- Blog
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Bus drivers, bus conductors and the spirit of Tobruk in Sloane Square
Loyalty and transgression on the number 10s. — I’ve been reluctant to share this story over the years because I’ve always suspected it’s a bit too perfect and that it might be an urban myth or bus crew folklore or something – a story passed around by bus conductors – but, thinking about it, my…
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A visionary work of art, a hateful apologia for slavery and Jim Crow… and a really bad film
The Birth of a Nation was the top-grossing film of 1915… — THE BIRTH OF A NATION, D.W. GRIFFITHS, DAVID W. GRIFFITH CORP., 1915 So I did it, I watched the whole thing. I felt obliged to, as part of my project to watch every top-grossing film since 1913 – 110 years of Summer blockbusters.…
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An organised crime drama with a dramatic police raid and an ultra-modern remote surveillance storyline
It’s called Traffic in Souls and it’s an extraordinarily modern movie – a prototype for a whole new category — TRAFFIC IN SOULS: WHILE NEW YORK SLEEPS, GEORGE LOANE TUCKER, UNIVERSAL, 1913 — Here’s my latest Quixotic project. I’m going to watch the top-grossing film from every year since 1913, which is when they started…
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Music that satisfies completely
From music we get all sorts of things. And one of them is completion. — I love jazz but even after decades of exposure to every different genre I’m still basically an ignoramus. I can’t speak with any authority about the music or the culture. I share Spotify links with my jazz pal Paul, I…
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Trump’s epic disdain
Trump the innovator is back on the campaign trail, diagnosing and mocking his audiences. And they love it. — I can’t stop watching this video. It’s a random tiny clip from a much (much) longer one. One of Trump’s fund-raising dinners. People at tables in a school gym or a hotel ballroom in Greensboro, North…
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I am as a poet, apparently
UPDATE: it’s finished. Here’s the PDF (it should be accessible to screen-readers and so on – let me know if you see any problems with the format). Or is it a chapbook? Anyway, it’s a tabloid-sized, 12-page, newsprint (thank you Newspaper Club) sequence of poems (19 in all). The poems are in the not-entirely-forgotten rhyme…
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An endless round of perfectly-formed gotchas
Some people can’t tell the difference between advertising billboards and politics. — What is it that’s so contemptible about these stupid stunts? This shallow, patronising bollocks? For liberals, this kind of smart ‘gotcha’ has now almost entirely replaced politics. For these billboard warriors, if you hone your clever message, tighten up the creative, select the…
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The bankruptcy of the growth mindset
Of course he’s on LinkedIn — I shouldn’t be surprised that the British Prime Minister – any contemporary national leader, really – is on LinkedIn. It’s supposed to say “I live in the real world, I know about the grind, about the exigencies of business and office life and the ugly necessity of self-promotion.” Maybe…