someone teefed my mobile so txts etc are going unanswered (unless our tea leaf has a sense of humour)

yes it’s the [typically idiosyncratic if that’s not too arsey to note, and – this year – gruel-thin] 05 listing from this gaff

MUSIC
it’d be pretty absurd and cheeky to catalogue anything, part of me thinks, given the disgracefully anaemic mode into which this weblog has fallen in its sophomore years.
so let’s just give thanks for all the dancers, ravers, popists, jazzists, folkists, grimeists {& grimmists}, furrow-ploughers, and general loons out there, and the rockists too [tongue in cheek: i know how the lovely Jon feels about this word].

FILM
‘Moolaade’ was a satire that just seemed to eclipse everything else, in what has clearly been a decent year in most categories [there’ve certainly been plenty of good blockbusters, and as pure cinema].
not the biggest advertising budget to play with, but Ousmane Sembene is probably someone who we can describe as still being near the top of what he’s attempting to do.

EXHIBITIONS
Beauty and the Beast: New Swedish Design, at the Whitworth, Manchester (in association with the Swedish Institute, the Crafts Council and Swedish Embassy).
an awesome survey of just the diverse above, with lots of shade and thrilling spaces filled with fascinating textures, the straightforward and the fantastic.
the lips of glassworks that were suffused with coloured lights were exquisite.
the programmed breakdown into beauty areas, and beast areas, seemed to work.

Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (also at the NGA, Washington, D.C., and in Fort Worth iirc).
biggest retrospective to date of this minimal poet, a large scale look at prints and sketches and the like, but mainly filled with the wonderful fluorescents that people must have on the whole come for.
the very generous size of the space was a huge plus, and although it’s clear i’ve not the wit to paint a picture it seems that if James Joyce were still around and carrying his notebook for epiphanies, he’d have had cause for an entry in that afternoon we spent rapt at the MCA.

BOOKS ABOUT MUSIC {etc.}
Nik Cohn’s New Orleans rap tome started well, and carried on.
unfortunately i haven’t yet had the chance to read a certain chap on post-punk but am working on it…

DVDS WHAT HAD MUSIC-MAKERS IN THEM
two items here: that quality, quality short documentary that came with Roll Deep’s debut album. i especially love the bit where they’re in the studio, all messing about. Riko is magnetic. it’s excellent. i watch it endlessly on repeat, delighting, thrilling.
another big city though a different shaped ball was the New York that someone shot Ryan Adams and his Cardinals band in as they plugged away at their rootsy Jacksonville album. there’s one particularly great shot of a skyline but the most exciting bit for me is probably a scene with Adams in front of what looks like the most awesome wine shelf in Manhattan.
all plonk shops are created equal but some are more equal than others.

big up all the bloggers - i.e. pompous fannying about mates and assorted lovelies

the superb (eat your heart out Guardian arts coverage) and always fabulously attention-holding silverdollarcircle went bust [RIP] but then again the amazing WOEBOT came back, as did the very special worlds of possibility. hurei &c!
Penman too...
and Luka!!

Geeta’s final sentences here = floored the reader.

OBITUARY
not to get all Christopher Howse on you but to note Craner’s OTM conclusions while discussing Fahd.

AND FINALLY
- have your NYE, just have it.

P.S.
a personal beery year in passing at the tap here

Scott and Evans boss the show pretty well, but their ignorance about marching with animals is colossal.

Captain Oates

finally got to the end of the bonfire of the vanities for the first time. had had it on the go for ages, at least a good year or so and whilst finishing reading other books during this period never somehow managed to complete this one.
first impressions (a bit late, eh) are that this seems one of my favourite contemporary American novels.
Wolfe writes with a remarkable focus when describing acts of violence, all the little scuffles and shoves that mark his narrative that occur at political meetings, outside courthouses, inside holding pens, anywhere.
at the beginning someone from the mayor’s office drives his elbow into an unruly protestor’s solar plexus. near the end a chapter has the words “solar plexus” in its title.
the eye for detail, and capacity for insight, and appetite for (frequently outsized) satire is certainly astonishing.
his sketch of an aeroplane tycoon at the dinner table comes straight from Hogarth, really.
the most repellent major characters seem to be the hypocritical, buffoonish and vain ADA Larry Kramer, and the self-serving Maria.
in the Picador paperback here Wolfe writes a ferocious, well-researched, thrilling – but also wrong –
introductory editorial calling for novels of the city, literature as bearing witness to society, and a fiction of real life.
citing such quality as Dickens, Balzac, Zola, Sinclair Lewis, and Thackeray he pours a sort of mild scorn on fancy-schmancy “Neo-Fabulists” such as Kafka and Borges (whilst recognising their talents) and laments what he sees as a current problem: the best literature coming out of his own land each year as he writes most recently is non-fiction reportage, not any novel.
unfortunately, Wolfe’s principled attack comes off as a bit bollocks and falls apart under its own weight by its conclusion (whilst making plenty of reasonable points and ending with an admittedly rallying war cry), but good novel like.

You know what I noticed. When you run down the street on fire people get out of your way.
Richard Pryor

there’s this one busker who sets up a big keyboard on a couple of those big yellow buckets you drum up a dime on.
he’s blind as in he literally doesn’t appear to have eyes: like they’ve been plucked out, as if whisked away and drawn out on a wire. the set seared shut with hot poker treatment.
he sits in the subway and conjures up a storm of toasty standards, the occasional shout and a lot of soul.
he stops and sometimes he doesn’t, but there’s always this incredible holler.

a laugh out loud line from an aide to an oligarch on the documentary that screened earlier on BBC2 (and a lesson in conciseness),
Russia's woes are due to a fucked up ex-KGB agent

perhaps you might have read various letters to various newspapers on the subject yesterday but if you're arsed try putting the following words into a search engine

Irish
Ferries
Bolkestein
Directive

it might just be that - in terms of ensembles - the Seinfeld quartet were the best there was ["Fruit's a gamble. I know that going in"]

Hovis Presley was indeed a bit of a legend, all told

K-PUNK, THE RAMBLER AND THE mind BOYS KNOW THIS FEELING

utter utter panic grips my entire soul as i sit watching the bbc football live text to see the Alty (at Gravesend) and City games reciting 'shit shit we're gonna lose, we're gonna lose/we're not gonna beat blackburn, we're not gonna beat blackburn'

{please} SAVE GALES

letter - a shameful place for an African summit

i was at a gig by London guttersnipe punk (etc) outfit Art Brut last night.

the phrase "Tracey Emin with a full bladder" kept running through my head.

this shit's fucked up

We would like to know whether there is another country with 23 parliamentarians convicted of crimes. If so, we can twin our countries

Beppe Grillo

--
Geeta on packing up her records
+
keep re-reading Joe M on The Late Registration his asides on the skits and Nas are pure genius
-
The Rambler responds to clap clap

Olly boy might be in Baku and Luka is back - news to me
+
Faust:...who are you, then?
Mephistopheles: I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good
[goethe]
Nay, then, I fear he has fallen into that damned art
[marlowe]

food: chorizo torta

coffee: one

soda: Jarritos mandarina

the torta was outstanding

espied a moth - a dull yellow, silvery afternoon butter tureen, or drab cream soda perhaps - in the subway, flitting about

just then two buskers (very good buskers) started up a Ben E. King and the moth carried flitting up to an artform too and as the low rumble of an approaching train became the crashing roar of an onrushing train the buskers carried on playing

all through the train and out the other side, without missing a beat

many buskers i do not fully comprehend having only English fluency

the other day someone had drums and was banging them out, knocking about

and someone with a white Master P wool hat was whistling on a train too, loud and clean

makes one think of Randy and her Crusaders

Madeleine Bunting gets paid for this bollocks?

Joe T on giant dwarves (scroll down)

