Tag: Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Completely Gratuitous Post of Newly Acquired Shiny Thing

So I’ve got a whole bunch of work on my plate this year where the income that’s generated is basically earmarked as “paying for Peter’s travel and con expenses.” It’s the stuff that allows me to go to the UK for World Fantasy at the end of the year, to Perth for the RWA conference in the middle of the year, and generally acquire a couple of shiny things (passports, luggage) that will make the increased amount of travel I’m doing a little easier. Today I got to pick up one of those shiny things that I’ve been patiently waiting to buy for a long while. Case in point: Picked this up on sale, along with a whole bunch of widgets, ’cause I’ve been looking for a portable computing option that isn’t Shifty Silas the Laptop. Something I can take along on those trips where all I really need is the ability to answer email, check out my RSS feed,

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

So every Tuesday I get together with my flatmate and a random assortment of other people to live-tweet a trashy movie with (usually) some kind of SF-nal flavouring. We’ve been doing it for over a year now and, due to some weeks off on account of work, finally clocked up our fifty-third film when we tweeted our way through Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Turns out this was a particularly fine choice of film, for all there are folks who wail when you label Bill and Ted as “trashy.” For starters, it turned out Kathleen Jennings had never seen this particular stain of late-eighties awesomeness, so we lured her along for the screening. For another thing, it’s one of those films that ’caused a whole bunch of the #TrashyTuesdayMovie regulars to fire up their DVD players and join in, which makes this the second time one of our movie hash-tags has done the trending thing. Apparently, when #WyldStallyns trends, it

Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

7 Notes from my First Two Days in Adelaide

1. Dreadlocks Adelaide is a city that has a love-affair with dreadlocks. Maybe it’s just that the festival is on. Maybe it’s got something to do with cannabis being decriminalised this far south. I don’t really know for sure, but I’ve been really *aware* of the number of people getting about with dreadlocked hair since we arrived yesterday morning. 2. Day One, Show One: Deanne Smith, Just Do It  (Comedy) My mother has pretty amazing tastes when it comes to stand-up comedy. The same woman who is slightly baffled by self-referential and deconstructionist narrative approaches in film and/or television picked Deanne Smith’s Just Do It as our first show of the Fringe, and thus far it’s been the best thing we’ve seen in our two days of shows and exhibitions. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. My mother and I have never really agreed on movies, television shows, or fiction, but she’s always had a truly sophisticated appreciation for

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Bright Star

I re-watched Jane Campion’s Bright Star today. Once again I am filled with a powerful need to track down people who claim Avatar was visually interesting and punch them in the stomach. Avatar, at best, managed to put together a cinematic spectacle (and even then, I’ll argue); Bright Star, which was released at the same time, is put together by folks who understand how to speak in the visual language of film and create images that are meaningful in and of themselves. It’s been four years and this still pisses me off. Avatar remains a constant disappointment, a reminder that occasionally I hope too much. Bright Star remains a delight , a film rather than a movie, and one that over-delivers on every expectation. I don’t often watch movies that qualify as art these days. I’m not entirely sure you see that many out there, in the wild. Bright Star qualifies as art. It’s worth seeing. It’s also a very

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Wuthering Heights

Sometimes, my brain, I tell you. No, wait, none of that actually makes sense when it’s written as a sentence. Let me try that again. So on the way out of the house this morning, I passed my CD rack and thought to myself, you know what I feel like listening to right now? Fucking Bombtrack. It’s been ages. So I pulled the first Rage Against the Machine disc out of my collection and took it out to the car and rocked the fuck out on my entire drive to work. It was awesome. I mean, even the pub with its motorized esky races and its double-exclamation points on pretty much anything they’re trying to advertise didn’t bother me today. I was listening to some old school RatM and I was at peace with the fucking world. Then I got to work and I parked the car and I started whistling as I walked upstairs to the QWC office where I’d

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Recent Reading: January 4th, 2013

So here’s the thing about my reading habits: I tend to do things in lots of four. On novel by a male writer, one novel by a female writer, one non-fiction book, one short story collection or anthology. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule; ebooks tend to fall outside this reading pattern at the moment, since they’re largely things I read on my phone. Books people lend me tend to get read fast too, lest they fall into the vast pit of my to-read pile and never emerge. Poetry gets read whenever I want, ’cause I’m much more likely to dip into a collection and read a poem or two than I am an entire book. For the most part, though, the pack of four is my approach of choice. I have personal rules built up around it, the same way I have personal rules built up around eating out (when there’s pork belly on the menu, order the damn pork

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Why I’m a Fan of 2 Broke Girls

So I had a Monday free from work this week and, in the absence of anything pressing on the writing front, I elected to spend the day flaked out in front of the Teev in a blatant attempt to recover from the worst of the GenreCon hangover. My televised tipple of choice – the first season of 2 Broke Girls, newly acquired on DVD by virtue of the fact that my local DVD store didn’t have season 2 of Castle on the shelves. I wasn’t really expecting much from 2 Broke Girls – it’s been routinely panned by pretty much everyone I’ve seen discussing it – but after mainlining all twenty-two episodes of Seasons One I think I’ve come to adore the show, just a little. Lets be clear – my adoration has nothing to do with the quality of the humour. There are sit-coms that I actually find consistently funny and worth-while (Community, Rosanne seasons two through four), sit-coms