Selected Criticism

Murder Most Florid.

For your average journalist, the holy grail of stories is the murder.

This may sound crass, but the murder is unique. It beats every other story in terms of shock, impact, and sheer narrative drive. Council business is endlessly complex. Car crashes are sad and messy. Murders might be all of these things, but they are also singularly complete, a fully-formed story in and of themselves. All murders, whether crimes of passion or pre-meditated, happen for a reason. They have victims and criminals, innocents and sinners, goodies and baddies. It doesn’t matter how convoluted those dark hours that lead up to the act are - there is always a shocking simplicity at their core. That is why they are the mainstay of film and television. No wonder newspapers love them.

Most journalists, at least, ones working for regional British newspapers, won’t come across murder cases that often - if at all. But out in the wide open spaces of East Texas, or the urban conurbation of Dallas/Fort Worth, homicide seems to be more common than village fetes.

Recently, I have become addicted to these stories, and more specifically, this kind of storytelling. I have always had a soft spot for this long form journalism. At university, I did work on the New Journalism, the first-person, semi-fictionalised accounts of Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and George Plimpton, where storytelling overtakes fact checking. The pursuit of the great American novel has always been seen as the USA’s greatest artistic challenge, but those years in the 1960s and 1970s proved that some of the best competitors were ducking out of the fight and picking smaller battles instead. Lester Bangs wrote little but record reviews, but he challenged Roth and Updike for raw expression and sharp humour.

The masterpiece of the age was, for me, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the true-life tale of two killers who murdered a Kansas family in a bungled robbery. Capote spent months integrating himself into the town, interviewing friends and family, and even the murderers themselves, to reveal the story of what happened in that isolated farmhouse. The book is unnerving, the prose sparse but textured, as flat and as hypnotising as the Midwestern landscape it portrays.

Capote’s natural successor is Skip Hollandsworth. A staff writer at Texas Monthly, he has, for more than two decades, researched and revealed the shame and structure of dozens of murders. Each story is gripping, cleverly wrought, with fragments of dialogue or diary interjected into the main text, a post-modern reflection on the many faces of his murderers, but they always resolve themselves into stark clarity by the end. The characters are all sketched in simple details - no-nonsense cops, or quiet-spoken family men who had issues with their mothers. But they all ring true. All the lives of quiet determination and desperation, lived out by the oil wells and high school football stadiums - they all ring true, because they are true. These things happened, and these things hurt. And it is in writing them that he goes some way towards healing them.

The true-crime genre can often seem a little seedy, the kind of thing you’d find in the back of cheaply-printed women’s magazines, but there is a quality to Hollandsworth’s journalism that earns its place in any publication. He is not a hack, but a writer with an incredible talent for storytelling, a chronicler of people and places who deserves a place at the table alongside any novelist. Read See No Evil, the tale of a creepy serial killer, and see a story as compelling as any shock-horror crime novel or blockbuster thriller. Try Honor Thy Father, and discover a Greek tragedy sprawled across suburbia. It is journalism at its best - it is writing at its finest.

Journalists across the world are hunting every day and every week for the holy grail, waiting to see if it crop up on their patch. But even if the choicest murder appeared in their road, they wouldn’t grab that fabled chalice. Hollandsworth proves what every comedian has known for years: it’s the way you tell ‘em.

Skip Hollandsworth

Freudian Grips.

Lucian Freud was not very good at painting ducks.

It seems like an odd criticism to make of the man who was, for my money, the greatest British painter of the past hundred years, and one of the finest figurative painters ever to have put brush to canvas. But it was a fact that leapt out at me as I wandered round his posthumous exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. There, in the final room, a late work, large in scale, light in tone, two children holding ducks. Everything about them is reasonable enough - fluffy white feathers, pointy orange beaks. But they are wrong somehow, squatting unnaturally in the scene like interlopers from another work. They are out of kilter with with his usual furniture - mottled flesh, unmade beds, comatose whippets and manky floorboards - crouched in the children’s hands like invented masks for something else. They just don’t fit. In terms of ducks, Beatrix Potter’s Jemima, even rendered in simple lines, has more ineffable duckinshness about her.

