Unpacking My Library Dept.: Last year I started buying a lot of books again for the first time since I was 16. The next trick is finishing some of them. My shelves are stuffed with admissions of defeat: maybe one time in four I’ve lasted until […]

I did not go to any of the seminars at ComICA – the comics season at the ICa in late July, but whilst I was seeing a film there I did have a moment to peruse the large comic wall being drawn on the way to the bar. And some nice person has now p[…]

ILX is being as useless as the woman on the Orange Film Commission, so I’ll have to pose my thorny problem here. That’ll Teach Them – the overlooked* third of the current British television triumvirate of teacher based shows finishe[…]

Is there anyone who isn’t working with The Matrix now? Is there any way in which “Sleeping With The Light On” differs from a Matrix ballad anyway? Will The Matrix’ own record (ye gods) be the pop-rock answer to N.E.R.D.? Why d[…]

In case you hadn’t heard – TONIGHT is the third Freaky Trigger club night, at Parker Place, on Parker Street, off Kingsway, very near Holborn Tube, in London, from 6.30 until closing time. Come along if you’re at a loose end and say[…]

LUMIDEE – “Never Leave You (Uh-Oh)”
People’s antipathy towards this track puzzles me, but then again I can’t think of a more divisive R&B track in recent memory. You either “get it” or you don’t. […]

One of the many smart ways that Memento works its gimmick (and it’s a shame that a film that tries so hard to transcend will always be “that backwards film”) is that it produces the same effect in the hero and the audience by opposi[…]

Tom’s Top Twelve this week is very much the Richard X Tribute Edition. All week I’ve been playing 80s records, to the point of making Isabel complain: I now think this was subconscious preparation for hearing Richard X. Often in comics or[…]

It must be getting on for fifteen years ago that my good friend Daniel wrote “…on some days I listen to just one song, once”. That song was “Stumble” by Emily, still one of the greatest records I’ve ever heard. I&#[…]

Dual stories, historical hokum. I have a feeling that the literary establishment would not consider The Sacrifice Stone by Elizabeth Harris in the same sort of exulted breath as The Athenian Murders, but it plays the same kind of game. In story one w[…]