I'm watching "Humph's Last Stand" (from the Brecon Jazz Festival last year) and the solo that opened Trouble In Mind was just beautiful - you could see that Humph wasn't quite able to pull off the technical feats he used to be capable of, but the passion for the music, the ability to communicate it - that was still there and shone through. Then the band came in and just lifted him, it was like a rush of energy came to him.
wonderful. | |
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Buried in the announcement that ISIHAC will return (something I'm ambivalent about - how do you replace Humph? - the only person who could do that mix of charm and bewilderment is Bill Bailey) the BBC also announced that that there'll be a new radio adaptation of all of John le Carré's George Smiley novels, 20 hours long.
I'm a bit worried about this - not least because
(1) the BBC's already done Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People wonderfully on TV.
(2) A Murder Of Quality isn't very good. It's really a classic English murder mystery that just happens to have Smiley in it. Mind you, a radio version might wash away the memory of Denholm Elliott failing on telly.
(3) Smiley is only a very minor character in The Looking-Glass War and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Both fine novels, and there's a great film of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
(4) Smiley is Alec Guinness, dammit. He's not Bernard Hepton (who's played him on radio before. Hepton is Tiny Toby Esterhase!)
(5) That is a lot of material to cover in 20 hours!
However it does mean that my favourite Smiley novel, The Honourable Schoolboy will be adapted, Call For The Dead should be good (making up for the awful film The Deadly Affair with a miscast James Mason as 'Charles Dobbs'), and The Secret Pilgrim cries out to be done on radio, as it's really as much about storytelling as it is about Smiley's influence on Ned.
We'll ignore the massive internal inconsistency in Smiley's timeline between the pre-Karla novels and everything that came after, and I assume the BBC will too :P
It's all down to getting the right Smiley. Derek Jacobi would be just about right, I think...
(Oh, and for those of you who prefer pantomime horses and slapstick, Rentaghost is coming back. Shudder.) | |
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You've probably never heard of him. But if you've ever seen a slightly cheesy movie trailer, you've heard his voice. Yes, that guy. With the big, ominous voice. Don LaFontaine, The Voice Of God, 1940-2008. | |
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... steer WELL CLEAR of Liverpool for the next few days. "La Machine" (the latest entertainment from the people who gave London the Sultan's Elephant) features a BLOODY BIG SPIDER - like, 50 feet long! My dad's been out photographing it, and has sent me a load of pics... ( ...including this one.Collapse ). | |
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...and becoming even more stunning. Yes, it's Microsoft. And yes, it's sheer bloody genius and I want one. I want every picture in flickr, smugmug and picasa in there. Maybe with a time dimension too ;) | |
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One of the best 'heavies' around - which combined with his particular talent for Pinter always made him immensely watchable. Rigby always created a threatening, looming, brooding presence, and his Watson against Tom Baker's Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles was a wonderful example of playing against the text. My two favourite Terence Rigby roles were both heavies of a very different stamp - the engimatic trader Big Al in Plater's Beiderbecke Affair and boozy spy Roy Bland in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy.
And let's not forget that he was even watchable in Crossroads. Surely the mark of a great actor. | |
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Sad little wannabe h4xxx0r fuckwad Gary McKinnon can now face the fate he deserves - being brutally sodomised in an American prison. Break the law, pay the price. Zero sympathy. Pity they don't use clicky-ba to "re-educate" the pitiful fingers of negligible little wastes of oxygen like him. | |
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I like a bit of peace and quiet on the the train.
Tonight, the announcements on the train home from Leeds were still going on past Garforth. That's a good ten minutes. It sounded like the pratt with the mic was going to stop somewhere just past Neville Hill depot, but he took a breath or two, gathered yet more thoughts, and carried on to just past the old Killingbeck Hospital. Then he started again, and kept blathering away to just past the old Vickers tank factory. Peace at last? No. Another pause, and he finally finished assaulting my ears on the far side of Garforth.
Just to rub salt into the wounds he started making more announcements before we'd even reached the York ring road.
25 minute trip of which about 15 were taken up with announcements that made local radio sound worthwhile. WTF? STFU!
Can we have Quiet Coaches that skip the shit from the guard train manager, please? | |
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Truly beautiful images in this song, it just knocked me out hearing it on Tom Robinson's 6Music show.
"Just Like A Drummer" - The Wave Pictures.
