James Bell Central

Month: December 2017

  • Call For Projects: A social media site for creators

    Call For Projects: A social media site for creators

    Call For Projects is the part of my website where I call upon the generosity of the reader to develop and complete a project idea that I know in my heart of hearts I’m never actually going to get around to starting, let alone completing. Each CfP will probably be an idea way out of my field of expertise. In fact, I’m going to go so far as to guarantee here that each will definitely be out of my field of expertise. But who knows, it might be in yours. And one of us needs to make it happen. And, y’know, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be me…

    A website specifically designed to use all the power of social media to help connect an audience with creators of all forms of art. (more…)

  • Recommendation: Simone Giertz, Queen of Shitty Robots

    Recommendation: Simone Giertz, Queen of Shitty Robots

    Long overdue recommendation here. Anyone who’s looked at my social media over the last year or more will notice one name cropping up again and again: Simone Giertz. The Shitty Robot Queen. (more…)

  • Eulogize This: M R James

    Eulogize This: M R James

    Warnings To The Curious

    Legend has it that Montague Rhodes James—late Victorian medievalist scholar, provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and perhaps England’s most acclaimed writer of ghost stories—hated all forms of modernity. He considered James Joyce a “prostitutor of life and language”, and voted against women being allowed to receive degrees at Cambridge. I have no doubt that a good part of the legend is true, although I think it’s easy to get the man wrong. Or at least, it’s easy to paint him into the satisfyingly prudish and fearful Victorian that makes us all feel sexy and adventurous by comparison.

    Firstly, I think his stories are frequently funny and self-aware. He can be happily rude about golf, and university life (particularly the habits of those at ‘another university’). And most of the victims of his ghost stories—dusty late-career academics and bachelors obsessed with all things historical—seem to be thinly-veiled self-parodies. (more…)

  • Recommendation: Song For A Winter’s Night

    Recommendation: Song For A Winter’s Night

    Every once in a while I stumble on this spine-tinglingly good version of Gordon Lightfoot’s Song For A Winter’s Night again, recorded by Sarah McLachlan (Jesus!) over 20 years ago. It did the rounds of film and TV in the mid 90s, and even though I think I never actually had a copy of it, it’s just one of those songs you only need to hear once to have it lodged in your brain… pretty much for ever, really.

    Current Favourite Part:
    The beginning, the end, and the bit in the middle.

  • From The Vaults: The Hallelujah Chorus

    From The Vaults: The Hallelujah Chorus

    An old favourite butchered by me and me bruv that we haven’t had in a while. Tomorrow there’ll be a special NYE version of the Bastard English Session, and no doubt this tune will crop up somewhere. (more…)

  • Recommendation: Patrick Willems on Comics

    Recommendation: Patrick Willems on Comics

    I’m basically pinching this as a recommendation, in which Patrick Willems, whose YouTube channel is great (check out ‘What if Wes Anderson Directed X-Men?’), gives some great suggestions on comic books for anyone who, like me, has hardly read any since childhood, but has meant to have another look and see if there’s anything you might like. This video does seem like a really good place to start.

    Current Favourite Recommendation:
    Bitch Planet.