Life has taught us that love does not consist
in gazing at each other but in looking outward
together in the same direction.

--Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

well, okay here is where Jon nails it (regarding uncarved nailing it, in actuality...).
~
more Agony, Eden and Meme is good, basically. allround chaps!

i'm puzzled by his His Name Is Alive declarations.

i've clearly only heard that earlier stuff, as like he says, mr warn defever (sp?) is not quite on point with - well, most things really - in those sort of outings. i do like that bloke who did the 'glimmer'r track', that sort of thing. you'd know him.
daniel figgis, there we are, i'm sure that's him. quite good stuff. sounds like, in name dept., comic daniel kitson. prefer him to kitson. still like kitson mind.

incidentally, have you seen Jon's sidebar?
Keenan's best albums? Keenan is quite the good looking young outsider/avant-rock cutie, ain't he?

Reynolds looks quite a lot like Oscar Wilde the only photos i've seen (sorry SR, but that's a compliment, i adore Oscar), whereas Keenan looks more, well a little hungrier, perhaps a little younger (OK, it could just be an exceptionally good photo; i hear journos are wont to do that on their mast piccies), more, hmm zeal? zest?
no, that's unfair.

~

you can tell somedisco must be a shallow POPist kind of place, judging people on appearances and suchlike...

one of the boys i rilly dig comes out, in the end, for your self, disavowing all yon theories, one sposes.

reasonable to me.

it is one of the great pleasures of my insulated existence to be sat here in this cocooned office, sneaking looks at the internet, as the champions league draw is being made, and conversation turns to the draw (when line managers are away).
what a merry picture i paint...

how horrible

four weeks today...
...hurrah!

what do we think of mr hoon's evasions?

hmm.

"Rodney Joyce says he feels safer walking around his native South Africa than he does in Britain (Metro, Wed). Could this be because, if he drove, he might well become one of the 20,000 victims of violent carjacking which takes place every year in that country?
Come on, Rodders - why have you fled to the UK?
Could it be because of the daily grind of having to live behind burglar bars and scampering up your front door when you pull up in your drivewat? These kids may be yobs but they are not armed with AK47s or 9mm pistols - well, not the majority of them, anyway. This makes the UK slightly safer than South Africa."
James Lewis, EC1.

~
rite on! one of the things that really irks us here at somedisco towers is this narrative that says, somehow, nowhere is as bad as britain (despite it being the second safest country in the world to raise a child, in terms of freedom from deaths in accident, violence, etc.), ooh, i'd feel safer anywhere, and so on, on and on and on and such.
the last year or so has seen middlebrow, middle-england shield-bearers (or should that be tub-thumpers?) such as richard littlejohn (Sun columnist) rilly take up this trope in earnest, and it's somewhat not on, frankly... ...the privilege and parochialism about RSA that enfolds my above take mind you. dear me.
~
'AK47s are the curse of Africa'
Sam Kiley

i dig agony shorthand, not least since Jon flagged it up to me (oh bwoy, your praises are sung in email, mr agony shorthand, are they evah!) but what paul meme has to say in response to Jay seems more OTM to me.
i'm probably more of a dub fan than anything else from the 70s too (embarrassingly, pretty much agreeing - certainly on a good day witha fair wind - with John Savage about the primacy of early Keith Hudson), but the bloke commenting
Reynolds seems to be making an issue out of nothing, no? (Funny how writers will do that so that they'll have an angle on things.) It's not as though the world at large has forgotten about reggae in the throes of their obsession with dub. It's only the miniscule demographic of certain Wire magazine readers that has done so. in the squawkbox there is a tad unfair. Reynolds is a man with a sense of perspective, i've got the article at home (probably the best short piece he's written, in my view) and he's just clearly taking to task macro-dun {or duns scotius hey, no i meant to write dub there} infection people, not the bloke down the pub who enjoys a boogie to UB40 or Shaggy.
but, yeah, Paul's reply basically nails it frankly, and i think should be stuck in pipes and blazed up.

i must admit at this point in time that i find the miseducation of lauryn hill not much cop at all, indeed apart from 'lost ones' and 'doo wop' and perhaps 'everything is everything' (and that mostly for sentimental reasons) i can't seem to get into it at all, and i've had copies in various forms for years.

on the other hand, i was looking about the gravediggaz yesterday (love both the first two albums) on AMG but accidentally found these instead, which was a bit of a surprise, let me tell you.

good for them

shocking piece from alisa solomon over at the voice today

damn, she is hot

what do you mean, there's an inherent contradiction in moaning about Adult.'s fanbase whilst quoting Nate Patrin's words earlier... that's a test, reader, you have to scroll back a day or two on this very page to see the quote in question, i would have searched thru the ILM boards archive to link it helpfully for you, but i just ate a couple of cookies (shout to Heiden) and now i'm good for naught.

indeed ILMers, you only really need machine gun. Jon Dale mentioned a new one of his to me in a mail the other day, but i can't remember the name. adolphe sax was okay, but heck i'm scalping it, and if a playful minor-blogger is publicly going on about his scalping, what would the big boys make of it?

RIP Bradley Rone

and Barthel nails it like this
Incidentally, the pop-as-inclusiveness theme nicely counters the main thrust of Simon's post, i.e. that popism is just another (fairly traditional) move in Da Discourse and "an option available to uber-hipsters who want to distance themselves from middlebrow peers." (Horrors!) Because--ha ha ha--we don't care if we're uber-hipsters. That's fine! We don't hate indie kids, we just want them to be happier. I don't want anyone to stop liking Godsmack (or whatever), I just want them to start liking Nelly and euro-pop. Call me a hipster all you want, man, I'm cool with that. Just dance to the damn music, OK?
~
without getting me confused about rigorous conceptualisms, which is useful.

on second thought, i think clap clap's entry [link below] finishes with some better stuff than anything SR or k-punk raises perhaps, i mean to say i agree with that.
i like the mostly weird blog anyway, but the finishing flourish of "At best, critics who write about pop acts are just jacking off; at worst, they're doing a disservice to the reader, and to "small" bands, and by extension to music in general" didn't sit well round here.

so i was gonna throw a link to the basically always (or at least consistently, if that a better phrasing?) excellent jess harvell because i thought i read a piece excoriating Adult. on there, but i must have had false memory syndrome (again!) and it was about coil.
still, i must say, Adult.'s rockist audience, who prefer them as the outfit of choice to have risen from the decadent electroclash scene (now as dead as fischerspooner's current account, etc.), that does rankle with me a bit. because Adult. of course, are coming from a bit of a bolshy punk nihilist background too, Suicide etc. (in the UK this is why Fat Truckers are liked), it's not just those rum Belleville Three chappies, hey we can relate to that!

yeah, see what i mean.
~
POPism &c. debate.
here are four of the best commentators:
SR, k-punk, clap clap, and, of course, the piece itself.

i may not have Ingram's theorising brains or ideas, but even i know when to piss my pants, and that was with this : -
...the kind of cloth-eared lefties who think that "strange fruit" is a good song.
'red rob' wyatt, paraphrasing gunther schuller.

i also liked my mate qasim (alright Q!) opining that jaimeson - with his, let's be fair to him - somewhat arrogant personal trope, could well be the robert miles of garage pop, and although he thinks the lumidee song is all pith and no zest he'd still, well, yeah

a contact of mine, at work, at a place called sunlight workwear, up in stirlingshire (that's scotland you know) is a mr ian penman.

strange but true.

good show

indeed

94%?

hmm

bah

i tell you what, what's ironic, is that the bbc used to (wrongly) slur the daily express as racist for its coverage of asylum seekers issues, and nowadays the guardian is (wrongly) slurring Auntie with much the same brush [ETA: eh?].
what gives?

how times change.

you can tell i'm the rightwing twat among many of my circles of friends because i'm the only one that holds the french government in lower esteem than the american government.

a TWANBOC fanboy writes...

Funniest. Blog. Ever. Official

the boffins at Cal Tech Maths and the DAMTP agree; it's been scientifically proven.
the testing was also rerouted and backed up-double booked by a team of specially trained macaque monkeys (sweatshop wages, alas, but hey they work for peanuts) freelancing straight outta BBC Monitoring, Caversham, Berks.
(more references available on request).
~
Well, Ingram's latest really is surpassing himself, his best since the celebrated 'What, me guv? Heard it, guv? Nah, guv' announcement re. the herbert big band recording

Maff, of course, responsible for one of the two single greatest lines in any blog/homepage/journal everanywhere,
here, i think you'll find.
{the curious reader may like to know the other line is located about halfway down this page here}
disclaimer, that's a lie, there's two others as well, if we're being honest, but they're confusing and to do with google searches (one of them concerns Scratch getting picked up in an upmarket NYC suburb tho' by the rozzers; write that down, that's a hint)
but, yunno, yeah, basically...

here's a tip for blackburn rovers striker andy cole :-

LEARN THE OFFSIDE RULE PAL.

to be fair to damon albarn, he was crying with the pity of it all at the leeds festival and finally realising that the fans want to hear what the fans want to hear (according to my correspondents), so that's eminently reasonable.

as for live forever, the britpop film, whilst - in general - SR will always be (for me) the best commentator on the entire era [link], it's nice to engage with it on your tod.
what you'll find, o viewer, are sterling performances from freres gallagher, and startlingly pompous/precious POVs from louise wener and aforesaid albarn. and the odd gem, of course, from a wry Jarvis.
albarn, in particular, seems to be getting aggrieved about such things as the labour government ignoring the views of pop stars in favour of expert advisors when it's time to decide on legislation.

fancy that!

the bastards, t. bLIAR, and Co., ooh what rotters eh chaps...

