I’ve just reread all of this, and I totally love it. It is difficult and demanding, and I wonder if the editors were tempted to provide annotations, footnotes or some such – but eventually I decided they weren’t needed. I’m no[…]

Title of this piece comes from the Pitchfork Graph link comments when someone called the charts visual porn, only to be chided that porn, on the whole, works via the conduit of the optic nerves*. But graphs? Hey ho, whatever turns you on. For me, its[…]

Freaky Trigger is ten years old this March. We’re going to have a few things celebrating that fact – some kind of party, some other bits of special content – but this is also a really good opportunity for me to revisit some of the s[…]

24. The Orb – Blue Room
It was a dark day when my tape of Rave’92 broke. Repeated rewinding and pausing had caused a hole to develop in the tape, and my rubbish cassette player refused to play it unless I wound it back manually and flippe[…]

I am not a film distributor. I just go see the blasted things. But even I can see that the release of A Christmas Tale (the new Arnaud Desplechin movie) might have been a touch botched, with it coming out mid-January. But then I saw it, ALL 150 MINUT[…]

Vachss is a unique writer. Most of his novels centre on a man named Burke, someone far enough beyond the underworld that they don’t know he exists. He makes a living ripping off child porn fans and wannabe mercenaries, and will take a PIish cas[…]

A quick recap!
This is a series of posts “liveblogging” the Pitchfork 500, reflecting the book’s dual purpose as criticism and playlist. The ground rule is that I do the writing in real time as I listen to the music: no edits after that (except[…]

Bear in mind that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is made up of a ragbag of old people and industry professionals. What does this superficially hip, nearly MTV edited, earsplitting, scatalogically* partial subtitled film got over t[…]

Let’s kick the BBC again. For all the rights and wrongs in the current furore over the BBC not showing the DEC appeal for humanitarian aid in Gaza, a key point appears to have been missed. I must admit the arguments over news impartiality, appr[…]

I didn’t walk out of the The Good Night because I fell asleep. HA HA – what an irony when the film itself is about sleeping! I did not fall asleep for very long, but I wish I had. You have probably already detected a theme in this list of[…]