Monday, September 4, 2006
The Black Seeds played last night at Blijburg, and it went off (as expected). The festival atmosphere was awesome, laid-back and hippie, and by the second song they had I reckon everyone on the entire terrain crammed up in front of the stage rocking out. It was lovely to see the feedback loop, as the [...]
Saturday, September 2, 2006
Last night was Baseline (Hein Van de Geyn, Ed Verhoeff and Hans van Oosterhout) and John Abercrombie, a lovely gig. It hit just the right tone for me, enough original compositions and serious soloing to be out-of-the-ordinary, but still not really experimental in the “I’m lost” sense. Still, they were on-to-it enough that it felt [...]
I’ve tried a few times before to start a regular book review post schedule. It never works. Now I have a new strategy: when I start reading a book, I enter it in LibraryThing, as
tikitu-reviews (a separate account to to the one for books I own). When I finish it, if all goes according to [...]
It seems to be my week for playing with LT. I just read a book so awful that I wanted to write a review slamming it (especially given the injustice of this publicity BS turning up first in Google — that’s a nofollow link) but I don’t want it on my LT profile. So I [...]
A film recommendation: Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor), Russian fantasy (part I of a trilogy), recently opened in the US; the original was an enormous hit in Russia and the sequel just premiered. The short version: it’s a confused stylistic hodgepodge with a simplistic moral underpinning, but so consistently ugly/beautiful (visually and viscerally) that it’s a [...]
Sunday, February 19, 2006
I finished my second time through Vellum, by Hal Duncan, and I’m trying to put my impressions in some sort of order. (I also finished Cloud Atlas, but I might have to reread that before I can comment coherently.) The short version on Vellum is, the ideas are great but the execution is just enough [...]
(Update: this review was originally titled “Cosmic Horrer in Tim Powers’ Declare“. Unfortunately I was playing clever-dicky with my then brand-spanking-new blog, and hard-coded the requirement that titles of reviews are the book title, and nothing else. Eventually I’ll get around to changing this (really really stupid) system, but until then, the review gets a [...]
Just had a short film session (both parse trees) with a friend, and I had to rave about these two animated films by Polish director Tomek Baginski: Cathedral and Fallen Art.
The Catalonian band Cheb Balowski are performing this Friday at the Melkweg. I saw these guys last night in Utrecht, this is a must-see gig.
I went yesterday to the “Victorian Circus” exhibition at the Brakke Grond. Artistically disappointing, technologically highly interesting. Worth a visit, if you can get there before it closes midnight Saturday (it’s free, which helps). The Brakke Grond is also recommended — selection of fine Belgian beers, good atmosphere, biljarts table, and an art gallery thrown [...]