Quite unrelatedly, I was listening to Stan Tracey’s version of “Under Milk Wood” only this morning, thanks to punctum’s Pink Floyd essay: of course the narrator is Merthyr Tydfil-born Madoc, doing all Dylan Thomas’s voices (as he no doubt had many other times). Also a Doctor Who stalwart: just one of those fixtures, really. Only 77.
(<– He’s not on this one, I don’t think: but I spent long hours as a kid poring over the cover as I listened to my parents’ copy, so I can’t help the association.)
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT • 1 Comment
In which one syllabubdobdee (who he?) dives into the complexities of “audience response theory” as it applies to Masterchef.
(And introducing Blogging Doesn’t Get Tougher Than This, an outlet for people who can’t not watch food programming on television…: ps not just featuring me as a commentator, either)
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT • No Comments
… in which Everett True gets the internet to do his PhD homework for him =:)
ET is crowd-sourcing responses to questions that relate to his thesis, which is about music-writing and the internet. Question #2 was “what is the role of the music critic?” — and he’s kicked off the debate with an answer I sent him some time last year. Which in turn links back to my review of Marcello’s book, which drew a distinction between the critic’s role and the reviewer’s. (Yesterday’s was on trolling…)
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT • 1 Comment
It’s been a long while since I last picked up my guitar, but every so often I’ll go to a gig that makes me consider making music again. This can be for a number of reasons:
1) The music is SO BAD I think to myself ‘I can do way better than this’ (aka the ‘Free Trade Hall‘ rule).
2) The dudes on stage look like they’re having fun, which temporarily blots out the memories of driving a hire van 800 miles in three days and not being able to find .012 gauge strings ANYWHERE in Nottingham on a Sunday morning.
3) The musicians are making excellent music in an achievable (for me) fashion, e.g. pressing buttons on a laptop, playing rudimentary chords or basslines, saying words in a monotonous voice (aka the Elastica rule).
more »
katstevens in FT • 5 Comments
(This piece was written to coincide with Mike Dibb’s documentary on the jazz saxophonist Barbara Thompson, and how Parkinson’s disease affects her playing life. The first time I saw it, at a screening last year, I knew I wanted to write something about my father, his Parkinson’s and the poem printed below the fold. I’d hoped a newspaper would run it — because I think the general topic’s important as well as interesting, and because I know Mike likes the poem — but though I sent proposals to several, and the finished piece to a couple, it was always going to be a complex balance of getting the proposal right, getting the piece right, getting the right section of the right paper, and getting the timing of my pitch right (not too early, not too late). I knew it was a long shot — it falls somewhat between tidy journalistic categories (poetry & music & health & family) — and in the event, I missed too many lead-times to find time to hustle an appropriate slot for it. So here it is. Update: Barbara Thompson: Playing Against Time, aired on BBC4, Sunday 19 February, 9-10.15pm UK time, but should still be viewable on via BBC iplayer for a while.)
A scientist and teacher by profession, my father had been an excellent amateur calligrapher in his youth, and an artist in ink, as well as an occasional poet. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 1967, but a badly shaky writing hand was the earliest symptom, some time before that, and he had to switch to his other hand to teach himself how to write from scratch, giving up drawing for ever. The condition takes you through cycles of capability — from flail to freeze and back — that mean that you are all too often not to be able to get your limbs to do the most ordinary things, such as picking up the pills which will cycle you through blessed mid-way periods of balance for a while, but then out again into the opposite unbalanced state. The effect on anything more deftly ambitious will eventually be devastating, but for some the slow on-set of the disease will mean — as my father’s poem below suggests — that the passions and possibilities of your art have become intimately tangled with Parkinson’s itself, how you feel about it, how you work with it; what you want to do, what you can no longer do. And in fact he lived with it — as did we, his family — for 43 years, an unusually long time. more »
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT • 6 Comments
Yo ho ho and a bottle of dumb. My joint fourth worst films of last year are additions to franchises, which use boats, monsters and lack any real plot logic. Both films are adapted from books, one ridiculously loosely, the other relatively slavishly. But in both cases I left the cinema rubbing my head wondering why it was ever made. And then I looked at the box office results and it was more than clear why. The movie business love franchises, even faltering franchises, an box office is king. But empty special effects sequences tied together do not make a film, and be it a franchise extension or a relatively tedious point in a franchise wind down, ships and monsters aren’t enough for me.
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Pete Baran in FT • 18 Comments
or “You Will be Very Crumpled””
… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community, and crossposted at FT.
aka the Sorrows of Young Adric, in which everyone’s favourite wooden doughy doe-eyed teen brainiac hatemonkey Adults Up and Takes One for Evolution, cleverly time-slipping an otherwise entirely unremarkable production-line Cyberman planet-bomb into the actual original Alvarez Impact… At this most traumatically significant transition-time for Likeable 5ive and his Famously Too-Numerous Pals, why not mark/muffle/muddle the Breaking of the Fellowship with the first starring role in kid’s pop culture for the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event? Anyway, EarthSoXoR was an ep I’ve heard a LOT, but never seen: SO NOW READ ON more »
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT • 6 Comments
Part of the freshly exhumed ‘hauntography’ series. Read the original story, or read more about the series.
Anyone reading these stories in canonical order should by now have a good idea of how they tend to play out. An aged antiquary finds or hears of the existence of a peculiar ancient artefact and in the course of further investigation, prompted either by avarice or simple scholarly curiousity, unwittingly awakens some eldritch horror who torments him, often to the death, either as punishment for his greed or out of mere supernatural malice.
On first approach The Tractate Middoth seems like it’s going to follow this pattern nicely. The title obviously refers to the artefact which will cause all the trouble, and it’s nicely esoteric and sinister sounding. And on the very first line our antiquary is introduced, a Mr John Eldred, elderly and male of course and sporting a fine set of piccadilly weepers (a wonderful term whose meaning is surely apparent even if you’ve never come across it before) and indeed seeking after the titular Tractate. But he is unable to procure it for someone else has got there first, someone perhaps of sinister aspect. Has Mr Eldred already unwittingly set malevolent forces in motion? Is there a ghoul in waiting for him? more »
ledge in FT /The Brown Wedge • 5 Comments
Quite unrelatedly, I was listening to Stan Tracey’s version of “Under Milk Wood” only this morning, thanks to punctum’s Pink Floyd essay: of course the narrator is Merthyr Tydfil-born Madoc, doing all Dylan Thomas’s voices (as he no doubt had many other times). Also a Doctor Who stalwart: just one of those fixtures, really. Only 77. 
