Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 144

Unusual Cinema Books

After being involved in the UK film industry for so long I can’t quite break the habit of buying cinema books, but there are surprisingly few interesting ones appearing now, as film publicity is micro-controlled by studios – so we get Disney coffee table books that whitewash the real stories, plus the odd exposé in […]

Glorious London!

We rarely see our cities through the eyes of others. While I was away a good friend from Barcelona stayed here in London, and after heading home her praise for the city was fulsome. It helped that the spring weather was glorious, but she found the sheer choice of activities overwhelming, citing the theatre, the […]

Celebrating 20 E-Books: The Curse Of Snakes

Well, this novel was the one that got away. A supposedly YA book that had the misfortune to open between two (rotten) Medusa films. Everything conspired against me in the writing of it. First, I hit the problem of readers’ ages. ‘The Curse of Snakes’ was intended as a novel that anyone at any age […]

Sexual Frankness In The North

It always seemed a paradox to me, that the further North you travel the more sexually frank many societies become. Latin countries are largely Catholic and repressed, but once you get among the Protestants, Calvinists and Lutherans anything goes. In starting to explore the Northern nations nearest to the UK, I’ve found this true in […]

No Post Today. I’m In Oslo.

…to be more accurate, at the Oslo exhibition of Takasha Murakami’s outrageous, transgressive work (about which more tomorrow). In the meantime, does anyone know whether his Kaikai Kiki Studio anime is collected on DVD? It doesn’t appear to be on any of my internet bookmarks but I’d love to watch his strange space creatures again.

Some Notes On Reading

I stumbled across the Amazon bestsellers list last week and checked out the most popular subjects in the Amazon table; rebel girls, dieting, Mother’s Day, Fearne Cotton, big knickers, more mums. We all need to relax, so I’m not criticising the reading quality (although it does set a pretty low bar), but what struck me […]

Brass Monkeys VI: Last Days

I’m a convert. Having always loved jungles and deserts, I’m not prepared to admit another alternative; the arctic snowscape gives you a blank white canvas on which to write your dreams. This is a wilderness that needs to be captured by artists and on film before it goes. The recent shocking rise in Arctic temperatures […]

Brass Monkeys V: Pyramiden

A few more shots of the strange, abandoned and occasional polar bear home that is Pyramiden. First, some of the film rolls no-one has checked out in the abandoned cinema… The sub-zero basketball court, left like everything else, as if the town simply vanished overnight… And the hallway, leading to communal areas where walls are […]

Brass Monkeys IV: Inside The Dream Land

Some years ago writer Nicholas Royle edited a collection of writers’ dreams – ‘The Tiger Garden’ , and I wrote about my recurring dream, in which I enter a baroque cinema and sit down in the auditorium, but never get to see the film being played. At the abandoned mining town of Pyramiden, we reach […]

Brass Monkeys III

The on-board instructions at the bottom of the safety pamphlet should have been a clue about what we were getting ourselves in for. I couldn’t see how merely keeping my hopes up were going to work out in water filled with ice floes. The ship was taking us north-east to the abandoned Russian mining town […]