A curmudgeon writes.
So there’s been a bit of a thing floating around the Internet in the last couple of days where people choose a favourite game from each year they’ve been alive. Some years were tough, but I’m reasonably happy with my choices – for now. Continue reading “Pick a year, pick a game”
The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Zombies! Death! Mystery! Haiti! THE UNKNOWABLE! All of these are perennially interesting to the whitest of the white – me, for example – and Davis’ book, a tale of the search for potions to make and unmake a zombie, is no exception. It’s interesting, but dryness (and occasional self-insertion) can make it tough going.
The cover of this edition is not a design which offers confidence in the book’s contents. It features a screaming Bill Pullman and a coffin, a tie-in with the frankly shithouse film of the same name. The film that’s loosely based on the source in the same way that I can loosely be called a virtuoso because I can play a three-chord banger as long as it doesn’t involve odd barre positions. Continue reading “Book review: The Serpent and the Rainbow”
Gardener to the King by Frédéric Richaud
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In this brief work, Frédéric Richaud manages to encapsulate the world of the Sun King and the rising tide of discontent between the French classes by way of… gardening?
Versailles is the focal point of this work, an expression of Royal dominance over the land. There’s plenty of information about the place itself, and there’s a distinct feeling that the abode – we begin just prior to court moving there from the Louvre – is itself a character. It’s treated with as much authorial love as any of the major figures in the work. Continue reading “Book review: Gardener to the King”
The Ladybird Book of the Zombie Apocalypse by Jason Hazeley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is going to be a short review, which is fitting as the book is short. An amuse l’œil, if you like.
It pretty much does what you’d expect from the title: it’s a pisstake of the Ladybird books, a series of books aimed at improving kids’ reading abilities. Widely used in the ’60s and ’70s, these books covered all sorts of topics and were illustrated in a very painterly manner. Continue reading “Book review: The Ladybird Book of the Zombie Apocalypse”
When I was a teenager my parents and uncle delighted in calling me Gunna. Gunna Martin. At first, I thought this was kind of cool, because as a kid I’d loved a book called Drummer Hoff, but apparently it was Not A Good Thing.
It was Not A Good Thing because it referred to my inability to do things in a timely fashion. Mowing. Picking up the dog shit. Cleaning my room. Homework. Anything that didn’t involve pissing time away, most likely. And so whenever anyone reached the point of extremity, out it came: Gunna Martin, that’s you. Continue reading “Gunna, get it?”
Discovering Scarfolk by Richard Littler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Scarfolk. That name! One to be uttered alongside Derry, Maine. Or R’lyeh. A place where that creepy clown from the television test pattern lives. A place where brutalist architecture never died, where clothing is all artificial material, everything has a fried egg in it, and the world is viewed through builders’ tea, smeared glasses and an obsidian doorway into another world. Continue reading “Book review: Discovering Scarfolk”
So I was farting around on Twitter – what else do you do on there? – and I came across this image.
So I figured I’d do it. I worked the first post up and someone commented, saying you could crank out the whole month in a day, if you had a mind.
I don’t have much of a mind, but I do have bookshelves requiring filling that I desperately need distraction from, so I did all 30 days (why not 28 or 31?) in one go.
And here they are. Continue reading “A compressed month of memesongs”
Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts by Grafton Tanner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Vaporwave! It’s a thing, still, even though it’s supposed to have been dead for a couple of years now.
What is vaporwave? If you don’t know, have some smooth, iconic jams. Essentially, it’s elevator music for some weirdly capitalist hellscape, and Grafton Tanner’s book exists to provide a bit of context with fewer bong-hits than you’d fine in online discussions of same. Continue reading “Book review: Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts”
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
Well, this is all a bit depressing.
I mean, we’re all fairly acutely aware of the way the internet makes us all a little stupider, right? There was a lot of hoo-ha about Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stoopid? but in this brief book, Postman makes the same claims about television, something which by now appears benign in comparison to the dizzying chasm of timesink that defines most of our modern lives.
And he did it in 1985.
And then Roger Waters wrote an album about it.
I know, right?
Yeah nah. 