Sunday, September 25, 2005
by Jonjon at Cutting Edge Body Arts. He’s a master.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
For twenty-five years or more, I have kept my eye on this little word ‘people,’ and I have yet to find a single American or English author who does not misuse it…. You are not obliged to do anything of the kind, and never will be, unless all good writers agree upon it, and then — for that is the way language is made — it will be proper to do so.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
That said, it’s understandable that I had my doubts when a first listen of their second record presented a sound that, while not a drastic departure from their first, nevertheless certainly demonstrated itself to be the result of some tinkering.Omnium Gatherum are Finnish, and they play melodic death metal…. This does not pose a huge problem, and indeed a part of me fears that an attempt to ‘punch up’ the vocals might be the first step in the same sort of weakening and watering down that afflicts the band’s geostylistic (and linguistic; Finland’s national love of Latin is just one more little-known reason to adore that icy bastion of agglutinative alcoholism) neighbors, Mors Principium Est, on their own recent second.They say that melodic death metal as a genre is dying, or dead, and that it is full of crap copycat bands who couldn’t write an original riff if you threatened to stomp all over their In Flames CDs, and they’re right, insofar as metal today is fertile and popular enough that the law of averages tells us that there simply have to be a mammoth load of terrible bands; there are the exceptions, however, now as there were in the past, and the bands who have found their own sound and struck their own territory are the ones that will be remembered.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Several days ago, I spent a night reading through I Was Following This Girl by Desmond Skirrow, a 1960s British spy novel which I had ordered, more or less on a whim, for 3 dollars from a used seller on Amazon after having by chance read a very short bio of Skirrow on Wikipedia in which his work is described as ‘outstanding’, ‘tough, irreverent and witty’, and in which Punch magazine is quoted to say ‘the Chandler formula, basically, but louder and funnier.’
