It’s a weird phenomenon to mourn the passing of someone you never knew. Or perhaps I should say met, rather then knew, because when it comes to artists whose work is important to you there’s always that feeling that you at least know them a little – know a part of them anyway. When the [...] Read more – ‘Adam Yauch 1964-2012’.
Last night my girlfriend and I re-watched David Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That is to say it was on the TV in the same room and I listened to the majority of it, and watched some, whilst I browsed the internet on my laptop. I’m not prone to putting too [...] Read more – ‘Towards Undivided Attention’.
As I type this, my girlfriend is sat less than a meter from the TV, pad and pencil in hand, decoding an alphabet composed of strange square shapes. Friday 13 April saw the release of Fez, an indie platformer / puzzle game four of five years in the making. Up until its release, during showings [...] Read more – ‘Navigating Mazes’.
I just started playing the long-awaited XBLA game Fez from Phil Fish and Polytron, and it has me thinking about an interesting thought experiment I came across recently via the comedian Demetri Martin. He in turn had heard it in some format as a story from someone else, so you’re getting this something like third [...] Read more – ‘Via Gomez and Demetri’.
I was never a heavy Instagram user: I posted shots now and again (mainly of food). The fact that I use an iPod Touch instead of a smartphone means a lot of the app’s appeal as instantaneous is reduced for me since I’m unable to upload until I find a wi-fi connection. Nevertheless, the aesthetic [...] Read more – ‘~Instant Photography’.
For any given task I want to perform with technology I tend to go through a number of different set-ups before I find the one which is going to work best for me. I’ll admit that some of this is down to my own inability to properly figure out exactly what it is I’m looking [...] Read more – ‘On Bookmarking’.
Something interesting popped up on Twitter recently which got me thinking about the way I’m using a certain word, and the way I’m thinking about a certain concept: ‘mindfulness’. On the surface it’s a really useful word, capturing in three neat syllables the entire idea of paying more attention to one’s surroundings, the moment you [...] Read more – ‘What Does ‘Mindful’ Mean?’.
I’m currently half way through my fourth and final MA module, and the time has come to start thinking about what I’ll write on for my dissertation. At 15,000 words in length and worth 1/3 of the overall marks of the MA, the dissertation is an important part of the process; it’s also the most [...] Read more – ‘Dissertation Abstract’.
OK, just quickly and from the gut; the only way I can do this is by saying who I’d like to see win – I’m not going to break down who I’m rooting for vs. who I think will take the statue away on the night. And, for that reason, I’m not going to cover [...] Read more – ‘Oscar Picks’.
By and large I’m pretty happy with how iTunes Match performs. I’ve had one or two issues with album artwork not downloading, or only showing up sporadically, but generally it has worked well and in just the way you’d expect. There is one thing that I hope gets changed in a future iOS firmware update: [...] Read more – ‘A Small Problem with iTunes Match iOS’.
The first time I watched David Lynch’s 2006 film INLAND EMPIRE, I sat with my laptop open and did some kind of unfiltered, automatic typing throughout the 3-hour running time. Lynch’s visceral, surrealistic brand of film-making arguably makes it a legitimate form of criticism to attempt to capture one’s raw, unprocessed reaction. And whilst the [...] Read more – ‘David Lynch: In Dreams’.
Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ve spent the last two days working on PhD proposals and therefore thinking a lot about what form the next three years of my life could take, but now seems like a good time to take a brief glance back at the last twelve months. Academia Having elected to pursue my [...] Read more – ‘End of Year Review’.
The deadline for this term’s essay is Friday at noon, so essentially there’s one more full day of writing, plus a few hours of editing Friday morning, between me and submission. As always, despite my protestations otherwise, it’s come down to my usual pattern of research, research, research, then write everything in the last few [...] Read more – ‘Essay Progress’.
Drink your tea slowly. That was the best advice I received in the first week of 2012. It arrived via Google+, by way of Kevin Rose. It’s actually part of a longer quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, which goes like this: Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the earth [...] Read more – ‘(Somewhat Belated) Happy New Year’.
I bought 10 albums this year, and three of those as presents for other people. A couple of years ago that number would be closer to 70, and it’s not like I listened to any less music in 2011 than I have in the past. The difference is made up by Spotify. I fell for [...] Read more – ‘The Ethics of Spotify’.
