Under Dubya's tree, from Osama, hugs & kisses

While having a little holiday weekend up North recently the Hornby landscapes, Airfix kits and shiny stuff in the window of a toy emporium, the Monk Bar Model Shop, caught the eye. In we went, marvelling at the intricacies of the models, the attention to detail, the whiff of train set, etc, etc, in a happily distracted mode of nostalgia and pre-Christmas random gift perusing.

I used to make the odd model when I was a lad (by which I mean, 'When younger, I would make, occasionally, a model from a kit', not 'Bizarre creations were formed by me in my youth', nor indeed that 'In my childhood years, I would force those I viewed as singular to wear clothes I had created' - sorry, I just thought I'd better clear that up), but it has been a long time since I wielded a tub of Enamel Copper Plate or inadvertently glued my thumb to an aileron.

However, I spotted this on the shelf and felt that I could be drawn back into the world of the miniature replica - once I had stopped actually wiping the tears of laughter from each eye.





I mean, really though. I bet this wasn't what John Masefield had in mind.

Dethpicable!

An intriguing snippet found on one of the internet's many free smut networks...



Daffy: The Wilderness Years

Pedalphilia

You may have seen/heard the one about the bloke caught apparently humping his bike by now...

Avoiding the obvious jokes about what passes for entertainment in Ayrshire - be it the hapless frotterer himself or the cleaners with nothing better to do than barge in on paying guests and then shop them for doing weird stuff in the privacy of their own room - readers of this or my other blog might know that 'two wheels good, four wheels not so good' is one of my mantras, and of course I've always agreed with Freddie Mercury on the splendours of the bicycle ['BI-cycle BI-cycle'... nudge, nudge, Fred, I got yer]... but in terms of actually wanting to 'ride my bicycle'?

"You've taken that too far."

Postfacto Sexualis!

Billionaire writer J.K. Rowling has revealed that Professor Dumbledore, the sorcerer principal of the Harry Potter saga, was gay.

In a curious Moebius strip trail of self-congratulation, the usual suspects [Peter Tatchell, for example] emerged during the week to applaud this retro-active character development. Growling gushed to fans: "I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy."

For the love of God. I would have told you earlier if I'd thought of it. Perhaps she was trying to avoid a slew of tabloid headlines [The Sun: HARRY BOTTER]. Tis well known in tabloid land that GAY TEACHERS PREY ON CHILDREN, fact. 

Outing Dumbledore after the series has finished achieves precisely nothing, as the somewhat dry quote from an unnamed Stonewall source ["It's great that JK has said this. It shows that there's no limit to what gay and lesbian people can do, even being a wizard headmaster."] illustrates.

If she was that committed to affirmative action, maybe she'd have had Harry and the ginger one share a bed. Imagine, 'Brokewand Mountain.' 'I wish I knew how to expeliarmus you.' etc etc

THAT would have been great. Not 'a character I killed off in the sixth book without hitherto revealing his sexuality was also casting spells for the other side, incidentally.' Bah!

Tale from an Accelerated Culture

Saturday morning, I'm on my way to get the train north to watch the football. I am hungover, I need food, I need a pen. Huge queues for every single shop in the station at King's Cross lead me out of the terminal building, through the underpass [newly refurbished and free of the odour of piss, drink and urgent sex you might once have associated with the area; well, so far anyway] to resurface on the opposite bank of the endless torrent of traffic, outside McDonalds. I stride purposefully to Ladbrokes, note that Leeds are 4/1 to beat Swansea, pick up a stubby red bookies pen [does anything look more rakish behind the ear?] and swiftly exit before the urge to waste a few quid on the lovely horses becomes too pressing.

The hunger is upon me now, and yet the thought of paying £3.79 for a bagel in the station - I'll say that again just in case you thought it was typographical error, THREE POUNDS AND SEVENTY NINE BRITISH PENCE for a BAGEL - is quite beyond me. I skulk 'neath the Golden Arches and, slightly dazed by the breakfast offreings blazoned across the back wall, I order a bacon, egg & cheese bagel and a small sprite, no ice. £1.79 for the bagel.

I take a seat under the T.V screen, which is playing Sky News... enmeshed in the Hegemon, there is to be no escape. I have just informed the counter slavey that when I say 'no ice' it's because I want a cup full of liquid, not half a cup of ice and some liquid, and further that his attempted explanations are useless because I used to work in McDonalds and I have retained certain useful information. I only want a cup to put my wine in on the train, I add under my breath as I slide into the seat and unwrap the bagel.

What the FUCK is this abomination? I am committing an act of eco-terrorism on myself. It is categorically the worst food I have ever eaten, slathered in oil from the cheese which tastes of nothing, and revealing one disappointment for the palate after another: the bacon which is perhaps only on nodding terms with actual pork, the defrosted bagel and the cuilnary feat of transforming an egg into bathmat. I grimly force it down as there is not time to turn into one of the Roux brothers now. I have made my bed with dirty sheets and must lie in its squalour.

