Myself and my wife have stumbled upon Dexter New Blood. She was ill for two weeks and off work, so we found this show and watched it together. However, it is only shown once a week so we decided to watch the series from series one. It started off great, a serial killer who works for the Miami Police Dept['s blood splatter forensics unit. We're into the third series and it's turned into a bit of a soap opera. Has anyone seen it? Is it worth sticking with?
I went in once and asked if they had runner bean flavoured crisps… …unfortunately, they only had Walker’s.
About the same time I used to do a good crawl of the Sam Smith’s pubs in central London. I’ll try and work out how many are left, but I know we ended up in the barn like Cittie of Yorke on Holborn.
Looks like there are currently 8 which would make a decent crawl, and I can remember drinking in 7 of them. Just. The one I don’t think I’ve been to is the Angel in the Fields on Thayer Street. Anyone been there?
Good stuff on the local news, at local stations on Birmingham wooden ‘music maps’ are being put up telling the stories of local bands - UB40, Steel Pulse, Black Sabbath among them - and highlighting the pubs and venues they started out at. Lovely idea. And they played a bit of Paranoid during the story. Ozzie is something of a self parody and has been for years, it’s easy to forget how genuinely radical this band was at the beginning. In other news my local is doing its traditional run up to Christmas with three days in December where, for a couple of hours, you can get 4 pints of Guinness for a tenner. Fatal. Door to door, seventy yards.
Just got back from seeing the Bob Marley musical Get Up Stand Up at the Lyric Theatre. Just Wonderful. The songs are brilliant of course and the dialogue doesn't shy away from Jamaican patois*, which is like a second language for one such as me brought up in Harlesden but may have been somewhat impenetrable for others in the audience. So sad that the great man only lived for 36 years, but this is a superb tribute and I was in tears for much of it. But then I'm just a soppy ****er. Highly recommended. * I originally typed this as patios, which would have been a wholly different review.
So I took the bait, and downloaded the "exhibition" onto Jnrs PS5. I've spent 15 minutes 'walking" around the place and the artwork is phenomenal, no wonder it took two years to make. Eerie music through the corridors, with tonnes of grafitti written on the walls, all taken from the artwork that Thom had done for the original release. When you enter certain rooms, remastered tracks from the albums are played, and as you move around the room, the sound seems to follow you - it's very well done. As a concept, it's pretty unique. I'd think you'd have to be a Radiohead fan to enjoy it, but as a neutral you'd have to be appreciative of the amount of work that has gone into creating this space. I don't think it would work well on a laptop or PC, but on a 60" tv in a dark room it's something else. This trailer doesn't really do it justice...
Stumbled across a great program on BBC Scotland a couple of nights ago - Meet You At The Hippos. Meet You at the Hippos: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00124rq via @bbciplayer Scottish actor Mark Bonnar (you'd recognise him even if the name isn't familiar) goes back to some of the new towns that he grew up in to look at how they employed artists to create street sulptures during the build phase, including his dad. Interspersed with some old footage and interviews with art historians, it's a quite funny documentary. Some of the sculptures were pretty far out, and it's a pity that some have either been removed by the local authorities or vandalised, but those that remain are quite striking. If no-one else, reckon @SW Ranger will enjoy it (though the sculptures may be a bit big for your studio!)
I read something about this and saw some pictures - didn’t his Dad make great big concrete animals? Think I recall some hippos in Dundee….
The hippos are in Glenrothes, and he also made some elephants, although their trunks are pretty wrecked now. Here's Mark with his dad at the hippos... And the hippos when they were first installed... It's a fairly random thing in the middle of a housing estate in Fife!
Pretty cool though for the people looking out of the window and not having to look at a burned out car
Managed to watch half of it so far. Good watch. So interesting to see the square buildings that were used almost everywhere in the new towns of that era, and then these interspersed irregular sculptures. I have liked the totems that I’ve seen so far. I am just at the design/make stages for my own garden sculpture commissions which are 1-2mtrs in size, which is a new direction for us since last year (working with a metal sculptor), so looking forward to these being completed and hoping to get some new pieces designed and into a couple of sculpture parks next year if we can get them accepted.
Promise to put them up when I have them completed and installed (so the clients get first viewing ). One almost completed, second is going through design drawings, but am hoping/trying to get it done before Christmas for them, but could be a tall order now with iterations of the design going on.
I’ve tonight seen them again and they were superb, far better than the Manics who they supported. They could do with some sort of enigmatic front man or woman though as I think they are a bit wooden to watch, even though their live sound is brilliant.
