Hello! I'm here again to spurt sticky criticism into the eyes of Pirates Of The Caribbean - At Worlds End, Fantastic Four - Rise Of The Silver Surfer, Denzel Washington's silly time travel action film Deja Vu and long-awaited comedy Knocked Up.
I've posted already about More Words About Music and Songs, my current blog project within which I write an essay about every Talking Heads song, one at a time. Since then, however, quite a few more have popped up...both Q magazine and The New York Post have written about the trend (the former mentioning mine by name), and I have to admit it's an interesting phenomenon, this, using as it does the formal rigidity of the default blog to its advantage.
The current, operational song-by-song blogs of which I'm aware are as follows:
• All My Little Words - The Magnetic Fields
• Blursongs - Blur
• Emotional Karaoke - The Mountain Goats
• Fragments of a Cale Season - John Cale
• Fridgebuzz - Radiohead
• Hyper-Ballads - Bjork
• I Got a Message For You - Robyn Hitchcock
• More Words About Music and Songs - Talking Heads (That's me...!)
• More Than Ten - Pearl Jam
• Music From a Bachelor's Den - Pulp
• My Impression Now - Guided by Voices
• One Imaginary Blog - The Cure
• Paraguay and Laos - The Bluetones
• Pop Songs 07 - R.E.M. (The inspiration for all of these blogs, either directly or in-)
• Ten Thousand Lies - Nine Inch Nails
• Too Many Words, Too Many Words - Low
So who out there is going to get a Wordpress account and set up the inevitable Bowie one?
While the Dalek two parter was a bit of a stinker, its grand ambition and goofy charm encouraged continued hope for a series that didn't contain the annual two or three risible, cock-awful episodes. We'd started strong, faltered slightly, but were still riding a crest of goodwill to some extent. Then there was The Lazarus Experiment, the scripting debut and hopefully swansong of some prick called Stephen Greenhorn. The episode must have looked good on paper - fan favourite writer Mark Gatiss appearing in front of the cameras for the first time as a mad scientist with a special machine to wind back his own body clock. But the process has bestowed more gifts upon him than youth - he's also now prone to turning into a gigantic man eating scorpion monster thing, which I'll refer to from now on as "the shittest special effect ever", for obvious reasons.
Continue reading "Doctor Who - The Lazarus Experiment & 42" »
Really captures the frustration of a Sunday, doesn't it?
Anyway, yeah, sorry about the downtime. It wasn't even anything remotely serious in the end - the server we're on decided to, erm, switch itself off for no reason - and it wouldn't respond to remote power-cycling. Unfortunately, the usual sysadmin was away, hence the delay in getting someone to PRESS AN ON BUTTON. Still, we've had excellent uptime since we changed servers late last year. But whilst we always had off-site backups, from now on I'm also keeping weekly on-site ones as well, so we shouldn't have this kind of downtime again.
Incidentally, sorry things have been a bit slow around here recently too. There are PLANS for this to change, however, with some interesting stuff in the pipeline.
See you in about 25 years, then.
George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison. George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison. And one more time for the folks in the back: George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison.
This was the lineup for The Traveling Wilburys...perhaps the only band in the history of rock music to really deserve the "supergroup" label. It's amazing that this group of world-changing musicians got together to record two albums in 1988 and 1990. A thousand times more amazing, however, is that they've both been out of print for over a decade. That all changed this past Tuesday.
Continue reading "Review: The Traveling Wilburys Collection" »
Working my way through I’m Alan Patridge some time ago I questioned myself about something. What is it about Bravealan that makes it stand out so clearly as a favorite episode among fans? It’s not significantly funnier than any of the others…nor does it have a complex plot of any kind…what sets it apart?
It didn’t take long before I realized that Bravealan offers the most direct exploration of what makes Alan tick of any episode…and, if you watch closely, it even gives him the chance to transcend the trap that is himself.
Continue reading "Alan Partridge and the Maturity Paradox" »
Despite the planned eviction being cancelled, the first week (or so) of BB8 has seen the usual early drop-outs. Least predictable of the two was Emilys eviction after dim-wittedly addressing the vile Charley as "you nigger" in what we can only presume was an ill-concieved, "ironic" address or more likely a catastrophically unfortunate slip of the tongue. I think she probably moves in circles of posh teenagers who take horsey glee in bandying about swear words and speak in Nathan Barley-esque gangster lingo, rather than is actually racist deep down, despite "tabloid revelations" to the effect that she had a snowball fight on a school trip to Auschwitz so she MUST HATE JEWS TOO, THE BIG RACIST.
Friend of NTS Jamie McKelvie has a new comic coming out in September. It's called Suburban Glamour, and it's clearly going to be rather good. He's already gone on about it a fair bit here, but now, through the medium of brilliant-one-page-advert-strips, let Astrid and Dave give you a bit more info...
(click for full version)
If the fact that it's written and drawn by the creator of a certain comic about Britpop that we all rather like, who also happens to be one of the hottest young artists in the business today, isn't enough to sell it to you; and if you're not yet swayed by the promise of a nice bit of twisted, modern-day urban fantasy, then let me say three words that will surely win you round :
Hot. Punk. Girls.
You know it makes sense.
Astonishing (safe for work, don't worry). Well done B3ta.
Inside job? Quite possibly. I suspect someone mischievous at Online got hold of the B3ta submission, couldn't resist including it, and it snowballed from there.
We're a little behind on our Doctor Who series three reviews at the moment - although rest assured, we do intend to catch up in due course - so it'll be a little while before we get round to raving about how utterly fantastic Paul Cornell's "Human Nature" two-parter was (although he might as well clear a space on his shelf right now for the 2008 Hugo). In the meantime, though, it's worth noting that for those of you who enjoyed the episodes and want to read Cornell's original novel, the BBC have helpfully put their eBook of it back online, complete with some extra notes on the adaptation by Cornell, and all the lovely painted artwork and whatnot. Newcomers to the New Adventures series should note that they're set inbetween the end of the original series in 1989 and the 1996 TV movie, and feature Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor (albeit one that evolved and changed quite a lot from his TV version).
And when you're done with Human Nature, go and read the excellent The Dying Days and Lungbarrow, as well - after all, you never know, with novels out there by Cornell, RTD, Gatiss, Roberts and Jones, Human Nature might not be the last of the NAs to get adapted for the screen...