Still, this feels like the only criticism you can draw from a walk around this enveloping, almost overwhelming show. Everywhere you look there is a painting of such magnitude, of such magnificence, it would be a centrepiece for any other artist’s display. From the early works, with the faces given alienesque proportions and cat-like almond eyes, to the final, faltering canvases of gargantuan nudes contorted amid dirty sheets, this is a collection that underlines Freud’s stature.

There is something about the scenery here - the landscapes of rugged flesh - that feels inescapably familiar, but up close, each work reveals the subtlety of his craft. Skin has never been so complex as it is in these paintings. A child in their first art class reaches for shocking pink to show their parent’s faces - as they get older, they turn to peach as their safest bet. But Freud showed skin as it really is, a downbeat spectrum of blues and greens, reds and pinks, greys and greys, layers of pigment overlapping in waves and folds that is both honest and unnerving. You see skin, but sense the veins and muscles underneath.

What struck me though was not the interior life being studied, although doubtless that is there. What I felt was the exterior world that surrounds each body, a sense of space that crowds around the contours of folded arms and legs. What you are seeing is not just a person on a bed - you are seeing the light of west London filtering through a skylight that hasn’t been cleaned for six months, the dirty pigeons clustered on the sill, the delayed bus growling in the street outside, the single mother with her pram turning her collar up against the autumn breeze. Each painting is an entire world.

The worlds find their microcosm in the hands that Freud gives to his models. I say gives to them rather than finds on them, because their is something unique about Freud’s depiction of hands that transcends the people that posed. In their creased palms and worn-out fingers, there is such simplicity, such power, that they are the single defining feature of his work. No one has painted hands like this since Michaelangelo, and Freud does it with more efficiency and verve than even he did. These paintings are Old Masters, painted by an old master. The tenderness of these tendons is the measure of Freud’s genius, and it is one that should be experienced while this remarkable exhibition remains.

Just watch out for those ducks.

Double Portrait, 1985-1986

The Bill of Frights.

There is a subtle art to the newspaper bill. It is different to a headline, although many people get them confused - although both reduce a story, be it a death, a fire, or a sunken ship, down to a handful of stark words, bills have their own unique quirks and character that a headline writer will never have to worry about. For one thing, a headline will always be packaged with a story underneath it. That means it can be a joke, because the punchline is never far behind. A bill, four or five black on white words guarding the newsagents, stands defiantly alone. It is a microcosm. It must tell the story, but not quite give it away (we all hope that someone still actually buys the paper). It must be straight-talking, but with enough curve to intrigue. It must shock, but never repel.

Writing them is a challenge, and one I tackle on weekly basis. The pre-determined space available, one portrait-like box, is like a coffin waiting for its occupant. Any word with more than eight letters is tricky to squeeze on, and anything taller than five words starts to force them to squeeze up like inscrutable hieroglyphics. Bad ones are always striking ( DEAD / WOMAN / FOUND IN / CEMETERY) whereas good ones go unnoticed, just another unwanted ad in the high street. But to people like me they hold a certain niche appeal - the haikus of newsprint’s disposable literature.

Thankfully, their strange artistry has not gone totally unnoticed. Gilbert & George, the sartorially sharp, discerningly contrarian art duo, have created their latest work, London Pictures, out of 3,712 newspaper bills they have carefully stolen over the past six years. 292 of them have made them into the show, a series of their trademark large photo-montages, rendered huge and glossy and bound in their unyielding black grids. Each selection groups the bills by linguistic theme - YOB, BANKER, STABBING, DEATH PLUNGE, HATE, TERROR, KILLING - the better to reveal the verbal shorthand that journalists use to stratify the world around them.

