The beat goes on

David Thompson is someone who knows a thing or two about dance music. In the early 1990s he was the European representative of Strictly Rhythm, an electronic music label based in New York. Then in 1994 he co-founded Emit (or rather, using their novelty typography, em:t), another record label specialising in dance music.

Now I would have thought that prolonged exposure to all those repetitive rhythms would eventually reduce your brain to mush, but evidently this has not happened to David Thompson, who regularly writes features and reviews for a variety of publications, including such august titles as The Times, The Observer and The Guardian. He writes on a pleasingly diverse range of topics, but especially on film, photography, comic books and 'graphic novels'. (A graphic novel is, I believe, best defined as a comic book that wants to be taken seriously.) Among his dislikes are the right-wing columnist Melanie Phillips and conceptual art. In his view, Tracey Emin 'belongs to a long line of performers who have cannibalised their own lives for public consumption, scrambling for our attention (apparently in any form), while offering no significant reason for us to watch for very long.'

Above all, David Thompson deserves credit for bringing to our attention BLEEX (the Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton), a pair of robotic trousers being developed by the Berkeley Robotics Laboratory in California. 'Never let it be said that scientific progress is hampered by anything as trivial as fashion sense,' writes David in a brief but intriguing article. However, he carelessly neglects to point out that the idea was clearly stolen from Wallace and Gromit.