Tales of cyber-neurosis
March 13, 2023 Leave a comment
So, confidence notwithstanding, my score was even worse than last year, with only my call for the Best Director Award proving correct. It seems that actually watching the nominated movies doesn’t improve my accuracy at all; perhaps next year I’ll save time by just reading the reviews.
March 11, 2023 Leave a comment
I’ve actually seen a few of the movies tipped for Academy Award success this year, and read about most of the others, so I’m moderately confident that my forecast may be a little more accurate than it was last year; I guess we’ll see tomorrow.
Anyway, here are my picks for the main categories:
February 27, 2023 Leave a comment
There was a story in the papers last week about Jeff Reitz, who visited Disneyland on 2,995 consecutive days between 2012 and 2020, when the theme park’s pandemic-related closure forced him to quit just short of the 3K milestone.
Jeff seems mostly positive about his experience, which he started as a way to keep active during a spell of unemployment, but I’m sure that there must have been some mornings when maintaining the run felt more like a tiresome obligation than a fun day out.
I have similarly mixed feelings about keeping this blog going. I must admit that, nearly sixteen years on from our debut, it’s hard to make the case that my occasional missives have any sort of relevance, and it is sometimes a chore to cobble something together for the deadline, but still, I’m loath to break the streak of posting at least once in each of the past 190 months. In a world where regularity is increasingly difficult to find, especially as one gets older, it’s comforting to have some dependable rituals, however irrational they may seem.
In the article about Jeff in the Los Angeles Times there’s a suggestion that he might have taken a break if he had reached the three thousand mark, but I think that without the force majeure of Covid he would have found it difficult to step off the treadmill. I might tell myself that I’ll quit blogging when I hit 200 months, or 20 years, or some other arbitrary target, but I know that I won’t. At this point “blogger” has, for better or worse, become part of my identity, if only in my own mind, and they’ll have to prise this keyboard from my cold, dead hands…
January 29, 2023 Leave a comment
Sad news today; Tom Verlaine has passed away, at the age of 73. I was just getting into music when Television broke up in 1978, so I didn’t catch up with them until later; Marquee Moon has been a favourite since my college days, and after their reunion I saw them when they toured in 2014, and again in 2016.
Much has been written about Television’s musical legacy, but equally important, for me at least, was their sartorial influence; I’ve been trying to carry off that 70s New York underground look for most of the last 40 years…
December 30, 2022 Leave a comment
It’s time once again for the annual audit of my engagement with contemporary culture. As ever the full story is on our Tumblr; here are the best bits:
Television – I still subscribe to several streaming services, but despite this I’ve been watching a lot less TV this year compared with last. I was going to say it was mostly lightweight genre programming, but looking back I see it was actually exclusively lightweight genre programming; I evidently no longer have the intellectual stamina for the sort of serious dramas that the critics recommend. I liked Moon Knight, and The Rings of Power was pretty to look at if ultimately rather unsatisfying, but, judged by the speed with which I binge-watched it, my vote for most enjoyably diverting show would have to go to season two of Only Murders in the Building.
Film – At the start of the year I took out a membership at our local arthouse cinema, fully intending to get back into the independent movie habit; let’s just say that hasn’t quite worked out, though I did manage around one film a month. Honourable mentions go to Amsterdam, Licorice Pizza, and Nightclubbing, but I’ll try to maintain my cinephile credibility by nominating a film with subtitles as my favourite; The Worst Person in the World.
Books – My major literary project this year was reading The Brothers Karamazov, which I found every bit as good as its reputation suggests; satisfying philosophically but also narratively, with characters so vividly drawn that one never feels they are mere mouthpieces for Dostoyevsky’s ideas, rather than living, feeling individuals. I have some regret that I didn’t tackle this great work years ago, but on the other hand I also believe that the books that stay with you are the ones you read at the right time in your life; perhaps late middle-age is when I needed to meet Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his sons. My other obsession in 2022, inspired by my trip in the summer, involved books about life in California; highlights in the fiction category included works by Bret Easton Ellis, Edward Bunker, Joan Didion, and Armistead Maupin. My favourite book of the year was something more contemporary though; I Fear My Pain Interests You, by Stephanie LaCava.