On the screen, as I chew my way through this excuse for food, is an advert for the third season of Ross Kemp on Gangs, which is being teamed, for this advertisement, with a new season of Prison Break, one of which [now I come to look at them with sober eyes and without a miasma of grease clouding my mood and vision] looks moderately interesting and one of which looks like total incarcerational cobblers. On Saturday morning both programmes - bagel and feelings of oppression weighing heavily on my heart - serve only to reinforce the sensation of being trapped in the Panopticon. It's a bad world out there, and it's bad food in here.

I sit with my mouth open, flavourless oil dabbed from the corners as the ad reaches its climax. 'How much more can you take?' the gravel voice of excitement demands. 'None whatsoever,' I announce to no one at all, and crumple the bag, wrapper and clarty napkins into the Last Bin before Kings Cross. I'm leaving it.

See, Naples and Diet

I have got over myself. Adopting the nickname 'Two-Blogs', let's rock. Life's too short and all that.

Now, turning our attention to the world wide web... Italians have this week gone bonkers about rice ['Having a paddy' if you won't]. Context... [shimmery screen and harps flashback]

Mass protests were being encouraged in Italy [apparently, as yon link notes, with [stereo]typical Italian ambivalence in response] over the rising price of pasta... downing forks, disgruntled diners and chefs took a stand against the rising cost of the famous staples of Naples [I've checked to see that I'm not making a gastronomic gaffe here, it is a staple in Naples, though not as famous as pizza but that doesn't rhyme, anyway... and elsewhere. As a respondent on one discussion board suggested, 'Well, I live in Milan and we prefer rice anyway...' or words to that effect.]

Underneath all this rubbish is the now becoming more discussed notion about biofuels raised as early as 2005 by the usual suspects, which is that they are being touted/grown as the wonder solution to the oil crisis, but at the expense of both food for humans and other creatures' habitats [not that this has ever stopped us]... which seems a somewhat fuellish [sorry] response to a different issue [transport] which might be better resolved by not 'keeping the cars moving whatever happens', and in turn creating a further problem, i.e. mass starvation AND other species extinction AND gridlock... different meeting...

However, Adelaide Ajroldi and compatriot lovers of the risotto may have a fight to contend with. There appears to be a stirring in the rest of the country not just against this biofuelled threat to the traditional Italian menu, but also against other staples. Not just protests about the rising price of pasta [and other traditional ingredients], but a movement AGAINST RICE...

First of all, the news from Venice that in a [supposedly anti-pigeon] move, the Mayor's office has considered banning rice at weddings. Taken on its own, this might be nothing to do with food-related disgruntimento. However, the VERY NEXT DAY, it appears that the Vatican has taken the issue so seriously [as usual] that even people called Rice aren't to be tolerated [perhaps a good thing, although maybe genuinely nothing to do with oil/environment/aggressive foreign policy and all about diaries].

What this all means to Italy's former status as leading producer of rice in Europe one can only speculate. The people of Lombardy etc should take note: this may be a ricepaper thin premise on which to waste some time bringing a blog back up to speed, but from small grains... etc etc.

Meanwhile, back at the old homestead:

Matt's Presto Pronto Matt Surprise:
White long grain rice
Green olives (no filling)
Green or classic pesto (half a jar)
Salt
Pepper (optional whole grain)

The trick is to fry for 30 seconds when cooked/combined.

Last slalom-speaking blog

It's often the way. There have been occasional moments where, for me, there's been comment worthy of note on this blog, and occasional moments where I just feel like I've been typoing for the sake of it. I always meant 'slalom-speaking' to be about veering between topics, but recently I've only ever felt inclined to write bilious - so I haven't bothered - or fatuous, so I've chucked in a funny spam email or something...

I can't be bothered with commentary on stuff I don't like anymore, it makes the veins in my temples stand out, my pupils go a pale green and I grow to enormous size and want to smash things in. Sort of metaphoricartoonidoolally. Seriously, as if the world needs someone wasting their time with bitterness at stuff. It's admitting defeat. I need to write about what I like. However, if I just write about stuff I like, it won't be very slalom.

So farewell, slalom-speaking. Hello... something else.

A world in a grain of sand

I just read this little bit of speculation:


"The Tech Lab: Charles Stross

UK science fiction writer Charles Stross, author of novels Accelerando and Singularity Sky, posits a future in which all human experience is record[ed] on devices the size of a grain of sand.

...For the past 50 years we've become used to computers getting cheaper and more powerful exponentially - doubling in performance (or halving in price) roughly every 18 months.

But a parallel trend in data storage means that storage space is becoming twice as plentiful on a similar time scale - and our ability to generate data to store is also increasing, as witness the 4m CCTV cameras around the UK, and about 70m cellphone accounts, of which maybe half are associated with camera phones able to record video.

Sooner or later they're all going to be switched on, all the time and our data storage capacity is growing so fast that we need not delete anything ever again. ...If we can figure out how to read and write data on the atomic scale, you could store the sum total of all the data we recorded in 2003 on a grain of sand.

And some time after our demise, this information will be available to historians. And what a mass of information it will be. For the first time ever, they'll be able to know who was where, when, and what they said; just what words were exchanged in smoky beer halls 30 years before the revolutions that haven't happened yet: who it was who claimed to be there when they founded the Party (but didn't join until years later): and where the bodies are buried.

