Reading for pleasure… again

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Recently I’ve rediscovered reading. That is not to say that I ever really lost it to begin with; more that I lost the enjoyment of it. Most of the reading I’ve done over the last two years has been purely academic, as part of research for the Ph.D., and anyone who’s read anything academic will attest to those materials lacking nearly any kind of excitement or wonder.

Over the last six months, though, I’ve slowly and steadily returned to reading for pleasure, with the help of a few simple and entertaining books, namely John Baxter’s Cooking for Claudine and Richard Hammond’s Or Is That Just Me? - the latter of which I finished this morning.

Baxter’s book is a simple tale of love in Europe. He is an Australian film critic, who fell in love with a French girl and moved to Paris to marry her – living the dream, one might say. But the catch was that in order to marry the girl, he had to cook Christmas dinner for her extensive – and very French – family. What follows is an often hilarious, but very touching, story of travels about France and the world, collecting ingredients for the various dinners he’s crafted over the years. Most entertaining are his attempts to break tradition: serving Cajun pork, for example, or a traditional Aussie pavlova. For anyone who’s a fan of Baxter’s writing (he’s penned some brilliant film reviews over the years), food, France, women, or simply a good yarn, the book is well worth a flip-through.

I’ve read Richard Hammond before (his earlier book As You Do), and I just really, really enjoy his stuff. He writes like I imagines he chats over a pint, and that’s quite endearing, when he seems like a genuinely cool and nice bloke. In Or Is That Just Me? he tells the stories behind some of his Top Gear experiences, but also those behind his other works, including one of my favourite TV shows, Engineering Connections. Whether attempting to be manly firing arrows from horseback, or falling off a horse to near-permanent spinal injury, every tale is told with humility, humour, and the kind of self-deprecating larrikinism that is very rare in the entertainment industry. What always staggers me, though, is that all the Top Gear blokes get on so very well, and are obviously the best of mates. Again – rare. Anyway, I enjoyed Or Is That Just Me? quite a lot.

I’m not sure what to move on to now, though. I recently bought The Devil In The White City by Erik Larson, and Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco is on its way. But both of these seem quite dense, and dense is something I can’t do whilst researching or writing thesis stuff. I’d rather get this first draft out of the way before I embark on a complex thriller – all the more to enjoy it. Maybe I’ll give the next Skulduggery Pleasant a go… or Jasper Fforde. Huuuuuurrrmmmm…

Until next time…

More nice things

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Another wonderful collection of thoughts about Peter Roebuck can be found here.

Peter Roebuck seemed to be one of the last bastions of cricket the way it was supposed to be. As the game became more driven by money, by greed, by coldly professional calculations and cynical self-interest, to the point where the lines between corruption and administration were becoming blurred…Roebuck stood as a voice for cricket as pure, as joyous, as the most beautiful of games.

Until next time…

Vale Peter Roebuck

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I’m not a massive sport fan, certainly not obsessive. But through certain associations (namely paternal), the game I would say I follow most closely – and certainly most enjoy watching, debating, reading about – is cricket. One of my favourite all-time commentators on the game was Peter Roebuck, so it was with some degree of sadness that I read of his death over the weekend. Stories are now emerging about questioning by police and implication in sex scandals, and so on, but whatever comes to light, one can really only judge him by his vocation – and it’s one he was damn good at.

I was touched by this obituary/tribute, written by Greg Baum, that appeared in the Herald today. Neither praising nor criticising, these were the words of an admiring colleague and friend, balanced and carefully-weighted, giving respect to the dead whilst lightly attempting to offer a measure of the man.

He was complex, intense, taut, edgy, opinionated, a little manic, mostly cheerful, sometimes broody. He was a contrarian, not for the sake of it, but because he always had another view. He spoke quickly, in a clipped tone, needing to get the thoughts out so that more could follow; his broadcast voice was his street voice. He did not do small talk, ever.

Cricket was his metier, but it did not confine him. He was widely read and supremely intelligent. He was also self-possessed, yet drew people to him. Women liked him, but often he was awkward in their company.

Well worth a read, and certainly a yardstick by which all obits should be measured.

Until next time…

Baton down the hatches: preparing for Skyrim

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Nice hat, douche.

On Friday, my life, and the life of quite a few gamers worldwide, will change. This change may last a few days (unlikely), it may last beyond a few weeks (quite likely), but it will occur nevertheless. For on Friday, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is released.

An auspicious day indeed, and I intend to chronicle as much of my adventures in this new realm of Tamriel as I can on the tweets and here at the Hovel. But I thought I’d take some time to fill you in on preparations for the big day and beyond. Basically, my real-world commitments for the next little while consist of finishing up grading for the course I’m teaching at uni, and Video Ezy. After Friday, I’m taking about 10 days off to chill and kill (dragons and ne’er-do-wells, obviously). So it makes sense that I’d make ready.

First stop, a meal plan, shopping list, and then cooking for most of the day tomorrow, to fill fridge and freezer with meals and snacks befitting the Dovahkiin. Then I’ll spend several hours of tomorrow and Wednesday attempting to finish off the World Wars chapter of my PhD. If I can get that done and submitted, I’ll feel much less guilty about aforementioned chilling-’n'-killing.

Beyond next week, I may be forever changed. I may throw off the shackles off academia and plunge head-first into professional gaming (known in most circles as ‘unemployment’). I may take up cosplay. I may become deluded that I actually am the Dragonborn – or, more likely for my style of play, dress in period finery and attempt lamely to convince the world I’m a dashing rogue and bard. Who knows for sure.

