I know that Biskind’s Down And Dirty Pictures is not supposed to be an academic piece*. But should he really set his stall out quite so clearly in the foreword (not even the Introduction)? In his summary of 90’s independent films he starts of[…]

“copyrighting the alphabet will not produce more books“:
i have to keep my eye on WAY more of this stuff if i am ever to get the last section of my book (the big one) (which i have been writing for 14 years now sigh) back in play: if i h[…]

I have gotten Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy mixed up before. Not in a prose identification way, they are distinctive enough, but merely in the name filing part of my brain. I was reminded of this by looking at the blurb for David Peace’s Nine[…]

RIP VHS: Marky Mark Lawson on the downfall of VHS. I can’t comment on the ‘common culture’ stuff as I was just a kid back then, but his evocations of overwritten and thick-piled videotape labels obscure one key aspect of the video: […]

S’NDOR WE’RES: Antithin
At last it has leaked out – thin men are the cause of everything.
They wait in ambush on street corners and if an old woman comes by
they don’t even greet her. They are more concerned with exchanging th[…]

Cat Power and The Handsome Boy Modeling School?Be My Boy.
I?ve been about thinking about Cat Power, and I’m thinking of her cover of Wild is the Wind, that grand Peyton place chantey about lost opportunity, and about how much more sad she made […]

“EWING SAID“:
‘Ewing said the game was designed to undermine the theory there was some shadowy plot behind the assassination: “We believe passionately there was no conspiracy.”‘[…]

END-TIMES WATCH #2:
“[Ewing] insisted he and his team had nothing but respect for Kennedy and for history”[…]

One of my favourite things about being a meat eater (aside the meat I guess) is having a casserole or stew with the meat on the bone and discovering offal popping out of the fluid near the end. This is particularly good with smaller animals which you[…]

“Igniting kids’ interest in history”: actually history is one of the genres better served by computer games. Well, military history, anyway, but games like Civilisation stand or fall by how plausible a timeline their game mechanics […]