Tompkins Square
Right from its first publication in February 1911, the novel Fantômas was a phenomenon. In the words of post-modern New York über-poet John Ashberry it was “a work of fiction whose popularity cut across all social and cultural strata. Countesses and concierges; poets and proletarians; cubists, nascent Dadaists, soon-to-be Surrealists: Everyone who could read, and even those who could not, shivered at posters of a masked man in impeccable evening clothes, dagger in hand, looming over Paris like a sombre Gulliver, contemplating hideous misdeeds from which no citizen was safe.”
As Ashberry here makes explicit, the singular success of the novel – put together by two hack journalists Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre in response to a commission by publisher Arthème Fayard – was characterised
Continue reading James Blackshaw – Fantômas: Le Faux Magistrat […]
Last November, I spent over a week in and out of the recording studio with my trusty video camera and two explorative guitarists, Cam Deas and Steffen Basho-Junghans. Part of the appeal of getting these two guys together was the cross-over in their respective styles and approach to their instruments (primarily 6 and 12 steel-string guitars), combined with their difference in age. With Cam being in his early twenties, his playing has a youthful passion and vigour to it which also contains high energy and real sparkle, while Steffen, being in 