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