"at that stage, the Remove was calling, and rather than face a slippering, Jennings announced to the others, 'Bugger this for a game of soldiers, I'm off to De Chaunceys to score a weed'. Darbyshire agreed this was a capital idea, and the boys repaired to the Old Whispering Wall."
~

actress Sophie Okonedo picture at the NPG;
[info, pic]

Whilst charlie catchpole – improbably named daily express television critic – is endlessly disturbing for his sub-charles bronson vigilantism, he is at least bang on re. american cop shows. Can’t say i’m yet a massive fan of the shield – oh but the pace, the violence blah blah – but anyone who flags up nypd blue and homicide: life on the street (the finest detective show ever, in my view), has to be okay in a roundabout, stand-up guy manner. Eh?
Now admittedly after its first few seasons nypd blue got kinda poo and mawkish for this viewer fast (even though the professional plaudits still came flooding in apparently - if a little slower - which is fair enough), and its partnership zenith was probably simone/sipowicz in the third season round this 'hood. whilst its individual performance zenith must still go, surely, to david caruso’s john kelly of the season one: when he got the chance to boff not only the completely delicious sherry stringfield, some cute brunette, and amy brenneman on occasion if memory serves: whattaguy!
Incidentally, how fine is sherry stringfield in the (from my perspective, one hastens to add) older woman fantasy status? Well, i think so anyway.
ER nowadays is just Fit Cutie City, granted it’s not like a hardcore buff bod show, just nicely cute, but it’s got the swoonsome Noah Wyle and i like that Phifer bloke or whatever, and the woman who plays Chen is just beautiful of course.
Anyway, even homicide: lots suffered somewhat (like northern exposure, alas) in its last season or two, but overall very high standards of writing, acting, and directing were maintained thru six high octane years. In that time britain got to learn how to pronounce Bawlmer’, learnt all about the best clam chowder in the world (Chesapeake; Bay Area is bloody nice tho’), saw salt marshes, glimpsed public statues in MD’s finest city, and got a lot of fairly well-plotted psychology to make you ponder. Of course channel 4 could only ever seem to justify putting it on (a bit like they did with Oz) between about 10pm and 1am or later. Most of the time one remembers watching it starting normally between about 11 and 1ish, though saw it later than that. 10 was the very earliest, i believe (flaming insomniac student, obv.). there was one pretty good link up with law and order recently, and we got to see john munch wisecracking like he’d never been away.
The one line that ever had my head nodding the most in agreement in UNCUT magazine concerned a review of the Bochco product Brooklyn South, which basically said it was competent fare, but wondered why stuff like this got video releases when no-one could seem to do owt for homicide. Fine sentiment.
CSI, and law and order, they’re both alright, as i said, the shield doesn’t grab me as much as it ought to, i’m aware i should pay more attention to six feet under and the sopranos (hey, i like sex and the city, whadda i know). unsure why i just segued from a discussion purely of cop show into stuff about two family drama shows. Ah well.
csi: miami spin off thing, that’s crap, seen a few episodes (does have david caruso in it, oddly; mind you, he sucked in things like Jade {boom! boom!} too), forget that.
anyway, this brief piece here – from some years back, granted – remains one of my favourite pieces of telly critic writing anywhere ever, and i would like anyone who reads this page to read that too, as i’m sure you’d appreciate it.
cheers.
P.S.
One has seen, in one’s entire life, about four episodes of hill street blues, so forgive me Padre.

and obviously robin c. on the passing of ian macdonald made my eyes moist.

The following article is fair enough. It’s no good knee-jerk leftists (who seemingly oppose populist narratives in this area because, well, one doesn’t know; not the old race card still, surely) crying wolf and caricaturing the Beeb as some tabloid-hello crapola sort of place with an article like this [ETA: er]. The attitude of the guardian leader writer seems typical of such foo’s (i remember the furore at the time, when they aired their asylum day series of programmes). To be fair to the guardian, their sympathies for migrants are more apparent than organs with more liberal (as opposed to a left-liberal perspective) perspectives on migration, but it’s there elsewhere.
More ranting no doubt on this topic later, including (but hopefully not limited to) abuse of the daily express with its wonderful ARE CHEATING GYPOS HERE ON THE SCROUNGE OR WHAT?! phone-in polls (well, they’re not quite that bad, but they’re certainly loaded questions…)

Why is it 'Powellite' to tell the truth about immigration?
By John Ware
(Filed: 27/07/2003)
Just after 8am last Wednesday, a good friend telephoned: "Have you seen what Blunkett has written about you?" he asked. He was referring to a front-page Guardian report of the previous night's Panorama, which I had presented as part of a series of BBC 1 programmes for "Asylum Day".
Panorama had demonstrated how chaotic and open to abuse our asylum system is as it struggles to adjudicate fairly between roughly 100,000 asylum seekers per year who claim to be fleeing persecution, and those who say they are, but aren't.
My friend went on: "Blunkett is suggesting that you are part of a Right-wing Powellite agenda." Good God, I thought. After Iraq, was this a second front the Government was opening up on the BBC? Under the headline "A return to Powellism", Blunkett had also written that the programme was "poorly researched and overspun".
I pondered returning my copy of the last BBC director-general, Lord Birt's autobiography. He had penned in it: "For John, utterly dedicated to telling the truth." Which is more than can be said about the Home Secretary in this instance, who had spun a particularly mischevious allegation against us, which he must have known to be untrue.
Using an undercover reporter, we had tested his much-trumpeted automatic fingerprint system, which is supposed to stop multiple applications for asylum by the same person using different names - a common form of fraud. We secretly filmed our reporter, a Romanian posing as an asylum seeker called "Mihaela" as she arrived at Harwich, where she was fingerprinted. When her application was refused, "Mihaela" presented herself at Dover as "Marianna". Again she was fingerprinted, and, after a week, was served with a detention order. In The Guardian Mr Blunkett claimed that this was because his "fingerprinting system showed up a match". We said this was untrue. Mr Blunkett said we were "wilfully undermining confidence that the asylum system works."
The detention order disproves Blunkett's assertion. It clearly states that it was served because Marianna's application was judged suitable for a rapid decision, rather than the usual period of months. Significantly, the box reserved for attempting to gain entry by deception was not ticked. She had beaten the system. The only reason the authorities discovered she was a multiple applicant was because, after she was detained, she owned up to being a BBC reporter. Only then were the fingerprints from Dover and Harwich matched up.
We had told Mr Blunkett's officials about our irrefutable documentary evidence before he wrote his article. They - or he - chose to ignore the facts and haven't even had the courtesy to retract.
A Guardian editorial said how much it agreed with Mr Blunkett's attack on Panorama. It complained that I had asked: "Why has Britain become the asylum capital of the Western world?" I was quoting the latest UNHCR report: "In absolute terms, the UK was the largest asylum-seeking receiving country in the industrialised world in 2002, accounting for 19 per cent of all asylum claims." Fact.
The Guardian, however, suggested that the real measure of the impact on the UK's infrastructure and social cohesion ought to be the number of applications per head of population, we being eighth in the Western league with Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Austria receiving proportionally twice our number.
I suggested to The Guardian that a more valid measure of impact was population densities and that with 380 people per square kilometre, England, where most asylum seekers live, was under much greater pressure than Switzerland at 19.7, Sweden at 21.7, or Norway at 14.42. The UK had a particular problem because two-thirds of asylum seekers go to London and the South-East, one of the most crowded areas of Europe.
Well, The Guardian editorial writer knew all that about that, he said, because he had been writing "bloody leaders for 35 years on this paper".
Me: "You've accused my programme of being poorly researched and it isn't."
Him: "I've just watched an hour of your bloody programme, which was a disgrace."
No one can deny that great care and sensitivity is needed here by opinion-formers. But opinion polls clearly show widespread concern about both asylum and immigration, which has more than trebled since New Labour came to office.
Our job as the nation's public service broadcaster is to facilitate and inform that debate in a manner that is not racist but rational. In the broad mix of our "Asylum Day" programmes, that is what we tried to do. I believe that we were helping to break a 35-year taboo since Enoch Powell went over the top with his "rivers of blood" speech. The censorious tone of The Guardian's editorial and the Home Secretary's resort to "Powellite" smears reinforces the point that the BBC should not be deterred from addressing real issues: the social and political impact of the growing scale of immigration in our society.

one of my favourite Naxos discs is Kodaly's Music for Cello, Three Chorale Preludes, Sonatas Opp. 4 & 8.

Maria Kliegel on cello and Jeno Jando on the ivories, cat no 8.553160.
a sympathetic treatment, or however they phrase it in gramophone (don't you think that James Jolly looks like a bad Bond villain? one of the eastern bloc gangsters, a Zagreb square, dodgy hair).

Cage's sonatas and interludes for prepared piano, played in some eastern seaboard canuck church, one's less fond of.
i'd recommend you scalp that to get 'machine gun', funnily enough, only a year after putting the-then freshly reissued brotzmann trio's 'for adolphe sax' in my top ten of the time reissues for the y2k.2 i'm off to scalp it, let's be honest, it just ain't 'machine gun', it also proves that lists are healthy as we *know* they're not stand in stone, it's only meant to be a ~laff~ (unless you're a pro music writer, i suppose, but even then...), chill out_____

interesting fact: the third edition of Toop's Rap Attack goes on about how Bam loved keying-up Squier's 'The Big Beat', serendipitous if that's a word... ...Toop, George, Hsu, Shapiro, Tompkins. that's who we want explicating on the subject, to really enthuse you and get you picking up the stuff.

on the subject of derek bailey, and my fudged apology earlier, having read a couple of old back-issues of the wire t'other night, i'm now not so sure anyone should apologise for rude words.

whilst we should be mindful of Nate Patrin's fine words at ILM once ("hating a band due to their fanbase = possibly the weakest, laziest and most condescending reason to abhor music") [a reproach to people who slag off the Manic Street preachers one sposes, but given that includes me : hey hypocrites abound here]
you really hafta see some of the letters they send into the readers write page.
no, i mean really.

