Amusingly sweary

The Flying Doctors comes to dvd.
I've had one of those days were time just seems to disappear from under you and it's suddenly eight in evening and you're not sure exactly what you did with your day. I'm about to watch The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford which I'm very excited about, though it's so humid this evening I'll be lucky to reach the end without dozing, probably.

Dirty pretty thing
Amusingly sweary interview with Keira Knightley, who I still think has done her best work out of period costume. As I noted way back in 2006, when asked by potential director John Maybury why she should appear in his film The Jacket, she replied: "If I don't make this film I'll be stuck in corsets for the rest of my career." It didn't really work did it, duchess?

Ben Affleck tones down the love for Barack Obama
I do find it interesting that there's a correlation between the actors I like and their political persuasion. To be honest though, the best thing about this linked article is the photograph, in which Ben is surprised by a cellotape machine going on the offensive.

a veep debate fantasy
Meanwhile, marbury is speculating on what the Biden/Palin televisual verbal smackdown will look like and includes a brilliant clip from the Bentsen/Quayle contest in which the latter is demolished by the former, though it's a salient reminder that the best VP candidate in the world isn't going to swing and election. Also: John McCain Only Met Sarah Palin Once!

Please, people, not another four years

Geoffrey Perkins, the former BBC TV head of comedy has died in a road accident in London.
That is really, really tragic. Perkins was the producer of the first Hitchhikers radio series as well as being involved with pretty much all of the best television comedy since then.

Ever Decreasing Circles
We've only recently lost John Esmonde too. Here's a lengthy analysis of his finest half hours.

This Hillary Democrat won't vote for Palin
As one Egon Spendler said: “This could be extraordinarily bad.” The problem with new Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin is that she has the appearance of being horrendously inoffensive (though not the politics), which perhaps makes her about the most offensive (in both senses of the word) thing that party could have done. They’re clearly desperate to suck the disillusioned Hilary supporters under her event horizon and some will be caught in her wake (despite the whiff of scandal). And here’s the thing I don’t understand -- that there may well be people who profess to be Democrats yet will vote for this other party, the very party which brought the rest of us in the world George Bush for eight years, simply because they’ve picked some woman who to be fair has nothing in common with Senator Clinton other than her gender and a lack of baggage, even though it was the very baggage and experience which made their ideal candidate interesting and useful in the first place [somewhat via].

If Obama Loses it's because of racism
But then I can’t understand why anyone would look at McCain then Obama and then pick the man who doesn’t know how many houses he owns simply because he's in the same age group and white. McCain's actually campaigning on a promise of change. Well, yes, there'll be a different man in the White House but will you or we really be able to tell the difference? Please, people, not another four years, the rest of the world, particularly the environment couldn’t take it. I'm a staunch Liberal Democrat and proud of it or hadn't you already noticed?

Is blogging dead?
I think it's changed. I think bloggers are far more aware now that they're using a communication tool and have often changed their style accordingly. I also think that there are less people taking their fingers to the keyboard rather than picking up a camera or microphone but I also think that to an extent that the quality of the writing has improved too. Plus this Metafilter thread on a certain subject shows signs of life.

The unpredictable way that useful emails arrive makes checking for them as addictive as slot machines.
Great piece from Suw about how email now commands our lives.

Giving My Sport A Bad Name
Keith Topping quite rightly calls out a Mirror tv reviewer who sarcastically refers to the BBC's apparent 'celebration of mediocrity' and fundamentally misses the point that a relay team coming fourth in the olympics is still better than coming twentieth.

Serious Macy's Shoppers

Caligula's sex and excess is bizarre and depressing
Having attempted to watch this in the late 90s when Channel 4 showed the cut version, I can only imagine that the full version is horrendous. And I agree, having oddly enough watched the I, CLAVDIVS version tonight, that John Hurt's interpretation is scary and superior.

Google Workplace
Mork calling Orson. Come in Orson.

Words

I've had a letter...

Hello,

I am absolutely loving the Hamlet blog - the play happens to be my personal favourite so it's nice to see the Dane finally gets a blog where he can vent (or I can catch up on various versions of the show). I'm sure you're well versed on all of the Hamlet variations currently available but I did want to mention that the company for which I work is running a competition for two free tickets to Factory's presentation of Hamlet at Shakespeare's Globe Theater at midnight (the very witching time of night, perhaps?) on September 6th. It sticks to the script by only uses props provided by the audience and each cast member can play multiple roles - and which actor plays which character is decided upon by the audience as well. Should be quite interesting, I'm really looking forward to it!

If you'd like some more information about the show and the competition, you can see a listing here:
http://www.spoonfed.co.uk/spooners/competition-394/win-2-tickets-to-factorys-hamlet-430/

Otherwise, I look forward to more blogging!

Cheers,
Meaghan

Thanks Meaghan. Hope the show goes well for you and the audience. More reviews coming soon, I promise!

Escape Velocity.

Books  Pity Colin Brake, or at least the 2001 version of him.  Writing his first novel, he’s commissioned to cap off one of the most experimental and interesting story arcs in the series’s history, finally answering the question of what will happen in St. Louis when the Doctor (and we) meets Fitz for the first time in a hundred years (or half a dozen novels) and doesn’t know him then send the time lord back into the vortex with his old companion and a much publicised new addition and also following Father Time, an instant classic and one of the best stories the franchise has produced in any medium.  Pity him, and then wonder …

The ‘stranded on Earth’ arc has by and large been very entertaining.  Bits of The Turing Test might have been incoherent and as is often the case in Doctor Who some of the climaxes of the novels haven’t quite lived up to the promise of the preceding pages, but we’ve seen a largely coherent description of the passage of time and its effect on our favourite albeit debilitated timelord.  It’s been most interesting to see the Doctor thread himself into society, to gather friends and allies and we ended Father Time on a note of optimism and the impression that to be frank, the Doctor had got his shit together and though still not completely in control of his faculties looking forward to seeing the decade out in the knowledge that it’s going to be alright, just wait and see.  In Escape Velocity, Brake largely ignores all that and decides that since this may be the only Doctor who novel he ever writes, he’s going to tell the story he wants and basically pays lip service to everything else.  In other words, wall wait just there whilst I piss up you.

