Monthly Archives: October 2011

Boys and girls of every age – wouldn’t you like to see something strange?

31/10/2011 – 11:28

… come with us and you will see

this our town of Halloween!”

It’s Halloween! Woo hoo! The day of the year where we crack out the pumpkins and dress up as Mike Myers to scare the willies out of the neighbours. To coincide we naturally have a Halloween section on Hive, with products for children and adults alike. And check out the book on the making of Michael Jackson’s iconic Thriller video – it’s on the homepage and it has a very cool holographic cover, detailing from start to finish how his arguably greatest ever video was made. Spookness galore!

The Phantom of the Opera comes to DVD & Blu-ray in two weeks

Les Miserables celebrated its 25th birthday last year

Staying with all things Gothic for a bit, yesterday I finally got to see the 25th anniversary concert of the Phantom of the Opera at my local cinema. In the same way as one of Cameron Mackintosh’s other stratospheric phenomenons, Les Miserables, was celebrated last year when it saw its 25th birthday too, the concert was broadcasted live to various cinemas around the UK from the Royal Albert Hall on the night it was staged earlier this month. And so I went to see it yesterday, all three glorious hours of it, and what an absolute show it was. The lead roles were perfectly casted by Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Boggess, both fresh from playing the same roles this year in the West End in the Phantom’s sequel, Love Never Dies. These two were perfect as the Phantom and Christine respectively, and you could more than be forgiven for wondering, “Sarah who?” as you powerlessly allowed yourself to be captivated by Boggess, effortlessly gliding her way through the much-loved songs as the Phantom’s tortured heroine. I certainly did. Karimloo I know has played the Phantom many times before and incidentally has just won the role as the new Jean Valjean in Les Mis, so to see him here onstage where he belongs as our tragic disfigured composer of operas was something I just couldn’t wait for. Prior to this I have only heard him play the Phantom on the LND soundtrack, so this was a real treat for me. The film was followed by a small speech from Lord Webber after which he then introduced four Phantoms from past and present, Michael Crawford, who made the role what it is today, and his original Christine, Sarah Brightman. Crawford had chosen not to sing at the event, but one hardly missed this because Brightman was more than happy to as she sang an absolutely electric performance of the title song with the five Phantoms; three from past incarnations including the legendary Colm Wilkinson, the current West End one, John Owen-Jones, and Ramin Karimloo. The DVD and Blu-rays of the concert will be released on 14th November and I highly urge anyone who didn’t get to see it live or the live broadcast, or even if you did and you want the memories, to splash out on yourself and make it yours. That’s all I ask of you.

The Frozen Planet is on BBC1 right now

Back on television last week was David Attenborough and his latest series for the BBC about life on Earth, The Frozen Planet. I will brag a bit here and say I had the luxury of seeing it in HD and to be honest, this is the kind of television high-definition was made for. From the sped-up forming of snowflakes to the isolating-tragic beauty of vast plains of ice, Attenborough once again took us on a journey were very few – if any –cameras had taken us before. Being made by the same team as my favourite of his, the Blue Planet, I knew I would not be disappointed. A highlight for me was seeing the courtship of polar bears which had never really been filmed before in the wild. I tried not to focus too much on the bizarre and barbaric way orcas catch and “play” with their pray; they are one of the eternal mysteries of our oceans as we learned of their behaviour in the Blue Planet. While I understand that animals eating other animals is nature and all part of the food chain, quite why killer whales behave in such macabre ways is still a great sphinx-like riddle for marine biologists. However the majestic beauty of the ice and snow which Attenborough and his team endured through on their trek from the North to the South pole made up for it, and I for one cannot wait to see the next episode this Wednesday and to eventually own it on Blu-ray.

If you like your television slightly less glacial but still with ice-stares, perhaps you watched the start of the new series of Young Apprentice, which began its second run on BBC1 last Monday. The same formula as the adults’ version applies to Lord Sugar‘s new bunch of young candidates; a team of 16 and 17-year old boys and girls prove how good their business acumen is and that they can outsmart a calculator in order to win guidance and nurture from Lord Sugar to kick start their futures. A lot of the teenage contenders are self-made businessmen and women in their own right, but by appearing and battling it out against their rivals – which they can only do by working in a team – one of them in the end will win over and impress Lord Sugar and his sidekicks Karren Brady and Nick Hewer. It makes for great television at the very least, watching the young business-brains of today struggle now and again with basic mathematics and discounts, profit and margin. I’m sure it makes a lot of us adults at home secretly think, phew, I don’t know what 35% off £7.99 is either, or sigh in relief as you realise you thought you knew which part of London Hackney was in, and it certainly wasn’t West, but that’s okay because they don’t know either!

One other thing that I was excited to learn about last week was that my favourite TV chef, Nigella, has announced that she will be releasing a brand-new cookery book next autumn. This book will see her very much focusing on her roots and heritage as she goes right back home to Italy, where she promises to show us traditional and non-traditional dishes from her motherland, complete a coinciding TV series too. The recipes will be given the “express” treatment also, so I’m already looking forward to lots of authentic Italian dishes with the Nigella twist on them. Not that I can always afford her ingredients, but she is a joy to watch in all her programmes and no doubt she will deliver another iconic and must-have dish somewhere along the line. Marmite spaghetti, anyone?

