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alexsarllIt only hit me on Saturday, passing a washed-out version of it on the side of a Tufnell Park building, that the Nuclear Power - No Thanks! image is a smiling sun. The sun being, of course, a massive, unshielded nuclear reactor. Nice work there, idiots. In other nuclear news, sort of, I was intrigued by Francis Spufford's piece about a forgotten moment in the Cold War when the West felt it was being overtaken by a forward-looking USSR. I loved the science-fictional details. For instance - in 1961 the Party under Kruschev made attaining what we would now call the Singularity a manifesto commitment. By 1980. Which was obviously quietly forgotten after he was edged out of power but still, it was a statement of intent.
Note also, as Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman has, that in the fifties Soviet economic growth massively overshadowed ours, just as Chinese and Indian growth do today, and leading to much the same Decline of the West rhetoric from the more self-lacerating Western commentators. Let us hope the modern version looks just as foolish in 50 years' time, at least as regards China.
I recall Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel being widely dismissed as another underwhelming British comedy film, but I thought I'd give it a go anyway, and you know what? It's really good. The only feature film of the late Gareth Carrivick, who also directed the similarly underrated TV series The Smoking Room and the iconic TMwRnJ plus a load of old rubbish but de mortui nil nisi bonum &c, it puts three slackers (two of them SF fans, the other one not and so a handy recipient of expository dialogue) in that great British location, the pub - and then locates a time leak in the loo. Pleasingly ornate and generally very funny time-travel shenanigans ensue. It looked especially good seen soon after one of old Who's more timey-wimey stories,Mawdryn Undead. Which may feature the return of the Brigadier and the debut of Turlough, but is nonetheless a bit bobbins. The first episode especially has incidental music to make one utter the hitherto inconceivable words 'Come back Murray Gold, all is forgiven' - it's like a maniac with a keytar is following the cast around. Nyssa has a dreadful new outfit and make-up such that she no longer even serves as eye-candy, she and Tegan are required to be quite unaccountably stupid in furtherance of the plot, and the villain-of-sorts is dressed like some sort of half-arsed harlequin except that his brain is falling out. It's all rather unseemly. As for the conclusion...I can take a certain amount of coincidence, but when you get the hero out of the concluding deathtrap just by a happenstance of timing, that's too much.
Went to see Artery over the weekend. If you've not heard of Artery, they were contemporaries of Pulp in the early Sheffield days, and on songs like 'Into the Garden', they have some of that same mystery and menace which Pulp passed through for a moment on their way to the pop years and beyond. Artery now...not so much. With time, their frontman has picked up the waterproof and the hectoring masculinity seemingly unique to a particular sort of Northern man. Jamie was reminded of a third-rate John Lydon, but to me it was what would happen if the Gallaghers ever got political. Most disappointing. Far more entertaining was Mr Manners' turn on the decks, where freed of any responsibility to the dancefloor he out-Love Your Enemies'd LYE, going from recent Luke Haines into 'The Rhythm Divine', mixing Kajagoogoo's 'Too Shy' into Wyngarde's 'Rape'.
Note also, as Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman has, that in the fifties Soviet economic growth massively overshadowed ours, just as Chinese and Indian growth do today, and leading to much the same Decline of the West rhetoric from the more self-lacerating Western commentators. Let us hope the modern version looks just as foolish in 50 years' time, at least as regards China.
I recall Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel being widely dismissed as another underwhelming British comedy film, but I thought I'd give it a go anyway, and you know what? It's really good. The only feature film of the late Gareth Carrivick, who also directed the similarly underrated TV series The Smoking Room and the iconic TMwRnJ plus a load of old rubbish but de mortui nil nisi bonum &c, it puts three slackers (two of them SF fans, the other one not and so a handy recipient of expository dialogue) in that great British location, the pub - and then locates a time leak in the loo. Pleasingly ornate and generally very funny time-travel shenanigans ensue. It looked especially good seen soon after one of old Who's more timey-wimey stories,Mawdryn Undead. Which may feature the return of the Brigadier and the debut of Turlough, but is nonetheless a bit bobbins. The first episode especially has incidental music to make one utter the hitherto inconceivable words 'Come back Murray Gold, all is forgiven' - it's like a maniac with a keytar is following the cast around. Nyssa has a dreadful new outfit and make-up such that she no longer even serves as eye-candy, she and Tegan are required to be quite unaccountably stupid in furtherance of the plot, and the villain-of-sorts is dressed like some sort of half-arsed harlequin except that his brain is falling out. It's all rather unseemly. As for the conclusion...I can take a certain amount of coincidence, but when you get the hero out of the concluding deathtrap just by a happenstance of timing, that's too much.
Went to see Artery over the weekend. If you've not heard of Artery, they were contemporaries of Pulp in the early Sheffield days, and on songs like 'Into the Garden', they have some of that same mystery and menace which Pulp passed through for a moment on their way to the pop years and beyond. Artery now...not so much. With time, their frontman has picked up the waterproof and the hectoring masculinity seemingly unique to a particular sort of Northern man. Jamie was reminded of a third-rate John Lydon, but to me it was what would happen if the Gallaghers ever got political. Most disappointing. Far more entertaining was Mr Manners' turn on the decks, where freed of any responsibility to the dancefloor he out-Love Your Enemies'd LYE, going from recent Luke Haines into 'The Rhythm Divine', mixing Kajagoogoo's 'Too Shy' into Wyngarde's 'Rape'.
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Date: 2010-08-11 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2010-08-11 11:30 am (UTC)Nyssa in velvet was cute, if generally quite annoying with it.
Even Turlough isn't quite up to speed here, in that he spends too long talking to a man with a crow on his head.
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Date: 2010-08-11 11:46 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2010-08-11 11:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-11 03:14 pm (UTC)(And it's not quite the same thing, I know, but one of the recurring characters in the next series of Torchwood is going to be a celebrity nonce...)
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Date: 2010-08-11 12:18 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2010-08-12 07:56 pm (UTC)The Day Khruschev Panicked
Date: 2010-08-13 01:11 pm (UTC)Surgeon's Saga
Doctor Goes East
Doctor Goes West
Doctor Goes North
Destination Moscow
Presumably he never got around to writing Doctor Goes South because he accidentally uncovered THE TRUTH and had to inform us all?