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Wednesday, 14 April 2004

oh and big up Simon R's publisher Omer Faruk who has clearly got quite a bit on his plate as a recent read of blissblog would tell you.
blogs on point

i dunno, it really cracked me up when i read that 'The song I’d like to hear played if I was taking part in a riot/street brawl' bit at Die Acid House Die

i guess in the way grime is over london airwaves, crunk is over chicago airwaves, that's cool. that or hispanic rap or latin pop, which is utterly utterly beguiling.

i can't be the only reader of tufluv curious as to why he took down that bit. do you remember that bit he had, going on about where one night he'd had some Kroney-B to drink and the reason his blog was called tufluv was because he was tough in love of late, and all that. i just found that rather affecting and i can appreciate why he took it down given his blog is on hold, but it fair brought weepiness to my dry old eyes. plus him and me must be both the same age almost exactly he said in a month or so he's 25, well i'm that grand old age the beginning of june.

silverdollarcircle's lovely rambley grime assessments for the nu yr.

WOEBOT's long-promised desi piece and as an aside i must just say - this because i'm sooo behind the door, it wasn't until April of t.h.i.s____y.e.a.r. that i finally heard the Hova-enhanced version of 'Mundian Te Bach Ke' (in a club, as a matter of fact, but hey it was about 2:30 so...) and yes it's certainly not a patch on the original is it!
also as i recall observing at this very blog rather a long time ago, in the States it's titled in English, 'beware of the boys', nowt wrong with that of course. but there we are.

two of my best friends are Brummie boys grown up from Handsworth. i love getting that bus round that way and riding it between West Brom and Handsworth and looking at all the graffiti, PUNJAB CREW-type stylings, sorry that's not anything per se to do with desi beats, but there we go.

and another thing, why have all the other English voices i've heard so far in Chicago been Sloaney-types (two women before for instance, literally braying 'blah blah blah's at each other!!) or just generally BBC-English posh SW london or sumfink.

i don't know, call me a reprehensible inverse snob clarse warrior (nah, only joking as u knows) but i was kkinda romantically hoping the first other English accent i'd hear would be some West Derby scally pointing out the Chicago PD and sqeauling 'eh la, bizzies la'

ah well////
Because if you drain land you are intimately concerned with water....water and meditation, they say, go together.

_'Waterland', Graham Swift.
some perspectif gained fru from livin' in the back

- Other Music Presents:

OPAQUE + LOCRIAN (guitars)

Glaswegian noise-merchants will be joined by local hero
Locrian for a unique take on the national anthem.

opaque.8m.com

plus

MUSIC FOR ONE
Sherry Ostapovitch (guitar) + Charlie Collins (reeds)

Inspired guitar melodies mix with electric pops, crackles
and scrapes.

musicforone.com

At The Grapes, Trippet Lane, Sheffield
Bus: West St/Rockingham St or City Hall
Tram: West St or City Hall

8:30 p.m. Wednesday 14th April
?5/?3, all tickets on door


- The Economist (replied to by a World Bank researcher about world poverty)

- will someone please tell me which Junior Boys stuff to get, as i've still not heard any amazing i know. shameful~

- the chippies in Barnsley are great, there's loads of great chippies in Barnsley, if yr a chippy person you'll know that, tru that.

- big up in fine style Maff for his wicked Brick Door and C90 Roots mixes, which have popped thru the door this morning. IMMENSE CHOONS on the Brick Door one which is on now! rilly nice, and possibly coming into two of my fave albums this year as Jess (might have) noted (at one stage, IIRC) [tho' Kanye and Madvillainy are predictably my faves of the year thus far i rate, TBH: that reminds me, must get the '03' listing up yes yes: no-one reads here anymore anyway boo-hoo so the tardiness don't matter...]

- Lev Markiz interview

- Health and Humour

- superLATIVE compilation aktion

- Terra to close

- Katharina M in the Red Sea

- Weegee

- Da Weaver's take on the most influential singles of the past 25 years {prompted by a Q piece, no less}

- Simon silverdollarcircle and i agree about the primacy of Sepultura's 'Roots'. indeed he likens it to a religious experience, must say the Xavantes drumming can get pretty intense, every home should have a copy on CD, you can probably get it cheap music zone or amazon or something, go on! even spizzazzz liked some of the singles

- just in general i suppose Matt's very agreeable on Abstract Art seems to benefit from the containment implicit in it's form. It's worth musing that the most outre, least containable forms of Modern Art are invariable repackaged for the gallery: Land Art in the form of Photography (is Land Art not a strain of Photography?) and Performance through the medium of poorly-shot badly-lit video (ha!) although i'd say street AVANT- posh person's whitey AVANT is a very doable parallel.
but Mr Stubbs' Sound is more insidious, circumambient, less easily shut out, permeates deeper into our heads, subliminally, perpetually. Which can be distressing. A painting you can take in, move around, move away from. nah, i know it's all just opinion innit (Stubbs seems to set his hat with the editorialising about the "almost suffocating popularity" of Tate Modern) but to me that's AMM or Faust or LaMonte Young or whoever sure, but also easily - say to pluck a name - an artist like Philip Guston to me, his stuff is easily as endlessly stayingwithyou nagging/disturbing/changing/whateva as some mis-tuned piano forks and a load of banging away (ooh my jokey lightness of touch &c.). of course perhaps that's just David Stubbs' thing as a music writer, as said, but Rothko (which, to strike a counter-Philistine jibe, I suspect he knocked up by the half dozen with a Dulux paint roller once he’d devised the initial concept) seems a tad unfair.
i think that " It is the frisson of high finance and connotations of fabulous wealth, then, which helps draw so many members of the public like moths Tatewards." is absolutely not the case; though do perhaps (if memory serves, which is often no guide____) recall Penman hating on Tate (Modern, of course) crowds some time ago?

- The Pictorial Handbook of Chinese birds looks like an excellent resource

- can't say i'm surprised by Zat Knight allegedly butting Jon Stead. have i mentioned my brother's girlfriend is the cousin of Brian O'Driscoll - true that.