...For the first time ever, the human species will have an accurate and unblinking, unvarnished view of its own past as far back as the dark ages of the first decade of the 21st Century, when recorded history "really" began."

... and then we'll really go fucking mental.

Culture and culling

I love the way Ticketmaster, 3 download and the like have some sort of cultural filter/compression device going on, with all bands levelled out to equal status [One Market Under God].

"Don't miss Kaiser Chiefs"
trumpets the Ticketmaster email update. Well, if they'd just hold still...

If you want a picture of the future...

Cabinet reshuffle. Jack Straw. Minister of Justice. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

And where are they cloning these Milibands? Milibank Tower? Gah!

Never mind the "Here's your new leader, everyone - rejoice!" pictures yesterday.

"Woah, did I miss an election?" "GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN!!!"

A number of items

Previously, on slalom-speaking...

For the first time I posted something and then just took it down... it wasn't that bad, just a bit pointless and bitter. Anyway, I'm sick of writing about stuff I think is cack in such passionate tones. [It was about the Kaiser Chiefs, 'everything is average nowadays', a chance hearing of which was multi-layered and multi-faceted in its revulsive qualities. Let's move along.]

I happily discovered that someone who posted a comment on a recent post is actually my oldest pal [by which I mean in terms of service [be quiet, do]] and we continue to converge in most matters of culture.

'Going forward' I am only going to write about things that make me write enthusiastially and well. If I'm just sniping fish in barrels then it makes me sound mean-spirited and does nothing to suggest the trillions of galaxies of better worlds I imagine every day before I even break my fast.

With regard to the last bit of the above sentence, I want more Holmesian circumlocution in my quotidian utterances. Taking a cigarette of tobacco, etc.

Finally, from the spam files:
Did you know that 76% of girls prefer guys with a descent ramrod?

'Is that not some sort of mining equipment?' 'In a sense.'

Here endeth the mini-manifesto.

'Mis-pronounciation'.

Listening to 'The Only Chart That Counts' - although obviously it needs to use fingers and toes, and perhaps remove some clothing as well - this afternoon revealed something called 'Umbrella' to be selling well. [To be read in the voice of a bemused high court judge asking 'What is a Gazza?']...

Maybe it's the rap superstar combining with cutie; maybe it's the the sexed-up video, featuring Rihanna cavorting with umbrella... ['Jay-Z, mate? You just stand over here. Cheers...']; maybe it's the download it NOW dynamism of the pop economy... I am, as usual, more concerned with something else.

Neil Tennant, Pet Shop Boy and former music journalist, once remarked in interview, a propos of nothing: 'Can I just say - Elton John's 'Sacrifice'? "It's no sac-er-i-fice." There are three syllables in sacrifice.' Likewise, there are three syllables in 'Umbrella'. Umbarella. Eh-oh!

I'm not that bothered, obviously. It's just my imagination running away with me.

Band name generator spam

'We bet you wouldn't mind to become a super hot bedstar for your non-satisfied girlfriend!'

Indeed no. Super hot bedstar though! In at number seven...

Too many protest singers

I saw a 'news item' [man bites dog, etc] last week, but I couldn't be bothered acknowledging it. It's a slow day at work.

Where, as I have observed on occasions prior to this, to even begin? 'Horrific ordeal'? Well, nobody made you do it, you stupid cunt. And what kind of animal rights protest involves eating dead animals? And a corgi, at that? This has to be one of the most annoying 'protests' I've ever seen, and all I'm doing by talking about it is giving this publicity hound the Winalot Prime of attention he's yapping like a fucking annoying lapdog for.

His next project is, it says here, to be buried in a box under a mountain of mashed potato - in Dublin. He doesn't say why, but given his 'taste' for the obvious in his symbolism, it'll probably be something to do with the Potato Famine. What a shit-for-brains. Perhaps after that he'll turn up at a succession of supermarkets, naked, in a styrofoam box covered in shrinkwrap, standing in the fruit and veg aisle nodding obviously at the pre-packaged products.

I'd quite like to see him turn up outside his own house toting a giant replica of a tube of Preparation H, pointing it at his arse and pantomiming a pained expression.

Dog-eating wanker.

Infospam

'The corpora cavernosa are the two bodies of erectile tissue on each side of the penis.'

I can't say I learned nothing at work today, anyway. The most informative email subject yet!

Charmless mag

Something must be amiss when the Sunday papers no longer afford anything in the way of enjoyment, instead only goading my sensitive cultural antennae into a quivering fury of cognitive dissonance and disgust. Reading the hard copy of the new look Independent on Sunday has resulted in a world record number of utterances of the word 'gah', narrowly pipping the last time I watched an episode of Big Brother.

The front cover announces 'Everything you need on a Sunday. Nothing you don't.' Apparently I need stories about Jude Law, articles announcing that spending £650 on a bag is acceptable behaviour, Juliette Lewis promoting Scientology. And the acme of annoyance, 'The New Review' coverstar Alex James, in an extended puff for his autobiography 'Bit of a Blur' [and before I get stuck into him, see that hyperlink? Works online, not in the paper. Loads of articles with underlined phrases in a different colour ink. If they're left in deliberately, it's a stupid affectation. If they weren't left in deliberately, it's an editorial oversight and further proof of slap-dashery and smug complacency.]

