February 2012
2 posts
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Death Proof (2007)
Kim: Now, what did you say after the last time?
Zoë: I know what I said.
Kim: What did you say?
Zoë: I know I said we shouldn't do this again.
Kim: No, you didn't say we shouldn't, you said we ain't EVER gonna do that again!
Zoë: Yeah, but...
Kim: But my ass! You said, not only are we never gonna play ship's mast again, but you also said, if you ever do what you're trying to do now, to not only refuse, but that I had permission to physically restrain your ass if necessary. Now, did you or did you not say that?
Zoë: Well...
Kim: No, no no no, answer the question mother fucker, did you or did you not say that?
Zoë: Yes, I said that, however...
Kim: Whatever with your however.
January 2012
4 posts
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Culture Desk: Seven Decades of Desert Island Discs... →
The New Yorker reviews the Desert Island Discs retrospective which was broadcast yesterday (and resists the temptation to use the US spelling of the word “Disks”):
If some castaways couldn’t resist the temptation to be clever—Alfred Hitchcock’s luxury item was a Continental railway timetable—and others surrendered to predictability (Philip Larkin chose a typewriter), a few gave their...
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Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 211, William... →
Wonderful interview with William Gibson (Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition), not least of which is this tidbit on how he approaches the craft of writing:
INTERVIEWER
How do you begin a novel?
GIBSON
I have to write an opening sentence. I think with one exception I’ve never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
INTERVIEWER
You won’t have planned beyond that one sentence?
...
December 2011
4 posts
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In ‘Game of Thrones,’ a Language to Make the World... →
People have made a career out of this?
“There’s been a sea change in Hollywood. They realize there’s a fan base out there that wants constructed languages,” said Matt Pearson, a linguistics professor at Reed College in Portland, Ore. He created Thhtmaa (pronounced tukhh-t’-mah), the language of termite-like aliens in the short-lived NBC series “Dark Skies.”
“Game of Thrones,” based on the...
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Book Review - 'Asterios Polyp,' Written and... →
Today I read this in a bookshop, curled up in an armchair. Feeling guilty, might have to stump up some cash and actually pay for the thing:
Enter “Asterios Polyp”: a big, proud, ambitious chunk of a graphic novel, with modernism on its mind and a perfectly geometrical chip on its shoulder. The tension between formalist rigor and emotional subtlety is not just the theme (and method) of the...
November 2011
7 posts
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One Man, Two Guvnors, Adelphi Theatre, review -... →
Laugh? I nearly died!
In the play’s greatest scene, one of the most hilarious I have ever seen in a theatre, he simultaneously serves dinner to his two guvnors while reserving large quantities of food for himself, aided and abetted by an ancient and doddery waiter (the sublimely comical Tom Edden) who keeps falling down the stairs, and a member of the audience who suffers no end of humiliations....
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Attack the Block – review | Film | The Guardian →
Finally got round to seeing this. Think I avoided it because, despite having a great concept, I was worried it’d be a disappointment. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case:
As well as excitement and laughs, [Director Joe] Cornish provides some sharp social comment on the subject of aliens and alienation. Now, there are many who will feel they have consumed enough hand-wringing analysis...
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Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern - Art... →
This is an amazing show. Every room contains something to inspire and delight:
Richter didn’t so much resuscitate painting as submit it to prolonged interrogation - pulling it up by its lapels and demanding it take stock of itself. He was no less forgiving of himself or his family, painting his Nazi-sympathizing father and ‘Uncle Rudi’ (in full uniform) in the same year as his...
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Grayson Perry: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman,... →
Using a word I wouldn’t normally associate with a trip to the British Museum, but this was fun:
Tombs, pots, craft, history, transvestites, what? If you have heard anything about the concept of the British Museum’s latest exhibition you will likely be feeling confused or sceptical. What has the Turner Prize-winning artist, mad potter, and celebrity transvestite been doing in one of...
October 2011
12 posts
11 tags
Whale Trail iOS game tops 38k first-weekend sales... →
Here’s a sobering insight into App Store economics:
So, Whale Trail. The £0.69 game involves guiding a flying whale through clouds while collecting bubbles, using one-tap controls. It sold around 6,500 copies on Thursday – its day of release, and before Apple’s Game Of The Week promotion kicked in. It then sold approximately 9,500 downloads on Friday, 11,000 in Saturday and 11,500 on...
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BBC News - V for Vendetta masks: Who's behind... →
A-ha! About time somebody in the mainstream media investigated the source of this… Trend? Fad? Phenomenon?
British graphic novel artist David Lloyd is the man who created the original image of the mask for a comic strip written by Alan Moore. Lloyd compares its use by protesters to the way Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara became a fashionable...
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Batman: Arkham City review - Edge Magazine →
The reviews for Batman: Arkham City are trickling in, and the critical consensus is positively glowing. This is from Eurogamer:
It’s a role-playing game, when you get down to it. Not just because you gain XP, engage in a little light levelling and are free to sharpen your combat skills one upgrade at a time. It’s a role-playing game in the most literal sense of the phrase, a game in...
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Game of Thrones: fantasy television | Television &... →
My new favourite TV series, after Mad Men.
This is the sort of show where gruff men in wolf cloaks mutter ominously that “winter is coming”, exiled princelings bitch about their lost birthright and there is much discussion of prophecies of old. Yet even if that kind of thing usually makes you run screaming to the nearest crime drama, Game of Thrones is worth sticking with.
...
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Monkey Business (1931)
Groucho: I want to register a complaint.
Captain: Why, what's the matter?