It is an arresting display. Black, white, and red, just like the old joke, the pictures are physically dazzling, a kaleidoscopic vision of repetition that breaks down, frame by frame, as you take in each bill in all its shouted, abbreviated glory. All life is here, or at least, a version of life as paraded by the tabloids: BANKER / ACCUSED / OF RAPING / DAUGHTER, or: BANKER / VANISHES / WITH TWO / SHOTGUNS. Who wouldn’t want to know what went on in the pages beyond these?

And yet, accumulated together, the images remind you there is more to these stories than the 350 monochrome words which makes it onto the day’s splash, or the half dozen words they are shrunk to here. Occasional snigger aside, there is a whole patchwork of tragedy that throbs behind them, grief that will tumble through generations. “Is it art?” one might ask. “Is it news?” might be just as valid.

As a picture of London, it is exquisite. Where else except this tireless, tiresome place could such tales as: BANKERS / S+M / DEATH / RIDDLE,  or: BIG / BUMMED / BURGLAR / BANGED UP spring from? It is less of a portrait, more a psycho-geographical map, demarking a fault line of of eccentricity and murder around the capital’s boroughs. From their home and studio in Fournier Street, where the civilised civil partners live in the shadow of Hawksmoor’s imposing church, the pair have told a tale of a city, and also illustrated their own distinctive ramblings. The artists are ever present here, hovering in the background of distorted photographs that provide a backdrop to the text, or looming as spectral disembodied eyes that burn out at the reader. The pictures are as much about Gilbert & George as they are about London, but of course, they are inseparable.

The show is running at White Cube’s three galleries until May 12, 2012. Read all about it. After all, today’s news, tomorrow’s fish and chips.

moderatenothing asked: great review of ATR! x

Thanks! More music reviews coming up soon.

Atari Teenage Disquiet.

Perhaps it was appropriate that Atari Teenage Riot chose February 29th, a day that rarely exists, to play a triumphant London gig. The band themselves are something of a fleeting, transient proposition. Break-neck music, line-up changes, and an indefinite hiatus lasting the best part of ten years, mean that the band existing at all is something of an achievement.

Of course, they haven’t all made it. Carl Crack, the Berliners’ original MC, died of a drug overdose back in 2001, while Hanin Elias went a separate route, briefly fleeing to French Polynesia. But the current trio - brooding CX KiDTRONiK, ferocious Nic Endo, and the indomitable, inimitable Alec Empire, are as tight a unit as they were 20 years ago when they emerged, snarling and feral, from the German underground.

I’ve often described ATR as the conceptually perfect band. Young (perhaps not so much now), beautiful (Empire has cheekbones you could break dictatorships on), violently political (an early single was called Hetzjagd Auf Nazis! or “Hunt Down The Nazis”), they carried with them the aura of the last gang in town, and made music that sounded like nothing else on earth. They mixed hardcore punk, thrash metal, hip-hop emceeing, and grinding, pounding dance music to make a sonic onslaught that seems, for the few minutes it lasts, like the logical end point of popular music.

Cerebral critics will tell you, hand on chin, that their electronic dance background comes from the sleek, industrialised techo clubs of Kreuzberg or Dresden, but in the flesh, sweaty and mottled as it is, their pulsing beats have a different feel. There’s a more Mediterranean swagger to the music’s flow, beats that take on a leery, Balearic tone, notes that, while still as taut as a landmine’s tripwire, actually don’t sound too far removed from the club bangers that populate the charts. It goes to show though, the difference between a Friday night at your local retail park super-club and an ATR gig, is the same as the difference between murder and manslaughter - intent.

