9 February 2012
Part of the freshly exhumed ‘hauntography’ series. Read the original story, or read more about the series.
Anyone reading these stories in canonical order should by now have a good idea of how they tend to play out. An aged antiquary finds or hears of the existence of a peculiar ancient artefact and in the course of further investigation, prompted either by avarice or simple scholarly curiousity, unwittingly awakens some eldritch horror who torments him, often to the death, either as punishment for his greed or out of mere supernatural malice.
On first approach The Tractate Middoth seems like it’s going to follow this pattern nicely. The title obviously refers to the artefact which will cause all the trouble, and it’s nicely esoteric and sinister sounding. And on the very first line our antiquary is introduced, a Mr John Eldred, elderly and male of course and sporting a fine set of piccadilly weepers (a wonderful term whose meaning is surely apparent even if you’ve never come across it before) and indeed seeking after the titular Tractate. But he is unable to procure it for someone else has got there first, someone perhaps of sinister aspect. Has Mr Eldred already unwittingly set malevolent forces in motion? Is there a ghoul in waiting for him? more »
ledge in FT /The Brown Wedge • No Comments
7 February 2012
As long planned, here‘s the page dedicated to our late friend and colleague, gathering together his work on the internet and the many fond tributes to him. This is a work in progress: please point us to anything you think also belongs here.
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT • 2 Comments
The man who invented the Gala Pie is a hero of mine. Not just because he took one of natures nicest foodstuff (namely the pork pie) and made it even better. He made it better by the addition of the hard boiled egg. But not just any old hard boiled egg. No, not only did he manage to get an egg somehow into the middle of a pie, but he also discovered a way of, er, lengthening the egg. To those of you not familiar with the long egg, the orthographic projection of a Gala Pie below will explain.
Orthographic Pie
more »
Pete Baran • FT/Proven By Science/Pumpkin Publog •
24 Comments
I semi-remember just two lines from the NME’s (Charlie Shaar Murray’s?) review of “Armed Forces” (secret unused title “Emotional Fascism”). One was that one of the other songs resembled ELP “jamming in the bottom of an oil drum”! The other — more germane to this post, as well as being true — is that “with the boys from the Mersey, the Thames and the Tyne” is a brilliantly compressed evocation of a nation’s sense of itself (if “a nation” = England obv), the disparate togetherness of an army abroad. The other thing I recall from the time is this: watching EC&tAs play this on top of the pops, and someone sitting near me — who was iirc an organ scholar — saying in sudden surprise (as he watched Steve Nieve play the triple-stabbed piano chords of the bridge passage into the second verse), “Oh! He can actually play!” more »
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør • FT •
72 Comments
April 2000, Piccadilly
The sun comes out over London and the Summer starts: everywhere you look you see people in love, snogging on the tubes and holding hands on the escalators so you can’t get past them. Baggy shorts and halter tops all over the place, kids sitting together on Eros and choking on the traffic fumes, everybody walking slowly, tourist couples clogging doorways. You need a lover yourself to cope with it all: if they’re not there or not anywhere, then you need a walkman. You could play gloomy music all day again, I suppose, but the weather isn’t going to change on your say-so. It’s nearly May and the city’s coming to life: time to dust off those Saint Etienne albums. more »
Tom • FT •
1 Comment
#389, 2nd June 1976
I was aware of this song long before I heard it – as a young boy it was quoted at me by my Dad should I ever object to tidying my room. Since my room was rarely tidy, I became very familiar with the central notion of “No Charge”. Like my Dad, I can find immense amusement and pleasure in this style of song – talking country with a sentimental edge – but this is far from a great example.
You might think, at first, that the style stands or falls on the strength of its concepts: not so. more »
Tom • FT/Popular •
371 Comments
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The mode of the music changes, the city quakes, or at least those blocks of primer-than-thou office space quake that house the HQs of worldwide record companies. The reason, apparently, is MP3 technology, which you all know about and most of you use, and which has been the subject of acres of ruminative, pessimistic music biz newsprint over the last year.
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handout for creating dummy Business reactions to MP3s aren’t what interest me (they’ve mostly been laughably ineffectual, as far as I can see), nor the economic consequences, nor even the theory that MP3 is going to democratise the production and distribution of music and open all our minds to amazing new, unsigned talent (not likely, in my opinion – small record companies are useful and will remain so precisely because they act as quality control, not as a block to the new). What interests me, rather, is the way MP3s will accelerate current trends in the way we’re listening and relating to music.
more »
Tom • FT •
1 Comment
6 February 2012
#687, 3rd April 1993
Another song where hearing the original changes your perspective on it: as a Bananarama album track, “Young At Heart” is fizzy but unusually thoughtful, a vignette of a kid growing to understand her parents’ choices and compromises. Even at three minutes it runs out of ideas, but it’s a lovely, wise little song and – like all early Bananarama material – it brims with can-do enthusiasm. more »
Tom in Popular • 73 Comments
5 February 2012
Together at last
It’s been awhile since we last reported on wonderful things you can eat almost for free but as the
Cooking For People Who Don’t blog carnival is on food security, it seemed a good time to revive the series. And as it’s arctic and your correspondent just staggered back from Sainsburys through settling sleet, my own revival happily coincides with some of the best things in life that are cheap.