- Brian Lara, indeed!

- the other day to celebrate the somedisco birthday and because i worked in a bakery for a long time once (pretty hard work, oh okay admittedly hardly Congolese diamond mining but pretty tough and the pay was crap) i did a baker's dozen of 13 of my favourite blogs. but it looked kinda arsey without me getting a links bar up, which i am hoping to do soon. suffice to say, skykicking, peking O and Loaf were all in.

- saw lots and lots of squirrels fighting, some goldfinches, wrens, strange robins, fulmar-like birds, and many goldcrest looking like birds on a long walk yesterday through some of the parks of downtown Chicago, big stuff, m'nice.

- John Ashbery on Yves Tanguy

- interesting to read Robin C.'s reflections on Dorchester/Weymouth/Dorset culture wars etc as i spent a very pleasant weekend in Weymouth recently. the landlady had moved there from London and one other old boy i was talking to (also a Londonder originally, Spurs fan no less) and her both outlined a sketch of Weymouth as quite distinct from much of the rest of the county. closed minds seemed to rule it, was the theme of the young landlady, whereas plenty of art students, lads, young scallies, rap fans, and nu-metal kiddies congregating on the street corners of what proved a lively and alehouse-packed town seem to suggest this New Labour corner of Dorset is forver diff'rent. travelling on trains and buses thru the rest of the area was like an England preserved in aspic that u almost think we've lost, purely thru a reparative memory defect, it's easy to forget sense and place in another's space.

astonishing ragged chalky coastline, and burnished sunsets also.
magnificent brooding clouds etc.etc.
simply marvellous.

- an imaginative educational project dropped due to lack of cash

- Bruce Conner interview.
i thought this article about the manc chinatown had some interesting parallels with that guardian story about the ethnicity of the customers of Brick Lane eateries, especially the line near the end about It’s not tourist-oriented and caters mainly for the local Chinese community, meaning that standards are higher here than in London and the value-for-money is greater

i mean i've liked London's Chinatown whenever the few times i've been there i dunno, but that Guardian article about Brick Lane raised some fascinating issues (the somewhat depressing tone that a group from Tower Hamlets wrote Monica Ali an eighteen page letter of complaint?!)

anyway that's a moot point and academic as it is, for it's Brum & the Black County/Bradford to get where subcontinental fare's at (though i do miss the cheapo/fecking brill 'curry caffs' of mcr's northern quarter when away from them)
i think this is my favourite guardian article this year so far for the tinge of hope at the end to be recognised though as well (pedantic point: over 50 restaurants at the last count in Rusholme beats in my abacus the 46 at the latest count curry houses in Brick Lane).

R.I.P. Ben Pimlott.

Tuesday, 13 April 2004

vain, selfish & lazy on 'the dreamers'

very nice article on it (which i still think is wanking for observer readers and best nailed by, frankly and as already mentioned, Pete Baran/some cynical Chicago hack).

Joe posits the very convincing thesis it would probably focus on its place in a miniature genre which also includes Performance, Y Tu Mam? Tambi?n and Withnail & I (the eventual somewhat let's be frank conservative??, refusal of the boys in 'Y Tu Mama...' to engage with the path Luisa would put them on is a fascinating and good ending).

however, the link he posts to viciously marZipaned's take on 'the dreamers' is a bit off-wack or is just me? well ignore what i just wrote in general it's different characterisations of American inde films - suppression, alienation, etc., seems pretty much bang on. BUT there's some strange phrasing here, or is it me?

'the French siblings understand the need for violence and direct action but the American, avoiding Vietnam through his presence in Paris understands the need for pacifism. Read it in the light of Kent State and you can't help but feel the siblings have one up on him'
eh?

'Above all this is a European film. I'm not sure an American and particularly someone who had never travelled around Europe would understand it'
seems a bit unfair/

'France has a contained aggression, the reaction is always there and hemmed in just enough- a fascist turns up and all the voters step out to stop him'
er, Vichy, the Front's electoral successes, rising anti-Semitism in France these days &c&c. i'm not sure about this at all.

Marshall Petain was c.95.
here's Simon on 'monoculture versus multiculture: pure fusion' (and all that)

i know i've posted about this before but i remember Paul Meme once stoutly (and rightly) defending Bill Laswell's fusioneering experiments and the like.
Laswell gets a lot of flak from some quarters for perceived Fourth World/Jon Hassell-styled cheesiness. and maybe it's a sort of knee-jerk impulse - in itself - to defend an outfit purely on reactionary snob grounds, but ah why not.

but i've been dying to admit for about a year now that i can't get with the programme with a lot of that global-beat style fusion (although i did for a long time have the names of both Loop Guru and Zap Mama stencilled on my bag in college) and this has been the case for yonks, although i used to be into it well loads several years back.
look at this - it's a well-reviewed AMG piece on Russell Mill's Strange Familiar, 1996's Undark Collective (Laswell, Hassell, K. Shields, R. Guthrie, even the Edge! &c.) critic John Bush points out some high spots, such as Michael Brook's infinite guitar ceases long before the end of his showcase track "Stone's Egg," leaving Mills more than ten minutes to deconstruct a groove that begins with a cavernous bassline and warped percussion but ends up with little more than a few solitary bells that did indeed - at the time - bewitch me and makes you want all sorts of Arvo Part fixes.

but i just can't be bollocksed with it all these days, i guess. i don't know why that is, and it's my loss, but this much is basically the case. it's really dodgy of me to have a lazy throwaway attitude towards Michael Brook/Fateh Ali Khan collaborations for instance, but i do do. and i don't know. it would be quite easy to unpick my attitudes here, but i've not been bothering.
there must be some weird culturally conservative ethnocentric tourist mindset at play in my listening if i only want to hear the purest qawwali, and the Ocora etc. stuff over other things.

