Many years ago, my Chicago Connection rolled into London from wherever he’d last been. Kenya? Malaysia? Guatemala? He had with him a VHS tape (remember those? They were archaic even back then) that he said contained a film entitled “The Beaver Trilogy” that I just had to see immediately. I looked at him semi-sceptically until […]
Manilla Envelopes
There’s a saying that goes politics is show business for ugly people. There’s probably some truth in that. But I’d counter with this: show business is politics for stupid people. I probably would have been better off knowing that prior to diving head first into an attempt at an acting career in 2004. Bizarrely, it […]
Southern Heat
When I was twenty-two years of age, I was desperate to make my living playing music somehow. The only way to do that where I grew up, in the hinterlands of western Canada, was by playing country and western. So I auditioned for a group of five blonde girls who called themselves The Sisters who […]
How Did Bruce Lee Die?
TODD: How did Bruce Lee die? I pause to take stock of this strange opening salvo. ME: He had some sort of brain haemorrhage. TODD: That’s what the “suits” want you to think. One of Todd’s great obsessions was the “suits”. Strangely, or perhaps this explains a lot, his father wore a suit to work […]
The Lone Satsuma
I’ve always hated New Year’s Eve. That’s not correct, actually; I’ve only truly hated the last evening of the year since 1990. That was the first in what was to become a long string of moribund nights out that I have had to endure come December 31st. On that occasion, shortly following my eighteenth birthday, […]
In search of the Daily Telegraph reception
Man, am I ever hungover. I sit in a hotel room in Birmingham feeling like I got into an ill-advised scrap with a giant. It is, of course, entirely my fault; I was seduced by that great Tory conference temptation, free champagne. And there is a whole day and a half of conference still left […]
The state of porn in Fargo, North Dakota
I had a fair few journeys on a Greyhound when I was in my youth, across the great expanse that is the United States of America. Taking a Greyhound coach is far and away the cheapest way of getting around America, so cheap that when I look back on it I don’t really understand how the […]
The greatest album in the universe
I guess talking about “albums” is pretty old school. What do the kids call collections of songs by leading artists nowadays? I guess they probably don’t. Anyhow, back when albums were a thing, a great yet now mostly forgotten one was released in 1991. It features the vocals of one John S Hall, who was […]
X Factor round-up: Raign v Cheryl Cole, Simon Cowell v Samuel Jackson
There are many things I don’t like about the X Factor, but amongst them is what its presence has come to definitively signify: the official end of summer. In association with the appearance of the karaoke related television programme in homes across Britain, is the tiresome discussion around the “Battle for the Xmas Number 1” […]
Star Wars and postmodernism
One of the first articles I wrote for this site was a re-imagining of Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Funnily, it’s actually quite painful to have to type out those words, “Phantom Menace”, not out of anything like a “George Lucas ruined my childhood” type vibe, but just because even after having seen the […]