Snack Attack

Boy Is Accused Of Sausage Assault has to be one of my favourite headlines in recent (or only) memory. As a counterpoint to the news about Philip Lawrence's killer it's both bizarre and depressing and yet it's also a wonderfully absurd low in the reporting of the ever declining state of Britain's youth. The darker half of my brain can't get over the image of a world where 'deviant hoodies' roam the streets with handfuls of pork snacks.

It's not exactly the Blade Runner boxed set but I'm looking forward to this:




Tunes: James Taylor: James Taylor

I Made This

Once upon a different life ago I held on to a deluded dream of being a film maker. I only say deluded because I wasn't close to being the kind of person I would have needed to be to get through. I enjoyed the time I spent dabbling, it was fun making the films we did make and of all of them I'm most proud of a promo we did for the band Snuff.

We'd been in touch with them about using some songs of theirs and they needed a video for their cover of The Four Tops' Standing In The Shadows Of Love. They gave us £500. £100 went on lights and tape, £300 on hiring an AVID suite and we walked of with the last £100. £25 each for three days work. I managed to blag some digitisation off an old Uni buddy I'd luckily bumped into a few weeks before. Probably the only good bit of producing I ever did.

We shot on Super-VHS, a day at a rehearsal studio and an evening at the Dublin Castle, a gate-crash gig they put on for us to get more footage. Then 2 days editing. We'd been in contact with an editor who had a friend with an AVID at home who was away for the weekend which is why it was so cheap. I think she was working for nothing.

I would have liked to have become an editor.

The band were great guys, the experience was a hoot and seeing 30 seconds of the video on The Chart Show was the highlight of everything we'd done. Hollywood might have been beckoning but the bank manager was waving harder.

I wasn't expecting to find it. I was looking to see if there was any live footage of the band. But there it was.



There's a cracking version of Soul Limbo on the EP.


Tunes: Iron Maiden: A Matter Of Life And Death

Some Time Later

Remember that pic of the sofa I posted a while back.

It now looks like this:





Tunes: Tom Petty: Damn The Torpedos

Another Coincidental Coincidence

Yesterday I was reading an article about how many public clocks in the country are no longer maintained. It included the quote about how even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Yesterday evening I caught the end of a movie that quoted the same line.

It's all getting far too spooky.


Tunes: Broken Social Scene: You Forgot It In People

Six Degrees of Baloney

Since I share my birthday with Jean Reno, I decide to watch Leon again last week. I was discussing it with Mike as we walked into Kingston on Sunday and who should be staring out at us from an advertising board in the window of John Lewis but...

You've guessed it, Jean Reno. Leon also stars a young Nathalie Portman whose character, Mathilda, watches Transformers a fair bit. The day before I watched Leon I went to see...

You've guessed it, Transformers. Before the movie we were discussing some of the inconsistencies in the plot arc between the first and last three instalments of the Star Wars trilogy, one of which was how Luke and Leia remember their mother played by...

You've guessed it, Nathalie Portman. In Leon Nathalie Portman's family are wiped out by bad cop Stansfield played by Gary Oldman, who (co-incidentally) shared a screen with Harrison Ford in Airforce One. Harrison Ford also plays Han Solo in the last three Star Wars movies and ends up with maternally challenged Leia in Episode 6. Oldman also appears in the Harry Potter movies, the latest of which, The Order Of The Phoenix, I went to see in Amsterdam as my birthday movie.

A birthday I share with...

You've guessed it, Jean Reno.

As an afterthought and for the sake of the maths which could still be wrong it's worth noting that Leon was directed by Luc Besson who also made a movie about Joan of Arc who was also the subject of George Bernard Shaw's play, Saint Joan, which we went to see at the National for my Mum's birthday. Joan is played by Ann-Marie Duff who found fame with the tv show Shameless alongside James McAvoy who escapes Idi Amin's clutches in the Last King Of Scotland during the siege of Entebbe which is where my Mum used to live.

Spooky huh!

Try it out for yourself and see what baloney you can come up with.


Tunes: Snuff: Six Of One, Half A Dozen Of The Other

Run To The Hills

Yesterday I walked past a guy with a bad limp and a walking stick wearing one of those clever 'bomb squad - if you see me running try to keep up t-shirts'.