Urbanized, the third film in director Gary Hustwit’s ‘design trilogy’ is currently in limited release in cinemas, and also as a pay-per-view streaming rental via the film’s website. Kickstarter backers of the project were granted a free rental, and I’ve just watched mine. The film is a great addition to Hustwit’s set of accessible, enthralling [...] Read more – ‘Urbanized, Gary Hustwit dir. (2011)’.
The home screen of Roman Opałka’s website says that on August 6, 2011 he ‘completed his work’. That was the day that the Polish artist died at the age of 79, thereby bringing an end to a project titled ‘Opałka: 1965 / 1 – ∞’ which had occupied him for more than 45 years. At [...] Read more – ‘5607249’.
A quick look at my recent YouTube plays reveals that I’ve used the site to watch interviews, look for the solution to a particularly tricky videogame puzzle, research material for a seminar on Ezra Pound, and re-watch a favourite sitcom pratfall. The site has become such a catch-all that it serves, for many people, as [...] Read more – ‘On Life in a Day’.
You know that question on The Guardian‘s Q&A page where they ask who you’d invite to your dream dinner party? Most people’s answers include all manner of celebrities and historical figures: Virginia Woolf, Hitler, Jesus… they go wild with it. Recently I’ve been daydreaming about a dinner party I’d like to throw, attended by all [...] Read more – ‘Daydream Dinner Party’.
At some point in 1994 a friend returned from a European holiday bearing a gift: a C90 tape onto which he had copied a pair of albums that he’d somehow discovered on the continent and thought I should hear. The way I like to remember it is with that hand-labelled tape being handed over along [...] Read more – ‘Happy Birthday Nevermind’.
You can always count on Radiohead for great visual design. Starting with the manipulated photography of 1995′s The Bends each record has had its own aesthetic style which goes a long way towards informing the greater ??? in which the music is located. I haven’t bought many CDs in the last couple of years (relying [...] Read more – ‘TKOL RMX 1234567’.
From the very moment of their occurrence there was no question that the events of 11 September 2001 were of historic magnitude. But at a remove of ten years it is clear that a decade has been an insufficient span of time to consign them to history. Those acts of violent spectacle have echoed, in [...] Read more – ‘Thoughts on a Decade Passed’.
At the time of writing I have five games of chess on the go – which is five more than I played all of the previous month. Having Shredder on my Mac (as previously discussed) didn’t prove a big enough incentive to play as much as I had hoped. For whatever reason playing against the [...] Read more – ‘Opening Moves’.
Around a month or so ago I came across a novel titled Today & Tomorrow. The cover bore a pencil portrait of a sullen looking Bill Murray – which was enough to make me buy the book. It turned out to be a pretty interesting read: somewhat in the so-called Kmart realist mode recently employed [...] Read more – ‘Interview with Ofelia Hunt’.
I think I first came across Tim Navis’s work via one of the image aggregator sites: Ffffound, Buamai et al. I make a pilgrimage to those for quick hits of visual inspiration on an almost daily basis, and every now and again I’ll hit upon work that chimes with me instantly. That’s how I ended [...] Read more – ‘Outliers, Vol 1: Iceland’.
Every summer The Guardian publish a short fiction special collecting new stories from established authors. Alongside these there is always one piece from a new writer selected from responses to an open call which the paper puts out a couple of months before. This year was the third year I’ve entered and though I’ve never had [...] Read more – ‘It Gets Heavier When You’re Standing Still’.
Bar the alterations made to the login screen, the most immediate substantial change you’re aware of when booting up OS X Lion for the first time is the reversal of trackpad scrolling direction. Whereas previously a two-fingered slide down the pad would scroll a page down, now a two-fingered slide up the pad is required. My [...] Read more – ‘Down is the New Up’.
The schedule for a full-time English & American Literature MA at Kent is two modules of classes in the first and second terms, and a dissertation in the third term. Us part-time students–of which there don’t appear to be that many–take one module in the first term, one in the second… and then repeat in [...] Read more – ‘Broken Spines’.
As part of my MA earlier this year I wrote an essay which compared 1900-30s modernist fiction with visual art from the same period. Although I focussed on only a couple of artists–the piece ended up being titled ‘Cézanne & Hemingway; Picasso & Dos Passos: Modernism’s Refiguring of Perspective in Literature and the Visual Arts’–the [...] Read more – ‘Bellows’ Snow’.
When I moved south in 2008 I took on a daily commute approaching four hours per day: a walk to the station, ~48 minutes on the train, waiting for a connecting tube, about 12-15 minutes to west London, and a short walk the other end. It sounds a lot, and it was a dramatic change [...] Read more – ‘Podcast Notes’.