ITES GREEN AND GOLD
[fig. a] well, anyway, Johnny Clarke break out left hook on covering Tosh's 'Top Ranking' perfectly well segue
into
Mos telling himself to knock em out the box Mos.
think the lineage is there.
[fig. b] cold skimmed milk in a glass is really proving its worth today
[fig. c] Reynolds on the Village Voice seems very good.
it's a struggle to think of an overarching listing magazine for the arts in English.
music, art and lit. ones - some great outlets still, but overall, well?
what do the likes of the TLS and LRB and NYRB come into {obvs not hip young gunslinger mags}?
in fact it's gotten to the stage that what with the likes of sympathetic treatments of, say, the latest Anne Carson anthology, you look to the Economist.
a tale of two regional cities:
Time Out Chicago recently launched. certainly great for food and drink and the arts and all the socialising listings you'd expect and even the movie reviews are pretty good {although a recent look at the Onion A/V club and reading Andy Battaglia and Nathan Rabin's well judged reviews really did show TOC's crits up}
but
still not as good as the boho free weekly Chicago Reader, with its in-depth articles [+ w' the lovable and pretentious J. Rosenbaum as in-house crit the Reader isn't doing too badly for movies - actually i'd argue that with Ebert here too, Chicago is the single best city in the Anglophone world for cinema criticism] and superior restaurant section.
plus cartoons, and good ones.
City Life is the Manchester listings magazine, which produces local guides too - the annual food and drink guide is a must and for my beads the best of its kind in the UK. it's certainly got people that can still investigate - a small piece early this year by Jonathan Schofield making uncomplimentary noises about the Hoegaarden Urban Oasis outside beer-bar that graced sites in London and Mcr this summer was notable, for example.
its club, visual art {visa columnist Tim Birch is very good, occasional missteps such as a recent foolish whinge about dancehall notwithstanding}, theatre and family day out listings are still very good, and the anonymous United and City columns are a hoot. in the "gay" section Wayne Clews is a very funny man. plus they do send people overseas, to Israel for political pieces for instance.
BUT
it started off years ago with good intentions and whatnot but with the targeting of those young ABC1 professionals that live in the Didsburys and Chorlton (-cum-Hardy more so, less -on-Medlock) they've had to up the sheen quotient.
that's progress for you i suppose.
also, the very occasional anti-metropolitan twinge from some writers is of course pathetic and to be resisted [pace Carmody, i could stomach that from, say, a Yorkshire or west midlands or south Wales listing magazine somehow - and on my count that's any of the at least six great Yorkshire towns including Beverly].
finally the film and music reviews are pretty bobbins frankly, although club reviewer Danny McFadden is a gem.
so there is nowhere to look to, i suppose.
[fig. d] Reynolds on Richie Hawtin's haircut right and true - a recent issue of URB had some great grime photos and i turned the page and there's the new look Hawtin.
now having outed myself just now as an unlikely cultural conservative (i suppose) i have to say my response which still endures was
WHAT THE FUCK HAWTIN WHAT THE FUCK
some people look good as slapheads and there was one
[fig. e] Sergei Lavrov: why don't you JUST FUCK OFF
+
reading this shite?
you could be reading Baal

nowt linguistic here
Shalom Lappin of King's London discusses the politics of Noam Chomsky over at normblog.

Lappin should probably read this (a defence of Chomsky politically), this (criticisms) and this (a debate between the two people above who wrote the pro- and anti- Chomsky pieces), if he hasn't already. they open up what he discusses a bit more {i had said it might temper his analysis and that the Reagan analogy might not be needed but i'm not so sure}.

mind you, Oliver's gentlemanly archives get to the point [plus contain Frank Gardner laughs]

if you can't be arsed to revisit de Tocqueville take it from someone who's been in the USA for a good month now (i.e., me) that the major observation a visitor will inevitably come to make about American society and politics is that in the US press restaurant reviewers would be proper fucked were it not for the word 'flavorful' {sic}

If the Chinese government wants to monitor Internet users, that's their business.

Cisco spokesman to Newsweek magazine, 2002

The Epoch Times

obviously in the present debate, SKY's largely negative role has gone completely unnoticed by The Sun

caught a Peter Hook DJ set recently.

house and scuzzy rock&roll.

quite early on he dropped this roots number, quite rootsy, sounded maybe like Linval Thompson or something, not an oppressive number but quite a punch.
scarified your ear canal and really hit the ribcage.

definite plus.

just sighted: a sparrow flitting under a black iron barred fence.
plumage many different shades of brown, duns, you could say symphonies in a murky forest
+
sugababes and TaTu on Stylus Singles Juker

well for the former of course must applaud Joe & Tom {tho' Hillary's phrasing is funny and clever} and for the latter most ppl.

[also Dom Passantino on LCD Soundsystem not only amusing and hard but, frankly, a v v good beatdown whatever you think; i have heard that particular choon enough to not know what i think either way which is a good Jerry Dammers speaking to the MM style i suppose]

why then last week's Petridis piece on the new sugababes album?
a RULE: the last thing anyone wants is alas yet more drear British r'n'b (sez you).
it's a sympathetic enough review but Sadly, Sugababes' version sands off the edges rather than amps up the lunacy why is this? why should that be sir? why sadly? maybe their vision is just right etc.

a bit more imagination and imagination used consistently and maybe, maybe, maybe we could start thinking about giving the bloke the respect we accord to better and more intelligent and more supple music-writers, e.g., the man's very own bete noire i.e. you know who [Will Oldham lyrics and philosophical considerations if yr don't know].

[also of the Frodsham Massive, Ian's asides on Bloc Party and the Kaiser Chiefs - i saw the latter in an enormodome plastered avec large Canadian flags t'other week with a surprisingly balls-out rockers Weezer and Foo Fighters - are proving endlessly re-readable]

speaking of old-skool blogging, Mark Sinker's wiki entry is grate and ludicrously fun to see up there and he speculates maybe Robin Carmody started it??
this piece on The Day Today by Robin C. {presumably the Robin...} may be over five years old but it's very good and his follow up on Jam too.
i wonder what Robin made of the Brass Eye paedo special.

what sort of wiki entry you could do for yourself i don't know.
a sample one for this place as imagined by the suspect Sinker thought might be responsible for his initial entry might run
[ahem]

General bloke associated early in his career of generalness with the noxious Manchester School, now widely discredited as a corrosive intellectual influence on many thinkers, he rehabilitated himself to a degree with a move to the Umbrella of the Newcastle School which posited Blyth as the centre of a mystical energy-centred "Second Universe" and that everything could be understood through Jurgen Habermas & optics.

Hobbies include slurping pho bo and whining about not having the money for a haircut.

[ahem]
(disclaimer: of course i love RC, genuine truth)

unnecessary to post maybe but hey some help

Kashmir International Relief Fund
Unicef
Oxfam
Red Cross Red Crescent (.pdf link)

+

the likes of Unicef are not asking for specific help from the public in the wake of Tropical Storm Stan but here are details of Oxfam's general fund

[cross-posted to my LJ]

Against David Davis

Joyce Carol Oates on Cormac McCarthy

Tom Wolfe might be amused: this chap seems something of a real-life Reverend Bacon [his story is even more damning than that article would suggest but the juicy stuff is in the log-in Tribune]

+

i like this one -
Have you heard the one about the retired general who said he had not had sex since 1956? His friend said, 'That's a long time ago.' 'I don't know,' the general replied. 'It's only 20.27 now.'

--

It may be a sign of the end of the world or some other great disaster. This is what we believe. I don't know what you members of the new generation say about it. We will keep praying to survive the danger that will come after it.

Tebared Tsegahun, on Monday's annular eclipse that he witnessed in Addis Ababa

=

the other day Janusz Onyszkiewicz observed that the EU should not "have a country like Belarus on its doorstep".
he's probably a bit worried about some countries inside, too.

better news from Luxembourg: here and here

techno techno techno techno

OK so i am not a Motor City fetishist or owt like that, re-processing arid history, immersed in dry debates (heck i read Simon R's best of 90's list as a little kid and was like "Belgium"!! gotta get me some of that!! tho' in truth i remain a Hawtin fan - and Pole too, incidentally) but how ace does this Carl Craig nite in the Chi later today sound
Demon Days is conceived as "dark music for dark ages"....DJ Gamall, who has teamed up with Craig for the launch, touts sinister sonics of vintage Cabaret Voltaire tracks and guests - the Pop Group's Mark Stewart...Chris Ofili - as evidence of a weirder tint in the event's future programming....Craig's a big fan of...Michigan's Spectral imprint and Chicago label Still Music, digs minimal German stuff...and listens to hip-hop for its production.
OK, so that last bit is a bit shooting hoops 'Vitor watches La Liga because he likes football'-styling but hey.
apparently Craig's favourite places to shop are Barca and London and his favourite jazzer is Miles Davis [hey, Jeremy Clarkson's is Max Roach, did ja know...].

i will not be attending as my numpty pills are again on high, but i will be at a tiki bar {OK there may be karaoke} which is something. and a good one to boot.
at least over here they have proper tiki bars, not just that Trader Vic shit like back in the UK...

+

btw, Norm Geras on form eh

P.S.
'Mr. Habré was once supported by the United States, which provided him with considerable military aid because it found him useful as a bulwark against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya'
wonderful understatement from the NYT this morning
(still many Yank newspapers this morning appeared to rely on a Paul Ames wire from AP, so the USA paper of record can rest easy; i don't think the GUMG will be calling about this)

the lovely companion was in the line for autographs after a MIA instore last night and asked MIA who her current fave grime emcee is.
MIA gave the question some thought and said that it's D Double, "still" [MIA was given some anti-racism badges because the organisation my woman works for has a motto of toward the elimination of racism and empowerment of women and MIA said something we took to mean that she thought racism was more subtle in England than the USA].

so there we have it.

incidentally as perusing various Ocora and Folkways things [in the world section was a Sainkho Namtchylak CD case that had a startling front and back design] there was this little beauty.

where music/intense spirituality and alcohol may meet

if you drink a pint of Adnams fisherman (just look at that pump clip!) whilst listening to 'Fisherman' from Heart of the Congos [preferably in some sort of bricabrac-addled gaff that resembles the old Black Ark replete with Jah mystick articles, old Pocomania notes of service and a familiarity with this essay about a rasta reading of Psalm 137] and maybe even wearing a reddish Don't Look Now pacamac

then music/intense spirituality and alcohol may well meet for you

JAMBOS PISSING THIS TINPOT SPL

thanks to Tony Herrington & co, tonight at the Empty Bottle not only is William Basinski performing but also Henry Grimes and Isolee [Chi-Town debut!].

and where will i be tonight?

why, about 100 miles away from the Empty Bottle.

obviously...

