paulcarvill.compaulcarvill.comFacts and opinion from the life and work of Paul Carvill, web designer, UK Articles
rules to Mexican Train dominoes game
2007-11-06 23:03:00 How to play Mexican Train (with dominoes) More About: Links , Game , Rules
tom chiarella Abstracts by Brijit
2007-11-06 22:48:00 Is Tom Chia rella one of our greatest living features writers? This is also a link to the interesting new magazine article aggregator site Brijit. It features human-written summaries of articles, and allows you to read them online if possible. I want to like this site, it's such a great idea. Unfortunately it seems that very few of the articles are available for reading online. Not their fault, I suppose, and maybe things will improve. More About: Links , Abstracts
In Control
2007-11-06 15:43:00 Is Ian Curtis just another spoiled rock star, consumed by his own ego to the detriment of all around him, and his subsequent legend yet another bloated entry in the long list of over-hyped, prematurely dead musicians? You could certainly try and argue the case. If you knew the bare facts of the story. BUt Control , the new film documenting the short life of the Joy Division singer, impeccably presents all sides of the events leading up to his death in 1983, and succeeds in making his tragic suicide all the more overwhelming as a result. The basic facts are well-known by any music fan - Curtis, an epileptic, was found hung in his house by his wife at the age of 23. Anton Corbijn, better known as a photographer who has taken iconic images of Joy Division and U2, to name a couple, carefully and unemotionally explores Curtis' adolescence, his family, his job, his early marriage, the formation of the band Warsaw, later to become Joy Division. Curtis becomes, for a while, the calm a... More About: Film
Shall I compare thee to an autumn day?
2007-11-06 14:31:00 How much do I love autumn? A lot. A hell of a lot. Long walks in the low-hanging sun, hot breath clouding the crisp air. Hearty, warming dinners of food fresh from the countryside. So far this season I've had a sweetly savoury rabbit stew, crackling, roasted partridge, tender, freshly shot pheasant. Myriad varieties of mushrooms fill the woods. The day's cycle can be fully appreciated. Deeper, richer and more satisfying than the flat, interminable sun of endless summer days. Wide blue sky, golden, crunchy leaves, long arching shadows, fog, frost, fireworks, bonfires, toffee apples, real ale and sandwiches. I'm not ashamed of it - autumn rocks! More About: Environment , Compare , Autumn , Pare
The Guildford Guy Riots - Bonfire Night - Icons of England
2007-11-05 18:00:00 The Guildford Guy Riots More About: England , Icons , Links , Night
THis is BREAKING NEWS
2007-11-05 17:56:00 Important news goes here. Write important news text here. Blah blah lbah blah blah. More About: News , Breaking News , Breaking , Breakin
I want you back(ing singers)
2007-11-05 14:31:00 Dooes KT Tunstall know how to rock? Yes. Does she rock even better with her new backing singers? Yes again. I saw her at the Roundhouse last week, and those singers add a depth and finesse to every song. Far more than an embellishment, they're inherent to the sound, and they make the band sound more like a band than ever before. Previously there was a tendency for Tunstall's gigs to be her and a motley collection of gadgets, echo pedals and kazoos. The kazoo's are still there, as is the drummer playing dustbin lids with maracas. But the band function as a tight unit now, emphasised by the mid-set acoustic bit where they all gather front of stage, and the encore of Stopping The Love, with an excellent free-jazz cello solo, amongst other things. The set is long, over two hours, borne out of the necessity of squeezing in songs from 3 albums, and keeping both old and new fans happy. If anything, she panders to newer fans a bit too much, asking them if they want to hear new ... More About: Back , Singers
Avril Lavigne says Hot (Official Music Video)
2007-11-05 13:49:00 Avril Lavigne says she's Hot... ...and finally caves in and joins the britney/christina slut brigade More About: Video , Music , Avril Lavigne , Music Video , Links
Britz hitz the spot
2007-11-02 01:16:00 I've just finished watching part two of Britz, Channel Four's drama about radicalized British muslims. Following the film I had a prolonged discussion and disagreement with my laydee, Kate, of which more later. With Britz, writer Peter Kosminsky has crafted a solid, challenging drama following the divergent paths of two young British muslim siblings as they grow up in a country which is slowly eroding its citizens civil rights. Sohail is driven to repay a "debt of honour" to the UK for granting asylum to his parents, and becomes an MI5 operative highly motivated against the cause of terrorism. His sister, Nasima, is a medical student who experiences first-hand the targeting and incarceration of her and her fellow muslims by an institutionally bigoted police force. Following the death of a friend as a result of such bigotry, she becomes radicalized through college contacts and goes to Pakistan to train as a suicide bomber. The program showed multiple facets of the current sec... More About: Spot , Hitz
La Graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain))
2007-10-29 11:35:00 La Grain e et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain) at the London Film Festival More About: The G
Braille cake
2007-10-22 23:01:00 Braille cake Originally uploaded by Paul Carvill This is the Co-Operative's very tasty carrot and orange cake. But look, there on the back of the packet - is it braille? Or is it just some machine readable system so the conveyor belts know which pile to stack the boxes in? More About: Cake
ENO nick Lambchop's Nixon cover art?
