This is Aleph

Already three weeks into the new decade, and it occurs to me that it's been a while since I last set out my online stall and pointed everybody at the various locations where I stink up the Internet like a virtual hobo. I know that the sidebar points to most of these places, but then the people who visit the blog via an RSS reader don't see that stuff, do they? OK, here we go.

Where I can be found online in 2010:

Sucker Punch - This place. My own personal Nexus of All Realities and the central hub of all my online activity. Internet years are like dog years, and in a few short months Sucker Punch is going to be six years old. By my rudimentary calculations, that means the blog is on the verge of a mid-life crisis. And yet, I still feel like I'm just getting warmed up. The focus of the blog has always bounced all over the damn place from shapeless rambling and little peeks at slivers of my life, to focused pieces on specific topics or as an outlet for thinking out-loud just to clarify things in my own mind. For someone as intensely private as I am with a persistent habit of compartmentalising my life, I seem to talk an awful lot. A few of my friends have said things to me recently that have made me take another look at my online persona. Some are surprised at how little I write about myself or my life, and some wish I would write more about things I know, things I think or things that are worth sharing - basically, the stuff I tend to say to people when I'm sitting opposite them. So I'm thinking that 2010 is the year where I pull back the curtain just that little bit more in the hope that I don't scare the living shit out of everyone. Let's find out how well that works out together.

Shrapnel - My tumblelog. The strapline "Jagged shards of popular culture eviscerating the flabby guts of the Internet" says it all. I use it as a bottomless all-purpose bucket where I chuck images, video and all sorts of other crap I unearth whilst trawling the murky corners of the Internet. Sometimes research material, but mostly just stuff that amuses me.

Last.fm - The vast majority of my aural input is catalogued here. If I'm trying to concentrate on something and I need to drown out potential distractions, the "Recently Played" chart will rapidly fill up with the background noise of really bad jazz or soundtracks to old exploitation movies. If I'm just listening for pleasure, you'll see it jump the rails to a stream of funk, soul and hip-hop, or what my daughter refers to as "Daddy's Old Skool".

Occasionally, I'll mess about on Blip.Fm, purely because it plugs into Twitter easily, which seamlessly brings me to...

Twitter - My daily, rolling spewings in 140-characters nuggets. Having been on Twitter for nigh on three years now, I've looked on with some amusement at how this has exploded into the mainstream over the last year or so as if it was something new. You pesky kids! I was chatting shit on Twitter before you were even an itch in your daddy's pants!

Flickr - I see things, I point the camera on my N95 8GB at them, I click, I upload them to my Flickr page. What more do you need to know? Have a look at the pictures - apparently they're worth more than a thousand words.

Del.icio.us - Still indispensable for me, although it does seem to have fallen out of favour somewhat. I frequently need to capture urls on the move, and I find it more useful to find relevant search results here than on Google, due to the folksonomy of hivemind tagging. A mixture of research material and pages of bookmarks that reflect my preoccupations and enduring obsessions.

Facebook and LinkedIn (or "Corporate Facebook") - Feel free to Friend me or make a Connection with me or whatever the bloody jargon is this week. Don't Poke me. I only like poking when there's some kind of Happy Ending.

How to contact me - I've resisted sticking an email address here, mostly because when I've tried it seems to attract spam and, occasionally, hate mail. If you don't already have my email address, then the best ways to contact me are via Twitter, in the comments section anywhere here or via Facebook.

Now you know where I am, let's spend the rest of the year figuring out where I'm going.

Eat Lead, Slackers!

And we're back. At last.

Took me a little longer than expected to get myself up to 88mph this year. Last week was almost a total write-off. I was all ready to hit the ground running hard and fast, only to discover that the ground was covered with ice and snow and I was slip-sliding all over the damn place. Last week morphed into a binary existence of either slowly traveling across ice and snow or trying to stay inside away from the ice and snow, so I treated the week with the contempt that it deserved - as a hangover from the end of 2009. Also: I'm a fucking mammal, so the inclement weather made me want to either sleep or eat instead of prodding the brainmeat into action.

So, as far as I'm concerned, 2010 started yesterday. Works for me. There's a helluva lot I want to do this year, and the words aren't going to write themselves. My To-Do list may be a vicious, unwieldy bastard sometimes, but I wouldn't want it any other way. I feel like I'm off to a good start anyway. Bring it!


