Went to Twickenham yesterday to see REM. As a pro-football, anti-rugby man I really wanted to have a moan about the venue but annoyingly I could find nothing wrong with it. Even though the station isn't as near the ground as Wembley, the crowd control and journey home were as good as they could realistically be. Curses! I arrived just in time for Guillemots , between whose songs the screens either side of the stage displayed adverts for their album and downloadable songs, which even in these days of commercial saturation seemed a tad vulgar. The 'Mots (as nobody calls them) are as erratic a proposition as you'd expect from a band whose members include a fat Brazilian drummer, an impossibly exotic double bassist/percussionist named Aristzabal Hawkes, and a hyperactive indie-boy leader who goes by as strange a moniker as Fyfe Dangerfield. Take Kriss Kross , which begins with a killer keyboard riff that proceeds to go missing for a couple of minutes as the song tears through a...
Sadly, mine look nowhere near as cool as these. A new branch of [well-known optical emporium] has just opened up the road from the office and, mindful of the fact that I’ve regularly had to squint to read text on my TV such as teletext, subtitles on foreign films etc (oh alright, it’s usually the scores on Sky Sports) for a while now, I took advantage of their aggressively-marketed free eye test offer. Lo and behold, I am now the owner of two brand-new pairs of glasses. Leaving aside the commercial considerations of the said opticians (in possible borderline cases such as mine where my eyes clearly aren’t that bad, do they prescribe specs anyway in order to gain customers?), I’m now adjusting to the fact that I’ll be spending large portions of my life with bits of glass and metal on my face. Things look subtly different when I put them on. It’s a very strange sensation. I also felt even more self-conscious than usual when I put them on in the office for the first time this morning. Wou...
Wrestling is a funny old thing. I can never satisfactorily explain why I enjoy watching it, beyond a few lame-sounding lines about male soap operas, the primal (male) love of combat, etc. The Wrestler isn't going to change anybody's minds about the sport (or "sports entertainment", or whatever), especially after the genuinely gut-churning hardcore bout involving glass, barbed wire and a staple gun. However, the film is far more concerned with universal themes of fear of getting old, and the struggle to find one's place in the world, and Marisa Tomei's single-mom stripper is just as important to its success. The role of ageing fuck-up Randy "the Ram" really does fit Rourke like a glove and an Oscar win would be well deserved. Ultimately the story is fairly generic, the sub-plot involving Randy's daughter being especially predictable, but as a wrestling fan I can attest that this film has been made with care and attention to detail, and as a viewe...
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