I should say that for much of the time the novel is at least readable, even if its taken a good two weeks to read it, for reasons related to bitter resentment.  The story, in which members of an alien race having crash landed on Earth motivate rival earth scientists in developing manned missions into space so that they can liaise with their fleet and argue the case for invasion or not, isn’t bad and offers a decent literal space race, suitably tipping its hat at the rivalry across the iron curtain of Wernher von Braun in the US and Sergey Korolyov back in the USSR.  The slightly dull Kulan are probably the alien type this kind of story requires -- like the Stoans in Voyage of the Damned, just human enough for us to see that they don’t all have the same point of view.  It’s the kind of romp which is the franchise’s stock in trade and has been done far worse elsewhere.  But why does it have to be so determined to be a romp with dozens of characters and yet another Star Trek-lite space battle when a quest story with a personal angle would have been so much more appropriate? 

The meeting in St. Louis, could have been at the climax of the novel and a more thoughtful approach would have made it what the novel is about -- perhaps making the time and place a ticking clock with both Fitz and the Doctor held up for some reason and fighting to get there for their rendezvous which they both do at the last minute or to make it really interesting not -- only to actually enter each other’s company due to an amusing coincidence related to the fact that whatever they’ve been doing is linked.  Instead, Brake has the Doctor take over a bar in London, rename it St. Louis and sit in the back brooding for some months until Fitz stumbles through the door which he inevitably does at the appointed time, even though actually travelling to Missouri is the more logical option.  Then, the much signposted, much awaited reunion is curtailed in favour of the aforementioned two hundred pages worth of running around only to transpire about two pages before the end and in an ill advised homage to An Unearthly Child.  Hardly The Stolen Earth is it?  I’m clearly falling into the trap of reviewing what’s not there, but after all the build up, we’re desperate for a story about the Doctor’s search for identity, whereas moments, such as realisation that he is a time traveller are thrown away in a sentence or two.

You want to be seeing the Doctor coming to terms with the fact that his extended stay on Earth should soon be at an end and his optimism at what may lay ahead, that his quest for knowledge will continue in time and space as he resumes his journey through the cosmos, finally able to see the sights that he‘s been reading about at The British Library all of these decades.  Instead, Brake decides to unnecessarily shoehorn in the character of Control, previously seen in two past Doctor novels on the assumption that there is a cross over in readership and who I had absolutely no knowledge of.  He apparently appeared in The Devil Goblins From Neptune and The King of Terror, but from what I’ve seen he’s hardly a well loved character; compare all this with the cameo of Iris in Father Time which was done with some humour.  The problem is that were not really told who Control is, he doesn’t seem to have much to do with the main story and you hardly miss him when he’s gone.  The sub-plot has the look, feel and chemical properties of padding and I spent much of it trying to square it with the character that Stephen Fry played in A Bit of Fry & Laurie.  You can’t help but feel that if Paul Magrs had been writing the book it would indeed have been the character that Stephen Fry played in A Bit of Fry & Laurie. 

To an extent, such expectations are born of our collective change in presumption as to what Doctor Who should be doing and how story arcs these days do have an epic though emotional quality.  But this was being written at the same time that the audio Neverland was being recorded so there was already evidence that the franchise was already sailing its 'ships into uncharted waters.  If anything in the preceding forty or so novels had done anything its to emphasise the mythic qualities of the character and the stories and here both are in short supply.  Though its interesting to see him and Anji entering the TARDIS together, the Doctor and companion having largely the same reaction to its scale for the first time, it's on their way to save Fitz and planet Earth from the Kulan.  Their next reaction?  To have cup of tea and sit down and a chat about what to do next.  Yes, the TARDIS can sit in the vortex for days before doing something, but this is supposed to be the same man who stole a space shuttle to save his daughter in the previous book!  Miranda doesn’t even warrant a mention by the way.  Brake’s simplistic characterisation of the Eighth Doctor seems based on a recent viewing of the TV Movie more than anything else and lacks any of the depth injected by the likes of Parkin, Miles, Orman, Blum and Magrs in their version.  In places too he seems to be channelling First as though amnesia automatically leads to befuddlement. 

Brake is far more comfortable when bending his breezy if sometimes grammatically incoherent style around the supporting characters.  Fitz is pretty well described, though now he's conveniently developing amnesia too.  There’s a quite wonderful journey through gender politics when a female scientist whose superior position on a team is torpedoed when the Doctor strides in and takes over and a figure like science fiction fan Dave, which could so easily have been a stereotype has very real world concerns, not least in keeping his girlfriend on side and taking her to Brussels does strike a chord as the kind of boneheaded thing some like him (or us to be fair might do).  Said girlfriend and new companion Anji, though created by series editor Justin Richards, has a good start here, as she slowly realises that everything her boyf has been saying about aliens is true and a certain quote from Hamlet pretty much covers everything.  It helps that at launch time, Richards very particularly publicised that she was inspired by actress Amita Dhiri, or rather he character Milly, from the iconic 90s sex in the chambers drama This Life, so for once we’ve someone in mind and it's often pretty amusing to imagine that often dower figure hurling bricks at windows and the like.  She's a neat, useful addition and a brilliant contrast to Fitz, Sam and Compassion.

But the rest?  Sweet Jehoshaphat.

"I don't know why Y didn't come..."

The Sugababes: does intra-band tension create the best music?
Thesis -- that the babes have been getting worse the more they've become chummier. "Certainly the music that former members Mutya Buena and Siobhan Donaghy made after their departures from the group, suggests that they took the creative spark with them."

Joss-sticks increase cancer risk: Official
I was a scented cone man myself.

US Presidential Campaign Videos
I was asked who Obama's running mate was last night at a pub quiz. I've spent so long calling him Leo Mcgarry, I couldn't remember the name Joe Biden. It's art imitating life, life imitating art. Though hopefully not, at least for Biden or a power plant, if you see what I mean.

Lord Mayor flies Olympic flag
"The Lord Mayor of Liverpool will help get the official preparations for London 2012 underway this weekend by hoisting the Olympic flag from the roof of the Town Hall."

The Asda Story Item Mall Now Open for Business
Brand confusion for those of us in the UK

Blake's 7 Returns, Red Dwarf Rumored Next
Just so long as it's as funny as Season 7.

