I tend to be sceptical of the rose-tinted nostalgia which encourages us to regard certain periods of the past as golden ages (reserving particular bile for the entire reactionary ‘Greatest Generation’ construction). I do genuinely fear for the future of the BBC, though. Partly the stakes are so high, so ...
Why didn’t I know more about Frank Rich until recently? I’d had this distant image of him as a gleeful, maybe slightly out-of-touch with anything other than Broadway, poison-penner of acidic theatre reviews. Not sure I could have been more ignorant. Turns out he’s a frankly brilliant Op-Ed, to the NYT as ...
Maybe I’ve been wrapped in the deadening clutches of US bureaucracy too much lately — yesterday at a branch office of the INS/CIS, fetchingly situated in the end unit of an unlovely strip-mall — but it occurred to me yesterday as I sat with the other hopeful souls that, while the essence of a country ...
Maybe it’s been done already, but someone ought to write something Kafka-esque in which a Josef Q finds himself compelled to join queue after queue in an impenetrable and byzantine bureaucracy, the end of each interminable one leading to the beginning of the next, only to find, at the moment of apparent conclusion, ...
A. has been bingeing on DVDs of 24 recently; bingeing might be the only way to capture its headlong rush. The programme has a very distinctive form. Such a long continuous narrative inevitably ends up being all middle, the same characters bouncing to and fro in a pinball plot, or perhaps circling in a holding ...
Dinner with friends some time ago, and, things having been a bit lubricated with wine, a friend of theirs aimed a question in my Limey direction, a reasonable paraphrase of which would be something like: “So. The Royal Family. What’s that all about then? Hmm? Hmm??” The edge of belligerence in his tone ...
(‘Worse than 2000‘. Sometimes it sucks to be right, when there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.) A couple of years ago I found myself working somewhere I’d previously worked about seven years before that, and in close proximity to some software that I’d written then, which was still ...
I’m not sure how I feel. Sad. A bit numb. But above all baffled by this strange, young, wonderful, fucked-up country. It’s a tedious truism that America is a country of extremes, but it’s absolutely the case. It’s the country of the Amish, but also the Castro; it’s the home of Gotham, but also ...
To USC last night, to see Michael Moore on his Slacker Uprising tour. It was a fascinating couple of hours, a curious mixture of hippyish old-school Woodstock earnestness and multi-media Daily Show satire. The two didn’t always fit together smoothly, but the effect of that was to reflect poignantly, in a way that ...
[Update: A thoughtful and thorough piece by Bruce Schneier, which covers a great deal of the same issues as below — and some more besides — though which seems to begin from the unsupported premise that technology in voting is in the end both inevitable and desirable, so long as its inherent problems are fixed. ...