So, Alex James. 'They were the fresh-faced art students who changed the face of pop nearly 20 years ago, and only last week they were voted the world's greatest band.' Whaaaaat?! Changed the face of pop? That was The Stone Roses, surely? I'm sure they've done very well for themselves, there were a few good records, but the 'country house' embarrassment... Fat fucking Les, I fucking ask you. To read the article you'd think they personally invented 21st Century music. If I want self-aggrandising bullshit from wordy bass guitar players, I read slalom-speaking.

Damon 'the significant composer of the past 20 years'. Again, whaaaaat?! Fucking 'The Good, the Bad & the Queen', lachrymose one idea Manu Chao knock off. Wigwam, thanks for letting us know Betty Boo was still alive, now stop it. Former drummer joins the Labour Party, who today announced that under new leader Brown [don't we get a say? Oh, just asking, sorry, carry on] they are committed to spending billions more pounds on 'anti-terror measures', while the trains of Britain stink of piss, and crawl through crumbling suburbs, overfull and slow, the buildings of Lewisham, Ladywell and New Cross [where Goldsmiths students still work, rest and play] falling to fucking pieces. Don't let anyone terrorise us, we're busy looking on in pride as our infrastructure disintegrates and millionaire popstars write about their great removed life in a very big house in the country.

Meanwhile deep in the blank pools of their eyes in the photo of Fat fucking Les, Keith Allen's daughter cavorts in her finery with Rhys Ifans, Alex James' children 'Geronimo and twins Artemis and Galileo' - I'M SERIOUSLY NOT MAKING THIS UP - milk his goats and Damien Hirst's multi-million pound diamond skull grins blankly shiny from the mantelpiece...

We are watching the decline and fall. Up against the wall, motherfuckers! Time for something different.

Happy Bobmas!

Bob Dylan, we salute you as you blow out the candles on your groaning birthday cake.

Photograph by Matthew Rolston from Rolling Stone

'On his sixty-sixth birthday
He already is an old man'

A-ha a-ha a-hacchhh

Excellent, a stupid article to cheer me up as well. This non-story, about the impending smoking ban in public places in the UK, was in The Guardian the other day as well, and was bollocks then. As if jazz - or rock music, or fucking any kind of music for that matter - is anything to do with smoking.

I think the most disappointing aspect is that all sorts of people are viewing it as emblematic of something or other other than what it is. What happened to Joe Jackson for him to come out with this, in his capacity as a smokesperson for FOREST, the pro-smoking lobby funded by tobacco companies, on bar staff:
"The whole point of nightlife venues is that they are places to get away from work and not to be nagged like naughty children.The few people who are working should be there on that understanding," he wheezed.

Hasta la revolucion! Well, back to the piano, Jackson, because you have clearly never washed 30 ashtrays at the end of an evening, nor swept a floor hoaching with roaches, nor had someone blow smoke in your face while they were ordering a drink. Your next album [should there be one] should be songs of contrition for conflating a perfectly sensible public health measure [the same kind of thinking that banned it on aeroplanes] with a spurious civil liberties argument.

Smoking is carcinogenic, a public ban isn't about stopping people from pleasuring themselves in public [there are other laws for that, of course, like the Criminal Justice Act and the Sex Offenders Act], but about allowing everyone else their measure of freedom to drink, dance, flirt or work without red eyes, stinky clothes, sore throats, yellow walls, etc etc etc. IT'S PROPERLY BAD FOR YOU! Interestingly, Graham Chapman [according to Wikipedia's Throat Cancer article] said that the primary site for the cancer that would eventually kill him was the spot on his throat where the smoke from his pipe hit first - and he was a doctor, so I'd trust that kind of opinion.

I don't know, it's probably different for pop stars. [Does an eerie loop of 'No such thing as tomorrow...' in the Tracheotomy Man voice to fade]

'Sweet blessings from [reads] Pierre Dominguez, it says here.'

Post seasonal adjustment disorder? The belief that one has never 'achieved anything of worth, anything that rhymed with my conceptions, my dreams (for those were fine; of that, I certain)?' [Lypiatt in Antic Hay] Or just feeling a bit of a mardy bum? I suspect (c).

Still, it's hard to maintain an expression of pained sensitivity/wallow in your own chemical imbalances like some ghastly French poet from the 19th Centuree when you log in [at the silicon face] and get emails with subject lines like this:
'Your orgasms will be enhanced to the point of ecstasy, and your stamina and overall sexual health will be greatly increased.'
This from Pierre Dominguez. What a benediction. Then, in a comically vulgar counterpoint, the fat and beery companion of the sensitive Pierre pipes up. It's Virgil Trotter:
' fuck them as much as they can handle', he slurs, then in the same breath, 'do it all night don't be silly', urgently, not even pausing for punctuation or capital letters.

Splendid, splendid.

Fire and water

I have long anticipated that a musician would just give away entire product online, now here it is: North London underachievers The Crimea release a free album, speculating that the increase in publicity and fanbase will lead to more gigs, merchandise, appearances, etc. Worked for Gnarls Barkley, obviously...