RIP Simon Wiesenthal

a disastrous weekend of football with some good in the rugby (still, 5 down at York and blatantly not caring yielded COME ON CHRIS YOU CAN GO GET PISSED AFTER THIS) interspersed with maths.

maths, that's right (and not just that i recently rewatched Pi), because all the churches in Indiana seem to have the sweep and the shape of Eero Saarinen.
beautiful.
the tall cornfields line off into the distance, perfect geometry, and the Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie Style commingles with the buzz of the cicadas, the hum of feedback and the brutal sun baking down hot.

well then
oh, i must admit i don't download but i always pay attention to Tom [&, well, do get to know].

---

ETA:
fuck me, Stelfox in the Telegraph.

awesome
{via The Rambler}.

so i was browsing the soul and funk and jazz and techno and oddities and polka (man, you should have seen some of those) and comedy and indie sections of this record store the other day, and eventually found the rap.

i was lingering over some Jedi Mind Tricks singles i'd never seen before when the girl behind the counter started chatting to me about them.
eventually we got onto the subject of how i appreciate 'Vexed' is a track on the American release of Dizzee's debut album (this is in Chicago).

she was saying how small he was and how little he looks when she's seen him, and i started proselytising about Roll Deep. she told me how when she'd seen Mike Skinner he was so wasted he just collapsed on stage and was fucking about. good lad.

but the punchline is that she'd recently seen Lady Sovereign over here in the Windy City.
i asked her what she thought of that gig.
her reply?
fucking awesome.

+

re. this top thread started by Ingram about '24' (Dennis Hopper accent king) i am now wuvving Pearsall even more than usual because he says The best American tv show of recent years has been 'The Wire'.
how i heart Bawlmer' 'tec shows, how i do!!

-

to end on a deadly serious note, Nick Paton Walsh's Chechen dispatch here ends with the utterly chilling "Basayev is like a dog on a leash. Eventually he will get agitated and bite".
i bet i'm not the only reader to be stopped in their tracks by that today.

about a year ago, my dad found his cousin, dead, at his home. cousin John lived with another chap, but he was on holiday in France at the time.
anyway, one thing the old man got out of all this was a watch that John used to wear.

apparently it's been keeping perfect time, doing very nicely (the old fella is a delivery driver of parts for the Ford motor company, so he certainly needs a watch).

on the morning of the 7th of this month the other week (the day John's body was found in 2004) my father's wristwatch started going haywire. it kept keeping really bad time and going forward two hours. my dad would keep resetting it but it kept going forward two hours and whizzing about. ma and pa decided they would take it to a H Samuels, the watch and bling people, and ask someone who knows about watches to fix it.

well, on the morning of the 8th the other week, my father gets up and the watch is back to keeping perfect time.
and it's been fine since then again.

weird huh.

the following club listing from a very recent edition of Time Out Chicago (issue number twenty six: bless!!)

"...explores that shady territory between soul...and Broken Beat that sounds a bit like what's hot in West London right about now."

[my emphasis]

am i being ignorant here or is the dating of this piece not, uh, about two or so years outta it??

me personally, i've only been to New Orleans once. i spent a couple of nights there, in late December 2002 (and one morning breakfasting on incredible biscuits and gravy and grits in Jackson, Miss. en-route).

the river was big and brown, and looked like chocolate. it was magnificent.

i spent a lot of time walking around the French Quarter and admiring everything. there were some interesting street artists. music was in the air all around, and it was like all great cities in that life was being lived on the street, and people were noisily dancing and hollering and the like. it was so hot.

it was the first time i ate catfish po'boys. i ate catfish a few days running, from a little sandwich shop near downtown, from some booth near the aquarium, from some place. that was awesome.

here's a recipe.

didn't see any pictures from Stadium of Light {Wearside edition} last night - was watching the collection of acrobatic set pieces that is Blade II with friends instead [and feasting on rainbow-paper wrapped chicken, prawn dumplings and a sliced pork ruby]; vampiric Luke Goss leading an army of Richard O'Brien clones through the sewers of a dystopian central European city = must be a joke there somewhere - so unsure if that lump Sinclair could possibly celebrate like Andy Cole did on Saturday in Birmingham, but anyway, did you see Cole?

gurning, like a tic or a leap of the mouth, just whooping it up = COOL AS FUCK

WE'VE GOT COLIN POTTS
etc

does Patricia Cornwell want to give it a rest on the Walter Sickert/Jack The Ripper theory?

for fuxake

reviewing some compilation of regional-specific tunes in a local magazine there was the phrase "think braindance on a budget".

is it just me or is that lame [much like the New Brand Flex ripping of Westwood once Si SDC mentioned, where one DJ is denying any responsibility for calling Tim, whilst the other slags him off to high heaven]?

not perhaps as lame as a rather dumb whinge about dancehall, of which possibly more on that later here...

Reynolds mentioned this the other day but i saw an advert, right, for some August bankholiday weekend bash in town (Mcr city centre) at the admirable Sankeys club - or it was affiliated to them, it's one of these warehouse parties {Carl Cox etc} - and i'm sure James Zabiela was a flagged-up name.

i know what he means, it's a functional death of imagination thing in the regional dance press, anything that comes along gets clapped at uncritically in my experience, which is not an ideal starting point for a forum.

will they?

this is indeed remarkable

i'll piss off my mate Steyn (sorry Mark! P.S. the cannoli was excellent, thanks) saying this, but Robert Fisk has a good article today in his Indy about the passing of King Fahd.
the first few lines, free, here.

i only skimread it, but nice touch in again calling Iran [& Saudi Arabia] a necrocracy.

elsewhere, although Dick Bentley is trying to make a good point, he ends up reading - truth? - like a, frankly, blase twat: this particularly due to his second bracketed aside and what comes immediately before those brackets.

D +

Garang, Fahd, good lord

AMIR KHAN.

given the Rev ARP's groovy swoon-in with 'my pal Vlad' {Blair and Putin is like Pete and Dud, except neither of the first pair have ever had their heads chopped off by a youthful [pre-incitement to religious hatred!!] Rowan Atkinson} can anybody predict how much notice Tone will take of HRW here?

from the archives

i only found out a few days ago that J Da Flex has a show on the BBC.
and 1xtra have a dedicated soca programme!

clearly i need to procure digital radio; i've been informed Argos will do you for about 30 notes, or i could try and rob something.
yes, might do that.

+

little dog's day is never less than first-rate, of course, but recently it's been really firing.
all the Glasto stuff and writing about anything he's seen on tv are first class, but the posts about haircuts & sweeping statements were something else.

+

i think Jess has the best tee shirt slogan in that style, above any other similar wheezes.
anyway.

+

and a good day for the guardian today, principally pivoting on the fact there are four letters [these] abusing the risible John Vidal.

+

the place where i work - their being shitheads - blocks the British Library website.
why?
"Reason for restriction: Forbidden Category "Cultural Institutions"
yes that's right.

Section 2

a pal of mine works in Birmingham Central Library. he recently found the following written on the front cover of a newspaper magazine [as he put it “The Shocking Truth revealed: The World’s only Daily Express Reading Rasta!”]

KING GAD JAH RASTAFARI I, the WORD/GOD In UR CONSCIENCE permanently
Inside UR RIB CAGE, on UR left, inside UR blood Pumping BEATING HEART forever 4ever
Inbtw ur thoughs
In UR thinking mind
In UR HEAD

LET'S ALL GO ON ABOUT David Rieff

i've always been a fan of a lot of what Alex de Waal writes, but this recent letter to the editor was thunderously against him, and worth noting.

well me hearties i'll get this out of the way for now,
let's big up their chests, a plug for some Sheffield folk and the Discus crew:

>FRIDAY 8 JUL 2005
>MICK BECK WORKSHOP BAND
>Mick has been rehearsing a large workshop band this year. Final lineup of
>10 - 12 pieces tba, but expect both familiar and some new faces.
>8.00 pm £5 / £3
>SHEFFIELD INSTITUTE FOR THE BLIND
>MAPPIN STREET
>
>THURSDAY 7 JUL
>Martin Archer - software instruments
>Martin will be playing a solo laptop set at the ex NatCenPopMusic as part
>of an evening of events
>SUNDAY 3 JUL 2005
>Chris Meloche - electroacoustic guitar
>Martin Archer - software instruments
>Nick Robinson - guitar
>Mick Beck - bassoon
>Charlie Collins - vibraphone
>Chris is a Canada based electroacoustic composer with many releases and
>broadcasts to his name including the recent Outward Sound Ensemble release
>on Discus. Expect minimal soundscapes going toward improv with Krautrock
>overtones.
>8.00 pm - £5 / £3
>OVER THE TOP, 78 KINGFIELD ROAD, NETHER EDGE

&

>I really hope you'll be able to make a date in your diary for this coming
>sunday July 3rd at Over The Top, 78 Kingfield Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield
>for the first UK performances (and indeed the first live date for 10 years)
>by Canadian composer / improvisor Chris Meloche.
>
>8.00 pm, £5/£3
>
>Chris is an intriguing musician with a string of releases / broadcasts /
>installations to his name. His music is essentially drone based, but with
>a deeply evolved sense of texture and densely packed with events. Shades
>of both Lamonte Young, but with a Kraurock edge to my ears, this latter
>helped by the fact that Chris uses guitar + effects rather than synth to
>create much of his work.
>
>There will be 3 contrasting sets on the evening. Chris will play with Nick
>Robinson (guitar), with myself (software instruments), and with Charlie
>Collins (vibes) and Mick Beck (bassoon).
>
>This does promise to be a special gig, it would be good to put on a full
>house for this one!

sorry for the >'s, i'm a bit rubbish

RIP James Nuttall

many congratulations to Qasim

- a large middle-aged chap wearing a black Neu t-shirt with NEU picked out in large orange letters. superb like a Brian Clough shirt {"we sat down..."}.