Michael Ondaatje’s novel In The Skin of a Lion is full of exquisite detail, used in bringing to life some beautifully crafted characters and extraordinary events. It’s a book that moves from a brilliantly rendered Canadian river to a palatial waterworks plant via a stolen yacht, a mushroom factory, a prison and a house aflame. Ondaatje’s [...] Read more – ‘A Simple Sentence’.
This week I saw a post on MLB.com celebrating the 10th anniversary of Seattle Mariners’ right fielder Ichiro Suzuki’s debut, and realised I’d been following baseball–off and on–for a decade. Baseball was the last of the big four US sports to get TV coverage in the UK. I’d followed the NFL for a couple of [...] Read more – ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’.
EE and I took advantage of some spring weather with a walk down at the river. She’s holding her shoes in the final shot after misadventure on the wet sand made them pretty much unwearable. Read more – ‘Barefoot at the River’.
In March of last year I posted here about a BBC series called Wonders of the Solar System – how expertly made it was and how inspiring I found its content to be on a Sunday evening. The follow-up show, Wonders of the Universe started a four episode run on BBC2 last Sunday, and was [...] Read more – ‘π’.
Whilst an unconventional release strategy has been getting Radiohead more attention than any band could use, Glassjaw have slipped out a pair of EPs all but unnoticed. Unless you follow Daryl Palumbo on Twitter (@DarylPalumboCC) or habitually check the band’s site for new, you’d be hard pressed to know that they were putting out new [...] Read more – ‘The Return of Glassjaw’.
So it’s been a couple of weeks: how am I doing with those lofty goals I set myself to spend more time with some of my previously peripheral interests? I haven’t played all that much chess. Despite carrying Shredder around in my pocket and having it on my laptop I’ve shamefully managed less than a [...] Read more – ‘Progress Report’.
I was in an attic bedroom in Worcestershire when I found out Kurt Cobain was dead. I was sat at a computer in college when I found out Soundgarden had broken up. And the day Rage Against the Machine split I was on campus at university. This evening, sat on a red couch in our [...] Read more – ‘|||’.
As much as I love Darren Aronofsky, back in 2008 whenever I heard anyone giving him credit for singlehandedly resuscitating Mickey Rourke’s career, one word kept coming into my head: Marv. Despite the myth that Rourke had dropped off the cinematic map until Aronofsky went and found him, a quick peek at his IMDB page confirms that [...] Read more – ‘Sin City, Frank Miller & Robert Rodriquez dir. (2005)’.
Let’s talk Oscar nominations. The announcements are due in less than 24 hours, and here are a few names / titles I’d like to see on the list: Best Picture There are a lot of probable nominees that I’m yet to see (The King’s Speech, The Kids Are Alright, Hereafter etc.) but titles I’d like [...] Read more – ‘Oscar Nominations’.
Do you remember that scene in Pulp Fiction where Christopher Walken tells the young Butch Coolidge the history of his grandfather’s gold watch? I had my own, less graphic version of that scene last week when my father passed on to me a gold watch which has belonged to him and to his father. It’s [...] Read more – ‘The Gold Watch’.
When I left the dingy Odeon cinema in Reading after seeing Fight Club in 1999 I felt elated. The movie had surprised and thrilled me, done things I’d never seen on the screen before, and knocked me back in my seat with its last 20 minutes. Fincher’s film was brave and brash and masculine, and [...] Read more – ‘Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky dir. (2010)’.
Today I turned 30. If you live long enough I suppose that’s the sort of thing that happens to you. It’s the sort of milestone birthday that makes you do a fair mix of looking back and looking forward, and whilst I’ve found the former less than instructive, the latter has been largely positive. The [...] Read more – ‘My New Decade’.
It’s been a while since I was last engaged in the writing of a serious essay. I graduated in 2006, and between then and now I’ve probably not written anything which received, or was worthy of, critical analysis. Between blogging, writing a couple of things for Thought Catalog and working on things like my long [...] Read more – ‘A Note on an Essay’.
Danny Boyle’s film begins with numerous shots of crowds: train stations, sports events, shopping malls. A collection of collections of people, teeming masses; so many of them that the screen divides into three to show their bustling activity. But the film doesn’t reveal its title card until 20 minutes or so later, by which time [...] Read more – ‘127 Hours, Danny Boyle dir. (2010)’.