Shakespeare’s Globe to release music through own label
Record label name almost a Daily Show reference.

Finally, following on from last night's review:

"There's nothing wrong with the Blueberry Pie, just people make other choices. You can't blame the Blueberry Pie, it's just... no one wants it."

Film On release a few months ago, Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights received a fair few mixed reviews -- many were beguiled by it, but the same criticisms did seem to crop up -- that it lacked substance, that Wong’s style was compromised in its translation to the west and that the performances are contrived with Norah Jones in particular not showing much promise. I can see those points of view -- it isn’t quite as mysterious or oblique at the director's other work, he doesn’t seem to be playing to some of his strengths as he tries to capture American culture and Jones does melt into the background.

Yet it’s a beautiful, luminous, beguiling experience, precisely the kind of film which works best late on a Friday night, when you’re tired but too wired on caffeine to go to sleep, replete with images and incidents of the kind which stay in the memory the following morning, making you grin or shudder. Even as I sit writing this, moments swim through the chemicals in my brain, the kiss which wipes the ice cream from her lips, the pile of returned postcards, the final drink, the celebration of the final drink, the toast, the loss, the win, the to-let sign and I’m mellowing in a way which only really happens after a cocoa and a Madeleine Peyroux album.

Wong’s never been much for complex stories, preferring instead to concentrate on the wreckage of relationships, and that continues here. Jude Law’s Mancunian New York café owner is surprised when a bedraggled Norah Jones appears at his door trying to confirm the infidelity of her boyfriend. Over successive nights she visits and he eventually authenticates the awful truth, then provides solace in the blueberry pie and ice cream which are always left over at the end each day. Before long and before he can tell her how he’s come to feel about her, Norah’s well enough to drift off into an odyssey across America, becoming involved with a spousal dispute in Memphis then a professional gambler in Vegas, keeping Jude abreast of her thoughts and feelings and learning experiences via postcards.

It’s a film about addicts; people who are hooked on solitude and pain, to alcohol and cards, to learning and lying. It’s also not the kind of film for people who like solid copper bottom plots with a beginning, middle and end and a watertight life lesson along the way. It is a road movie, but the destination is contentment. It’s a portemanteau film but with a central character gaining an education but not learning anything she didn’t already know. There are no easy answers, no pat conclusions and like most of Wong’s other films you’re seeing a slithers of some lives, but not everything, you don’t really know these people any better by the end than you did from the first of its ninety minutes.

The reason that Norah Jones doesn’t stand out is that she shouldn’t. Elizabeth’s the kind of person people can talk to, who only now and then has a sense of purpose when she’s pushed to it. Jones's performance is of the kind you’d find in independent cinema in the 90s, not desperately showy, rather naturalistic but with bags of emotion hidden behind the eyes. Sullen for much of the film, it lights up when she smiles, making those occasions explode with emotion. It is true though, that it improves as the film progresses and you might wonder if Wong shot in order, since she clearly finds confidence in the other performers, sparring best with Natalie Portman’s gambler towards the climax. It's intelligent and even better than some actresses who're making their living in the profession.

It is a great cast, though also a ramshackle one. As the warring couple, Strathern is a reliable drunk and Rachel Weisz introduces us to another of her American accents with a focused unpredictability. It’s been suggested that the rest struggle, that perhaps Law and Portman are miscast, but I’ve never really understand what that means in this kind of context. True, if Vin Diesel had played the café owner there might have been a problem, and though Law’s accent wanders like a pissed student trying to work back to the station down Oxford Road in Manchester, he’s able to communicate a kind of guileful tenacity masking loss and loneliness. Similarly, I think this is some of Portman’s best work -- she’s maturing into a great actress and it’s a genuine surprise to find that face gregariously commanding a poker table, only revealing her vulnerability when it best suits her cause.

Two elements of the film‘s style stand out. It’s also one of the best uses of popular music I’ve seen lately in film; the director repeats music within the same vignettes, most clearly when Jude Law is searching for Norah; the repeated opening piano steps of Cat Power’s The Greatest signalling his longing over and over. Wong’s new cinematographer Darius Khondji largely continues the look developed in previous films, with our view of the characters often blocked by furniture or writing on a window pain, only opening out as the film heads off into the desert and a familiarly Fordian landscape, perhaps signalling Jones's emotional freedom. But it’s the jerky effect created through hand cranking during filming which is the most revealing, allowing us glimpses into the souls of the characters, still images dropped in during motion revealing to us the very thoughts they're desperate to hide.

Magic. Excitement. Some nudity.

George Lucas is lining his wallet once more and rereleasing both trilogies in new boxes. The reaction at the Amazon review pages is suitably hostile. For I, II & III: "A new box doesn't make these films any better, George. Nice try. There is nothing new in this set folks, so don't bother."

For IV, V, VI, the prose is even more florid: "Why isn't the 1997 Special Edition on DVD?! Wasn't it supposed to be "George Lucas' definitive vision"?! Now he has YET ANOTHER vision of the Original Trilogy?! Why didn't he make the prequels fit the Original Trilogy, instead of butchering the originals?! Weren't we told that he was releasing the first versions of Episodes IV, V and VI back in 1995 "one last time"?! But no, now he's releasing the versions he said would never again see the light of day, and what he said was the finished product is not available on DVD. I guess the word "logic" is not part of Lucas' vocabulary..."

Lush Sees Link Between Naked Backsides & Packaging
I've been trying to imagine this happening in Liverpool.

Meltdown expected
Andrew Collins offers a textual analysis of the reworking of a popular music track which happened during the Olympic party yesterday: "Are Scouting For Girls really so witless as to think singing a song about a nuclear attack on London would be appropriate for what is a celebration of London ideally not being attacked? (Were they trying to be punk rock and dangerous? If so, then why change the words?)"

Doctor Who Quiz
How many titles can you name in five minutes?

Carlotta
Kat has a nice encounter. Reminds me of my own adventure.

Dell May Be Signaling New Type of Innovation WIth Lattitude-On
"The basic idea of the new Latitude is that the machine will have a second ARM based processor and Linux operating system along side the standard Intel processor and Windows OS. This machine within a machine will provide a super fast, lightweight, battery friendly environment for doing things like email, web browsing, and perhaps other communications tasks. It will be “instant on”, so you will always be able to get to your basic functionality, and yet you will get a battery life measured in days and not hours when in this mode."