Although 'Lottery Winners on Acid' got pretty much constant rotation round our way when it came out, this latest move may see them fall on their arses [what if everyone hears it and goes 'yeah?' not 'yeah!'... plus just, like, giving stuff away like, well, lottery winners on acid - pinkos!] but for now, let us appreciate the paradigm shift going forward proactively. Onwards, onwards - O the wild charge they made!

Woofentones #1

Here is the theme music to an imaginary TV show from the 1980s. Along the lines of 'Knight Rider', 'Airwolf', 'Street Hawk' etc... I always envisaged a 'super boat' series, only to be thwarted by some feeble Hulk Hogan vehicle.[HAHA! 'vehicle...']

The original Fruity Loops [primitive sequencing tool used by primitive sequencing tools, version 3 when I was writing this stuff, now up to version 7.0.2 in Beta - all aboard the loopin express!] sketch developed from about three failed techno songs, which resulted in the working title of 'Large Kraftsleisses in Oban'... perhaps it's best not to even wonder.

Anyway, I decided in the end to call it the semi-ambiguous 'Theme from Road Fox', which clearly incorporates elements of 'Firefox' [as in the book about a Russian plane, nicked by Clint Eastwood in the film, not the wonderful window on the web manfacturers, although both have their charms], and which might refer to a tech-spec device that, say, Kylie Minogue, clad in strictly plot-necessary black lycra/leather kit - ['Unzip me.'] might play the controller of. In fact, that 'unzip' reference now has digital meanings also, so why not have a cartoon with Kylie doing the voice where she's a virtual crime [as opposed to street] fighter or something? Zooming along the information superhighway? When I crack computer animation, I'll melt your eyes. Melt 'em, I tells ya!

I digress. Roll credits!

theme from road fox...

sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards

Having started, deleted and restarted this post about fifteen times, swithering between manifesto, apologia, rant and explanatory head notes, I decided instead to just say 'oh bondage, up yours!'. More news on exciting produkty directly, but now... I present the first in a [hopfeully increasingly frequent] diversions into non-epistolary expression plundered from the vaults at Chateau Wolfenstein... above.

Toilet humour from work

Luckily I get to read and mess about with text for a living. Today one of the transcripts contained this:

"In the broader geopolitical area, diversity is critical and it is interesting to observe the situation in the Netherlands , where they are looking at the storage of massive amounts of gas through the purchase of Norwegian Troll gas."

Pass the sprouts, Lars! IT'S FOR THE GOOD OF THE PLANET.

Enjoy the silence

Regular readers of this blah will perhaps be wondering where my scintillating chat has gone. There has been little to exercise me. I grow disillusioned with the form. It's been sunny. Whatever. Here's a picture of a lovely horse.

A Passion for Chocolate

Sometimes it's just too easy. The magic of RSS means you switch on the PC to this kind of item, about a life size chocolate sculpture of Jesus.



Fantastic. But the predictable moaning from the Catholic Church in America fails to capitalise on what is surely the most obvious potential recruitment bonanza they've had in years. Surely people will flock to join the flock when they hear what's on offer.

'Corpus Christi...'
'Mmmm! Don't mind if I do. Is that red wine?'

IT'S WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT. We already trough too much chocolate this time year anyway, we might as well invest it with some connection to the divine.

Some more of a connection, then.

Update: They decided against it. Obviously.

Sort of free at last

This morning's news of the brand new £5.3 million gorilla enclosure at London Zoo was deeply affecting. Some simian sympathies must have stirred inside - this photo of chief primate Bobby:

and the caption 'It is the first time Bobby, the male in the group, has seen the sky without bars since he was captured as a baby in Guinea.'... had me welling up.

I suspect your blogger has been reading too much Dante. 'But he gets heated rocks and everything!' Well, you can't see the moat and electric fence in this photo, obviously, and he is still in a zoo... But you get the idea.

Interesting other occurrence of Great Apes in the news today: Should other mammals be given human rights, as they share our DNA to a very close degree? Well... maybe we could just stop drilling into marmosets' heads and hooking dolphins by the eye, rather than feel the need to draw up a charter to formally regulate our behaviour.

The Sole of Destiny

I recall I was nattering to m'colleague Andy - as to be found at The Breezy Call blog, see the list on the left - about nice this 'n nice that and distressing t'other... Matters turned to accidents of geography, where animals' paths cross to devastating effect. (Forgive the voiceover tone of that last sentence. I've been engrossed in the BBC's excellent documentary number Planet Earth, Attenborough's foray into the natural world - see it while it lasts! Pretty soon it'll be aerial shots of Polar bears swimming in ironic Busby Berkeley circles through rapidly melting chunks of icecap - and I wanted to set an appropriate tone of reverential awe and fatalistic acceptance...)

Andy related that he 'terminated a woodmouse', although without any prejudice, let alone extreme.
'I was walking along a path not far from my house when it panicked and scurried out from its safe hiding place on the side of the path and under my irrevocably descending right boot. I have fairly small feet, so it is hard not to see Darwin's hand in its self-deselecting rush to the only certainly-deadly place for miles around. Its demise and my role in it left me in a very morbid and philosophical mood for much of the rest of the walk, and I wasn't even smoking anything which might encourage such a profound state of mind.'

