‘Nuff said.

Well, I didn’t manage to catch the Jaws night at The Electric, but I did venture out to the picture palace twice in the last week.

The Guillermo Del Toro produced, Juan Antonia Bayona helmed The Orphanage was rather good. More of a good old-fashioned ghost story than an out-and-out horror pic (despite one visceral scene that was a pure, popcorn-into-the-back-of-head-in-front shocker), it reminded me a bit of The Others. Haunting, atmospheric and melancholic-in-a-good-way, but – in my humble opinion – not really deserving the comparisons to Del Toro’s sublime masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth.

The other film was In Bruges, which was tremendous fun. Colin Farrell and the mighty Brendan Gleeson play two hitmen lying low in the Low Countries after a job goes tragically wrong. Painfully funny, jaw-droppingly politically incorrect and highly recommended, it reminds me of those great, edgy British films that George Harrison’s Handmade Films used to knock out in the late 1980s.

Go see.

So here I am again.

March was my month off from here. I say that as though it was planned or premeditated, but I should come clean and admit that – like most things in my life – there was precious little planned or premeditated about it. Nothing new there, then. I moved house (I think I mentioned that before) and, as a result, didn’t have a domestic Internet connection for the best part of last month. To put it another way, I was broken down on the hard shoulder of the information superhighway. As metaphorical dilemmas go, I suppose it’s better than being online roadkill.

(Just been interrupted by Lily, Clare’s 4 year-old daughter who really should be fast asleep by now. She wants me to help her find her toy unicorn, and who am I to refuse? This is a new thing for me, but I suspect that random toy unicorn searches will become a regular part of my life. So it goes.)

Anyway, I’ll keep this brief as (a) I’m tired and my head is fuzzy, and, (b) I haven’t quite mastered the knack of picking up from where I left off after a random toy unicorn hunt.

But I’m working on it.

Clare & I spent last weekend in North Wales. On Saturday we went for a ten mile walk around the Alwen Reservoir and surrounding hills, woods and countryside.

My legs have since recovered.

This first pic was taken just around the corner from the gorgeous Hafod Elwy Hall, where we stayed.

And here’s the Alwen Reservoir:

And here I am at Denbigh Castle:

Don’t worry, I won’t make a habit of this…

I received the following text message from my good friend and erstwhile comics collaborator Phil Walsh at 7.11am on 28th January 2008:

3.38am. Weighing in at 7.7. Alfred John Vincent Walsh was hurled into our plane of existence by emergency C-section after fifteen of the most terrifying minutes of my life. Beth and our son are both well, in the pink in fact, and resting comfortably. Thank you for all your thoughts and prayers. I’m going for a long lie down now, good night.

Congratulations to Phil and Beth – this was great news to wake up to! I know you’ll both make brilliant parents.

Enjoy the silence, because it won’t last. There’s a reason for this, of course. There’s always a reason.

I’m hammering the keys of my bruised and woe-begotten laptop at 3.15 am on Christmas morn. There’s a reason for that, too, but it’s not what you might think.

I’ve just finished building my brother Rob’s Christmas present. I hope he likes it. My brother Rob – AKA, Brother Younger – is somewhat more practical and pragmatic than me. He’s a carpenter by trade, and a very good one at that. He enriches people’s lives through the medium of wood and when he builds something he builds something useful like a kitchen or a staircase or a patio. Being somewhat less practical and pragmatic than him, I built him a website. It involved no heavy lifting and I managed to complete it without getting a splinter. Ree-zult.

It’s a fairly modest affair, but I’m happy with the results. You can find it at www.roblennon.com.

Initially, I tried to build the site using Notepad, Paintshop Pro and my somewhat rusty grasp of HTML. I say “rusty”, but I doubt my web design skills were ever metallurgically pure. In any case, I tried to build a site the old-fashioned way and the results were squonky to say the least. If I left it as it was it would have looked so late-1997 that the Government would probably have slapped a conservation order on it and declared it a Website of Special Scientific Interest.

In the end I cheated and used a rather nifty hosting and website design package called Mr Site’s Takeaway Website, and it did exactly what it said on the tin. Granted, I fiddled around with the HTML a bit, but that’s just the way I am.

As a brief aside, Brother Younger – when he’s not being more practical and pragmatic than me – is also prone to low humour and theological high jinks. It must be a family trait. Like I said, he’s a carpenter, and he once told me that: “In this line of work, the next step on the career ladder is Messiah.”

If you live in or around Birmingham, if you’re partial to low humour and theological high jinks and if you have a home or a business that contains wood, you really should go here and give him a call.

Merry Christmas, by the way.

Rol tells it like it is:

And finally, why is it that when you get one of the aforementioned crap-headlight types behind you, and slowing down to let them pass has no effect, they’re always going to the exact same place as you? You keep thinking, they’re bound to turn off here, they’re bound to turn off there, but no, they’re with you all the way. All the way to your office parking space, all the way home to your very driveway / garage / onstreet parking area. I’m surprised they don’t follow you inside and ask for a cup of tea. Or a cloth to polish the dirt off their headlights… just in case they’re not dazzling enough.

Some more YouTubery, this time courtesy of my old pal Graeme.