- the only Glasto coverage i've seen thus far has been Royksopp, the White Stripes, Norman Cook and MIA. no prizes for guessing who i enjoyed most. then again i ain't been to Glasto for years. Norman Cook, though, in a big thing over the stage.
amazing!
quite good, really.
i was next to a Brighton fan at the last Manchester derby i managed to get into (a London blue had brought 'em, London City fans presumably being rarer creatures than London Utd fans) and they told me all about it.
Andrew Motion is an Arsenal fan, apparently.

- Big Brother eh! i mean the tv programme. i saw it last night (i normally live in the back). i ate a panang curry (beef) with it, and my food was good.
a Zimbabwean mate told me one of the girls (in the programme) who'd i'd assumed was from England is in fact Zimbabwean. they actually showed me Zimbabwean newspaper opinion columns online excoriating her risque behaviour.
there's got to be something wrong when an extremely attractive woman gets slagged.. . no i'll not finish that sentence.

- one of the greatest clubs in the world (here: being a fuckwit i'm not there, of course...) is 10, er, tonight. their flyers around town have rip it up and start again as one of the slogans. funny eh... ...well for some bloggers, or a re-issued Orange Juice-type fan. er.
sorry.
genuinely it is, btw, i'm not just saying that, no fashion victim club is the Electric Chair, and not just guitars/bands, no, an actual club (with lots of different sorts of music; it's true!). you may have heard of it.
for some reason i am at home listening to grime (which is hardly torture, granted) and not there.
hmm.
bah.

- i've been shifted someplace else at work. my first day my 19 y/o colleague to my left and i started talking music [jazz, indie, chart pop, soca]. she identified herself as mostly listening to bashment (and Kano, plus some folk i'd never heard of, and that John Legend geezer).
yes indeed. finally not a mean-spirited Razorlight fan {no disrespect, i just mean where i work, in the very narrow and defined field of my immediate surrounds}.
hurei.
to be fair, all the kids in the place listen to Wiley, as far as i can tell, Roll Deep and the B15 Project (which is not B12, mercifully some might say), and all the snarky older geezers to Ryan Adams/Conor Oberst/local indie alterna outfits like Keith or such {there's probably somebody in the rear listening to Whitehouse or Joe Jones or Smetana}.

- borders are worthless to us

~ Bahman Ghobadi

- it is a bit strange, almost, listening to 'Fix Up, Look Sharp' and Kitchener and various cheeba-cheeba style acts, and lots of African tunes and loads of stuff one is laughably unfamiliar with, in a major city art gallery, but there again the exhibition was this one. paired with this one, which made for an interesting distinction.
i don't know what i think of the former but the latter had a great portrait of that Kramer of Leeds.

- isn't clay amazing.

- Ruff Sqwad are astonishing. this is said a lot, but they are {or were, or whatever; it's true}.
there is some old sample and it is some old soul singer and she is toasting in over regal trumpets and she is testifying and in the background go-go types are having it large (as parlance would have it) and it's a cliche but true that some delicate reed work is being done with a squadron of ryuteki players, or something.
and this is the background.
what was that Gummi Bears cartoon?
make that live action but with Brian Blessed and Michelle Yeoh and set it in Dakar and some Irish forests and then put these sorts as the OST with old wooden staffs being used, and it would be good.
it is like you are watching your favourite recent Danish movie or have gone to Sheffield's Korean film festival or are eating a big bag of chips cruising down a Bruges canal, or whatever it is you like to do, really.

- oh the Killers were on too [is it just me? is it just me? oh alright there's one or two tunes yes]. and some other bands, probably.

- that Vince Vaughn film, Old School, with Will Ferrell and Elisha Cuthbert and your man Wilson.
i FUCKING LOVE that party bit they have at the beginning and they drag Snoop Dogg out and Vaughn's character says something along the lines of "my friend and your favourite", i love that bit, i really do, that particular line, for some reason it amuses me.
i actually do.

- this has been an even extra than usual pompous prick post, but still nevermind eh.

- you know that bit in the fourth season episode of Red Dwarf called 'Justice' where they're sentencing Rimmer for basically murdering about 1,800 people (or whatever) which is whatever way the Justice computer sees it and he can't for the life of him remember what they're banging on about and so the computer barks out about "your wilful negligence..."
and he gives it

oh that

how good is that?
how good?

seriously.

it's like that bit in an episode of Blackadder II when Stephen Fry says "he was a very perceptive man Sir Thomas More" and as a good chum of mine ain't unfond of pointing out, nobody laughs.
nobody laughs!
and it's brilliant.

"list of suitable candidates for the post of Lord High Executioner"
the timing in that scene is spot on, as Sean Bean would say for extra cold cooking lager.

"...Lord Blackadder..."

then he ravels back his parchment.

excellent stuff.

- this computer (that i'm typing on) is bloody rubbish ~

- lots of sqeeuing soon{ish} over bloggers that linked to my book tag thing.

- i wish i were in South Bend.

unusually sharp (+ concise) Auntie analysis on why to do fuck all

glasgow coma score

THAT GUY

Charles Clarke - once again - ably demonstrating how good he is at pissing his life away

a bit of a naive rant

there is some unwelcome news.

Xfm, the alternative radio station, have won a license to broadcast in Manchester from later this year.

SDC's favourite the NME is {perhaps predictably} pleased with the onset of a quality music channel in the city that gave the world the Smiths (oooh!) and the Stone Roses (ahh!).

Xfm promises listening Mancs a "guitar-led quality modern" platter of tunes [from artists who challenge mainstream pop aesthetics, apparently; point 6 on this link is KLASSIC].

good things about Xfm Manchester:

- a Mark Rae, he the Grand Central hip-hop head, show. apparently.
- also a Blood & Fire show, so i imagine that will basically be a superior version of Mark Lamarr's reggae show on BBC Radio 2. so that, to be fair, is clearly actually good news.
- now, some people aren't fans of Mr Scruff, but his 'Hot Pot' programme on another local station is alright, better than much radio content, so why not.

so why unwelcome?

because one of the stations Xfm was bidding for the license against was this one.
check this RWD feature for backup.

so, bah!

i think i might at least go and post the Unity URL at a livejournal community i'm a member of; a tiny spreading of the word.
yunno?

bah.

oh, on a lighter note, thanks to Si, Jon and Baal for their book shouts (some fascinating answers at WoP & ETW, and nice common ground with SDC).

also managed to see the In at the Deep End DVD last night.
despite the fact fried dumplings and fish made me hungry, it was great.

some key points i took away : -

- Wiley drives an Audi! must tell an Audi-fannish mate of mine. he recently bought a car for 87 pounds. he drives a Skoda but has an interview with an Audi dealership. rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of a company car.
absolute dime bar, really.

- fried dumpling, fish.
mm-hmm.

- Riko almost blissbloggerish in his views on listening to dnb as a young un thinking grime would come along, grow out of it - it being dnb etc. - or away from it [well, i mean, you say what you want in interviews, but you see what i mean]. really quite a hardcore-continuum shout that {i dunno if that's outmoded these days?}.
what, is this projecting on my part?
anyway.

- the documentary is funny, highly entertaining, along with the one on ones fascinating viewing, and a repeat watch.

good, good stuff.

actually, i think i could do without Weezer or Razorlight fans so airily dismissing the entire back catalogue of Destiny's Child.

but - you know? - at least there is a little light.
some, you think?
allow them.

and spats.
handbagging is just cheering, innit.

my favourite is Chirac, the jester, the joker.

a beekeeper spreading smoke.

knows his lines off by heart.

love it.

read some on the economics, if you want [and hadn't].

Pearsall tagged me:

1) Total number of books I've owned:

numbering in the low hundreds, probably (100-200 most likely). when a uni student it seemed easy to pick up second-hand books from charity shops, cheap university co-operatives and inexpensive local stores. currently, i own about 20 books or less, over half of which are music reference ones anyway.

