James Harriman-Smith

Category: Pop culture

  • The Zotero Quest

    Those who know a little about role-playing games (RPG) may be familiar with the concept of ‘levelling up’. When your character acquires a certain quantity of experience (all experience is quantitative in these games), they pass from their current level to the one above, becoming – in a variety of ways – more powerful. In…

  • Orphan Black and General Sensibility

    Have you been watching Orphan Black? I have, and enjoying it immensely as a way to get away from writing up my PhD. Unfortunately, though, the fact that my thesis is all about performance makes it pretty much impossible to ignore my research completely when watching a TV series. Especially this one. I can’t help…

  • Monsters

    This post is so far out of the Christmas spirit that I’ve decided to put this warning at the head of it. Apologies. Continue only if you’re feeling Scroogish. Continuing my sideline of reading whatever roughly contemporary anecdotal accounts of acting and performance I find in secondhand bookshops (e.g. Sher’s, and Brook’s), I’ve just finished…

  • Millennium Actress (Sennen Joyû)

    Without a doubt, and for reasons that will soon become clear, Satoshi Kon’s 2001 masterpiece is one of my favourite animated films. The story is relatively simple: we watch a film journalist, Genya Tachibana, and his unnamed cameraman interview the famous retired actress Chiyoko Fujiwara about her life whilst a series of earthquakes shake the…

  • The Game

    Warning: spoilers I watched Ender’s Game last night, and, with only a vague memory of the novel by Orson Scott Card on which it is based, was newly struck by all the moral questions raised by the story. One or two of them – as with most things these days – seemed to connect with…

  • Benedict Cumberbatch

    I heard the other day that Benedict Cumberbatch (aka. Sherlock Holmes, Julian Assange, and Smaug) is going to be playing Hamlet in London towards the end of 2014. There is much excitement about this, on a par with that surrounding David Tennant’s Hamlet with the RSC in 2009. This way of talking about somebody‘s Hamlet…

  • Queen and My Thesis

    This idea for a post came to me during a run. Around the twelfth kilometre, as the endorphins were kicking in and the village of Coton disappearing behind me, Queen’s 1991 hit, The Show Must Go On came up on my playlist, and it struck me that the lyrics of the song – recounting Freddie…