Finally! The Daily Mail admits what I already know. This is NOT a revenge blog
Justice is served.

Spooks stars in city band's debut video
"Having played at the real-life wedding of two of the stars of BBC 1's Spooks, Miranda Raison and Raza Jaffrey, the band called in a favour and asked the duo the help them create a hostile reception as part of the plot."

150 Olympic Images.
Magic. Excitement. Some nudity.

Analog Meets Its Match in Red Digital Cinema's Ultrahigh-Res Camera
The next generation of hi-def camera. Four times more powerful than that used on the Star Wars prequels and the first to have depth of focus features.

Robin Hood in Queens
"The relocation gives the library a more central role in the school's daily rhythms. The library's curvilinear wall affirms its unique status within the school; its variously sized inhabitable windows operate like the cutouts in a construction fence, providing selected views from the ground-floor hallway and cafeteria. "

I'm inconsolable as always at the close of these Olympics.

Sport If our hyped eight minutes of the Olympic closing ceremony were meant to offer a taste of what our life is like in modern Britain these days, it pretty much succeeded. It does piss down, we do spend a hell of a lot of time waiting at bus stops and when we do try and get on board the way is blocked by school kids and the sound of Leona Lewis blasting out from the speaker on a mobile phone or Led Zeppelin from an ipod and there'll inevitably be someone kicking a football around on the top deck. That is of course the cynical view of something which couldn't please everyone and has obviously been carefully thought out, and the opening of the top deck of the bus was very eye-catching as was the violin player. I just wasn't dazzled. When Armando Ianucci mentioned on Radio 4's Charm Offensive last week that David Beckham would be kicking a football from the top of a London bus it sounded like one of his flights of fancy.

Far more entertaining was the appearance of Boris, striding towards the ceremonial podium a salute here, thumbs up here, a small man trying to wave a very large flag. I felt a pang of regret that Ken Livingston wasn't in his place after all the work he did in bringing the Games to London, but as demonstrated in the post-show interview on BBC News, Ken just didn't have the ongoing element of verbal jeopardy as his successor. Boris was quick to point out that at the London opening ceremony there wouldn't be thousands of people being moved around like small dots of colour which is about the best description yet of the overwhelmingly pretty, spectacularly nice ceremonies we've seen. Though I hope the London closing is better than the one at the Manchester Commonwealth Games, where we subjected the former colonies to S Club 7 and a set from some local DJ.

Otherwise, I'm inconsolable as always at the close of these Olympics, blubbing more than once through each of the montage sequences showing British successes and failures. To repeat the rest of the media (what do you mean I'm not in the media?) this has been an amazing games for local sport and though the athletics have been disappointing, there have been enough signs that the youngsters having their first taste of major competition will be fighting to return at London 2012 because they know what's there to win or lose, and what it means to stand on the podium. But that's true in many of the events; Tom Daley's an inspiration -- I wish I'd been that articulate at the age of eighteen -- and so long as his confidence doesn't turn to arrogance he's sure to win a medal in four years.

I've also enjoyed the BBC's coverage. Waking up with Adrian Chiles and Hazel Irving or Claire Balding has been a refreshing change to the middle England groping BBC Breakfast, watching the sporting headlines of overnight achievement through bleary eyes and shooting awake during a rerun of Rebecca Adlington's startling win. The commentary team have been superlative, just as passionate as us to see British success, often shouting and screaming along with us at home. One of my favourite non-sporting moments were the shots of a certain swimmer being chased through the Tienanmen Square by locals under the impression that he's Michael Phelps, shouting "I'm Steve Parry from England" at the top of his voice. At the other end of the day, Radio Five Live's Drive programme has brought the atmosphere through Peter Allen and often Dom Joly in the centre of Beijing often chatting up a storm with the tourists or getting the athletes to open up in ways which might not happen with a camera in their face.

Ultimately then this has been a great games. The Chinese authorities still have a to lot to learn about freedom -- of the press, of their people to protest, of letting those who might not necessarily agree with them politically to live their lives. There's talk that the Olympic experience for spectators hasn't been spectacular (and I loved that Steve Redgrave at the climax when asked so Britishly complained about the food), but for this armchair fan of the non-spotlit sports it's been a blast. As with last time, I will be following a bunch of these athletes going forward but unlike last time there'll be no big announcement, no published list to jinx anyone. For the next four years the Google News Alerts will be my friend and hopefully next time, more good people will be able to follow there dreams. See I'm not as cynical as you thought, and really rather a cliche, so much of a cliche in fact that it's inspired me too.

I'm a fan. Does it show?

Christmas 1972 on flickr
"Two of my sisters, my brother-in-law Rik, and I descended on Charleston, SC, just before Christmas 1972. I flew down from Nashville with only the clothes on my back and gifts for my family. And a tin full of untested marijuana brownies I'd made the previous night from an ounce of high-quality Jamaican weed."

Composer Says Beijing Olympic Committee Ripped Him Off
"Peter Breiner, who arranged more than 200 national anthems for the 2004 Olympics, has accused the Beijing Olympic Committee of stealing those works for this year's Games. He says he is "100 percent sure" that his arrangements are being played at medal ceremonies -- and the Washington Post's culture critic couldn't agree more."

How to write a hit sitcom according to Graham Linehan
"Make your own rules and stick to them. On Father Ted he and Arthur Mathews vowed never to show Ted at work, leading to a raft of jokes about his very short Mass in one episode that worked because the actual ceremony was unseen. ‘Rules like that focus the mind. They force you to think in more creative ways to get around things."

It's time to update our what-celebs-order-at-Starbucks list
"Renee Zellweger ordered a half caf pumpkin spice latte at my store. Daryl Hannah ordered organic milk for her drink. Jackie Mason orders something different (but something plain) each time. I can't remember what Bruce Willis ordered because I was too busy thinking what a rude wanker he was. (I didn't recognize him.)"
Also: The good news about coffee

iPhone 3G - already with pictures !
"Not sure if this is or is not the 'norm' but I just received my brand new iPhone here in the UK and once it had been activated on iTunes I found that the home screen (the screen you can personalise with a photo) already had a photo set against it !!!! [...] It would appear that someone on the production line was having a bit of fun - has anyone else found this ?"