I saw you in the film for just two seconds
A documentary set in heaven
Where the hipsters roll like children
And the painters roll like gods
The sun came in like a pack of orange spaniels
Through the window over the ledge
Under the curtains on their bellies
Creeping and bending
Balls of string, coiled like springs
Hang down from the cymbal stands
And in your hands I sleep just like a drummer
And wake up with the thunder
Of your typewriter, every night... | |
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following on from my last post, an article on a blog about social networking doubting the need for hyperconnectivity ;) Living without Twitter with No Regrets. Of course, he's actually saying that Friendfeed is l33ter than tw aitter, but his closing remark is the most interesting part of the article:
Communication is a great thing but over-communication I think can also be a detriment. We seem to want to spend so much time talking about literally nothing in order it seems to justify our use of these tools. Communication tools are meant to enhance our lives and our work but it seems that they have become more of a means to lose ourselves in the mundane instead.
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Kenneth Williams used to be mocked for doing his "funny voices" in straight legit parts.
Martin Shaw deserves equal mockery for his use of the Arthur Mullard voice and the Cockney Gangstah one on George Gently. Which also seems to be set in "The Past" in pretty much the same way that Heartbeat is - a few early-sixties motors does not a valid historical setting make.
Crap. | |
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Has someone at 6Music taken a backhander to play Sequestered in Memphis by The Hold Steady about once an hour? It's not a bad piece of sub-Marc Cohn/Bruce Springsteen/Driveby Truckers-esque Regular Guy Rock, but it really doesn't need playing that much. | |
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Well no actually, but a couple of reviews of Leeds eateries. Sam's Chop House is the Leeds offshoot of the famous Manchester food pub. The Manchester version has consistently served me the second-best roast beef I've ever had (the best ever being at the Durham Ox at Crayke - go there), although it was a while before I noticed they'd launched a Leeds branch, in the heart of the legal/financial district. Sam's is unashamedly blokey and nouveau-old-fashioned. It aims at an atmosphere somewhere between gentlemen's club and high-class Victorian boozer. It's not somewhere for formal fine dining; it's somewhere that seems very busy early evening with post-work drinkers and gets a nice steady trade of diners later on. There's a reasonable range of beers, including a rather good house bitter and a surprisingly palatable house lager and a couple of decent and regularly changing guests, and a surprisingly good and well-priced wine list. But you're not here because it's a pub - you're here for food, preferably of the serious, solid, English comfort food variety. They take this kind of stuff very seriously and price it well - with portions that are just right. On my first visit a few months ago I had their special 'North Indian' chicken curry as a bar meal, for about six quid. It was everything you could ask for - fairly mild, complex spicing in a smooth sauce, a timbale of nicely cooked rice, good quality meat, and went down very well with the house lager. A cut above the vast majority of pub food. But I looked at the rest of the menu and decided I'd be back. Last night I dropped in on the way home from work (it's only a couple of minutes from the station), and the place surpassed the Manchester branch in my estimation. My starter was a generous portion of potted Morecambe Bay shrimp with thick, brown toast. The tastes worked together beautifully - an excellent mix of the taste of the sea and the natural sweetness of the shrimp with the butter and herbs on some excellent bread. Tradition doesn't get much better. At least not until the main course. They pride themselves on their corned beef hash and I had to try it as if done properly it's one of the finest comfort food dishes out there. And Sam's is exemplary, served in a big, thick cake of home made corned beef (of the Irish/American style), shredded and mixed with sauteed potatoes and topped with a couple of rashers of gorgeously salty dry-cure bacon (and a poached egg, but I don't like eggs, so had mine without). All this needs is salt, pepper and a proper bottle of HP sauce, which was provided as a matter of course. This is died-and-gone-to-heaven stuff, ultra-simple, but brilliantly executed. The portion size is such that when it arrives I thought I'll never get near finishing it... but I did. Chaophraya is a blingtastic Thai restaurant just round the corner from Leeds station. Since I've been working in West Yorkshire I seem to have been dropping in there every few months and it's always been very good but 'safe' - the food has been superbly presented and prepared but has maybe lacked that little bit of oomph that tips it over into the sublime. They managed that the other week. I started (as I often do there) with moo yang (skewered marinated grilled pork) which was as tender and sweet/spicy as expected. So far so good - then on to the main course. I was on a bit of a carnivorous kick and decided I'd have an old favourite that I'd never eaten at that particular restaurant, weeping tiger. Chaophraya's version is rather different to other interpretations of the dish. As well as liberally coating the steak in peppercorns, fish sauce, soy etc. and serving