anyway, Mexican game shows are the bees knees//

Monday, 12 April 2004

nice guy
Christ yeah the US military forum my God they all
wanted to kill me. What a shower of cunts


haha!
in the interests of balance

the lovely companion tells me just reading yr blog, it says lone star steakhouse is shit, but we were at texas
roadhouse. to be fair they're all equally shit, and not just coz i'm veggie.
bollocks, i forgot to shout out Pabst's Blue Ribbon!!! dead loud.
damn.

continuing the blog nepotism and to Q again, Nathan Barley
Harm on Mark Steyn & w' a history lesson
Eppy on Nirvana

{admission: i have never, knowingly anyway, heard any Nirvana that was that 70's rock band}
not sure if entirely feeling David Stubbs abstract art thing actually, i mean he's a music journo but at least admits his prejudices so that's something, but even so...
food
TO K-PUNK

following on from his fine refinement of Polly Toynbee with its brilliant point about "Besides, in effect, muslims have been racialized, castigated as a racial other, in the BNP imaginary" {though still unsure if i agree with but the rhetoric of 'the end of multi-culturalism' plays into their handsor think it's unnecessarily OTT/alarmist - actually probably not is it, though i hardly need to be told to open my eyes - w' all due apologies to Mark and also Mark's It's only by making hard economic arguments - about the need for immigrants, about the vibrancy immigrants produce in a culture - that we'll persuade many of the sceptics is going on, and has been going on for sometime w' i reckon not much positive effects in some p'haps many arenas, etc. so that is why i was sounding pessimistic i guess}, i was just wondering if anyone knew what David Lovibond is saying in the latest Spectator (you can't get it as quickly in the USA as in the UK and blow registration for a game of soldiers). his Multiculturists make colour the measure of all things (headlined: THE REAL RACISTS) is not promising...

some time ago i remember Matt going on about SR's occasional tossing off of the odd lukewarm appraisal which was making himself reconsider his own views on all sorts of flavour of the month bismarks, eg Linda Perhacs re-issues.

but i could never remember that, but i must say in a case of INTERNECINE BLOGGING DISPUTES I JUST MADE UP

Friday's Yeah but back to Kanye and pushing sampling to limits ... it's noticeable how when people get to raving about his tracks, how it often turns into a list of the things he sampled ? "i love that Luther bit, it's so gorgeous"... it just makes me wonder, yunno? is a KLASSIC example, especially in light of alla crew bigging Kanye up.

good stuff.

Simon picked meup on my hating of Kanye a few weeks ago here at the steadily deteriorating somedisco (what can be done to make this blog good> i dunno) and all i can plead is hearing in entirety the album which one took a chance of has absolved my hardline views and i was wrong and a fool, also a good mate of mine who's a somewhat canonical Wu/Mobb Deep/Jeru character was influencing me unduly with his Kanye=producer yes, EMCEE= no, pronouncements.
mind you that;s the braks.
shrinkingcities: International Investigation [via Space and Culture]

from personal experience, think one can vouch that the dereliction of Detroit is essentially especially heartbreaking.

a tale of moving capital, white flight, and political inertia.

terrible really.
sorry for all the spelling mistakes, my lips are chapped and i ate too much candy (sic) so it's affecting my fingers.
i don't actually own any Naxos discs at present but there again i ain't got a mobile phone these days either so there we go.
also, a sincere (and tardy, sorry) thank you to Tim for his lovely bit of FYI directed towards me myself re. the literally divine sounding Herbert Howells.

cheers.

P.S.
i too was surprised by A.C. going out, of course, in fact in that last four the only one i'd a put money on being it at in at thet stgaw would be Porto.
P.P.S.
in an ILM style and apologise for labouring hte point as i've said it b4 but Naxos is always going to be CLASSIC not DUD if only for the expesnv okay so i sound like a cheapskate but bugger it ah.
P.P.P.S.
i can't really do anything in return for Tim Rambler so thought he might at least be a little amused by two, er, idiosyncratic reports from in the field: below (Altrincham against Hucknall, also Altrincham lost to Alfreton today TOO, ; QPR at Oakwell)
Alty lost 2-3 to Hucknall last night, unlucky really. They took the lead, after we'd had a number of near misses and our on loan 17 year old from Stockport County-Jamie Baguley-hit the bar with an audacious 35 yard chip (as good as Craney this boy is) then we equalised before HT. We'd bossed the 1st, but they were a right bunch of dirty cunts too (as any team managed by two ex-milkmen twats in Wragg and Burr would be), forced two of our lads off with injury in the 1st 45. They came out second much better, took a 3-1 (we scored an og for their 3rd tho) which they didn't really warrant and Craney scored a typically good late flair goal but not to be and looking dicey for our automatic Conf N. chances now. Still, most punters reckon we only need 60points for the top 13, which is only 7points from our last 6games so it's certainly doable still.

Oh, btw tellin you bout Bez's Bigoraphy "Freaky Dancin" which I'm reading at the mo. Good example of it's wit and style here (Bez and Shaun Ryder are just about to meet Hooky for the very first time in the Hac)

"Reality, without warning, suddenly takes a serious side step when through the lights an smoke emerges a figure that bears the distinct likeness of Hooky. It could be a Stars in their eyes moment, it is that surreal!He's stridin over to us, laughin his bollocks of

"What the fuck are you two cunts on?"

"Fuckin hell, what are you on with those fuck-off motorbike boots? retorts X without missin a beat"

A fine example that mate of the books general sort of rogueish scally Salford types and ther drug dealin and criminal tendencies...gonna go now as Gooners-Chelski on ITV in a bit and gotta get a beer. Btw hilariously typical bitter article written by Stuart Brennan in the MUEN yday, describing mockingly the Arse as "The world's greatest football team", especially ironic when thats what the Rags call themselves on their own TV channel. They really are the most ungracious bunch of losers you will ever find, Four Fucking One-twats!

::::


Just got back from Barnsley, we were 2 1 up with 5 minutes to go, 3 2 down in injury time, 3 3 with the last kick of the game. After a loss at Bristol, we were poor, we scraped a draw at Tranmere, they missed a twice taken penalty and thrashed Grimsby. We are going right to the wire but I reckon we shall grab second. City need to stop drawing.

