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I’m the Axeman, Baby
Let me get one thing straight. I’m no musician. I don’t play, I don’t perform. But I’ve owned a guitar since I was a teenager and, when no one’s listening, I get pleasure from stumbling my way through the dozen or two chords that I learned back then. I could probably manage a tolerable Kumbayah…
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Back in LA
Last night’s wrap party was great. I knew so many people there that I always had someone to talk to, unlike those vast BBC affairs where you just keep circulating because you don’t want to stand on your own looking like a tool. There were loads of people I didn’t know, as well, and some…
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Writers Who Direct
In Conversation: A Writer’s Perspective is a projected series of author interviews edited by James Cooper. Volume One is available now and is a publication of The British Fantasy Society. Contributors include Joe Lansdale, Graham Joyce, Ramsey Campbell, Mark Morris, and Tim Lebbon. My conversation with James was in the form of a series of…
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A White Christmas
Only the second in my own memory; my first was, I think, in 1966, and I can fix the date because That Darn Cat was playing at the Princes Cinema in Monton and the snow-covered marquee features in the first roll of film I shot with my Christmas present, a Regula 35mm camera. I spotted…
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Christmas 2009
We’re all safely home – on a day of closed runways and widespread flight delays, our flights weren’t held up at all… we stopped for a curry and a sleep in Ealing and then, on a day of countrywide blizzards and blocked roads, we sailed through West London and up the M6 like there were…
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Titans Will Clash
Have you seen the new trailer for the remake of Clash of the Titans? “Titans Will Clash!” I’m cool with it, because I thought Clash was a way less than perfect movie and was far from Uncle Ray’s best work… that crappy mechanical owl that has to have been inserted by the studio as a…
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Richard Williams
You could do worse than hop over to Blowing my Thought Wad for this piece inspired by a recent Foyles event featuring ‘veteran animator’, Canadian-born Richard Williams. Williams is an animator of eclectic achievements, the most well-known of which I imagine to be Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I suppose Williams is to drawn animation what…
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Star Wars
Star Wars? I was right there at the beginning, I tell you. Well, when I say the beginning, I mean I got into the press show. In Manchester. All right, so it was hardly the creative coalface, but looking back on it I can feel that I was a witness to something. I saw the…
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The Avengers Guy
I had to miss last month’s UK Fantasycon, but I’d already been asked to write an appreciation of Guest of Honour Brian Clemens for the Convention’s programme book. Here’s what I said. It was one o’clock in the morning and I had stuff on my mind. I turned on the TV for distraction. In a…
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Old Sitcoms Never Die…
These days, they surface on Hulu. Gail Renard made the comment, “Speaking of star cars, I wonder what ever became of the one from the Smothers Brothers’ TV epic, “My Mother The Car.” A title and a pitch all in one.” Someone else in the UK remembers My Mother the Car! Were the Smothers involved?…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