The intent at the Garage in Highbury is focussed and decisive. Any casting director looking for a band to play the mega-rave in their post-apocalyptic film could do no better than book ATR. Empire challenges for the title of most charismatic man in rock/noise/music/art/culture/life, wielding a megaphone like a battleaxe and screaming slogans against the government, the banks, the system. At one pause in the set, he rallies the crowd together, praising Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, as well as internet collective Anonymous. “People think I’m a conspiracy theorist, huh?” he poses, eyes contorted with the glare of the truly paranoid. “I won’t stop until all the Nazis disappear” he offers at another juncture. You don’t get this with The Vaccines.

Energy-drink Relentless have sponsored the gig, but with tickets at £5, the “sell-out” murmurings are kept low-key and soon drowned out altogether. The show is ripped through in double time, a million BPM, ear-shredding noise that obliterates most of the lyrics aside from their cute penchant for screaming their own name. The blasting songs, each filled with super-accelerated Kalashnikov drumbeats, are accompanied with an ever-present strobe light, a seizure-inducing barrage of what remains the greatest real-life special effect. The overall impression is dizzying, disorientating, and deafening. I love it. I’ve never felt anything like it. For one glorious hour I would follow Empire into the heart of revolution, and I’m still pretty sure I’d pass him matches now.

SMASH THE BANKS. UNSEAT THE GOVERNMENT. DEBASE THE CURRENCY.

On my way out, I bought a t-shirt.

The Room, With a View.

The Room is widely declared to be the worst film ever made. Now, this is a difficult thing to quantify. For one thing, most people haven’t seen every film ever made, so finding a worst is based on a fair amount of assumption and guess work. You have to believe that out there, in the archives of tapes and reels, there is nothing that can be worse than this. On top of that, there is the fact that to discover a worst, you must go against not only a critical impulse, but also a natural instinct, to deliberately avoid exposing yourself to something that is bad - even actively unpleasant. Most people don’t want to do that. We want things that are good, things which validate our belief in our own good taste. When a positive critical consensus forms around a work, like a pearl around perfect grit, it draws people in. Word of mouth spreads, the glamour grows, and the canon becomes self-sustaining, with the same Top 100 lists republished endlessly with only minor variations on a tired theme.

To discover something truly bad then, takes effort. Thankfully, with The Room, the work has already been done for us. It is bad, shockingly bad, so bad that many people assume it is a joke. And yet, it’s not quite that bad. It has the semblance of a plot, it has a narrative arc that moves from conflict into tragedy, it has moments, almost, of actual drama. It’s not like those films you used to get on Channel 5 at 10.55pm on Friday nights starring Shannon Tweed, or those non-budget horror films which populate the DVD bins of petrol stations. But like the “uncanny valley” effect that means the closer that robots come to resembling humans, the more disturbing they appear, the closer a bad film comes to being like a real film, the more unnerving it is.

In every respect, The Room is deeply flawed. The acting, the writing, the cinematography, all are woefully amateur. There are scenes that are so awkward, it’s as if the director has not only never seen another film before; it’s as though he’s never watched two people having a conversation before.

Usually, a director acting alone couldn’t go too far wrong, but when the writer, producer, executive producer and lead actor are all terrible too, problems inevitably arise. In the case of The Room, all of these diverse roles are taken by the same person: Tommy Wiseau. Wiseau, a slightly shady figure with an accent as baffling as his hair, created The Room as a massive vanity project which could cast his singular genius in massive form across the big screen. Unfortunately, this genius never quite expresses itself as you imagine Wiseau would like it too. To begin with, you think it’s you that has the problem. Maybe you misheard that oddly-read line? Maybe the sketchy jump cuts are part of a deeper artistry you just don’t get? But no. It’s him. There is nothing here less than defective. Characters emerge to prominence when they’ve never been introduced. People pick up objects in one room then walk into another with their hands empty. To keep the audiences interested in two people talking, Wiseau makes the characters constantly sit down and stand up, like pneumatic pistons. He re-uses footage within ten minutes of it originally being shown. The dubbing is flat-out atrocious. No one ever shuts the bloody door.