Pleasant week in the Lakes as well where the football museum in Ambleside is a must.

Happy times.
big up Joe P.C. Hiphop and Tim Rambler for their epic ATP wrap-ups.
Matt on trainers

i own two pairs of trainers full stop one is a really old Vans with holes in i can only wear when it's guaranteed sunny, i got 'em for about a tenner off a moody geezer in a Stoke on Trent market stall years back, they're beige and q. nice.

the other is some old Pumas, white and brown.

wjht i wanna know is this does this make a me a direttionalless prole or something?
i was at a hiphop/rnb night in a college town and it was a very mixed crowd, nice and diverse, (i did a dbltake the first time going to the DJ box to request some Crookyln Clan cos the DJ was the spit of P. Diddy) and they were certainly dropping a lot of crunk and the atmosphere was fine, i read down in Atlanta it kicks off a lot if loadsa crunk was dropped but it was all cool round that way.

i don;t know why i'm writing this down, possibly because i just read that new Straight Outta Clapton blog via blissblog and iliked the paean to dirnking for a stwart.
i rate erase Dan is on fire at the mo.

the account of a Parisian photography gallery visit was especially grav.y.
differences between Davis and Reynolds

Luke quites likes the Hova but not loads but he quite likes him, i believe.
as does Simon i believe, but whereas in the past i've noticed Luke's oppositions to him are more like there's a lot of better emcees or he seems to be a bit of a cock of a person, Reynolds (and perhaps increasingly) is going for the spiritual bankruptcy options etc.

i was gripped w' Simon's meditations on the Dangermouse album thing.
i've not heard that, let alone the Jigga with Pavement.

i can see Simon going for the whole guru option if he continues to hammer the spiritual enclosing visions, the narrowing of views, the solipsistic thuggery, i think there's quite a lot of mileage to be made there i guess.
Sittin in on a Friday (rare for me) but last nigth went round to
Andy's gaff n drank a bottle of Red Square Vodka, so rough as houses today so gave the night out a miss


i was out with my mate's little sister once and she downed most of a bottle of voddy actually. she's kinda rock n roll. good lass.
Luke showed me photos of that celebrity bloggers meet up with the likes of Maff and Nick Eletrokin and Simon silverdollar and Mark k-p and the like.

i just wanted to say that (i've only met Maff b4) those pictures are cute, a good bunch of sorts.

anyway, Luka tells me Jim's good for a few scoops, so that's good.

anyway, i wanted to tell Qas MATE IF Y=URE EVE IN THE US AND WANT SOME FOOD don't go to a place called Lone Star steakhouse (well okay the catfish and strange breads were okay butin general) it's fucking shite.
i spent Easter Sunday with a load of Texans.

that was interesting.
the tapwater in Chicago is fucking minging, nearly as bad as in London.
i bet it's shite in New York too, i remember Reynolds going on about filters at Wal-Mart once.


the tap water in Nicosia, New Orleans, and Bruges is good mind.
Dear Qas,

i had some Pabst Blue Ribbon like you said. it was cheap like Old Style (another cheapo Yank lemonade).

it was okay. i had it after some Grey Goose and orange. later on i drank more beer, and whisky. it had a slightly liquorice or aniseed flavour or something. it was in a can. i told my companions it was like cough syrup and no worse than Budweiser (which is true).

i was at a bar called Ogle's in LaPorte, IN, and all the Yanks w' me expressed surprise about my choice. i read some article that hipsters in some of the cities are having a lot of Pabst these days cos of it being an old geezer drink and so not marketed very heavily and so that appeals to them. but i was drinking with a load of 'regular guys' (i don't think farmhands/firemen/loft fitters count as hipsters but better that then a load of Nathan Barley wannabees with immaculately coiffed hair, cosmetic spectacles and a multi-coloured iPod).

yesterday i got some Everclear which was nice, if a bit nutty/not smooth vodka. i was told the particular type i was drinking was illegal in the next state.
the Stella and Red Stripe over here is alright, and Miller/Bud Lites are rank. you may as well drink Kaliber/dishwater.

in a bit,
s.
P.S.
the margaritas are good.

Wednesday, 7 April 2004

two year old retires from restaurant business to go into day care
It is being argued that the loud music and the playing of pornographic DVDs are among the main attractions to teenagers using buses on the affected routes
apparently even with this recent spate of gangland killings (23 deaths in the last few years is it?) in Melbourne that's been grabbing headlines the overall crime rate in Melbourne is still much lower than for Sydney so that's something.
eminently depressing

i wonder if certain media outlets will make the same link?

TBH, they should.
okay so maybe i was a little hasty in pronouncing hughes my favourite critic in the arts (i would've meant contemporary of course) but really i can't think of too many other people to enjoy that much.

who else is there for a tired old sopworth like myself?

a little JB Steane maybe, i like - of course - and then old geezers it's true like Lucie-Smith or Bloom, or for populist thrust i like that Tim Marlowe is on the telly and from the british press certainly martin gayford of course, adrian searle, oh i dunno. chaps like that collings wth this fluffly sort of floppy hair approach,
hmm
this is what loaf is talking about /

i suppose in the face of all that it is hughes and damn him for being a curmudgeon sometimes but when he's on-song it's a sweet lieder, Fischer-Dieskau getting worked over by Timbo, tough and supple and with a tensile strength folded in cold aluminium or sumfink' like that.
The Melting Blog

what a great site!

[found out about it via Pop Life]
JOSHUA CLOVER REDUX

the lovely companion is enamoured with this beauteous piece here.

