About the New Andy McNab Book

june 9 2009

He’s been in my ‘Top 3 Favourite Authors’ since 1997 but might get kicked out because of this fiasco.  

It’s his latest in the Nick Stone series and 20 pages in it’s obvious it’s been ghost written.  I look forward each year to the latest installation and well, the disenchantment on my face runs deep.
 
You can just tell; the sentence structure, expressions, rhythm, he’s missing in all of it.  I’m maybe 100 pages in and already have found two chunks of text that’ve been copied and pasted from his other books.  I get that he’s busy and his brand is blowing up, that’s cool, but this is not.

A prediction: you might not yet know him but you will, because I predict his books will be turned into Hollywood movies and the Nick Stone franchise will become as big as the Bourne one.  And get this: he’s sold the movie rights three times to one of his books, brilliant.

This Luminato Art is Excellent

Part of this year’s festival is the ‘Luminato Box’: a temporary white-walled structure built inside Brookfield Place (formerly BCE Place).  The artist may display their art provided it adheres to these rules of the box, and today I wandered in.

When I first passed through the curtain and looked around I didn’t get it (okay, I rarely get it) but then when you get closer to the canvas the light fades on, transforms everything, and then you’re the girl standing there going “holy crap”.  Look:

june 8 2009

“The Shadows of Burden (Doublespeak)” by Studio F-Minus, “is a series of interactive media pieces in which a seemingly random arrangement of wires is revealed to be a complicated sculpture casting the shadow of a tragic character in Greek mythology at the moment of his punishment”.

Then I met one half of the duo that is Studio F-Minus:


That’s Brad Hindson, architect and modest guy too, because it turns out his Nuit Blanche piece last year, A Dream of Pastures, was one of the whole festival’s highlights, but I only found that out by Googling the guy.  On the left there is a side-profile shot of the mess of wires, except it’s not a mess at all.

Me: This is too cool, how this comes out of your head.
Brad: We work closely together, Mitchell and I.
Me: There’s so much finicky work in here, eh?
Brad: Ya, it took months to make some of these. 
Me: Check and test.  Check and test. 

Brad knows patience and would probably relate to this.  Too bad for you though, because as I type this Brad is taking it all down since you only get to be in the Luminato Box for just one day.