Well, yeah if your idea of a good time is car crashing, building exploding, face gurning, wise cracking, slasher-stalking, bad taste sperm ingesting, gross out comedy, then this probably isn’t for you.

If on the other hand, you can bear to sit still for longer than five minutes in your own company, and you can cope with a film that tries to represent consciousness and history through the subjectivities of its characters, then you can handle this beautiful, absorbing piece of film making.

And you’ll be a better person for doing it, because you’ll know in your heart of hearts that you can face poetry and not freak out. You’ll also know that you can cope with not being product placed, music marketed and coporately-branded by a piece of studio produced slop, spoon feeding you consumer durables in the name of entertainment.

So what are you? Consumer or aesthete?

This film is so unengaging. The characters are bland, the family don’t seem to have any relationship with each other. It’s full of the same psychobabble it claims to be critiquing. I didn’t care that Mom was unfulfilled, Pop was bitter or that no-one listened to the youngest kid.

The main character lucks out in school, gets diagnosed with ADD and all ritalined up. He becomes successful but then gives up the meds for dope, has a fling with a stoner girl, and then goes off to NYU. I mean, is that a unique and interesting plot? Clue: no.

It was all so ordinary. The direction lacked flair and seemed to be a hotch potch of techniques better used in Magnolia, Donnie Darko, Napoleon Dynamite. Go see those films instead because Thumbsucker is an afternoon TV Movie nothing more.

I was really excited about reading this book because of all the rave reviews it had had – Tori Amos likes it for God’s sake! However, I found it really uninteresting: the characters were so unlikeable and the main male character was such a drip.

I liked the idea of a London beneath the one we already know, but found the His Dark Materials trilogy did that whole multiple reality thing much more effectively.

Neverwhere is written like a graphic novel, you can almost see the drawings alongside the text as you read it. It really feels like a book waiting to be made into a film, and has none of the structural finesse of Philip K Dick or even J.K. Rowling.

I got bored with the book and found myself wishing it would all just go away.

I guess I just don’t get it.

When The Independent reviewed this film and said there was nothing else that could have been added to make it better, I was sceptical and then intrigued. This is a whodunnit caper in the style of a hardboiled Bogart noir. Except it’s set in a high school in America. This isn’t The Breakfast Club or Grease though, it’s an alienating and alienated landscape where the Vice Principle acts like a Police Chief and students inhabit the Underneath and hold some very dark secrets…

Everyone in ‘Brick’ is heartless, cynical and out for their own ends, even the “hero”. The best aspect of the film is that you have to pay attention in order to enjoy it: you have to make sense of the highly stylised language, the rapidly changing inter-relationships of the characters, and the rather murky world they inhabit.

You want an intelligent, engaging film that challenges you to view it? You want an enjoyable couple of hours that’ll disorientate and entertain you? Go see it.

What happens when you put four respected electronic artists in a virtual concert hall and tell them to improvise until forever? The answer is The Lappetites. Feed in any amount of electronic smog, radiophonic interference, plus manipulated data glut, shake it all about, and hear what comes out the other end. A kind of radioactive, free form electronic jazz that references modern electro-acoustic composition, punk rock and avant garde freaking out. It’s a traffic jam in your head, and a witty rush through the history of electronic music. Exhilarating, exasperating and emotionally draining, sometimes all you can do is hold on and hope you don’t fall off.

The HCGTM does what it says on the cover; provides an amusing, irreverent trip through the macrobiotic jungle. Learn how to cook yummy wholefood meals, balance your yin and yang and maybe snag a new lover along the way. Recommended.

Not as mind blowing as Aerial, this piece of sound sculpture, made up from field recordings from a pond, keeps veering into novelty squawking and empty electro-doodles.

Magnetic Oxide, Electricity and Tone Generators.

Listening to Eliane Radigue’s Adnos I-III, the room is humming at a low end frequency. The air produces heat wave shimmers like those surrounding mirages. I put my hands against the loudspeakers and my fingers bump and jump spontaneously off the woofers. Drones on drones on drones on drones all slip over each other and fill up the air. It’s hard to know if you are diving into the sound or if it is swallowing you up.

Somewhere inside my bones molecules bump into each other. Somewhere in the galaxy, a scientist is thinking about atomic fields, particles and localised excitations and wondering if the maxim “position is an operator in QM but is a parameter in QFT” actually applies when sound becomes a liquid.

Inside the drone, nothing much changes, except when you stop paying attention. Then particles are destroyed in space, new noises come out and the reco/r/dings are the temporary documents of where you were in place and time as it happened: 2002. In the San Francisco Zen Centre zendo, the air is agitated by the thousands of people who have sat on cushions, breathed in, breathed out and entered the drone. They do this everyday at the same time, in the same place.

Meanwhile, Eliane Radigue sits at an ARP 2500 with a Tibetan singing bowl and a Tibetan Thanga painting framed on the wall. She is a Parisian woman in her 70s.

Before reading this book I wasn’t really sure who the Animal Liberation Front was, why they did what they did, or what the point of it all was. I just assumed that their actions were the result of the usual sexually repressed macho violence that hangs around in “radical” political movements stinking up the place.

Well, gentle reader, how wrong could I be? This book suggests that many involved in the ALF are probably women, operating from a position of love rather than hate, and that the ALF have never intentionally harmed another living being in the very many of their activities carried out around the world from the late 1960s.

Threaded into the book are a number of fascinating philosophical positions about the Rights of Animals and how they should be respected. Bookending the volume are two essays about the use of the label “terrorist” and its impact on the Animal Rights and other dissenting movements in Western Democratic states.

The net result of the many stimulating essays is to really make you question what you think about human society’s treatment of other species, and in turn, human treatment of other humans.

The book is controversial, for example in its discussion of the Holocaust and how it served as a model for animal abuse in factory farming units. What you can’t get away from is the sheer scale of the killing:

Each year in the US alone

over 10 billion farmed animals are killed for food consumption
17-70 million animals are killed for testing and experimentation
Over 100 million animals are killed in hunting; and
7-8 million animals are trapped or raised in confinement for their fur.

This book tells you what you can do about it.

(figures taken from the years 1999-2000 – fur figures vary greatly according to demand. Hunting numbers have been steadily dropping as factory farmed animal deaths continue to rise)

This book is funny, serious, flippant, sarcastic, truthful and ethically rocking. It provides a number of reasons to go vegan, stay vegan, and deal with those who can’t deal with the reality of what they’re putting in their mouths when they chow down a McCrapburger.

AND speaking of putting things in mouths (or wherever) there’s a bitchin’ guide to sex toys too. All this plus a fantastic website to go along with it all at http://www.veganfreak.com/

People, if you’re not freakin’ then you’re not listening.

Buy it.