Dangerous & Lazy

Disgusting of May to pretend to attend the obviously fake "Armed Forces Day" in order to get out of celebrating National Pralines Day.

24 Jun 17

Sensational communism

I generally find out about TV shows either through links to thinkpieces posted on Twitter, or through gifsets posted on Tumblr. I suspect the gifsets have tended to be a more reliable guide to good shows than the thinkpieces, a suspicion that was reinforced when I finally got round to watching Sense8 recently. As the gifsets promised, it’s great, but it’s great in a particular way – formally challenging, conceptually fascinating – that I’m surprised I didn’t see more thinkpieces about it. Read more↴

Recent

The Official Chart for January 2017

So, maybe I’ll continue to do this regular music post thing, but once a month? And rather than struggling to find something to say about every track I hear that I like, I’ll just write about the tracks I know I’ve got something to say about, and stuff the rest on a Spotify playlist (and […]

The Official Charts of 2016

In no particular order, and somewhat arbitrarily selected from a bunch of other great stuff that came out in 2016 (and also collected in a Spotify play list) Top tracks Karó, “Silhouette.” Florrie, “Real Love.” A bass line like a thunderstorm. Carly Rae Jepsen, “Fever.” “My breath was lost when you said ‘friends’ / well that […]

The official chart for August 21

New Britney! When I first heard “Do You Wanna Come Over?“, I thought “Britney doing Girls Aloud,” although actually the guitars are more “Sweet Dreams my LA Ex”; either way, this has something of the sound of mid-2000s British pop, the golden age of popism, a sound Britney didn’t embrace at the time (though there is the […]

The Official Chart for August 14

Last two weekends I was in France, which is why I’ve skipped a couple of my regular music posts. While I was there, I read the French edition of Elle, which seemed keen to undermine the stereotype that French people are fashionable, by advocating “urban pirate” as a key look for Autumn; and to undermine stereotypes about French […]

The Official Chart for July 24

Doing this weekly music post thing has encouraged me to seek out more new music, which is good, but is a problem when a record comes along that requires more than a week to really get to grips with. Such a record is Róisín Murphy’s new album Take Her up to Monto, one of the strangest records […]

Snippets

LRB · Adam Smyth · Ropes, Shirts or Dirty Socks: Paper

When I started seeing a lot of hype about “digital humanities,” I joked that I should start branding myself as an expert in “wood pulp humanities.” Of course I soon realised that the joke was on me: wood pulp humanities, that is, humanistic inquiry into the materiality of books, is a fascinating if rather niche field of [...]

THE MANDELBROT MONK

Initially, Udo’s aim was to devise a method for determining who would reach heaven. He assumed each person’s soul was composed of independent parts he called “profanus” (profane) and “animi” (spiritual), and represented these parts by a pair of numbers. Then he devised rules for drawing and manipulating these number pairs. In effect, he devised [...]

Melodrama On Loop – The Awl

When I think of Melodrama, I don’t think Taylor Swift’s 1989 (2014) or Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION (2015) — both arguably breakup albums of a sort — so much as Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2013). Lorde’s and Korine’s narratives chime together; the euphoria of the party before the solo depression that follows. Even the acoustic renditions of Britney Spears’s [...]