Hyped up to me as one of the best horror films in history, i’m convinced it’s actually an incredible
comedy. There is so much Gremlins energy oozing out of this whole film; every scene, you can
just imagine George Romero sitting back and going “…can i, like, put that in a movie?” and then
putting that in a movie. A zombie gets pied in the face. 8/10.
Mad Max: Fury Road is not the greatest film ever made, but it feels like the
greatest film ever made while you’re watching it. I’ve never seen a film edited like this: a
two-hour-long sugar rush where every shot is overcranked till it breaks and nothing ever stops
moving. 9/10, with one point added solely because of the guy in the post-apocalyptic convoy whose
job it is to play the guitar.
Stepdad’s pick, in honour of Donald Sutherland’s death. Great stuff, with a fascinating eerie
soundscape, creepily good practical effects, and, hang on, is that Jeff Goldblum? 7/10.
Well, that sure was a Russell T. Davies Doctor Who finale, wasn’t it? Part one’s always
great, and then, as always, he can’t write an ending for the life of him.
Now the season’s over, it’s clear that it needed more room to breathe. Eight episodes of forty
minutes just isn’t enough for a show to do both monster-of-the-week and a longer arc; with two
episodes taken up by the finale, two Doctor-lite episodes, and one where she’s unconscious for half
of it, we’ve barely gotten to know the relationship between Ruby and the Doctor, which is a shame,
because what we do get is brilliant! They play off each other so well, and i wish we could
have seen more of them together.
“It’s like Rear Window, but on a lorry.” This scrappy Australian flick delivers just what it
says on the tin, with an early turn by Jamie Lee Curtis as a hitchhiker who gets picked up in the
second half. 6/10.
I’m out of touch with music these days, but listening to Charli XCX’s
pulse-pounding new hyperpop record, i can’t help but think this is what pop music must sound like in
the next universe over. I was sleep-deprived after staying up for election night and that definitely
helped the vibe… 8/10.
Ushaw Hall’s website plays coy about itself. You can learn that
guide dogs are welcome, they’ll be exhibiting interactive “Humanimal” sculptures next month, and
that they're very proud of the pun “Ushaw in”, but curiously little about what the place actually is
(or was). I went anyway.
To spoil the fun, it’s an old Roman Catholic seminary that was turned into a museum when people
stopped being religious enough to care. The entrance makes that well clear; walking up from the car
park, the curious visitor is flanked by an ostentatious neo-Gothic chapel on their left and
modernist student housing on their right. (The latter remains unmuseumified, too boring to make much
out of.)
Right from reception there’s an interesting historical tidbit with a bust of Abraham Lincoln
himself, who a helpful volunteer told me once attended Ushaw before he decided a more secular
political career was right for him. (It was that or boxing, i suppose.) Upstairs is the Presidents’
Hall, whither the stairway looked off-limits enough not to chance it — so never mind that, and let’s
instead turn right.1
This takes us down a series of winding hallways with wibbly tiled floor — as of now, an exhibition
has lined them with wedding dresses old and new, including replicas of those worn by the royal
family, creepy mannequin heads and all.2
More importantly and more permanently, these are the chapels of Ushaw Hall.
They are beautiful, and have seen better days. The paint peels from a dimly-lit mural in a nook i
presume is for choirists. In others, light dances in vibrant oranges and blues through expository
stained glass. The brightest of them all, seen here to the right, invites its visitors to pray for
Ukraine in a solemn reminder of the times.
These smaller shrines have an intimacy to them that reflects the house’s hush-hush history. First
exiled from England, the Catholics settled in the small town of Douai, in the north of France — only
to be forced out again by the secular fervour of the French Revolution. Even then, they struggled to
find welcome in a staunchly Protestant Georgian England, until a sympathetic aristocrat sold them
land in Durham’s secluded hills. The hall itself was built with the façade of an unseeming terrace,
only showing its religious nature to those within.
Onwards, then, into the star of the show — the main chapel. Pews upon pews span the long gap between
the entrance and the colossal tabernacle, behind which the walls are adorned with what first looks
like simple ornament but reveals itself to be tightly-packed black-lettered Latin. You can tell it’s
Catholic by the eagle in the middle, the Vatican having never quite given up its attachment to its
Roman roots.
