THE WRITER

WATCHING: Barton Fink. A fascinating, intricate and ambitious film though it may be, Barton Fink, like many of the Coen Brothers’ films, is a little to arch for me to completely love. As far as I‘m concerned, Joel and Ethan are at their best when they venture out of Coen-world and into the real world a little (as in Blood Simple, Fargo and The Man Who Wasn’t There), something Fink never quite manages to do. New film No Country For Old Men, which is apparently a return to Blood Simple territory, looks to be far more my kinda Coen…

LISTENING TO: Travis, The Man Who. They may be deemed uncool and boring nowadays, but Travis are still one of the best bands of the 90s and The Man Who is their best album. The teenage alienation of As You Are, the intimacy of The Last Laugh of the Laughter (awful title, I am prepared to admit) and the melancholia of Why Does It Always Rain On Me? make the band’s sophomore effort a rich and textured piece of work that puts many of today’s bland, one-note bands to shame.

READING: Spider-Man Fairy Tales Issue 1. A rather curious, but really quite brilliant version of Little Red Riding Hood recast in a medieval-style Spider-Man universe. Spidey's still doing his stuff of course, but the focus here is very much on Mary Jane (Little Red Riding Hood herself), who must choose between being her own woman or being loyal and dutiful as her mother says she should be. C.B. Cebulski's writing is rich and layered with allegory, while the art from Ricardo Tercio is suitably atmospheric. A must-read if you want a break from the Civil War/Back in Black tripe that Marvel keep weighing poor Spidey down with.

THE EDITOR

WATCHING: Not seen a film for weeks now, so it's all TV here. Gradually catching up on the end of the current seasons of Lost and 24 (no thanks to Sky and Virgin Media). Also had the end of Desperate Housewives, which was a genuinely quite shocking ending to a pretty decent season with plenty of the darker moments and not too many of the girly moments. Oh, and there's Big Brother, but thankfully not too much of that so far.

LISTENING TO: The new Ash album, which I'll go into more detail about when I do a proper review in a few weeks, but it's definitely a 'grower'. Also been listening to Brother Bones & His Shadows, a weird CD of 'bones' music that includes the Harlem Globetrotters' theme tune. There's also The Left Banke getting a lot of 'rotation' at the moment, along with some classic 1970s Aerosmith. Can't beat it.

READING: Just back off holidays, so there's a lot of this. Finished The Dream Life Of Suhkanov, then started Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and read it in a couple of days. Then there was The Promise Of Happiness by Justin Cartwright, which was ok, but not great, same goes for Panic by Jeff Abbott, which was a great page-turner, if short on substance. And finally (in no particular order) is Red Dust by Ma Jian, a great true story about an artist in Communist China who gets sick of life in Beijing and heads off on the road across the vast expanses of his country.