~
hey, i'm joking.

it's like more acts round here, everyone puts on a face on t'internet, it's good for writing that, Goffman's dramaturgical analogy is really mastered by Penman i should say.

attn. any yorkshire dwellers!

i am in _no-way_ connected with the label Discus (head honcho Martin Archer) though i do own one of their releases and am on the email list.

i'm cutting and pasting his latest missive merely in the interests of furthering (however slightly) their audience, so if anyone reading this lives in the area (some chance hah! given how only about three people irregularly check here as far as i'm aware ;)) why not give it a whirl. OK, enough waffle, here we are :-

"Wednesday 27th August 2003
J D Parran - woodwind
Mick Beck - tenor sax, bassoon
Paul Hession - drumset


Parran is a neglected legend, a soulful musicians' musician


Point, Snig Hill, Sheffield
8.30 pm. £5 full / £3 concession, all tickets on door

New-York based J.D. Parran is a widely respected musician and educator. A
master of the saxophone, clarinet and flute, he has worked with many of the
great names of free jazz and free improvisation, including Anthony Braxton,
Andrew Hill, Alan Silva, Cecil Taylor, Henry Threadgill, Peter Brötzmann, Derek
Bailey, Evan Parker, Joelle Leandre and George E. Lewis, as well as with such
artists as Stevie Wonder and John Lennon. Recently he released ‘J.D. Parran and
Spirit Stage’ (Y’all Records), his first recording as a leader, of which Alvin
Batiste said, “J.D. has captured threads of expression that connect the
diversity of diasporan idioms resonating in the African American experience and
has done so in a hip and urban manner”. His collaborators in this concert are
the exemplary British improvisers Mick Beck (sax/bassoon) and Paul Hession
(drums). Like Parran, they are players of great range, subtlety, power and
soul; the meeting of three promises a night of superlative free jazz and
improvisation."

ta.

IT WAS THE NIGHT BEFORE NEW YEARS AND ALL THRU THE FUCKIN PROJECTS NOT A HANDGUN WAS SILENT NOT EVEN A TEC'

my pal qasim is a comic. he gigs as qasim jilani. he's the fucking daddy and he's a student of theology.

no god botherers for me tomorrow, he can just go on the offense about zoroaster and eschatological criticism.

my mother (like me, and most people) adores carole's 'tapestry'.

The only timely analogy the team (team! team! touching base and all that rubbish) can come up with that is of any use for the Nina Scenario is that of a state of the art USAF jet evading Stone Age Iraqi air-defence emplacements on the ground.
For someone with a nickname of Radar, the local gossipmonger (that is, me) is notoriously poor on detecting the goodness of the Stealth-like bomber and its fruity charms.
One shot and they’ve gone, with the result that my fellow employed scum are being left sorely disappointed with the paucity of present effective arrangements and their un-imaginativeness thereof.
There may well be trouble ahead.
Alas, we’ve not even had the good times yet, and certainly no music or moonlight.
On the plus side, red sauce improved this morning’s breakfast barm no end.
~
David Sneddon: usually execrable, started quite well if only for laughs, camped it up, axe heroics, genuinely enjoyable backing band. Bit of fun (most things go better vaguely camp or edgy; don’t believe me? Check out any photo of Trouble Funk in attack mode). C-.
Busted: all harmless enjoyment (sic), if a little short in the tooth to be already employing such a tediously static/predictable m.o. Posh totty eyebrows mind. D+.
Lumidee and that fat bloke with her: marvellous of course, everything is just fitting in so well, crudities, girlies, voice, production, off-key sings. A.
Blu Cantrell and Sean Paul: fantastic, as per. A.
Jaimeson and some bird with a nice set of pipes: Rather schmoove, bit rambunctious (if not quite a 3 a.m. troll down the Ramblas for Indo off dodgy Tunisian) after awhile, strange posh women tarting things up, peculiar treat. B.
Rachel Stevens: where has the wicked tunes of S Club (or even the tune itself) gone? A kind of disappointment in every department, quality timing with the title still (ex gone to Los Angeles hah…), even really strange and quite bad tic-toccing tuneage. Weird. D-.
Richard feat. a cardboard cut out of Kelis: nowhere near as good as some people would have you believe. S’pleasant and all, but the game is up, one fears. C.
Think that was it.
There was a lad from Bradford who’d won some comp to do a video for Girls Aloud (10K sterling budget no less!), and he made them grin nervously with cracks about naturist themes (good work feller). Unfortunately, he didn’t get into a fight with Whalley native Richard X reprising the War of the Roses. That would have been good that.
Colin Murray was, as usual, peerless (within the realms of the format, anyhow).

WHY IS THE SKY BLUE? WHY IS WATER WET?
shout to spizzazzz and cozen (Hart Crane for me mate, Lowell over Heaney for Luke).

cover feature on the daily express today 'coronation street: has it gone too far this time?'

turn to page 16.
big headline. "corrie's gay kiss -- hunky nicky to shock fans".

apparently, there will be "controversy".

it's quite ironic as blonde studmuffin adam rickett - one of the actors involved - looks a bit like that equally cute blonde boy that was the schoolkid in queer as folk (done first and best in manchester, uk, o any american readers, btw).

you couldn't make it up...

hmm. and this too.

a rarity today, in that the daily express and i appear to coincide with views on an asylum seeker/migrant (to be reasonable, it may well not be the last time). in mitigation though, 39 year old steven omokanjuola of dagenham does sound like a thoroughly unpleasant chap (one can only imagine what tollwalase oladimeji - have a go type intervening in a fight omokanjuola was having in woolwich - a victim of his rage, feels towards him).

of course it wouldn't be the express without at least one massive cock-up a day (the fairly nasty-taste-in-the-mouth of "quoted effect" headline "donkeys 'eaten by migrants'" SHOULD, of course read: 'donkeys missing, police admit main line of inquiry is nearby somalian community may be red-handed' but now you see why i so admire the sun's zip and tabloid headlines in general cause this is a fencesitting broadsheet type of place but anyway.........), and they manage that in the now customary spectacular style on pages 12-13 with the banner headline IS IRAQ A NEW ULSTER? which is, of course, sososo offensive to, well for a start, Iraqis and anyone from the island of Ireland (but especially Iraqis) that, well, basically offends me on so many levels i don't even know what to do with it____

alright, so that was rude about derek bailey, i suppose all kenny wheeler fans can sue me.

here's to metheny...

what quality (and accurate) words from kodwo e. in this month's wire about the best of the nerdosphere!
with his proclaimation about the "sheer greatness" of heronbone, perhaps more wire readers will give up on the derek bailey (god please) and turn to diamond clik...kudos due.

here's a rap sheet (of sorts) for mr al-majid

death threats against the Sri Lankan PM are obviously all balls but this is....rather good

(alright so the rapture are possibly biggest nme overrate since terris but in the UK this weekend you could be at the reading or leeds festivals and i admit the littler stages, esp the comedy tent and the dancey type stage can be pretty kewl) but - really - you want to go here, yunno?

the below reminds me of this.

mike barthel, we love you.

most interesting.

tearfund.

a brutally honest - and to be frank, fairly accurate, c'mon face it (well, not the any other way bit and i'm no economist on the second half yet you'd hope perhaps but the actually first part of the sentence nails most folk yah?) - letter in the paper this morning : -

"Although we can all pay lip service to condeming sweatshop labour, the truth is we wouldn't want it any other way. Realistically, the planet can't support the bringing of everybody in the developing world up to our standard of living - how many cars, TVs and package holidays can the world take? If we can't bring them up, we need to go down. But who do you know who will give up their car, TV or overseas holiday?
James Walsh, Leeds."