2) The last book I bought:

Time Out’s City Guide to Chicago (most recent edition in the UK, 2004), planning for a visit there later this year.

3) The last book I read:

see above! or dipping into currently anyway… …it’s good on history, the blues [unlike some guidebooks to Chicago, house is {rightly, BLOODY OBVIOUSLY} given more prominence than, say, Tortoise or Liz Phair or the Smashing Pumpkins: still astonishes that we have to type this here in 2005], popular culture, and the like. it really, really makes me want to drink a large Scotch 96 storeys above the city’s streets (Signature Lounge at the John Hancock Center). i’m making a long bus journey next week so i might take The Bonfire of the Vanities with me then. started that book about five times, never finished it.
i like Wolfe’s bite, if not some of his views in the introduction in the edition i’ve got.
one day there’ll be a blog post about it… …i do remember quoting a short excerpt on this blog once, from quite early in the book, when he uses the word “fuck” several times in one paragraph to (to me) arresting effect.

4) Five books that mean a lot to me (in no particular order):

i guess you do this bit formally with the writer following the title even if the piece of writing concerned was like, Hamlet, or something.

Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler. there was an interesting post or two on Dissensus quite recently about how he went all reactionary (or something), but this is a brief masterpiece.
concise brilliance.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. you can tell this is going to be a genuinely great novel as soon as you read about the rule regarding the too cold temperature at which the prisoners don’t have to work, and shinning up to see the thermometer.
Waterland, Graham Swift. Swift’s first, and best. a very good friend of mine bought a copy for his closest friend, when said friend was about to start work as a history teacher. i introduced it to my girlfriend, and i know she recommended it to someone else. for years now i’ve been a really shit reader (or can be) and i’ve genuinely not properly finished this book either, but i do love it.
it’s startling, and luminous, vast, slow, fast, and very, very good.
in terms of evoking place, it’s special to me like For Whom the Bell Tolls {cheating sixth?!}.
it just improves with age.
btw, this has always been a cool Graham Swift site.
Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, Nancy Scheper-Hughes.
immense (and frequently extremely moving) ethnography, which discusses what it says on the tin, o nordeste; matters maternal close to the bone in the northeast of Brazil.
anthropology as excellence, in a nutshell.
really the only more academic type of book that i’ve turned to as often as this in the past would be maybe the likes of the Oxford Companion to Philosophy [Ted Honderich you naughty controversial boy you...] to dip in to, Herbert Read’s art anthologies, or 'Eastern philosophy' companions.
i’m afraid the most i’ve ever got into science books has been some maths collections, or Hawking, or introductions to Feynman, etc.
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa. simply one of the finest novels of the twentieth century.
(really) long-term readers of this blog might recall a bit of a breathless post here once enthusing about rough lads, tri-cornered hats and the like, their guttural Sicilian accents.
starts in divine style and – amazingly – doesn’t let up.

5) Tag five people and have them fill this out on their blogs

i dunno who’s still reading this blog these days anyway and whether anyone who did this would want to do this on their page anyway, but here goes:
my lovely, lovely Jon (just out of interest, like), the fab Harm, that woman Geeta [think i remember an entry on this topic on The Original Soundtrack not long ago, but my memory is rubbish…], magnificent Baal and last but most definitely not least, that sozzled rogue Craner {probably best on this one, if at all}.
the Welshman even works in a bookshop!
i read that Chrissy Hitch interview in a recent Time Out and it was just like an older Gower boy.
Marvellous stuff.
P.S.
on the subject of books, one of the best things of the year at all has been P Shapiro knocking out a second edition of the rough guide to hip-hop.
NUM NUM

short version of Dorian Lynskey's typically Guardianesque (that is to say, typically poor) review of In at the Deep End:

i like my blues authentic, damnit!

Dispatch estimate for these items: 6 Jun 2005

Delivery estimate: 7 Jun 2005 - 8 Jun 2005

excellent.
and a DVD too, not that i own a DVD player.
presumably accompanying posters will be a little larger than the insert in the CD case of Wiley's album.

+

am seeing Bobby Conn in manchester tomorrow, not exactly by choice as such but hey. Destiny's Child are in town the same night.
wah.

somedisco has been a bit indie rock of late, reports to follow i fancy.

not that you'd perhaps want to take in Destiny's Child if you took into account the grandiose language of Paul Morley on them, but i'm mostly inured to his claims these days [perhaps not arguing with his 'sold their McSouls' analysis, granted: certainly not on the day British tv airs the McLibel documentary again - a far finer film than Morgan Spurlock, incidentally].

+

been rinsing all five tracks of the CD single of Insomnia for much of today.
the Monster mix, now that's a big big tune {even its radio edit}.
clearly.

the Tuff mix might be a grower though, it kind of sounds a bit Richie Hawtin at times.

to be in a field in 1996 watching Faithless would be no bad thing.

a few days ago or so (it was the 31st of May, 2005, to be precise), The Times ran a pretty big feature - in its main paper - on funk carioca.

catch up team.

i mean, talk about pulling your finger out of yer arse!

clean forgot the significance of the date until skimming Johann's comments

+
good news:
on a far lighter note

other fucking superb things are:
Ludacris and Terror Danjah having a chat in what's presumably the latest issue of dazed and confused magazine
and
Riko's blog,
cheers Dissensus!

Riko's blog Riko's blog
hurrah!

well whetting the whistle for the album or what?!

It is a superb day and the plane flies over Skew or Hidden Valley making three circuits so that I could get photos, and then does the same at Karratha Station. A geologist takes me to the top of Mount Price – deposits me by midday and comes back at 5.30. I have a delightful afternoon quietly watching the day and light go across the plain.

from the diary of Fred Williams, on this date in 1979

P.S.
it's rare to see a bbc news page with a little bite but see the paragraph that starts "Meanwhile, the US State Department's website" here~

On the way we run into a squall – the pilot comes down out of it in a corkscrew turn and the sight at about 500 feet was brilliant – flocks of parrots and lines of brumbies. Running through the desert – very memorable. Chris takes me to a delightful spot. I paint for one and a half hours – too rushed.

from the diary of Fred Williams, on this date in 1979

WHY IT’S RIGHT TO STAND FIRM AGAINST THUGGERY

a few months ago somedisco [“gorgeous newshound”! – Oliver Craner; “really can’t sing”! – WOEBOT; linked with a “corrosive intellectual force”! – Robin Carmody] scooped the likes of The Times, The New Zealand Listener, The Economist, Le Monde and The Far Eastern Economic Review with its obituary of satire, prompted by the behaviour of a certain central Asian despot (the plaudits bestowed upon me for this feat of journalistic brilliance have caused me to start writing about myself in the third person occasionally, you see).

now it seems that satire in the UK may have finally met its grisly end; i don’t know if British satirists can cope with the onslaught of actual reality that emanates from the Daily Express these days (you hafta give ‘em the benefit of the doubt and assume their coverage is deadly serious in intent).

a fine highlight of recent days is its reporting today of the decision by the Bluewater shopping complex, Kent, to stop people entering its premises if they’re wearing baseball caps (so presumably Carl Barat will be pleased, as he sang about the sad sight of an Englishman wearing a baseball cap) or hooded tops [hoods presumably up – come on, they’re not unreasonable].
today’s phone-in question is ‘Should hooded yobs be banned from our streets?’
there’s a YES number and a NO number.

classic.

as the phrase says, you couldn’t make it up.

incidentally on the above Anthony Blair being outflanked by the Lib Dems and the Tories, who are both speaking more sense than him on this particular issue.
but Comrade Blair is a bit of a regrettable social authoritarian isn’t he.

manchester matters
[in the sense of discussing manchester, UK, not that anything here, yunno, matters]

whoops!

Mylo isn't a local indie dude, he's some brassy dance music merchant apparently.
though popular with alt. kids i believe.

i'm sorry.

one thing that i will say is Fat City - which is the very nice record store/label/laundrette (well maybe not all those things) associated with the Grand Central people etc {fat city web} has some flyers for their lovely friends&family nights out at the mo.

now i remember Maff memorably once calling Andy Votel a berk (i think i recall this anyway).
i also remember interviews with Votel from relatively ages and ages ago going on about all the {prety much a quote, a paraphrase, i can't remember, i just can't be arsed to look and besides where do you start in the morass of the internet. eh? etc} all the Polish jazz, Turkish rock, and such he'd taken pleasure in unearthing.
perhaps it was for a b-music night at local bar Cornerhouse (Gruff Super Furries turned up once, and they were playing Roman Polanski-associated Polish jazz iirc).

anyway.

this flyer the other day well Andy Votel has unearthed Polish jazz, wild psych(e) from somewhere or other and Turkish rock (or was it folk) for your listening pleasure.
like a badge of honour, a fearless crate-digger.

such, almost, trumpet blowing seems most unseemly.

