August 2025 – Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
3 posts published by Ray Newman during August 2025| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
3 posts published by Ray Newman during August 2025| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
You stop calling the police after a while, d’yer know worrimean? What’s the point? Either they don’t come at all, or by the time they turn up, the bloody thing’s gone to ground. They think we’re daft enough up here as it is, up at Longwood. Normal for Longwood – NFL. That’s what the doctors […]| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
Penny does not expect to hear the roar of an invisible dragon on the path on the edge of a potato field. It takes a moment for her to think to look up. The hot air balloon passing above her head is too low and too large. Its white sphere stands out sharply against dense […]| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
They – that is, the bastards that would grind you down – cannot stop you making music. They can stop you from making a living from it, though. Think of all those bands who somehow never seemed to g…| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
1 post published by Ray Newman during February 2025| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
Watching the film Hundreds of Beavers and a product of Shakespeare’s Henry V in the same week was something of a crash course in the suspension of disbelief. Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik, 2022) is a slapstick comedy about a fur trapper (Ryland Tews) using ever more elaborate methods to catch beavers. Except the beavers […]| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
I’ve got a limited supply of paperback copies of both Municipal Gothic and Intervals of Darkness ready to ship to anyone in the UK who wants to buy one. They’re £13 each including delivery in the U…| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
5 posts published by Ray Newman during July 2025| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
A key feature of popular music is the use of artificial echo and reverberation to make small ensembles sound big, to complexify simple arrangements, and to turn poky studio spaces into wide open landscapes. Listen to ‘Isi’, the opening track of Neu! 75, by German band Neu, for example. It begins with a simple sequence […]| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
Having narrowly avoided setting up a newsletter on Substack (well, a second newsletter) I’m going to use this blog for a similar purpose. Not least because the other day I read this… …and I thought, yes, same. I’ve also been inspired by Paul Watson in a couple of ways. First, by his monthly round-up of […]| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
If horror film makers have nothing else they can always rely on a cheap mask to bring a sense of the uncanny, playing upon our deepest instinctive fear of The Other. Watching the 1974 Spanish horror thriller Night of the Skull, directed by Jess Franco, I was struck by how it instantly seemed to step […]| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
Art doesn’t necessarily need to include people, and art that omits them isn’t necessarily inhumane – but we need to resist the allure of the soothing blank. When I read the line “For it…| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
I’ve never been to Los Angeles and probably never will. But it’s a city that exists as a high fidelity virtual model in our collective imagination as a result of more than a century of dominance over mass media. What percentage of American films and TV shows are set in LA? A disproportionate number, I’m […]|
Do you get the urge or is it just me? You’re walking along and you see a half-eaten sandwich lying on the ground, covered with bits of grit and crawling with ants, and you think: I want to eat that…| precastreinforced.co.uk
London, like New York, is often too busy, and too much in flux, to play itself on film. So, time after time, filmmakers rebuild it on backlots – with varying degrees of accuracy. Each of these othe…| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
Alan ‘Ginge’ Newman has died at the age of 75 after a lifetime of making and thinking about music. He wasn’t a full-time musician, however, because like most people he had to work to support his fa…| Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart
When they’ve built flats or superstores on the last of our wastelands, where will stories happen? Where will we go to play dangerous games? Think of a 1970s British crime drama and you might well p…| precastreinforced.co.uk
