Join me on a journey through the shit I'm selling on eBay. 1. 20th Century classical music on vinyl. Seven period LPs - Ligeti, Mahler, Berio, Janáček, Schoenberg, Cage… ebay.io/m/VzBCKR
Steve Bowbrick
@bowbrick.bsky.social
GROSS is a materialist history of Hollywood.
Is it possible that the greatest film ever made is almost 100 years old? Acquire for yourself a Napoléon mug, with a red-tinted still of the fabulous Albert Dieudonné as early-career Napoléon. www.redbubble.com/i/mug/Napol%...
If we actually get around to building any of the seven proposed new towns in Britain, can we call one of them SILKINGRAD?
It's this fella's birthday. I mean Napoleon Bonaparte, not beautiful, wistful Albert Dieudonné, who played him in Abel Gance's gorgeous 1927 five-and-a-half-hour epic. Anyway, for the day that's in it, here's one of my favourite essays, about the film: bowbrick.substack.com/p/gross15-19...
I need you all to understand that A BIRD ECLIPSED OUR ECLIPSE
Also, it must be pretty good ladder…
New-Cleckit Dominie@ncdominie.bsky.social · 2mo agoAccording to an article in 2022 (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/3856...) the Immovable Ladder was in fact moved in 1997, but to avoid controversy it was promptly put back. I offer the Ladder as a metaphor to anyone else who spends a lot of their life in committees.
🌐 On World Wide Web Day, we’re celebrating the Wayback Machine’s milestone of archiving more than 1 trillion web pages, preserving decades of the web we’ve built. Explore decades of web history with the #WaybackMachine: web.archive.org #Wayback1T #WorldWideWebDay @mark.bsky.social
Writing about Grease turned out to be a much more interesting task than I expected - I mean this thing is beyond weird. I've made my piece about the film (really about the final 15 seconds of the film) free for all: open.substack.com/pub/bowbrick...
GROSS/69 - 1978, part two - 3,000 words about the final 15 seconds of Grease
The strange apparatus of cinema…
open.substack.com
Thinking of taking up smoking so I can use these unbelievably cool matches from Club Enchanté in Cherry Hill, NJ.
Before Mamdani there was Eugene Victor Debs. And in 1927 the socialists bought a New York radio station and named it after him: WEVD. This fabulous, ultra-modern SPARK logo dates from the 1930s. Buy a t-shirt (or a mug, or a sticker or whatever) from my Redbubble store. rdbl.co/4vIWhso
Amazing story of how the scientists and engineers tried to keep Skylab in orbit, then gave up on that and instead tried to ease it back into the atmosphere gently and then had to give up on that and just cross their fingers as it barrelled across the Southern hemisphere… www.nasa.gov/history/45-y...
45 Years Ago: Skylab Reenters Earth’s Atmosphere - NASA
A few days before they left Skylab on Feb. 8, 1974, the final crew to occupy the station raised its altitude, hoping to keep it in orbit until a future space
nasa.gov
No, Count Binface does not mean that British democracy is especially tolerant or accepting of outsider voices. Let's try not to be mugs: bowblog.com/2026/07/11/c...
Did you see this green screen glitch in the BBC coverage? Where are they?
The interdimensional rift in the middle of the road in this old photograph of Youghal in County Cork is FREAKING ME OUT.
THE VATICAN IS CALLING IT A SCHISM I REPEAT HOUSTON, WE HAVE A SCHISM
Claire Willett@clairewillett.bsky.social · 3mo agoOH SHIT DUDES THE VATICAN HAS WEIGHED IN AND THEY ARE BIG MAD 🔥🔥🔥
If you're using a computer mouse now it's still essentially Doug Engelbart's 1967 design. You can own one of his original patent drawings printed on, well practically anything, really. Including, obviously, A MOUSE MAT: www.redbubble.com/i/mug/The-mo...
I guess if Greta had her time again it'd be Fridays for Production.
By the middle of the 20th Century the idea that grown-up couples could separate just because they were unhappy was essentially universal and by the end of the seventies it had come to stand for individual autonomy, freedom from social repression and the liberation of women.
Divorce peaked in the USA in 1979 so obviously the top-grossing Hollywood movie of that year was Kramer vs. Kramer. Since then, divorce rates have returned to the 100-year baseline and relationship movies are about dating disasters, toxicity and trauma… Essay: bowbrick.substack.com/p/gross70-19...
Right, book nerds, if I don't shift all these books I'm going to have to set light to them on a boat and push them out into the North Sea or something. There are 101 books currently in my eBay shop, from every genre and at every price. Message me here for MATES RATES!
Radio fans, I've added another station to my collection of vintage RADICAL RADIO merch: short-lived punk/anarchist/situationist/hippy/autonomist collective Radio Alice that lived for only a year in Bologna and was ultimately taken off-air, mid-broadcast by armed police in March 1977: rdbl.co/4wOdfYp
The Internet, which we thought was going to be liberating, turns out to be a tool of control: repressive, coercive and damaging to our most basic freedoms: bowblog.com/2025/10/29/b...
"Destroy and destruction; they're the only two words I know. Destruction and destroy." Marvelous Marvin Hagler, one of the truly great middle-weights, defended his undisputed world title an extraordinary 12 times between 1980 and 1987. Throw cushion, t-shirt, stickers, the works: rdbl.co/4lfsOBl
I've always done my own taxes but I think I might need some help as I find it terrifying. Does anyone have any recommendations of anyone who works with shambolic low earning writer types?