_'_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ it's quite fine, too~
this just in from the DEPT OF BIG WHOOP

In the past 50 years, more than 620,000 refugees and displaced people have been resettled in Australia, according to Australian immigration department statistics.

yeah OK that's with a host population of, what, 27 people (at least nine of whom blog regularly)?
priceless pt.II

/

to answer the question, actually,

YES

it is that minging all year round.

it's true, regrettably :/

there is kebabs in kettles and then there is other shit (Texas Fucking Roadhouse is like eating in a barn with all the shite over the floor)

i did just eat asparagus and margarine, vey nice it was 2.
something is rotten in the state of Denmark

so whilst Frere-Jones cools his heels and this Julianne Shepherd is posting, yeah all well and good, i like that and i like anyone over that_ __way but not entirely sure on the uptake of Hughes on Freud

/

posting links to three pictures backs up what Hughes is saying, although at first you might not think so.
i'm sure that's the aim of all S/FJ krew anyway, i'm just sayin'...
ah man

Thomas L. Friedman
You are Thomas L. Friedman! You're the foreign
affairs expert. You're liberal on most issues,
except you're a leading voice in the pro-war
movement. You're probably the most popular
columnist at the Times, but probably because
you play both sides of the Iraq issue and
relish your devotion to what you call
"fanatical moderatism." You sure can
write, but you could work on your sense of
humor.


Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

[via M. Matos]
goddamn, and all the while Amblongus has been eloquently (and rightly) critiquing the Friedman frontin'
absolutely priceless

Tuesday, 6 April 2004

mt. disappointment on David Stubbs' abstract art vs. abstract music thing (incidentally, nice 'calling out of context' defence there)

yeah!
confession

i've always liked Varese, but never got down with Stockhausen.

but look at The Rambler go: Herbert Howells, who he? quality. that's well bismarck that is.

and Klangfarben-beats beats idea was wonderful, i think The Rambler should be read in schools in music lessons or something,

i was at this site where people write opinions of food franchise chains and i was browsing the submarine sandwich shop section and one bloke wrote something like 'i'm having a party in my mouth and quiznos are doing the catering'
swoons
how would a concrete umbrella work?
newscientist.com is reporting that a diet of worms can help cure bowel disease
Jonathon Jones on whether New York could regain its power to delight/

Forty years ago, when American art was infinitely bolder than it is today, artists had no trouble dealing with contemporary events which, if minor next to September 11, were national shocks. Within months of Marilyn Monroe's suicide in 1962 James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol exhibited elegiac portraits; soon after Kennedy's murder in 1963 Robert Rauschenberg made history paintings. Today there is no artist in America with the intellect or arrogance to carry off anything comparable. Instead, art in New York now seems a collective ritual: the content of videos and installations is not that important. Rather, walking around Chelsea, enjoying art, is a practical reassertion of what makes New York New York. The aesthetic weakness of today's American art is turning out to be a social strength.

Sitting in a darkened warehouse in Chelsea, you see unroll upon the walls nocturnal images shot by Bruce Nauman of his studio after hours. Occasionally a mouse scurries at the corner of your visual field; swivel your chair and it is gone. Nauman subtitles the piece Fat Chance John Cage. It is the kind of art that ought, after September 11, to feel irrelevant: this is what American artists were doing on the eve of disaster, filming mice in their studios. In fact, it is deeply, sweetly reassuring; a relaxed, civil way to spend a Saturday morning


what an absolutely superb point!
i admit i was thinking the gooners would beat the blues. but i can't be the only person who's not suprised that monaco beat real. far too many informed watchers of the game i personally know were a little too quick - in my opinion - to write off monaco hammering depor as a fluke, or not of interest when it was the mighty real they were up against.

anyway, none of this surely changes that ac milan will probably (well, you can't be definitive eh...) steamroller their way to the trophy.
Anyone who feels sickened by the behaviour of the mob in Falluja should pay a visit to the Martin Luther King Jr centre in Atlanta and see some of the thousands of photos taken of good ol' boys standing, smiling and, sometimes, picnicking with their wives and families, alongside corpses of black men and women they had lynched.
Jonathan Fanning
London


from today's guardian letters page here.

yeah, well, OK, and the point you're trying to make is?

i dunno, that just reads like kneejerk anti-Americanism to me. can we not be sickened by the behaviour of mobs in Falluja and be sickened by the historical reality of lynching without necessarily connecting the two phenomena? like how we are sickened by labour camps in China and street violence in Jamaica, for instance, without necessarily connecting the two situations (unless you insist that America as a superpower maintains control by violence blah blah and is therefore historically inured to violent acts as it's the 'only language they understand' which is clearly perhaps what the writer intends but i ain't giving that perspective the time of day, so___).
you might think i'm being unkind here and somewhat hysterically reading things into the writer's remarks that aren't there.
but i don't know.
the mobs in Falluja were reacting to Americans with poisonous action in the case of those four American dead; racist American violence was responsible for lynching. but the half-baked circular semi-logic there is dubious.
otherwise, may as well just write something like
Anyone who feels sickened by the behaviour of the mob in Falluja should pay a visit to a Revolutionary France feature at their nearest museum and see some of the accounts of the horrible Terror that followed the storming of the Bastille bleh blah.

or

Anyone who feels sickened by the behaviour of the mob in Falluja should look on the internet for information or archived television footage about those Israeli soliders or coppers was it i forget which, who were torn to pieces by a Palestinian mob

ETC.

y'get me?
no doubt it's a very clever letter, but...
here's a good response to George Carey [via the fascinating Jews sans frontieres]
i'm enjoying Marcello's persuasive take on a new history of David Essex (and besides, i was never a big fan of VDGG as it happens).

what i really wanted to say, apropos of email from k-punk, is that perhaps the Kanye West LP is a 'Kid A' moment. or whatever the first Radiohead LP where they were all listening to the Warp back catalogue and Penderecki is, it is 'Amnesiac'? i dunno, i ain't really a big Radiohead fan (i.e., the one after 'ok computer'). but i remember at that time i found it quite exciting that they might bring Autechre into the mainstream of indie disco nights and the lower reaches of the pop charts, through Thom Yorke's enthusiastic patronage. hey, i was young and naive...