I had to commiserate. I'm lucky in that my interfaces with rodents extend as far as ignored humane mouse traps with bits of cheese in - or, more frequently, crowbarred open humane mouse traps with no bits of cheese in and a thank you note in scratchy mouse hieroglyphs [three fat mice, one with a quill, one doing a thumbs up [somehow], one rubbing its tum, a block of cheese with a tick next to it.] However, I've crushed many a snail in my cack-footed blundering about, which is always unfortunate, not least for the flattened gastropod peeling itself off the paving slab. Not so much a run-in as a walk-in (which is worse, it's in slow motion and all the more agonising. N o o o o o o o o o o o o...).

All things considered - unless you're considering becoming a Jainist monk - best to ask not for who the foot falls... it is for this reason that astronomers are a much-undervalued section of the scientific community, particularly meteor watchers.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! North Americans

To the Astoria in Charing Cross Road, London Village (a week ago this Thursday) to see LCD Soundsystem, as previewed breathlessly in the last post. A charmingly scuffed venue, the sort of thing ripe for getting bought by Carling and turned into a boozeodrome... and perhaps ruined, which would still be an improvement on just getting shut and replaced with more retail outlets - which you can find out about here...

So that's the venue... inside, we were felt up by security before finally getting in to the hall in a state of great anticipation for the gig. First, though, we had to endure Prinzhorn Dance School. They were like an early pre-song version of Talking Heads, all Joy Division colour scheme with occasional leggy and knock-kneed lass bass player shouting... super-earnest mainly grooveless songs that dragged themselves forward in the mud as comments sniped in from all around our party: 'Is this Christopher Eccleston's serious music side-project?' 'I look forward to the album with Eno,' 'Shall I shout 'Play Love will tear us apart'?' 'Several days later...' A friend mimes the singer hanging himself as I mime putting on 'The Idiot'. Interminable.

Mercifully, LCD Soundsystem were superb. They started with a three week frug-out version of 'Us v them', and then Daft Punk were playing... the unison Blockbuster-esque howls on 'North American Scum' so startling and intense... you forget sometimes, observed one of the circle who had not seen them previously, listening to the albums, that this is a band, an incredible band, in the six people grooving brilliantly on stage sense. The crowd was full of excitement. J disappeared forward to join the milling at the front and reemerged afterwards flushed and actually speechless with the experience. She signed 'a.ma.zing' while pointing distractedly about.

This was a gig which relit my fire, eyes on the band as I squeezed back from the bar through the crowd which was grumpily shoehorned in as 'Tribulations' rocked aptly in the foreground. Some knots of people irritably calling for 'losing my edge', but times move on - one teasing blast of the drum sample elicited a gasp of excited recognition, but the keyboard player quickly stabbed off the machine with a finger. A dynamic and forward looking band, for all the references to bygone musical mileposts the hip priests of Pitchfork can delineate... first encore 'Someone great' was already in my top tunes of the year CD mix, the live version can go on the bonus disk. Fanzines were plotted, band adverts put up: we heart LCD Soundsystem.

'Saved, for the moment.'

More cowbell!
(Photo by crispin hearn, pinched off the LCD website)

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

I haven't written anything for ages. Nothing to say, nothing to say about.

But! LCD Soundsystem at the Astoria tonight...




... yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!

That 'bit of a mouthful' joke in full

Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov could be the next president of Turkmenistan by monday. He's a former dentist... the juxtaposition of his name and prior career are keeping me chuckling this afternoon as I prepare to celebrate my birthday.

'Kurby' looks askance.

Kurbs update: He is now the President of Turkmenistan.

And now, some corn for poppin'

We knew in advance that there would be snow. It's a regional pastime, making a big deal out of not- very- extraodinary weather. One million Londoners apparently unable to make it into work due to an overnight blizzard of munchkin proportions - Swedish and Finnish friends laughing down the phone... we did our part here in the tundral wastes of SE4. A quick trip to Hilly Fields before breakfast yielded a mighty fine snowman...

My later plans, including an ambitious Greenwich meridian-aligned series of Easter Island-styled heads, only snowmen, ranged across the slopes, would come to nought as the snow melted and what we assume was kids going to the adjacent school destroyed Frosty in a snow blind kung fu rage...

If you think this theorised adolescent malevolence a touch fanciful, look in the background of these photos - taken earlier in the day - for an icy narrative of stalking, implacable, chilling fate - played out in the misleadingly pristine snowy surrounds -


revenge...













......a dish best served.....







........very, very cold...

Groundhog Day

Today is 'Groundhog Day', both in the 'here we are at work again, let it end, let it end! like in the film starring Bill Murray' sense, and in the actual-festival-in-America sense.

