You know how sometimes an overhyped album full of tracks which would sound unoriginal to an fifteen year old NME intern, but which, due to its constant rotation on MTV vanilla / base / 2 / flux / overdrive / dance / mobile / hits, VH1, VH1 Classic and TMF, has sold platinum and won everything from a Mercury to a MOBO, lands in your lap, and surprise, it’s shittier than McCain’s y fronts after half a decade at the Hanoi Hilton?

This is nothing like that.

Zero 7 are a deceptively unambitious band, producing some of the most innovative eclectic chillout since 3D spilled a metric shit tonne of E into the Bristol reservoir in ‘93.

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As the days lengthened and summer approached, Anton thought of Anna Sergeyevna and her little Pomeranian, white against the hot black cobbles of Yalta. In the mornings he would write, and each evening walk the warming lanes of Alushta. Try as he might, he could not forget her fragile beauty, her grey eyes and tearful countenance.

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‘Any and all extraneous, superfluous or suspicious nipples will be kept private and confidential’.

The sign reassured me a little. Still, I was nervous. This would be my first full body massage. Next to me in the tiny lobby, sat an old lady with one of those permanently slanted, shaky heads. Across from us, filling a seat meant for two, a stout business man fiddled with his tom bowler. He caught me looking, and smiled lasciviously. I smiled back, though not with the mouth he could see. A bell mounted above the door rang softly.

Miss Bloom?’

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I smiled and pointed toward the salads.

‘I’m sorry sir, this is a vegetarian restaurant.’

‘Meeeat.’

‘We do have a fine selection of cheese steaks.’

‘Meeeat.’

This guy was serious, he wanted his meat.

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Gerry Anderson’s latest creation takes the string puppet genre to new heights. Each of Galatica’s intricate 1/14th scale marionettes is lovingly crafted from a silicate compound, developed during the creation of the infamous Flange In A Can, adult toy. Each characters emotional performance is handled by a dedicated crew of classically trained puppeteers.

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His story was made up in 1995 by a crack team of liars. All that great old-timey soap opera, all those gallant deeds and winsome lasses, global pandemics and military conflicts, dark ages, renaissances, and imperial allegiances. All faked photos and tall tales; and what a dream, so black as to occlude your entire life.

Ah, what times we didn’t have. What actualised rationality. Imagine all the sheeple, living free from herds. Imagine feeling real.

Mere echoes of the lost unpast remain. Movie titles – ‘the land before time’; aesthetics -the whirligig foamtopia of Mallets Mallet, Klaus Nomi’s pantomimed historia; sweet diaries agape - American Psycho.

Butter me slippery, it seems that only I remember, here in my invisible Zeppelin, afloat the tufty castles of the air, my vision quenched in Lady Sutra’s delirium, my skin tattooed mnemonic of the wake time. Now down I come, face burnt by pavement and the mocking quim cleave of a sergeants klosh.

They drag me, Romans, to the iron prison. They hook my smock and drench me till I float. They stance me on the wood in hooded veil. They paste me with their hoofey glugs of scat. Their wolfen cleave my mandible like chum. Then last as l’ectric joost slugs to the crisp, I cry ‘Tis ‘nuff, I love the lie’.

In the latest Richard Curtis jape, Freddie Murcury must pull the little princes (adorably portrayed by Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen in full clown makeup) through the brutal death of their mother.
Helen Mirren makes a triumphant return in a double role, as the mutilated corpses of Dodi and Diana.
But it’s the epic final confrontation between Queen and Tony Blair, in a star turn by the reproductive organs of a turnip, that makes this oscar winning comedy a must see.

As the Jackdaw Fool Learjet coasts over Tarantino’s exclusive Maldivian getaway, El Duceador, I load my shotgun and Pi straps on his rocket belt. We look at one another, beweaponed mercenaries, hired guns in the war of review, and our fists meet with an explosive slap.

‘A Good, death’, he tells me.
‘Dine in Metnal’, I reply.

As Pi turns and kicks out the flimsy cabin door, a searing wind tugs us both toward the sky. We bolster ourselves until the pressure equalizes, and the plane begins to lurch into a death dive. The roar is deafening. We exchange nods, and cast ourselves into the roiling sky.

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I met Ronan outside the Savoy at half ten, and since Mark wasn’t answering his phone, we headed on in, giddily anticipating the epic to come. We signed the board proffered by a tall, ball and almost invisibly incidental marketing man, taking our seats in the darkened theater.
Consumed by hunger, Ronan soon left for the confectionary counter, returning minutes later with an epic seven euro popcorn. It was too early for me to be eating solids, but I took some anyway, enjoying it all the more for being his. That sounds a little gay, ignore it.

Ronan said something like ‘This is going to be deadly, I can’t wait to tell everyone in college’, his schadenfreude a bleak postmodern reflection of our inability to existentially inhabit extant reality.
The lights dimmed, the film began, no trailers ruining this pure theatrical experience.

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Three words. Sir Tuesday Peregrine-Archer. As I waited back stage at the Venetian, I realised I hadn’t been this nervous since Mel Gibson called to my home to critique my review of Apocalypto. Nothing I’d read about Sir Peregrine Archer’s meteoric rise, from minor member of Dublin’s first family of journalism to international superstar, could have prepared me for this moment. His one man show ‘Gandhi, the Brooklyn Cabby Years’ has traveled from the Edinburgh festival to London’s West End, Broadway, to it’s current home as a top selling Vegas attraction; proving that far from being a untalented, sanctimonious, one trick non entity, Sir Peregrine-Archer is amongst the great comedic visionaries at work today. With his rapier wit and distinct, effeminate lisp, Peregrine-Archer has become a latter day Coward, the boast and terror of the highest echelons of London, Tokyo, and New York society. Rarely seen without his once shabby, now ultra fashionable, nouveau boheme fleece and fox fur ushanka, and always sweetened by the latest in a string of dizzying arm candies, Sir Peregrine-Archer cuts an elegant yet iconoclastic figure.

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