but like Maff says in his crucial and lovely piece on 'the college dropout' this God-botherin' talk is being dropped on Roc-A-Fella, not some undie concern.
also, the lad who sold it to me and had a enthusiastic conversation about various chitown emcees, etc., was a guy working in a chain record store of the lowest common denominator (trust me on that, i'll not name names but i wasn't in Powell's Jazz and Record Mart or anything), and so we can presume not some media type hipster that might no doubt decry Maff's views on the LP and damn it with faint praise as 'okie-dokie', so that's why i rate Ingram is really OTM there.
also that last trk it cracks me up when he's saying about his mom helping him move house and he complains, in a really matter of fact voice that clearly many people are going to be able to relate to, that the landlord is somewhat of a jerk.

quality~!
not that i necessarily agree with Rob Hughes much of the time (or indeed, a little of the time on occasion), i just adore his cojones.

anyway, i wuv gilbert and george me.
briefly, one thing that is interesting about Hughes below (my favourite critic fullstop in the arts, to 'fess up, even if that makes one stuffy) is his hating on Hirst's pickled shark, do you recall his outburst it would have been more interesting if he'd caught the fucking thing himself, rather than hiring some bloke from Queensland to do it (or words to that effect).

also interesting is his grouping of Freud with Edward Hopper, his celebrated obit/essay on Rothko compellingly privileges Hopper above of, and ahead, from Rothko.
i think that's a contrary position, and actually quite a persuasive one.
three from the guardian site:

Migration rhetoric belies the facts

a press review wot th papers sez section notable in part for the ludicrous Melanie Phillips and wrong-headed approach of Tony Parsons.

Living in fear: my week with the hidden asylum seekers
incidentally, what with Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD perhaps in the loop again (apparently), there was a striking article from the washington post's fred hiatt yesterday (cutting and pasting cause it might get awkward with registrations).

On the 10th anniversary of South Africa's peaceful transition from apartheid to majority rule, outsiders may want to congratulate themselves. After all, didn't we all stand with Nelson Mandela, imposing economic sanctions until the white-minority regime gave in?

Well, yes, some countries did, eventually. But the rosy history forgets how controversial sanctions were -- how many people argued for "engagement" and against sanctions, which they said would only harm the oppressed black majority.

Self-congratulation is particularly misplaced when so many nations are slinking away from a moral challenge not all that different from the one presented by South Africa before 1994. No two situations are identical, but Burma, a Southeast Asian nation of 50 million people, presents some striking similarities:

• Egregious violations of human rights. The military generals who rule Burma, led by Gen. Than Shwe, maintain such an iron grip that possessing an "unlicensed" fax machine or quietly criticizing the nation's school system can land someone in jail for years. "Murder, rape, forced labor, child soldiers," was the recent summary by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) of the regime's official policy. Amnesty International has identified some 1,300 political prisoners, many of whom have been tortured.

• A viable political alternative with moral authority. In South Africa, there was little doubt that Mandela and the African National Congress enjoyed the support of most people. In Burma, there is no doubt that Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy enjoy majority support: When the regime, in a momentary spasm of self-deluded confidence, allowed elections, the democrats won more than four out of five parliamentary seats.

• Support for sanctions from the people who know best. The ANC understood that international trade and investment barriers would hurt some of its supporters in the short run; that was a price, it believed, that had to be paid to win freedom. The NLD has been similarly clear.

• Experts ready to blame the democrats. South Africa's regime tried to promote fears of Mandela and his colleagues as radicals, Communists or revenge-seekers. In the case of Suu Kyi, a Buddhist committed to nonviolence, such vilification would sound preposterous. Instead, critics turn her principles against her: Georgetown University scholar David I. Steinberg recently suggested that she is "rigid and uncompromising." U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's special envoy to the country "emphasized the need for all the parties . . . to turn over a new page."

Given that Suu Kyi has been held virtually incommunicado since May 30, when government goons attacked her and her supporters, killing scores and injuring many more, it's hard to know how she could "turn a page" even if she were so inclined. Many of her top advisers remain in prison, and no supporters or journalists are allowed to speak with her.

That leaves the field clear for those who argue against sanctions. And sanctions are a blunt instrument; one can certainly be opposed to them without being an apologist for the regime. Steinberg and others argue that they only entrench the regime by impoverishing the people.

But it's also true that sanctions haven't really been tried. The United States imposed an import ban last summer, after the May 30 attacks, but the Europeans haven't followed suit, and the Bush administration hardly has pressed them to do so. Meanwhile, the administration is cozying up to the autocratic prime minister of Thailand, Burma's neighbor, who is busy shoring up Burma's regime even as he erodes human rights in his own country.

"Myanmar is not South Africa," writes another pro-engagement scholar, Robert H. Taylor. "Its politics are more complex than a battle of democracy versus authoritarianism."

By that standard, South Africa wasn't South Africa either; its politics were complex, too. And that complexity was often cited as an excuse for inaction.

"When we called for international action, we were often scorned, disregarded or disappointed," Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently recalled. But, he said, dismantling apartheid required international pressure, as will promoting democracy in Burma: "Sadly, tyrants choose not to understand the language of diplomacy or constructive engagement, but rather respond only to the action of intense pressure and sanctions."

Than Shwe and his generals are rumored to be planning Suu Kyi's release in a couple of weeks. Diplomats will be eager to claim credit and declare a problem solved. But undoing one of their many outrages is just a small step. Whether it becomes the first step toward democratic reform will depend in large part on whether the generals feel pressure from overseas, or whether they think they can keep blaming their prisoner for her "intransigence."

that bush article in a recent onion here, well, was in a coffeeshop the other day chatting to some woman and she seemed to think it was real.

she was either (a) a biscuit, unfamiliar with its satire
or
(b) engaged in a fairly sophisticated plot to befuddle the unwary traveller and just pretending to think that for ironic comedy purposes.

incidentally, who does that onion article remind us of, just a tad? yes, that's right (best use of Wikipedia since Hua's stepping-to re. Taiwan's elections? - incidentally Hua on NERD is vey good).

