I saw an ad for a new series of Most Haunted the other day. This thing has been going for a long time, and there are a lot of regionalised versions - surely by now they must have covered all the most haunted places. How many spooky castles and abandoned insane asylums are there in the world? I understand that Quite Haunted or A Bit Eerie At Night aren’t very catchy names, but this is blatant false advertising.
At some point, logically speaking, they’re going to end up airing Least Haunted. Have teams wandering around supermarkets and such. Get some screaming biddies and slap a night vision filter on the camera and you’re set.
In other news, please to follow this link. It’s a selection from a book entitled 100 Photographs That Changed The World, and there’s some amazing stuff in there. And on a lighter note, this provided me with several chuckles.
Venice is a strange place. Even though there’s constant blue skies and sunshine, it’s freezing cold this time of year. And there’s no wind, ever. The great majority of streets are narrower than a Dublin alleyway, with the rest not much wider, and when it gets dark it feels like you’re walking around inside an abandoned building.
Continue reading ‘Venice’
In my head this post is quite long and interesting. However, following a ten-hour wait in Ciampino airport and a not entirely friendly crash back into working life, it has retreated behind some rogue neurons and refuses to come out.
So, uh, yeah. Italy’s a very nice place. Like, really really nice.
More tomorrow.
1. It’s hard to take flabby poodle-head guitarists seriously.
2. Greg Puciato is built like the Death Star.
3. I’m off to Italy for the week.
Talk t’ya.
Direct link here, or follow the usual channels.
Elmore Leonard writes the most unobtrusive prose ever. It’s like you’re not even reading a book! It’s like there are suddenly words in your head and you don’t know how they got there.
I just finished Get Shorty, and I gotta tell you, it’s impressive stuff. The plot is fine and good but the real thrill is watching the characters interact - they all have their well-defined perspectives and areas of expertise that affect how they relate to each other and their environment in a believable way. The plot, and this is a hell of an achievement, seems to proceed naturally from the way the characters behave rather than from the author mapping it out.
Leonard reminds me somewhat of JD Salinger, in that they both manage to drop fully-rounded characters in your lap without breaking a sweat, using nothing but tiny quirks and distinctions of voice. (Salinger’s short stories are devilishly impressive in this respect.) Truly, men worth being jealous of. (Or… men of whom it is worth being jealous? Shit, Elmore Leonard wouldn’t have this problem.)
Saw the Smashing Pumpkins t’other night and… well now.
The first twenty minutes or so were amazing. As in, I was laughing like a fool and having trouble breathing because they were that god damn good. That opening stretch counts as possibly the best gig I’ve been to in its own right, so I didn’t really mind when they started playing the new songs. Too many of the new songs… ok, whatever, they’re not touring a greatest hits collection. But things really went off the rails with the half-hour noodlefest towards the end. No matter what Mars Volta fans might insist, standing in a cattle pen watching a band practice ain’t a good night out.
I have to repeat though, lest this get too negative, that what dodginess there was merely brought the average down to immensely good night. I was disappointed solely because they set the bar so very, very high with the first few songs.
I also saw Queens of the Stone Age in the Ambassador last week, which was a hoot and a half. No… two hoots. It’s always stuck in my craw that I missed them in the Big (Quite Small?) A in 2002 , so it was good to get another shot at that. Not much else to add, seeing as they didn’t trample on my dreams (aw Billy, I’m just foolin’ with you), except to say that Josh Homme is the man. Science has proven it.
Now for Dillinger on Saturday, We Are Scientists in April, and hopefully Saul Williams and Elbow at some point too. Things are shaping up quite nicely indeed.
(Unrelated: this is fantastic.)
In “When Film Gets Good…” Terry Southern maintained that it was “wasteful, pointless, and indeed in terms of art, inexcusable, to write a novel which could, or indeed should have been a film.” There were subtleties to his argument that I won’t go into - his point was that film, being more of a direct appeal to the senses, can run rings around novels when it comes to portraying straightforward dialogue and narrative. Now, being a writer himself he naturally didn’t leave it there, but insisted that prose writers needed to pull their socks up in terms of originality and offer something that films could not.
I mention this because I’ve just finished Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-Two in the Shade, which is one of those novels that’s infatuated with written language. Continue reading ‘Fun with words’
Very, very good. It’s incredibly focused - a simple setup, believably basic character motivations and very little exposition. This annoyed the crap out of me while I was watching it, because why doesn’t everyone write like that? Rule number one: only include what you need to include.
You can tell that the effort of avoiding the genre cliches got to the makers, because as soon as the end credits start rolling (which is the one and only time the film breaks character) the most epic, giant monster-est piece of music ever composed kicks in. It’s called “ROAR! (Cloverfield Overture)” and it lasts twelve minutes. It’s almost unbearably awesome.
The first fragment is up and can be found here. I’m still screwing around with the format - expect some links to make navigation easier when things get properly going.
Also there should be a Thomas McGuane review up here by now but…there isn’t. Stay tuned.
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