Archives – 2004 – November  
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How to tell a film is based on a book: 1: A Home At The End Of The World
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— 9 Nov 2004 Pete Baran Comment

How to tell a film is based on a book:
1: A Home At The End Of The World
Lots of stuff happens. Very little of it makes any sense. The characters tend to be uncommunicative and quiet, you can tell there is shedloads of internal monologue going on in[…]

Am I alone in finding David Starkey repellant? He’s history’s Carol Vorderman. “I’ve tried to eliminate the really crass errors but I’ve no doubt that I’ve made huge numbers of mistakes. That’s the name of the game when you’re looking at the big picture,” he tells today’s Guardian. Not a sentiment you’d get from, oh, any remotely serious historian: the mystery is that Starkey is regarded as a a better fit for TV and stardom over anyone else. Maybe you have to really *want* it: get the agent, work the old contacts, I don’t know, otherwise I’d be doing it myself. Whatever, Starkey’s ideas would have seem antediluvian in Namier’s day, and teh Guardian’s l4ym0r inverse snobbery line — “He’s not some rent-a-gob pundit straight out of Oxbridge. Like them or hate them, his views are founded in academic rigour [unlike aanyone from Oxbridge…]” — is merely a symptom of the real dumbing-down both it and Starkey claim to deplore. The ‘trickle-down effect’ into TV from the serious historiography of the past 70 years (basically from the French ‘Annales’ school via the British Marxist group) would appear to have been decisively halted — whether this is or is not itself a result of ‘trickle-down’ from the corporatizing of publishing — which, of course, has made history so hot right now — I don’t know. Rockist? 4 life, beeyotch.
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— 9 Nov 2004 HKM Comment

Am I alone in finding David Starkey repellant? He’s history’s Carol Vorderman. “I’ve tried to eliminate the really crass errors but I’ve no doubt that I’ve made huge numbers of mistakes. That’s the name of th[…]

Design and Art
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— 9 Nov 2004 Anthony Easton Comment

Design and Art
The murals that bedeck the sides of the 50s era Bowl-a-Rama on Glencarin and Bathurst, in Toronto, have an eerie resemblance to the larger Barnett Newman work, of the same time.
Why is Newman art and Bowl-a-Rama design ?
(Newman intere[…]

Huge article
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— 8 Nov 2004 Geeta Dayal Comment

Huge article in the November issue of Scientific American asking (cue doodly synth music) “What is the secret behind music’s strange power?” I’m a sucker for music/brain articles–it’s one of my favorite subjects to[…]

Senses of shame: CHAKA KHAN – “I Feel For You”
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— 8 Nov 2004 Tanya Headon Comment

Is it because she is blind that she feels for me? Or that the lights are off? Either way the last thing I want is a woman with scary hair groping me up and down. Especially if she is then going to drag along fellow blind man Stevie Wonder on harmonic[…]

The literal mening of “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day”
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— 8 Nov 2004 Pete Baran Comment

The literal mening of “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day”was made clear on Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway this weekend. On an evening where half the country was out at an organised fireworks display, they finished off[…]

Macaulay Culkin is a funny looking chap.
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— 8 Nov 2004 Pete Baran Comment

Macaulay Culkin is a funny looking chap. Was he ever a cute kid? I’m not sure. His popularity may well have been more based on his resemblance to Edvard Munch’s Scream. Is it any wonder that the Scream horror franchise traded on this imag[…]

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THE SQUARE TABLE 20 / Fatboy Slim – “Slash Dot Dash”
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— 8 Nov 2004 Tom Comment

POP FACTOR: 342 CONTROVERSY RATING: 247
Simultaneously lazy and ballsy, a rum way to end a pop career but weeks away from its brief radio life at least it sounds like a footnote, so not as undignified as it might have been. As a track on one of the[…]

You cannot libel the dead.
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— 8 Nov 2004 Pete Baran Comment

You cannot libel the dead. Which is why it always suprises me that bio-pics are often completely reverantial towards their subject. For example Finding Neverland is a film designed to rehabilitate the reputation of a man whose reputation is, since hi[…]

Neo-Coms
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— 8 Nov 2004 Tom Comment

Neo-Coms
Rich Johnston’s comics gossip column reports an upcoming book from Marvel, Combat Zone: True Tales from GI’s In Iraq. How true, precisely? Here’s what Johnston has to say about the credentials of co-writer Karl Zinsmeister:[…]

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