Tag Archive: impotence


The heartless horror of Mother!

Filed under: Movies — 1 Comment
October 4, 2017

MOTHER! directed by Darren Aronofsky (USA, 2017)
mother1

Beware of films with exclamation marks in the title!

“Mother! is a movie designed to provoke fury, ecstasy, madness, and catharsis, and more than a little awe”.  This verdict is from a review in Vox that Darren Aronofsky says ‘gets it’.

It culminates in an apocalyptic finale that works on the theory that nothing succeeds like excess. It is shocking in the sense of being shockingly awful.

If Aronofsky’s goal was to get under my skin he succeeded but, while I usually gain a perverse pleasure from mindfuck or body horror movies, this one left me cold and with feelings of distaste and repulsion. Continue reading →

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BACKTRACKING # 13 – JOY DIVISION

Filed under: Music — Leave a comment
May 7, 2011

Part of an irregular series of bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl. (Search ‘Backtracking’ to collect the set!)

JOY DIVISION – Love Will Tear Us Apart b/w These Days / Love Will Tear Us Apart
(A Factory Record – Fac 23- 1980)

I’d hazard a guess that the majority of music fans who came of age in the seventies has at least one version of this song in their collection.

It might be any one of the numerous covers by artists like José González, Bjórk, Paul Young, Swans, U2, Arcade Fire, Calexico, Mark Owen and, my favourite, Susanna and the Magical Orchestra.

Serviceable as some of these are, there’s no improving on the original.

It was released in April 1980, just one month before Ian Curtis committed suicide. This makes the plain grey sleeve design, which resembles a gravestone, look like some spooky premonition of the singer’s tragic death. Continue reading →

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Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

Filed under: Books, Fiction, Politics — Leave a comment
January 12, 2008

book coverphilip roth

What began with ‘The Ghost Writer’ in 1979 ends 9 novels on with Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zucherman, now 71 years old, returning from 11 years self imposed isolation to find an America greatly changed for the worse. He is full of with grumpy old man observations, like viewing cell phones as “the embodiment of everything I want to escape” and also bemoans the waning of his creative powers “I may have accumulated over four decades the prestige of writing book after book but I had reached the end of my effectiveness nonetheless“. Continue reading →

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