i feigned and parried like a minor dufflepud within the Narnian chronicles and came down on the fence, giving away just enough so either side could have gone back happy with the meet.
actually, i think i still rate 'memento' as a 'better' film than eternal sunshine of the spotless mind but there again i esteem it greater than 'requiem for a dream', a stance in direct and CONTROVERSIAL opposition to ello.
also the Cubs bt the Reds 7-4 on opening day which Dick CHENEY attended and Moises Alou ROOLS
i love Jon's 'Pusher asides

(not to mention recanting over Sherburne which is the rite thing such is the loveliness of Sherburne allyearround : check that remarkable economic drifting tale he recently linked to?)

i also loved those Sinclair quotes that Luka put up at his blog during his recent self doubt post. snap out of that funk Luke, i know Reading beat you, but you're still in the playoffs.

oh, 'eternal sunshine of the spotless mind', it was alright, some wonderful shots and what a gift Carrey is, a large actor, starting to grow into something big due in no small part to his versatility. a film far easier to embrace than 'memento' and certainly funnier also, just different not worse or better.
Geeta's exposition of German expressionist flicks from the 20's that toyed with visual signs for mental illness was something that had enormous resonance watching the scenes when Clementine decides they should snoop in the beach house.
the Super8 quality of the reels towards the end, when it would have been far easier/more obvious to have early Boards of Canada and their rustic machinic soul soundtrcking (though i was singing the Beck, must shamefacedly admit...), could have worked really well.
that disintegrating was like moths fluttering around flame and was quite a lovely effect.
also still on Geeta i loved the sidebar on Folk Music of the Sahara but this (made me) beg the question, is it possible to write about that sorta thing (Tuareg trances &c) from a bornnbred non-Tuareg (in this case, again) western country perspective without getting all 'Mysterious / Other / Foreign' on yr reader's azz.
praps not.
also still on Geeta i was glad UConn. beat Georgia Tech principally because i wanted some other team in an earlier round to beat Georgia Tech and i cried into my catfish steak and milkduds when they didn't.
mind you i thought 'no logo' was a load of old rope.
a map of misreading

Noam Chomsky wants to clarify something George Monbiot said about his tamales/

Chomsky is right to, with judicious approach and even brow, apply a thoroughly sensible reinterpretation of where Monbiot fell down in misusing Chomsky in his original article here.
however the final paragraph lets himself down somewhat, no? Serbian diplomacy at the time: give over, that's what you call a smokescreen surely (diplomacy was "exhausted" prior to alliance action, to quote Joe Lockhart, don't forget).
writing "advocates...of intervention in Rwanda" in the manner that he does - and this week of all weeks - is a tad,well, ungenerous.
[of course i supported NATO airstrikes at the time but then soon after started to re-assess that rather unquestioning support of mine to the extent that i got all confused by the issue]

meanwhile, there is an eminently sensible leader in the guardian today
one thing i'm not feeling over at het graun is Naomi Klein's somewhat unseemly theorising [here's one possible answer... yeah, thanks for that]
Hughes on Lucian Freud [my girl Jess would be especially pleased with Bob's opening para.]
this one's for Ian '86400' Baxter:

Other Music Presents:

OPAQUE + LOCRIAN (guitars)

Return of the Glaswegian noisemeisters, joined this time
by local hero Locrian for a performance of their unique
arrangement of the national anthem ...

opaque.8m.com

plus

MUSIC FOR ONE
Sherry Ostapovitch (guitar) + Charlie Collins (reeds)

Inspired guitar melodies mix with electric pops, crackles
and scrapes. "Sherry mangles her guitar quite exquisitely"
- Night With No Name

musicforone.com

At The Grapes, Trippet Lane, Sheffield
Bus: West St/Rockingham St or City Hall
Tram: West St or City Hall

8:30 p.m. Wednesday 14th April
£5/£3, all tickets on door

Friday, 2 April 2004

Darfur in Flames
and although John Bush is one of my more fave AMG writers, i think he's damning with faint praise and being rather unfair etc. in his piece on original pirate material here {about the stuff other than Skinner}

is he American? hmm,
there again, Cornelius Cardew, Simon H. Fell, Roots Manuva, George Formby, Coldcut, Pigfish, Bananarama, Bauhaus and an LP of spoken Jane Austen on the same list is somethin kinda delicious.
speaking of AMG sometimes they need to have a word with themselves, possibly even outside.

some very nice music i'm sure but metastyle of England?!

come on now, behave.
Joe on 'the college dropout' speaking sense (permalinks don't seem to work at his place)
Treddin on thin ice entry at AMG


agh!

maybe i have read this but although i've got a great memory for faces not in general for otherstuff so apologies for forgetting but this album will have 'Eskimo' and 'Icerink' on it?

OK OK OK OK.
April 26th official date, i'm sorry but i'm more excited about that then a grand don't come for free, people can saddle off with their kompakt and streets if they want, but...
it's addictive from the first tune.
one thing to note for the somedisco birthday is finally getting a copy of 'the college dropout' (well i am in chicago), i went along and got it me, and i was chatting to the boy in the shop who resembled a kinda (well it was a bloke i guess) slightly bigger version of the little one from 'diff'rent strokes' was it 'Willis' or was that just his catchphrase (well, it was a young man really), you know gary coleman ain't it? i forget, anyhow, was chatting to him about it, and he was recommending loadsa shops on the south side, and tape outlets for me to check out, and gave me a load of names of chitown emcees i'd consequently never heard of [the list of hip-hop figures from the windy city i'm familiar w' stops at do or die, twista, common and Kanye himself pretty much *ahem*...] - otherwise i could do proper RESEARCH IF I'D REMBERED HUH?? like Maff - (i told him i actually liked the sounds of the skits and having heard it, i still do, they're funny and fresh largely: the guy at the shop was wondering if the 'cliche he'd heard' about england was true with ref. to english fans thinking that 'three feet high and rising' was the last time an album had good skits which i thought was a general thing but then i remembered it was only ever places like jockey slut where i ever actually read that codified in cold, hard print, so erred on the side of caution) and i got it me.
and indeed it's the album of my year thus far off the top of my head.
KLASSIC photo caption over at Slumberlord on 'Toxic'
OK now i wanna really go sonar
Waggish
oliver
dariabrit
cathy
Nick Hackneyed
anil
Land of a Thousand Dances
k-punk on Destiny's Child at hyperdub
one thing about it being my birthday is trying to introduce some sidebars or something, a few links finally, am a luddite but it's about time!