…Upstairs is the Presidents’ Hall, whither the stairway looked off-limits enough not to chance it —
so never mind that, and let’s instead turn left. Winding at right angles around the central court we
first arrive at the library, or what little you can access of it. Management and the university are
promising big things… eventually… once they restore everything… and catalogue it… and… oh, sod this,
let’s go to the café.
[One hot chocolate later…]
This is a wholly unrelated bookstore found elsewhere on church grounds. Behind the camera is a
fireplace. Yes, i am kicking myself for not photographing that instead.
As we were. Further along we find find the mess hall, where aspiring clergy once ate in silence,
with only the wet sopping of a hundred English breakfasts reverberating back and forth across the
walls. These days it’s used for noisier conferences and school trips, fitted with identikit metal
and plastic tables and seats which don’t do much to complement the nineteenth-century décor.
Some time later, past the temporary exhibition of inkjet printouts of old maps3, our trip comes full circle. As i walk home through the well-kempt garden and around the reedy old
pond, i might not have been convinced by the seminary’s faith, but i have been convinced of their
taste in interior decoration.
A short website status update, since my ongoing writer’s block on a relatively simple
interesting-place-visit post wasn’t enough for the universe: Ithaca12, the beat-up old laptop on which this fine website is hosted, is poorly, and has a
noticeable bulge coming up around the battery.
Everything is backed up and i’m looking into a new, dedicated server machine, but if the site goes
down all of a sudden, you’ll know why.
Āryabaṭha numeration
turns numbers into compact pronounceable syllables. Kind of genius — we already took our digits
from the Indians; why didn’t we lift this as well?
Why ornament went away.
We are so back: “So it is now possible to buy perfectly proportioned classical ornament, nearly
indistinguishable from stone, that has – if the molds and the factory infrastructure are treated
as a given – taken only minutes of labor to produce.”
Tombstone (1993). I have this pathological aversion to westerns, so i wasn’t
expecting much — but once i turned off the part of me that was waiting for Richard Pryor to
show up i realised that this the “’em” in “they just don’t make ’em like they used ta”: just
a solid, well-made flick, regardless of my thoughts on the genre! I cried manly man tears at
the end. 7/10.
The Thirteenth Floor, everyone’s fourth favourite film about a simulated world from 1999. I found it
surprisingly interesting whenever it didn’t remind me too much of The Matrix, and a
bit pathetic whenever it did. (Don’t try to do action, simulated world movie from 1999.
You’ll never measure up.) 6/10.
As a bonus, since nobody cares about this movie, you can just
watch it on Youtube if you
want.
Little Shop of Horors (1986). My pick for family movie night. Utterly charming
from leaf to toe — the best example since Gremlins 2 of a film where you can see the
craft that went into making every frame. Incredible effects, wonderful music, magnetic
comedic performances from the whole cast… 10/10!
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the impromptu double feature to the
above. My brain has been completely frazzled by watching this. I went from loving it to
hating it to complete bafflement to examining it like a scientist would a new species of
frog. This film may very well have invented homosexuality. Defies numerical rating/10.
Late Night with the Devil (2023). Always nice to see David Dastmalchian, even
if it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before — 6/10.
The Fall Guy (2024). Ryan Gosling’s a brilliant comedic actor, but him and
some great setpieces struggle to save this film from a shoddy script and baffling editing
choices. The jokes aren’t funny, the dialogue scenes linger for far too long, half the stuff
from the trailer is gone from the movie… the whole thing desperately needs a trimming down
to a tight ninety minutes. 4/10.
Eurovision 2024. Bullet-pointed, as per tradition:
I went in totally blind this year, having missed the semi-finals while building a new
PC. Oops!
Sweden appear to have trapped the Backstreet Boys in the Matrix.
There is no country named the Netherlands and never has been. Doesn’t exist. Not real.
We begin bombing in five minutes.
Big fan of Spain’s bizarre campy cougar energy, even if the audience and juries weren’t!