Hype Alert! Noticed yesterday that I have a piece of microfiction in the current issue of Icon magazine, which pleased me hugely as I wasn't expecting it. Whilst I wouldn't expect anyone to buy the magazine on the strength of my minor contribution alone, it is worth noting that the current issue is a special all-fiction issue, featuring work from Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow and Will Self amongst many others, and it's bloody good. Whilst magazines are withering on the shelves and coughing up bloody ink-flecked chunks of pulpy matter as they die off one by one, publications like Icon magazine are luxurious objects of beauty, crafted by people who realise that content, form and aesthetics are inextricably linked. Icon magazine invites you to stroke the cover lovingly every month before wrapping your brains around the text. Buy it!

That's all for now. There is work to be done...

Keep the Bugs Off Your Glass and the Trouble Off Your Ass

The end-of-year slowdown is in full effect as we prepare to cruise gently into the New Decade in a postprandial tryptophan-induced haze.

I was going to write a Year or Decade In Review. I kicked it around for a couple of days, but I just couldn't get excited about it. "Best Of" lists are clogging up the Internet like a virulent outbreak of pixelated weeds and I've grown bored of reading them, so I sure ain't gonna waste my time adding another one to the pile.

I'll give you this much - Battle Royale remains my undisputed favourite movie of the decade, and if you have a burning desire to discover my thoughts on that, I've already written 4,000 words about it here (in addition to another chapter on Seijun Suzuki's Branded To Kill). It'll make for a fine last-minute Christmas gift for the blood-thirsty cineaste in your family. And that's the shameless plugging for the decade over as well.


There is one more Favourite Movie of the Decade I wanted to write about in detail, but I'll save that for a dedicated post next year, in which I'll pledge allegiance...to the band...of Mr.Schneebly. But I've already said too much...

Every year at this time, I always say to myself that I want to achieve more in the following year. And I do. Every year the output increases in both quality and quantity. But I'm still never satisfied. My reach continues to exceed my grasp, and that's no bad thing. I look forward to further grasping in the coming decade.

OK. That's enough aimless prattle on the blog for 2009. I'll continue to spit out 140-character pellets of bullshit on Twitter over the festive period. I have movies to watch, comics to read, friends and family to catch up with and bourbon to imbibe. I'll probably be climbing the walls by Boxing Day.

All that's left for me to say to you all, my dear friends out there in Interwebland, is Merry Christmas and I hope that 2010 brings you closer to whatever it is that you want out of life. Onwards!

Living In A Box - Paul King's Bunny & The Bull

Let's get one thing out of the way before I get stuck into this: I have no intention of making endless references to The Mighty Boosh when discussing Bunny & The Bull. Back in 2004, reviews that constantly compared Shaun of the Dead to Spaced were tedious and unfair. Movies have to succeed or fail on their own merits. This isn't a spin-off from a TV show. So all I want to say about The Mighty Boosh in relation to Bunny & The Bull is, yes, Paul King directed most of the episodes of that show and, yes, both Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt appear in extended cameos. OK? OK. Let's do Bunny & The Bull the favour of treating it as a free-standing entity. Moving on...


It's difficult to discuss exactly what Bunny & The Bull is, or even what it is about, without diminishing it somewhat. I'm not worried about straying into spoiler territory, it's just that I expect that Bunny & The Bull is likely to be different things to different people. Whilst King's movie is undoubtedly very, very funny in parts, I think it would be a stretch to call it a comedy. It's a buddy road movie where two friends travel across Europe in search of romance and adventure. Or maybe they never leave the confines of a cramped London flat. Or perhaps they never get any further than moving around the wounded psyche of repressed naif Stephen Turnbull, played by Edward Hogg.

And therein lies the true strength of Paul King's movie. Bunny & The Bull is a slippery film to nail down, which makes it far more interesting to me. No matter how much the film seems to be about friendship and love, there's a thinner, darker skein woven around it all weighted with loss and tragedy. It's fun and enjoyable and laugh-out-loud funny in places, but you can never quite escape the slightly disturbing, unsettling fug that hangs in front of it all like dirty net curtains. Having two apparently contradictory tones at play is a difficult trick to pull off, but King just about manages it.

Edward Hogg's wired, twitchy performance in the astonishing White Lightnin', which helped that little-seen gem snag Le Hitchcock d'Or Prix du Jury at this year's Dinard Festival of British Cinema, showed what a mesmerising screen presence he can be. In Bunny & The Bull, Hogg has to do most of the heavy lifting as the straight man to Simon Farnaby's reckless, lovable oaf Bunny, without the fall-back of intermittent goggle-eyed one-liners.

Stephen's memories take place in a beautifully-constructed environment of carefully-lit backdrops, miniature models and calculatedly ramshackle, dreamy sets. Once you get past the sheen of artifice and the gags and the distracting cameo appearances, there's a genuinely affecting movie tinged with hope hiding just beneath the surface.