also one letter that cannot be decided on whether it is tongue in cheek or nay (one suspects the former, but heck). if not, the writer is merely a numpty who we'll ignore, as it kind of speaks for itself dunnit.
"Jude Cohen notes that [less than] £1 from a pair of trainers goes to the Indian sweatshop worker. Let's conservatively estimate that one of these workers stitches together five pairs of trainers per day. My friend traveller to India in the last England away Test series there, and apparently Test match tickets were a mere 18p. So for a single day at work in the sweatshop the Indian can watch nearly 28 days of cricket. That makes him richer than me!
Dean Hunt, SE1."
~~~~~~~~

oh. just. whoah.
and the guardian in about nine years too late shockah. can't say one's surprised, their pop crit is Alexis Petridis and he's fairly crap, on the whole.
let's be honest here.

you probably read about it elsewhere yesterday (like me) but it's interesting to see what the locals make of it

pace freaky trigger's new pubblog i can honestly say that - well, you know that sam smith's pub just off oxford street? (if you say that berwick street is RIGHT off oxford street, then this street the pub is on is LEFT off oxford street and not too far before the berwick turning) i can't remember what it's called but it's a bit of a local, posh businessmen, salt of the earth cabbies, teachers on holiday reading their broadsheets fit aussie birds behind the bar and quality scots lads, *anyway*, i've had __excellent__ fish and chips in there a couple of times, about a fiver, and a pint of the decent sam smiths bitter in london for about 1.60 is good (of course it's 1.21 or so in my two local sam smiths, which are altrincham's malt shovels and manchester city centre's oyster bar), the fish and chips is the thing, the condiments and cutlery arrive in a small wire basket that they might use to winch lassie out of a well in that one episode where the littlest hobo blows town adrian mole style... ...lovely bread and butter too, as Edmund says in prince caspian few things keep the party rockin so much as a nice slice of bread and marge.

apparently Luka says it's only here and I Feel Love that stand up for Wallace Stevens.
i dunno, i always feel that da heronbone is half 'the wasteland', half 'to an old philosopher in rome', so i ain't sure what's going on there...;)
~
on the subject of eliot etc., here's a coupla interesting (you might even say provocative) links for ya reading pleasure : - 1, 2. ta!
~
finally, as some people may already know, jon dale once of the notepad has now moved here.
it's a crying shame that therefore the notepad archives appear to have gone belly-up, as herein contained one of the seven or eight (surely?) best nerdosphere [well, full stop anywhere to be frank witchu] writers on the pop choon, three chords and the truth {or assorted misc. wossnames}.

__________________________________my burden is set down entire.


_rimbaud.

interesting article in the local rag last night : -
‘M.E.N. Reader’s Viewpoint
“Ladies and gentlemen,
Willkommen, Verwelkoom, Bienvenuto, Bienvenida and a big welcome to EuroPride, which kicked off at the weekend. Manchester is currently hosting Europe’s biggest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender festival, EuroPride Manchester 2003.
The marketing team has been busy, hyping it with a “dynamic and varied programme of events celebrating 10 days of culture, sport, education, campaigning, debating and some serious partying,” all with a mighty Queer As Folk whiff to it. EuroPride, a concept that is so very international. A pilgrimage with a distinctive cosmopolitan feel to it.
EuroShambles or EuroShame might be a more appropriate name. It’s such a waste that all that human energy isn’t being challenged into EuroAction. A time to celebrate? Oh, come on.
Man-to-man contact is still illegal in Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Cuba, Chile, Djibouti…I’ll stop there: you get the picture. It’s illegal to engage in homosexual activities in over 60 countries.
While so many of the so-called gay and lesbian “community” will be jiggling their pierced, tanned, toned, tattooed bits up and down Canal Street, our gay “brothers” are being imprisoned with anything from a two-year jail sentence to life imprisonment.
Discovery of gay sex in Saudi Arabia results in a flogging. In Yemen the law prescribes the death penalty. Anyone testing HIV-positive in Cuba is committed to a “sanitorium” and isolated from society.
The presence of thousands of lesbians and gays marching side by side, hand in hand, on the streets of Manchester must seem totally radical for people who live in countries where the political systems view same-sex practices as a “crime against family life” and “carnal knowledge against the order of nature.”
As these repressed people view such images over the internet, do they feel supported by an event such as EuroPride? Answer: No. All those shrill, rainbow-ribboned whistles would be better blown outside many an embassy throughout Europe.
Such a shame that veteran gay rights activist Peter Tatchell and Ben Summerskill, the newly-appointed chief executive of Stonewall, haven’t got the spark to incite action, rather than just talk, talk, talk at a snoozy equality rights conference lined up for August 22.
Gay activism isn’t what it used to be, but then this is the era of complacency.
I’m well aware of the arts, health, charity, political perspectives to the event, but I wonder how proud the majority of the Stepford Boyz and Galz are going to feel after their binge.
The one lasting memory I have of this year’s Pride event in London’s Hyde Park, organised so generously by the manufacturers of alcohol and publishers of hard-core pornography, is of the main entrance.
Two signs summed up what that Saturday was all about in large, garish capitals: BAR TOKENS.
I wonder how many of those glittering pink pounds will actually reach the named charities from Operation Fundraiser, which is hoping to raise £300,000 through ticket sales and hotel bookings.
The breweries, of course, are laughing. The commercialised gay scene is a monster, and the sooner the consumers tire of the jaded theme park concept and move on, the better.
The very idea of worshipping at the shrine of Atomic Kitten and Girls Aloud this Saturday is just so unimaginative and stereotypical. In a word, naff.
Despite being the co-editor of the City Secrets collection of short stories, recently published by Manchester’s Crocus Books, I will not be attending Euro Pride, not even for the literary event this Thursday at Manchester’s Central Library.
The collection is all about new voices, and a far cry from the usual formulae which lesbian and gay publishers churn out…
You won’t be seeing me at the parade on Saturday either. Nah, I just can’t be bothered with any of it, not knowing how things are for others in over 60 countries.
This is not a time to party.”
P-P Hartnett is the author of four novels. He co-edited City Secrets, a collection of short fiction by writers from the north for Manchester-based Crocus Books. He has contributed to publications such as Attitude, Gay Times, Pink Paper and Diva. He lives in Colne.’

as a slight (and somewhat related) sidenote, it’s worth pointing out that when the Home Office decided Jamaican claims for asylum should be generally regarded as fraudulent from the get-go (that is the overall, brass tacks effect, when a country gets placed on the white list mentioned before round these parts), it was being widely reported in even non-specialist outlets that JA queers were getting murderously, barbarously etc. harassed for the simple matter of their sexuality (and obviously, in some cases, wanting to get the heck out of the Yard to places like the UK. for shame, Mr blunkett).

~
"many brothers i be sparkin and bustin mad light inside the dark
call me dough snatcher"
~

those pesky gerbils.

swing low sweet gerbil; it's all in the wrist.

those gerbils play indoors, it's all floodlit.

nice as pie.

they carry on through the ringroads, past burnley or down to stockport (seeking v/vm?)

doing a song, tethered like billy goats (or should that be billy o?)

it's a rum do with those gerbils, yes.

one of the things they did was put all the toys away, and it led to a run of extraordinary writing.
the dolls sat in the corner, glowering,
letting the kettle spit its hot wrath at them.

some observations to be made following last night.

- fair dos
- utterly unacceptable
- but luka, wallace stevens is greater than t.s. eliot...
- item
- commentators with posh Hampshire accents do sound good deploying Aussie slang ("ripper") to describe something driving away: more evidence of the infallibility of the great Richie Benaud
- "ripper" and other Aussie words are creeping in a lot, but this is healthy, as they are good.
- somedisco might turn into a Richie Benaud (and Hariprasad Chaurasia) fanpage.
- as Henry Winter said, Cheyrou would not have gotten in Liverpool's reserves in the 70s.
- Cilla's misfortune is another's amusement. "Tearful Tuesday: Cilla's had a lorra lorra cash stolen". ~
- interesting
- QPR on the counter attack were a sight to behold. whilst the expected fears did indeed materialise (no Gallen, no Ainsworth, Langley pissing off to Cardiff for one), they gave a plucky game, deserved a point, and were essentially the better team (they certainly impressed upon the host more). indeed, their rapidity in this department reminded one of the great counter-attacking Forest teams of one's youth.
- Leon Knight is an adequate replacement for Zamora; punchy and zippy.
- QPR's final touch was often not as penetrating as we'd have liked, but their approach play had an assembled company of United and City fans enthused a good deal; certainly better than a fair few Division One teams.
- both outfits from the Withdean last night will at least finish in the top six, and realistically, a setback like this does not stop me pronouncing it - one way or t'other - as QPR's season
- it's cool to go to Namibia trekking, but to then solipsistically hold court, waffling, boring people with how great you are (c.f. that MWE sketch about "backpack-travel-bores") does undo a little of your good work...
- (writing generally) in all her permutations, sophie ellis-bextor is (basically) shit.
- tho's she'd do better than me, so i should put up and shut up. everyone's a critic eh.
- i removed an untruth about liverpool fc. less mean, is a maxim.

QPR have a lot of men out for their visit to the withdean tonight; you'd take a point, on balance. we shall see.

why can chad manage it, but not pharrell?

i refer to wanting to start singing when you can't, stick yourself all over the place.
it's all the more disheartening when ignoramuses that aren't aware of the numerous multifaceted gifts the neptunes have gifted the eager listener (i'm with TWANBOC on the redone rawwk NERD album) just look at pharrell prancing around now and conclude they're not to be bothered with.

METRO critic neil davenport is a strange one, rather inconsistent. one week he can be on form comparing the pernice brothers to a pleasing amalgam of the left banke and brian wilson, another week he can be saying some average indie-schmindie outfit are in fact a daring fusion of conversations between photek and some alt.outfit. strange.
this is worth mentioning because today's edition has his colleagues arwa haider and andrew williams rightly asserting that 'fix up look sharp' and - hell, you know you want to - 'let's get ill' are good singles. and in the albums section, the neptunes comp 'the neptunes present the clones' delivers the goods.
