Top-Ten-Tastic

Rory gets the ball rolling on FunnyHaHa again with a look at the top ten funniest films of the century. I'd like to know what happened to Love and Death, Annie Hall, Rushmore, Young Frankenstein, Ghostbusters, The Jerk, The Man With Two Brains, Addams Family Values, Jabberwocky, Bob Roberts and so on and so on. And how can anyone leave out Spinal Tap? Perhaps I should head on over there and get contributing. After I've done some work of course.
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29

It's my birthday and I'll send presents to other people with the same birthday as me if I want to.
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More colours at frownland

Frownland Yellow + Zeldman Orange = New Frowland. Like it.
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Apple goes mad

Flower Power and Blue Dalmation? Those aren't colours that anyone will want, surely?

Better specs, yes, but still not the upgrade everyone's been speculating about. When are we going to get the 15" LCD iMac?
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For god's sake don't get out there - it's a waste of time

Has anyone else found themselves constantly assailed by those getouthere.bt.com ads on Xfm until they had to have a look at the two pieces the people on the advert were talking about? I did, and I've discovered something: I judge work by the first ten or so lines. And by that criterion The Property Game (the first chapter of the novel one of the participants has written) is not bad at all, but The Gavvers, a sitcom about the police with some sort of post-modern ironic view of racism and brutality within the police force is just terrible. I urge you not to take a look.

Also, why would anyone upload anything to this site? Films and music, fine - people can download them and the reponse is immediate - but why would you be bothered to read a script or a chapter of a novel online? Extending online writing (as opposed to broken work like blogs and discussion forums) never works. And who on earth is looking at it? If you want to get your book published send it to an agent or publisher. If you want to get your sitcom made, send it to a producer like the rest of us. BT aren't a production company. It all seems like a lot of effort for nothing.
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Comedy = Truth + Time

...as I think Woody Allen once said. Recently there was truth, and since then there's been time. So here's comedy:

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100, then we would probably have special magical powers.
If they were to all stand shoulder to shoulder they could make a 'human fence'.
95 would support Manchester United, the other 5 would be too busy making replica shirts in a Vietnamese sweatshop to express a preference.
1 would own a Dyson. This one would have the cleanest room.
1 would have an alternative use for the Dyson. He will require the services of the 1 doctor and the 1 fireman.
10 would have venereal disease, but the number is likely to rise rapidly. They could have a 50-aside game of murderball. Or of murderchess. Or murdercanasta. Or murder.
Every ten minutes one of them would fart. He would be the most unpopular member of the village.
87 would claim that the first series of This Life was much better than the second, even though only 13 would have actually seen it.
1 would have a paranoid psychosis. The other 99 would talk about him behind his back.
They would all argue about the cooking arrangements. The 8.3 vegetarians would moan about being hard done by. The 0.3 vegetarian probably has a point.
27 would be drunk or stoned, another 12 would be 'near-drunk' or 'near-stoned'. One would be a dealer. This is how he can afford the Dyson.
1 (yes unbelievably just 1) would ride an executive scooter around the village.
93 will have a great idea for an internet company.
Channel 4 would set up cameras around the village and make a reality TV programme. The guy on the scooter would get voted out by the others every week.

[as written by my friend John Powell]
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Coming back soon...

No actual new content yet, but keep a look out.
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Readers to the rescue!

I need to probe the vast knowledge base that is my readership.

Does anyone know what the music is in that mini-Mars thing advert with the couple snogging on a sofa?
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Flier refinements continue

Okay, here's version two; changes based on various helpful comments.

The image is no longer the tiny original blown up enormously. I traced round the two men on the left, and remade the ground and background.

Better?
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SDoTH

Dave McVey connects Harold Pinter and Tom Hulce in two and wins himself a copy of Lord of Light.
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Time changes everything

I don't really look at kottke.org anymore.

Is there something wrong with me?
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Nostalgia

Do you remember Ride?

Slowdive?

Mint 400? Submarine? Chapterhouse?

Strangelove, Levitation, Blind Mr. Jones, The Belltower?

New Fast Automatic Daffodils, God Machine, Medicine, Pale Saints, Moose and Revolver [this is the weakest link...]?

I do. What do you remember?

[All brought on by seeing Ned's Atomic Dustbin play Kill Your Television on the Top Ten comedy records on E4 the other night which I'm now listening on gloriously archaic twelve inch vinyl.]
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Work In Progress

Here's a first design for the flier for Mark and my show at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden.

The silhouette is nicked from Corbis Images (bad James) but I could always get someone to draw one similar. The theatre would like us to put their logo on it, but it's grim so I might refuse. Maybe. Depends how bullish I'm feeling at the time.

