Montana area. Fields was the first female African American carrier for the mail service in Montana and entrepreneur. Her mail route by stagecoach