Avatar

I finally went to see Avatar at the weekend (with a bellyful of Nando's and Ben n Jerry's). I must admit that I was a little sceptical at first. I was expecting the 3D stuff to be a bit gimmicky - any excuse to have something flying out of the screen, that kind of thing. However, Avatar completely confounded my expectations. Visually, it is truly stunning and an incredible achievement even on an astronomical budget. The dialogue might well be a little on the cheesy side, and the plot is certainly something we've seen before from the likes of Pocahontas, The Last Samurai, Dances With Wolves, etc. (man from western society encounters an alien culture, becomes assimilated, falls in love and winds up defending his adopted people from his own), but it is well-executed enough not to detract from the sheer beauty of the graphics. The 3D effects certainly added an extra dimension (sorry) to the cinematography, and it may be that one day this will be the default medium for Hollywood. However, at the moment, it has the feel of an optional extra: impressive, but slightly superfluous. The people behind the technology have still got some work to do if it is to become commonplace - removing the necessity for cumbersome and uncomfortable glasses would be a good place to start.

Kuwait

My dad took this photo in Kuwait in the 70s. I love it.

GLARING OMISSION!!!

Can't believe I forgot to include The Knife - Pass This On in my list of tunes of 2009! It might even be the best of the lot, and the video is great too.

Book report 2009

The best of my 2009 reading list:

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

A serious contender for my favourite book ever, Lolita is pretty thought-provoking. Nabokov is possibly the only author who could make you empathise with a character like poet and pervert Humbert Humbert, who is in some respects a monster. Take away the paedophilia however, and the book can be considered a conventional love story: two people meet, fall in love and everything seems rosy until one falls out of love with the other and they end up fucking each other's lives up.

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

When I started reading this I thought "how the fuck am I supposed to read this?!" It's written in a made up futurist dialect of english peppered with slang terms based on russian words. Burgess doesn't even provide a key! But somehow this proved to be much less of an obstacle than I initially thought and I read it in a single day (it's not all that long). It's a brilliantly brutal story.

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

I haven't read many funnier books than Heller's 1961 masterpiece. It started off as a bit of a slow-burner, as the first half of the book consists of loosely interwoven stories focussing on a wide cast of caricatures, with a pretty slack adherence to chronological order. But in its latter half, the book gets darker and darker and faster and faster, and as Heller ups the pace, the reader can't help but strive to keep up with him.







Oh and a special mention goes out to Graham Greene's short story The Blue Film.

Whoopsies

Some highlights from the first two reels shot on my christmas present:

On and on and on and on and on and on and on...

My 10 favourite tunes of 2009 (not necessarily from 2009, that's just when I first heard them):

The Panthers - Goblin City (Holy Ghost! remix)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1D-vXUAX2o
Love this video, it really suits the track.

Mavado - Never Believe You
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyNKXZB3_Kw

Durrty Goodz - This is What They Want
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOl7jsBGkKU

Koto - Visitors
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOh4B7zPx70
Listened to a lot of Italo Disco last year.

Kalyanji Anandji - Dharmatma Theme Music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvTgPoFdUQ4

Black Devil Disco Club - H Friend
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvkctUpaDng

Roxy Music - In Every Dream Home a Heartache
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSniBxXjK_8

Shyne - Bad Boyz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSniBxXjK_8
Shyne should know what he's talking about here, seeing as he's just got out of prison for shooting someone in the face. Anyway, CRANK DAT SHIT UP!!!

Asia - Only Time Will Tell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnR-uaahrbI
I love this lot's artwork, and their ridiculously overblown 80s proggyness.

Chase n Status feat. Plan B - Pieces
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HXrNbqU0uE

Fluke

I don't know how I managed to take this picture.

Crystal Castles @ Reading 2008.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee

My grandad would have found this article interesting. He was fascinated by the injustices committed against the Native American nations by the US government, and how a once proud people have been robbed of their land and heritage, and are now a marginalised and forgotten community.

A first

I've never made New Years Resolutions before, but seeing as I fucked up last year a bit with the whole teaching thing, maybe its about time I did.

1. Write a blog - check.
2. Take more photos.
3. Get more exercise - maybe go jogging with Ben and Case.
4. Find myself a job.
5. Save up for a trip to New York this summer.
6. Get myself onto the Leeds Economics Masters and sort funding out.
7. Read some Dickens and Tolstoy.
8. STOP BEING FUCKING LAZY.

Howdy Y'alll

I've decided to write a blog, partly cos everyone seems to be at it these days and partly cos I could do with practising my writing. I'm kind of intending it to be about all sorts really, whatever I'm thinking about at the time I guess. So it'll probably be a bit of a smorgasbord of politics, economics, sport, photography, music, literature, whatever. Standard bigchat.

Hmmmmm

Is it just me, or is anyone else a little unsettled by some of the reaction to the proposed Islam4UK March in Wootton Bassett? While I abhor everything Anjem Choudary stands for (as far as I know anyway - I don't know him all that well after all), when I see language like "go back to where you came from" (I paraphrase, but it's a pretty common theme in the multitude of facebook groups that declare THIS IS NOT A RACIST GROUP BUT...), I do worry that it is actually fuelled by more than a little racism. You read the groups a little more carefully and it gets worse. "Islamic people are taking the piss out of our country", "these people give up there lives to stop the iraqi's taking over the fucking world" and "lets fuckin kill them all" (I hope you can tell from the spellings that this time I'm not paraphrasing). I can kind of see why people from Muslim backgrounds might be feeling a little alienated at this point. In fact, probably a few people from other asian backgrounds may be feeling the same way, since the thing about discrimination is, it doesn't always discrimate accurately.



And I haven't even mentioned the BNP.