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Make Something to Your Taste
Make Something to Your Taste

At the bottom of Jay Springett’s latest post, Destination Distraction, he’s added a short video, Make Something to Your Taste, his latest 301 Permanently Moved podcast episode, which caught me at exactly the right time. It’s a mesmerising video where Springett is convincing in reinforcing the importance of creativity and...

The Hartnell Years
The Hartnell Years

Picked up a copy of The Doctor Who Production Diary: The Hartnell Years by David Brunt. I’m in the middle of watching the first season of Doctor Who from 1963-4 and, while I make great use of both the first volume of About Time and The Television Companion – both...

Weeknotes wb 2 September 2024
Weeknotes wb 2 September 2024

Weather’s changed and there’s now a definite sense that Autumn’s begun. It’s cooler – almost cold – and darker during the day and we’re experiencing sudden showers. By the end of the week the children were both back at school (fairly happily, which is a relief) and I’m getting to...

Agatha: A Tale of Three Witches
Agatha: A Tale of Three Witches

I’ve just backed Andrew MacLean’s Kickstarter project, Agatha: A Tale of Three Witches. It’s a prequel to MacLean’s fantastic quarterly series, Head Lopper, a comic I’ve bought from its first issue. (The last issue, #16, was released in 2021.) Anything Head Lopper gets an automatic “must buy” from me. There...

Weeknotes wb 26 August 2024
Weeknotes wb 26 August 2024

September has always been the pivot on which the year turns. My birthday is in a couple of days and, as a child, it would be the signal that the return to school would shortly follow (though in those days, the start of school seemed to be about a week...

Weeknotes wb 19 August 2024
Weeknotes wb 19 August 2024

There’s a definite sense that summer is coming to an end. It’s feeling cooler in the mornings and grey clouds and rain have dominated many of the days this week. Come to that late-summer point where I’m genuinely uncertain about which day of the week it is. Doing (or should...

FURTHER DOWN THE STREAM...

Who and Hobbit

22 May 2024

In other news, I went looking in local charity shops for a copy of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell, a novel I’ve read twice but don’t have a physical copy. No luck on that front but I did find a delightful hardback of The Hobbit (I have the...

Dual-booting Noble Numbat

7 May 2024

Installed the 24.04 LTS release of Ubuntu, Noble Numbat, on Macbook so it dual boots with Sonoma (itś actually a 10 year-old Macbook Pro using OCLP to enable latest version of OSX to run). The only part of getting Ubuntu to dual boot was the actual dual booting itself. All...

English: “ill-thought-through changes”

3 May 2024

Brief – but valid – Guardian editorial calling for changes to English teaching. “Too much of what is valuable about studying English was lost in the educational reforms of the past 14 years,” the paper says and that “ill-thought-through changes, which imposed a model more suited to science and maths...

Tom Tom Club, 1981

2 May 2024

I’ve been listening to a LOT of Talking Heads lately and – while I was listening to Genius of Love performed on the live album of Stop Making Sense – realised that I’ve never really listened to the Chis Frantz and Tina Weymouth side-project, Tom Tom Club. Got to say...

Brink Book 6, 2000AD prog 2379

24 April 2024

Very pleased to see the return of Brink by Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard to 2000AD. I hadn’t read last week’s prog and, when I saw Culbard’s unmistakable cover for prog 2379, I had to dash out to WH Smiths and pick it up. Unbelievably, it’s Book Six. Brink is...

Ed Piskor

2 April 2024

Incredibly saddened to hear of the death of Ed Piskor, comic book artist and co-host of Cartoonist Kayfabe. I’ve been reading Ed’s comics since Hip Hop Family Tree came to my attention a decade ago and have followed his work through Grand Design and Red Room. His heartfelt celebration of...

Three, Four Tet

22 March 2024

“It’s got enough heart that we won’t accuse it of going through the motions, yet if that was all you ever asked from Four Tet, this is surely a dream come true,” says the reviewer on Sputnikmusic of Four Tet’s new album, Four, in a rather passive-aggressive review that calls...