The one sure thing is that Skyrim lands on taloned claws with igneous breath on Friday. God help the real world.

Until next time…

The girl lets loose at EB

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In the craziness that’s followed the release of EB Games’ ‘Man’s Guide to Trading‘ video, all sorts of people have been weighing in, on the tweets and otherwise. The girl, having watched the video and seen my post about it, asked if she could contribute to the blog. So here are the girl’s thoughts…

I’m a girl and I like games. As Binnsy said, I play them regularly; on my phone, on PS3, and, on the odd occasion, I revert back to my first gaming love, the Nintendo64. I don’t particularly like games such as Call of Duty et al, not because of the violence, but because the perspective first person shooters gives me a headache. I also don’t really like games that I’ve termed ‘quest-y,’ the ones where you trek to some godforsaken part of the land you are playing in, only to be told that you have to go somewhere else to pick up the magic staff, find a particular goblet or follow a person until he does something interesting, only to turn around and do it again. 500 times. I find these games to be too open-ended and repetitive, but that’s just me.

Binnsy, however, loves these sorts of games. Binnsy quite likes games in general, and that’s fine with me. Because that’s who he is. When out, we go into game shops together. We also go into bookshops together, into the grocery shop together and into clothes and shoe shops together. Because we are a couple.

I watch him play the games I don’t like because for some reason I am able to follow them better when not the person playing. I understand that it’s a form of relaxation with him, a place that he can go to, to escape his PhD, and I welcome it. I can also, if I choose, go and do something else. I don’t get angry at him for playing games, because he includes it in our relationship, instead of excluding it. It gets mixed in with doing the washing up, cooking, cleaning, shopping, uni work, exams etc, instead of something that he does when I’m not there.

If he wants to play a game instead of watching a movie, he’ll ask, not because wants to make sure that it’s ok to play, per se, but because there’s only one TV. He doesn’t play every day when I’m with him, he doesn’t sneak around, and he certainly (I hope) doesn’t feel guilty when he plays. If he did start to play for hours, i.e. more than 4 or 5 at a time everyday, became moody, spent more money on games than he had the budget for and started excluding me from involving myself in that world, then I probably would get annoyed and concerned, but that has yet to happen.

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The upcoming EB sh*tstorm

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Okay, this video is getting a lot of people angry, and for good reason:

It perpetuates stereotypes and myths about gamers and gaming that many men, and women, have been working hard for years to debunk. The two things it does acknowledge are that most gamers are grown-ups and that they have girlfriends/wives. But it takes gaming back to the realms of a taboo, and that’s wrong.

I can speak for only me. My girlfriend loves games. The ones she plays most are on her iPhone, and in the past she’s played an awful lot of Nintendo 64. She’s also fond of the Lego games on PS3. The thing she loves most, though, I think, is watching other people play games. She’s been known to fall asleep on my lap drowsily telling me where to go in Uncharted, for example. And her family pretty much completed Zelda as a unit – the person actually holding the controller was a secondary party!

I grew up playing Goldeneye and Perfect Dark with mates. Multiplayer was just a given. Now it’s Wii Sports and Dirt, but the fact remains.

Fact is, for most people, games are well and truly a social thing. And they’ve slowly worked to shake off the image of this dangerous, hidden fetish that men indulge after the missus has gone to bed.

Action. What does one do in this situation? I know people on Twitter are boycotting, cancelling pre-orders and loudly abusing the poor chap/chapette manning the EB Twitter page. And I know where they’re coming from. I have a pre-order for Skyrim at EB in Richmond, and here are the reasons I won’t be cancelling it:

  • I really want Skyrim.
  • I’ve already put $40 towards it.
  • The staff there are probably just as pissed as we all are about the ad, and
  • they had nothing to do with it. So I’d like to help pay their wages.

The above noted, this kind of advertising is horrendous. If there is one negative effect of Mad Men on the world, it’s in the notion that this kind of advertising is cool and works. If they really watched the show, they’d see how it proliferated the terrible gender bias and sexism of the time. Grow up.

Until next time…

War is hell; war films come close

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My doctorate began life as a modest proposal on the similarities and differences between the approaches of feature filmmakers and documentarians. It has since evolved into a jumbled mess of all sorts of readings around war, conflict, media, news reporting, filmmaking, the Vietnam War, and all sorts of inter-related philosophical and academic meanderings.

It has taken a few steps back, though, and shrunk a bit, in the last month. My biggest issue was scope – like my Honours thesis on Kubrick, I was aiming too high. My thesis, therefore, has become a mapping of war cinema through three unique periods: the World Wars and their interim (1914-1945), the Vietnam War, and the Gulf Wars (1990-present).

My aim is to map similarities and differences in approach to war cinema (both fiction AND documentary) in these periods. And it’s interesting. But the biggest similarity that I’m finding with all war films is that every single one of them is ridiculously long. There’s barely one under two hours, with maybe the exception of Valkyrie (2008), which was directed by Bryan Singer, so doesn’t really count*. I’m in the midst of analysing Patton (1970), and am staggered that it’s taken me almost a week; I can usually quite substantially annotate a 90-100 minute film in around two or three days.

So there you go. Basically, my thesis boils down to the fact that all war films are far too long. I’m certain my examiners will agree with me.

Until next time…

* – Actually, Singer’s WWII thriller marches in at 121 minutes. So even that doesn’t escape my diatribe on the zeitgeist.