2007-10-22 01:30:00 ENO nick Lambchop's Nixon cover art? Originally uploaded by Paul Carvill I passed this billboard for English National Opera's autumn season a while ago, but kept forgetting to take a snap. Someone there's obviously a Lambchop fan - the incongruous giant letters, the typeface, the reflection, the warm autumnal hues... More About: Cover , Nick , Cover Art
Masque of the Red Death
2007-10-20 11:30:00 Punchdrunk are a theatre company who stage "promenade performances", wherein you wander at will through the action, the actors and the extensive sets. It aims to be a totally immersive experience, and "Masque of the Red Death ", based on a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, is their latest. In the story the land is being destored by a pestilence know as the Red DEath. A prince locks a thousand people away with him in a castle. All is well for six months, then a masked ball is held, and at the stroke of midnight a cloaked figure appears and kills the prince. The figure is the Red Death, and they are all doomed. Punchdrunk have taken over the Battersea Arts Centre for this performance. On entry you are given a white Venecian mask to wear throughout the evening. You are also advised not to talk. You then proceed into the venue. At first this can be disorientating. Everything is dimly, spookily lit with candles or smoky shafts of light through trees and windows. Any door you com... More About: Theatre , The Red Death
Ever further abroad
2007-10-19 15:34:00 One of the joys of the Humax 9100, a personal video recorder and the freeview version of Sky+, is stockpiling great TV to watch whenever you find yourself with a spare hour or two. In the last week or so I've been enjoying immensely the latest series by Jonathan Meades, "Abroad Again". I don't know how big of a telly star he is, but whatever size it is I can't believe he isn't a bigger one. Of course talking about the size of Jonathan Meads comes with its own risks. Famously always appearing in a crumpled black suit, that suit has recently become much more capacious as Meads has faded away following some heavy duty dieting. He is a sporadic presence in his own films. By turns comic, menacing and scathing, but always erudite and fascinating. His hovering otherwordly presence, clad in dark suit and dark glasses, is found all across his otherwise static and beautifully composed frames. He talks about architecture, and touches on everything from the design and structure of... More About: Broad
Q for snooze
2007-10-16 19:04:00 I think we can safely assume that Q Magazine is musically more backward-looking than it is an innovation seeker. At its recent awards ceremony, the results of which bizarrely but inevitably made their way into radio and TV news bulletins, no doubt thanks to a team of PR monkeys and a lack of any serious news agenda at the major stations, trophies for "classic " artists, or the many euphemisms for that word, outnumbered prizes for new acts or new music by 10 to 8: Breakthrough Artist Best Act In The World Today Best Live Act Best Album Q Innovation in Sound Best Video Best Track Best New Act Q Icon Q Idol Q Inspiration Award Q Legend Q Classic Songwriter Q Hero Q Lifetime Achievement Q Merit Award Q Classic Album Q Classic Song More About: Music , Snooze
The empire line
2007-10-11 00:11:00 As a consequence of having 2 wisdom teeth out, and an aching face, if not necessarily one that was swollen up like a sea cow, I found myself with half a day sitting around at home, popping nurofen like a crack addict. So what better to do than finally watch David Lynch's latest headf*ck "Inland Empire ". It's altogether darker and more desolate than his last, "Mulholland Dr., but could be considered a companion piece of sorts. Lynch continues his fascination with the mechanics of filmmaking, the inference or divination of meaning through film's limited language, and the dream we call the star system. He examines that dream closely enough to more accurately describe it as a nightmare, but is astute enough to acknowledge that it owes its continued existence to the belief, the dreaming, of others, of us. Lynch's films defy any quick or easy analysis. In part this is through the sheer twistedness of his imagination and his knack of further complicating matters by applying a frac... More About: Film , Line , The Empire
In the Shadow of the Moon
2007-10-09 01:10:00 I was lucky enough to see a preview of the documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon , which will be showing at the London Film Festival in October. It was showing at the Rex cinema, a plush, velveteen theatre lurking at the bottom of some menacing red Lynchian corridors and stairs. The film tells the story of the Apollo moon landings through the words and observations of many of the astonauts who carried out the missions. This might seem an odd choice of subject at this point in time, given the fact that we have never been back to the moon in the last 30 years, and the relative lack of manned space exploration being conducted now. But the success of Andrew Smith's 2005 book "Moondust" proved the continuing interest in the Apollo space program. Is the success of that book and the appearance of this film purely coincidental? Did the book prompt the production of a film? Did the astronauts, or someone else, want control over their version of events? If you have read Moondust then... More About: The Moon , In the Shadow of the Moon
A Disappearing Number
