FT TOP 100 FILMS
19: SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT
Anthony Easton says:
Everyone liked this, they liked the crudity and mistook it for sharpness; they liked the absurdity and mistook it for political acumen, they liked the casual inclusion of […]

SENSES OF SHAME
Touch Me- Samantha Fox
In many ways Samantha Fox wanting us to touch her should not surprise us. As the most famous Page 3 girl the Sun ever had, she was certainly used to being seen. What difference would a bit of touching make? Well[…]

Derrida obituary in The Guardian: here. Does a terrific job of a summarising work and life concisely and clearly. The leader here is certainly more appropriate than the Times one mentioned below, and not just because I agree with it to a far greater […]

I drank a beer last Friday that tasted like cold, weak, black tea. This delighted me as I rather like tea like that. Others were not quite so taken by its flavour. Perhaps the word beer primed their tastebuds too much. (I cannot unfortunately remembe[…]

Delovely has a problem at its core, which scuppers the whole biographical process. Cole Porter’s songs were not autobiographical. Generally they were written for musicals, where the songs helped tell the story, a story which was quite unlike hi[…]

X marks the spot.
When Fame Academy was on, I argued that a transposition of critical and popular judgement might be under way in tele-land. (Not necessarily a good or a bad thing.) At the very least, what Pop Idol itself did was place the audience, […]

A Cinema Hot Dog
I finally got the nerve to have a FrankFOOTER (Do You See). Quite nice actually, but it didn’t half make my piss stink the next morning. (Next in our series of “makes your piss smell” look out for “Sugar Puffs[…]

Jacques Derrida 1930-2004
Expect to see more of kind of obscene gloating in the next few days. There are few scholars whose death could provoke such unseemly and offensive glee among the staff of what used to claim to be a paper of record. The violen[…]

Etan Thomas: NBA Progressive
Check this out: a strong statement by NBA dude Etan Thomas, who is apparently a poet and anti-war activist. Thomas is a fifth-year center for the Washington Wizards, which I still think of as the Washington Bullets, which[…]

Anti-Beatles Prejudice
It can be hard to disentangle judgement and prejudice at times (actually it’s always impossible, but you can do a fairly decent job most of the time). I occasionally wonder whether my dislike for and low opinion of the Be[…]