Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

1. I don't think Iceland is Danish. If I remember rightly they won their independence from repressive Copenhagen in 1944, after prolonged resistance. 2. Is it just me, or does ( ) sound like the first bit of Agaetis Byrjun drawn out to four times its original length? Don't get me wrong, I liked ( ) ...

The Klezmatics - Fun Tashlikh, from the Rough Guide to Klezmer CD.

I keep hearing people talk about Modest Mouse, and I knew they had a song called 'Bukowski,' but I've never got around to listening to the band and finding out exactly what they sound like. I last saw someone mention it at the Tiny Mix Tapes website. One of their readers had written in with a reques...

Possibly Mervyn Peake, who showed me that wordiness doesn't always mean that an author is sloppy or verbally flatulent; that adjectives are not the evil that teachers at high school said they were; and that a person can be explicitly descriptive and yet simultaneously mysterious. He led me on to Chr...

I wish that I could sing in a terrific voice of profound depth and recklessness - oh, and in tune. In tune would be nice. In tune would be very very nice indeed. Most of my friends can sing but I limit myself to making a whispery grinding noise in the background. If I could sing and play the dombur ...

This has nothing to do with terrorism or aeroplanes, but the fact that he named himself after a religion makes my brain get hiccoughs every time I see it. It's like meeting someone who introduces himself as Fred Zoroastrianism or Jimmy Shinto or even some other well-known thing: George Papua New Gui...

My tech knowlege rocks in at zilch, but I have a handy pet techie on hand who helped me get rid of my bug. It turned out that the server the board was based on was so full that our messages were just bouncing out of it. Solution: move the board to a different server. It took a few days, but things s...

Two Cities is my least favourite Dickens. In his other books, even the lesser ones like American Notes , the challenge of reading them lies in keeping up with the exuberant rate of his invention, but T.C. is dry and the dryness makes it, as you say, slow. Critics had sniffed at his work and called ...

My pleasure. I came to the books after watching The Brothers Quay's Street of Crocodiles stop-motion version of his first book, and, after thinking about it, I can see what the people who describe his work as 'sex' are getting at - it's full of men who dissolve, erupt, or transform themselves, in wa...

There's a Finnish band called Gjallarhorn who use the didj to replace the drone of the more traditional native bagpipe, and it works beautifully. I wonder, however, how the people up in the NT feel about their traditional male-only instrument being waved blithely around the world and tootled away on...

Anyone who defines Schulz's writing as 'sex idolatry' or 'perversion' is being far too narrow, or else they're reading a completely different Schulz to the one I love. How could any thinking human being reduce Street of Crocodiles or Sanitorium to plain sex? The books are sensuous, with a luminous f...

I came here after seeing this problem reported on the phpBB help boards. (my board has a different problem, a bug, which I'd like to get fixed, but that's another story.) I agree with the person who told you to treat the troll like a computer virus. This is your board. This is not a democracy. Elimi...

I've been trying, fruitlessly, to get into this album. It's a shame, because I like the idea and I wish I liked the execution as well. I think it's the calm plunk-twiddly-plunk of the cello that gets to me. I prefer the rougher sound of, say, the Papua New Guineans recorded by Charles Duvelle, that ...

I don't have Hookah Cafe, but the name is ringing a bell. Is it some kind of jazz-rai? Wait - let me do a search ... ah, there it is. Found it on Amazon. The reviewers make it sound like chilled fusion exotica, which makes me think, "Ouch," but if you say it's good then I'm willing to give it a shot...