In Crouch End yesterday (this will become important) I saw a small child gleefully playing in the snow after being let out of school. The poor nipper was possibly upset that his primary school had not been closed by an inch of snow, but he was making[…]

* I don’t think it will, by the way. Its a good, but pretty bogstandard, biopic which stands or falls – like most biopics – on how interesting you find the facts of Harvey Milk’s life. And in this case its Milk’s life […]

In “Comics as Culture”, M. Thomas Inge posited that comics and jazz were the two art forms that “perhaps represent America’s major indigenous contribution to world culture.” A throwaway line; as you can tell by the title[…]

Three more links from the past – two of them never before reprinted! (possibly with good reason) If you want just the content and none of my reminiscing, go here. (more…)[…]

As we are naval gazing here at FT, with our ten years celebrations, I though I would have a little trip through the related links on the sidebar. A magical mystery tour which took me to an article I wrote back in 2006 regarding the oddness of the phy[…]

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[…]