This is utterly fucking awful. I really loved a pair of Bester’s old SF novels, kind of pulp with modernist ideas (we’re talking Joycean SF in the ’50s), and real intensity – at least, that’s how I remember them, but I w[…]

There is a problem that many high-concept properties have. The concept is more interesting than any individual story you can tell about it. This is a problem common with many hero-led action films and other media adaptations*. The idea behind The Apo[…]

Dressing up your pets is art! No, really, it’s not just a sad and tragic thing people who talk about themselves as if they are the parent of the pet do, not at all. I know this because my good friend Rachael is organising a second art event con[…]

Andrew Wheeler’s essay, The Sorry State Of Fans, talks broadly about the same things I did the other day – fan response to, for instance, the Dr Who TV series. Both Wheeler and I find fandom wanting, though for differing reasons: I’[…]

Scott Shaw’s Oddball Comics is an entertaining read once a week, where all he does is uncover a really stupid comic from the past and retell it. There is very little side, or snide, but then there does not need to be. Take this weeks entry Spid[…]

You don’t expect an Elmore Leonard book to start in Africa. Perhaps that is the point. The first five chapters of Pagan Babies is set in Rwanda, and is pretty much about the massacres. Admittedly it told me nothing I did not already know about […]

Just a brief post right now about this book, which I truly think is one of the best books about music ever, though my recent reread of it is enabling me to catch assumptions and potential flaws more than I noticed in the past. Nonetheless, I think t[…]

Actually it’s a post I made on a brobdignagian R-Thread on ILM with the Wedge-related part in bold:
“In Seattle Dave Q said that ‘ordinary people’ are mostly rockist. I think this is true once you’ve started self-identif[…]

When I go to Berlin to perform
I only need a knapsack and these (points to arms)
And these (points to legs)
You don’t know me, or the possible effects of my words
You owe me fifty pounds
I have a passion I feel is degenerated by
Unwittingly bei[…]

Ryan Gander is pre-occupied with the perceived failure of Utopian Modernism. Gander’s childrens book The Boy Who Always Looked Up is an account of the final days of reviled Hungarian architect Erno Goldfinger, as told through the eyes of a you[…]