This entry is sponsored by the letter ‘s’ and could possibly come under the catch-all of ‘stew;’ what I’m actually here to talk to you about, though, are SWEDE and SAUSAGES. more »
Hazel in FT • 10 Comments
1 February 2012
OK, this one is sort of a cheat, as with the exception of a festival screening, the following film was not released in UK cinemas in 2011. But it did go straight to DVD and waved at me on LoveFilm to be interested in it. I like Japanese films and have been disappointed in the decline in distribution of them of late, and whilst this was a remake, it was a remake of one of my favourite Japanese films, which was a really interesting anime. Not only that, it was a live action remake of a film which in animated form is funny, silly and really rather touching in places. Despite having a slightly mangled title, I saw this new version and thought, that’s a story which could actually work well in live action – why not give it a go. And then, when watching all two hours of the new version of it, I discovered why not. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See • No Comments
Clare Foy is a terrific British actress who deserves great things as her career starts to stretch towards Hollywood – but you have to say she doesn’t look too happy here. Nicholas Cage is an Oscar winning actor. Ron Perlman is a great genre actor, who brings no end of war worn personality to his roles. Dominic Sena is a director who has probably never bettered his Rhythm Nation video for Janet Jackson, but has a list of action movies on his CV which aren’t the worst of the worst (OK Whiteout was pretty ropey, but I have a soft spot for Gone In Sixty Seconds). There is not enough here to say that this film would necessarily be bad. Or even tip its hand in the opening two minutes as to quite how bad it will be. more »
Pete Baran in FT • 3 Comments
30 January 2012
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I like Owen Wilson, I really do. Its probably out of deference to liking his general charm that How Do You Know was pushed down to eleven, so I could be sure that whilst Owen Wilson has already turned up on this list twice, he doesn’t make the top ten. As far as it goes I like
Albert Brooks too – Lost In America is one of my favourite films, James L. Brooks is alright- Broadcast News still holds up today (edit due to abject idiocy, see comments for details). Add to that a real appreciation of Reese Witherspoon and this film should not be in this list. The main problem is that the film posits a question, and so to answer said question Reese Witherspoon does pretty much this face all the way through the film. Its her characters “not sure” face.
With this cast, and James L.Books directing, number eleven promises an intelligent, revisit of romcom staples with an attractive, likeable cast. Does this plot description (thanks IMDB) look interesting?
“After being cut from the USA softball team and feeling a bit past her prime, Lisa finds herself evaluating her life and in the middle of a love triangle, as a corporate guy in crisis competes with her current, baseball-playing beau.” more »
Pete Baran in Do You See • 10 Comments
#686, 20th March 1993
Shaggy’s take on “Oh Carolina” acknowledges its debt to the past right away – sampling the intro from the Folkes Brothers’ 1960 original. Not just a nod of respect, it’s a canny move, as the crackling, wheezing shanty-town piano sounded like nothing else on 1993 radio, giving “Oh Carolina” instant cut-through. more »
Tom in Popular • 59 Comments
29 January 2012
So negativity is the new black, and as ever it is easier to cream the crap from the good, than list the best of the year. I saw 120 films in the cinema last year and 154 on DVD, of which it turns out about 131 were officially released last year. But I was a little more discerning, if such figures allow one to be discerning. Previously I was desperate to see the good in everything, and so would even subject myself to a Jennifer Aniston romcom to see if something decent came out of it. It rarely did. This is a disclaimer to say that it is quite possible that the films I am about to list are actually not the worst of 2011 at all, rather the worst of those I saw. So do not quake in your boots Paranormal Activity 3, The Smurfs or even the Horrid Henry movie. Russell Brand I am sure will be pleased to hear I missed Arthur, and whilst Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds have no reason to rest on their laurels – I didn’t see the piss-in-a-fountain body swap comedy the Change Up. Despite LOVING body-swap comedies.
So why thirteen? Well thematically there are a few films which crop up together, which means there will be ten entries – with some nice joint entries to try to decide exactly why the colour Green is so bad for films. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See • 2 Comments
25 January 2012
One of the pubs unfortunately missed from our ‘tween christmas and new year pub crawl, for to because it was shut, partly due I suspect to lack of passing trade over the festive period, but also to finish off their very nice renovation work, The Old Fountain, tucked away between Silicon Roundabout and Moorfields Eye Hospital, could secretly be one of the best pubs in London. OK, so it’s been in the Good Beer Guide for five years, but I think it’s massively come on even in the last 18 months. East London CAMRA have been praising it for a while, but it barely gets a mention in Hip Guides To London’s Great Pubs.
The beer is, of course, excellent, with usually 6-8 taps on, but they seem to really push the boat out in getting the specials from Darkstar, Brodies, Ascot and others, although occasionally this can lead to hop bomb overload, there’s usually a decent mix. The bar food is also pretty special, the salt beef sandwich (and I realise this may be regarded as heresy) is as good if not better than the Royal Oak’s, and certainly the equal of the erstwhile Wenlock buttie. They do pulled pork buns too, and a couple of other things, but i’ve never managed to order anything that wasn’t the salt beef…
Oh, and did i mention they usually have around FOURTEEN different kernel bottles in the fridge? it’s the biggest range I can think of that doesn’t involve visiting a railway arch…
You can see what they’ve got on the bar at @OldFountainAles
CarsmileSteve in FT /Pumpkin Publog • 5 Comments
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Anyone reading these stories in canonical order should by now have a good idea of how they tend to play out. An aged antiquary finds or hears of the existence of a peculiar ancient artefact and in the course of further investigation, prompted either by avarice or simple scholarly curiousity, unwittingly awakens some eldritch horror who torments him, often to the death, either as punishment for his greed or out of mere supernatural malice.
