Links - Building the Future on the ruins of the Past

My life must be returning to normal as I suddenly have time to work and blog.  Hurrah!  It's been a while but I have noticed a few interesting posts over the last few days and felt in the mood to share.

       

JG Ballard on the Bilbao Guggenheim - I don't know if Ballard has done architectural criticism before but given the content of a lot of his books it feels like a completely natural departure for him.  Imagine him and the great Jonathan Meades (who talks about the death of British modernism here, here and here) teaming up and casting a disparaging eye upon the state of our modern urban environments.  Mmmmm.  Especially as Meades considers the Guggenheim to be "easy listening music for those who profess to detest easy listening"

Paul Kincaid on Short Fiction - Reasons to be cheerful? possibly.  I never used to read short fiction but I've recently come to quite like the format of magazines such as Interzone with their blend of non-fiction and actual fiction.  I think part of it is that as a critic rather than a reader, short fiction is easily consumed like one of those tiny 1980's nouvelle cuisine dishes.  A pit of caviar, some avocado and a swirl of sauce.  Bish. Bash. Bosh.

Shaun C Green reviews The Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight - Apparently it's a story about the blending of punk and Islamic sub-cultures.  The great thing about the book is that when it was written, the blend was entirely fictitious.  However, now if you type "taqwacore" into Youtube you get THIS.  I would love to take a look at this book but apparently the British version is censored because the British publishers Telegram bottled it and removed a number of contentious ideas such as the idea that Mohammed being a paedophile actually makes him more worthy of veneration because then we know that he was a real person rather than a purer than pure ideal that feels distinctly airbrushed.

Kieron Gillen on the beauty of Sensible Soccer -  Part of The Escapist's month long focus on sport, he writes about how the 1990's saw the zenith of Football computer gaming because Sensible Soccer, unlike the modern FIFA and PES titles, understood that football was not about individual skill but about structure and thought.  I was never much interested in actually playing football but I adore its little complexities as well as its larger ones.

Comments

[ShaunCG]

Thanks for the link, Jonathan, really appreciate it!

[Jonathan]

No Problem Shaun :-)

I don't normally link to reviews but I thought the book's subject matter really made it something worth mentioning. Nicely handled review too.