'let's get ill' is a strange one, because it should be a good tune, but the professional music print journalists of this country - whose knowledge is let's say a 5 or 6 out of 10 - love it, whilst the best pro/am bloggers (who are the best music writers) with their 9s and 10s knowledge, are lukewarm.

anyway.
colombia indeed.

frightening

the metaller at work is offering (or should that be threatening?) to do me a cd-r of symphony x (like dream theater, but not quite as good, apparently) and queensryche.

dunno, when i was a young pup and kerrang was still good, their concept album 'operation mindcrime' [AMG] always seemed quite appealing; suitably ludicrous, Orwellian themes, etc.

perhaps one should bite the bullet.

i should dig out a list of albums from that pfork list i thought were valid ones to be on; recall thinking at the time, out of the 100, about 27 or 28 you could argue to be. some of them though, no chance...

just like to assure mark that one does not necessarily scoff at baudrillard or anything like that, just meant that one agrees with what luka said about preferring weill.

purely, yunno, on a writerly level.

did you see the cricket yesterday?

a whole gamut of emotions, the murky weather excellently suitable for swinging English seam bowlers.

ah!

mark lawrenson, in his newspaper punditry mode, said in one of the red tops on saturday morning, he did predict, "charlton 1 : 0 man city, di canio will come off the bench and score the winner"
~
alas~
what he should have written was 'man city will piss ALL OVER charlton for long periods, and win by three clear goals'

get thee gone, hie thee to a monastery, buffoon

cage did say boredom can be a valid, appropriate, etc. aesthetic response.

thank the gods for roy greenslade

k-punk rightly pointing out here some more faults with pfork list (apologies to k-punk if it looks like this topic doesn't excise me, only me and some chums were arguing about it ages ago and have now calmed down, but if he sets me off again, i'll go off on one).
he's right of course about, for instance, the fall listings. 'hex enduction hour' is just stone cold their best, overall (i ain't a fan in the slightest, but i checked with our kid, who is - don't forget 'hex...' has '...nazis' on it among other sonic delights), and i really like the stuff about 'yo bum rush the show'. that is indeed a marvellous album, so skeletal and harsh, like skeletal trees overpowering you on a yomp.
i'd still hold out for 'nations' being the best PE though.
i have gone through a long period, as mentioned, of 'planet' and for a while the debut being my fave; the sequencing on 'nations' seems to hold up very well (it's as well sequenced as 'revolver' or the soul II soul debut, one'd say)
i will say one thing, which is that the write-up for 'daydream nation' is not that enthralling - best sounds of the 80s, just the fucking best?
~
hmm, i'm with Christgau here in coming out for vol.1 of the ol' ind. beat of soweto.

“Dr Kay’s discovery that Saddam actually issued the order to his commanders to use chemical weapons against coalition forces might also help to shed light on another crucial aspect: the involvement of British intelligence as the conflict in Iraq developed.
One of the greatest success stories of Operation Iraqi Freedom is that Saddam’s commanders declined to implement the Iraqi dictator’s order because, prior to the war, many of them had been successfully persuaded by British intelligence not to fight.
No mention of this brilliant intelligence coup, of course, will be made at the Hutton Inquiry because it is not deemed relevant to the more parochial issue of whether or not Saddam’s forces could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.”
_Con Coughlin.

yes, he’s a hawk, one knows. still. and the Hutton Inquiry is solely concerned with assessing the sitch round Dr Kelly’s death. but anyway.
it’s kind of ironic – or whatever the word is – that Dr Kelly was himself pro-war.
if you think about it.

the only problem someone might have as a principled objector to the Beeb is, through careless language and such, other not finely attuned peers might wrongly infer that that someone is coming at the anti-Beeb angle from the totally unprincipled Murdoch papers angle.
ah well.

in the ongoing attritional conflict between the notepad and somedisco about who is best – bob hughes or matt collings – one would like to draw your attention to the following robert hughes quote, discussing damien hirst’s pickled shark: -

“It might have been fractionally more interesting if he had caught the fucking thing himself instead of hiring a bloke from Queensland to do the job for him.”

hah! beat that Collings (imagine Hughes saying it in his avuncular, slightly nasal, Aussie way to boot)!

whatever happened to min patel? i don’t really know. he just seemed to go away.

luka's right about baudrillard, incidentally.
spose the rimbaud is arguable too.

interesting

Post-postscript = i was always more of a '...black planet' fan for years when i first got into PE (as, strangely, is nicky wire from the manics), but now recognise that (surely) '...millions' is the best.
i've got some mates who prefer the debut or fourth album, but loads of my mates (who are very much raawk types) like '...black planet' too. maybe it's that sorta thang (who'd a thunk?).

work gossip update: apparently barry slobbering over janine in last night's eastenders was sick-inducing and people were turning over, fearful of losing their just consumed tea, etc.

Postscript: my season officially started last night, with this.

k-punk seems (quite reasonably) bemused by that pfork 80s list, back in the day.

of course there's loads wrong with it, but it is pfork and they very reasonably clarify it as pretty much an alt.list. for about two weeks afterwards i was going to do my alternative list (much african pop seemed high on the agenda) but i never got round to it. perhaps i will now with some renewed nerdosphere interest (after all, all the best nerdosphere writers are far superior to the pfork staff, yes, even the good egg that is the editor-in-chief ryan s.)...

look how my bro dan drew attention to this way back.
[linenoise plug, the powers that be = i.e., dan & him, are soon to hopefully relaunch a nu/improved linenoise {much, probably} model, with any luck with helps from the likes of him, him, man like aconite, man like rhys, and, er, me. i don't know if the gaffer will be pleased with such a shameless ad, but there you are.]
~
anyone interested in musical matters would do as well to avoid here over the next couple of days, as the weekend is likely to be spent in posting ranting screeds on the immigration and asylum seeker debate.

just spent about 20 minutes reading a few conspiracy theory sites, such as that lobster magazine.

priceless bollocks, the lot of 'em.

number 63 here makes faintly interesting reading when set against the earlier link in the previous post {you recall, this one}.
~
[note: whilst chris ott very well might be a cocteau twins fan, he also likes interpol.]

this is fair enough on 'colossal youth' (tho' one likes to imagine at pfork, all the indie hipsterati are constantly watching their own back on the kewl rating, so might be forced into pronouncements they're not really meaning for the sake of appearances), if a little not enough engagement on the music whilst instead barrelling off on the criticism-in-love-with-itself tip.
howEVAH,
both the slits and the raincoats were actually really quite useful bits, 'cut' especially of course.

"i don't like hip-hop that much."
_______________buck 65.

~
hmm.

Philip here hits the nail so concisely on the head it's practically untrue.

it's all good fun, and Luke (who i send frequent shabby mails to, incidentally) seems to be interested too, so i'll have some larks with five below. hurrah :=

- Sciascia is better than Vidal
- Joyce is better than Borges
- Eudora Welty is better than Angela Carter
- Faulkner is better than Hemingway
- Stafford Rangers FC are better than Hednesford.

cheeeahz.

"A BBC journalist was pressured by her bosses to identify Dr Kelly as the source of her reports, the inquiry heard....Ms Watts said she believed there were 'significant differences' between her reports and Mr Gilligan's. Such was the pressure put on her by BBC news director Richard Sambrook that she took legal advice. 'I felt under some considerable pressure to reveal my source,' she added. 'I felt the purpose was to help corroborate the Gilligan allegations and not for any proper news purpose. I was most concerned there was an attempt to mould them so they were corroborative, which I felt was misguided and false."
Metro, 14th Aug. 03.

jesus

yes, am again vibing over dream theatre in a hotwax stylee today .

if either of my two regular flamers would care to email me the precise details of which 11 minute song of theirs (no Dead jamming here tho', all tightly controlled metallomungousmutha-musicianship clearly) could reasonably (well, at least arguably, which is my cop out...) be described as the greatest song the world has ever seen,
i'll airmail a package of Toblerone chocolate to them.
that's an 11 and a half offer eh.

my mate pete's been getting into his kurosawa of late, this frenchman link is for him.
le cercle rouge was rilly outasite.
apparently his masterwork is that one from '67; dunno it.

...all got it in for me...

mobb deep's the infamous is, of course, one of the greatest documents of its type, well, ever.
i appreciate musical development and so their most recent album - infamy - wanting to include some choice cuts that were specifically targeted for the radio was an eminently reasonable move, and i ain't about to go off on some i-monster/penderecki/mr bungle listener fan anti-commercial radio rant, but (ah! the inevitable but, Jones chimes) the dry, airless second album of theirs and that most recent one are - probably - honestly about the most complete volte-face of any act i can think of in the mainstream stylee that i love. it's basically going all soft innit?
i don't know.

even radiohead from the debut to their most recent ones, well, there's the continuity, there was always the restless invention and the questing metamorphosing desires present one supposes in yorke and greenwood, you can hear in early chunky riffs and in the space between things that there's the germination of an idea that they could go down and do things the Warp way. oh whatever.
greenwood was once saying it was so cool when he read of Miles D poring over the libraries at Juillard, just made him "love him more", and i suppose i feel like that when i actually read of olu dara, just knew he was a trumpeter who nas had mixed feelings about cause didn't they only stay together for the sake of little nas and any siblings he might have had.
but he's not only an avant-garde cornetist, but look at this AMG review. apparently he now is mainly a country-blues singer!
john fahey redoing sleepy john estes-ville here we come!

gotta take issue wit my girl Jess on Buk and Kerouac.
admit i don't like kerouac either, but "anal waffler" is unkind.
the perfectly-formed threads of delightful savant-poet linearity that do manage to flow through 'desolation angels' or the other stuff means a waffling allusion is somewhat off-the-mark.
and Buk, there are some memorable things there; take the winged baseball ace for one. the general fat hookers trope is consistently winning too.