I think it speaks for itself.

I don’t watch much TV nowadays; I’m definitely more of a Movie/DVD Box Set kinda guy. Partly it’s because I spent a ridiculous amount of my childhood mainlining on cheesy action-adventure American imports. This may have left me with an encyclopedic knowledge of The Six Million Dollar Man, Airwolf and Manimal, but it’s done little to improve my overall quality of life. Nowadays I prefer to do other things and make up for all that time spent suckling on the glass teat.

The other main reason why I avoid TV is because I can’t stand watching soaps, sports, reality shows, property porn or anything with a phone-in vote and/or the word “Celebrity” in its title. The TV schedules weren’t designed for people like me.

But last night I watched the show Californication for the first time and was pleasantly surprised. In case you don’t know, this is the new raunchcom in which David Duchovny plays Hank Moody, a highly-sexed and highly-troubled novelist who moves to Los Angeles. Despite not being an fan of the X-Files, I’ve always quite liked Old Blank Face and loved his oddball roles and cameos in Twin Peaks, Zoolander and especially The Larry Sanders Show. I thought I’d give it a try.

Anyhow, I was working on my laptop while the show was on in the background when something made me sit up and pay attention. Duchovny’s character was shopping in a convenience store and charming the hotpants off a scantily-clad surfer girl when he told her: “Life’ll kill ya.”

Hmm – thought I – that’s the title of a bloody marvelous Warren Zevon song and album. I’m a big fan of Warren Zevon – in fact, I’m rather evangelical about his work – so maybe the writers of the show are too. Or maybe they’re not. Maybe I’m just projecting my Zevon obsession onto their work. Who knows? And – more importantly – since when did blurting-out a Zevon song title work as an efficient chat-up strategy? I’ve got loads of his albums and can be a cocky sunovabitch at times, but I wouldn’t dream of approaching a member of the opposite sex and saying to her “Werewolves of London“, “Mr Bad Example” or “Excitable Boy“. It’s weird, freaky and inappropriate behaviour, even in LA. Granted, “Carmelita” might just work, but only if you were absolutely certain that her name was Carmelita.

This internal monologue was promptly settled when, later in the episode, Hank and his ex-girlfriend Karen [Natascha McElhone] went to see a performance by their daughter and her band. What song do they play? A cover of Zevon’s haunting “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” [the final track on his Life'll Kill Ya album]. There was a different cover of the same song later in the episode, just in case you missed it the first time around.

Apparently, the series is full of Zevon references. I found this on Wikipedia:

The show frequently references the work of musician Warren Zevon. When doing a crossword puzzle, Hank was stuck on a question for which the clue was “5 letter word for excitable boy”; the answer is Zevon. Excitable Boy is the name of one of Zevon’s most popular albums. In the episode “Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow Fonder”, Hank tells the surfer girl he meets at the store “Life’ll kill ya,” — the name of a Zevon song and album. In the same episode, Becca’s band plays “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” and later in the episode a cover of the song is played as well. And in “California Son”, the episode opens with “Mohammed’s Radio”. In “The Devil’s Threesome”, Hank tells Charlie “Your shit’s fucked up.” Charlie answers rhetorically “My shit’s fucked up?” The latter is the name of a Zevon song. In the episode “The Last Waltz”, a cover of Zevon’s song “Reconsider Me” by Steve Earle and Reckless Kelly can be heard.

The show features loads of sharp, snappy dialogue. I particularly liked the line where Duchovny’s character is described as an “Analogue guy in a digital world.” I might be paraphrasing, but that won’t stop me from using it at the earliest opportunity.

So there you have it. If you like Warren Zevon, you’ll probably like Californication. If you like sharp dialogue, you’ll probably dig it as well.

Oh, and I forgot to mention: if you like raunchy sex, there’s plenty of that, too…

When he isn’t encouraging, urging and sometimes forcibly coercing the city’s artistic community to use the Internet to their best advantage, my friend Pete Ashton also finds the time to be a rather talented photographer. That’s award-nominated polymathematical Renaissance Brummies for you. I sometimes suspect that his interest in photography is not unrelated to history as a comics aficionado. After all, he’s not the first illustrious Peter to have moonlighted as a shutterbug.

Anyhow, I was browsing through his Flickr pages and found the following pics he took at gigs I recently attended. They’re rather good.

Here’s Jim White from last month’s gig at The Barfly that I wrote about here:

And here’s Jim’s able support, the immensely-talented Jenny Owen Youngs, who Pete admittedly “kinda fell in love with for an evening”. Glad to know it wasn’t just me, then.

And – last but not least, here’s the mighty Jeffrey Lewis at the Hare & Hounds in Kings Heath who I wrote about here. He was crouching down in order to operate an OHP that was projecting one of his hand-made budget videos onto a screen whilst he narrated a song. I think it was the bloody hilarious ‘Champion Jim‘, but I’m not quite sure.

Pete also took some pics at Thursday’s Curate’s Egg event featuring Gallon Drunk, but they’ll have to wait as I haven’t written about it yet. But he didn’t take any pictures of Tuesday’s The National gig at the Irish Centre as he wasn’t there.

But I was…