Cruel Summer or Shut Up Sunshine!
It’s probably best not to look forward to things, but I do, and I’m often disappointed. I’d waited quite a few weeks to see Pirates of the Caribbean. I mean the trailer was great; skeletons, Rob Zom[…]

Caldeirada de Lulas!! Talitha brought me squid stew in a tin for tea on Thursday, and it was the best thing ever, just spread on thick bread. Like a sardine tin, where you peel the metal top back. She got it in a shop called Lisboa, somewhere in West[…]

New Evanescence single: debut airing on the American Teen Awards 2003. It’s really not fair to keep us watching with the promise of a new album from x-Nysync star JC Chasez but instead give us the black clad American equivalent of the Cranberri[…]

But Tom, what of the PIRATE ZOMBIE MONKEY? I neither am at a grate barbequeue as I am being a goth and avoiding crowds and going outside in the heat. Instead I am here to comment that the LADIES from 24 are completely interchangable with the GURLS fr[…]

YARRRRRRRRRR! Everyone else is at a great barbeque and I am sat at home nursing a hurt foot so it falls to me to mention Pirates Of The Caribbean, which we saw on Friday night. I am not the best person to review films, I rarely see any so my cinemati[…]

Capleton-Lock Up
It’s impossible to hear the vocal from Addictive by Truth Hurts without alarm bells tearing through your brain. So when Capleton manage to work the beat into something altogether more booty shaking, it’s quite a feat. Dan[…]

The artwork for Closer was delivered to Factory Records two months before Ian Curtis’s suicide. Hyperreal Gothic statuary, tombstone typography: you can call this the “Premonition of Genius”, if you find any use for such ideas. Or y[…]

There aren’t many online pages about Robert Kanigher, and given that he died last year most of what Google turns up are obituaries. Entirely properly, these tend to stress his many worthy and creative achievements in comics and don’t writ[…]

A corollary about genre fiction (following from my Block-blog below): there are genre fans who are uninterested in the works admired by people who are more general fans of the medium, SF fans dismissive of Dick, Delany or Ballard and so on, for their[…]

Lawrence Block and the continuing unease of genre
Although it seems as if these days almost every literary commentator acknowledges that genre fiction can be as good as fiction in the literary mainstream, it’s just lip service. Nods are made to[…]