Buk in(/e)vokes Celine and makes you riff on Montaigne, which is A Good Thing.
but there again Jess is a hardcore bird, her Emin ramble was most invigorating and i think we're both on the same page with our general Pamuk/Saramago/Pessoa/Verlaine trope (guessing here, but still).
i wanna get her to make me a comp tape, i'd like to see plenny o'
Lady Saw on there, talking about rough dick, and some wet Vanity 6.
~

elsewhere, this is hugely disappointing (tho' hardly surprising, a course).
the times is still my fave broadsheet, so of course it's a shame. you can hardly credit the sun though; even by its standards, this all seems rather a little OTT (it's hardly like i'm a massive defender of Auntie, etc.)

i've never been a big byrds "byrds" fan to be truthful about it (i.e., all the byrds stuff); '...rodeo' is the only thing of theirs one digs very much; it's odd it grabs me, because apart from the old wilco moment and maybe some emmylou harris, don't have much time for alt.country, not even lucinda williams and certainly not even the likes of uncle tupelo or whiskeytown or anyone like that, which do realise is poor.
the submarine band/bladda bleh and the famed parsons solos like the 'gp/grievous angel' double don't do it for me, though i have heard there's some dynamite live stuff of his.
jon@the notepad apparently really rates the notorious byrds bros which is fair enough, and even solo david crosby.

matt, in his first para review at the 1xtra bash where he's going on about old white dudes going out, he reminded me of nicky haslam.
if you don't know who nicky haslam is, you're not really missing anything, though he does have elegant sentence construction and knows a good anecdote, a rather knowingly tongue-in-cheek style to boot.
does go on about how trendy he is tho' rather a tad.

Matt goes the 1Xtra do

The Glorious Twelfth

~
oh, and some tasty birds
(in the interests of fairness)

as y'all know, i'm not exactly a huge fan of mark steyn or owt like that, but he's on the ball here : -

"Okay, Arnold's not a Nazi. He was born in the Austrian town of Thal, but not until 1947, and thus was technically unable to join the Nazi Party no matter how much he may have wanted to. But he certainly has family ties to the Nazis. His wife's grandfather, Joe Kennedy, was one of America's most prominent Nazi sympathisers.

Oh, wait. That's not the Nazi family ties the Dems had in mind? No, as Katie Couric put it on NBC's Today Show, "He's the son of a Nazi Party member. He said he was prejudiced, before overcoming those feelings by working with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, and the dean of the centre said an investigation of Schwarzenegger's late father, conducted at the actor's request, found no evidence of war crimes."

Sorry, folks, you'll have to do better than that. The more you bring up the "son of a Nazi" line, the more you remind voters of what Arnold is: an immigrant who escaped and transcended his past. You can't saddle a man who chose to be American with the baggage he left behind in the old country.
"

the Democrats tacky 'ooh Nazi!' cries already look as cheap as the Tories did around 1996.

indeed. i guess this contradicts what one wrote earlier (god, quoting oneself, i'm turning into a right solipsistic shitbag, i'll get all American homepage stylee on yo azz "AND THIS IS MY MOM AND MY DOG HARVEY" soon, watch out watch out the cat's about!), but there again one does have Whitman's birthday.
~
i suppose, with ref. to Emin, she is always more interesting than her critics (much like The Mover).

a few years ago, jools holland had an electrifying show with both joe strummer and warren zevon on it.
zevon joined strummer for a bit of a clash jam and did a storming 'my shit's fucked up'.

i tend to admire zevon as much as i can't help but think townes van zandt is yeah overrrated, i dunno.
the only country a dabbler like myself seems to need, apart from the odd foray into more folk/source recordings are some of your greats, Haggard, Williams, Rodgers, Cash, Patsy Cline, i don't even get with the Carter Family really.

i will say, as the precursors to alt.country and all that, the byrds 'sweetheart of the rodeo' continues to blow away slightly hipper stuff from the likes of Gram P. solo or the flying burritos, in my view.

just my few-pence.

Lord Filkin here discussed, how "they are places where persecution and human rights breaches are rare" with particular reference to the adding of another seven states to the original list of ten safe countries. the original ten were the EU accession countries of Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia.
in February of this year the Home Office widened the list to include Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania and Serbia and Montenegro.
the latest (July) edition of inexile reports that the most recent additions to the list are Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Ukraine.
this recent HRW paper would seem to suggest that the movement to place Sri Lanka on the list is dangerously shortsighted.
~
recent wobbles in the peace process are a cause for concern, but still, it's made the list.
~
Filkin at least had the grace to sound embarrassed ("My embarrassment is to find myself before the House at a time when, due to the pressure of circumstances, we have had to add seven more states to the list, although the advisory panel on country information is not yet up and running. I shall not labour the point, but the House will be aware of my embarrassment in that respect. ") when he announced his warm mouthful of fudge with regards to adding some additional states to the list of ten.

october

division two bets off already?
~
and hull won well too. and yeovil!

well, it's all good round that way.

today.

the average maximum daily temperature in wadi haifa, sudan, in may and july, is 54 celsius.

fancy that.

~
"When you find someone you want to have a relationship with, nothing is too much trouble, everything seems possible, and the world shifts beneath your feet, altering your perceptions and changing your plans. This is a good thing. This is an experience you deserve to have."
_Amy.
-

luka is a hammers fan, some people forget that, i just wanted to ask does he think chelsea fans will nick the we've got joe cole chant off the happy hammers of good old poplar and canning and bow and plaistow and stratford town, i'm quite enjoying all this hullaballoo me, i can tell any london readers that the united fans do go on about it, they claim not to care, but they do you know, alright i'm just a bitter, ignore me.
me, i'm a man city and alty fan, i assume reynolds supports oxford?

i saw a midget bloke riding a speed racing bicycle contraption thing this morning and i can honestly say (he was a midget, not a dwarf, i'm sure) in tour de france style colours and i can honestly say that's the first time i've seen a midget riding a bicycle for awhile in such a manner.

oh, and eat ya heart out, sam johnson.

robert hughes _ for = writes well about the futurists, schwitters, pissarro

matthew collings - for = talks well about rimbaud on the telly, for a start.

it's a bit of a doozy that one.

SUBZ first throw.

on a bus this morning in red marker a brilliant flower, large and inviting, reminded you to visit here.
there's some wonderful motifs in the subway, so bold and just out of left-field, WHERE do the kids get their ideas i really don't know...

check
:=
(3)
(4).
vital.

i love all the critics who slag off sex and the city me.
i don't care that it's no good, and it never was very insightful anyway (but especially in its flagging final season), and that carrie's omniscient (well, not really, but i'll just say voice-over) narration was trite or obvious stuff that should have been left with fred savage or angela chase, i couldn't give two tosses.
so what if it's just about commerce/sex/shops, a floozy post-post-feminist mess, and was originally supposed to be four gay guys discussing cock, but that was shelved cause it was deemed too racy for the great american public, i'm bothered not.
i just *love* sj-p's style, i ~adore~ the whole aesthetic of the show, they all look good but her style is just magnificent, i adore her completely.

what piercing insights! what forensic excavation! what dazzling acuity! fuck me.

another one from the BT.

blooden sand.

david pace, recently included in granta's best of YBN for 2003, says =-

...one of the problems i have with crime fiction in general - or inspector morse on TV - is if you stop to think about it, it's making an entertainment and thus money out of murder....my feeling was i'd been in yorkshire as a child and lived through it and if i wanted to write about what i knew, that was what i knew...i changed the names...i wanted the books to keep a slight distance.

~
mr pace is the author of a quartet of novels on the yorkshire ripper.

pot and kettle?

alright not to get too self-absorbed on yo ass, here's a nice picture here.

just went to the urinal before.
realised i put on me boxers the wrong way this morning.
much hilarity ensuing for the colleague at my side.

actually, it's probably the NME that is the culprit there, maybe pitchfork.

whilst SR's heart is of course in the right place here re. my new pal, obviously Dale knows that. he's not one of these silly kids that - memorably - metal hammer letters pages, once compared disagreements between NWOBHM/nu-metal/old metal/whateverthefuckmetal fans to american gangbangers/the bosnian conflict/etc.
still, SR is OTM again, indeed though i must say this month's wire cover stars are actually intriguing me, and sure one of them sounds like he's got reprehensible behaviour in his past, i quite enjoy SR's trope of moralising his stuff, he's a necessary moral voice at the edge of the nerdosphere, some people can get a little intense.

now that's a research project for Ingram! do you get the stupidest letters in metal mags, hip-hop mags what, etc.?

do you prefer the compilation of jam covers titled 'with fire and skill' or the compilation of bad brains covers/inspired stuff, titled 'never give in'?

a good cover, speaking again of the jam when buffalo tom slowed them down people liked that, anyway, a good cover would be buffalo tom doing john kettley is a weatherman.

turn it into an aching low moan whistle, perhaps the bit about michael fish could be turned into broad hints about forbidden love, kettley's tragically unrequired secret love for his fellow weatherman, that's the real rub of the tune in a nutshell right there, the frontman could sing it really soft, aching, a most poignant minor-key thing, it could certainly reinvgorate the blast of the original song.

on top of the pops 2 some weeks ago, stevie wonder was shown to be an ace composer when various folkies, pop acts, etc., were covering his songs and they sounded good done by somebody else.
there was a stickswoman with the most prodigious mammaries there an all.

and then there were two...

SUBZ has appeared as out of nowhere under the subway, two tags spotted, one a glorious riot of colour, and - excitingly - by the second scrawl are the futher lines "tbc first drop" or something like that, definitely a TBC, and 'first drop' or 'first showing'.

my heart is all-a-flutter, chumley.

whilst we're in if for good old bobby hughes, over at the notepad Jon has confirmed it's matty collings that floats his boat.

there may be a fite...
;)

rather undecided as to the merits of this.

mentioning jesse jackson,
he appeared in the second episode of this series.
~
