Art of the Title’s Top 10 Title Sequences of 2014
For our list of the top 10 title sequences released in 2014, Art of the Title’s editors chose from among film, television, video games, conferences, and whatever category Too Many Cooks fits into. Feeling pretty smug that I called out Halt and Catch Fire’s title sequence back in June. Pity the show itself doesn’t live up to its amazing titles.
El-P and Killer Mike discuss Steven Seagal
El-P: Steven Seagal’s the kind of guy whose idea of morality is very clear. Like, when in Out For Justice, Steven Seagal is just this brutal guy who goes around smashing people’s teeth and breaking people’s arms and just shooting people, and then he’s driving and someone throws a puppy out of a car in a bag, and he stops and gets out of the car and gets the puppy, and that’s the moment where it’s like, Seagal is a good guy, because he gets the puppy, and he brings it with him. And then at the end of the movie he finds the guy who threw out the puppy and beats the shit out of him. This is the Seagal perspective on morality. “I’m a good guy, because I found a puppy, and it doesn’t matter that I literally just destroyed someone’s trachea with a pencil. The puppy is more important.” And, you know, I respect him and his delusions.
NPR’s Best Books of 2014
I guess we’re heading into that time of the year when every site publishes their “best of the year” list. NPR’s list of books looks really tight though. My backlog of stuff to read is pretty terrifying now.
The Shape of Rome
One of the things I loved about living in Rome was that it’s a living history. If you wanted, you could stand on any street corner and unpack the layers of history and yell “STOP EVERYTHING – THIS BELONGS IN A MUSEUM”. But people don’t because they’ve got lives to live. And their lives will add another layer.
The BBC recently put out an amazing three hour retrospective on Chris Morris. I love Chris Morris but I absolutely hate being tethered to the iPlayer, so I created an MP3 version for offline listening.
You can grab it here:
Raw Meat Radio – Chris Morris Retrospective
In her recent blog post, my wife pointed out that the “it Says in the Papers” section of Morning Ireland is a really useful tool for giving you a super-condensed daily overview of the major stories in Irish media. And it’s true. It’s my favourite part of Morning Ireland (well, technically it’s my second-favourite, right after Harem Lousch reading the weather forecast — honestly, nothing brightens your day quite like hearing a Dutch person saying “schattered schowersch”). So I was pretty happy when my wife said “It Says in the Papers” was downloadable as a podcast.
Turns out that’s not strictly true.
It’s actually only available as part of the general Morning Ireland podcast, which also includes the news bulletins, the sport, the weather, as well as miscellaneous stories broken out into their own individual podcast episodes. In other words, there’s a whole load of shit there that I’m not actually interested in and don’t want to spend five minutes each morning deleting the extraneous crap from my feed just to get at the stuff I actually care about.
So I’ve created “Morning Ireland – The Best Bits”, which takes the Morning Ireland podcast firehose and filters it down to just the bits I care about — the news bulletin, It Says in the Papers (and Harem Lousch reading the weather).
To subscribe to it, just add the following URL to whatever podcasting software you’re using:
http://lowbrowculture.com/podcast/morningireland.xml
Obviously, the normal legal stuff applies — I don’t actually own the license for the media, this is for personal slash educational use only, caveat emptor — etc. etc. If you’re using it and you have any feedback, drop me an email.