August, 2009

NB: Includes mild spoilers to Inglourious Basterds, Violence and Language. Here’s the big joke: eight vengeful Jewish American soldiers roam the fields of France between 1941-44 killing German soldiers, and under the direction of their hillbilly Lieutenant (Brad Pitt), scalps them. Literally. In close-up technicolor. If they are allowed to live, for propaganda purposes, a [...]

2,400 pages. That’s what President Obama’s vacation (to use the Yankeeism) reading entails according to the White House, as reported by Slate’s invaluable John Dickerson: The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington, D.C.; Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York’s Lower East [...]

Just to make one thing quite clear: This blog is irrelevant. Hope that’s alright, then. But, what’s this all about? Yesterday I posted on The September Issue, a film about US Vogue and its editor, Anna Wintour. A reader commented: ‘Ho hum. A blog about a film about a magazine about an unreal narcissistic pseudo-world. [...]

Whenever anyone says they don’t care for fashion I think of Meryl Streep as an ash blond, looking down her nose – and I wish (like Woody Allen with Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall) I could just call out Streep from the crowd to give her speech. In The Devil Wears Prada, Streep plays Miranda [...]

I was going to post a blog (got as far as the title: How to eat food), about Michael Pollan’s eye-opening book, In Defense of Food, about food culture which I read on my holidays, but even if my stomach is on song with it, my head’s not yet in the right place to pass [...]

Here’s a fine example of TSP, seen in the street the other day. Guess what kind of person owns this car?* This picture was removed at the request of the car owner. ___ * It was parked outside a real estate office. As it happened, a while later I witnessed a short, bald, slick-suited man [...]

Photography v painting. That hoary old argument*. Naturally enough, photography wins, with hands tied behind its back. The density of detail, that magical documenting of evidence – today was fine, there was no wind, the sun was brilliant, the shadows were dark, she was smiling etc. (We have to trust that no photoshop was applied [...]

I finally got around to reading Nicholson Baker’s piece on Amazon’s Kindle – the device that will finally do away with The Book. I could, of course, have read it online three weeks ago but I had misplaced that edition of the New Yorker and I just knew I had to read about the Kindle [...]

Driving along and someone says, What’s that? We all listen hard to the radio. ‘Elgar?’ I say. ‘And it’s got a bit of Jerusalem.’ ‘Very Anglican church,’ says the driver. A bit later the announcer tells us the wonderful stuff was the Jupiter section of Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Which was a perfect excuse to [...]