When is a new Prefab’s album not a new Prefab’s album? When it was written and recorded in 1992-93, and isn’t played on by anyone other than Paddy McAloon. And therein, perhaps, lies the problem. McAloon is incapable of writing a bad song. He also has that touch of the truly great songwriter in that […]
Archive | September, 2009
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (Jonathan Cape) £18.99
For readers whose wrists are still aching from nursing Thomas Pynchon’s previous novel, the gargantuan Against the Day, Inherent Vice – his latest bulletin from his own alternative version of America – may have arrived with unseemly haste. Yet at a mere 369 pages, this new work is not only lighter in terms of its […]
Sin Nombre (2009), dir. Cary Fukunaga
With so much debate today focussing on immigration, it seems strange that so few films have looked at the topic. Hollywood rarely goes near it for anything other than a new slant on romantic comedy (remember Green Card?) and Michael Winterbottom’s In this world remains a fairly rare instance in European cinema. Yet the immigrant […]