What is the correct response to the old ‘what are your influences‘ chestnut?
It really should be an interesting question as genuine influence is usually pretty fascinating. Witness, for example, the John Lennon jukebox CD/documentary or, […]

Superhero TV Cartoon Theme Songs
I think my favourite and least favourite TV theme tunes are currently from superhero cartoons. The best of them is the Teen Titans theme. It’s a terrific show very much in the Japanese style throughout, all the […]

INDIE AMNESTY
You know the score by now, unwanted CDs of doubtful provenance auctioned on eBay for our Grecian Earn appeal. So forget the blurb and check out these beauties!
Sad Beth for one earth pence!
I Love 1996
Someone take their tartrazine away[…]

Recording my new album — so there was this one and there’s this one and then there’s a so-far unreleased one done back in May, but album number four has been completed and I’m listening to it now as I dub a copy to be sent up […]

How Now Christian Metz?
or: Giant Leaps Forward in Film Theory: “Similarly, running around a structure buried deep beneath Antarctica (it’s colder underground) without a hat for an extended period of time is ridiculous. And fighting an a[…]

Breakfast with the snoots — the Pacific Whey Cafe and Baking Company knows its audience and knows its locale. That’s the well-off and then some crew that lurks not merely in Newport Beach in my neck of the woods, but Corona del Mar and th[…]

My August albums — there are three records that I listen to only at one particular time per year, and that’s an LA summer, smack dab in August. I didn’t get any of them in August to my knowledge, I don’t even think I first hea[…]

It’s not the Space Needle, so what EEES it, man? — the BT Telecom Tower has always tripped me out a little whenever I’ve seen it around London. I’ll turn a corner or the taxi I’m in will change a lane or something and t[…]

Atrocity Exhibition as Primetime Drama: Actual Real Surgery on TV pt whatever [warning: long post]
The J. G. Ballard interview that I quote a bit of below took place in 1982, and a lot of the rest of it (unquoted) feels a bit dated now, even naive &[…]

Gah
As I may have mentioned before, I’m less than pleased at Morrison’s takeover of Safeway. This is not to praise the latter chain, it was a mediocre supermarket at best, and horrifically overpriced; and this is also not to say that I&#8[…]