Bunny & The Bull is released in the UK on Friday 27 November. I wish that cinemas still showed a cartoon before every movie, because showing the original Bunny and Bull in the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes short Bully for Bugs first would make for a damn fine double-bill.

40 Reasons why I love Sesame Street

1. Can you tell me how to get...?



2. Super Grover!



3. Sesame Street does Mad Men



4. Cookie Monster eats the World Trade towers in 1976 (via Boing Boing)


5. The Pointer Sisters and the Pinball Number Count



6. How to make your own DIY Pointer Sisters Pinball Clock


7. Bert and Ernie


8. Miami Mice



9. The Amazing Mumford



10. One of these things is not like the other things



11. Bob


12. Hooper's Store


13. Heeere's Cookie Monster! (via Popped Culture)


14. Count von Count


15. C is for Cookie



16. Slimey the Worm



17. Sesame Street Fever


18. Gordon


19. Follow That Bird


20. Oscar the Grouch


21. Who Are The People in Your Neighborhood?



22. Stevie Wonder performs Superstition



23. James Earl Jones counts to ten



24. Kermit the Frog's News Flash



25. Johnny Cash sings Nasty Dan to Oscar the Grouch



26. Big Bird in China (via Kung Fu Fridays)


27. Mr. Snuffleupagus



28. R2D2 and C3P0 visit Sesame Street



29. The Typewriter Guy



30. Gladys Knight & The Pips tell you how to get to Sesame Street



31. The cast of Bonanza count to 20



32. Guy Smiley



33. Grover the Waiter



34. Lena Horne sings the alphabet



35. The Bill Cosby alphabet



36. The Mad Painter



37. Richard Pryor demonstrates emotions



38. Cookiegate



39. Big Bird sings It's Not Easy Being Green at Jim Henson's Memorial



40. This blog post was brought to you by the letters H and B, and the number 40. This has been a production of the ...


Happy Birthday, Sesame Street!

UPDATED: Just found an extra clip and it was far too good to exclude. So here's my 41st Reason why I love Sesame Street. Jesse Jackson and I Am Somebody:

The Quick and The Dead - Revisiting 28 Weeks Later

Over the weekend, I watched Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later again for the first time since its original theatrical release. With a couple of years perspective, I enjoyed it a lot more the second time around.

Which isn't to say that I didn't like it back in 2007. I did - a lot. But this time, I could watch it without endlessly comparing it to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. Back then, I penalised Fresnadillo's movie for not being sufficiently scary, and for amping up the action and big-scale splatter. But that's just not fair. 28 Weeks Later has plenty of good scares, from the superb pre-title sequence showing a small group of survivors in a remote boarded-up house suddenly overwhelmed by the infected, to the moment when the inevitable cycle of infection ramps up all over again with one fateful kiss, to a treacherous walk down a stalled escalator in a pitch-black tube station, decomposing corpses slick and crunchy underfoot.



There are definite parallels here between the claustrophobic simplicity of 28 Days Later (and Ridley Scott's Alien) and the tooled-up militarism and firepower of 28 Weeks Later (and James Cameron's Aliens). The same song played with different instruments, and there's nothing wrong with that, because it's all about the execution. Whilst the first chapter in both series focus more on anticipation and tension, guile and smarts and hiding in the shadows, the second installments shift approach slightly to things that explode or ignite or crash and go "Boom". Interestingly, though, for all the mounting shell-casings and rising pyres of flame in 28 Weeks Later, the element that makes it all work is the family that finds itself torn apart, put back together and then rent asunder all over again over the course of the movie. Without that, it would just be another Living versus Dead knock-down drag-out (albeit one done with a lot of style and well-judged gore).

The true horror of 28 Weeks Later isn't the rampaging infected let loose on London once again. It's the tragic inevitability of the moment when the American military realises that everyone has to die in an attempt to contain the outbreak - infected and living alike. A decision which is even more devastating once it fails.

The aerial shots of an abandoned London are just as starkly beautiful as they are in Boyle's movie. No clusters of pigeons in the sky. No swirls of smoke from the buildings. No streams of traffic crossing the capital. And no people. Yes, I know that someone in an effects house probably spent hours digitally removing all signs of life from aerial footage, but that doesn't make it any less striking.

And the street level shots of London are equally gorgeous, with every street corner marked not only with overturned cars and dark stains, but towering mounds of bright yellow refuse sacks full of diseased body parts awaiting disposal and incineration. (Yes, I am aware that I just described piles of corpses as "gorgeous"...)