Music – I’ve purchased rather fewer albums this year than usual; I think it’s because I’ve not been listening to the radio or reading the music press much. Still a lot of good stuff though; here are my top eleven, since I can’t quite edit it down to ten:
I didn’t get to see much live music this year; of the shows I did attend Kim Gordon was the one I really enjoyed.
So that’s the year in culture; not particularly adventurous I guess, but not totally ossified either. Next up: blogging.
November 30, 2022 Leave a comment
The undoubted highlight of 2022 for me was my trip to the US in the summer. I had a particularly agreeable time in San Francisco; lazy days in peaceful parks, intriguing art in quirky galleries, culinary discoveries in exciting restaurants, and a climate that was pleasantly warm, but without the stifling heat and dust of Los Angeles.
I’ve been daydreaming about returning to the Bay Area more or less from the moment I stepped off the return flight, but I must admit I’ve been given some pause by the news today that the SFPD are planning to enhance their crime-fighting effectiveness by deploying killer robots on the city streets.
The actual story is perhaps a little less alarming than the lurid headlines; the androids in question will not be autonomous, and will only be armed in extraordinary circumstances, but still, I’ve seen Robocop, and Terminator, not to mention Blade Runner, so I know one can’t be too blasé about these things. I guess I could always move to Oakland instead…
November 16, 2022 Leave a comment
In a week when discouraging news wasn’t hard to find – the war in Ukraine spilling over into Poland, Donald Trump hitting the comeback trail, the UK government gearing up for another round of austerity – it was heartening to see NASA’s Artemis spacecraft finally get off the ground.
We’ve written before of our disappointment that, well into the 21st century, lunar bases aren’t yet a thing, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that the mission goes without a hitch, and the project to use the moon as a stepping stone to Mars comes to fruition within my lifetime. I don’t think things on Earth are quite so bad that leaving the planet is our only hope, or not yet at least, but it’s good to have a plan B…
November 14, 2022 Leave a comment
It was one hundred years ago today that the British Broadcasting Company, as it was then, transmitted its first programme on the wireless, a news bulletin from London, covering, among other things, billiard scores and the foggy weather. Or it may have been a children’s programme broadcast the previous day from Manchester; records of those pioneering days are a little sketchy.
Whatever the details, when viewed from the perspective of today’s fractured and fractious media landscape it’s hard not to feel a sense of longing for the days when broadcasting was viewed as a way of “spreading culture and good sense”, an antidote to the horrors of the Great War. More recently, the internet seemed to hold similar promise, but that hasn’t really worked out either. Perhaps the next telecommunication revolution will be more successful…
September 13, 2022 Leave a comment
The Grim Reaper has been busy in the last few weeks, claiming some genuinely significant figures; first Mikhail Gorbachev, now Jean-Luc Godard.
You may not be surprised to learn that I watched a lot of Godard’s Nouvelle Vague films when I was a student, but I have to admit that, À Bout de Souffle, Bande à Part, and Alphaville apart, they have pretty much merged in my mind into one long, disjointed montage of coolly alienated young garçons et filles pursuing doomed relationships in a monochrome Paris. Of his later work I’m fairly sure that I’ve seen Prénom Carmen, but I can’t recall much about it.
When it comes to cinematic milieus, I probably lean more towards 70s New York than 60s Paris (while recognising that without the influence of Godard it’s unlikely that Scorsese would have made the films he did) but, that said, I still think that Michel Poiccard makes a infinitely more appealing role model than Travis Bickle, so there’s no doubt that Jean-Luc’s reputation as a genius auteur is fully justified.
Second Life Shrink 