David Sue the local journo is a funny one banging on about electro influencing local indie outfits and how their take on electroclash provided glory and tunes and whatnot and memory and staying power {i may be overstating his case somewhat, granted} in contrast to that foolish fashion-led distaste of the London-NY electroclash scene [i'm sure i recall a statement along the lines of electroclash started in mcr, which would surely be a surprise to inhabitants of the Eternal City, circa '1998/99, as i've blogged here before].

but if you're trying to tell me the orgasmic release of 'emerge' - its shiny pop goodness, lovely anxiousness, general stubborn qualities of glee and finery - wasn't some good shit then bugger off.

this alone should be enough to privilege any 'fashionista nonsense' over a regionally triumphant revival of whatnot.
i think.

hmm.

sorry bit of a rant above but whatever it is seems to be off my chest now.
+
The Rambler is too good to us

I like dance very much. Dance is an extraordinary thing: life and rhythm. It is easy for me to live with dance.

Henri Matisse

the Sunday Telegraph post-election edition was keen to join the rest of us in celebrating a diminished Labour majority but didn’t seem particularly hot on the need for a Tory reformation (not a fully modernising paper yet, give or take an article from Francis Maude and Stephen Dorrell). still, at least they’re not the Daily Express, who hailed “hero” Michael Howard after he announced his intentions to step down as party leader: language Mr Howard himself would surely run from. i wonder what his opinion was of Michael Heffer’s Spectator article arguing he should stay?

there was, though, one pretty daft thing in the Telegraph the other day which was a perhaps OTT leader column about resurgent Conservatism, this, that, and the other.

What is clear is that the party is staging the beginnings of a recovery in the South-East generally and London in particular – a partial revival embodied in the election of Justine Greening in Putney. It is just possible, in this respect, that Londoners will prove to be trend-setters: their contact with the horrors of street crime is more relentless, their sense of the economy’s fragility more acute, their fury with shoddy public services and pathetic public transport more intense.

i appreciate that London, as the epicentre of British life, has all these sorts of problems magnified [both in the actual and in perception] because of the weights of numbers there, and that is the point the writer is trying to get across.
but the shopping list of grievances is used to beef up an argument that doesn’t carry too much water.
try talking to the inhabitants of Nottingham or Liverpool about the horrors of relentless street crime.
surely the inhabitants of towns like Grimsby, Hull or Stoke-on-Trent have an extremely acute feel for the economy’s fragility? more so than Londoners, you could argue.
yeah, shoddy public services like dodgy hospitals and whatnot. what about the residents of, say, Barrow-in-Furness?
i know some Londoners {in the popular imagination} don’t mind moaning about the tube etc (cattle transportation blahblah) and can belittle intoxicated tourists who don’t have to deal with its rigours year round.
pathetic public transport?
no trains in the sticks, no buses half the time.
all i can say is the writer should come up to Manchester and visit the just-as-crowded just-as-often-abused Metrolink tram system, with the ‘consolation’ that tickets are more expensive up here and the line far less extensive {now, that is something that is partially Labour’s fault, to be honest}.

the point is London does not have it worse than the provinces in these respects (in the case of the menace of street crime, certainly not compared to the larger provincial cities, or perhaps muggers prefer to work as bakers under Tory governance, thanks presumably to tax breaks for pastry chefs) so this undercuts the argument being put forward.
but it’s only a line being pushed tentatively, to be fair.

so there you have it.

jetty

A good pal of mine has recently made me two compilation CD-R’s, of Cormega and Big Pun. i’m woefully ignorant of these two, just knowing the sorts of back-stories everyone does, but i’ve been meaning to get into both for ages now. There’s a lot of collaborations and in the case of Big Pun exhaustive mining of the clearly rich seam that is his debut album and i’m not even sure if every tune should technically be specified to one or the other rapper alone. Be that as it may, the tracklistings are as follows:

1. Dramatic Entrance
2. Tony/Montana
3. They forced my hand
4. Live ya life
5. The Band [or is it the bond? i’ve not heard this CD yet really and can’t read his handwriting]
6. RU my n***a
7. Redemption
8. True Meaning
9. Raps a hustle
10. Stay up
11. Thun & Kicko [i’ve heard of this one cause it’s the Prodigy collaboration – what was that line against him? “I got money stacks bigger than you, ya little fuck” or something]
12. Therapy
13. The saga
14. Beautiful mind
15. Fallen soldiers
16. Love in love out
17. Monsters ball

and

1. Banned from TV
2. You ain’t a killer
3. Off the books
4. I’m not a player
5. Punish me
6. It’s so hard
7. John Blaze
8. My dick
9. Glamour life
10. Tres leches
11. Laughing at you
12. Still not a player
13. You came up
14. Mamma
15. 100%
16. Twinz
17. How we roll ’98

i’ve not really listened to the Cormega one yet, although his persona and the whole Nas connections fascinate me. i’ve been meaning to pick up that very first album for ages.
The Big Punisher is a revelation, technically he’s really good. And there’s some banging choons on this one, it’s great. ‘It’s so hard’ is good even though at first something about the chorus just made me plain laugh out loud.
My friend had told me to listen out for how good his breathing is and that; it’s sometimes almost a bit hard to believe someone as physically large as he was at his end can sound like this. What was it, 400 pounds on his deathbed.
i was told he’s the first Hispanic-American rapper to go platinum (or was it multi-platinum).
and Puff Daddy was an idol of his, also.
that’s a bit funny given – purely in rapping terms – Pun is clearly supremely superior to Diddy {well, and a lot of other, much better emcees, anyway}.

George Monbiot on West Papua discusses the sorts of issues i wrote about - believe it or not - for what the Americans call the thesis in my politics degree.

short version: JFK, the UN, etc., cruelly sold 'em down the river.

the BP site has some lovely colours.
it's almost a shame the Amnesty one is so drab by comparison.

there is this, tomorrow.

see that Dorina, at the bottom?

she comes up with excellent and inventive new twists on classic side dishes, deliciously.

she's also my girl's mate.
and a complete star.

incidentally, speaking of salsa and guacamole, if you're ever in the neighbourhood, you could do worse than drop by here, to give your tastebuds/tummy a special treat.

it's to die for.

unbelievably crass headline in the Daily Express today ["BRITAIN HAS TOO MANY MIGRANTS SAY ASIANS"]

please don't misread the following as the parochial ravings of an aggrieved (anti-American) reactionary, because it isn't:

i might not be the greatest supporter of George Galloway but it's hard not to take issue with suspiciously well-dressed for a hard-line leftie from this slate piece [note the incorrect photo caption about Bethnal being a borough; link via Lenin].

absurd really.

suspiciously well-dressed leftwinger?
shocking.
shouldn't be allowed really.
yes i'm naturally suspicious of well-dressed radicals myself.

still, as Craner points out, Slate are pretty unsatisfactory on the British election.
i'm not asking for the moon on a stick but the particular correspondent flagged up above; well, you almost get the impression, it's as if, almost, they've not moved on from the caricatures they ironically spout at the start of that first piece, received wisdom from their grandad.
not good enough, really.

+

Demon spitting, 8 bar, 16 bars.

at its raspy toughest, his voice seems a bit like those upturned pyramids of glass you get on the top of brick walls as a security device.

but, again, he has the suppleness and luminosity of a great poet {i wonder - if i were famous - the above sentence would get me in pseuds corner in the Eye?}.

-

i'd loved to have seen SR's ppunk chat the other day.
i'd ask Paul Morley how he gets his voice like that.

like he sells ice cream inside a cinema in a small town.

it's a voice of cigarettes and hair salons and fruit and veg stalls and provincial newspapers and the bloke who prints the leaflets for your local Chinese takeaway.

+

you should watch your mouth son
you don't know where i'm from

i normally either ignore Paul Morley, pretty much, or think he’s just way off-beam. though where he comes from has a very good brewer indeed, Robinson’s, and if you like beer, you should seek some of their stuff out.
the Double Hop ale is really firing at the moment and cannier publicans have stockpiled winter warmer Old Tom [this is me, writing about Old Tom on the internet for only the 95th time, and additionally writing on the internet for only the 95th time that Old Tom is 8.5%. hurrah!].
but a recent piece in the Sunday Telegraph about hot flavour du jour Antony (and his band, the Johnsons) was interestingly provocative.
some of the money shot is below:

A duet in the middle of the short show with one of Antony’s idols, Marc Almond, making his first live appearance since an almost fatal motorcycle crash, has the audience enthralled as if some kind of shocking truth about the very nature of existence has been revealed through flamboyant performance. The suspicious feel suffocated by stark raving narcissism.
Supporters say that Antony, as a gifted artist, has intuitively arrived at this formula of cryptic, veiled confession, tortured presence and wounded white soul: the suspicious detect traces of steely calculation, the hint of a tightly formatted script, the attention seeking of a one-time provocative avant-gardist bored with tiny audiences. Some consider his voice to be the latest in a line of compelling romantic eroticists that includes Jimmy Scott, Nina Simone, Tim Buckley, Bryan Ferry and Cat Power. The suspicious, and at this point I must own up to my own suspicions, might not be able to recover from the feeling that he is the latest in a line that includes Wayne Newton, Tiny Tim, Mick Hucknall, Heather Small and Shirley Bassey, and that the enterprise trembles on the edge not just of the obviously extraordinary but also the painfully mannered.

leaving aside the unfair {? yikes!} dismissals of Shirley and Heather {and Tim, at a pinch}!
i really like his “and at this point…”

‘you mean to tell me you’re not voting for Inkatha Eugene? And after all this time!’

on the subject of Tim Buckley, can we note how weird it is all the fashionable indie lads at work (the odd one still using gay as a synonym: sort your head out please) – every one a big Razorlight fan, no less – are all about the Jeff Buckley but haven’t heard of his dad? or Joan Armatrading, whilst we’re at it.
just a bit odd, is all.

on the subject of Razorlight – now somedisco isn’t one of these foolish places that casually disdains an artist because they are building on elements of the past or give pleasure by reversing down the road or by borrowing and adding a new(ish) twist, celebrating etc, and aren’t the latest in the most up to date sonics {if we did that, every single outfit - and that is literally every single one, certainly all the bands – that the NME has approvingly mentioned in the last year would have to be sent to the gulags} - OK yahbut c a n i j u s t n o t e t h a t l a s t n i g h t roll deep did salt beef and it did kick the entire career of Razorlight [and the Kaiser Chiefs for that matter, and the Killers, and and and etc etc etc] to the sidelines, i’m afraid.


