In our age of Internet memes and instant sharing, I know with certainty that I will not be the first person to make this joke, but presumably this new Coke Life implicitly makes the ordinary red label stuff... Coke Death?
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| Life. It's got a green label, so it must be good for you. |
There's humour here ("You Are Boris Johnson" will hit the mark for all those old enough to remember those "choose your own adventure" books of our youth, whilst "Beardface" and "And Now For Something Strangely Familiar" are also highly effective comic pieces), controversy (the Ballardian "Funeral of Princess Diana Considered as a Grand Prix Motor Race" might not be to everyone's taste but is deftly handled), a bit of social commentary ("Killed to Death" and "Rutting Season" are both very good on contemporary celebrity) and outright surrealism ("All The Young Bowies"). As with Let's Kill Love, Kilner also includes a longer story - "Passion" is surprisingly thought-provoking with regard to art, religion, the tabloid press... and a couple called Hugh and Liz.
Best of all though is the story in two parts that bookends the collection, "Single to Kepler-186f" and "Hello Cruel World". These stories epitomise Kilner's style, his preferred subject matter, his dark humour, his inventiveness and his originality. In these tales, our hero, disenchanted with the modern world and deprived of the romantic escape he hopes against hope for, volunteers to journey into deep space to colonise a distant, uninhabited world. But as you might expect from Kilner, things don't quite turn out as expected...
I won't go through all twenty stories here, but I will say this: Numbskulls is a whip-smart collection, with recurrent themes entwined throughout. Working through it, this reader found himself having lightbulb moments on multiple occasions as stories referred back, obliquely, to earlier tales in the book. To borrow a maths analogy, it's like Kilner has shown his working out as he's gone along, which leaves the reader feeling very satisfied on reaching the solution. The quality of the writing alone warrants a five-star review, but that feeling of satisfaction the reader gets, delivered subtly but so, so cleverly, makes this my book of the year. You can, and should, buy it here.
I watched The Apprentice for the first time this series last night. The whole format seems to be a bit laboured now and, if I'm honest, I only watch the task enough to be able to shout at the television when they're all in the boardroom. Shout and roll my eyes in despair, that is, because it does seem like the shortlisting process for applicants, of which there must be hundreds if not thousands, seems to be "Who's the most arrogant? Inept? Opinionated? Ghastly?" In other words, who is most likely to get people like me rolling their eyes and throwing my hands up in the air at the awfulness of them all. Rather than, let's say, who might actually make a good apprentice in Sugar's corporate world.
That's television these days, I guess.
There was a double whammy last night. Robert got canned for hiding during the task but then, stupidly, not hiding in the boardroom. If you're going to hide, stay hidden (like Stephen and Felipe, who seemed invisible all evening). And Scott got fired for being angry and intense - that's me reading between the lines, but it seemed to me that Lord Sugar was just glad to be shot of his aggression. And poor old Scott: I'm not going to do a separated at birth because the similarity was more to do with actions and manners than simple looks, but oh my, he reminded me of a young version of this guy, complete with chest-puff/chin-thrust move:
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| Mr Mackay in Porridge, confusingly played by Fulton Mackay |
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| Scott McCulloch, an angry man, in typically modest mode |
As the post title suggests, I wouldn't want any of them on my team, but if I had to nail my Apprentice colours to the mast, I'd go for Jemma Bird and Solomon Ahktar. Jemma seems relentlessly optimistic and tries to make the best of every situation, however bad it seems and, as yet, hasn't got involved in rows, back-biting and juvenile squabbles. But then it was only episode two. Solomon actually seems to have good ideas, and appears to be a guy you could actually work with, a criteria that is surely more important than grandiose CV padding. I wish these two well. The rest? You're all fired.
Because I know you all lose sleep over my mobile phone choices, here's an update to the chronology.
Don't get me wrong, it's brilliant, but this is progress? Why are all manufacturers chasing bigger and bigger screens? For the avoidance of doubt, this is the biggest phone I've had since the late Nineties... yet it is billed as Compact. It far outperforms its predecessor in almost every respect, but how I wish that hadn't become temperamental.
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| Miranda Richardson as Jude in Neil Jordan's "The Crying Game" |
Is it just me that wonders if Quentin had watched Miranda Richardson as Jude in The Crying Game before he styled Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction?
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| Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace in Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" |
There was a time when I would buy, on average, an album on CD every other week. Sometimes more. My shelves groaned under their collected weight. But life changes. Life gets busy with other shit. Time for just sitting and listening to music gets eroded, especially now that I no longer spend an hour in the car commuting every day. And tastes changes too. I was going to write that my tastes have changed but let's be honest here, my tastes have stayed mostly the same and the world has moved on. I've just had a quick look at the current UK top 40 and do you know what? I don't know a single track in it. Not one. I couldn't even hazard a guess, a hum, at any of them. My taste has never been mainstream, but it seems what I like has never been so far removed from what is popular. Or commercial, at least.
I got to wondering recently when this parting of the ways happened. Perhaps these Clandestine Classics would provide a clue, I thought. So I drew up a graph, running from the year I was born to now, and I tallied up the 38 entries in this series thus far to see how they were distributed. This is the result:
Seems 1992 was a much better year for music than I remember! The big surprise here is the shortage of tracks from the early to mid Eighties, but then I guess the "clandestine" criteria for this series means I can't easily include The Jam, The Smiths, and many other bands I listened to a lot back then. I had a big 60s Mod revival thing going on then too - Who, Kinks, Small Faces - again, hard to categorise as clandestine. The consistent level throughout the Nineties is no surprise - I was out a lot, going to lots of gigs (mostly with The Man Of Cheese), avidly reading the music press, exploring new sounds. Then in the Noughties... well, I didn't grow up as such but life moved on around me. Then, in 2007 my life took a right-angle turn and I had time again to indulge, to seek out new bands, to try new things again. Even so, no Clandestine Classics since 2011.... I am not down with the kids.
