“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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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There’s something hits different about Cineworld’s current slogan. Being told that I can “feel more again” by watching an animated movie about anthropomorphised mallard ducks migrating haphazardly to Jamaica isn’t quite what I’m going to the cinema with my kids for on a Saturday afternoon. We just wanted to do…
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