Whaddya think, ladies and germs?
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The regression continues

Listening to an excellent album by Norwegian duo The Kings of Convenience called Quiet Is The New Loud (which wins my prize for best album title so far this year) that I picked up for £9.99 in the Virgin Megastore the other day after trying it on a listening post. Sort of Simon and Garfunkel meets Nick Drake. Handy things, listening posts, especially in helping you avoid buying stuff you might otherwise splash out on in having heard one of a band's songs, viz, At The Drive-In - great song on rotation on Xfm, rest of the album is dire; Frank Black and the Catholics - always hopefully he'll get back to Pixies form, unfortunately not yet; ...And You Shall Know Us By The Trail of Dead - excellent name, boring indie metal (they also appear to own the URL www.atthedrivein.co.uk which amusingly redirects to their site...); but most of all (and this is going to cause a lot of upset to some people) The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs which sounded like a load of tedious bad jazz meets Noel Coward. Sorry, Vaughan.

Also saw Almost Famous this afternoon, and I can highly recommend it. The kid is great, Kate Hudson is definitely star material in the making, and Billy Crudup is charm personified as Russell, the Stillwater guitarist. However, stand-out performances for me were the increasingly brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs and Jason Lee as a wonderful wannabee Jim Morrison/Robert Plant. And Cameron Crowe, as always, is a master film-maker. Go see.

Oh, and can I just mention that last year I had the pleasure of working with a very talented young actress and comedienne by the name of Wendy Wason? I've rarely, if ever, met someone who was such fun to work with, and possessed of such raw comic talent. (Happy now, Wendy?)
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New weblog! New Rory! New world order!

Walking West is dead. Long live The Week Link.
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It's amazing! I'm eighteen again!

I went to see Grandaddy at the Forum in Kentish Town last night - my first gig in about ten years.

My friend Matt, a great fan of the band, rang me a while ago and said would I like to go, and I thought, dammit, why not? And, as luck would have it, it was excellent. Support came from Lowgold, a four-piece Coldplay-alike with Buffalo Springfield harmonies, who tried to gee up the crowd with their MOR compositions, but only really took hold with their two singles. In fact, if I remember rightly, I missed the second half of their set because I was having a piss. Ah well.

Grandaddy were marvellous. Five John Deere baseball caps turning the wide open spaces of the American mid-West into music. Hewlett's Daughter, The Crystal Lake, Summer Here Kids - all the favourites; and they ended with the first track from their new album, The Sophtware Slump, the spacious, gentle, poignant, eight minute long aural bath that is He's Dumb, He's Stupid, He's The Pilot. Just great, honestly, just great.

Matt and I have now decided to make gig-going a regular feature of our lives, and if we keep it up, guitarists and wannabe rockstars that we are, by October we'll be so desperate to get onstage ourselves that it'll be almost unbearable. Watch this space. I am re-invigorated...
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I make it onto the radio but not quite in the way I'm hoping for

The James thanked by Gordon Loncaster on xfm at 1.50am this morning was me. It's a start.
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Why oh why did I set myself the task of coming up with new and pithy headings for every entry of this weblog?

I remember I was once in a show that I wrote and for one of the small parts I had taken, I would improvise new lines at every rehearsal to amuse my fellow castmembers. Unfortunately this meant I had to do it every night of the two week run. You'd think I'd have learnt my lesson by now, wouldn't you? Anyway...

The new design of plasticbag.org is up and running, after much teasing. It's going to take some getting used to seeing as all the time I've been blogging it's one of the few weblogs that has never changed, but I like it. And I notice that the move back to underlined links is well underway.

Meg, who has also been tweaking her layout (which ought to be a euphemism for something) reveals a hitherto undiscovered propensity for Hockney-esque photo collage. And have you ever wondered what it would like if you put Basil Rathbone's head on Sasha Baron Cohen's body? Wonder no more. All of this, and more, hidden away in her new extra.toppings section.

Shadow of the Vampire was today's filmic excursion. Two teenage girls behind me kept singing 'Dancing in the Moonlight' and laughing uproariously. Perhaps my hair led them to believe I was the lead singer of Toploader. The film itself was a joyously unhinged look at the making of the expressionist classic, Nosferatu, with Malcovich and Defoe fighting each other for the title of 'maddest German', and a rather good performance from Eddie Izzard for a change. A little gem, and best of all it really made me want to see the original.

And last, but not least, for one frightening moment, Blogger seemed to have lost all knowledge of any of my weblogs. Turned out to be a glitch, but it gave me a momentary perspective on what it might be like in the not-impossible situation that Blogger gives up the ghost completely, considering Pyra's current circumstances. I value it a lot more than I realised.
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Stuff that's happened while I've been doing other stuff

Blogger's become a one-man show. Shame. Not much to say on this subject that everyone else hasn't said already, particularly as I'm a bit behind the times today.

Rory has retired Walking West. Boo. He always had an enjoyable thing or two to read of an evening. Still he claims to be working on something else (his 'big project' perhaps?) and you can look out for it at his Speedysnail news page.

I've seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at last. And yes, it is very good, isn't it, everyone. It's brilliantly choreographed. Watching the fight scenes is like watching a ballet at ten times the speed with the possibility that any one of the participants could lose a major limb at any point. Very exciting. And so soporiphically peaceful (several old people in the afternoon screening I went were indeed lulled into a state of noisy sleep).

And some other stuff that I can't think of right now. Hmmm. Later, maybe. Either that or they're just really dull.
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