For me, Wes Anderson’s first five features plot a pretty much symmetrical graph of quality. Bottle Rocket (1996)–though obviously full of heart–felt too rough around the edges, and The Darjeeling Limited (2007) seemed a little too crowded and lacking in focus. But, if the apex of Anderson’s craft is still The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), then [...] Read more – ‘The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson dir. (2004)’.
As with all reviews on this site, the following contains what might be considered “spoilers”, and if you’re sensitive about such things I would advise bookmarking this page and coming back after you’ve seen the film. Sometime during the hype-storm which preceded the release of The Matrix Reloaded in 2003, I saw a preview video [...] Read more – ‘Tron: Legacy, Joseph Kosinski dir. (2010)’.
Right from frame one I’m reminded that Roger Deakins is the Coen brothers’ secret weapon. Having re-watched The Assassination of Jesse James recently, Deakins’ way of making the expansive scrub-desert environment look romantic and possessed of an almost otherworldly beauty was already at the forefront of my mind. Equally impressive is his command of the more intimate [...] Read more – ‘No Country for Old Men, Ethan Coen & Joel Coen dir. (2007)’.
It’s as big a part of Christmas as any decoration, Muppet movie or feats of overeating: the annual List is a tradition dating back at least a decade between myself and Dr Green. Each year, no matter the weather, we make the pilgrimage to get together and exchange lists of our favourite 20 records released [...] Read more – ‘The List 2010’.
It doesn’t seem long ago at all since I was writing a post about registration week for my MA. Somehow, whilst I wasn’t looking, September has become December and I’m one term into the course. In that original post I spoke about how campus felt simultaneously alien and familiar, and that was something which continued [...] Read more – ‘End of Term’.
AMC’s motto is “Story Matters Here”, and with Mad Men consistently proving to be the best written and most entertaining show on television it’s a hard one to refute. This year’s first season of spy-drama Rubicon also proved to be engaging and well crafted, and I had high hopes for comic-book adaptation The Walking Dead. [...] Read more – ‘The Walking Dead, Frank Darabont dir. (2010)’.
I’m currently reading Dr. Nina Power‘s book One Dimensional Woman. As well as being an insightful critique of contemporary feminism it has introduced me to an entertaining (if depressing) game to play when watching movies. The Bechdel Test originates from a 1985 installment of a cartoon strip by Alison Bechdel called Dykes to Watch Out [...] Read more – ‘The Bechdel Test’.
In 1975 Jack Nicholson could do no wrong. It was the year of his firework display of a performance in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, for which he will rightly be remembered, but it was also the year he turned in a very different piece of work for Michaelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger. The role [...] Read more – ‘The Passenger, Michaelangelo Antonioni dir. (1975)’.
It’s a river in northern Italy; it marked a sort of point of no return for Julius Caesar’s army when they crossed it on the way to Rome in 49 BC, which is where the phrase “crossing the Rubicon” comes from. I know that not because I paid attention in history class, but because Brian [...] Read more – ‘Rubicon’.
At the gates of the University of Kent’s campus in Canterbury there’s a sign that says ‘Welcome to the UK’s European University’. It sounds like the sort of statement that a lot of institutions probably make, but with campuses is Brussels and Paris, Kent’s claim seems to have some weight behind it. So it seems fitting that [...] Read more – ‘Registration’.
I remember, at the time of the original PlayStation’s release (1994), attempting to weigh up the strengths and weaknesses of all of the machines that were coming to market in what uses to be called the hardware cycle. Other contenders included Philips’ CD-i and the 3DO, in addition to entries from manufacturers more firmly established in the games business: Nintendo’s [...] Read more – ‘On Playstation Design’.
In his four feature films to date Darren Aronofsky has displayed a breathtaking diversity of tone and style. The tense, claustrophobic black & white of Pi; the lurid, feverish Requiem For A Dream; the operatic grandeur and poetry of The Fountain; and then the working-class realism of The Wrestler – four very different films, any [...] Read more – ‘Thoughts on the Black Swan Trailer’.
Nicholson Baker is one of my absolute favourite novelists: witty, observant and capable of conjuring magic out of any overlooked facet of life that he turns his attention to. Baker’s piece on videogames in this week’s New Yorker (abstracted here) is characteristically insightful and treats the subject with a light touch, but reading it I [...] Read more – ‘In Response To Nicholson Baker On Videogames’.
In the NME review of Arcade Fire’s upcoming third album The Suburbs, Emily Mackay writes that the record could be ‘their Automatic For The People’. When I read that sentence something like the dropping of a penny occurred in my head: why hadn’t I noticed similarities between those two bands before? In the ten years [...] Read more – ‘Two Bands, Both Alike In Dignity’.