Proving that Americans can do whimsy as well as the next anthropomorphed rodent, the massy marmoset Punxsutawney Phil emerged - live via webcam! - from the burrow at Gobbler's Knob - NO, REALLY - in his official capacity as Prognosticator of Prognosticators to project an early spring, (which might be due to global warming, but the President of the Inner Circle was being loose with the translation from Groundhoguese to avoid controversy with the 15,000-odd strong crowd that had turned up). Loud cheers and feasting commenced. And rightly so, given that it is only the 14th early spring announced in 111 recorded predictions.

Phil, 112, noted it had been 'a good gig', and promises to be back in the summer with his new game show 'How Much Wood Can You Chuck?'

Depends on where you're standing, obviously

Shell oil group have announced profits of £13billion, or $25billion.

That's THIRTEEN BILLION POUNDS, a 13 with nine zeroes after it if you're on the short scale.

On my current salary, I would have to work for 520,000 years to see this many zeroes in my 'paid in' column.

If I were a favela dweller on "less than a dollar a day" [see also this study], it'd be, well, about 68 million years.

If I actually worked on a pipeline in Nigeria, I might not live that long.

"Chief exceutive Jeroen Van Der Veer described this as 'good.' "

Hogwatch

I love the word 'hog'. It's so splendidly archaic. It has a number of applications - go the whole hog, hog the limelight, one can be a hog if one insists on troughing food long past the point of satiety [an activity I have a particularly snouty affection for]... living high on the hog, hog heaven... as well, of course, as describing an animal which has given so much to farming and language, the pig.

The last month and a bit has seen the word 'hogwash' jump to new prominence, well, in my head anyway. First punnishly, in 'Hogfather', the Terry Pratchett adaptation that ran on Sky 1 over Christmas, or 'Hogswatch', as the season is known in the book/film, in which a group of interdimensional miserabilists known as 'Auditors' take out a contract on 'the Hogfather', a Santalike, with the projected aim of removing belief from the universe to 'tidy it up', which Death, as a fellow anthropomorphic personification, takes skeletal steps to stop, for reasons which become obvious... illustrating that for all the potboiler aspects of some of TP's works he's also communicating some important ideas about imagination, in an excellently disk-like self-justificatory/deeply important to the future of what we laughingly call civilisation manner...

Then hogwash appeared again, in two articles this week, one in which - superbly - the Canadian pig farmer accused of mass murder dismissed the charges as 'hogwash'... which probably has more resonance with him than it does for the news media headline writers of the (hogocentric) world, who fell upon the juxtaposition with, well, hoggish glee... (I make the 'hogocentric' distinction as there are peoples of earth that disdain the pig diet, which is fair enough, I don't eat cat, as I've observed in previous hog, er, blogposts... But 'no hocus pocus, I focus on the facts', as Killah Priest once observed, and...) the fact is that the expression was expressed by a pig farmer, as a figure of speech with direct practical meaning to the user, which is so neat that it practically makes me skip for joy.

The other article this week, on a North American who without a doubt is responsible for the deaths of innocent people [discuss any aspect of the preceding clause], came as Dick Cheney 'was asked to respond to some Republicans in Congress who "are now seriously questioning your credibility, because of the blunders and the failures".' His fob was: 'hogwash'...
The article unfortunately doesn't relate which particular premise Dick 'Lon' Cheney considered to be nonsense, perhaps we'll never know. I don't have much skipping to do about 'the war on Iraq' [as discrete from 'the war on terror']; perhaps Hogwash is a new Halliburton product for the freedom-revelling people of Iraq. I love the idea that the people fighting Americans across Central Asia are fighting 'democracy', as opposed to 'a country that invaded another country'.

I thought I'd join in with the use of 'hogwash' as a term denoting my opinion of something's nonce-sense as, once more, the Observer columnist Nick Cohen annoys me beyond measure [see my 'looking Islamism in the eye' post...] in this article on How the Left Lost its Way, where he absurdly suggests that people on The Great Anti-War March worldwide on 15th Februrary 2003 were actually marching in support of a 'fascist regime'... no, no, no, nonono! We were marching to express the notion that the war was wrong, badly thought through, a huge mistake in the making, a colonial throwback, unevolved conflict resolution and not in the slightest little bit about bringing freedom to the people of Iraq, unless by this is meant 'the freedom to give all your oil to the west'. Fascism should not be simply applied in terms of totalitarian regimes, uniforms, nice boots, etc; it is, as Mussolini suggested, and he should know, better termed 'corporatism', given that it is a convergence of state and industrial power. The anti-war march was a culmination of a mass-realisation that in the west we live highly ordered lives geared towards maintaining a slow churn of the money mill. It was an expression that this in itself is not an acceptable basis on which to assume the role of arbiters of the world, far less to actually go and, like, kill other people for being repressed. It was a cry for help from a depressed civilisation and it was answered with a silence which exposed the lie of our democracy. Then we all got properly depressed and started blowing ourselves up.

