A double agent operating in London dreams of retiring, but his life is complicated when he is assigned to assassinate a traitor: himself. With one foot in the pop art fantasy of James Bond and another in the grim world of John Le Carre, A Dandy in Aspic never quite succeeds at being either.
On the Cultural Gutter, we’re going on a tour of the universe via The Cosmic Crooner, all about Frank Sinatra’s bizarre Trilogy, a third of which is devoted to a swingin’ tour of the future.
On Cultural Gutter, I’m Neuromancin’ with Myself. The early 1990s was when I read Neuromancer. Into this maelstrom of personal evolution and conflicting feelings came Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk.
In the whole of Ireland, there’s only one working distillery open to the public (Bushmills is technically in another country): the Teeling Distillery. In The Spirit of Dublin, I sit down with distillery co-founder Stephen Teeling to discuss his family history, the state of Irish whiskey, and the complicated process of building a distillery that is open tot he public in a country that has no guidelines for such a thing.
My trip to Ireland wasn’t all stone circles and eldritch pacts with ancient forces. I followed the Irish Whiskey Trail to visit the country’s distilleries – only to discover that you can actually visit the distilleries. But there are lovely museums.
Over on The Cultural Gutter, I’m looking at two series of scifi novels by Jack McDevitt in Archaeologists in Space.
Testi plays Milo, a small-time hood who, when the film opens is lugging his wounded buddy through a field after a heist that has apparently gone rather poorly. His friend dies, and Testi buries him in the field before getting arrested and ending up in a jail run by Oliver Reed’s Vito Cipriani.
