| Monday, June 30, 2003 |
 | Blogger2 is blue and circular - it seems somehow vulvic. This is a test. The world is silent.
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| Tuesday, June 17, 2003 |
| Incidentally, it makes me very happy indeed that overcompressing video makes flesh tones go blue. How cool is that? I'm always going to overcompress video from now on...
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| Neverwhat?
Saxey tells of the secret shame of being in Neverwhere II, if only for a second, with the head of an ibis painted over you. And soldier, I know. I was there.
So, what's so bad about Neverwhere? Well, that's a tricky question, son. Because, although Neverwhere is dodgy, it is dodgy in a really good way. Or, if you'd rather, it is good in a really shit way.
Good things -Peter Capaldi is in it. Peter Capaldi is in it again. Hywel Bennet is also in it. Paul Macartney is the hero. The Marquis de Carabas is "the sex". Spooky music. An Eno collaboration, and thus by definition great. And, damn it, it was an attempt to make a reasonably serious, reasonably adult fantasy series shown at a decent time. Got to respect that. This is all good.
Bad things - the central concept, that there is a spoooooky world below London where all the underground names are, like, real is one of those things that, although both clever and intriguing, makes you want to gouge your eyes out after a while. Earl's Court - it's a court! With an earl! Blackfriars - they are some friars! And they're black! High Barnet - It's a wig! Floating three hundred feet in the air! Elephant and Castle - well, you get the idea. After a while it starts to feel a bit like the Pan's People over-literal dance interpretation plague.
The special effects are often Childrens Film Foundation, which is understandable. Some of the line readings are likewise, which is less so, although often understandable. Harrison Ford, when upbraided for ad libbing on the set of Star Wars, apparently snarled at his director, "George, you can type this shit, but you sure as Hell can't say it," and somebody should probably have done the same here. Speeches that would look fine on the page can be awkward when rerendered as actual vibrations in the air.
Goths are not scary. They're not otherworldly. They're not menacing. They're just goths. This is a lesson to be learned by all peoples of the Earth, but we should probably start with Gaiman and the Wachowski Brothers.
And, perhaps most galling of all, it stars a quirky child-woman with a mysterious quality whose view of life, although seeming at first skewed and eccentric, may make us look more closely at the assumptions of our own sheltered existences.
None of which stops it from being a lot of fun, and the new Rocky Horror if I get my way. But let me say only that a child-woman with every indication of being about to be quirky was involved in the filming of these five seconds of Mirror Mask.
I need say no more.
Loving the (utterly apocryphal and self-conceived) idea that Mirror Mask is going to be Neverwhere but with buses, though. The destinations are all a lot less mysterious ("so...you wish to travel to.....outside Sainsbury's? A hard journey, my lady..."), and you have to save up "Terminal" for the finalé. But still. "Nevertherewhenyouneedoneandthenhalfanhourlaterthreeofthemallcomeatonce", anyone?
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| Thursday, June 12, 2003 |
| This is scary. It's the way that the text suggests an entirely different concept of "grooming" to that traditionally ascribed to cats.
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| Tom and Meg are both excited by the release of this album. But I'm not so sure. Frist up, there is no coherent plan to the track listing. What do these songs have in common? Almost nothing, stylistically, temporally or artistically. Simply having avoided most of the 80s revival compilations does not necessarily make you a movement. And are some of these even from the 80s? Sexuality? Paranoid? Really?
However, there are some decent tracks on it, if you like that kind of thing, and having been caught able only to dance to Ned's Atomic Dustbin and Kill Your Television on a recent trip to a goth club goth club goth club, I will no doubt feel the same way when "The mobile phone ad music form the early 90s, but without the remix you believe to be superfluous" comes out.
Nonetheless, my opposition remains firm, if only because, while watching late-night TV (inevitably), I saw the advert for this album (bloke dresses in goth finery, then shatters the illusion by actually leaving his bedroom), followed immediately and with the stench of complicity by an ad for a similar compilation, devoted to Prog Rock.
Prog Rock, I tell you. This cannot be encouraged.
In the meantime, why not celebrate Children of Castor month with this frankly terrifying picture of Helen Coker.
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| One of my new collection of brine shrimp allows me to enjoy one of the best words in the language - thixotropic.
Thixotropic describes a substance that, while normally a gel, adopts a liquid form when shaken, before reverting back to a gel. It is a quality often devoutly sought by nasal sprays, and good luck to them.
Thixotropic. It's just such a beautiful word.
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| Friday, June 06, 2003 |
| So, Wednesday night, while I was delivering a friend to the Galileo for a quick drink before she went to see the London première of the Adrian Noble Brand at the Theatre Royal opposite, I bumped into my sister.
This was extraordinary, given that she lives in Paris and was last seen marooned in the Shetland Islands by fog (took the overnight ferry, apparently). We were both a little shocked.
Anyway, she was going to see Brand as well, as a guest of the Norwegian Embassy, and insisted that I come along, her friend having cancelled. She'd called the LRB to ask if another fellow wanted to join her, but he hadn't called back. So, she dived back into the Norwegians to retrieve the ticket she had just returned, and we headed for the foyer, only to see said other fellow.
