Saturday, August 19, 2017

Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street (The Grateful Dead)


Welcome to a Fun-Packed cultural corner! 

Time for an update on what is motivatin' me over the hill this week.



Look and Learn article: Excellent piece on Sherpa Tenzing. Loving too the old ads in these magazines from the sixties. I think I remember Sky Ray 3 iceblocks (cool name), or something very similar... memory plays tricks.

The ad for some girls' mags, June and Princess Tina (cool names), that I used as the feature image above is a complete, gay hoot!


TV: Blacklist on Netflix is real fine. We are currently munching our way through season 3.

Sport: I signed up to Sky's BEIN sports channels in time to see all the drama of Arsenal's to and fro battle with Leicester last saturday. So great to have the premier league back in my living room in living colour.

Literature: I believe I'm at week 28 in my mission to read 50 books in 52 weeks. The last item on the list I mentioned was book 29 from week 24 - Warren Ellis' Gun Machine.



Since then, I've chewed through book 30 Assessment Strategies for Self-Directed Learning (Costa, Kallick), sexy title huh, book 31 - Up In The Air (Walter Kirn) and now I'm on book 32 - Nick Hornby's Juliet Naked.

Gun Machine was superb. Warren Ellis (no, not the musician in Nick Cave's band, but yes, the guy who did Castlevania) is a terrific writer with a mind and imagination like the tip of something very sharp, like a razor or a pin or a, um, sword - you know, like rilly sharp! 

Up In The Air was a tad disappointing. Another case of the movie version taking the lead character and writing a completely different story around him. Bizarre.

Somehow I missed Juliet Naked when it came out. It's pretty good - not up there with his best but sitting nicely under About A Boy. I have a nagginly vague feeling that I have read it before but I've now put that down to Nick's familiar prose style.



Record find of the week: Robert Hunter's debut from 1974 - Tales of the Great Rum Runners. I've kept an eye out for this ever since seeing the cover in an album cover book. What an amazing cover right?

Being a Grateful Dead fan means I'm very familiar with his stuff. So I was thrilled to get my mits on this in the $10 sale bin at Real Groovy while in Auckland for Jerrrrrrey!

K. You're up to date!

Love and peace - Wozza

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