it with a thermonuclear crushed fresh chilli sauce, Chaophraya present you with the (extremely high quality sirloin) steak sliced and still rare on a sizzler and liberally coat it at the table in a thick dark sauce that seems to have sweet dark soy (along the lines of an Indonesian kecap manis), more fish sauce, and various other good things. This caramelises and creates lots of beautiful little burnt bits that are exploding with 'umami', the fifth taste, which combines beautifully with the steak's own hit of it. And then you get the chilli sauce which turns all your taste receptors up to about 15 on a scale of 10... I needed the jasmine rice to cool down. And to cover with all the little bits of debris on the sizzler when I'd finished the steak. Dude, they got one very very clean plate back. The roasted green banana with ice cream wasn't bad either, but how do you follow near-perfection? | |
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...is the verdict on Bob Clarke's Four Minute Warning. Clarke is ex-RAF turned engineer turned archaeologist, and in this book he turns his attention to a description of both the UK's nuclear arsenal and the supporting military infrastructure throughout the Cold War, and then to the civil defence and other mechanisms that would attempt to put society back on its feet in the event of an attack. The book is structured in two halves - Protect covering the weapons and radar/intelligence networks, and some of the politics (albeit from a fairly right-wing perspective), and Survive covering civil defence. Clarke starts off in typical Subbrit/Research Study Group sort of mode, telling us all about ROTOR bunkers, ROC sites and so on. Then he starts to discuss council emergency HQs, Regional Seats of Government, the need to preserve essential utilities and things start to get bleak. He draws evidence from declassfied official documents and rapidly comes to the conclusion that the rundown of civil defence in the late sixties was not walking away from the problem - it was admitting that there was nothing that could be done about it. His argument is sober, compelling and factual. And bloody terrifying, knowing what we now do about the tonnage that was pointed at the UK. Clarke contends that any reasonable attempt at a civil defence programme in the fifties and early sixties was based around a few Hiroshima-sized bombs; Dresden-style effects plus some radiation and fallout, essentially. Horrific but essentially survivable on a national level. Once you're into the realms of multi-megaton H-bomb airbursts, you're talking about entire regions utterly devastated by one bomb; throw in a few ground bursts and most of the country is bathed in fallout. Add up the sort of numbers Peter Hennessy's The Secret State gives for the number of warheads aimed at the UK and the only conclusion you can come to is that Britain would be reduced almost immediately to a small number of doomed, dying civilians in cobbled-together home refuges (remember P&S telling you to pile the doors up against the walls with mattresses over them?), a few bunkers full of equally doomed officials, and perhaps some cobbled-together token emergency services. Until they die, anyway. Any nuclear exchange would quite literally have meant the end of any meaningful civilisation in a country as small, as densely populated and as dependent upon its own food production as Britain. A powerful book for anyone with an interest in the nuclear state, and the doublethink that said 'limited' nuclear was was somehow possible. There's no such thing as 'flexible response'. | |
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Sentimental toss. But very shooty-bangy, full of prefigured stuff from the last four series. And didn't the Crucible look all Death Starry? Cheesy, I loved it. The surprise was... ( spoilerCollapse )As ever, Tennant, Tate, Cribbins and Sladen were excellent, Barrowman was Barroman, Noel Clarke was better than ever and Camille Coduri didn't annoy me! And as for Julian Bleach - bloody superb, as was Nick Briggs' vocal performance. Cribbins gives the entire cast an acting lesson in every scene he's in. He was up for the Doctor when Tom Baker got the role; it's fascinating to think how he might've played it - or has it taken 30-odd years for him to get the straight acting chops? | |
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It's Friday afternoon and I'm reinstating references to barm cakes on wikipedia. I think it's POETS day, isn't it? ;) | |
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Vaguely inspired by Alfred Bester's The Men Who Murdered Mohammed (and to a lesser extent Norman Spinrad's Carcinoma Angels, I guess) and written pretty much on the fly in about half an hour. ( Silly. Doctor Who. Biased.Collapse ) | |
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On the whole, er, wow, but some major problems - RTD reusing a plot device from last year ("let's all pray link up our phones to find the Doctor") - and some really ropy CGI. Fantastic performances from the regulars, Billie's teeth seemed to work properly this time. Bernard Cribbins is a great action hero (then again he's offed a few Daleks back in the Cushing movies and auditioned for the Fourth Doctor). Catherine Tate's face when she saw Rose behind the Doctor was a wonderful piece of silent acting. Ianto and Gwen from Torchwood were crap, but then again so's Torchwood. Anyway, they 'died' last week preventing the Sontaran invasion ;) ( SpoilersCollapse ) | |
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...Queen on stage at the Mandela 90th birthday gig.