Cue sister retrieving ticket from me with apologies, and going over to proffer it to SOF, who had in fact not been contacted by the LRB and was there on his own recognizance, and thus slightly confused by this interruption. Anyway, finally made it into the theatre and by further ludicrous chance found myself sitting one row directly in front of my friends who were going to see it independently. Absurd...
Mind you, the play was fairly absurd too. I have some questions over Noble's direction generally - sometimes it workes very well, sometimes it is excruciating, and this was more like the Joe Fiennes Troilus and Cressida than the Ralph Fiennes. Ralph F. seemed to have been given the playbook of expressionist acting - everything was gestures, cowering, grand movements, presumably to communicate Brand's greatness of spirit. Everyone else tended to go for naturalism. The result was a bit like seeing Olivier doing Richard III in an episode of The Good Life. Continuing the sitcom theme, something in Fiennes' long face, coupled with his sideways staggering and hangdog expression, was terrifyingly Leonard Rossiteresque. Which didn't help. An interesting spectacle but not, for me, a great performance. Good fun, though, and with some great stage effects, and the Mayor was terrific.
We were invited to the first-night party, but were both tired, I wanted to grab a drink with the Barbeloids, it was just going to be the cast and crew and a few dignitaries, and what do you say to Ralph Fiennes anyway? "Hi, Ralph. We kept bumping into each other, literally, at Kokomo's when you were doing Shakespeare in Shoreditch. And we spoke briefly at the RSC. But I'm not stalking you, honest. Here are three of my eyelashes. We are now engaged"?
So, yes. All a bit odd. And then yesterday I retired to my sickbed, feeling decidedly under the weather, and am still not on top form today. Thank god for B3ta, and specifically for Skippy the Goth Kangaroo.
Skippy understands the suffering.
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| Thursday, June 05, 2003 |
| Last semester in New York, NOBODY ever came to my door who wasn’t delivering food....not one single person…it gets to a point where you essentially don’t exist.
Ghosts on the Net – that comes from a lengthy interview with Kieran (filler, if one wanted to be cruel), from J.C Herz’s “Surfing on the Internet”.
I’ve become slightly addicted to books describing the state of the Interweb about a decade ago – all the starry-eyed talk about 300baud modems, Lynx and MIrc. Fair fills me with nostalgia. Silicon Snake Oil’s confident predictions that computers would never really take off, the Introduction to Internet Culture’s explanation of Kibology. The fear of the creeping power of Prodigy…
In fact, having read that – Kibo turns up in Herz, as well, since there were in fact only about 12 people online at the time – I got to wondering whether Kibo was still around. As it turns out, he is. But is he still relevant, insofar as he ever was? I’m not sure I dare descend back into UseNet, so could somebody just tell me?
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| Tuesday, June 03, 2003 |
| Jesus, I can't get away from this head-shaking thing. It's like a short-haired disease without any cure.
Still, while my brain is rattling in my headbasket, let us use it to strike up a joyful thrum at the notion that Cruise of the Gods is out on DVD. I don't own a DVD player, of course, but I think that might actually not be enough to stop me buying it. Me and Tom, and possibly George, and that's it. That is the entire target audience. That's actually smaller than the comparative target market for Dream a Little Dream 2, which is going some.
Not. however, going as far as some of Dream a Little Dream 2's fiercer partisans. IMDB comments page conturbat me
You must watch this movie. People who put it down only did so because they were disappointed it wasn't really a sequel. The first one was a drama whereas this one is a comedy. It takes place five years after the first one.
Coleman has died.
I'm laughing already.
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| Dude. I just tried to shake my hair in cogitation, as I have done for the past month or so, and nearly dislocated my neck. Without the extra weight of my vast bouff coiffure, which had long since passed David Live dimensions and was heading toward the full Pin-Ups, my head is unbalancingly light, and I feel oddly naked. Actually, Iam oddly naked right now, having emerged from the shower one has to take after any severe haircut to dislodge itchy-scratchy remnants of one's former hirsuteness.
Why is that oddly naked? Because I'm posting from a cybercafé. Stelios is going to be in liquidation trouble...
Anyways, I look forward to a new and highly lucrative career in management consultancy and the respect of my peers, but failing that the absence of heat rising through my dense barnet causing my hair apparently to levitate while itching like a bastard would also be good.
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| Ah, bugger. Fossil have put back the release date of their wrist-mounted PDA.
Obviously, I was never going to be among the early adopters of a wrist-mounted PDA. I have a strict policy on technology of buying behind the curve, hence the good-looking Vic-20 I am writing this on. However, there was something deeply satisfying about the idea of wrist-mounted PDAs. Some suggestion that we were inchging one step closer to our golden Buck Rogers future, where the energy problems, overpopulation and crippling inequality of this fallen world have been miraculously healed by technology, leaving only aliens to worry about.
Well, partly that. Partly because the idea of Hoxton ringing with the wounded cries of media design consultants who had been dragged off their razor scooters by the sheer weight of their wrist-mounted PDA is really, really amusing.
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