Cultural Life: Neil Hannon, singer

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Kelly Rissman

US News Reporter

Books: The best book I've read recently is "The Rest Is Noise" by Alex Ross. It's a very thick tome about 20th-century classical music. It filled in a lot of blanks my knowledge as well as being a riveting read. Right now I'm reading Graham Greene's "The Heart of the Matter". I went through a phase of reading Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series. It's a change coming to Graham Greene which is quite dry and old-style... but beautiful.

Television: I'd watch more if there was any to watch - I usually end up watching "30 Rock" and "Frasier". I have a DVD of Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation". It's good to see a different era's take. I want to get Carl Sagan's 1980 television series "Cosmos: A personal Vogage".

Film: "Synecdoche, New York" blew me away. It took its premise and absolutely went through with it– the whole thing eating itself. It was reasonably life-affirming but for the most part incredibly depressing!

Music: I'm listening to a lot of Penguin Café Orchestra – you'd know the tunes from adverts. It's modernism, except it's fun to listen to.

Visual Arts: I like Botero. He is a Colombian figurative artist and he just paints fat people, or he paints everybody as being large.

The Divine Comedy's 'At the Indie Disco' is out on 24 May; album 'Bang Goes the Knighthood' on 31 May