John Water’s new film tries so hard to offend that you cannot help be won over by its twee charms. Tracie Ullmann’s sexually repressed mother gets a bang around the head and becomes the twelth apostle of Ray-Ray, a kind of Jesus for sex a[…]

on sunday sistrah becky and i took dad down south and west, to the stiperstones, with its rocky outcrops, past the abandoned leadmine at snailbeach: he would lead student field trips out here fortnightly at least, while he was still teaching, though […]

The European standard it seems these days is to have two beers with the same name but of different strengths. We are not unused to this in the UK, pace Carlsberg and Carlsberg Export after all. Even Fosters made a brief foray into these murky waters[…]

And now I get it. This is low-key storytelling at its best, the weaving of anecdotes into a whole: into a life. You can only tell a life in stories if that life is not too mundane, but what Murray challenges himself to do is walk the tightrope of a v[…]

I’ve openly admired most everything Derren Brown has done, with the exception of the silly Russian Roulette show. There was a so-so counting trick on tonight’s show with the episode’s “guest celeb” Jo Whiley which i coul[…]

Stylus Singles Jukebox, this week with even more me. This time I feature as a lone voice crying out in a wilderness of horror, or a lone horror crying out in a wilderness of good sense, depending very much on your opinion of “Mr. Lonely” […]

MP3 and text submitted by Martin Skidmore
Joe Tex and Mable John – “The Same Things It Took To Get Me”
I like duets in general, but this is my favourite ever. You expect good strong singing from the stand-up preacher of soul and fro[…]

One of the things I do like about election time are the posters. I like the posters displayed in people’s windows, although that seems to be less and less common these days. The only posters on our street were ours and the flat across the road […]

Clay Shirky’s essay A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy is a couple of years old but I found it personally resonant right now.
“And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conver[…]

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