2007-10-01 15:28:00 I saw A Disappearing Number at the Barbican recently. I thought it was visually astonishing, engrossing and immersive. While the plot may be a little too tenuous to hold up all the metaphysical grandstanding, the power of the production is undeniable. Some keywords I noted instead of writing a proper review: repeating mathematical patterns which go on to infinity, divergent patterns - always moving apart/away from zero, convergent series - two factors always getting closer and closer, but which meet only in infinity, only maths is real - drama, theatre, is all fake, the cambridge professor, real affection for indian mathmetician, he has no proofs, admiration through books, work left behind, chance meeting? Point of maths is to leave something in the world, something concrete. Also, the Barbican theatre ae both great. wide, comfy seats and a great view from almost anywhere. Don't be scared of getting the cheap seats. More About: Theatre , Sapp
Makes me want to Spitz
2007-09-27 16:09:00 So the Spit z is closing down. At least for now, in its current location in , it is. This is a bad thing. The Spitz has a history of putting on an eclectic mix of music from the fringes, specializing in folk, blues, country, avant garde and electronica. It's a smart, intimate venue with a great feel and a friendly crowd. It's location wasn't always that convenient for me, but on arriving I always felt more at home than at any other venue of similar size. I went last night to watch the penultimate gig in its current incarnation - Mr David viner supporting Paris Motel. Both bands were a revelation. Viner, cutting an early Phil Spector-meets-hillbilly figure stormed through some deafening blues and theatrical pop. And Paris Motel, described as "Brian Wilson was writing songs for the Weimar Cabaret", were, perhaps in honour of their influences, gloriously ramshackle, an extraordinary mix of orchestral pop and spectral vocals. Tonight they're putting on one last hurrah - a ... More About: Music
Hell yeah!
2007-09-20 16:06:00 I saw Helvetica, the film last night with some like-minded typography wonks from The Guardian, and can say that it's entertaining, informative, revealing and suprisingly funny. The film starts with a typesetter arranging metal letters, and goes on to tell the story of how Helvetica originated, how it got its name, and how it came to be used so ubiquitously. It's expansive, too, and also give insights into the typography design process, and the very philosophy behind type and visual design and communication. The most interesting aspect of the film is how passionate all the interviewees are. The great and good of the design community are all present - Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter, Massimo Vignelli, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf. Vignelli adores it and speaks bitterly of "the disease of post-modernism". Michael Bierut coughs up a hilarious distribe about how corporations from the chintzy 50's would crawl across a dry, dusty desert to get a new design featuring Helvetica as if ... More About: Design , Hell , Yeah
bourne
2007-09-14 12:45:00 The Bourne series is the filmic equivalent of Bourne himself - frosty, tough, intruiging, paranoid. It's a also excellent. What makes it so good? I think it's the locations. They are almost all European. London, Madrid, Paris, Moscow. Cold, wintry, sparse, bathed in morning blue light. In the last installment he goes to Morocco. It looks hot, but everything else about it feels cold and foreign - the language, the architecture, the people. And in a nice piece of symmetry, when Bourne finally arrives in New York it is a bitter, snowy winter's day. The paranoia is also cranked up to absurd post X-files proportions. The US government, the CIA and various other shadowy, unacknowledged organisations are capable of spying, watching and listening to anything you do or say. They spy on each other. The rot goes right to the top. There are also some interesting running motifs in the series - car chases, the symbolic cutting of Bourne's female associate's hair in the first an... More About: Film
A Throw of Dice
2007-08-31 11:51:00 I saw "A Throw of Dice " in the open air of Trafalgar Square last night, accompanied by a live soundtrack composed and performed by Nitin Sawhney and the London Symphony Orchestra. Always a deceptive space, the crowd was 10,000 strong for this showing of the 1929 film made in Rajasthan. The story originated as an episode from the Mahabarata, an ancient Indian Sanskrit epic, and tells the tale of two gambling kings who fall in love with the same woman. The sound was crystal clear, although the fountains occasionaly spritzed those seated near them, and the screen occasionally billowed in the wind, sending the perspective disconcertingly awry. The film looks great for something over 75 years old. It's a new print, obviously, but the mechanics of the production are also a step ahead of their time. Several times the camera tracks towards a group of gambling men, or follows Sunita down a hallway, the movement magically powerful in an era when the vast majority of shots were from a s... More About: Film
Guardian Newsroom - Martin Rowson
2007-08-28 15:11:00 I don't want to come across like a company man, but I feel the need to recommend a rather special service provided by The Guardian to employees and the public alike. The Guardian Newsroom is a publicly accessible exhibition centre and archive situated directly opposite the Guardian's offcies in Farringdon. In their own words, the newsroom "...preserves and promotes the histories and values of the Guardian and the Observer newspapers...", and it is truly a remarkable resource for anyone even remotely interested in the production, provision or contents of the news. Currently showing in the exhibition space is a retrospective of the irascible and scathing Martin Rowson's cartoons during "The Blair Years". Tracing the downward arc of Blair's premiership, strongly tied to his special relationship with George W Bush and the war in Iraq, these cartoons articulate Rowson's deep loathing of our highly compromised erstwhile leader. Blair is repeatedly drawn as a diminutive, twitchin...