Cillian Murphy spent the first half hour of 28 Days Later making a mental adjustment adapting to the post-apocalyptic world that disintegrated whilst he was comatose in a central London hospital, and the rest of the film redefining himself in order to survive in a new world. Here, the destructive guilt Robert Carlyle has been carrying for 28 weeks is the catalyst that starts the cycle of arterial blood spurts and mouthfuls of torn flesh all over again. Both actors display a different flavour of muted numb acceptance, and Carlyle is astonishingly good. No amount of cold clinical military logic can compete with the gnawing emotions of a shattered man.

Back in 2007, I hadn't seen The Wire yet, and The Hurt Locker didn't exist, so this time I was looking at Idris Elba and Jeremy Renner with different eyes. Disappointingly, the role of a stiff unyielding commanding officer isn't much of a stretch for the man who essayed the complex and ambitious Stringer Bell. But I couldn't help looking at Renner's character and imagining him as Kathryn Bigelow's daredevil Sergeant James and thinking that, after coping bravely and recklessly with all those unexploded IEDs in Iraq, he's still unprepared for the chaos of London's blood-vomiting infected.

iMDB teases that the long-rumoured 28 Months Later may finally become a reality. If it does eventually run bleeding and screeching to the big screen, it's got a lot to live up to. Here's hoping it's no Alien³.

Moving Pictures

Yes. I know. This blog has gone quiet again. It'll sputter back into action again soon, I'm sure.

Until then, a thought. The last couple of months have convinced me that 2009 is shaping up to be one of the finest years in cinema we've had for a long, long time. And here's my evidence - just a few of the beautiful, indelible images that I've been carrying around in my head, and the reason why I still take myself into dark rooms with a wall of flickering light in front of me, waiting and hoping to be showered with moments like these:

This is not a love story - (500) Days of Summer

Before I begin, a disclaimer. Generally, I really don't like what passes for romantic comedy these days. I'll make an exception to this rule if a movie includes Simon Pegg and a blood-stained cricket bat. If there's a chance that Hugh Grant might bumble onto the screen, you'd have to bludgeon me with a blood-stained cricket bat to keep me in my seat.

You see, the overwhelming majority of romantic comedies are neither romantic nor comedic. On the whole, they're lazy by-the-numbers retreads of things you've seen done many times before, and better. They seem to exist solely to give Jennifer Aniston or Kate Hudson some semblance of a career. The startling lack of imagination in this virulent, mulitplex-infecting genre even extends to the advertising campaigns. The posters go a little something like this: The two leads against a white background. Leaning against something invisible. Smirking. Faces you want to punch repeatedly.

All of which is just a preamble to say that (500) Days of Summer is genuinely both funny and romantic. And, refreshingly, it dispenses with the depressing inevitably of a "they lived happily ever after" ending by setting you straight up front. A voiceover tells you what to expect - "This is not a love story" - and one of the first things we see is the aftermath of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel's failed relationship at the straggling end point of their 500 days together. The film then scrolls backwards and forwards along the timeline, using numbered title-cards denoting which day of the relationship we are at, shuffling and juggling them so that the good days are juxtaposed with the bad, nascent passion rapidly mutating into devastating heartbreak and back again.

"A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order." Jean-Luc Godard

What else has (500) Days of Summer got?

It's got two exceptional central performances from a pair that haven't appeared on screen together since Jordan Melamed's criminally under-seen Manic. (Levitt really does look more and more like Heath Ledger with every passing year. Someone should tell Christopher Nolan that we've found his next Joker.*) As much as Levitt brings a spot-on lightness of touch to his role, Deschanel is the one with the tougher act to pull off. She has to be convincingly and simultaneously plausible as both the ideal dream woman and as an icily-detached and insensitive bitch, without once ever sliding into a hackneyed stereotype of the Kooky Chick. The truth, of course, is something more complex and believable than either extreme, as the film's accretion of details reveals as it progresses.

It's got a full-blown song-and-dance number to the Hall & Oates tune You Make My Dreams.

It's got a lovely spot of flirtation centred around the theme tune from Knight Rider.

It's got wit, charm and inventiveness. It's got to be worth 95 minutes of your time.

The only thing (500) Days of Summer needs now is an audience. Make sure that it has one.

(500) Days of Summer is released in the UK on 2nd September. Thanks to the gang at Jam for the screening. And whilst you're waiting for the movie to rock up at your local popcorn palace, have a play making yourself a virtual C90 at the nifty (500) Days of Summer Mixtape site.

