This is the place where I’ll archive my most recent weekly blogs. These posts are arranged in chronological order beginning with the most recent. Blogs which are more than thirty weeks old will appear in the menu, Essays, under the sub-menu, Old Blogs.
FOR OLD TIMES’ SAKE
Clouded Yellow: We’ve been friends for such a long time, you and me, and now we’re two old codgers sitting close to the fire because we need to keep warm. Do you remember how we used to talk about things that really mattered to us? Those hopes and wishes? How we laughed and wept about…
BUZZWORDS I HATE
This week I’m going to spoil myself and release my inner Old Fart, and do what old people do best: Rant. This need to fulminate nearly always goes alongside a sense that the world is in terminal decline and that this fall from grace is reflected in our language, so I intend to single out…
D.O.A. (1949/50)
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched this movie yet, you may not want to read further until you’ve seen it. Unlike the film noir I discussed in my recent blog, Double Indemnity, which was an A-list film featuring major Hollywood actors and given a fairly large budget by Paramount, D.O.A. was produced by a short-lived…
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched this movie yet, you may not want to read further until you’ve seen it. I know this is a rather obvious choice as my first film noir to become the sole focus of one of my Sunday Updates: if we ran a poll of a thousand avid noir fans,…
THE ACHES & PAINS OF OLD AGE
SUNDAY, 16 NOVEMBER 2025 When we’re young, very few of us can imagine ourselves growing old. We see these sorry creatures with white hair struggling to walk a few steps and taking what feels like an age to do even the most basic of tasks and they almost seem to be a different species. Often…
DO HUMAN BEINGS NEED RELIGION?
SUNDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2025 DO HUMAN BEINGS NEED RELIGION? Nietzsche’s famous quote, ‘God is dead. And we have killed him.’, is far from true if we take it to signify the demise of religion. While this may be the case in pockets of western Europe, although even there God isn’t quite dead but has been…
CHARLIE CHAN IN HOLLYWOOD
SUNDAY, 2 NOVEMBER 2025 Although the ‘Golden Age of Hollywood’ saw the release of almost fifty Charlie Chan films, this blog will largely focus on those made between 1931 and 1937, with Warner Oland as Chan and Keye Luke as Number One Son. The main reason for this is that they’re by far the best…
CAN A VEGAN KILL A COCKROACH?
SUNDAY, 26 OCTOBER 2025 Don’t worry, any vegans who may happen to stumble across this, I promise it won’t be a diatribe against veganism. I know I could have written ‘a Buddhist’ instead, but I’ve got to join the modern world of clickbait at some point if I hope to attract any readers, and while…
CULTURAL EXCHANGE
SUNDAY, 19 OCTOBER 2025 Or should I have used ‘appropriation’? This was much less of a concern when I was growing up: books would simply describe the arrival of Japanese prints in Europe after Japan opened up to the world and their deep influence on some of the Impressionists and painters like Van Gogh; or…
MEMORY
SUNDAY, 12 OCTOBER 2025 In last week’s blog I mentioned a film noir titled Somewhere in the Night about a soldier returning from the war who is suffering from amnesia and doesn’t remember anything about his past. The movie depicts his desperate attempt to find out who he is and what happened to him before the…
FILM NOIR
SUNDAY, 5 OCTOBER 2025 SPOILER ALERT: As always with essays about movies, this warning is required. I’ve tried my best not to reveal too much of the plots of the films I mention here, but not divulging them at all is frankly impossible. In one sense, film noir never existed. It wasn’t an artistic movement…
THE WISDOM OF OLD AGE
SUNDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER 2025 I wasn’t quite arrogant enough to think that I knew everything when I was a young man, but I certainly thought I knew a lot more than I did. My knowledge at the time was far from deep or broad enough to recognise the gaping hole of my ignorance. I don’t…
DEFINING ART
SUNDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER 2025 One of the questions that rattled around the art world and academia during the 20th century was ‘What is Art?’ Things had seemed simple enough not all that many years before: Art was a picture on a canvas hanging in a gallery or in a rich person’s house, or perhaps paintings on…
DEAD INTERNET THEORY
SUNDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER 2025 Using the internet has always involved balancing the benefits of our access to its wealth of information with the problems of the surfeit of this information and the difficulty of evaluating its quality and honesty. For me, as for most regular users I imagine, this balance has always tilted towards the…
MY TOP TWENTY HIT PARADE
SUNDAY 7 SEPTEMBER 2025 I’m going to be totally self-indulgent this week. About a year ago, I responded to a YouTube video by Samuel Andreyev in which he listed twenty songs he felt everyone should know, so I thought I’d do something similar as a change from my usual doom-laden stuff about humanity’s slide into…
MICKEY MOUSE DEGREES: THE ARTS & SCIENCES
SUNDAY, 31 AUGUST 2025 I have a Mickey Mouse degree. Or I assume I do. Because if people find out I have a doctorate, they may look vaguely impressed for a moment. Until they ask me in which field and I reply ‘Theatre Studies’, after which I’ve had a few people literally burst out laughing,…
INFANTILISATION & DIANAFICATION
24 AUGUST 2025 This week I’ll look at two trends which many people on the right of politics claim to discern in contemporary life: infantilisation and Dianafication, both of which they view as destructive developments. According to these critiques, the former manifests itself in authorities of all kinds – governments, health services, advertisers, educationalists, health…
THE INTERNET: BROKEN PROMISES
SUNDAY, 17 AUGUST 2025 I’m more than old enough to remember the early days of the internet when its advocates breathlessly informed us that it would make a genuinely participatory democracy possible because everyone would have a voice, not just the rich and the powerful and big business and the mass media, and as a…
THE DEATH THROES OF WESTERN DEMOCRACY?