Stu-Stu-Studio
2007-08-24 02:12:00 I paid a visit to the BFI Southbank's* new Studio screening room last week. It utilises digital projecction, and as such is able to show vast numbers of films from the BFI's archive. It really is an intimate space, deserving of their own description of it as "boutique". There are around 40 seats there, and it's not much bigger than a large living room, with the screen a comfortable height and distance even from the front row. I recommend going to have a look in person before you book a ticket, if possible, so you can nchoose where you'd prefer to sit. I was forced to do this anyway, as the one drawack of their usually very helpful website is that they don't take Maestro cards (the new Switch cards), either online or over the telephone. Same price as tickets for the other screens as well. I saw Powell and Pressburger's stunningly photographed Black Narcissus which, Mr Dean's ludicrously skimpy shorts aside, will have you enthralled throughout. *It seems this is the new... More About: Film
Green Man
2007-08-24 01:09:00 Green Man proved to be, for the second year running, my music event of the year. Situated in gorgeous countryside at the foot of the Brecon Beacons, even the dismal Welsh weather and almost doubling the crowd capacity couldn't spoil the idyllic musical enclave. With the majority of the line-up erring on the side of the exploratory, the laid-back and, shall we say, the earthily authentic, this year some added beef came in the form of throbbing rock god Robert Plant and cranky, angular Steve Malkmus. Of course, ample soothing vibes were in available thanks to a sweeping set from elvish harp-plucker Joanna Newsom, folkey-dokey harmonisers Tunng (pronounced Toong, apparently) and beardy French pop geniuses Herman Dune. The food is good and plentiful, and includes vegetarian Indian at in a cushion strewn tent overlooking the stage, the unfeasibly long queues for Pieminister's pie, mash and peas combo, and a fresh mackerel barbecue. Woo! There's also both a proper bar and a coupl... More About: Events , Green
Where you bin?
2007-08-16 15:39:00 I bin at Bincho Yakatori! It's a new Japanese restaurant in the Oxo building, with plenty of proper charcoal barbecue action, stone cold saki and enough chicken gizzards to scare anyone! The decor is muted, bare wood and subtle lantern lighting. Candles line the point where the walls meet the floor. You can have a table with a river view or sit at the long, low counter facing the open kitchen. The menu is divided into chicken skewers, stuff that comes on skewers that isn't chicken, soups, salads and whole fish dishes. The skewers are roughly tapas sized (Spanish tapas, not the bloated half-dishes you get in most English tapas bars) - so we're talking about 3 bites per item. Outr favourites were the lamb - soft and tender with a deliciously juicy, smoky taste - the Japanese pickels and the whole barbecued horse mackerel. There's plenty of vegetable options too, including mushroom skewers and onion skewers, and also several ways of including rice, from a grilled ricecake t... More About: Food
Ark Party - Costumed Disco Cruise
More articles from this author:2007-08-09 16:20:00 Check out my colleague's totally freakin' mental party - it's a costumed disco boat cruise, where the theme is Noah's ark - but the animals have mutated into things like Ninja Shark, Fufu The Gambling Bear, Trouser Snake and The One Legged Spider. It's on the 18th August. http://www.arkparty.net/ark/party/tickets /one More About: Events , Party , Cruise , Disco , Disc 1, 2, 3, 4 |
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