Estonia are frankly embarrassing.
Completely maxed out my scorecard for Ireland, who have sent in Xanthe-bait of the
highest order.
Yes… hahaha… yes!!!
Greece’s song is the most annoying thing since Crazy Frog and it baffles me how highly
it scored.
I think the UK is just cursed at this point. We send a legitimate star with the world’s
gayest performance (admittedly more in the “getting sucked off in a dingy bathroom” way
than the “campy drag queen” way) and not a single point from the audience?
God bless Finland. I usually hate it when acts try deliberately to be funny but i died
laughing at a pantsless man in a censored Windows 95 T-shirt
emerging from an egg while pyrotechnics go off.
Switzerland have taken Sam Ryder’s mantle as this year’s designated golden retriever… a
great performance from someone who’s clearly happy beyond words to be there. A deserving
winner if there ever was one.
Croatia’s catchy pirate dance is great but i cannot forgive that abominable stage name.
I don’t care how many records you sell; there is no excuse to call yourself Baby
Lasagna. Go back to the drawing board. Now.
T2 Trainspotting (2017). Mama’s pick for family movie night. I wasn’t so hot
on the idea going in… and then it was, to my surprise, pretty great! It uses the idea of the
legacy sequel to its advantage — it’s a film about nostalgia, the good and bad of
it all. It really does feel like you’re catching up with these characters twenty years
later, all wondering where their lives have gone. Some beautiful shots, too — a film from
2017 that bothered hiring a gaffer?? What a concept! 8/10.
127 Hours (2010), continuing the Danny Boyle theme. Probably the best film a
film about a guy whose hand is stuck next to a rock could ever be, it convinced me of the
occasional merit of a good biopic over a documentary — this would not and could not work if
you only had access to the original crummy camera footage and talking-head interviews. Also
perhaps the only movie in history to contain an inflatable Scooby-Doo jumpscare. I was going
to give it an 8, but then they played Sigur Rós in the triumphant ending scene, so sod it,
it’s a 9/10.
Chris Chibnall is dead and Doctor Who is alive! I thought Ncuti Gatwa was
playing the role too young at first, but the season proper has me totally convinced. His
Doctor, the first Doctor to Fuck™, has this infectious energy and zest for life that’s
totally new to the character, and a great rapoport with his companion — even when the new
series is bad, it’s unhinged in a fun way, rather than the forgettable doldrums of the
Chibnall era.
Got a new computer! I can run Minecraft with shaders without any lag now. We are
so back.
Hello. I’ve been to Consett. I thought you might like to hear about it. (Gosh, i’ve missed writing
that.)
It’s been
a miserable year
so far weather-wise, so wind-swept, cold-nipped, and rain-soaked that it took until April for me to
look outside and go, ah, not a bad day, let’s go for a jaunt.
The plan was simple: get a bus into Consett and head straight for the nearest hill. A short and
sweet saunter through woods and farmland; short compared to some of my previous odysseys from
Newcastle to the Wansbeck, sweet compared to the scenery in the more populous parts of the
palatinate. (It was not to be.)
I’m at the bubble tea / I’m at the tanning salon / I’m at the combination bubble tea and tanning
salon
We start in the centre of town, a humble lower-middle-class affair whose high street would strike
southerners as horrifyingly dilapidated and northerners as above average — nice enough, at least,
for the area’s local MP to choose it as his base of operations. Around
the corner from the cinema1, the pedestrianised and sensibly named Middle Street plays host to (in decreasing order of
classiness) a provider of musical instruments, an independent sweet shop–gift shop–pet shop, a
building society, a Greggs, a Superdrug, an animal rescue shelter, a frozen food emporium, a Turkish
barber, Ladbrokes, a vape shop, another vape shop which also sells computer parts and
repairs your phone (my lawyers say i can’t call it a mob front), and Barry’s Bargain Superstore.
