Critic Cal

As soon as my extremely-slowly-but-finally-surely recovering tendon permits, I plan to dance. Not publicly, nor proficiently -- just enthusiastically around the house when no-one's watching. It is an undertaking from which I expect to derive great delight (ineptitude notwithstanding [1]), and I lament that I did not avail myself of the opportunity more frequently prior to being robbed of it by injury. For now, I must be content to sate my terpsichorean cravings vicariously. And the weekend just gone was the perfect occasion -- ZooNation 's Some Like It Hip-Hop   at the Peacock Theatre in London. OK, so the soundtrack was hardly Jay-Z, and the four of us comprised almost the entirety of the "nearly-30-to-my-mother-in-law-would-probably-rather-I-didn't-say" contingent amidst a slew of excitable 12 year olds, but it was super-fun: I just love watching people being really really good at what they do, especially when 'what they do' is lots of imaginatively ch...

Neo: "I know Kung-Fu" Morpheus: "Show me" Classic. (Shame I can't link to a legitimately-uploaded clip...) When I first got a Kindle and began happily filling it with everything I'd ever had half a mind to read (fortunately my taste for old stuff means much of this is free) there was that inevitable moment where I thought "if only I could cut out the middle man -- wire my brain up and download direct", y'know, like in The Matrix . Now, I'm most certainly not disputing the pleasure of reading -- I'd save a choice selection to linger over the old-fashioned slow way. But there's so much information out there, and so little of it in my head! My computer screen, as well as my Kindle, bears testament to this frustrated greed for "knowledge" -- layer-upon-layer of browser windows, each packed to the edges with tabs, tracing a meandering, tenuously-linked train of thought through history, philosophy, literature, current affai...

[Edited to add (02/06/12): I keep taking this down and putting it back up again, because it was written in a moment of high emotion and it all seems a little bit too much about 'me', and 'feelings' and all that -- which, believe it or not, was not at all my intention when I started writing stuff. I hope I will find some more interesting things to write about in the future, but for now I will add this to the mix lest anyone think I am setting myself up as some sort of example of how to go about all this learning-and-thinking business. I am but come to it lately myself and have many mistakes yet to make...] In the words of Jeff Buckley (albeit the song's a cover ), "I think more than I want to think; do things I never should do". But I will stop there, because, mercifully, the drug references do not apply. "Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh." ( Ecclesiastes 12 :12b) Over-zealous introspection, naiv...