That’s not to say this tale of sad adultery isn’t worth watching. On the contrary, watching it was probably my favourite cinema experience ever. It was more like watching a football match. I had heard there was audience interaction, but this is something else. It never stops. People shout and scream. They argue with characters. They throw things (mainly plastic cutlery, thanks to Wiseau’s decision to scatter his set with pictures of spoons, the placeholder image in some shop-bought picture frames). I was hoarse by the end of it. Not only should you watch this film, you should go right now, and take all your friends, because they won’t get what you’re talking about unless they see it too, just as you’re not getting what I’m saying now.

It may be incomprehensible. It may be sexist. It may be funded by the Mafia (which prompts the interesting axiom - California making films about the mob = good, the mob making films about California = bad). But it is not the worst film ever made. Indeed, it just might be the best.

(The worst is probably a porn film. Or Black Swan.)

Blogged to Death

When Lana Del Rey’s debut album, Born to Die, was released last week, it kicked up a digital dust storm that rolled around the entire indie blogosphere. Of course, Ms Del Rey (nee Elizabeth “Lizzie” Grant, as I’m duty-bound to interject) and her team at Interscope probably won’t be too concerned by the fuss it’s caused among the bearded men in plaid. Outselling the rest of the top five albums in the UK put together, the record has secured a spot high enough on the shelf to avoid the dirty cloud it’s left in its wake.

In the eye of the storm, the critics howled and gnashed their teeth. Drowned in Sound tried to pierce her manufactured carapace. Our American cousins at Pitchfork ummed and ahhed over the album’s true value in our post-modern world. Perhaps strangest of all was the response from Tiny Mix Tapes, which, when faced with the record, decided to eschew prose and instead resorted to a robotic list of thematic references across the twelve tracks, providing an index for future scholars to peruse. Much tutting followed.

Yet in a way, their contemporary concordance to the Collected Works of Lana Del Rey was the most appropriate response of all. Turning into Vivian Darkbloom (Vladimir Nabokov’s anagramatised female alter-ego) makes a lot of sense, as “she” glossed “his” books in the same way TMT did to LDR. Why Nabokov, the Greatest Novelist of the 20th Century (my opinion, based upon the available facts)? Well, the White Russian hovers over the album as much as David Lynch or Nancy Sinatra. The lyric “Light of my life, fire of my loins”, cribbed from the front end of Nabokov’s most perfect novel, Lolita, also propels Del Rey’s Off to the Races. Not to mention one of the album’s bonus track that’s just called, with less of a nod of the head and more of a hands-up, “yeah whatever”, Lolita.

What do the songs and the novel have in common? Not a lot, if we’re honest. The Master would cringe at some of tin-eared rhymes that clunk along like one of Detroit’s worst automobile efforts. What makes them worse is the painful insincerity. When she sings “I will love you till the end of time; I would wait a million years”, you know she doesn’t mean it. She barely sounds like she can picture the guy she’s singing it to. This is, I suppose, what happens when you co-wrote the songs with people like former Fame Academy (remember that? The BBC’s rival to Pop Idol? No, me neither) winner David Sneddon. Aside from a litany of apposite references - mainly brand names and place names, the proper nouns that make up life as we know it - a lot of the words are dud. Even Video Games, the stand-out track that stands head and naked shoulders above the rest of the album, doesn’t make a lot of sense.

It barely matters. There is more than enough here to keep the interest. The strings that surge into trite Technicolour at the opening of Born to Die set the tone perfectly, and it is the tone that carries the listener through. The production, shimmery and dusky at once, is a wonder, and the entire album sounds both poppy and lounge at the same time, like a poppers party in your grandmother’s living room. There’s more bass than the casual listener might expect, deep, hopping basslines that underscore the showtunes (each dropping in at a key emotive point), and industrialised drums that give a machined trim to the tracks.