So lets add a more recent bar to the graph. Midlake are a Texan folk rock band who've been plying their trade since 1999. I'll confess to not being familiar with their history or earlier work. I've since read that in 2012 their lead vocalist and primary songwriter upped sticks and left the band, and that 2013 album Antiphon was their first output without him. And what output! I heard the title track on the radio and was immediately hooked. Antiphon (a Greek word for a specific type of "call and response" religious chant) may be folk rock but it's choral in a way that definitely sounds ecclesiastical...but fear not, it's an entirely secular work. I think. Because the lyrics are a little obtuse at times; they seem to be anti-war, but also talk of the poor kneeling down before He who takes and defiles, and of idols who wore fine wool... so who knows.
What I do know is that the harmonies made by these, the remaining members of Midlake, are incredible, dense, layered. It's the sort of sound other bands would make with a computer. I found these sounds to be transportative, given the right mood. The record buying public disagreed - the album of the same name limped to number 39 in the UK chart, and didn't chart at all in the US. There was no single release which, given the aforementioned state of that chart, is probably no surprise. To get the most uncluttered perspective on those harmonies, have a listen to this live session version first - then head back here and revel in the depth, structure and sheer weight of the album version, here courtesy of YouTube. Oh, and is it just me or does the middle eight sound briefly like early Seventies Genesis?
I'm still not down with the kids, but I'm okay.
I don't go on Facebook much, if I can help it. I don't really "do" memes1 on there either - it all feels a bit 2008 - but since this one is book related and I was nominated by a good friend (not just nominated, Dark Steps made it onto her list) then I thought I'd better do this. Here's the spiel. List ten books that have stayed with you, for whatever reason, then nominate others to do the same. Simple.
I've added an extra rule of my own: only one book by any given author. Anyway, in no specific order, here goes:
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. You think the film is intense? Try the book. Pitch perfect prose too.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Maybe not his greatest work but this is about books that stay with you...at the time in my life I read this, I was pump-primed, ready to be flattened by this book.
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. The book that speaks to me most about being a bloke (and about being a record collector).
Vox by Nicholson Baker. Famously dismissed as a "toenail paring" by Stephen King because of its brevity, Vox is proof that word count is not the be all and end all. Intimate, shocking (still), thought-provoking and very special to me. I almost swapped this choice for The Fermata, by the same author, but since I read Vox first, it (just) gets the nod here.
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. An exercise in controlled horror. You've probably only seen the Will Smith vehicle, but wipe that film from your mind and savour the far-superior source material instead.
Skeleton Crew by Stephen King. I nearly chose The Stand. I nearly chose the recent (and brilliant return to form) 11.22.63. I should probably have chosen The Shining, as it's arguably his best work. But I chose this collection of short fiction instead, as it was the first King I ever read. It's probably not even King's best collection (that's Night Shift, I expect) but it does include The Mist and Mrs Todd's Shortcut. Most importantly though, it began a love affair for me that persists to this day.
Oryx And Crake by Margaret Atwood. If there's been a better (and more unnerving) slice of speculative fiction written in the last twenty years, I haven't seen it. Atwood is beyond compare, in my book.
The Death of Grass by John Christopher. Nowadays book shops, real and online, are awash with dystopia - everything is dystopian this and dystopian that. But this book, long out of print but now back in circulation, just pips The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham for proper, old-school dystopia.
The Outcast by Sadie Jones. I thought long and hard about whether to include this. It is a good book, of that there is no doubt. Have I read other, greater books? Yes. But this makes the because it stays with me, more than most others, because of the time in my life and the circumstances in which I read it.
Watership Down by Richard Adams. The book I have read more than any other (14 times, I think). In a book about rabbits, all human life is here.
And now a cheat, to mention a couple more books. Just bubbling under, not making the cut, Spaceship Medic by Harry Harrison, a book from my childhood, and Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, from a time in my teens when I read an awful lot of science fiction. Oh, and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis which, I'd wager, stays long in the mind of anyone who reads it.
And that's it - ask me again next week and you'd probably get a different list. I know this isn't Facebook but the whole thing is about books that have stayed with me (me, me, me!) - that makes it personal, hence ideal blog material. No, it doesn't (just) mean I'm too tired to write anything else new. If, by slim chance, we're friends in Zuckerberg's empire, I hope you don't mind the repetition.
1. Is there a verb yet that means "to 'do' a meme"? Answers on a postcard to the usual address (i.e. post a comment). Cheers.
I do like the irony of this optimistic message, set against the whitewashed window of a closed-down shop...
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| (Unless you are the shopkeeper...) |
...in which Asterix, Obelix and the rest take on a rampaging hoard of kohl-eyed, back-combed teens, cutting a doom-soundtracked swathe through Gaul in their ill-fitting black clothes... not that I'm stereotyping, at all.
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| Asterix and the Goths |
I feel quite tempted to watch the news Apes film, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes. I am so impressed with the simian CGI, and filling in the gaps in the Apes timeline is always going to be a better bet than reimagining the original film (ask Tim Burton if you're in doubt).
Trouble is, however good Dawn is, it'll never top this...
