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Twice in the last few days artworks projecting a self-consciously anti-racist message have been removed from show – on the grounds that they were racist. Council removes Banksy artwork after complaints of racism Barbican criticises protesters who forced Exhibit B cancellation October 2nd, 2014 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
 At 10.30pm tomorrow, Saturday September 27th, BBC2 TV is showing Margin Call, a movie about the beginnings of the financial meltdown we now all live in the becalmed and depressed and resentful aftermath of. I wrote admiringly about this movie when it was first being shown in British cinemas, to near-zero audiences if my experience was anything to go by. Maybe this time around more people will pay attention to it, what with the BBC’s Radio Times giving it four stars. September 26th, 2014 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Earlier this week I got back from a week in Brittany. During the first few days of my stay, I and the friends I was staying with visited the island of Belle Ile. Their daughter is my god-daughter, and she was singing (very well) in a classical singing festival that happens in Belle Ile every year. While in Belle Ile we also enjoyed other sorts of music making. In particular, at midday, in the fish market of Belle Ile’s biggest town, La Palais, we listened to a small beat combo called, as I later learned from the small print in some of my photographs, Les Gadgos. Les Gadgos are a bunch of blokes, but they have engaged a lead singer for their latest clutch of songs and their latest CD, a blond chanteuse named Mélody Linhart, who looked weirdly matter-of-fact in her days clothes. But she sang very well, in English. She did various venerable American standards, like St James Infirmary, and slightly more recent American movie tunes, including I Want To Be Like You. She made the latter piece of froth sound almost as profound and existential as St James Infirmary. But take a look at this other Les Gadjos person, who I now know to be called Clément Lenoble:
A classic French type, I think you will agree. But that cigarette was actually quite a surprise, because Clément Lenoble was one of the very few people whom I observed during my week in France who was smoking. There were a few. He wasn’t the only one. But the basic news is, those Frenchies are no longer fumer-ing. Not the sort who live in or summer in Brittany, anyway. Instead, this business is on the up and up:
That was just a clutch of e-cigarettes in the window of a shop that also sold other stuff. But later, I came across an entire shop devoted to this one product:
French smokers are a dying breed. No doubt, anti-smoking fanatics would reply that they’re a dying breed because smoking is killing them all off, and I do agree that this change of habit is probably a good thing. But even so, I miss guys like this, singing their gravel-voiced chansons in bars, with their whiskey glasses on the piano and their gauloises hanging down from their creased and lived-in faces. Or maybe I just miss the idea of such people, being around, in France. Smoking is now illegal in most public places in France. I just wish les pouvoirs-that-be had been content to let the habit die away of its own accord. But that is not how such people think. I also photoed many other more fun things. August 15th, 2014 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Alternative comedy is for people seeking an alternative to being amused. – Samizdata commenter Endivio Roquefort I July 31st, 2014 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Live and let live, be and let be Read and let read, write and let write Live and let live, be and let be Talk and let talk, quip and let quip – The lyric of one of Cole Porter’s slightly lesser known songs. Cole Porter is this week’s Radio Three Composer of the Week. Yesterday, Porter himself was to be heard singing this song. But what’s with that “bite and let bite”? July 30th, 2014 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to make too much of this. But here it is anyway. In a report about successful pop entertainer Frank Turner meeting successful pop entertainer Josh Homme, Turner is quoted saying, about Homme, this:
Thanks to Turner and Gigwise, and google sending me an email about it, I get to enjoy it too. The shit in question is referred to in this earlier posting here by me, and I wrote some more about Turner here. June 16th, 2014 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
A story in The Telegraph has brought to mind the following quotation, which seems doubly apt: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” – Karl Marx, writing in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” June 14th, 2014 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
… give you this week’s most valiant attempts by Guardian writers to contrive a link, any link, between a news story of the last few days and their own ongoing obsessions. From Lindsay Beyerstein, an article very approximately about a recent attempted murder in Wisconsin allegedly motivated by an internet meme: “Slender Man is a convenient target for our fears. Misogyny and racism aren’t.” My favourite comment came from doshermanos_III:
Another quintessential Guardian take on current events came from Giles Fraser. (I should explain for overseas readers that the Michael Gove mentioned is the current British representative of SPECTRE, Witchfinder-General, and Secretary of State for Education.) It seems this here Gove goes in for a bit of kulcha and likes his Handel and his Saints-Saens. Fraser does not hesitate to draw the obvious conclusion: “Samson was like a suicide bomber. So why do you love the opera, Mr Gove?” The comments section for this article fizzed with good ‘uns. To choose but one, robjmac quoted Fraser asking,
and replied,
June 7th, 2014 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Oliver Stone, a man who is nothing less than a fountain of lies and inanities, is looking to make a movie about Edward Snowden. Frankly even that later day Ed Wood, Uwe Boll, would be preferable. Hopefully Barbara Broccoli would do a better job… though as the Snowden story is very much still ‘a work in progress’ I cannot help thinking it is a tad premature to be trying to tell a tale whose outcome is far from obvious. June 3rd, 2014 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
The other day I wrote a post about the plight of the Bushmen living in the Kalahari desert in Bostwana. Jaded Voluntaryist commented,
I replied,
Then I said,
April 23rd, 2014 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
– from the Telegraph obituary of Gabriel García Márquez April 18th, 2014 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
This io9 piece reports that a musical based on Ayn Rand’s Anthem will open, in New York, on May 29th.
There is a website, where you can read this:
It will be interesting to see how well it does. April 10th, 2014 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
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