Bands as Saturday Morning Cartoons

16 March 2024

This is an enjoyable site: stuffbymark.co.uk, where Mark Reynolds presents imaginary retro cartoons, movie posters and the like based on songs and bands. I loved the bands-as-Saturday-Morning-Cartoons especially – but Reynolds’ great at this.

Gallagher & Squire

14 March 2024

Eventually listened through Liam Gallager John Squire, the new album by.. er… Liam Gallagher and John Squire. Alexis Petridis claims: “it’s a noticeably better album than anything in Gallagher’s post-Oasis oeuvre, and indeed anything Squire has released since leaving the Stone Roses in 1996. The songwriting is melodically stronger and...

Reading & Writing for Pleasure

13 March 2024

Just read the excellent Reading and Writing for Pleasure: A Framework for Practice and Approaches to Reading and Writing for Pleasure by the Open University’s Reading for Pleasure programme. Plus the TES interview with Professor Teresa Cremin about how to encourage more children to read for pleasure. The takeaways seem...

OFSTED try to “do” literature

12 March 2024

Amusing – and chilling – piece by the wonderful Michael Rosen about part of the recent OFSTED subject report into English. Rosen examines the controversial paragraph 90 of the report which attempts to insist that only texts of “literary merit” should be studied in schools and attempts a sleight of...

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho

7 March 2024

Found this in a charity shop today: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, part of The Film Classics Library’s “most accurate and complete reconstruction of a film in book form”. It’s a comic book-like presentation of the whole of the movie and an absorbing read. I often find that stills from movies (especially...

Philip Glass Solo

6 March 2024

There’s already a great deal of Philip Glass in my music collection but I couldn’t resist listening to this latest album, Philip Glass Solo – though it was Luis Alverez Roure’s striking portrait of Glass that caught my attention. I first listened to Glass in the 1980s when I bought...

Make Children Happier

29 February 2024

As part of a series arguing for revitalising policies a future Labour government should adopt, Polly Toynbee proposes three key educational reforms: “Bring back those 1,416 Sure Start centres that have closed” “Schools need just one target: make children happier and education a pleasure” “kickstart FE, with the resources and...

Ending(s), Night Country

24 February 2024

LA Times interview with Night Country writer, Issa López reveals something about her thoughts regarding the ambiguity of the final episode’s end (and, to be honest, much of the season). In the interview, López stresses that she was deliberate in creating a story and setting where there can be both...

Future Days, Can

22 February 2024

The latest episode of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking arts programme features a showcase of Can’s third album, Future Days. The programme is an enjoyable (and informative), presenting Can’s album in the context of post-Sixties Germany and of the original line-up of the band. I’m not sure why the programme...

Laird Barron’s Night Country review

19 February 2024

Laird Barron is enthusiastic about the fourth season of True Detective, arguing that the writer/showrunner, Issa Lopez conjures an “ethereal undercurrent of magical realism”. He sees many of the artistic (and philosophical) decisions made reflect the lonely, estranged Alaskan setting. He also discusses the show as being within the tradition...

Curations, artuk.org

19 February 2024

Curations are a wonderful means of self-organising British art using the Art.org web site.  I use an installation of Pinry – essentially a self-hosted version of Pinterest – to generally keep and manage images and graphics I want to keep. The Art.org  curations makes keeping hold of images of British...

Dreamfear/Boy Sent From Above, Burial

14 February 2024

“caustic rave maximalism… comes across like a forlorn mini cassette mix from the 90s vaults” according to The Quietus. Some sort of teleological excavation of a lost techno compilation from Ninties compressed into 25+ minutes of realtime aural actualisation. Of the two tracks, I find Boy Sent from Above...

Volta, Loula Yorke

7 February 2024

Quietus review says that “Yorke’s new release Volta is deeply cyclical” and reflect a period of focused composition rather than Yorke’s previous improvised recordings. Makes comparisons with Hannah Peel’s Fir Wave. All seven tracks are great – though I’m especially taken with An Example of Periodic Time. Have listened to...