It is perhaps quite fitting that the ugliest part of Bristol’s city centre is its high-street Shopping Quarter. I cannot recall ever being in a district so under-representative of its host city as Bristol’s shopping quarter. Combining faceless high-street retail brands and desperately ugly, mid-20th century architecture , the shopping quarter is a ghetto of charmless consumerism to…
Category: Art
The Best of Living Dead Movies
Exploiting the current popularity of the zombie genre and since Halloween’s just a few months away, I present the best zombie movies to watch over the holidays. Shaun of the Dead (2004) Shaun of the Dead combines an intelligent and self-conscious script with enough violence and gore to keep any zombie movie enthusiast satisfied. For…
Disturbing Moments in Animated Cartoon History
As a young teenager I was obsessed with weirdness. I surrounded myself with the bizarre. I embodied the odd. I watched horror movies compulsively, read extensively on the abduction techniques favored by different serial killers and studied the indoctrination methodologies of cult leaders (I could tell you more about the Manson Family than I could about members of…
A Poem
Every now and then I get the very peculiar urge to write poetry. Most of what I write is generally rather light and pithy. I harbor no surreptitious notions of ever being a poet proper. So, without further adieu. Here is a little poem for you. It’s called An Irish Camping Poem. An Irish Camping Poem. A…
A Distracting Ramble Through Nowhere in Particular
Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness – George Orwell, 1946. I recently saw a youtube video of a 2003 interview with the late David Foster Wallace in which the writer expressed concern with what he regarded as a decline in the willingness of Americans to…
I Hate Inspirational Facebook Quotes
The Facebook news feed was introduced to provide users with a constantly updating list of stories from their social network. I am sure, however, that your news feed – much like my own – functions as little more than a digital cavalcade of triviality, solipsism, credulity and occasional outright stupidity. Always patronizing and invariably trite,…
On Hemingway, Bulls, Fascists and Aliens
In an attempt to remedy the onset of misanthropy, I have recently been assisting with a West End theatrical reworking of Ernest Hemingway’s break through novel, The Sun Also Rises. Admittedly, my contribution to the production is – at best – very limited, consisting mostly of weekend stage hand dogsbodery. Nonetheless, the experience provides a…
Misprints, Miscommunications and Lies
In his highly entertaining inspection of the many uses and abuses of the English language, The King’s English, Kingsley Amis addresses the struggle between “illiteracies and barbarisms, and pedantries and genteelisms” [1] by identifying two distinct sorts of offender of whose linguistic habits one is impelled to “deplore if not abhor.” Amis classifies members of…