N’Gai Croal (@ncroal) is one of those smart guys that you just know you should listen to. He knows tech, he knows videogames, he knows basketball…. Occasionally though Croal will come out with something even more insightful than usual. Before I cut back on my podcast consumption I used to listen to Croal in conversation [...] Read more – ‘The Breaking Down of the Desktop Analogy’.
It is Gus Van Sant’s birthday. When I think about my favourite directors the names that come to mind tend to be guys (and they are all male unfortunately) with long and varied filmographies, and Van Sant’s name is right near the top of that list. You look through his back catalogue and you can’t [...] Read more – ‘Happy Birthday: Gus Van Sant’.
In an age of infinite duplication, when what we mean by photography or film or music is, with increasing commonality, a digital file easily reproducible as an exact copy of itself, there is something revolutionary about the very idea of a unique artwork. Limited edition vinyl pressings and packed-in hardcover art books are one thing, [...] Read more – ‘The Necks at The Barbican’.
In the shadow of the FIFA World Cup and Wimbledon you’ll be forgiven for not noticing that London is currently playing host to the 11th annual World Barista Championship. In coffee circles however, it’s a big deal: dozens of national champions head to head over three days making espressos, cappuccinos and a ‘speciality’ coffee of [...] Read more – ‘World Barista Championship 2010’.
It’s not often that a lauded film-maker follows the most high-profile work of his career with a short based on a videogame. You have to wonder how the deal was done for John Hillcoat, coming off his Viggo Mortensen-starring adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (review here), to direct a half-hour work ‘filmed’ entirely within [...] Read more – ‘The Man From Blackwater’.
I’ve been a Bret Easton Ellis fan since I was about 17 or so. I’d already exhausted Irvine Welsh’s back catalogue and finding Ellis was a godsend. I read everything I could get my hands on (with the exception of The Informers – I hated the cover image) and loved everything about his style, his [...] Read more – ‘Trending Downwards: A Look Back At Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero’.
Looking down from Tate Modern’s first floor balcony you can see the scar left by Doris Salcedo’s 2007 exhibit Shibboleth, a lightning strike of new concrete which runs the length of the vast Turbine Hall. Perched up here you could happily spend a great deal of time watching people coming in from the rain and negotiating [...] Read more – ‘Exposed at Tate Modern’.
When almost everyone else went home for the summer break in 2001 I was one of a small collection of people who stayed in the halls of residence. My term-time room was on the west side of the complex and one of the conditions of staying was that I had to move all of my [...] Read more – ‘Summer Music’.
I’ve never been a particularly disciplined reader. Outside of the constraints of an academic reading list I’ve always found it difficult to stay the course on one book at a time, and if my interest level dips I tend to stop reading rather than pushing through. Even with books I have been very much enjoying, [...] Read more – ‘My Own Worst Editor’.
I first read David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to Kenyon College shortly after the author’s death and shortly before attempting to read Infinite Jest for the second time. It may have been the Kenyon speech that inspired me to take on the novel again; it’s one of those pieces of public speaking which seems to [...] Read more – ‘Water, Water, Everywhere…’.
“Sitting comfortably in a dark room, dazzled by the light and the movement which exert a quasi-hypnotic power… fascinated by the interest of human faces and the rapid changes of place, [a] cultivated individual placidly accepts the most appalling themes…and all this naturally sanctioned by habitual morality, government, and international censorship, religion, dominated by good [...] Read more – ‘Antichrist; Lars von Trier dir. (2009)’.
On a Sunday evening you can’t help sometimes thinking about Monday morning and the desk, the inbox, the paperwork that’s waiting when you get to the office. The last couple of weeks I’ve found the perfect antidote to all of that: BBC1′s Wonders of the Solar System. Like anyone who has sat down in front [...] Read more – ‘Wonders of the Solar System’.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. That last stanza, and really just those last two lines, of Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening’ always struck me as a little bleak; it [...] Read more – ‘The Road; John Hillcoat dir. (2009)’.
The cinema of 1999 is memorable to me for four key experiences: the Star Wars prequel I’d been looking forward to for years; David Fincher “fucking the frame” with Fight Club; the Blair Witch Project nearly making my heart beat out of my chest, and of course The Matrix. No one saw the Wachowski brothers’ [...] Read more – ‘The Matrix, Avatar and Our Changing Attitudes to the Virtual’.
