Freelance writer specializing in comedy and the geekier end of the pop culture spectrum.
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Beowulf
Tonight I went to the cinema to see Beowulf. It was the 3D version, so I'm currently suffering from a mild bout of sensory overload. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I thrive on sensory overload. Beowulf - in case you don't already know - is veteran genre director Robert Zemeckis' CG blockbuster adaptation of the classic Old English poem. Featuring a screenplay by the mighty Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary and a heavyweight cast of motion-captured semi-synthespians - including Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie - it's already cleaned up at the US box office and looks [...]
Warren Zevon and Californication
The multitude of links between the raunchy David Duchovny-starring TV show Californication and the late, great American singer-songwriter Warren Zevon
Gigpix
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 [...]
Dancing Fool
Some YouTubery, courtesy of the Brummie of the Year nominee who sent me the link. It's from the Rootsville Festival that was held at Birmingham's Custard Factory during the last weekend of June and features the stunning set by The Dhol Blasters and The Destroyers. The former are masters of rapid-fire traditional drum-action, the latter are Conservatoire-trained swaggering maestros of Eastern European folk. So now you know.They played on the event's 'Lakeside Stage', otherwise known as the pool outside the Medicine Bar. The pool had been drained and a marquee put up over it, which struck me as a nice, [...]