Up close and personal: BBC Four to screen series of legendary music films
"Starting with the iconic film about the brilliant and tragic British cellist Jacqueline du Pré – and continuing with portraits of Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Evgeny Kissin and Nathan Milstein (two films) – the BBC Four series culminates in the debut screening of Nupen's latest film Karim's Journey. "

Bargain basement 'art' from eBay goes on show at Hayward Gallery
"Tom Morton, the exhibition's curator, amassed the ephemera after typing "conceptual" into eBay's search engine. The display, due to open on Thursday, is likely to reignite the debate on the line between "conceptual art" and pedestrian, everyday objects, which has raged since the birth of the Young British Artists' movement in the 1990s."

Watch the Olympics? You must be off your box
"Five Live's commentators do what the TV can't: bring the world's greatest sporting spectacle to life"

Beijing Olympics Stadium: about 30 min. before Men's 100m Final

Britney Spears Live!
"This is the feed from her live microphone... and only her live microphone."

Batman 3 Poster - Riddler
Artist's impression of what David Tennant would look like in the role. Seems like perfect casting to me.

How to lose favour with Kirsten Dunst: ask if she's in love with you yet
Video blog with Simon Pegg from the set of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. He likes Kirsten Dunst very much: "She is the product of that odd collision between wisdom and youth. An actress since she was three years old, she demonstrates experience and professionalism, coupled with a healthy understanding of the nature of the business. She is also one of the most instinctively gifted actresses I have ever had the pleasure of working with. I'm a fan. Does it show?"

No more now.

Sport Lucy Wainwright came seventh in a time of 1:53.102 in the Women's kayak single K1 500m final. Well done to her for making the final, not coming last, and good luck to Lucy for the future. I was screaming for you, and sorry I was such a jinx.

De-Lurky

About Three things before watching tonight's film:

(1) Since broadbanding myself (is that even a verb?) I've installed a Twitter client (is that what they're called?). Twhirl sits in the windows taskbar and whenever someone tweets, a little box appears with the content. It's great -- I feel very much more connected the web collective and its just fun to read about the minutiae of the lives of others. Plus, since its more accessible, I'm also tweeting on a more regular basis. You can follow me here.

(2) Since I'm not Gawker Media I'm obviously not concerned about these things, but I've just noticed that the readership of one of my feeds at Bloglines has dropped by five in the past twenty-four hours. Now, I'm assuming that its because you're using some other feed software or following the Friendfeed instead. I'd be interested to know if that's the case. Comments please.

(3) I've not asked this for a while, but have I any readers who've only recently joined? I'd love to hear from you. How did you find me? How long has it been? Any questions?

Superlambanana-on-and-on #8

Passing through Lime Street Station tonight, look what I found. It's Lovemedoodle, the Superlambanana which has been at Euston for the past few months. I had thought about visiting London especially to photograph it, but ever the nerd decided to buy that external hard disk instead. I know I probably missed an adventure, but spare a thought for these people. If only they'd waited a month or two, they might have done their work even more quickly.

First time I heard his song 'Crap Shag'.

Life An in-situ production of Henry IV, Part One which ended in what seemed like the square where all the winos lived and when one of the characters died, one of the tramps approaching him and giving him a kick and asking 'Is he dead?' and the bloke playing Falstaff IN CHARACTER trying to pay the bloke to leave us alone in pennies.

Seeing a production of The Crucible in front of a set which looked like it had been painted by a nursery school in which the lead actor had been taken ill and the director read in his role from the text, him being apprently being replaced in the role of a pensioner by a sixteen year old, with the audience slowly walking out but a core ten of us sticking it out to the bitter end.

Arguing with a stand up comic during his rubbish show (he spent a good five minutes of it insulting the obvious critic) about the number of Police Academy films there were. Never before and since have I found myself bellowing the words Mission To Moscow at midnight.

Pitching up for a mostly nude midnight performance of the musical Hair and find an audience filled with families. Leaving the theatre and literally bumping into a post-Shooting Stars, pre-Little Britain Matt Lucas dressed as a pink bunny rabbit, removing the head and saying 'Fuck me, it's hot in here...'

Seeing A Comedy of Errors for the first time, in a production which was imagined as being in a lunatic asylum so the actors all hung around in a cage and the lookalikes were achieved by having the same actors offering the dialogue as though they had a split personality and having no idea what was going on from about ten minutes in.

Seeing Mitch Benn who I went to school with for the first time in ten years and unsuccessfully trying to get myself invited to the after show party. I've seen him since, now and then, and he only seems to recognise me 50% of the time. First time I heard his song 'Crap Shag'.

My second favourite production of Measure for Measure was at Edinburgh. It was in the intimate atmosphere of the C venue, with a tiny stage area and small cast. One of the few I've seen that's understood the tragedy and scent of fear which pervades the piece and that convincingly explained why The Duke would disappear amongst the populace in disguise.

Watching the first The X-Files film on the opening night sitting between two fan girls in Scully t-shirts at the back of the main screen at one of the Odeons only subsequently realising that I was there so that they would concentrate on the film rather than each other. Watching The Avengers film alone in another screen later in the week, realising that it was a bit shit.

Another midnight show, this time featuring two women pretending to be transvestites being women. Clearly it was supposed to be a feminist statement and the singing was good, but most of the audience (which included three men dressed a vikings) sat suitably confused.

Attending a performed script reading at the Filmhouse Cinema for a film called Bad Blood introduced by Tim Roth. I maintain that David Tennant was also there, but that could be just my memory playing tricks. Taggart's Bythe Duff definitely played an old vampire though. I was late, but managed to buy a ticket from someone outside and ended up sitting on the front row. In my Trainspotting t-shirt. Which might have been a bit distracting for Kelly MacDonald who was sitting directly in front of me and playing the lead role. I hadn't meant to. I didn't even know she was going to be there. I don't think the film was made in the end.