Ruff Sqwad, what are you doing to my ears?

thank you.

Mick Hucknall helped to start up Blood & Fire.
that alone ensures my fellow ginga minga a place in the most bounteous paradise.

earlier i saw a blackbird that fair took my breath away with its swoop - a low swoop - a perilous low swoop - over tarmac.
it then alighted in the front garden, pecking at the cherry blossom.

a dried dog turd nestling in the crook of the gutter.
baked hard in the sun.
eww.

some little scallies cycled past me.
one said 'alright mate how ya doin'.

i said 'good ta pal', thru my coughing fit.

BE STILL MY BEATING HEART

{x-posted to my LJ
sorry always wanted to write that}

[the nearest i've ever been to Germany is Belgium but i still treasured a] Tresor t-shirt, spunky, gave it away though stupidly.

Geeta's reportage from Berlin cut me up

brilliant brilliant

- and via normblog, who's in fierce mood of late.

normblog often criticises the likes of Jonathan Steele in the guardian, but this article from the other day was pretty decent {it also generated a sensible letter}.

Johann Hari on climate change is also good.

away from the pressing business of that sparkling anti-London bid thread i have just been informed that David Hasselhoff once had his stomach pumped after eating too many M&M's.

i know it's a cliche - and i have discounted a few phrases - but there's nothing more to add to that.

i think there's something charming about the fact that SR is having his ppunk panel in the same bar that the estranged frontmen of rock'n'rollers the Libertines were recently reunited in.

we might be looking at an inability to organise a party in a brewery

Amnesty International on Israeli settler violence

it really is a pilgrimage now, to glimpse that Piscator again

Q: How is this closure? You’re committed to come back and play two Test matches. Wasn’t this a case where you were let down by the Government and the ICC, at which point somebody – and it had to be you – should have simply said, ‘We will not go, and we will face the consequences?’

David Morgan, English cricket boss: I can see your point of view, but I don’t acknowledge its logic. The Government had no legal power to prevent the ECB touring Zimbabwe. The nine full members of the ICC other than the ECB were of the view that there was no place for moral judgment when deciding whether to meet commitments.

And do you agree with that view?

[Long pause]

Yes, I think I do.

Why?

Because I believe that otherwise, world cricket would grind to a halt.

Is there anything Robert Mugabe might do that could make you pull out on moral grounds?

I can’t envisage that.

Something like the infamous massacre in Mkhonyeni, where women and children were herded into huts and burned alive while their relatives were forced to watch?

Let’s be clear. The next time we are scheduled to come to Zimbabwe is in October 2009.

By which time you expect Mugabe will be dead or gone?

I couldn’t comment on that.

inimical to academic freedom

utterly glorious 48 hours of association football~

Oh Fergie shouting the odds with Moyes, how i laffed. but clearly the fact the rags r an indisciplined rabble is entirely the referees fault

speaking of authenticity (well, not really).
but something said about MIA in a blogging debate some time ago now was interesting, about being the daughter of a refugee {although someone in the NME did call her the daughter of a freedom fighter the other week - hmm; their review was more even-handed on the issues around it}.

for some reason it kinda reminded me of Martha Gellhorn's contempt for Palestinian self-determination (having witness what she witnessed in the death camps of WWII she couldn't bring herself to square a circle on this subject), i mean, the random remark made about how long is a refugee a refugee.
something like that.
apologies for amnesia.

and to be fair to George Galloway, this Dissensus thread contains this classic
Heard on BBC news the other day

Heckler: Why are you a friend of Saddam Hussein?
GG: I'm not a friend of Saddam Hussein
Heckler: But you shook hands with him.
GG: I'm shaking hands with you now, but you're not my friend.

Can't beat logic like that.
{i'm so gutted i don't have the time or facilities to go on Dissensus these days}

and on the subject of, er, terror and whatnot, this guardian article here is interesting [had been thinking of catching the play anyway]

my pal Miguel (Adolfo) Dominguez, his good lady, they're having a nipper. infant due October.
i told him we'd wet the babbies head in Adnams and grappa.

DON'T BE THAT GUY

Tony Wilson has been doing well recently, signing Raw-T and the like {i wonder if they took him for an "Ultimate Burger" in the Gorse pub?}.
Pearsall writes that MarkOne's outfit might be the best Manc grime crew, but it's not London here, to be fair.

Wilson has said the only conventional rock band coming out of Mcr these days he's interested in are the Longcut, thus eschewing by implication other equally popular (with local trendy alt. kids, and the myopic press) outfits like Mylo, Nine Black Alps [average almost-grungey revivalists, and every single press piece i've read on them says that, so you can forgive me], or Oceansize.
he thinks the Longcut are worth applauding because their cues come from Beefheart and Can, maybe also jazz, less of the usual wellspring of influences.

oh, he's also into Young Offenders Institute, a good bunch of north Mcr lads (i think, and from Collyhurst at that, which is where Nobby Stiles is from if you like violent old Man United players), but since they've been described {iirc} as Mike Skinner fronting Oasis {iirc} their appeal might be easy to see. yob-anthems do go down well with the punters don't they.

alas Wilson recently undid all the good work of his soothing noises about grime, his mentioning his son was a junglist, and all that.

he's only gone and said - discussing Britrap - that it contrasts favourably with "inauthentic poppy shite" from across the pond.

i appreciate (and love) the fact Wilson's own DJ sets contain Glen Campbell and presumably he was a fan of Alan McGee's sets dropping Leadbelly (who everybody should adore), but if Tony could just do one with the other intellectuals to debate authenticity [he has a perhaps unlikely ally in Bob Geldof's daughter Peaches - yes, Peaches, whose father is remembered for his humanitarianism and West Brom fans nicking a hit of his to adapt to their terrance chant Fab don't like Mondays - who told the Sunday Telegraph the other day she disapproves of "commercial hip-hop"], perhaps the rest of us can then sit on the floor in peace, and hear our poppy shite properly, without interruption.

i mean, Peaches Geldof and her backpacking (presumably?)!!

i'm sorry but it's not like i'm sure if i'd enjoy the taste of bacon and egg ice cream, but i'd still like to eat at the Fat Duck.

man.

Never, ever use pineapple or sweetcorn. I would rather resign than use those awful ingredients on a pizza.

Giuseppe Silvestri

George Galloway: 'my pal the war criminal' {i know i'm being most unkind as he has those valid points about the legal limbo and detentions the Americans maintain, but it's George yunno...}

P.S.
not entirely sure what i think of Kofi's shout, but you could [indeed, should have, at the time] be entirely against the Anglo-American sanctions and not descend into farce (alright Gorgeous!), as CASI always consistently&eloquently argued.
P.P.S.
hello Oliver

Bouba's banane du cameroun, a true design classic

remarkable work: o to be in Amsterdam to see this

two Amnesty International reports on policing, one regarding Malaysia, the other a French shame

excellent Pearsall post

could murder a curry.

Sarah deserves much props for her pie ideas

so, then, Saul Bellow.

i read of your death in a pub yesterday afternoon (Lees bitter).

you did write some novels.

merci beaucoup, for everything.

RIP.

meanwhile

babies in the ground

moss smashed out

perhaps April is not the cruellest month

it is likely that the sun will rise tomorrow

Chorley meister is now knocking up acrylic abstract paintings of an
'organic' nature and is trying to flog em for 20 sovs, no luck yet though.
god loves a tryer!

well not all his views just the dubious ones, everyone knows the score.

it's like that proverb says, don't throw a lance unless you're sure of your aim but at the moment no one that is throwing is bothered, in fact they're actively and arguably deliberately reckless.

a plague on 92nd minute equalisers for teams from SE7.

oh

Monday 4 April
Over The Top
78 Kingfield Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield
8.00 pm
£4 / £2

Charlie Collins - vibraphone
Mick Beck - bassoon, tenor sax

Also

John Jasnoch - guitar, mandolin, ud
Martin Archer - software instruments

k-punk on, well, it's all there, as usual.

what i like best is that very agreeable point about Eurabian cafes.

i can see it now!