which was the most riveting programme of the year to date.

right, there were some technical difficulties before, so in the interests of historical completeness (god, what a solipsistic TWAT) but mainly because the piece by Jesse Jackson is too briefly good and sensible not to be linked to (and because the computer has two bloggers running at the minute, displaying two different sets of posts including the one from before that was doubled up: if only Penman were here, we could make eloquent sense of the chaos, alack...) here we are =:

it's worth commenting on this column.
the good Rev. is, after all, one of mark steyn's colleagues, and yet compare jackson's piece with one i linked to the other day by steyn in the most recent spectator.
same conclusions sure, and fine enough, but the tone of steyn leaves a lot to be desired.
he is noted as a good showtunes authority though, so perhaps his humour comes through into his ooh political writing for that reason, you'd obviously surmise.
funny to think that - one guesses - steyn probably does not have much time for the good rev. (conservatives don't like sex scandals in opposing leaders).

~thought for the day~
a multitude of words cloaks a lie

do realise somedisco's always bigging him up, but mike barthel is the best commentator on the nerdosphere today (and there's a fair few astute comments being made all over them) re. pitchfork's new and improved version of 'we are the world'.
check him here.

a fascinating op-ed.

mr putin's words after such an outrage are indeed well-judged and accurate.
but the ending of the sentence is, perhaps, something he might know about.

indeed.

in a coincidence, the first random blog that popped up into the browser this morning was geto boy league.

shite.

i love the lightness of touch, the sheer tumbling outwards, the fecundity of the das efx debut.
it's quite poppy and the geto boys fan at work is going to - he's never heard of them - lend 'dead serious' off me, in exchange for me going deeper into his grimy nyc trope.

the invention of das efx on that record always astonishes me, the nearest parallel i can think of is probably whittling, like some rural craft that few now possess skill in, but that which should still be admired by a largely denuded populace.

anyway, i'm off to surf for more of this.
it's almost bizarre Ingram is top of the pile. almost, but not quite...

below is sebastian smee (electronic daily telegraph edition) on euan uglow : -

The art of Euan Uglow ought to be great. It possesses and displays almost every necessary ingredient for success; and yet in a dismayingly high number of cases, the soufflé seems simply to have collapsed in the oven.

The wonderful Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, on the edge of the Lake District, has mounted the first public exhibition of Uglow's work since his death in 2000 at the age of 68. In a catalogue essay by the Degas scholar, Richard Kendall, we are told that the show is an important stepping stone on the way to the imminent publication of a complete catalogue raisonné. Along with a concurrent selection of Uglow's drawings at Browse & Darby in London, it is also a terrific opportunity to reassess Uglow's achievement.

When Uglow succeeded, one senses a tremendous coup. His best pictures impress you with their combination of sensuous delight and intellectual brio - a one-two which feels bracingly fresh in today's artistic climate.

Perhaps the finest example in the current show is a 1973 canvas called Georgia. It shows a young woman in a long-sleeved mini-dress leaning back on a patterned couch. The pose is contrived and the woman's head held stiffly upright. And yet the overall effect is astonishingly alive and erotic.

Uglow's brilliant arrangement of the smoothly curving parabolas and flat surface shapes is matched only by his intensely beautiful orchestration of colour. The background grey setting off pinks, greens and a rectangle of brown is reminiscent, in a muted way, of Matisse's The Piano Lesson, and all these colours are set alive by the rich red stripes on the model's white sleeves.

Uglow was fascinated by a very particular brace of contradictions: between classical cool and tactile sensuality; between surface flatness and sculptural volume; between human particularity and timeless geometry.

The overall feeling of his work matches these preoccupations: hard-won, strangely thwarted and yet surprisingly warm. The warmth is almost all a result of Uglow's marvellous way with colour, which, in his best works, functions not just as an icing on the cake, but as one of the secrets of matter itself. Simultaneously creating volume and asserting flatness, Uglow's colour creates all sorts of pictorial tensions, convincing you of his "propositions" (for that is how they are presented) almost the instant you look their way. From these instant peaks, however, the work is too often a downhill trudge.

As an artist, Uglow was in thrall to a very English empiricism, which placed famously onerous demands on him and his models (his paintings took years, not months, to complete), but also, at times, on the good will of the viewer.

His method relied on a form of contrived objectivity so rigorous that not only his studio floor and the flesh of his models but eventually the paintings themselves came to be pockmarked by little crosses and dashes designed to act as measuring strokes, so that everything could hold its place perfectly in the overall design.

This approach was adapted from his teacher, William Coldstream. But Uglow also took his cue, as one curious early landscape of Lake Lugano makes clear, from Cezanne. Like Cezanne, he was interested in a combination of optical truth and compositional wholeness.

But there is none of Cezanne's animating doubt in Uglow ("It is Cezanne's anxiety that forces our interest," said Picasso, referring to the Frenchman's mistrust of sensory data, from which Braque and Picasso extracted the rudiments of Cubism). Instead, you feel a stubborn, almost mulish insistence that this, and this alone, was exactly how each painting was always going to turn out. Uglow broke pictures down into their constituent parts, the better to analyse them. But he only rarely succeeded in knitting these parts together again to create that fragile dream of wholeness which is at the heart of all great classical art, from Piero della Francesca, Poussin and Ingres through to Cezanne and Matisse.

Some element remains missing - a preparedness, perhaps, to veer away from the original premise and into the unknown. And although this lack may not be easy to point to on the canvas, it is no less palpable for that.

~
it's odd that. smee's print colleague, martin gayford, takes pretty much a contrary line, and i find him rather more persuasive.
indeed, for some time now, i've been wondering if - out of all the broadsheet art critics - my one time favourite - the guardian's adrian searle (see him on the uglow here, whilst noting that gayford convincingly dismisses in his recent sunday column the concerns of the "guardian" critic who was less than flattering about the uglow show; what a lot of hyphens there are here!) - is being displaced in my numero uno affections with gayford, and i'd have to say this is maybe the case.
oh, digression, Jon Dale, THIS IS FOR YOU.
anyway, gayford recently did a tour de force on the riley at tate britain among other things.
among other good searle archived features, was his sympathetic obit of the late, great juan munoz (the lovely companion and i saw his installations at the truly wonderful art institute of chicago).
i'd link to gayford stuff, but for some reason the electronic telegraph appears to be able to afford (!!) to employ different vis art critics for its website, than its sister print edition.
whereas searle has to double up on print and =line for het graun. odd that, but there again the telegraph is "britain's biggest selling quality daily".

i suppose one thing i dislike about steyn's writing on african affairs (when i've seen it) is his smirking tone. perhaps piss taking is necessary when discussing serious affairs for some writers.
i mean, fair enough, geoffrey wheatcroft was wrong with his attack on the film 'life is beautiful'. he said a blackly comic film on that subject matter (the camps of the Nazis) was just plain wrong and not doing anyone any favours etc. he wasn't down with its satiric edge and didn't seem to want to consider that the little guy's best recourse of a political point/celebrating humanity/a cry of resistance/yadda yadda, is very often the satiric jab. if all your other options have been diminished, then it's often a pretty decent bet. this was basically the case in Juvenal's day and so it remains today.

so perhaps Steyn feels he needs to introduce a little levity for his readership because they're discussing such a bleak state of affairs - the pyschopathic leader of liberia and such. which might be fair enough, you suppose.
but sometimes i wonder. his strange sniping asides in his recent piece on Amin for the sunday telegraph, that reference in some piece ages ago to the toxic classrooms of Ramallah or whatever, his constant banging on about the Islamofascist threat.
okay, mega-terrorist Arafat doesn't need defending here, but i do wonder about steyn.
hmm.

Mark Steyn's latest.

this is really rather pathetic, maybe american left-wingers are that absurd (hey, i have spent an afternoon down Telegraph Avenue) but - let's be fair mr steyn -

~
"Three weeks! And Bush is still just talking! The Times spent 14 months deploring the ‘rush to war’ in Iraq, but mulling over Liberia for three weeks is the worst kind of irresponsible dithering. "
~

anti-iraq war types don't have to justify calling for an intervention after 'only' three weeks (not the months and months he decries the paper of record for mulling over iraq) because this is on interventionist grounds, the iraq thing was a tad different, as you must surely WELL know.
i like steyn, he's punky (i even agreed with him about iraq, to be honest), but he's talking about serious issues here, and it seems to this reader he STILL can't resist pops at his own domestic political enemies.

plain daft.

news item.

budvar is a great ale, budweiser is fucking shite.#
CAMRA say it is "essential" a "brewing gem" does not "fall into the hands of a global predator".

on the riviera yesterday, kylie looked luminescent, she is gorgeous, it's so untrue.

i love him already, of course, and i think his views on DR are interesting.
what i will say is that all the kids (17, under or over) round my way (i'm in manchester) love dizzee (alright, apart from one colleague at work who thinks he's too 'dark', but we listen to a lot of n'awlins bounce together) love dizzee, you can hear his stuff getting played all the time in the street, cars in pub carparks etc., (the only ms dynamite tune you ever hear off the kids is 'booo', though you can hear her album in the cars of people who also like kid606 or DMX or sunn or the detroit cobras or whatever; that is, you know, me and my white boho pomo trustafarian friends).
and i thought that was interesting.

praps it's just a difference between exeter and mcr. i dunno.

and i ADORED this -

"they read out the nominees and played little 5-second clips as examples of each. exceptionally dreary: the thrills, coldplay, athlete, lemon jelly, the darkness, radiohead, remarkable nuggets of utterly dead-sounding music. and then"

i honestly don't know anything about those jingles Angus mentioned - is this an Aussie thing?

