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Talking Twin Peaks
Thanks to Emmet O’Cuana for inviting me onto The Hopscotch Friday Podcast to discuss my book on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and the new series, Twin Peaks: The Return. I’ve thought a lot about the series since it aired, and it was great to have a chance to trash through some of the issues – we could have gone on for hours more, and there were aspects we didn’t get a chance to discuss. I think we hit many of the major points, and I’m looking forward to going back to the series after a time apart from it, and pondering it further.
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Working the Blue Rose Case
I’m pleased to announce that I’m part of the autumn season of lectures organised by the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies in London. MIHS is a ‘community-based organisation that offers university-level history, theory and production-based workshops for people of all ages. The Miskatonic is a non-profit endeavour through which established horror writers, directors, scholars and programmers/curators celebrate horror history and culture with a unique blend of enthusiasm and critical perspective.’ Here’s the blurb for the autumn schedule: Mark Pilkington (Owner of Strange Attractor Press, writer/director of MIRAGE MEN) launches the season in September with his lecture “Rituals in the Dark: Evoking Magic on Film”. From the grit of medieval grimoires and…
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miss representation
I was delighted to hear that a new documentary, called Miss Represention, created by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, played at the Sundance Film Festival, and has been getting a great reception. Here’s the trailer: The issue of how women are represented in the media is one that occupies my mind on a regular basis, so I’m pleased that Newsom has put her time and effort into analysing and criticising this subject. There are a couple of articles in the Deseret News, touching upon this film and related issues that are well worth reading. The first is Family Films are not Friendly to Women, which reports on a public interview that took…
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everything is amazing
I’ve been meaning for some time to link to this video of comedian Louis C.K. when he appeared on Conan O’Brien Show in 2009. He discusses how ‘Everything is amazing right now and nobody’s happy’, which is a hilarious commentary on how fantastic technology is today, and yet how often people spend time bemoaning the tiny inconveniences it brings. It’s a good reality check, because I’m not immune from being irritated at how long it takes for a device to boot up, or the extra seconds for a web page to load (of course if I didn’t have a million tabs open in my multiple browser windows the computer might…
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Octocon 2010
This weekend I’ll be a guest at the 2010 Octocon convention in the Camden Court Hotel, Dublin. The Guest of Honour is George R.R. Martin, best known as the author of the A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels. The first novel in the series, Game of Thrones, is currently being filmed in Northern Ireland as a HBO mini-series. Its tone has been described as ‘Sopranos with Swords’, and since HBO rarely does anything badly, this could be the fantasy television series of a generation. Here’s the teaser trailer that HBO has released: It’s a considerable coup for an Irish convention to have such an established author as a…
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avoidance
Today I’m finishing my dreaded task of the year: sorting out my tax returns. It’s a vicious cycle: because I loathe doing this job I avoid doing it. That means, despite the promptings of my accountant, I tend to leave it until rather late. Each year I get stressed about it and once it’s done I swear I will never leave it this late again… until the following year rolls round. One of my favourite observations about this particular form of task avoidance is from the first episode of Black Books, called ‘Cooking the Books‘ (written by Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan). First, is the conversation between Bernard Black, with…
