Seductive Tactics

The enormously wealthy and emotionally remote investment banker Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) receives a strange gift from his ne’er-do-well younger brother (Sean Penn) on his forty-eighth birthday: a voucher for a game that, if he agrees to play it, will change his life. Thus begins a trip down the rabbit hole that is puzzling, terrifying, and exhilarating for Nicholas and viewers alike. This multilayered, noirish descent into one man’s personal hell is also a surreal, metacinematic journey that, two years after the phenomenon Se7en, further demonstrated that director David Fincher was one of Hollywood’s true contemporary visionaries.

Blue Cathedral, the third outing from Santa Cruz's Comets On Fire, is the culmination of five years of sonically overdriven rock & roll research. Here, the original quartet – Ethan Miller, guitar and vocals; Noel Harmonson, echoplex and analog keyboards; Ben Flashman, bass; Utrillo Kushner, drums – is augmented by new member and second guitarist Ben Chasny (aka Six Organs of Admittance) and the intermittent saxophone playing of guest Tim Daly (at whose studio this album was recorded). Chasny guested on the sprawling psychedelic freakout that was 2001's Field Recordings from the Sun.

A handbook on all aspects of chess which has been written to enable players to progress to good club level or better. It includes sections on computer and Internet chess, main chess openings, test positions for players of all standards, practical advise on further study, information and advice on club and tournament chess, courses in tactics and attacking strategy, first hand accounts of local, national and international chess events and a selection of the greatest games ever played.