Sun City, lads? Yeah, that was conveniently forgotten. | |
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Whoever decided Amy Winehouse was fit (physically, mentally or musically) to go on stage at the Mandela concert tonight was being unnecessarily cruel to the poor woman. Her eyes are like cash registers ringing up "No Sale", she can't hold a tune, and she looks painfully, scarily ill. She needs to be in hospital, away from bad influences, recovering the talent she's pissing away along with the rest of her life.
Give the poor woman some space and time. | |
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" Stoner aims to emulate Dutch performance". No this isn't about someone indulging in too much space-cake and going to one of those strange clubs where ladies show you their undercarriage shooting out ping-pong balls, it's about a motorcyclist (Casey Stoner) hoping to repeat last year's win in the Dutch motorcycle Grand Prix at Assen. | |
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Just seen that George Carlin has died aged 71. For some reason Carlin isn't well known in the UK (he damn well should've been) - but he's the true father of a lot of 'alternative' comedy on both sides of the Atlantic. A comedian's comedian? Perhaps. A wise, profane and incredibly funny man? Definitely. | |
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The plot was hackneyed - typical butterfly-effect stuff. Sliding Doors except the bint who dies doesn't get off with the man.
Catherine Tate's performance was occasionally back to her shouty comedy mode. Oh and Billie Piper annoyed me. She seemed to be wearing ill-fitting teeth for most of the episode and was clearly having difficulty sounding like she came from the Powell Estate. Oh and RTD with the Dead Dad Thing, yet again. And I'm sure I've seen the superhero-less world done in Superman...
But it was bloody brilliant. The 90% of the time Tate wasn't annoying, she was compelling. The powerlessness and bitterness Donna felt and the bleakness of the situation she found herself in were powerfully drawn. And as for her self-sacrifice - to quote a line from a favourite Pete Atkin song - "No dice -- there was nothing left to throw". And who would've thought Bernard Cribbins could bring a lump to your throat in the refugee and "Labour Camp" scene?
Magnificent. This was Doctor Who doing what it does best - assimilating and subverting well-known tropes, playing with its own backstory and telling a bloody good story with strong characters.
Oh... and to quote myself after Silence in the Library: "I'm wondering whether one of the linking arcs in this season is the fragile wall between levels of fiction and reality?"
Er, yes ;) | |
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Table2Clipboard - copies tables in Firefox and pastes 'em into Excel (or OpenOffice Calc) properly. Just saved me a couple of hours! | |
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Wine finally reaches 1.0 status. Remind me - what is the point of a shoddy piece of much-delayed software that runs only a small subset of compatible applications? (This refers as much to Windows as to Wine). The war's over, anyway; virtualisation won. | |
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Half Man Half Biscuit cover I Think We're Alone Now. Not quite up there with the covers of Mister Blue Sky, Novelty, Transmission, or the bits of Spectre vs. Rector that keep creeping in between songs, but hey, it's HMHB covering Tiffany. ;) | |
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As Tony Hancock would say...... Stone me.
Internment returns through the back door thanks to a bunch of bowler-hatted thug throwbacks.
And as for Labour... I'm sure there are some decent Labour politicians out there. 30-odd of them, probably.
I hope the rest of them can face their fascist faces in the mirror tomorrow morning.
I'm not ashamed to be British. I'm ashamed THEY are British. | |
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I think it's utterly shocking that Hans Reiser wasn't sharing the location of the body of the woman he murdered -- I mean, what kind of commitment to the Open Source ideology is that? And worse, he's only doing it for profit - well, a reduced sentence. ;) What would Stallman say? ;) (Eric Raymond would no doubt say he should've used a gun rather than stabbing her). Bloody open-source weenies. They annoy me even when they try to be criminal! | |
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Seems that that nice Mr Tennant has a penchant for guest stars. I can imagine it now: Moffat: "So David, how long do you want to carry on?" Tennant: "Let's see... well, there's fifty-two women on my list, even if you put one in each episode that's another four seasons, minimum, plus whoever you can line up for the specials..." And this is clearly why there's Doctor-lite episodes - just to give the poor man time to recover! Oh and no wonder 5 was 'his favourite Doctor' in the Children In Need sketch! And we can obviously see why Billie Piper left - I mean, her or Sophia Myles? No contest. ;) | |
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