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
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
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...
Weeknotes wb 12 August 2024
This is the first of my attempt at maintaining a weekly “weeknotes” used to intentionally review and reflect on the last seven days. I know that the format of this weeknotes isn’t quite right and will undoubtedly undergo changes. I’ve enjoyed reading the weeknotes and, after some recent posts by...
Hüsker Dü Live
Spent a couple of hours today listening to some of the live recordings of Hüsker Dü that can be found on the Internet Archive. It’s a mixed bag: some pretty good ones that sound as if recorded at the mixing desk, while others are just muffled noise with the occasionally...
Control
Eventually picked up a copy of Control, a five year-old game I didn’t realise I wanted to play until the release of Alan Wake 2 revealed that it was set in a shared universe. Described as “a solid comedy pastiche of the X-Files, right down to a mysterious smoking man”...
“it’s the nameless non-slop that matters”
Wonderful post by John Higgs which ranges from the Trump assassination attempt, the Olympics opening ceremony to “knobbing about”. Higgs makes the best analysis of the Olympic opening ceremony I’ve seen, dscribing it as “slop”, which he defines as The ceremony was a lot like modern digital culture. We are...
Love in Constant Spectacle, Jane Weaver
Have been listening to Jane Weaver’s Love in Constant Spectacle for a couple of weeks now. Such a carefully constructed, intimate and gentle album which builds a fragile melancholic voice over dreamy motorik beats. Weaver’s gentle psychedelic pastoralism (which is the best way I think I can describe it) is...
OCLP and Ubuntu
Shock! Horror! Yesterday, I realised that – and I’ll blame this squarely on work – I’d slipped back into using OSX in that unconscious, it’s-what-I’m-used-to way. So I tried booting into Ubuntu on my macbook to find that it just refused to boot up. The boot choice led to a...
Shakespeare and His World
Found this copy in an Oxfam bookshop today. I used to have a copy years ago but lost it in a move between schools. Originally publishing in the mid-1950s, it’s essentially a standard version of Shakespeare’s life though I imagine that some of the historical detail might be dated (ha!)...
Bob Mould, Hüsker Dü, Sugar
It must be the general mood I’m in at the moment but among the albums I’ve been sorting through in my never-ending organisation of my music library have been (last week) Hüsker Dü and (today) Bob Mould and Sugar. I originally got into Hüsker Dü back in in my teens...
Rock Bottom, Robert Wyatt
My attention in music recently has shifted again towards the early 1970s to the post-psychedelic stuff produced by musicians loosely grouped as the Canterbury Scene. My tastes in pyschedelia have always been in the slightly-folksy English pastoral strain which has brought me via Soft Machine and Matching Mole to Robert...
Who and Hobbit
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...
Oblivion (2006)
Found a copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for PS3 in a secondhand shop for £1. It was released in 2006 (and 2007 for Pas3) and is often included in lists of greatest videogames. I remember my eldest son playing it back then on 360 but I’m pretty sure...
Dual-booting Noble Numbat
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”
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
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...
Fallout 3
At the same time I brought down my old PS3 and games, I found this copy of Fallout 3 for the Xbox 360. I’ve not ever played a Fallout game (not sure why and have played Oblivion, Skyrim and Starfield) and really enjoyed the tv series. I assume that it...
Play Station 3
Dug out my old “fat” PS3 console from the loft today. The plan was to see if Disney Infinity still worked so my youngest son could play using the NFC figures (the piece that triggers the game was missing so we couldn’t do that). I also brought down the PS3...
40K Painting
Finished my first-ever Warhammer 40K miniatures. They were part of the 40K starter set my son wasn’t interested in painting (he was more interested in the alien-like Tyranids). If I’m honest, I found painting the miniatures difficult and stressful – but glad I tried it. My only other experience of...
Brink Book 6, 2000AD prog 2379
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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...
Feel More Again
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...
Make Children Happier
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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...
New Year, 2024
And just like that it’s 2024. Over on Pixelfed I’m posting a photo each day as part of my attempt at being more intentional this new year.
Moons of Jupiter
Clear sky tonight and it was possible to get a good look at Jupiter in the night sky near a full moon. What was super-exciting was seeing the four Galilean moons of Jupiter – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – through a telescope. It gives an incredible sense of the...
60 Years of Doctor Who
Incredibly, the first episode of Doctor Who was aired on the 21st November 1963. As I’ve been a fan of the classic series from childhood, I thought I’d go back and watch the first season. The adventures of the First Doctor and his companions are the ones I’ve watched the...