Predator Badlands is shockingly bad. Those pitching that it is a fresh new take simply lack the ability to imagine a world in which we aren’t force-fed shit like this. The Marvelisation of the Alien and Predator franchises continues apace. Romulus, Alien Earth and now this; all soulless junk.

Pt Damien Jackson KIA Helmand Province 5/7/06 Killed four days short of his twentieth birthday. He was extraordinary.

Columbo Prints are available here. Just £35. christopherjamesart.bigcartel.com/product/pete...

The Columbo Case Notes Notebook is available on Amazon worldwide amzn.eu/d/5ETkUUx

From the venerable UNCUT way back in 2003, a selective critical listing of the band’s mid and later-period “singles” (1988-2001). Particularly fun to see the guys’ realtime reactions to some of these songs. www.uncut.co.uk/features/lis...

There’s been a purple patch of tv over the summer, but now we are struggling to find anything decent. Back in the cycle of watching the first ep of a new show then immediately abandoning it because it’s dreck. Any recommendations? The more nihilistic and dread-filled the better.

Hot off the Royal Mail van. Thanks for the recommendation @www.johnbleasdale.com I’m going to sit with this very comfortable seven inches in hand while I take a break from the easel and realign my back. Super fast delivery by the fabulous @plumeriapics.bsky.social Lovely stuff.

The Witcher was never Fellini, but it was fun. Series4 is dreadful. Sub-Hollyoaks levels of acting. A forced lesbian storyline that is meant titillate teenage boys but the lack of chemistry makes it completely sexless. And the budget has clearly been slashed so it looks like BBC’s ‘Doctors’. Dreck

As long as This Life+10 exists, this will not be the worst thing ever made. It has usurped The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives [all of the husbands are deeply closeted, but very obvious, homosexuals. It’s like Angels in America meets The Kardashians] as a new Hulu nadir. Watch while tripping balls.

Portrait Artist of the year judges constantly talk about finding a likeness. It is an utterly pointless goal in the age of the camera. Painting should showcase the material, or why bother, and strive to communicate something more than the obvious, which lurks somewhere that is felt and not seen.

M is watching bake-off. I don’t watch it, because it’s devoid of the nihilism I crave. I enjoy the contestants talking about making cakes like they are saving lives in an ER, it’s the most important thing in the world and everything is riding on it. It’s a lesson in perspective and narcissism.

Just sorting through The Boy’s washing and find that he has bought himself a rather lovely Pulp Fiction T-shirt. He was watching Eyes Without A Face at the weekend too, having bought the blu ray. All of that investment appears to have paid off, and I’m rather pathetically proud.

This is the kind of headline I’m on the internet for.

Pre order up now lads @www.johnbleasdale.com @caiross.bsky.social @mrenglish.bsky.social

Ten days of court time. Ridiculous. “As of Sept 2025, there are 4,086 rape cases and 1,759 child rape cases waiting to go to trial in the Crown Court in England and Wales, both record highs. The total number of all sexual offence cases waiting for trial in the Crown Court is 13,238.” (Rape Crisis)

I thought I’d be completely sick to the back fucking teeth of hearing about the former Prince Andrew by now but no, I cannot stop laughing.

The artist formerly known as Prince

Incredible work. I’ve always loved McCullin’s Vietnam work, but his later material featuring nature and landscapes has an inescapable humanity too, despite the complete absence of people. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

The Iris Affair: The Night Manager meets Eldorado; HBO money, ITV2 sensibility. Trope upon threadbare trope. Stodgy direction. Poorly written- each character could be called Basil Expostion- and, most criminally of all, it’s really really fucking dull. Why do I do this to myself?

Very grateful to have a great project to get my teeth into in the studio at the moment- I’m energised and fizzing with ideas. I spent my first decades rarely without a 2B in hand, so sketching again feels….right. And I’m really fucking good at it, so I don’t know why I ever stopped.

Despite not being anywhere near what I would ever usually listen to I am forced to recognise that this record is, indeed, excellent. Nepo Baby Pop. Recommended.

"Monarchy is a survival of the tyranny imposed by the hand of greed and treachery upon the human race in the darkest and most ignorant days of our history." James Connolly

Stunning egress from the city centre this evening

It occurs to me that the satisfaction inherent in painting is tied to its analogue nature. There is no digital element. It is today what it was decades ago, never changing. It is just me and the material and the thrilling possibility of an image. It will always will be the ultimate physical media.