There’s the voice, too. Sometimes scorned live (as her Saturday Night Live performance showed), here it is velvety and moreish, though not afraid of tics and quirks. Occasionally it’s more Cher Lloyd than Regina Spektor, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

There’s little Nabokovian granduer to the album all in all. You could try and argue that it re-stages the old critical conflict of Lolita - is it jaded Europe deflowering innocent, naive America, or coquettish America seducing elegant, civilised Europe? - but it’s doesn’t bear the weight of the effort. It just wafts the dust storm on again, and everything gets dirty. But the music remains. Lana Del Rey stands, pristine.

Heaven-11

The accelerated news cycle of print media, pressured now by the steroid-like inducements of the web, mean that when magazines cobble together their “Best of XXXX” lists, they’re usually written and on the page long before Auld Lang Syne has been drunkenly sung around the earth.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to wait until the first month of 2012 has nearly passed before trying to settle on my favourite eleven records of 2011. And that’s not just because I didn’t get round to hearing most of them until Christmas.

1. Braids - Native Speaker

I first encountered the glassy tones and guitar burbles of Canadian quartet Braids at Latitude festival back in the rainy summer months. Ankle deep in mud, with the background sibilance of rain on the canvas roof of the tent, their complex rhythms and intertwining melodies were both calming, and yet strangely fraught. The tautology of the music and the tautness of the sound make for a heady, engrossing mixture. 

2. A Winged Victory for the Sullen - A Winged Victory for the Sullen

For a genre that eschews churning traditionalism, “post rock” has always struggled to veer away from a rather rigid and narrow self-definition. “Post classical” is no more likely to surge to new and distant realms, but the aching strings of A Winged Victory for the Sullen are more than enough to make you realise than minimalism can be just so expansive. Elegiac, stirring, dreamy and dreary, and with titles like Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears, it even has a sense of humour. A mesmeric record.

3. Explosions in the Sky - Take Care, Take Care, Take Care

Part of the “post rock” old guard that inspires ire and adoration in equal measures, the Texan team provided one of my favourite live experiences of the year when they shook Camden’s Roundhouse to its foundations. The latest album didn’t stray far from their gridded template of chiming guitars, crescending drums and hearts in the air climaxes, but it didn’t have to. Their genius is elemental, as distinctive as tone, tempo and timbre. 

4. Yuck - Yuck

Was it as good as their early demos suggested? Perhaps not. Was it still a winning collection of rousing songs? It absolutely was. Fun and fuzzy, revelling in American college rock through a patina of English eccentricity, it was an album of raw atmosphere, a smoke-stained haze of joy. Chorus crashed into chorus with wild abandon, and the reverberations can still be felt.

5. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

Less immediate that some of the others on this list, but a firm favourite among every critical firmament, these Anglicised anthems wormed their way into my head like shells burrowing deep into Flanders’ claggy mud. An album of war and loss, of nature denatured by men and machines, it is a testament to Harvey’s talents as a songwriter and sympathetic historian.

6. Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness

I don’t like sports, but I love Los Campesinos!. Seeing as they love sport, this is a difficult position to hold, especially when half their songs about love and despair are wrapped in the metaphor of an England ‘96 shirt or told as tales set on the baize of a worn snooker table. But with lyrics this rich and resonant, and music so solid and insistent, this album, their most consistent and focussed yet, soon transcended its playing field origins.

7. Josh T Pearson - Last of the Country Gentleman

Having only heard Pearson’s last significant output, his work with Lift to Experience and their grandiose double album The Texas Jerusalem Crossroads, last year, I didn’t know if I was ready for this. What this was was something both removed and yet still fused to his previous work. Stripped of bluster and ballast, but with the same emotional resonance and profound, agonising depth, this was a country record that shuns stadiums in favour of late night, solitary soul searching. Hold on to your hats, say goodbye to your heart. 