Mr Steyn and i will have two regular mochas please.

Mr Steyn would like the head of a Palestinian youth too please.

on a plate.

and a whippet for me.

by the by, how random have the contortions of the Tory press been over Howard Flight (well, i refer here to not entirely convincing pieces in the Express and the Sunday Telegraph)?
most amusing.

yes yes yes that's right fuck him off

BRITAIN ISN'T WORKING.

etc.

discipline.

i mean, i'm not partisan but you couldn't vote for David Davis could you now.

the man has the ideas of, frankly, a cunt.

early Stevie Wonder, the man's an alchemist

everything swelling

outwards&upward

Neil Kulkarni once wrote the review [in Uncut] for the re-issued (few years back now) quartet of albums from music of my mind to fulfillingness'...

i found them very influential at the time.

'maybe your baby' as a sprawling Can-like workout...

recently, it's been business as usual for the PM

OK so i was being a bit tongue in cheek about Howard Flight earlier,

maybe he's onto something,

maybe he's mistaken


but you have to read from the same hymn-sheet


he's fair value about how only his local people can really get rid of him (if they so desire), fair's fair, that's what it's all about

a suspicion remains though...

...i've not got anything to top the likes of the spoofs Clampdown Joe posted (via somewhere) the other day


but my favourite graffito on the Tory posters so far (and i daresay there's been a lot)

was on one of the bog-standard ones (i can't think what it was, i think it was one about prison)

underneath the 'are you thinking what we're thinking?'

someone had written in black marker, thus

YES, I'M A SIMPLISTIC FASCIST TOO!

oh that new Snoop album, top bombing


so the new Dr Who, well tinkering with theme tunes apart what fun!

a Salford accent and thank whoever for Billie Piper, almost bee-stung lips like a young Swindon Kim Basinger, very cute indeed, Siena Miller eye makeup apparently, boho chic to interviewers who transcribe!

no good stuff highly exciting and laugh out loud.

Soderbergh's Traffic later on,

Don Cheadle


i mean i ask you


classy as fuck


when Guzman dies

and then walking away from the Zeta Jones house,



bugging mission accomplished (or whatnot)


classy as f u c k

filling out a survey the other day in the magazine bit i wrote 'for music the wire urb xlr8r'

OMFG

today for the first time ever i happened across copies of FACT (#8) {the excellent 'American issue'}

sure, certain ace blogging contributors had mentioned it, i'd read about it, but
wow
this beauty has gotta be up there and will be entered in future surveys GAH few days too late...

what a large variety of news and reviews

utterly utterly utterly superb!

Kano in a Stone Island coat, fab!!

the myth of the exceptionalism of Manchester United

RIP Lord Callaghan

three quotes, one interesting one sensible-sounding the other kind of poignant

the further you got from Britain, the more admired you found she was [on Thatcher]

"you cannot now, if you ever could, spend your way out of a recession"

you never reach the promised land. you can march towards it.

A few of my favourite football fanzine-type witterings this week have been as follows:

the United fan praising the class of the Milanese red and black after United lost at AC in European competition, tumbling out of the Champions League for this year.
they wrote that if you were in rounds with Milan you would never get a beer out of them as they were that tight.
With Southampton however, you’d be pissed as arseholes…

…the Chelsea fanzine CFCUK (in memory of Matthew Harding) is quite good, they print what songs they sing in all games (taunting Tottenham away with ‘worse than Orient’), some good banter however let’s be frank the west London club the Clash endorsed was QPR and that’s the end of that.
there was a review of a Laurel Aitken gig though so fair play.
CFCUK also has a bit too much of the ‘protest too much’ about it, with their frequent moans about how unfairly poor Jose gets treated by the media (for fuck’s sake, he buys his coats from Matalan), and harangues against Arsenal, United and even Liverpool.
their problem is they got less than 10,000 against Oxford in 1987 (and 10,000 against, incidentally, Man City around 1994 for a Monday night game) and football fans never forget.
yes, it’s all rather pathetic [to say the least] to go on about gates – though it does notoriously wind up the likes of Newcastle to sing ‘where were you when you were shit’ {in fact to be fair just about the only club utterly exempt from this is United} – but given the fanzine was moaning about it, a reaction is just amusing for someone with a childish sense of humour.

the final thing comes from the pen of Burfield, who writes for the more mannered of the two main Man City fanzines, King of the Kippax.
discussing the combative and – frankly – not that popular City defender Danny Mills he writes:

What message does it send to Nedum Onouha, who was absolutely superb down at Highbury, that Mills should walk back into the team (not to mention ‘and play like a cunt’)…

typing of things that people are fanatical about, there was an almost shocking review in the Sunday Telegraph arts supplement from Paul Morley about three weeks ago (well, two reviews in miniature).

firstly he was just rude and pompous about Embrace, all ‘who are these, laddism, blah blah blah’ and it was a truly bad review, it was actually quite dire.
then an attack on Procul Harum, one of those who birthed Embrace apparently.
now i may be like any other focker who likes the one Procul Harum tune and that’s it but this seemed to be wrong-headed and trying to fit the incorrect shape into the hole in front of him with a too robust hammer.
quite a shame really from Morley.

also a little bird told me – didn’t see it meself otherwise – but what was that Christgau review of Run the Road in the Village Voice?
alright an A- review isn’t that bad, but a rather patronising review that left something of an unpleasant, bitter taste at the back of the throat was less good.

and whilst i’m in an unflatteringly ugly argumentative mode i would just like to take a pop at David Gill.
this is the United chap who suggested some re-think of the Champions League format – the top knock-out competition for European soccer clubs of all nations – because with some big teams getting knocked out earlier than is ideal, it seems television receipts and sponsors, etc., are getting thinner on the ground (and make no bones about it, it’s all money these days).
Arsene Wenger (a one-eyed gent who manages Arsenal) is behind Mr Gill, i believe.
those naïve idealistic types that like to think football is all about competition, level playing fields, fair play, etc and other such boring ideas have snorted at Mr Gill’s suggestions.
personally i think my advice to United and Arsenal of
DON’T LOSE TO AC OR BAYERN
might soothe his brow.

who knows, if United were still in European competition this year right now, would Mr Gill be making this announcement at this stage?

who can say but clearly i’m cynical for even suggesting the above.

P.S.
why is Michael Howard trying to shaft that Howard Flight bloke?
sounds like he’s just giving a reasonable attempt at the truth of Tory spending plans to me..
P.P.S.
John Holt {avec Lloyd Parks} plays Birmingham, Bristol, London and Manchester [Sheridan Suite, Miles Platting]!
get yourself down!

going through some old clothes last night.

one too-small corduroy beanie hat, with some woolen stripes of various colours.

what was i thinking?

just looked like a cunt with an acorn on his head.

todays rock piece is 'regular john' by QOTSA.

it's like fireflies with ancient violins playing traditional central European melodies or something, it's like a teeter-totter that's gotten loose and is bounding around.

a good choon and to start as the opening track on their s/t album {as previously noted :- don't use "eponymous" ever since Rob Young wrote in his editorial space in The Wire once that said word was pretentious} with such a fabulous song-title is great too [avon isn't bad either].

josh homme, huge arms, as Baal might say.

ooh i do like this blog

Jon on the Sunn 0))) dilemma {depressingly, i personally know more than one idiot who still uses 'gay' as a synonym for, well, rubbish or no good - what are you, nine or ten years of age? twats all}

Every artist paints their own experience and I'm afraid my experience was the HIV virus

Derek Jarman

i went and got a (laughably unimaginatively named) livejournal {yes, one of those!} the other day, which is really one of those crock of shit self-obsessed things that horribly navel gazes, but it’s all good fun –
typically pretentious given who’s writing – and the lc wanted me to stop anonymously commenting on her own livejournal, so for the sake of pompous solipsism there’s a link to it here.

elsewhere, it’s not exactly roared back into life, but there’s been a few more ill thought out and stupid rants at the tap of late.

Thomas Jones

don't wanna mention any other parts of this leader about the World Bank [though the Commission for Africa has a fine suggestion] and there's not too much to get worked up about, but is it me or is the particular sentence Some worry that his strong emphasis on human rights may complicate relations with China rather, well, weaselly from the guardian?

i'm so behind the door that for the first several times i heard people discussing Amarillo (actually the charity update of the golden single) i thought they were talking about some new modish Mexican-influenced fusion restaurant that had just opened.

i even whistled a bit in the shower this morning,

no more surely please.

listening to (GZA's) 'Swordsman' last night (god, it's so good, i love the drums, they're fantastic) recalled nothing so much, oddly, as glorying in the salad days {i mean the alt meaning of early success here, not youthful naivete...} of TWANBOC/WOEBOT

i was trawling the WOEBOTNiK archives before and want to link to this piece on Screw [scroll down to the 25th]

a fine last sentence, too

in a word, no

whoops!

got me lyrics mixed up and back to front... ...what i meant was i love the bird in a tree and beeps of train to skaville anyway..


ahem