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Posts Tagged ‘Richard Herring’

The year we make contact

Highlights of the year thus far:

Breaking Bad - discovered through work colleagues, the ongoing saga of a middle-aged chemistry teacher who discovers he has terminal cancer, and with nothing to lose sets up a crystal meth lab, proves to be consistently entertaining and amusing well into its second season, although I’m slightly concerned that the friends who recommended it were pretty insistent it was the ‘wrongest’ thing on television, bigging it up in my head as Chris Morris’s Oz or somesuch, and yet sitting there watching it, all I can think is how utterly reasonable it all seems.
Not freezing to death during one of January’s many cold snaps. Fucking hell, it’s been cold in the flat though. I hand in my notice next week, which means I should be out of this shithole by mid-April, thank fuck.
Catching up on As It Occurs To Me, which I completely failed to listen to in the run up to Christmas. Richard Herring as brilliantly puerile as ever. Why won’t people let him be on the telly? I also caught his Hitler Moustache show at the Leicester square theatre last week. I saw a pre-Edinburgh preview last year, which was pretty funny, but this was a much more refined, focused act, with lots of new material. He’s a very funny man.
In a similarly late to the party vein, I also picked up the first issue of Dodgem Logic. The Moore stuff is predictably essential, Graham Lineham and Josie Long’s contributions are brief but brilliant, with everything else coming across as a bit meh… And yet, whilst there’s a vein of knee-jerk hippy bollocks there, something appeals about the just-throw-everything-at-the-page editorial direction. It’s the sort of thing I feel should be being done better somewhere on the internet, and yet for some reason isn’t. Interesting to see how it develops.
Saw Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. Not great, but nowhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be.
My love of Grant Morrison’s ongoing Bat-saga is unconditional and unfailing, which I’m sure will come as a surprise to no one, so isn’t something I’ll go into here. His new creator-owned series Joe The Barbarian on the other hand, was an unknown quantity as I managed to completely miss all the hype and the interviews. I needn’t have worried of course - the first issue is a slowly paced scene-setter, but sets up the series concept beautifully, with incredibly lush artwork by the previously unknown to me Sean Murphy.
Booking myself a trip to SXSW in Austin next month. Not that physically booking it was really much of a highlight, but something to look forward to. I used to joke about how I was boycotting America whilst George W. Bush was in power, but I’ve recently realised I did, in fact, boycott America whilst George W. Bush was in power.

I like the way I teased doing essay-length posts in my end of year round up, but have in fact made even less effort, resorting to bullet points rather than full posts. Something else I started doing this year was Project 365 - a photo a day for a year. Well, the loss of my camera lead, coupled with a few drunken nights where I forgot I was supposed to be taking a picture at some point meant I didn’t even make it through January (seems wholly appropriate the dream was born and died in a pub, mind. I only heard about it the day before NYE, chatting to a colleague in a pub, moments before he made off into the night with a stolen clay pot). Looks like my online fail is destined to continue. Thank you for your continued patience.

Posted on February 14th, 2010
by
nick.brownlow
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Apparently, what becomes of the broken-hearted is they move to North London

So as you may have noticed (both of you) I couldn’t even keep up on the monthly update thing. In my defence, my comfortable, sedentary South London existence came to an abrupt end in May, necessitating an unwanted move and downsizing which sees me in Kilburn, which everybody seems to think is a step-up, until I tell them it’s a studio, there are rats, and the landlord is essentially uncontactable.

But enough about that.

I’m quite warming to Kilburn, actually. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel the same level as affection as I did for my former digs, which for much of the time I was there felt like the first proper home I’d had since leaving the parents, but I appreciate its liveliness at the moment, and it’s great having so many things to do on my doorstep. Caught Richard Herring at the Good Ship last Monday, which was great, although I think I preferred his last act. Or maybe that’s just because I had a girlfriend then. Lots of good, cheap places to eat as well - many thanks to David Southwell for blogging about the Vijay in his Black Box Recorder post, I live round the corner and checked it out last Saturday. I sense they will be enjoying my custom for some time to come.

Celebrated my newly-found singledom by getting the DVD box-set of The Shield’s last season - ha! take that you harpy - and oh my. I knew things were going to go really badly for Shane just as soon as they started lingering on the family a little too much, but just watching his hopes wink out one by one was physically hard to watch. And Vic - they finally got you to hate him, and gave him an ending he deserved. Ultimately it was probably a season or two too long, but it was fun whilst it lasted and the ending is as powerful a piece of television as I’ve seen in quite a while.

Probably not going to continue the book log thing, although I’ll continue to update the Now reading plugin I’m using in case anyone cares. Didn’t really read a lot during my forced relocation, but Giles bought me The Unblemished by Conrad Williams, and I burnt through that in a week during which I practically turned vegetarian. Great re-imagining of the trashy 80s horror novel, and better than any book that can be described as a ‘cannibal apocalypse’ has any right to be.

Posted on July 6th, 2009
by
nick.brownlow
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February Calling

Am late posting about February, which is bad, because I actually did stuff. Firstly, I went along to Gipsy Hill Comedy Night at the Black Sheep on the 13th, a local night for local people with not so-local acts. It was Richard Herring headlining that caught my eye and got me through the door, but it turned out to be a really strong line-up, with four great sets and even a compere who was pretty decent. Also: handy for an early Palace Spice. Then there was Black Box Recorder’s second night at the Luminaire in Kilburn, my second dose of Haines in two months, this time with added Moore and Nixey, and predictably great. March already all the poorer for being a Hainesian desert of a month.

I also caught the preview of Let The Right One In at the BFI, which I was looking forward to after pleasant rumblings from across the pond. It doesn’t get a general release here until April, so for once my movieblogging might actually be of use to somebody. In short, it’s very good. I’ve had the book it’s based on on order from Amazon for a while, and I understand it’s a lot more convoluted, but the film itself is elegantly spartan and understated, with moments of warmth, horror, violence and even (black) comedy. For my money, certainly the best Cold War era-set Swedish Vampire film I’ve ever seen.

Reading for Feb:

The Wine Dark Sea by Robert Aickman

Err, that’s a bit rubbish really isn’t it? I’ve now read all of Aickman’s short fiction currently in-print, however, and it’s definitely been something of a revelation. As a frequently cited influence for many of my favourite authors, I wasn’t really expecting to find much I hadn’t already encountered elsewhere, but Aickman was a true master of the form, and his voice is still very much a unique one.