1). Post-truth.
2). Elites.
3). Sovereignty.
4). Mandate.
5). Neoliberalism (yes, still).
Worst Concepts of 2016
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Monthly Archives: December 2016
Best Art 2016
Hide and Seek– Drawings by Eileen Cooper, at Swindon Museum and Art Gallery.
Best Films 2016 (that I saw in St Helens)
1). The BFG.
2). Jason Bourne.
3). Sully (actually, a terrible film – if you’re a bit of a plane nerd).
Best Film not from 2016 that I saw on a plane in 2016
Closely followed by Saturday Night Fever, but I’d seen that before.
Best Films 2016 (that I saw on a plane)
1). Deadpool.
2). The Nice Guys.
3). Elvis and Nixon.
Bite Size Chandler
“‘Take me. I’m yours – all of me is yours. Take me.”
Raymond Chandler, Playback, 1958.
Bite Size Chandler
“Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver’s shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunch-box. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six time to six millionaires and so blasé and decadent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture-mover in a sweaty undershirt.”
Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister, 1949.
Bite Size Chandler
“I think today there are much better film writers than I could ever be, because I never quite saw things in the terms of the camera, but always as dramatic scenes between people. I suppose you know the story of the writer who his racked brains how to show, very shortly, that a middle-aged man and his wife were no longer in love with each other. Finally he licked it. The man and his wife got into a lift and he kept his hat on. At the next stop a lady got into the lift and he immediately removed his hat. That is proper film writing. Me, I’d have done a four page scene about it. What his chap did took a few seconds.”
Raymond Chandler, 1957 (The Raymond Chandler Papers).
Bite Size Chandler
“‘You really think that?’
She stared at me. I finished my glass and got my weak look on my face again. She ignored it.
‘Of course I think it’, she said. ‘And so do you.’
‘I think it’s a little more complicated than that.’
Her smile was cosy and acid at the same time. ‘I beg your pardon. I forgot for the moment you were a detective. It would have to be complicated, wouldn’t it? I suppose there’s a sort of indecency about a simple case.'”
Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 1940.
Bite Size Chandler
“I hold no particular brief for the detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of the living.”
Raymond Chandler, ‘The Simple Art’ of Murder’, 1944.
