Reviews
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REVIEW: Clean Living under Difficult Circumstances: Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism, by Owen Hatherley
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 austerity… Read more
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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 were… Read more
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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.… Read more
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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 time… Read more
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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 big… Read more
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REVIEW: Alternative Comedy Memorial Society (ACMS), Signature Brew, Haggerston
Thom Tuck’s reign of terror is over. With the traditional ACMS host trapped in the midlands doing some acting, Joz Norris and [ok, other regular host] Siân Docksey have enacted a bloodless coup of London’s most pleasingly all-over-the-shop alternative comedy night. And what’s more, they are furiously pressing the big red reset button. They walk… Read more
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The Comedy Arcade – live at the Camden Fringe, Water Rats, Kings Cross, Sunday 8th August
Cor this is a late show! 9:30pm on a Sunday is when I’m usually cowering in existential terror of the week ahead. So it was nice, instead, to be at the Water Rats – historically, one of Kings Cross’ most “anything can happen” venues – to enjoy Vix Leyton and her Comedy Arcade. The Comedy… Read more
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Review: Weapons of Mass Hilarity, 2Northdown, Monday 16th August
“Where do you want to sit?” “The front”. Not the usual exchange when attending stand-up comedy, but this was a show with a difference. Weapons of Mass Hilarity showcases comics with links to the Middle East, and the friend I was with is British Iraqi. Of course she wanted to sit at the front and… Read more
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Review – Funny Femmes, 2Northdown, Sunday 15th August
The conveyor belt of straight white men never stops. I should know: I myself was made at the straight white man factory. Production is booming, and despite consumer feedback, many of my model think that a) we’re funny and b) people should listen to what we have to say. And so we are vacuum packed,… Read more
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