Critic Cal

"I do not want to be a tragic or a philosophic chorus." (Louis MacNeice, 'Wolves') What is it with my propensity to set myself up as the 'voice of gloom'? -- everything's "Kafka this" and "Nietszche that" and "Bond is trite" and "I'm too deep to have fun" and "T.S. Eliot is the only one who understands me". Last Saturday, for example (possibly in protest against the mainstream hype surrounding the latest installment of said trite franchise) I dragged a few unfortunate associates to see ' Beasts of the Southern Wild ', an intensely artsy affair with plenty of hype of its own within appropriately artsy circles (to which I evidently have pretentions). It is a poetic, dreamlike exploration of the harsh animal brutality of human existence, seen through the eyes of a 6-year old girl living with her deteriorating father in a ramshackle bayou community on the 'wrong side' of the levee bu

Somewhere in the growing pile of books threatening to bury my bedside cabinet is one which, when the cares of life o'erwhelm me, I know I can turn to, open at random, stab blindly at the page with my finger and find a word to minister to my need. It is 'The Biggest Ever Tim Vine Joke Book'. "Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels." "I've just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I'll tell you what, never again." "Rome wasn't built in a day. That's Milton Keynes you're thinking of." "So I was taking the M4 out of London, and this bloke said, put it back." "The trouble with an all day breakfast is you've got to eat it so slowly." "This bloke left a huge lump of plasticine in my dressing room. I don't know what to make of it." We all know the old story about the man who tries similar with his Bible. Hoping for guidance, he opens at random and al