Or maybe: Sir Michael Caine should be a national treasure.
I’m not sure which of these statements I agree with most.
What’s indisputable is that the quality of his acting should not be celebrated. His performances are, almost without exce[…]

Bank Holiday Sounds: I am in a good mood this weekend, and it’s time to share it with you. Download this song (2.5MB) and see how you feel. This is not some kind of evil trick.[…]

Sasha Frere-Jones guest-posts at Fluxblog and raises some really interesting questions about repetition, formula, and ‘badness’ in music. The comments box, delightfully, lives up to them.[…]

THE SQUARE TABLE 13 / The Libertines – “Can’t Stand Me Now?”
Pop Factor: 510
“How can anyone still get it up for this?” asked Blissblog a bit ago. Good question. Listening to this I can’t help thinking of wh[…]

As an attempt at a revisionist account of my mother’s cooking (perhaps one day I will be able to discuss cooking without simultaneously discussing my mother, but this is not that day), today, with some friends, I decided to try to incorporate f[…]

The Legend
I just watched this tremendous Jet Li film again, and it has one absolutely magnificent role, that of Jet Li’s mother, played by Josephine Liao. [um, spoiler alert and all that, if it’s applicable to an old movie that’s b[…]

This month’s Sight and Sound features a review of Takashi Miike’s new film Gozu, and tentatively calls 2001’s Visitor Q his masterpiece. The reviewer’s take on Miike’s prolific career (Visitor Q and Ichi the Killer are c[…]

The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook
We have been lucky to discover several previously lost diaries of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre stuck in between the cushions of our office sofa. These diaries reveal a young Sartre obsessed not with the void, but […]

Glad It’s All Over: Where have I been? Off for one last – well, maybe – fling with ILM, having fun on the Top 100 Albums of the 00s thread (plus the tracks one which you should find quite easily). I knew the results three weeks ago […]

Hands up who thinks the world’s pubs need more bland, dodgy beer.
(counts) One two, skip a few, ninety-nine, one hundred.
I make that just about everyone, which should mean this comes as good news:
Interbrew/Ambev merge to form world’s bi[…]