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“You got a dead cat in there or what?”
The Terminator (James Cameron, Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, 1984) You can still feel them, can’t you? Ice cold despite the violence involved in the machine’s passing. Check your shoulder. Nothing there, not so much as a single finger. So where is the chill coming from? Sarah Connor squirms out of the machine’s grip…
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“A bit of ambition here, for the love of fuck!”
If you’ve not subscribed to the Mindless Ones newsletter yet, I think you probably should. Comes out once a week, usually in time for you to read it with a coffee on Sunday morning. Dense articles on art, magic, and politics accompanied by fucked comics and the odd spectacular illustration. Collective vision: no one member…
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Who’s Watching?
A few people have suggested that I start up a ScotLit video channel recently. I’ve resisted the temptation so far, but sometimes wonder if this is me trying not to talk to avoid hearing my own thoughts. I always saw myself as the type of weegie that dreams of being elsewhere – Gotham City, New…
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“And so are you”
Scissor Sisters – OVO Hydro, Glasgow, 17 May 2025 “How can less be more?” Alison Goldfrapp doing ‘Strict Machine’ in a big metallic jacket as a warm-up? A bit much. Sending out a twerking gorilla to open the curtains on your show? A little rich for my tastes. Bringing on Jessie Ware halfway through the…
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Dinner Plate Medallions
Scotland loves a story with two faces. Jekyll and Hyde. Glasgow and Unthank. Luci and Luda. Heaven and hell. There are more than two stories to tell about Glasgow, of course, but allow me a little bit of theatre, I can feel the set rising up around me now! This city dreams of itself as…
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The Forbidden Gummy Laces
What should have been a week of anticipation ended up being a week of anticipation instead. Let me rephrase that: when we should have been looking forward to Copenhagen, we’ve been worrying about whether our cat was going to survive gut surgery. The question of whether we would be going on holiday was real, if…
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The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)
“We cut ourselves to suit the cloth. We cut ourselves to size when first we are delivered to the world’s blunt engine. Barely twenty, with catalogue shoes and faces not our own, we step out on the shifting funhouse floor, clumsy at first but rapidly adopting the requisite compensatory gait, a paraplegic cakewalk almost graceful…
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I Still Don’t Know
Another day, another attempt to avoid a pointless scrap on social media! I understand what Elizabeth Sandifer is getting at with this joke, but the comparison still bams me up. More than it should, obviously. The gaming franchises of the 2000s don’t need defended from every lighthearted mention, and yet… Guitar Hero and the like…
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“A homeschooled pimp who argues with bins…”
I refuse to feign interest in a Rolling Stone article, but this tweet from Phil Purser-Hallard – and they’re all tweets, as even the dank one himself knows – is as dull as the story it objects to. To watch The Sopranos as “macho gangster pulp” is to admit you watched it in the most…
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Behind the Screens
One afternoon, Father Power pointed up at a red light to the left of the altar and said that when that light was glowing, God was in the house – it was powered by Him. I looked up at it, a red glowing bulb in an ornate brass cage, and asked why – if God…