*I totally stole this observation from @ControlB. Sorry, Brett

One Million Giraffes (and one Clay Shirky)

There are a lot of things that the internet does really well. It does meaningless well. And crowdsourcing. It does magnificent towering monuments to imaginative folly, and creativity, and creating a community out of every single person online.

At the moment, my imagination has been captured by a web project that encapsulates all of these things and is beautiful in its simplicity. In Stavanger, Norway, there’s a man called Ola Helland. He made a bet that he could collect 1 million giraffes by the end of 2011, by leveraging the power and goodwill of the People of Planet Internet. And from that bet was born One Million Giraffes.

The only rule is (in Ola’s words): “Your giraffe(s) can be created in any way and form, but not on a computer”. The barrier to entry is negligible. You don’t have to create a masterpiece. You can dash off a crappy giraffe in mere minutes if you wish. After all, a crappy giraffe is still a giraffe.

But I’ve been endlessly delighted by the breadth of inventiveness on display from the thousands submitting their giraffes. People could do it the easy way (and some, of course, do), but where’s the fun in that? If you’re going to do something for no reason whatsoever, do it with gusto!

Clay Shirky explains all this stuff much better than me in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising Without Organisations. (I’m sure Shirky would prefer it if I spelt that title with some “z”’s where I’ve placed “s”’s, but I write the Queen’s English on this side of the Atlantic. The internet also does “divisive” and "nit-picking" very well, too…)

As Shirky states in the book: “You can think of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities, activities that are enabled or improved by social tools. The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action.”

I’m pretty sure he wasn’t thinking about giraffes when he wrote that sentence.

At the time of writing, Ola has 22,121 giraffes, so he needs 977,879 more. Go and make a giraffe and send it to him. It’ll make him happy.

And if you’re wondering, here’s a picture of my contribution. It's one in a million:

Metal Fatigue

(Or "Why I won't be subjecting myself to Transformers 2")


It would not be strictly true to say that I have a blanket disdain for the oeuvre of Michael Bay. The Island didn't totally suck and, like Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, I too have an unhealthy affection for Bad Boys II. Anything that extreme and that offensive - that pushes the buddy-cop movie so far past the breaking point until all that remains is a clotted mess of spent shell-casings, twisted metal and bleeding eardrums - deserves some kind of warped recognition.

But I remember my experience of being battered by Bay's first Transformers movie. And it's not something I'd willingly put myself through a second time.

A couple of years ago, I had a blistering job interview that left me reeling. It was more like a sustained attack on every single element of my professional and personal life to date. My interviewer made Sir Alan Sugar look like a pussy. It was interminable and painful, like a trip to the gym after decades sitting slumped on a couch, and the interviewer's opening gambit was "I don't believe half of the shit that you've written on your CV, but we'll come back to that later."

Two and a half hours later, I staggered back out into the murky, welcoming air of London, loosened my tie and tried to remember how to walk again. I was completely and utterly spent. I hopped on the Tube and headed towards Leicester Square, figuring that I deserved to treat myself to a movie. Something big and dumb that I wouldn't have to think about. Something that would just wash over me. I chose Transformers.

At that point, it would have behooved me to remember that Michael Bay calls his style of filmmaking "fucking the frame". In Transformers, the frame should have brought Michael Bay up on charges for sexual assault.

I'm just old enough not to have any kind of nostalgic affection for the robots in disguise, so I wasn't concerned that an icon of my childhood was going to be defiled by a movie. That was one thing working in my favour. Turns out that was the only thing working in my favour.

Not only was my choice of movie a boneheaded move, but I thought I'd catch it on the largest screen of the Empire Leicester Square, where everything is bigger and louder. It's easy to describe the Transformers movies as "robots hitting each other". It felt more like "robots punch me in the head over and over and over again for two and a half hours."

And another thing. I really don't comprehend the enduring appeal of Shia LeBeouf. He's a perfectly adequate performer, but he's not leading man material. But then, he is playing second fiddle to clanking metal.

And I sat there thinking "You know, big robots are inherently cool. Big robots changing and unfolding should be visually interesting. But when the director keeps cut-cut-cutting and the soundtrack keeps clang-clang-clanging, what is the point of all these horrendously expensive visual effects when I can't keep track of whatever it is I'm supposed to be looking at?"

I also thought: "This is giving me a fucking headache."

For the second time that day, I weaved outside dazed from a not-particularly-pleasant sensory onslaught. And that's why I won't be pissing any of my money up the wall to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

(Postscript: It was worth subjecting myself to the interview, though. I got the job. I've still got the job to this day. My interviewer likes someone who can hold their own against a verbal reaming. So the day wasn't a total bust.)