This dumps us onto a crossing onto Parliament Street, where the Galileanically
inclined can attend the charming parish church (with “messy church” every month for the tots). I
follow it down its procession of historic terraces, in a rather literal sense: Briton Terrace, Saxon
Terrace, Norman Terrace, and then to spite me they finish it off with the pattern-breaking Tudor
Terrace. I suppose it could have been a later addition, going with Stuart Court across the road, as
well as Georgia and Edwardia Courts, two small cul-de-sacs i only noticed on Google Earth after the
fact… but that sequence gets thrown off yet again by the road whence those two branch off, Romany
Drive, which unless they meant to write “Roman” but hired a dyslexic cartographer has sod all to do
with the other streets.
A path bearing at its mouth a welcoming sign (all caps,
“no part of this land is dedicated to the public, any use of this land is entirely at the
user’s own risk, et cetera, et cetera”) marks a liberating end to our onomastic confusion, funneling us down a sloping green crescent of
parkland into a reclaimed steelworks. (It’s always a reclaimed steelworks.)
Finally, we reach the end of the funnel, where the light pours from the sky, the buildings abruptly
stop, and any wayward ramblers are left with only a gorgeous view of Durham’s rolling hills
stretching out before them. This exact moment, this exact view — this is why i get out. To sit on
the edge of a hill, the dull traces of modernity firmly behind you, and see the country not devoid
of man’s presence, but shaped by it, over hundreds and thousands of years, from hunting-grounds to
cleared forest to farmland to steelworks to grass for grass’s sake, a place where, like the terraces
of Parliament Street, you can hear England’s history sing in your veins.
Anyway then there’s a really steep path downhill where i almost slipped and fell like Super Mario
going down a slide.
Traipsing down steps i’m not 100% sure were public and over a road made of more pothole than asphalt
i wind up following a burn to the River Derwent. This is where our route’s industrial past makes
itself seen. Every few yards a worn sign pops up warning of a “drainageditch”, or a graffiti-blanketed pipe crosses the rain-cleaved dene;
at the very end, a picnic table by a former pump house grants me some respite.
I take stock of myself. My phone’s battery, always surprising me with innovative ways to run out, is
in danger of crossing the ten-percent mark. It’s the first nice day of the year, but that also means
i’m out of shape and out of practice: i won’t be able to make it all the way.
Equally, i’d be a fool to clamber back up all that. I keep walking. The rushing burn has become a
tranquil river, its waters still enough to see your reflection. I think to myself that if you’re
going to name a pencil company after a river, this one’s not a bad choice.2
Civilisation creeps back in with the tell-tale sounds of power tools. This is
Allensford Holiday Park, a modest gathering of caravans proudly advertising itself as “near the outstanding Northumberland
National Park”. (It isn’t.) When i get there it’s thronged by teen schoolboys freshly out,
chattering about video games and lining up for ice cream. (Something, something, nature is healing.)
Checking Google Maps with what power i have left reveals my worst fear: there’s nowhere to go but
up.
The distance is short, but the slope is grueling. I convince my legs to heave themselves up along
the side of pavementless roads, ducking into fallow fields and passing places wherever i
can find them. It gets worse the further i get. By the first field, i’m a little out of it. By the
Catholic boarding school, i’m utterly exhausted. When i climb what i think is the final hill, only
for perspective to cruelly show yet more around the corner, i wonder if this is what hell is like.
But i make it — sweating and breathless, hydrating myself sip by sip, i make it to the bus stop, and
wait. The driver, when he comes, must think i’m a zombie, but i’m glad to be on my way home. Note to
self: don’t take that big a break again.
Aniara (2018). I actually watched this one back in February, but forgot to
mention it at the time — a Swedish hard(ish) sci-fi tragedy, where a colony ship on its way
to Mars gets knocked off course with no fuel left to turn
back. This is unrelentingly bleak, sometimes to the point where my brain would shut off and
stopped caring, but there’s a lot to like.
I love the idea of the Mima as a character/narrative device/whatever: a living
AI that uses people’s memories to bring them back visions of
Earth as it was, then gets depressed because too many people
are using it and flooding it with memories of the apocalypse. Giving the holodeck a soul?
Genius.
Unfortunately it doesn’t so much end as it just fizzles out — i guess you could make a case
that that’s on purpose, since that’s how these situations go in the real world, but i found
the whole dénouement deeply unsatisfying excepting the veeeery final shots (if you know, you
know). 6/10.