Groucho: Matter enough. Do you who sneaked into my stateroom at three o'clock this morning?
Captain: Who did that?
Groucho: Nobody, and that's my complaint. I'm young. I want gaiety, laughter, ha-cha-cha. I want to dance. I want to dance till the cows come home.
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It's Always Right Now, Until It's Later | Theatre... →
Technically speaking, this is a review of Daniel Kitson’s show from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival from Summer 2010. I saw the same show last Friday, staged at the National Theatre, but couldn’t find any recent coverage so this will have to do:
“This is not a love story,” insists Kitson at the outset. Yet in its ripe, swelling humanity and its compassionate eye for all that...
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“Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change...”
– Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address (2005)
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Inside the Russian Short Wave Radio Enigma | Wired... →
Oooooooooh, spooky:
From a lonely rusted tower in a forest north of Moscow, a mysterious shortwave radio station transmitted day and night. For at least the decade leading up to 1992, it broadcast almost nothing but beeps; after that, it switched to buzzes, generally between 21 and 34 per minute, each lasting roughly a second—a nasally foghorn blaring through a crackly ether. The signal was said...
September 2011
19 posts
11 tags
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Rebrickable →
From the “I wish I’d thought of that” cabinet, a website that allows you to combine your LEGO sets to create other sets.
The industrious folks at Rebrickable have catalogued whole swathes of the LEGO toy-line and created a searchable database, so all you have to do is type in which sets you own, and Rebrickable tells you what you can do with them.
It’s bit like typing...
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In Case You Were Planning to Watch ‘The Playboy... →
Nora Ephron, who wrote When Harry Met Sally, takes aim at the original Playboy prince:
I have for many years been puzzled by the persistence of Hugh Hefner. Why is he still here? Why does anyone write about him? Why does anyone quote his remarks about his own cultural relevance as if they are anything but wishful thinking?
Everything Hugh Hefner is responsible for—the magazine, the clubs, the...
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Lloyd's listed: will it make the Grade? | Art and... →
Stumbled across the Lloyd’s of London building whilst running an errand. Soon to be Grade I listed by English Heritage, apparently:
Here is a building with glass lifts rising up its steely exterior. Here are stainless steel-clad service towers housing prefabricated kitchen and washroom modules lifted by cranes into place. Here is one of the most impressive of all 1980s atriums, soaring 60...
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (15) - Reviews, Films -... →
It’s not often I go to the cinema to see the same film twice. This is certainly one of those occasions:
Tinker Tailor is dense, deep stuff, and a mark of its subtlety is that the deceptively mild-mannered Smiley doesn’t utter a word until 20 minutes in. One of the joys of the film is that Oldman, after years playing supporting heavies, has a real role to grapple with, and one of...
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Locusts, Cilantro, Elvis Presley - Lapham’s... →
Food factoids a go-go!
Tomato, potato, corn, beans, zucchini, squash, avocado, bell pepper, chili, and pineapple are among the foods that Christopher Columbus brought back to the Old World. Onion, garlic, wheat, barley, olives, and lettuce are among the foods he introduced to the New.
“If you’re just going to sit there and stare at me, I’m going to bed,” Elvis Presley said, breaking an awkward...
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Dans Le Noir review - Times Online →
Last night, I ate in the darkness. No, I’m not talking about biscuits in bed. I was in a restaurant cloaked in pitch black, designed to transport us to new heights in gastronomy…
My stomach is still wincing from the memory, and I’m not alone in thinking as much:
What’s the point of Dans le Noir, you may well be asking. The answer seems to be twofold: by depriving the diner...
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Source Code – review | Film | The Guardian →
Having seen this film, I was left in the paradoxical state of scratching both my head (puzzled) and my chin (thoughtful). Quoting this review from Peter Bradshaw, only because of some unusually insightful comments towards the end:
Source Code is glitzy and hi-tech in a 21st-century way, but also has something from an earlier age: it is a story from the Twilight Zone, with hints of Philip K Dick,...
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Groundhog Day (1993)
Phil: I think people place too much emphasis on their careers. I wish we could all live in the mountains at high altitude. That's where I see myself in five years. How about you?
Rita: Oh, I agree. I just like to go with the flow. See where it leads me.
Phil: Well, it's led you here.
Rita: Mm hmm. Of course it's about a million miles from where I started out in college.
Phil: You weren't in broadcasting or journalism?
Rita: Uh unh. Believe it or not, I studied 19th-century French poetry.
Phil: [laughs] What a waste of time! I mean, for someone else that would be an incredible waste of time. It's so bold of you to choose that. It's incredible; you must have been a very very strong person.
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Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, Tate Modern,... →
Sunday afternoon, grey skies, pouring rain. I took refuge in the Tate Modern:
Along with Picasso and Dalí, the great Catalan modernist Joan Miró belongs to a triumvirate of Spaniards who dominated 20th-century art. (Juan Gris was a fluent Cubist, but he didn’t devise his own pictorial language.) Like his compatriots, Miró lived a long and prodigious life – he died on Christmas Day in 1983, aged...
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Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time |... →
Melancholy ennui? Nay, it’s scientific fact!
4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than...
August 2011
10 posts
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Deus Ex: Human Revolution Review | Eurogamer.net →
I’ve been playing Deux Ex: Human Revolution without a break for the past 36 hours. Well, I’m taking the odd nap and toilet break, and scoffing my face with protein bars to top up the energy levels, but other than that my entire waking hours have been consumed - CONSUMED - by this incredibly engrossing videogame.
By the barest whisper of a whisker, I narrowly missed the opportunity to...