following Jon Dale's influence i may have to quote someone (the august Harvell in his case) discussing the blog, whether indirectly or otherwise, on the mastbar. that'd be quite rocknroll innit.

but there's nothing too much cop out there about the great somedisco, alas/

i suppose i could use Reynolds' saying "idiosyncratic", Lukes assessment (in the mists of time this one) that i was 'quite nice', or something; or perhaps Robin w' "a corrosive intellectual force", yeah i quite like that one!
say it ain't so, Loaf?
incidentally american arthouses seem to be a bit behind the door, they're only showing 'blind shaft' round here at the moment! [also 'Broken Wings', you know the Israeli drama]

IIRC that was showing in london around last october or november and certainly in the rest of the uk by december.

incidentally that AMG link seems to be give a somewhat harshly cursory star rating, when i finally do my y2k3 lists of faves it'll be in the kino section, fer shewer.

fair enough it's a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut approach you could reasonably argue and so therefore a bit bombastic (Bang on a Can to the Eno of 'The Road Home' {'Wo De Fu Qin Mu Qin'}, to analogise on another recent Chinese film relatively widely seen back home??) but the performances and sketches are so affecting & impressive, it's no simple case of politics intruding too much on the narrative a la 'Lilya 4-ever', as one might argue.
Geeta on 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' sounds also well on it.

i don't think it will stand up to my beloved Memento, frankly.

however, am seeing it tonight so perhaps my bigoted back-against-the-wall preshow perspective will be changed, which would be nice.
Gareth on Remarc and Stars of the Lid/subcultures really is on it
speaking of people saying some useful or valid points but some of it getting obscured in a storm afterwards, luka told me the telegraph headline about George Carey's Islam comments was really reductionist and unhelpful (the telegraph's headline was just something like ISLAM HAS NO MADE NO GIFTS TO CIVILISATION.

to be fair to Carey, though clearly some things he says are dubious (the condemntation angle for instance, which is discussed among other things quite well here) he has some far more reasonable things to say than 'Gimli'.
alright, Gimli: but I would not choose to live in a theocratically organised Muslim society., same here, but his apocalyptic images, the less than careful conflating; so who cares if 'By 2020, 50 percent of the children in Holland under the age of 18 will be of Muslim descent jeez/
happy birthday
=
somedisco is one today!
=
well i think so, the first post at this blog was on the 2nd april 2003, but bcos of the leap year that was a wednesday not a thursday. therefore i dunno if it was the somedisco birthday yday it might be 2mro, be that as it may
=
this blog was actually once a half-decent read, hard to believe i know but true! you don't believe me, check even just the first couple of dates from its birth here (at least the style is vaguely interesting unlike the flagellating shite these days, if he sez so imself....)/
+
not sure what to do to mark the birfday maybe the number 52 will be involved doubt 365 or 366 would be.
praps mo' l8r
one heartbreaking thing about west Europe today is that anti-Semitism is undeniably on the rise (certainly in France, according to the most recent figures).
as is Islamophobia...
the photogenic Marine Le Pen refutes anti-Semitism.

Marine has recently been doing the interviewing rounds (she's got a delightful looking set of photos of the gaff&family life&c in a recent sunday telegraph magazine piece) and bringing her fresh, tempered, more contemporary message to the streets [she wants to "de-demonize" the Front of her father; incidentally in 2002 she remarked Try as I might, I can't find any point of difference with my father's programme], worrying about - inevitably - France's Arab immigrants&c.

hmm.


Gimli the dwarf in chats out of arse shockah
Broken Language sez it all re. the illmatic ten yr rerleas (me and the crew have been moaning about this for months) {via Hua}
Ranting Demagogues: How censorship works in free societies

perhaps this writer approvingly quoting Pilger and discussing the events of April 2002 would care to drop the kneejerk conspiracies for a second, and engage with notes like this and let us make our own mind up here, and bear in mind has proved unable to bridge the huge gap between the country's rich and poor whilst you browse Human Rights Watch

:/
Aidan Foster-Carter goes surfin
Josh Clover on Chris Hitchens:/

My favorite has been his decision, when confronted with the supreme absence of WMDs, not to mutter about how the Iraqi regime was so heinous they had to go no matter what (even sober, Hitch knows that argument sounds real funny as soon as someone down at the Blarney Stone says "Um, uh, so what's up with North Korea, sir?") [snip]

whatever you think of the rest of Jane's tract on the Hitch (and there's some good points of course, failures of planning for reconstruction and such), the above is, alas, plain infantile (and yes Clover does go on to talk instead about Hitch's bizarre 'no reasons needed'...). sometimes one can hear this objection and - well, shyeah - but that would be in a less imperfect world, where we didn't have to read about - say - this, or this, or this.

the point is yes, it would be good wouldn't it, for the Pyongyang regime to be removed. but they're there, the western world is not ameliorating the plight of the North Korean people, and this shouldn't necessarily impugn the motives of individuals like Hitchens who like to attribute humanitarian motives to their support of the Iraqi invasion.
this is a legislator drafting a proposal that would curb judicial activism in the US.

Many argue that the exercise of such broad judicial authority, expanded over time and by political tradition, has a growing adverse affect on co-equal branches of government.
“As judicial power expands, Congressional power contracts,” said Lewis. “This is especially true when the power to interpret the Constitution rests in the hands of activist judges anxious to find the latest ‘right’ hiding between the lines of our founding document.”

is probably true in the case of the first part and arguably so in the case of the second segment of his formulation, but - look! - here's what's really going on with Rep Lewis' seedy little sketch/

Thursday, 1 April 2004

BOLLOCKS
re. the "whu" yday of course every1 knows the chapter of shame for the west in all that but yday's news confirmed it all so blatantly, i haven't heard if the Clintonians have responded yet