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You owe me twenty quid: Tyres in Spaced

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15 May 2020 Last week Becca Harrison tweeted about re-watching the turn-of-the-millennium Channel 4 sitcom, Spaced , and some of its most quotable lines (concerning jaffa cakes in coat pockets) and imitable actions (mimed shoot out). Being an Ulsterperson, my fondness for the show often homes in on Tyres played by Belfast-born, Holywood-bred actor Michael Smiley (if you're a Ben Wheatley fan, you ought to recognise him). This train of thought, not for the first time, got me thinking about the significance of Tyres. When Spaced first aired in September 1999, Northern Ireland was a year-and-a-half into its fragile official peacetime following (and not quite yet distinct from) the prior thirty years of conflict. I was in my mid-teens and it was only when I reached my early and mid-twenties that I fully understood the characters in the show, especially the oddities of being a grown-up but feeling not as mature as your age suggested, of feeling the ageing process but still being...
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Unbelievable part 11: Ishtar

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17 January 2020 In parts 8 and 9 of these posts on Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable exhibition in 2017, I worked through some issues and points raised by its central mythology of a freed slave who became an excessively wealthy art collector whose attempt to ship his collection for display in a custom-built temple met with disaster. I want to turn now to the notional temple and the Mesopotamian goddess in whose honour it was said to be built: Ishtar. This is a gap in the plot filled out by the film that shares the exhibition’s title. At least I hope that’s from where I understand this detail as it is not in the guidebook and the film’s license on Netflix has expired, so for now I cannot double-check. Let’s assume until I can that my memory is correct and have a look at relevant aspects of the show and their possible significance s . Hailing from an area that is now part of Turkey, the collector in question, Cif Amotan II, is sa...
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Spirited Away

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22 May 2020 Back in what feels like the beforetimes in February, Netflix began a staggered release of Studio Ghibli films, which put me in the mood to revisit many of them as well as see the few I'd missed for the first time. As the Covid-19 crisis became more apparent and lockdown was (finally and suddenly) introduced in the UK, the desire in particular to find comfort in Sprited Away (dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) grew all the more. It's a film I've watched a few times before, and I enjoy the experience of seeing the works in both the original Japanese and English dubs. When Channel 4 ran a Studio Ghibli season, oh goodness, 10 to 15 or perhaps more years ago, only the dubbed versions were shown. But Netflix gives fantastic options for audio and subtitle combinations, and this time round it has to be the Japanese. In early April my anxiety concerning the pandemic was overwhelming, and getting it under control led to fatigue. One afternoon I had to admit defeat and lie i...
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