#147

This is the studio Ghibli film. “Mr Dough and the Egg Princess”. It’s sort of Krabat meets the Gingerbread Man or Golem plus a bit of Baba Yaga. I can’t find a video anywhere online. Apparently you can only watch it in the museum.

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#148

I wondering now whether to watch the tv show of the Owl Service. I wonder if it will seem clunky or wonderfully 60s? I’m sure it will be available online somewhere.

#149

I bet he made terrible music. guitar people can be weird, snake oil enthusiasts, on forums of mainly hobbyists and there are always some who will only accept equipment that is really vintage or boutique, yet their musical idols would be people who just used whatever they could get their hands on, they miss the point its about making music and not some game of top trumps based o guitar specs, and that budget guitars can be really good

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#150

Camera people are even worst. You must have the absolute top of the line equipment, and then take totally generic (if technically correct) photos.

Even worse with cameras, usually the most expensive camera bodies are often the same as the middle of the range ones, just with extra water and shockproofing, so people like photojournalists can rely on them in difficult assignments. No need for that for hobbyists!

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#151

What did you think of A Little Life? I fucking HATED it but it seems to divide opinion.

#152

Haven’t read it yet- I’ve seen very mixed opinions of it too.

I really really detested the Essex Serpent, and that had rave reviews.

#153

I’m enjoying the Book of Dust so far though. A great spy/thriller story set in the alternative Oxford. Fixes the issues I thought the Amber Spyglass had of trying to split attention between way too many locations and big events. It focuses very closely on just the one setting and small group of characters.

#154

I heard a lot of good stuff about that, but I struggle enough with actual Victorian fiction, so I was never very likely to bother with faux-Victorian fiction.

#155

That’s good to know! Will ask for it for Christmas. I’ve barely read a single book since baby was born, but might find some time over the holidays.

#156

It was smug fake Victorian- my friend hated it too and hit the nail on the head describing it as watching the author move a load of paper puppets around.

It was the literary equivalent of those obnoxious steampunk themed bands who do Victorian-style covers of modern songs. Kind of smug and glib and shallow and thinks it’s more interesting than it is.

#157

I found the first episode!

After 10 seconds I feel confident in saying that this is where Ghost Box got all their ideas from.

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Eerie Indiana & other spooky shows from when you were a kid
#158

I feel vindicated reading this, due to how much of my music was made on a guitar we got from Argos years ago (which I now still use, but for experimenting with weird tunings and treatments). I’m looking at it now, it has a Lord Quas, a Grouper, and a Merge Records sticker on it and therefore looks wicked cool.

The way musos talk about gear is intimidating as hell to me.

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#159

Haha yes. It looks worth a watch though.

A couple of years ago I went to a screening of the Snow Spider at the BFI. There was some Comic Book Store guy there who kept shushing and scowling at anyone who moved, which was pretty funny. I guess he is very dedicated to his terrifying 80s Welsh children’s horror.

#160

I think that’s the idea behind it. Make it all sound so intimidating and impossible to do that they won’t have any competition and can be safe in their insecurity.

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#161

I quite like the Decemberists.

#162

i’ve heard your stuff and it is really good, which I’m sure most gear elitists stuff is not. i’m quite guilty of being into guitar gear, but recognise it is for shallow reasons, I want a type of guitar because I like its vibe and history, I don’t think it is needed to play well, pedals I like ones that do new and innovative things but don’t get how people can spend thousands on klon overdrive pedal or something. But yeah, guitars I always think about how kevin shield’s original jazzmasters were eastern bootlegs, sonic youth completely butchered their guitars, robert smith used a pickup from his woolworths guitar, it was the music they made that was important not the specific models

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#163

Thanks man, not heard of this - will definitely check it out.

#164

Really pleased to see the love for Patrick Leigh Fermor here.
Weird coincidence: he started the walk of A Time of Gifts in December 1933; six months later, Laurie Lee set out on As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. PLF is the more gifted writer, although I always felt slightly annoyed that he seemed to spend half the time in posh parties with aristos, while LL (largely) earned his way across Europe.
My other favourite “travel” writer is Jonathan Raban. He’s got an amazing eye for nature and geography, and the people he meets. In Passage to Juneau, where he sails - something he’s obviously very good at, and the method of travel in many of his books - Alaska’s Inside Passage, he spies that the broken images in the native Americans’ art resembles the broken reflections that he sees constantly on the surface of the water. The first book of his that I read - Bad Land, in which he traces the Montana-Dakota railroad, the settlements alongside that bloomed overnight and just as quickly turned into ghost towns, and more stories from the settlers - blew me away. It’s as good on - say - why the descendants of the people who clung on are so volubly sceptical of government and keen to shout about self-reliance, while also showing the “experts” sometimes have a point. There’s also a lot of prairie oysters and a chilling encounter with locals who follow the same ideas as Timothy McVeigh.
I need to read more Robert Macfarlane. The Old Ways, in which he explores a wide variety of walks, has much more to say about the landscape than the politics of access (or indeed who travels by foot), but the section where he takes an accompanied walk along the Broomway in Essex - a route along sands that is “allegedly the ‘deadliest path’ in Britain” - is unearthly, and the memories of his grandfather, leading up to the funeral, might make you cry.
If anyone’s not read The Lonely City by Olivia Laing, I think they should (to tell the truth, it should be handed out at Euston, King’s Cross and Victoria in a London for beginners pack). I wonder what she’s going to do for the opening of her next book, though. They usually start with her utterly heartbroken, but as she’s getting married soon, she’ll (hopefully) have to find another way to start.
Iain Sinclair’s walks are worth following - London Orbital is the best known, but Edge of the Orison, in which he follows the route John Clare took when he escaped the Essex asylum, verges on poetic.
Lastly, I can’t recommend the scabrous, witty, brutalist genius of Jonathan Meades’s Museum Without Walls enough. Or you could just watch the TV shows… http://meadesshrine.blogspot.co.uk/p/shrine.html

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#165

I’m not sure if he’s my favourite, but I really like an author called Paul Wilson. He put out a few books in the late 1990s that were comparatively well received, then disappeared, but wrote another a couple of years ago. I known next to nothing about him, and there doesn’t seem to be much online about him (not helped by the fact that he shares his name with the author of the Little Book Of Calm and a particularly tedious SportsWriter from the Observer) except that he’s from Lancashire and his books are set in small towns there, and are about how those with power treat those without, and they’re sad and restrained and beautiful.

#167

Days Of Good Hope, and Do White Whales Sing At The End Of The World were my favourites, but he doesn’t really have an extensive back catalogue.

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