Anatomy of a Fall (2023). Caught this one at the
Tyneside, where it happened to be the next film
on at the time i got in. This spoke to me not just because of the powerhouse performances
from Sandra Hüller, a dog named Messi (how did they get him to do that?), and the
fifteen-year-old(!!!) Milo Machado-Graner, who i wish nothing but the best in his future,
but because it matches up with events in my life to a frankly concerning autobiographical
extent. This would never, ever be in my wheelhouse were it not for random chance, but i
teared up thrice over. 10/10, and i’m annoyed i couldn’t make it my best of last year.
Ten seconds after watching… Wait, people online think she killed the husband? Are
they fucking stupid? What? It’s obviously an accident. Did we watch the same film? Did the
cut they saw not have all those carefully-inserted moments where people almost fall off of
ledges or get hit by cars to hammer home that accidents can, in fact, just happen? What?? I
— am i just projecting my own experiences here and not wanting to believe that my mum would
kill someone? And then if they don’t think she killed the husband, they’re like,
oh, well the husband deserved it, he was so awful in that argument, and like, no!!! The mum
in the film near enough turns to the camera and says “the worst moments in someone’s life
are unfairly cherry-picked as evidence for a trail and do not represent them as a whole”;
again, did we watch the same bloody film? Are people stupid? Am i stupid? Is Justine Triet
stupid? Am i dying?
Reservoir Dogs (1992). Mama’s pick for family movie night. Every time i watch
a Tarantino film i really get the sense that he’s jacking off to how clever he is writing
the script and this is that tendency at its worst. I get why it caught on, i really do, but
this is absolutely insufferable from start to finish any time someone who’s not a cop is on
screen. I do not care about your thoughts on Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”, Quentin!
3¾/10.
Monkey Man (2024). I have been hyped as shit for this ever since the first
trailer came out. You can tell this is Sexiest Man Alive Dev Patel’s first time in the
director’s chair (looooots of shaky-cam close-ups), but it’s damn stylish, and he shows a
lot of promise. I can also see why Netflix did not want to touch this with a barge pole
given that the plot is essentially “Dev Patel kills the BJP”.
(It has some, ah, terroristic overtones that would be a little concerning if it
were even 10% less shlocky.)
That aside, i really enjoyed the film, and thought it got better as it went along — early
on, i wasn’t super clear on the character motivations at play, but then the most me-bait
thing since The Northman happens: Mr Patel’s character has a near-death-experience
flashback and wakes up having been rescued by a hijra priest at a secret temple to
Ardhanarishvara, a half-male, half-female incarnation of Shiva. Into! my!
fucking! veins! 6½/10.
De dolende god (2018),
as seen previously on The Garden. This is pretty much designed to appeal to me specifically, and yeah, it’s really good.
It’s sweet, heartfelt, absolutely gorgeous, and of course, extremely European. It’s the odd
one out in this list, being a comic book rather than a film — a medium i don’t have much
experience with, so it’s hard to give it a numerical rating in the absence of comparisons…
but let’s say 8/10.
I actually think in their heart of hearts all biologists want to be mad scientists. The problem is
that they’re really bad at it. You try attaching a chimp’s head to a man — that’s, what, half a
casualty? That’s nothing! Even if you put the tinfoil hat on and say, ah, but lab leaks and viruses
and whatnot — if we’re going to rank the sciences on their ability to do a pandemic, covid isn’t a
particularly good showing when all most people under 90 remember of it is being really bored,
sticking uncomfortable Q-tips up their nose, and baking sourdough bread.
They’re in dead last because of all the sciences in this list, biology has the largest
negative kill count, having saved billions of lives and thus making themselves known as
utterly incompetent at being evil.
Like biologists, every astronomer dreams of waking up to an imminent asteroid impact. (This isn’t a
particularly secret ambition, either.) They’ve read and written all the sci-fi lit there is, and
theoretically have a pretty good grasp on how to destroy the world.
