I recently finished David Simon and Ed Burns’ book The Corner, a piece of extended reporting about life around a Baltimore drug corner. There’s one thing about the way they write it which really gets me: every so often they’ll have a section explaining the absurdity of the situation they’ve been talking about, how futile [...]
The Mac OS X version of Twitteriffic has a shareware style registration model: the idea is that if you like the software you’re supposed to register it. Apparently one of the benefits you get from this is that when you start the registered version up it will, instead of prompting you to click through a [...]
One of my recent DVD acquisitions was Festen, the first of the Dogma 95 films. In spite of not having seen the film since it came out more than a decade ago (though I did re-watch it once then after first seeing it at the EIFF) it’s been one of the films I think back [...]
It’s been so long since the film festival that I keep on forgetting half the good films I saw there when talking to people about it, so for the record here’s a brief list of my personal highlights:
Encounters at the End of the World: Werner Hertzog goes to Antarctica, making a film more about the [...]
I used to read a moderate amount of fantasy but apart from this series I’ve mostly drifted away from it, mainly due to an over-familiarity with genre standards and the fact that these are exacerbated by one of the standards being to present everything in the form of lengthy, multi-novel serieses. Worse, the individual novels [...]
Paradoxical Undressing is a mostly spoken word show by Throwing Muses/50 Foot Wave front woman Kristin Hersh. A series of ten minute autobiographical fragments covering the time up until about the first Throwing Muses album read over guitar riffs, interspersed with excerpts from songs (mostly hers but a couple of covers).
The texts have much of [...]
Recently I’ve been watching the first season of The Wire. I now see exactly why it comes so highly recommended – the best TV I’ve seen in years. The comparison with a novel is spot on, as much as Babylon 5 was but without any of the weak spots on the acting front. Arc plot [...]
One of the best films that I saw at the EIFF this year was Errol Morris’ documentary Standard Operating Procedure about Abu Ghraib. It takes his usual approach: a series of interviews with those involved with limited narration. Here the most prominent interviewees are Lynndie England and Sabrina Harmann, together others who were either directly [...]
One of the things I keep noticing in Q&A sessions for documentary films is that some people seem to have a hard time relating to the people they see on screen as being actual people.
Today I watched The Order of Myths at the EIFF. The film is a documentary about the Mardi Gras celebrations in [...]
Recently I bought a PS3, partly because there are a few games due out shortly that I’m rather looking forward to (mostly GTA and Civilization Revolutions) but mostly for the Blu-Ray DVD player and the Linux support. I’d been hoping to also use it as, for example, a MythTV front end. First impressions are that [...]