alexsarll | The kisses of the enemy are deadly

People who enjoyed last night, or would like to go another time, or simply have nothing better to do with the Internet: mail loveyourenemies@gmail.com so we can join all the viagra, p0rn and Rolex merchants in your spam folder. And yes, I'm very sorry about getting the venue address wrong.

On Friday I was reading back through my old entries, and increasingly understanding the Urge to Delete (though obviously I was not goth enough to succumb). The worst was that exactly a year before, I had been reading an Iris Murdoch novel. As I am now. There was no conscious decision on my part, I've never particularly thought of her as a 'February writer' or anything - I'm clearly just far more an(nu)al than I'd supposed.
A year before that, of course, 'I' was wondering how to turn tATu.

Thought: the Beastie Boys were once a thoroughly entertaining novelty/party whiteboy hip hop act. Does this mean that in a decade, Goldie Lookin' Chain will be tireless and slightly over-worthy political activists? Man, I wish the Beasties had gone with their original plan and called their first album Don't Be A Faggot. It might have stopped them getting quite so serious.

The Guardian asked a noted blogger to write a diary of blogging. Is that idea worthy of Sterne, or just deeply stupid?

The Line of Beauty is done; strange to think that a novel of the Eighties now counts as 'historical fiction'. I'm also wondering whether it counts as alternate universe fiction if one of your central characters is an MP who didn't exist. But then, that makes all fiction alternate universe fiction. I digress. It's a fine book, and if Hollinghurst's capitalists seem grotesque, his socialists are petulant and naive; I fear that in neither case is there as much caricature as one might hope. My one real objection is that in all three books of his I've read, there is a sense that any straight male (or at least any young and attractive one) can at least temporarily lapse into gayness, but the reverse never happens; insatiable as they are, none of his queers is ever tempted by a girl.
Also, has anyone else ever heard the term 'bumshoving'? I thought a combination of eighties playground, boys' school and Viz had taught me every bvggery euphemism going, but apparently not.

The Whole Equation by David Thomson is published in hardback by Little, Brown priced £22.50. Available February 14th.

David Thomson's latest book is described as "A History of Hollywood", but this only begins to describe it. It's also an economy, an aesthetics, a philosophy of Hollywood. It's an idiosyncratic book, at least as much a personal credo as a textbook, but it still does an admirable job of explaining how the American film industry works. For the most part the explanations are clear enough that the interested novice can follow them, but Thomson (renowned for his Biographical Dictionary of Film) is expert enough that even those familiar with the subject will learn much. Admittedly there are passages when one cannot explain quite what is being said, but still somehow feels that one is learning something; even here, though, it is more that Thomson's style approaches poetry than that it is merely incoherent.
Interestingly for a man so devoted to film, he is very much aware of its limitations; unfavourable comparisons to other artforms, particularly the novel, are frequent. But this is simply because he has a grand vision of cinema's potential, a potential he seems to believe it has barely begun to fulfil, and from which it has sometimes turned in the wrong direction; a key lament is for the replacement of "better than life" Technicolor with cheaper, inferior colour processes. This is not to say that he is a slave to well-worn canons, or has a blind fascination for old films over new; early movies regarded by many as masterpieces are, to Thomson, only "something on the way to art", and the Lord of the Rings films are among the modern work he enjoys. "I don't believe anyone has ever tried to explain movies this way", says Thomson at one point, but it would be a fair comment in almost every chapter of this magnificent, unique book.