Unfortunately when a mad astronomer says the world will end it carries the same tenor
and believability of that snotty-nosed kid on the playground saying his uncle works for Nintendo. A
gamma-ray burst will end all life on Earth? When’s that, sweetie? Oh?
Two trillion years from now? That’s nice, dear. Ooooh, an asteroid that has a 0.001% chance of
passing by the moon? Terrifying.
If they really wanted to, the computer scientists definitely could kill everyone and break
all electronics forever. Unfortunately they’d be out of a job if they did that, so i
don’t think we have much to worry about.
The good news for sociologists is that they are, genuinely, completely fucking insane. The bad news
is that they don’t even know how to write a paper with replicable results, let alone take over the
world. If they ever figure out how to distinguish a fake article about toxic masculinity in dog
parks from a real article about toxic masculinity in dog parks they might move up a bit in the
ranks.
Psychologists have really fallen off since the initial publication of the
Haber–Haber Scale of Scientific Evil back in 1932. They used to rip monkeys from their
families and put them in cages, get people to administer lethal electric shocks, put people in
prison for the lulz — now, alas, they seem content to let their perfectly developed evil skillset go
to waste and futz around figuring out how to make people subscribe to emails instead. Sad!
Chemists are great at doing evil. They can make poisons, kill people with radiation, pretend
“α-(5,6-Dimethylbenzimidazolyl)cobamidcyanide” is a
totally normal thing to say — the list goes on! The main thing bringing them down is that they don’t
seem at all interested in doing evil. They know the nega-utils from working at big
pharmaceutical companies are going to the economists here, right?
Ah, physics, the “fuck around and find out” of the sciences, whose practitioners never met a death,
destroyer of worlds they didn’t like. Ever since the atom bomb they’ve been a consistent presence in
the upper tier, and it’s not hard to see why. Even when they’re not literally killing millions,
they’re sticking heads in particle accelerators, developing new and innovative ways to undo the
fundamental forces of the universe, and causing chaos among the general population by convincing
them their collider would destroy the universe. Their fourth place position says more about the
quality of those who ranked ahead of them than any faults of physics specifically.
Mathematicians are barely holding on to their humanity. They haven’t seen the sunlight in days. They
think quantum physics is just too soft and people-y. In this lies their danger: the possibility that
they might snap.
Take Grigori Perelman, a mild example. He was a prodigy, proving conjectures that had stood unproven
for hundreds of years — and then, at the apex of his career, the million-dollar prize… he just
stopped. He just left the field, became a hermit, and was never seen again. Mr Perelman’s story is
the best-case scenario.
The worst-case scenario? Well — the real reason mathematics is so high is that they have the dubious
distinction of being the only field on this list to have spawned an
actual terrorist. If it were up
to me, i’d keep the mathematicians under 24/7 CCTV surveillance.
Geologists? What? Surely they’d be at the bottom: all they do is study rocks!
That was my thinking too. But then i thought about it. And thought about it. And uncovered the dark
secret of geology. No, they can’t make earthquakes happen on demand, or turn themselves into lava.
That’s theory. But what of applied geology?
Applied geology has other names. Chief among them: mining, fracking, and drilling. The geologist
plan is a slow burn. They dig, and dig, and dig, guzzling up all the coal and oil they can muster,
spewing their flames into the atmosphere. And by the time anyone noticed… it wasn’t their problem
anymore. Oh, they say, that’s not us, that’s Nasa, that’s the biologists, that’s the economists, it
could never be us humble innocent rock nerds. But they know. They know, deep down, that when the
last forest burns itself up, when the last city falls into the sea — the geologists will look over
the rubble, and the geologists will be king.
It still confuses me a little why Minecraft doesn’t have a Swahili translation. It can’t be a
question of not having the will or number of speakers to do it — they’ve got Yoruba, Hawaiʻian,
hell, even Nahuātl. Is it something to do with the prefixes? (Fudging grammatical gender is one
thing, but 13 clearly distinct classes is another…)
Richard Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi, the half-Japanese Euro-federalist count who suggested “Ode to Joy” as the continent’s anthem
and thought all races and castes would merge in the future into “something like the Ancient
Egyptians”
