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Colin Newman recommended The Amateur View by To Rococo Rot in Music (curated)

 
The Amateur View by To Rococo Rot
The Amateur View by To Rococo Rot
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"1999 was a strange and transitional year. The second half of the ’80s and the ’90s were about dance music. That’s all there was. I remember when drum‘n’bass hit, we were, like, “Why would you want to listen to anything else?” Then that started to finish toward the end of the ’90s, and people in the underground were making records that weren’t dance music but were still credible. To Rococo Rot wasn’t just about playing, it was about machines as well. They somehow embodied both Krautrock and post-rock in an interesting and Berlin way. When Wire did our tour in 2000, we were two dates in and we started to notice that that every venue was playing Soundgarden before our sets. We had a copy of The Amateur View, and our sound person would put that on and just calm the audience down."

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40x40

David Schwartz recommended Videodrome (1983) in Movies (curated)

 
Videodrome (1983)
Videodrome (1983)
1983 | Horror, Sci-Fi

"David Cronenberg’s reflexive masterpiece of modern horror, with James Woods as a seedy purveyor of soft-core exploitation for cable TV, and Debbie Harry as his siren, brought the media-as-message theories of fellow Torontonian Marshall McLuhan to visceral life. This was one of the first movies I rented on VHS, and Videodrome is partly an exploration of the strange, clunky physical sensation attached to the idea of a feature film being available on a paperback-size plastic-and-tape cassette that is inserted into a machine . . . and our brains. A quarter century later, Cronenberg’s dazzling vision of a world where image and flesh are one—“long live the new flesh”—Videodrome’s futuristic vision is timelier than ever. And above all that, the movie is sexy, smart, funny, and fascinating, moving adeptly between its layers of reality, imagination, and that vast territory in between."

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LC
Late Call (Call, #1)
Emma Hart | 2014
6
8.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
Hmmm

Okay, so I've literally just finished this and I'm crying those silent-but-painful tears because your emotions have just gone through the wringer. That last 10% or so was rough.

But from a way before that--somewhere before the 40% mark--i got bored, lost all interest in this completely. I normally love my escort/sexworker stories. Yeah, I know I'm strange, but I do tend to really like those kind of stories. But with this... I don't know if it was their past together or it just bored me but I struggled for a long time.

I must have felt something for the characters though or I wouldn't, even now, be crying over that unhappy ending to this part of their story. I'm also not sure if I want to read the next part. Will think about it in my dreams.
  
The Change 4: London: Dirt
The Change 4: London: Dirt
Guy Adams | 2017 | Science Fiction/Fantasy
6
6.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Still unsatisfying
This second London-based book sees Howard and Hubcap on their way into London. They stumble across a strange scene at a supermarket and find themselves the hostages of a private army of a post-apocalyptic drug dealer, whose experiments are going wrong more by the day.
The book was as short as the others but again had next to no real plot or purpose, other than people getting in a situation and getting out of it again. We do start to see some of the New World Order type rich people running the world, post-Change, which is built on in later books, but again there is no real insight into the world, the change, Howard's background or where his dreams suggest he has to go. I hope the final, Tokyo-based book closes this all off or I will be a little miffed.