i like the Heinz campaign mind

one thing i love about mike skinner is he was so refreshing in the end of year magazine polls last year in the likes of UNCUT is it?

i mean Marcello C and SR and other good types write there (well, obviously those two are beyond good, into stratospherically nice, but some bloke irritated me once by bigging up some indietronica type stuff he was reviewing and putting in a sly dig at people like Timbaland and other producers, they mentioned how this was better and more imaginative than Timbo etc. - which as may be, or may not, but i know that *better* writers than you, me laddo {e.g., SR, Jon Dale, f'r instance} would argue more convincingly opposite, but who's counting... - but the point is, well, -one- of the points here is, Timbaland gets into the charts for a start... ...what does your man do... ...sigh, somedisco bigging up the big chart men, despair indie-minded IDM readers- "oh well whatever nevermind"), but you had those end of year things, where they were asking 'the stars' what their favoured stuff was that year, and everyone was all

'oh, i adore the new willard grant conspiracy and of course the laura nyro re-issues dontcha' kno''
~or~
'i was particularly enthused with a glutch of PowerBooks-power metal crossovers this year, and anything Radiohead do has value, of course'
~or~
'ah! The Flaming Lips! hail their finery!'

but skinner just said something about Kelly Osbourne and Ludacris (albums are boring, i prefer singles or something, he said something like that somewhere) and it was then i knew here was the man...

i shouldn't mean to get all rockist iconography on yo azz, but you could just tell word of mouf was going to be a good album before you'd even heard it when you looked at the corner.

look at that!, brill.
it's absolutely superb, what's that in his hand, is it a rolled up fish supper?
the dog resembles ann widdecombe, that's fantastic that.

i just wanted to second Luka on the Sebald tip; he was a favoured novelist of James Woods sure, but you can't have it all now can you (well, at least, i always find red and brown sauces on my breakfast barms a mistake in practice, tantalising in theory).
Iain Sinclair is alright, i suppose, although i must say i used to know this lad - Irish physicist and mathematics fan, he went on exchange to Harvard no less - who loved Sinclair, preferring him to Shakespeare (which is fair enough) but he once said to me the reason why Sinclair was better than Shakespeare was because of the bard's "trite" moral themes, which was clearly a bit of a daft thing to say.
Shakespeare was a poor naturalist though, he misquotes birds, i mean owls certainly.

speaking of avians, there was a fantastic wood pigeon this morning.
a bit like deliberately taking a contrary point of view to see if a weak-willed friend will agree with you on a topic you know they ought not to, the pigeon was vexing sharp with some cherry stones or something in the road, well, on the roadside. it had that big 'cra-aaacccck' sound, wonderful plumage, it was great.

spizzazzz and TWANBOC are two of my favourite blogs, so i ain't sure about all that banter you know. i feel spizzazzz were perhaps a tad unkind to mr ingram with their asides. still, TWANBOC just carries on, doing what it does best, which is to be virtually peerless (shout outs eh Matt!).

Even though there’s all this innuendo about in their review supplement, eg, Harper Collins books always being looked on favourably, or sometimes lazy suggestions that their reportage on Chinese affairs is a bit well, dodgy, or other Murdoch related slurs (yeah, know he’s a tad dubious but, just too slacker to be bothered most of the time, which is a shame, as i probably should…) i must admit i really like the times. in fact, it’s my favourite (well, easily available, out of the five mainstream ones you can get everywhere in this country anyway) broadsheet, i like ‘em all me, but i like the thunderer column and the leaders and even people like michael gove, who even if he is too bullish, are often OTM.

pros on the others: -
The Guardian has good international coverage and such.
The Telegraph has good international coverage and such, plus Kevin Myers and Inigo Gilmore.
The Independent has Robert Fisk and Miles Kington.
The FT is just the general don of clear-eyed reporting and its weekend magazine is peerless.

“America silences Niger leaders in Iraq nuclear row….although the Sunday Telegraph has also learned that senior American soldiers were in Iraq last week to investigate the movement of Niger’s uranium.”
Alright, so in the 80s Iraq could easily have gotten hold of uranium in Niger, but surely NO CHANCE (for various reasons, all clearly understandable) in the period Mr Blair claims it did. one accepts governments have to lie during the course of diplomacy and in matters of foreign affairs/national security, and indeed possibly lie often, that’s fair enough (you gotta be pragmatic/realistic eh) tho’ they might say it’s just misleading the public, etc., but Mr Blair’s claims on this issue have been looking a tad daft, frankly.
Still, this is kind of irritating: cheeky roughshod American government, etc.etc.

If there are worse-behaved tourists in the world than the British, I do not know them, though I admit the Finns in St Petersburg run them a close second. Fortunately, however, the Finns are few, while the British, alas, are many.
The British abroad, at least where they congregate in large numbers….are, not to put too fine a point upon it, the scum of the earth.

-Theodore Dalrymple.
“you gotta admit, he’s ‘kinda gotta’ point.”
__me.

“In the early 1990s, a study of references in academic journals suggested that barely half of all scientific papers are cited again within five years of publication (if you think that’s bad, the figure for the arts and humanities is just two per cent). This does rather suggest that much of what appears in academic journals is useless guff.”
Robert Matthews.

the economist is certainly better than prospect or the spectator or the (frankly risible, too often) new statesman, for instance.

?!!!

JFC.

In court last week Mr Justice Maurice Kay ruled that the government was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights with reference to the plight of three potential asylum seekers. A Somali national, an Ethiopian, and a Malaysian national had been put into a situation that constituted “degrading treatment”. One infers from his remarks that rough living is an inevitable (if, of course, unintended) side-effect/result of official policy. This is down to the government decree that says aspirating seekers not making representations as soon as, (after arriving in the country), can and will be denied material aid from officialdom.
When all that was being rushed into legislation, the roar from some sections of the media that this was an eminently workable and decent, humane system were nigh on deafening. The Daily Express, one recalls, was in from the beginning, assuring the casual reader that any potential seeker should want to make a claim as soon as possible, and not – say – wait around for a few days before trudging to the nearest Immigration Office. Why, if they’re genuine, the Express thumped its tub (innit good when tabloid writers warm to their theme?), they should want to get in to the system as soon as possible, of course. Nagging doubts such as raising the possibility of a lack of paperwork on the persons of aspirant seekers or any possible (and understandable, surely) ignorance on their part as to the facilities available to them were brushed aside. Someone who presented themselves after about 36 hours of being in the country, but not the crucial first 12 (or whatever the figure is, it’s 12 or 24 ain’t it?) misses out on aid, and the tabs – you inferred – were implying that was not their problem or even, indeed, anything they were ~concerned~ about.
Through ignorance, or targeted (for sales reasons or general populist thrust) ignorance, or plain lack of compassion, when the tabs in this country marginalise one section of our society, we all suffer a little.

“Matthew has gone out. He’s gone in search of the Sherbet Dip Dab. ‘You get a lolly with the Dip Dab,’ he said, ‘which you can use like a spoon. The lolly becomes sticky so that the sherbet adheres to its surface. It is very effective. Anyway I don’t know how far I will have to travel to find it, but I’ll phone you if I start to head outside London.’
I told him I thought Bracknell sounded like the kind of place that would sell Sherbet Dip Dabs and he thanked me very politely for the suggestion.”
_Rebecca Tyrrel.

‘how= ~much# do i HEART this woman?

Haddon Hall in Derbyshire has a lovely looking garden.

somedisco has said it before, and will say it again, but matthew norman is the best restaurant critic just, ooh, anywhere. Nigel slater is a glorious food writer, and delia on eggs is good, but really, no, it’s matthew norman int’it. here he is on the latest addition to the gordon ramsay empire, the Boxwood Café in South West One, discussing a waiter (“possibly a New Zealander” fucking glorious; You can see him with his pink gin and copy of the FT) : -

A colleague of his, a man of magnificent obesity and the most spherical human being on the planet after former England cricket captain Mike Gatting, at least added an ersatz Runyonesque flavour. But so far as flavour goes, that’s as far as it went, since the food appeared to have been ruthlessly purged of it.

Sublime!
which is more than can be said for the scran down the boxwood caff, from the sound of it…

~

beautiful.

~

“Marcel Proust, who visited Giverny, made the perceptive remark that Monet had designed ‘a garden more
of tones and colours than of flowers’, and that is how the artist presents it in this picture.”
___Andrew Graham-Dixon on Monet’s ‘The Water-Lily Pond’ (National Gallery, London).

i know it’s nepotistic or something to bang on about him, but i do heart Luka’s stuff, and i think there’s a parallel here with that stuff k-punk was quoting about him, getting more attuned to nature, the bridge in this painting symbolising paying more attention and getting at one, etc., Luka’s like that, he’s very nuanced and extremely careful. Excellent sort.


“Glenys Kinnock will speak for a decrepit bronze age monument in Wales, and if that’s a joke on the part of the series’ producers, then it’s a very dark one of which they should not be proud.”
________Giles Smith.

Two posh people of late who’ve been unnecessarily throwing their toys out of the pram include the otherwise normally reliable clubbing and such journo Jacques Peretti who called that comedy terrorist bloke a “twat”. actually, a twat. come off it mate, are you just jealous of the publicity he gets?
The other one was some woman who wrote into the guardian magazine, a week after they’d published an excellent article about what basically amounts to slave labour with domestic skivvies in moneyed homes, coming to the west etc. from Africa etc. the woman basically was saying some people were winners and others needed to do domestic tasks. It was especially poignant the hard-headedness of her letter as – if memory serves – there was another letter next to it on the same subject, but that writer was talking about lots of other things, and contextualising the whole report, and praising it. not sure, but think the piece in question was this one.

hmm.
i don't know many things, but i do know the economist is one of the greatest magazines in its field in the entire world.
who to trust eh?
what a toughie...