8. Emmy the Great - Virtue

It wouldn’t be right to call this is a leap forward from Emma-Lee Moss’ first album, but it scarcely had to be. Warm, intimate, with a knack for song craft that is as redolent of native British folk as it is of American alt-rock bands, this was album to hum to and to hug to, with imagery as large as the dinosaurs of its opening track.

9. Bright Eyes - The People’s Key

My love of Conor Oberst, his projects, and his productions, are well known, and did not falter when he released this, a flame-licked fantastical odyssey through paranoia and personal faith, via pomegranates and lizards disguised as humans. Another testament to Oberst’s talents, each lyric lit up like a flare among the hushed darkness of the tracks themselves. Another explosive addition to the canon. 

10. Johnny Foreigner - Vs. Everything

Fewer intense squalls of noise, more collages of sounds and stitched-together impressions of emotions, this was JoFo’s most bewildering and beguiling record yet. Long, but not too long, a greater use of Kelly’s voice softened the serrated guitar assault of yore, yet the gang vocals that throbbed together through the album’s centrepieces were more powerful than anything else they’ve ever done.

11. Dananananaykroyd - There is a Way

Though the album may be less memorable that their debut, the group’s sad demise meant that this will stand as a final testament to their greatness. Always more ferocious live than on plastic, the butch workouts of their day-glo hardcore still stand out, with tracks like Muscle Memory packing a mighty sonic punch. We will remember them, by the ringing in our ears if nothing else.

Dananananaykroyd playing last year. The green shoes are mine. Thanks to Marky Thomsett’s photo skills, see a full set of the fateful night here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/markyssnaps/sets/72157625824252049/

Byromania.

Like all good former (now reformed) English students, I had my dalliance with Lord Byron. That mop of dark hair, the curled contemptuous lip, his quick way with a couplet and breezy use of ottova rima - I admit it, he had his wicked way with me, and god help me, I enjoyed it. I ended up following him round his old haunts. At Trinity, I signed my name in the matriculation register underneath his awkward statue in the Wren Library (it was intended for Westmister Abbey, but he wasn’t allowed in - wrong kind of shoes). In Nottingham, I rode the tram with one eye out for the end of the line at Hucknall, where Byron lies buried. In Italy, I took a lonely vaparetto out to the island of San Lazarro where Byron spent time with the Armenian monks. It was love at first reading, and it is a love that has never faded. To my eternal embarrassment, I still drunkenly toast his name.

After writing my first year dissertation on his early works (he tried to burn all the copies - I should have done the same with my essay), I was asked to produce an altered version for the Cambridge Authors website, putting my half-considered musings up alongside some of the current critical greats. I don’t think this piece is up there with Johnson, Hazlitt, De Quincey, or even sorry old Eliot, but it’s nice to have my critical views established somewhere. Even if it does make reference to the NME.

http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cambridgeauthors/byron-life-and-work-2

Walesong.

There was a time when I lived in Wales.

I moved there when I was about ten. It was different to Yorkshire, in some ways, though quite similar in others. The main difference was the way all road signs listed everything twice. This is commendably thorough, and all lends a faintly ridiculous air to certain directions: “Barry / Barri” being a particular favourite (now made totes mainstream by Gavin & Stacey, which deserves a blog all of its own thanks to me being one of the few people who must have actually experienced both Barry and Billericay for extended periods of time).

Anyway, there was a time when I lived in Wales and I wrote a blog. Another blog, a different blog, an earlier blog. I did it for Media Wales, the company to whom I was briefly indentured, and it appeared on their website alongside serious news, and stories about rugby. I didn’t write many posts for it, and the ones that were written were mainly done while sitting out different work experience placements, but there were some fun topics addressed. It also gave me my first real experience of feedback (read: “criticism”) when a question-setter from Only Connect took issue with my good-natured teasing of the show (I stand by every word).

Also, for reasons beyond my ken, it is still the first Google result if you search for my name.

And so, for the sake of completion, I include the full archive here for future generations to ignore:

http://blogs.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/josh_farrington/