Ten years ago this week, I was at the Edinburgh Festival. With perhaps the exception of Paris, it was the best holiday I've ever had, simply because every day was different, nothing was prearranged, and I genuinely felt like I belonged. It has been on my mind as it always is every year and when I mentioned it to a friend whose moved to the city lately in an email, I began a stream of memories and I actually had to stop myself from writing for hours ...

I tend to be the quiet one.

Soderbergh In The Park To Stage Production Of 'Ocean's Twelve'
I think this is probably even funnier if you really do, like me, thing Ocean's Twelve is a work of experimental genius.

Extroverts, please speak up!
This seems to work for me on a case by case basis -- in some cases I can be very open and hello and how are you total stranger, but at other times, often if there I sense that everyone knows everyone else, I tend to be the quiet one. Museum private views are a nemesis. House parties are better.

Watchmen DVD May Be Even Longer Than 3 Hours
It's a Lord of the Rings style double dip.

Manchester and Liverpool: A different dimension
Simon Calder traverses the canal. Spends an entire paragraph extolling the virtues of Sefton Park, and he's right, it does look like an ear, even from where I'm sitting.

Countdown Launches Search for new Arithmetician
Seems as though they want to nurture another mathematician -- apparently they originally found Carol through a newpaper job add so they're trying the web equivalent. Application forms asks potential number pickers to describe why they they'll be the best person for the job in less than fifty words. If they google for an answer (it happens) they'll no doubt find this. Yes, that'll probably do it.

Bookstores in Tokyo

The Olympics with MST3k
For Neil. Not a spoof either judging by the comments.

Blonska thrown out of long jump
Old news just twenty-four hours later (the relays!), but I still love Kelly's attitude which is basically 'I told you so, nyer-nyer-nyer.'

Mobile phones go all superspy in Spooks Code 9
I can just about rationalise that after that kind of attack even the security services would be using whatever technology they can get their hands on, except the production team clearly want us to think that its all hi-tech (so therefore dated within five minutes).

Interview: Blockbuster CEO: Skeptics Aside, Confident Of Physical’s Digital Future
Or Blockbuster CEO: can't understand why people would want to watch old movies, and spends most of the interview demonstrating why Blockbuster are losing traction against Netflix in the US and Lovefilm in the UK. It's sad. He uses phrases like 'the long tail' but doesn't really seem to know what they mean and misunderstands the fact that these days it's so expensive to rent a film for a single night in his stores/shops that people are just going out and buying the things instead or happy to have the random alternative.

3, 2, 1 ... blogs relaunch!
Announcing some exciting changes to blogs and commenting
The Guardian reworks its blogging platform and finally updates its RSS feeds so that everything goes through the same pipe -- no need to subscribe to two or three different feeds for the same writer and looking stalkerish in the process.

Meet Leland Chee, the Star Wars Franchise Continuity Cop
Following on from my rant of the other day, here's an interview with the very man. His reaction to the question about Alan Dean Foster's novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye (written before the Endor Holocaust and in which Luke and Leia become very, very good friends) is priceless. I came away with the impression that actually it's not a useless job and that its a good thing that Lucasfilm at least pays some attention to this stuff even if there'll always be the spoddy uberfan who'll find something to complain about. 'But it's been established that the X-23b Land Fighter has four guns, yet in the new novel Engagement on Loobo Shopa (that title's copywrite me) it's described as having two. Fail.' etc.

LJ Kruzer > Since I Took A Taxi
Strange, dancie, techno but soothing. Thanks Robin.

No consumer advice is available for this work
Though I've not entirely forgiven the BBFC for giving The Dark Knight a 12A rating (really? the knives? the bit with the pencil?) this report page for a classification confirmation of Robert Altman's The Player placates me a little bit for the satirical usage of the words "The cast for this work includes" before going on to list what looks like every cameo...

At Beijing (or whatever I'm calling this now).

Lucy's made the final. As the BBC reports:

"In the women's K1 500m, Britain's Lucy Wainwright also qualified for the final, finishing second in semi-final one in a time of 1:52.580secs. [...] Wainwright, 30, made a slow start but was impressive in the closing stages."

She goes at 09:20 on Saturday morning.

"Oh yes! Yes! I'm a huge fan of the Moomins. Have you read the Moomins?"

TV Wonderful interview with one Rona Munro, writer of Survival from one David Darlington. On the lesbian subtext:

"Anywhere is the place for a lesbian subtext! And again, it was the eighties, and we were all really conscious that there were certain elements missing from mainstream culture and, as far as possible, if you got a chance to chuck them in there, you were duty-bound to do it. The same as having an Asian character – it looks a bit clunky now, but at the time you actually had to fight for those things, and you could only do it – Alan Plater told me this trick later, and I'd inadvertently done it – he told me that basically if you say "This character's Asian" they won't let you have that character, but if you give a character an Asian name, a name they can't assume won't be anything else, then they'll get you an Asian actor, or a black actor, or whatever. And what's that? Fifteen years ago? Seventeen years?"

She wants to write another one ... [via]

Superlambanana-on-and-on #7

I don’t walk. Well, clearly I walk, I just don’t do it much for pleasure, and particularly up and down hills. I don’t have special shoes or much of a sense of scale. I’m too much of a city dweller I think, so though I’m ok on the flat, put a gradient in front of me and I'm a pathetic sight. Today, I walked. I walked up Moel Famau in North Wales, something I certainly wouldn’t have done unless, as you can see, there was a Superlambanana at the top. And I found out why I don’t walk. It nearly killed me. Photos at flickr.

That’s an exaggeration, hopefully for comic effect, but though I was relatively relaxed when I began, by the time I was half the way up the hill I was reduced to baby steps, desperately looking for the stones buried into the pathway rather than the shale lying on top just so that I wouldn’t slip. I’m unfit, I know, but this was serious, I was gasping. We’d taken the difficult route for speed and I decided that this had been a mistake. Then, surprisingly, my feet stopped hurting, I found out what passing through the pain barrier actually meant.

All very dramatic. But of course, every so often you turn around and see the view, the trees crashing through the landscape, the heather shimmering in the wind and you realise why you’re walking and you keep one foot moving in front of the other. People are constantly walking towards you and you greet each other and you decide that you’d really like to see what they’ve seen and it gives you a lift (even though its an actual mechanical lift you’d probably want more, Stannah or Schindler).

