As the title implies, Owen Hatherley is trying his best in trying times. This collection of his essays covers everything from tributes to Black Box Recorder to shop signs in Walthamstow High Street, from early blog posts to recent essays for the London Review of Books, as Britain staggers from late Blairism to coalition austerityContinue reading “REVIEW: Clean Living under Difficult Circumstances: Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism, by Owen Hatherley”
Category Archives: Diary
Granary Square
I am a frustrated writer. I am frustrated by how little I write. The first sentence is the hardest, as an old lag might say. There are so many competing demands on one’s attention, from social media to existential dread (or, to give it its more common name, social media). And then there’s depression, anxiety,Continue reading “Granary Square”
REVIEW: Everything, all the time, everywhere, by Stuart Jeffries.
I was an undergraduate during post-modernism’s golden age. It was 1998 and things, we had recently been assured, could only get better. Warwick uni was the quickest to embrace New Labour’s neoliberal reimagining of higher education. Private security goons stalked campus roads to nowhere. Treatises as brazenly unserious as Francis Fukuyama’s End of History wereContinue reading “REVIEW: Everything, all the time, everywhere, by Stuart Jeffries.”
Next Level Sketch and IMDp
Hello! Join me on a journey through time, as I write a rambling, diary-style blog post. Its intention is to remind whatever future version of me that might exist that these things happened. You’re welcome. Tuesday was the final Next Level Sketch of the year. I was not involved, as I was at an auditionContinue reading “Next Level Sketch and IMDp”
Film Review: Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve
“Today’s mega-Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what is not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.” David Foster Wallace I’m currently reading “Everything, everywhere, all the time”, Stuart Jeffries’s fun pop-culture polemic about how post-modernism has taken over both the world and our souls.Continue reading “Film Review: Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve”
Review: Legs comedy present Logs, Soho Theatre
This review first appeared on Phoenix Remix I’ve seen Legs Comedy do Logs twice in one week. Does that make me a Logs ultra? The first time was a mere ten minutes of wood at ACMS. Tonight was the full, burning, forest of their hour long show at Soho Theatre, at the pleasingly wild timeContinue reading “Review: Legs comedy present Logs, Soho Theatre”
Film Review: Chungking Express by Wong Kar Wai
“The body loses water when you jog, so you have none left for tears” 1994 was a different time. Quentin Tarantino was considered talented. Hong Kong was a British colony. And Wong Kar Wai was a relative upstart, rather than the superstar he became after In The Mood For Love. Tarantino himself was a bigContinue reading “Film Review: Chungking Express by Wong Kar Wai”
Serpentine
Nothing happened today so i am flying back a month to write about my charity swim in the Serpentine, to raise money for The Alzheimer’s Society. You can read all about why I did it, which I explain in typically graceless fashion, here. The distance I had chosen to swim, two miles, isn’t very far.Continue reading “Serpentine”
Isolation / Don’t Look Back
Turns out it was Covid. I am marooned in the suburbs, self-isolating in my parents’ house, and holy water supplies are dangerously low. In lockdown III I wrote an album. In this, my own, personal lockdown, I’ve decided to try and do the same, even though I don’t have my mics or indeed most ofContinue reading “Isolation / Don’t Look Back”
Monkey Swallows The Universe
A slightly lost week this week, being ill, waiting to see if I have Covid. I suspect I just have a (“the?”) flu, but one might as well be sure and there’s a walk in centre just down the road. Once I was able to get out of bed, I went and stuck the stickContinue reading “Monkey Swallows The Universe”
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