SUNDAY, 10 AUGUST 2025 The UK government has just passed the Online Safety Act, a law requiring everyone who wants to access any internet site that contains ‘adult material’ to register by showing a form of ID such as their passport or credit card details to prove that they are eighteen, or to allow the…
IS ‘WOKE’ DESTROYING BRITISH COMEDY?
SUNDAY, 3 AUGUST 2025 One of my favourite comedy movies is The Producers, (directed by Mel Brooks, 1967). It came out of America, but I see it as a good example of what has happened to comedy over the last sixty years in UK culture as well. The film sends up just about everyone and…
THREE CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD MOVIES WITH WEAK ENDINGS?
SUNDAY, 27 JULY 2025 I’m going to look at the endings of three movies from the ‘classic’ period of Hollywood: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), and Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946). I must start with a spoiler alert. I can’t discuss the endings of these films without giving away information about what…
SCIENCE & PSEUDOSCIENCE
SUNDAY, 20 JULY 2025 Nowadays many online posters argue enthusiastically in favour of what they term ‘science’; one popped up on my Facebook feed this morning. The person who was speaking seemed supremely confident about what science is and equally certain about what can be labelled pseudoscience. While I suspect that almost all of us…
RANDOM THOUGHTS ON VEGANISM
SUNDAY, 13 JULY 2025 Veganism has a much stronger presence online than it does in the mainstream media. This is partly because diet in general is a battleground in the virtual world, particularly on YouTube, where a gaggle of self-declared health experts slug it out with each other about the boons and evils of a…
DOES AI TELL PORKIES?
SUNDAY, 6 JULY 2025 AI is undeniably the topic du jour. The newspapers are full of it, videos are popping up like a plague of rabbits all over YouTube, and many of my online students in the arts and humanities seem desperate to discuss its ramifications. I’m wary about jumping on this bandwagon because, as…
GENIUS
SUNDAY, 29 JUNE 2025 ‘Genius’ was a word which appeared almost without fail in every tribute to Brian Wilson which I read or listened to over the past fortnight. It has become increasingly common in contemporary discourse and has been semantically bleached to the point where it seems everyone and his dog can be defined…
GOOD VIBRATIONS
SUNDAY, 22 JUNE 2025 The Beach Boys were such an important part of my teenage years that I want to respond to the news of Brian Wilson’s death last week. They were the first band I saw live, when they played Birmingham around the time of the release of Good Vibrations (although they disappointed me,…
CARS IN POPULAR MUSIC
SUNDAY, 15 JUNE 2025 The car has been an integral feature of post-war popular music since the arrival of the teenager was announced in Life Magazine in 1944. Whereas in Europe the iconography of the new youth culture tended to centre on the motor bike or the scooter, in the vaster expanses of America the…
PRIVATE & PUBLIC SPACE
SUNDAY, 8 JUNE 2025 When I was young, I was generally scathing about manners. I saw them as fake, either a strategy posh people used to put you in your place or the vacuous expression of petit-bourgeois insincerity. A lot of this probably stemmed from my English upbringing, in which ‘We must meet up sometime’…
THE BLACK SWAN
SUNDAY, 1 JUNE 2025 I’m always behind the curve in terms of the books I read because I can no longer afford the full price when they’re fresh off the printing press, so I have to pick up what I can from a charity book sale near where I live, where I can get them…
FOOD, PERFIDIOUS FOOD
SUNDAY, 25 MAY 2025 I have to admit I’m a sucker for YouTube videos on the subject of food and nutrition. It’s a weird and wacky world which mixes genuine scientific research with kooky, off-the-wall claims, populated by ideologues in white coats with a stethoscope hanging from their breast pocket (subtle semiotics, uh?). They all…
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