Sure enough, at the top of the hill, with the rest of Denbighshire unfolding around me I knew it had been worth the pain, I’d done the right thing. And there was the banana, just on the edge of the summit, its technicolor designs contrasting against the green of the ground and the greys and blues of the sky. My Uncle and I sat on the edge of the Jubilee Tower nibbling a Snickers and taking in the view, at which point it really dawned on me why we’d taken the difficult, direct route to the top, the satisfaction of really having achieved something.

We took the same route downwards and saw other city dwellers making their way up a hill for the first time. Families with push chairs, teenagers in tracksuits, all of them, like I'd been still unaware of the danger ahead. One girl was lighting a cigarette, surely something she’d be regretting within minutes. Wwe greeted them all in a way which you simply wouldn’t or couldn’t in the city and I decided that's why people like to walk do it. The views are great and everyone is just so much friendlier than in town.

Whilst we're on the subject...

Anna and Bobbie are moving to San Francisco. Good luck, Guardianistas.

Anatomy of a panarama
Liverpool photographer Pete Carr has produced a typically atmospheric vista for the new Pizza Express at the Albert Dock. Here he tells its story. Many early morning starts.

La, lalala-lala. La, lalala-lala. La-la-la-lalala. La-la-lala-la-la-la.
Investigative preteens in a big red bus coming soon to shiny-disc.

Blonde Alanis.
The more I look at this photo, the more I feel as though reality as we know it is imploding.

Snopes: CNN/MSNBC News Alert -- Real Virus.
Why couldn't I have read this a week ago?

Crazy Like A Fox
Dippy title for a short interview with Rachel McAdams which explains something of the post-2005 drop in acting work. She simply didn't want to. Warning to fellow fan club member John -- the accompanying photos make her look like a feminised Gary Newman. Meanwhile, Juliette Binoche likes to dance.

I Sense a Disturbance in the Star Wars Canon
Of course in my short kvetch about Star Trek spin-off fiction I almost completely obscured the mess which is the Star Wars expanded universe and vitriolic debate thereof, which judging by this linked Wired article inspired by the new Clone Wars cartoon makes the discussion we Who fans have regarding UNIT dating look like a quick decision about where to buy a sandwich at lunchtime. As complex as a the plans for the Death Star, the Expanded Universe has levels of continuity from the films downwards that have suddenly been disrupted by the introduction of a new interim level to deal with this new cartoon and its successors. There's a whole weblog dedicated to this stuff and the detail involved is just scary. As I said in the comments there, in Who, everything is canon unless we don't want it to be -- there is enough temporal anomalies and timey-wimeyness to allow for three different reasons for Atlantis to fall or the Marie Celeste to sink or Sarah Jane Smith to clearly not be from 1980, even though sometimes she has to be.

Whilst we're on the subject, watch this:



Then this:



Which is rather like discovering the thing about Father Christmas. Either way, thanks to Damon and Iain for pointing it out. Possibly.

"Art is the daughter of freedom. " -- Friedrich Schiller

Art I finally managed to see the Klimt exhibition at Tate Liverpool or as they rather poetically describe it, Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design & Modern Life in Vienna 1900 (a title I’ll be returning to shortly). I’d been putting it off despite rave reviews -- this has been the gallery’s most successful show, with according to the attendant in the cloak room, fifteen-hundred people a day going through its doors. I hate busy exhibition and museums because you notoriously end up seeing all human life but not the art, yet with this closing in a couple of weeks I knew I had to just grit my teeth. In the end, the show wasn’t too busy, mostly because visitors might have stayed away since Tate Liverpool doesn’t traditionally open on a Monday. Still there were a fair few people trudging across the exhibition’s darkly carpeted floors but for the most part they behaved themselves and I found, at least for the time I was there, a good atmosphere.

Tate Liverpool’s flagship Capital of Culture exhibition might not be the best Klimt exhibition you’ll ever see, simply because that will never exist. His theoretically most famous painting, The Kiss, something which would naturally be the crowning finale of this kind of retrospective, is too expensive and fragile these days to be moved from its usual home of the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna (not to mention that museum’s reluctance to loan out its most famous tourist attraction). So despite being the first exhibition to concentrate on the painter in our nation’s history, it’s necessarily incomplete and I wonder how many visitors will have been aware of the reasons (and I’m sure I heard someone in the gift shop, the only place The Kiss is on display, wondering why that painting wasn’t in what they’d seen before).

With that in mind, Tate have repositioned the focus of the show to not simply present a history of a single painter's technique but also the context within which he was working, the music, architecture, fashion and attitude of Vienna circa 1900. In reality that means lots of furniture and models of buildings, dresses and photography. It’s fascinating stuff; the ambition of the Viennese Secession movement of which Klimt was a part was to create a kind of ‘whole art form’ in which no single media had precedent and all blended into one another, from the painting that hung in the house, through to the cutlery to the house itself. Wagner was the musical proponent -- in producing The Ring, he didn’t simply want to compose the score but also design the sets and costume and direct the actors.

Within the exhibition we find a desk in the shape of box with a section that pulls out to become a chair; cutlery which mirrors the detailing of the walls of the house in which they’re used, a tea set with handles that allow for coffee and milk to be poured comfortably and efficiently at the same time. It’s the reason that many of Klimt’s canvases are square, both portraits and landscapes, it’s because they fit better within the overall interior design of a room. I’m reminded of the scene in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters when painter Max Von Sydow’s agent brings along some potential clients who want to buy his work. They want it by the yard so that it can fit best within the scheme, an idea Von Sydow’s none to pleased about because it insults his artistic integrity. Klimt on the other hand, understood market forces and created his work to fulfil them, at least initially.

This, then is not an exhibition to visit if you’re looking for wall to wall paintings by a particular artist, or for that matter to see an unbroken sequence of his work so that you can see how aspects of his style changed and developed. If there’s something I still came away not really understanding, it’s how he shifted from the earlier more pre-Raphaelitian courtly style through to the bolder, erotic images which he's perhaps most famous for. Clearly a decision was made by the curatorial team based on what was thought to be available which is fine but given the name on the poster I simply would have liked a clearer through line (though given that I was very tired when I finally dragged myself through the doors and could well have simply missed it amongst the labels and information boards).

