And we hit December. Or December hits us. The Year That Never Ends seems finally, inexorably, to be coming to a close and a vaccine is flying in to bring back a hot dose of normality. Pints and scotch eggs all round, we think.
In this week’s issue, we break down the creation of a couple of iconic movie scenes, take a turn around food and music in two different Georgias, listen to the sound of cities during a pandemic, and enjoy a potter round the garden in comics form.
Now is the time. Here is the place. This is The Cut.
The Film Desk observes:
This desk is of the opinion the last good Bond movie was Casino Royale. It featured a Bond actor who had something to prove and wasn’t yet bored of the role, one of the best foils for his toxic masculinity in the character of Vesper Lund and, at the film’s core, arguably the most exciting poker sequence ever filmed. Polygon breaks down how it was conceived, built and brought together.
https://www.polygon.com/21623336/james-bond-casino-royale-poker-scene-breakdown
A very different kind of tension was captured for William Friedkin’s Sorcerer. The bridge sequence is the sweaty, febrile heart of a sweaty, febrile film. As four drivers try to get their trucks filled with nitroglycerine across a very rickety bridge, the nerves build in a powerful but utterly believable way. Our pals at Film School Rejects take us through the hurdles Friedkin and his crew had to jump to get the scene in the can. Let’s just say there wasn’t much CGI involved…
https://filmschoolrejects.com/how-they-shot-the-bridge-scene-in-sorcerer/
In case you’ve never seen it, take ten minutes. Prepare to have your toes in knots by the end.
Scraps From The Food Desk:
Down the way From Cut Command lies one of Reading’s lockdown success stories. GeoCafe pivoted from a Georgian cuisine-led joint to a brilliant grocery store which is selling all sorts of wonderful grub, including their own khachapuri, a stuffed flatbread which will have you rethinking the humble sandwich. The generosity of Georgian food culture is summed up in the feasting tradition of supra and the spirit of shemomechama…
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20201124-shemomechama-the-word-for-when-you-cant-stop-eating
Who doesn’t love a good french fry? Get the right ratio of crisp to fat to fluff to salt and you have a recipe for a little bit of fast food heaven. For a golden time in the early days of the franchise, the best place to get your fix was McDonalds. Hard to believe now given the limp greasy noodles they pass off as fries these days. Luke Fater for Atlas Obscura goes back to basics and tries to recreate the original and greatest…
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/original-mcdonalds-french-fry-recipe
Ditties From The Music Desk:
You may have Sugababes down as just another generic manufactured early-oughts girl band, in which case you are wrong, you hear us, wrong! The first iteration of the threesome matched brilliant songcraft and cool delivery to a fearsomely DGAF presence which has never properly been matched since. It’s weird and horrifying that 20 years has passed since the release of the debut album One Touch. Still, for this desk, a high water point in twenty-first century pop…
https://www.clashmusic.com/features/one-touch-of-love-20-years-of-sugababes-debut-album
Athens, Georgia in the late seventies and early eighties would prove to be a hotbed of musical creativity and invention, with two iconic bands bursting out of the confines of the college town and onto the worldwide stage. R.E.M. and the B.52s may have been the names of note, but another lesser-known group had as much influence. As a beautifully packaged retrospective of their collected works hits the shelves, allow us to introduce you to the best band you don’t know–Pylon.
http://www.estheticlens.com/2020/11/05/artist-talks-tara-key-antietam-pylon/
What are the sounds of the city? Traffic and people and the general mad hubbub of human occupation. What happens when that occupation no longer takes place? Artist Stuart Fowkes made field recordings of cities around the globe during lockdown, to find anything but the sound of silence…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-22/the-changing-sounds-of-cities-during-covid-mapped
The Book Desk notes…
We never tire, however much you beg, of reminding our Readership of how comics are a fantastic educational medium. Down The Tubes takes advantage of the launch of a graphic guide to growing your own food to run down the history of gardening comics, which have been going in the UK at least since the nineteen-forties. Who remembers Mr. Digwell?
https://downthetubes.net/?p=123410
We offer the next link with a big fat spoiler warning and exhortation, if you haven’t done so already, to read Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb books. Amped-up gothy sci-fi lesbian horror with sword-fighting and bone magic. What’s not to like? However, there have been sniffy reactions to the relationship between the two main characters, witch-queen Harrow and her cavalier Gideon. Put shortly, some commentators look on it as a slave narrative. Tor looks more deeply into the controversy…
https://www.tor.com/2020/12/01/gideon-harrow-and-the-value-of-problematic-relationships-in-fiction/
And finally, as it’s coming up Christmas, we thought we’d give some air to last year’s WROB festive special. All your favourites and more, along with guest appearances from a screed of X&HTeam-mates. Go on, you know you want to…
https://wrobradio.wordpress.com/2019/12/16/wrobxmas/
Last week was Thanksgiving, of course. While the closest the holiday gets to recognition in these parts is the merry joy of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we took a moment to think about what we can be thankful for in the year of The Situation. We’ve been a lot luckier than many people in 2020, to the point where we could expand our random internet wandering into this continuing tirade of nonsense.
With that in mind, we dedicate this week’s Exit Music to you, Readership. If you read, have shared or recommended anything we’ve done over the past thirty weeks then seriously, thank you. It means more to have you around than you think.
See you in seven, sweethearts.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 