I don’t know if BEE was responding the David Foster Wallace’s comments on American Psycho, but I read somewhere that BEE considers himself a moralist, and the point of most of his work is to depict horrible people behaving horribly, as a kind of grotesque warning to his readers. I’m kind of torn on the issue – my…

Wow, that’s really surprising to hear. I guess maybe I just caught BEE on a good day, and Rushie on a bad day. In contrast to BEE, when I asked Rushdie if I can take a photo with him he bluntly said no. Thankfully his assistant took my camera and took the photo while he was signing. Somewhere there’s a hilarious photo…

tbh, having just taken a pop at all of those authors, it’s actually been one of my plans for several years to read all of the books that Fincher has worked from, because I figure that even if none of them lives up to his films, there must be something there for him to work from. The Zodiac book and Benjamin Button are…

I feel less bad about it gathering dust on my shelf now, thanks! Sadly this is one of my problems with SF in general – I get so excited by the ideas but it’s rare that a novel manages to match the author’s imagination with compelling storycraft.

None taken – and you are, I’m afraid, correct. And, tbh, given that this was in Oxford, the majority of attendees were probably also of the same totally-non-minority identity. My accompanying friend was female though, and now identifies as queer, so... maybe his affability towards her counts for something in BEE’s…

I’ve not yet read Roadside Picnic or Solaris, but I suspect that Tarkovsky’s adaptations probably warrant inclusion here.

Yep, I’m pretty sure that the writers could have killed several birds with one stone with an entry titled ‘Anything that David Fincher has directed based on a book, except maybe Benjamin Button’.

Yeah, but ‘We Can Remember...’ is only a teeny little short story. Same for ‘Minority Report’ which, terrible ending notwithstanding, the film does a great job of both fleshing out and making much more comprehensible.

I met him when Lunar Park came out – he did a signing a stone’s throw from where I was living as an undergrad. That was my first major experience of him aside from the books of his that I’d read at that point (probably the first four – I bought both Glamorama at the signing too), and he was incredibly nice. He signed…

Yeah, good point – I was thinking that Drax would be a more likely casualty of the two if it came to a face-off with Thanos.

There’s also ‘Slipping Away’ from that record (Things Falling Apart), which is a really cool deconstruction/redevelopment of ‘Into The Void’, which is of course itself a redevelopment of ‘La Mer’... It’s cool that Trent can pick up motifs and refrains from already-great songs and develop something new out of it.…

Pretty sure Ruffalo has several more films in his contract so... not likely. No idea about the others.

Why is Bucky an impossibility, btw? (Appreciate it may be the same reason I rule out Hulk.) Surely his ‘red in the ledger’ status – which has been pretty well explored in Civil War, rather than just vaguely mentioned…

Did you hear their cover/remix/reimagining/whatever of the ‘Halloween’ theme last year? It was probably my next most played track after ‘The Background World’. It starts off as a pretty faithful cover and then somehow becomes this typically-Trent evil dance music. If you like The Social Network and Ghosts and all that…

You’re welcome! I swear I just had that song playing on repeat for so long once I’d discovered its awesomeness.

I hadn’t considered the connection between the video and the artwork, so that might help, thanks! tbh I’m not even sure that I knew that there was a video for ‘This Isn’t the Place’ – I can only remember the…

I doubt that anything will topple ‘La Mer’ for me – it’s been my favourite NIN joint probably since I heard it, and its status as such was totally cemented when it made a surprise appearance in the setlist for one of their “farewell” shows. Trent gave a little speech before it about how he holed up in this house to…

Contrary to what Yummsh says, the ‘physical component’ (as it was called on the NIN site) didn’t include a CD. It was presumably called that – airquotes an’ all – precisely to inform buyers that they weren’t getting a CD, but instead some mysterious physical product.

tbh I kind of liked the whole ‘there will be consequences’ thing of that ‘physical component’. It was kind of like the Durutti Column record that came in a sandpaper cover that risked scratching the fuck out of your other records.

The physical component of ‘Add Violence’ was totally forgettable, but on the other hand…

Yes, of course, everything is permitted. Not everything is correct, though.

As a militant grammarian I’d have to disagree, but yeah, bands like The Beatles and The Smiths wreak grammatical havoc with their name choices, so it’s totally understandable that in practice most people would say ‘are’ instead of ‘is’ for them.

Actually The Streets could have all the members of GY!BE, Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire and Polyphonic Spree combined and it’d still be correct to use ‘is’ instead of ‘are’ – there’s only one band called ‘The Streets’.