There’s an earlier painting, Fable, which looks like the work of a completely different artist -- sight unseen you might guess it was by Collier or one of the British late Victorians. His heart clearly wasn’t in it, but there’s something of leap from that to the Beethoven Frieze with its imagery that crosses a randy Charles Rennie Mackintosh with Maurice Sendak's picture book, Where the Wild Things Are. That’s probably why I like his work so -- other painters often keep the same style but then apply it to different subjects. Klimt kept much the same subject but changed the way he represented it. One constant is hair. He seemed to be obsessed with it. In his early paintings he diligently worked to make sure every strand appeared convincingly, in later paintings the shapes became more abstract but the tresses flowed.

About the only proper connection I can make is that as time went on, Klimt became something of a lathario and the eroticism of the imagery certainly increased in tandem with the number of models which hung around his studio. The finale of the exhibition is series of drawings of ladies in a variety of positions giving themselves and each other pleasure. Despite only being simple line drawings, they were enough to have the painter branded as the pornographer of Vienna (even though the majority only came to light after his death). Other works, such as The Three Ages, alone might mark him as something of a misogynist with their wiry representations and Judith II/Salome (reputed to have ordered the beheading of John The Baptist). But I don’t think anything could be further from the truth, he was an interesting chap but I think he was just interested in showing women, good, or bad, or very, very bad indeed.

What ultimately pulls the exhibition together is the audio guide. A couple of pounds hire provides you with an iPod Touch loaded with a tour, this tour in fact available to download from the Tate website. Often these guides don’t work, either because you have to lug around a cd player dangling around your neck or one of those tall black wands which often crackle and can’t be heard over the din of the other visitors. The Klimt guide almost puts the visitor inside an Andrew Graham Dixon documentary, mixing audio-only explanations of the exhibits with related photographs (showing some of the paintings in their original context), music and video interviews with curators at the gallery of origin or family owners. The text is finely balanced too, intelligent without being sonorous, knowledgeable as well as humorous.

I did like the design of the exhibition too. The walls have been painted submarine grey which has the effect of making the colours within the paintings even more luminous. An earlier work, Two Girls with Oleander, with its golden back drop looked like the artist was achieving in a paint what he’d later do in genuine metal. The whites of Portrait of Marie Henneberg’s dress and Salome’s skin pop out too. If nothing else I’ve come away with a renewed appreciation of just how luminous a painter Klimt was; like medieval artists he understood that it was possible to be subtle even with the boldest of colours and that in the darkened rooms and hallways were some of his paintings would ultimately hang, it’s those qualities which would make them unforgettable.

Along with the nudity and scary eyes.

No log-ins necessary.

Plugoo
I've installed this fancy chat box widget to the sidebar of the blog so that you can talk to me directly if I'm online and logged in to ICQ/AIM. No log-ins necessary.

So You Wanna Be a Track Star?
British sprinter Jeanette Kwakye 's colourful blog. Congratulations to her for qualifying for the 100m final and then managing a 6th place with a PB.

What Michael Phelps listens to on his iPod.
Not as unpredictable as you'd hope. Outkast and Eminem. So much for my "It's all about The Carpenters..." theory.

Kevin Smith Has Seen Watchmen: “It’s F**king Astounding”
Meanwhile, is it too long? It does seem odd that we live in a decade were Lord of the Rings can be as leisurely as a walk in the Pennines and TV boxset watching is the norm, yet studios get the jitters over the length of a superhero film, one which is in no way for kids. Why would anyone finance something on this scale and then not want its potential audience to see everything?

New scandal hits British Comedy Awards
Tape delay meant people were still paying to vote for an award even though it had already been presented.

Boring weekend ahead for Netflix users
"The company said it shipped no DVDs on Tuesday, some on Wednesday and none on Thursday." That sounds like my Lovefilm experience every week lately. The loss of the Sunday post means that if I post a dvd back on Saturday afternoon, it won't be picked up from the postbox until Monday which means it'll hopefully turn up at Lovefilm on Tuesday, they wait their usual day before send a new one out which means something might turn up the following Thursday, which too close to sounded like a Craig David single for comfort. And that's assuming that the post office deliver the thing the next day in both directions. One week, I posted something on Saturday then didn't get a replacement until the following Saturday...

No Penn students, ever.
Disappointingly I'm linking to Gawker. But it is a very good post explaining why a US magazine would not hire from a particular university. I wonder if there are any UK magazines with that attitude. "None from DeMontford, ever." etc.

The left side of my face seems to be melting off of my skull.
Actor Dane Cook isn't at all happy with the look of the poster for his film, My Best Friend's Girl, and not entirely because it looks like promo art for pretty much every film comedy Jason Biggs has every co/starred in. It's a funnier evisceration, though he has to hope that it's not more grinnable than the actual movie.

The AV Club interviews Naomi Klein
Klein's one of my favourite writers and the book is on the list; the comments from readers are fairly amusing at least at the beginning since most of them can't understand why the website is interviewing someone with an opinion about something other than whether the last film/television show they were in was actually any good.

Philip French reviews Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Mainly it's a synopsis, but the final line is classic French.


Synopses and Final Cover For Star Trek: Destiny Trilogy
I link just to make the point that given the criticism that Doctor Who's had recently for all the crossovers and spin-offs, that when the show went off air, with only a few examples it largely went to ground and produced a range of stories in keeping with what went before and were very circumspect about crossovers and 'fanwankery' and generally ignored the Daleks. To quote said synopsis:

"On Earth, Federation President Nanietta Bacco gathers allies and adversaries to form a desperate last line of defense against an impending Borg invasion. In deep space, Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Captain Ezri Dax join together to cut off the Collective’s route to the Alpha Quadrant."

To echo some of the comments at the linked article (a) since when was Ezri Dax a Captain? (b) the bloody The Borg again (c) I know shared universes often plough ahead and ours did but I don't see anything in here which hasn't already been done a hundred times by that franchise. It looks like I got out of Star Trek at just the right time. There really is something to be said for being monogamous about these things.

This trailer for the next chapter of Heroes shows that Kring and the gang have decided to start making a different, better programme (with the characters actually using their powers). Though I always remember how good The Phantom Menace looked in the B-Trailer so these things are designed to deceive.