By hivenetwork | Posted in Hive's Blogs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Even more writing!

24/10/2011 – 08:56

Wow. Two blogs in the space of one week. You must feel very privileged.

During the cold weeks of November, National Short Story Week will commence on 7th and go on until the 13th of the month; the event where short story reading is encouraged and short story writing is even more so. By clicking on the website here you will see a recommended reading list has been supplied to anyone who loves books and writing to help get you involved. There’s writing tips too if you’re not sure where to start, and how to write for various mediums. There’s even a small feature on what short stories some of our prolific authors enjoy reading, and of course most crucially, how you can get involved with writing short stories. Get those pens out, dears, and get ‘scribing for National Short Story Week!

Congratulations and all that jazz to the winners of the Independent Booksellers Book Prizes 2011, who were Edmund de Waal for The Hare with the Amber Eyes in Adults, and Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex in Children’s. You can find these two fabulous award-winning titles right here on Hive by clicking on the titles.

And even more bubbly must be quaffed and bunting hung out in celebration of the Booker Prize winner and indeed, the Not the Booker Prize winner as both accolades were awarded last week to Julian Barnes for The Sense of An Ending and King Crow by Michael Stewart respectively, so well done there.

Going back to the art of writing your own words though, a quick mention must go also to National Novel Writing Month which will start at the beginning of November too. Seems that November may indeed be the month for staying indoors in the cold weather, keeping warm with a blanket and the cat and writing your first bestseller… so do so by logging on here and see how you can get involved too.

As usual make sure you’re following us on Twitter and Facebook, and I’ll see you soon!

By hivenetwork | Posted in Hive's Blogs | Comments (0)

She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge.

19/10/2011 – 17:48

Jarvis' lyric book. Published by Faber.

Okay. If you’ve been reading my blog now (and I sincerely hope you have been, quite frankly if you haven’t, then you should be ashamed of yourselves) then you will know that I love Tintin. I also love Star Trek. These statements should not be front-page news to you, my dearest faithful readers and followers. However one of my other big loves is not something I have discussed before until now, but what with the amount of media surrounding him of late, I feel it is time to do so.

Anyone who knows me knows of my love for the band Pulp, and indeed their leader singer, Jarvis Cocker. I’m not going to turn this into a biography about him; I’m sure you’re all well aware of Common People and Disco 2000, but I just wanted to say how thrilled I was to learn that he has just been appointed as editor-at-large at Faber & Faber. Jarvis begins his two-year role at the famous publishers in January, an extended relationship if you will with Faber as this week saw the publication of his book of collected lyrics, Mother, Brother, Lover. The book houses seventy-odd lyrics that Jarvis has penned in his thirty-year musical career, and while all, or most, of the hits are in the book, album tracks and B-sides should most definitely not be ignored as these songs arguably contain Jarvis’ most biting, harsh and socially-observing lyrics. If I’m a geek about absolutely anything it’s Pulp’s back catalogue and so this book is something of a bible to me. The title has tickled me too; having listened to Pulp since I was fourteen I knew instantly why Jarvis had named his book so. And if you’re a fan of Jarvis’ quintessentially-English brilliance, you’ll know why too. The geek did inherit the Earth.

MetaMaus is due to be published in early November.

A proof copy of a book I have written about before here on the blog has landed on my desk this last week, a book which accompanies one of the greatest personal accounts of the Holocaust in literature history. I am talking about Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which tells the biography of the author’s parents and the life they endured in Auschwitz.

Originally Maus was published in two parts; My Father Bleeds History was published in 1986 and its sequel, Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began, completed the masterpiece in 1991. In the Maus books Spiegelman drew in graphic novel form his father’s experiences and life in Hitler’s Europe; how his father met his mother when they lived in Poland and were in fact quite wealthy and ran a series of successful factories prior to the Nazi invasion. None of this could help them avoid their fate of what was to come; they would be double-crossed into thinking they had found a train from Poland to Hungary, finally getting away from the War, when in actual fact it was taking them directly into Auschwitz. And here they stayed, until the Americans decided to show up.

I have written about Maus before; what I want to bring to your attention is this new book entitled MetaMaus, which is being published at the beginning of November to accompany and coincide with the 25th anniversary of Maus P1′s original release. The book, just from looking at it and not even having opened, looks already more than worth the £25 RRP. A heavy hardback, it has a spine of canvas bursting at the seams with more history and artwork you never knew existed about the legacy of Maus and the Spiegelmans’ lives in Nazi Germany. There is wonderfully also a treat of a DVD with the book, comprising audio interviews, photos, notebooks, unseen drawings, original drafts of Maus and more. This is the absolute tribute to the only graphic novel to have ever won the Pulitzer, and quite rightly so. Through MetaMaus, Maus will continue its legacy and will ensure that it is studied and referred to as one of the most harrowing true-life accounts of the Holocaust in history.

