Magazines

Carly Death Rae Jepsen

I have spoken of my love for Sound On Sound before. It’s a popular music magazine that’s about music. It cares for more about excellence than coolness. If you enjoy the mocking of naked emperors, its demo review pages are especially fun. Sadly, I had to save money a few months back when my subscription came […]

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Parallel Lives

It’s all over for the ‘Head On the front page of The Spectator online, Fraser Nelson suggests that David Cameron could be “the British [Barack] Obama“, which struck me as a coincidence, because I am the British Gore Vidal.

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“Till Murder Us Do Part”

Here at PooterGeek we love reality mags. If I had to compile a list of British Women I Have Met Who Will Never Appear In One then new media guru Suw Charman would be in the top ten, but she’s the sort of girl who probably plugs her MacBook Pro into an Infinite Improbability Drive to […]

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Philosophers: 2 — Scientists: 0

Last Friday I found myself stuck in a room in a Cambridge college waiting to do a photo job so I took Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations down from a shelf and, as an intellectual dwarf perched on Hindsight the Giant, sneered at it. Certain things he said appear absurd in the light of certain experimental […]

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Love Over Gold

Somewhere in a box I have a copy of Dire Straits’ Love Over Gold on cassette. I bought it when I was a kid and listened to it on the Sony boombox that I won when I was thirteen in a competition to come up with a new advertising slogan for Pot Noodle™. Dire Straits’ […]

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In With A Bullet

In the latest edition of your super soaraway Foreign Policy there is, shockingly, a year’s-end top ten. Those crazy dudes at FP—bringing you close-up views of the hottest international relations—have collected the most significant “Stories You Missed in 2006” and they are grimly interesting, including for example India helping Iran to build the bomb and […]

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Every Cloud

I was sitting in a waiting room yesterday. As always, I couldn’t resist reading one of the women’s reality rags—almost as appealing as discarded copies of the Daily Mail on a Tube train. Real magazine rewarded me for my defying public mockery with this lovely headline, neatly balancing the ghoulishness, shrill optimism, and bathos that […]

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Po-Mo Pomes

I’m planning a technical how-to about writing lyrics so I’ve been doing some background research. During meals I’ve been swotting up on my villanelles and my anadiplosis and my recurrence from a copy of Jeffrey Wainwright‘s Poetry: The Basics that I picked up at the library. It’s informative and an excellent read. At the start […]

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Women And Money

Further to my two articles about Playboy last year, here and here, those of you who have the requisite plug-in installed might want to watch this smart and very short film by Laurie Anderson. [Provided they let you stream small video files, it’s safe for work.] [via Exploding Aardvark]

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Live-In Doll

The growing demand for shock-horror “true-life” stories has, apparently, now raised the going rate for a non-celebrity, sub-tabloid confessional to £10K. [Sorry I’ve lost the link for this factoid, but it’s more plausible than most of the headlines I’ve circled in the photograph above.] I suspect that the following from Marie Claire is about as […]

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Musical Differences

There’s an overlap between my CD collection and Richard‘s, but we do come at music from slightly different angles. He subscribes to The Wire; I subscribe to Sound On Sound. In the most recent edition of The Wire all three of their interviewees had beards—two of them goatees. In the most recent Sound On Sound the main interviewee was 80s pop […]

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