Task, because it has 7 episodes with many moving parts, is a fairly hollow experience, but the final episode hit an emotional resonance within me that was so powerful that I wept. Mark Ruffalo’s humanity reminded me that there is still so much good in the world. Good stuff.

Women who have sex for money are *always* exploited. It’s not ‘work’, it’s not a job, it’s exploitation. The happy hooker does not exist. ‘Sex worker’, far from being empowering, diminishes this exploitation and the squalid behaviour of men like P. Andrew repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcont...

It’s a hard realisation- in middle age- that the world does not belong to us anymore. Twenty five years ago I was the future, now I’m a relic. An analogue beast stalking, lost and confused, a digital age. So when what you’re doing is not going to change the world, what is it for?

Ashcroft spunks out another record completely devoid of inspiration, created in a hermetically sealed cultureless vacuum. If you’d never heard music before you’d still think this cliched, turgid, and built on worn lyrical tropes. Middle aged Adidas wankers with feather cuts will think it profound.

Leaning hard on Nick Cave at the minute. Took me far too long to appreciate his…genius, I suppose. As a lyricist I think he’s peerless. There’s an emotional immediacy and clarity that visual art cannot ever convey, which frustrates me as an artist, but Cave taps this vein effortlessly.

This.

Late to the party with Severance. I thought it would be a frustrating ‘Lost’ style endless series of open questions, but no. S2 E7 ‘Chikhai Bardo’ is the best episode of television that I have watched in some time. $200 million well spent for the production design alone.

Insomnia is a hell of a drug. With the old licences you could eat a yoghurt in a windswept car park, while crying about your divorce and the fact you have to wait until next Saturday to see the kids. The new one is flimsy shite. I demand a better class of plastic. 2015 v 2025

I used to think that Struzan was second only to Saul Bass when it came to film posters but his work is so inextricably linked with a very long run of iconic films that are lodged deep in the psyche of Gen Xers that this usurps any claim of superior design www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie...

The government plans for digital ID are more far-reaching than previously implied; required to access child care, welfare & housing support, to rent or buy a home, buy a pint, join a library, enrol your children in school, to apply for a job, open a bank account and "much more besides". Fuck this.

I’m glad that we live in a world where people are free to exhibit their eccentricities guilelessly, but I cannot imagine posting this online. It’s like a fetish wear demo. Do comic book guys fuck wearing this stuff? Is that what this is? Like the puppy people?

Beautifully edited sequence is this

Watching the Alien 3 Legacy Cut- a five years in the making fan project to correct the janky cgi, colour correct the negative and to combine the best elements of the assembly and theatrical cuts. It’s a miracle that it’s this good. Definitive. A far superior Alien film to Aliens.

Hermann Göring was a narcissistic homovestite, he was obsessed with being awarded medals and honours, with grotesque bling, treated underlings like shit, married multiple times, insisted on a disgusting level of opulence, and was mad with power. He also wore makeup Does that remind you of anybody?

Three Studies of Columbo Pencil & Digital Collage, 2025

A long lost Burton interview here (from 39 minutes). Unheard for forty one years and recently rediscovered. His final interview for the BBC weeks before his death. It is, as you’d expect, magnificent. @www.johnbleasdale.com @caiross.bsky.social @mrenglish.bsky.social www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Trying to renew an expired driving licence has turned into a fucking Kafka-esque nightmare; government websites where facial scans are mandatory (no thanks, fuck off), and the DVLA, whose system was built by a braindead moron. I’m not cut out for the modern world. I feel like a prisoner here.

Sublime. ‘I’m Alan Partridge’ levels of brilliance.

Henry

The Francis Bacon Foundation following me on insta in September, and subsequently starting to interact with my account, was certainly not on my 2025 bingo card. I still find social media a profoundly odd experience at times, where the barrier between us and celebrity/heroes completely dissolves.

Michael Sheen talking about his dad's career as a Jack Nicholson impersonator is the finest radio you'll hear all year.

Thoughts on AI slop and the people who evangelise about it. This is longer than it takes to have a wank, so do that first. www.instagram.com/reel/DPbevhp...

Mine too Richard

“The nationalisation of both family and sex makes possible a biopolitics of reproduction that is also a necropolitics…the fascist woman is enlisted in the libidinised religion of death that glorifies the national martyr, fallen in the act of killing.” Toscano, Late Fascism (2023) Essential read

Lots of talk about Keeping Up Appearances, rightly so because it’s still one of those very safe and daft absurdist classic sitcoms that works, like One Foot in the Grave, but there’s not much praise for Hetty Wainthropp Investigates. Patricia Routledge was brilliant in both.