By hivenetwork | Posted in Hive's Blogs | Comments (0)

Have the last word… indeed!

12/10/2011 – 12:15

Have the last word - and win £1000 to spend on booty on Hive

*Grabs small trumpet and makes long tooting sound*

Ladies and gentlemen of book and independent bookshop-lover land! By now you should all know about the fantastic competition Hive is running; finish a grisly story started by award-winning crime author extraordinaire
Mark Billingham, and you could win £1000 British pounds sterling to spend on DVDs, Blu-ray and/ or books on Hive. I think this is a very juicy thing for anyone who’s ever fancied penning a murder / crime novel and now’s your chance to go for it, and have Mark Billingham say that you were the best, made him shiver and want to carry on reading… have your last word on Mark’s specially written for novel, and be in with a chance to win £1000 to spend on Hive.

And there’s even more! Do not despair if you are not chosen by Mark with the winning entry, the writer who submits the entry which gains the most public votes will get £250 to spend on books, DVDs and Blu-ray at Hive as well. That will buy you a lot of booty.

Any chance I get to write I snap up with great fervour, so come on writers, do the same too and show the world how awesome you are how you write… how are you going to finish off Mark’s novel? Go to the competition site, have a look at the details, read Mark’s opening paragraph and ‘scribe for your life!

And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up-to-date of all the entries and to cast your vote.

By hivenetwork | Posted in Hive's Blogs | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

“London is so beautiful this time of year…”

10/10/2011 – 17:36

So it must be said that things are hotting up here in Hive Towers almost to Vesuvius level… our Have the Last Word competition is definitely keeping our followers on Twitter and Facebook guessing as to who our mystery author could be. I’ll give you a clue too… his name was used a lot in the recent Crime Thriller Awards as a nominated author. Not that this gentleman is a stranger to winning awards anyway… but I won’t say anymore as le chat will be very firmly out of le sac in the next two days…. How exciting! You don’t get this every day now, do you?

Karl's diaries from when he visited the Seven Wonders of the world last year.

The last three weeks has seen the start of a new series of An Idiot Abroad, where comics Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant send Ricky’s loveable-but-not-as-dim-as-he-looks former radio producer Karl Pilkington to various places around the world, where Karl is to “live out the dreams” of other peoples’ bucket lists. In true Ricky and Stephen-style though, there were some amendments; Karl gets to pick his choices out of a list of a hundred dreams, but these choices are then tweaked and expanded on by Ricky and Stephen, for visual pleasure and certainly not at Karl’s.

Last week he was sent on the Trans-Siberian Railway, right through to China, but had to endure sleeping “on a very tight and cramped shelf” that was the accommodation of third-class. No, no one else seemed to know there was a third-class either. In latest episode the dream was to go swimming with dolphins in Australia. As opposed to just flying straight out to Oz and swimming with the gentle creatures, Karl was made to stop over in Thailand and spend time with some Bangkok ladyboys, followed by going to a zoo and being mauled by lots of monkeys. Just when he thought this madness was over, he is finally flown to Australia, only to find out upon arrival that the reason he is being met with a large steel cage is because he is not going swimming with the afore-mentioned super-intelligent, peaceful, aquatic mammals, but the inspiration for Spielberg’s Jaws; great whites. It’s a far cry from his life growing up on a Manchester council estate in the 80s. Unsurprisingly Karl bottled his first attempt to swim with the whites, but eventually summoned up his courage and got in the water with the giant man-eaters.

So far it’s been a good series, but I have to say I have enjoyed the first series of An Idiot Abroad more; the contrast of cultures where Karl eats a bag of pickled onion Monster Munch in a poverty-stricken backstreet in China whilst the locals “look normal” feasting on scorpion, skinned frogs and dead fertilised chicken’s eggs is a lot more eye-opening to watch. However. If you follow Ricky on Twitter @rickygervais you will see that there are a lot more delights in store for us at Karl’s expense for the remainder of An Idiot Abroad 2. If you like their humour and indeed were a fan of the Office & Extras, then you will not be disappointed.

I was pleased to read about The London Bookshop Map, the first edition of which was published a couple of weeks ago and aims to support and spread awareness of local independent bookshops in London. It will subsequently be published every six months to allow for updates, and is free and available in bookshops and galleries around London. I think this is marvellous, though I’m a bit of a closet-cartographer anyway. Plus I love books. If you want to know more, click on the link at the beginning of this paragraph, and you can also go to their Facebook page too and get into it there. Anything that promotes independent bookshops and bookselling can only be a good thing, and hopefully this map will show Londoners and tourists who don’t know more about the independents in the Big Smoke. Good booklover-type-people of London; galvanise!

And if you want to know where there are good independent bookshops across our entire sceptred isle, then why not use this new map as engineered by the Guardian and its readers. A fun way by clicking on the coloured dots in different counties will ensure you see reviews and information about your local independent, or indeed any in the UK which are housed on it. You can submit reviews about your own experience in a shop, and create a funky coloured map pin for them too so other readers can see and spread the word about our great independents. Get travelling, I say!

Laters!

By hivenetwork | Posted in Hive's Blogs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
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