Congrat-Krill-ations!

A Savage wedding is imminent!

Rupert proposes to Krilly on the Pont Neuf in Paris, and a strong addition is made to Team Savage.

Congratulations and Felicitations abound!

God help us.

I sincerely hope the planned movie adaptation of Paradise Lost never hits the screen.

I can think of no scenario which will end well for this poem and its legacy. If the Christian Right sends its peons in droves to see it, we'll get them all whining on about how it strays from the literal biblical texts, about how it makes Satan a hero. Or, perhaps worse, a few might attempt to claim the poem's more conservative content (Eve's centrality in the Fall, anyone?) as possessing the authority of scripture... which it don't have.

What the film won't have is the awesome density and restraint of the text. The article's parallels to Troy (2004) are appropriate: it is not valid to present this text by dramatising it, just as a silent 168k GIF version of Star Wars is an echo of an echo of an echo of the original's grandeur.

I won't even start on how the producers intend to convey the political, theological and personal context of this blind, penniless, king-killing zealot's work. Paradise Lost may well be the most complex piece in English literature outside of Joyce or Hamlet, and the thought of mega-churched hicks appearing on Fox to denounce it after investing only 100 minutes of their lives fills me with impious rage.

Good. Very good.

I'd been getting worried about the implications of the religious hatred law, now thankfully defeated.

To me it seemed that drawing parallels between this law and race hatred legislation was like trying to include Intelligent Design in the Science classroom. A race, we all agree, is something you can't decide, can't change, and which says nothing concrete about how you behave or treat others. A religion, on the other hand, will often be the defining factor in your behaviour - and a bad interpretation of it should rightly be criticised.

Thank you, Mr. Atkinson.

Cross fertilization.

Y'all should check out "The Media Mew", the mega-blog by Savs associate and Johnny Depp-lookalike Jake the Peg.


I'm a kind of roving correspondent, with a particular mandate to report on movies, music, comedy and wrasslin'.

Yeah!

Narrowing tastes?

S'funny, my judgements on whether to see films or not are now pretty snap: I honestly never gave 10 seconds thought to actually seeing The Island despite the presence of 2 fave actors of mine, but a gawky, geeky little film like Thumbsucker - marketed using the Sideways/Huckabees template - pretty much has me at hello.

Wonder how many You, Me and Everyone We Knows i have to see before I learn my lesson?

))<=>((

Beautiful pretentious quote, btw, from director Mike Mills in the above article:

"The marketing thing pissed me off. It shows deep disregard for the audience, for life."

and then, later, the interviewer notes:

"I have to pop out of the room where we are talking. When I return, he is filming the bubbles in my drink with a tiny digital camera."

What we done on the PGCE.

Task: to write a poem, in the style of Blake's "Tyger," asking questions of an animal.

Respect due to co-authors Mark and Wendy.

Who rang the town?
Who? Who? Who? Who?
Who rang? Wu Tang?
Who? Who? Who? Who?
You rang the town.
Th'orangutan.