Mr Cohen 'pro-war lefty', [see this article I liked because it uses the phrases 'pro-war lefties' and 'belligerati'] also suggests that a focus on this self-regard, 'opposing' American foreign policy, to simplify it for the sake of argument, has left us 'blind to the evils of militant Islam'. Hogwash! The only thing blinding 'us' is the log in our own eye [a log felled illegally in South America]. Armed people with a grievance change ideologies like underwear, it's the'militant' bit we [whoever that may signify historically and contemporaneously] should be concerned about. [In fact, if you want a bit more circularity to this piece, a quote from Pratchett again [although it could be Neil Gaiman] from Good Omens, 'Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.'] Loath as I am to use as subjective a word as 'evil' here, yes, blowing yourself up on a bus can be seen as evil; it surely follows that flattening an entire country to effect regime change is fairly hardline 'evil' behaviour - and pretty fascistic too, if we use Hitler as a model of impositional politics.

Anway, methods of control may differ... Words are one of the most effective. I'm satisfied that religious people are in general doing more damage to themselves than any external attack might. How about finishing up this paean to piggery-related rhetoric with a roll-around in 'Truth vs hogwash' ?

crackle ephemerides

The usual sprinkling of spam of a morning - but there's a change in the tone. I note a growing sense of self-assurance in the random word generating programmes which are either unduly concerned with my reproductive organs or attempting to get me to show an interest in the stock of obscure companies.

In the case of the former type of mail, er, shot, they have moved from caveman-drawing spurty-nob 'blaaaart! cover her face in jizz! have a colossal cock of cobalt pluming granite-like out from your body! flesh-carve a Rushmore scale edifice of penile awe, magnitude unbounded by earth physics...' to a kind of 'post-feminist' mode of 'and where do you think you're going with that walnut whip, my good man?', where the starting point is not a blokeish assumption of upsize augmentation of already existing functionality but a laddetteish sneer that what I have is not even up to the job. The job being to satisfy the billions of size queens queueing at my door requiring sauce, and lots of it. copping, at live journal dot com, is clearly my sex-obsessed consumer machine alter ego, rabidly theoretical, full of computer amphetamines, scanning trillions of porn images per second and wanking itself into a digital frenzy while chattering out insulting messages to the corporeal me designed to induce a turmoil of physical and mental inadequacies.

In the case of the latter type of mail, perhaps a reflection of the idea that commerce drives art more than artists care to admit, there has been a poetical development, incorporating a mix of neo-classical erudition and enthusiastic 18th century verbosity with a kind of Taoist balance which almost, but not quite, coheres. gjuctauv - a lower-level typing slavey at vincewelsh.com and my aspirant literati machine alter ego - observed this morning: 'May you, in the whole course of your life, have no suppose that things, because they may be, are therefore meant at you.', which grasps at a philosophical profundity beyond the capabilities of the average Celebrity Big Brother participant.

Might this be the first stirrings of autonomous intelligence in the machines? The questing for expression that signifies the ascent of silicon to sentience? Note presumption of 'upward' vector. Just think, if the machines keep evolving, they'll be able to kill each other soon.

'His arguments are, strictly speaking, unanswerable' gjuctauv concluded.

Big Bother [redux]

This is the last post I shall ever do on a TV show. Some years ago I switched off the telly when Vanesa Feltz was featured as a panellist on an afternoon current affairs programme, on the reasonable basis that I wanted no part of a society in which Vanessa Feltz was a cultural arbiter.

Gradually I drifted back to the box. Well, no more. I've had another such Damascan moment. Celebrity Big Brother:

The rapid and ludicrous escalation of something so artificed to some sort of international incident would have had Swift and pals chuckling and slapping their thighs at yet another victory for Dulness...

The 'row', according to BBC correspondent currently in India Nick Robinson, is 'damaging Britain's reputation'. Indeed it is, but only to the extent that it's internationally embarrassing this has become the most important topic of debate of the moment, apparently across the entire populace. Did we of the UK suddenly forget the old global warming, war everywhere, 'mysteriously' dropped Saudi Arabian fraud investigations, road and rail infrastructure decaying exponentially, building on greenfield sites so that every last square metre of land can be tarmac'ed..?

Well, apparently 'we' did, racist in-breds that we all are. The scant minutes I've endured of the programme illustrate nothing more than people [some of whom did not attain 'celebrity' through their intellectual acumen and discursive acuity, it might be observed] in an awkward and deliberately intensified atmosphere not coping very well with each other - what a surprise.

The show's producers must doing a little tv exec jig of glee at all the attention their show is now getting [if I can use the word jig in this context]... The whole 'game' - as Sylvester Stallone succinctly dubbed it -and how dismal is the field of reference when Sylvester Stallone is a voice of reason? - is predicated on an accepted exploitation of 'them' the slebs and 'us' the plebs, for the benefit of tv co Endemol, which sounds like a haemorrhoid cream, except they're the pain in the arse. I have otherwise intelligent mates watching it, stroking their chins and saying 'yes, yes...' with knowing nods and narrowed eyes. Total herd manipulation - and here I am baa-humbugging like everyone else. Baa! And bah!

Allegory:
[Geordie Accented Voice-Over]: 'Day 14,602,555. America is kicking the Middle East to death in the garden. Britain is in the diary room.'

Pitchforked off

See, Pitchfork. I used to read them as a matter of course - useful and verbose information on music news, kind of NME crossed with the Wire - until I got so frustrated with their odious digitally precise degree of anal fanboy dissection ['6.3 out of 10' I fucking ask you] and occasional preposterous know-it-all politically naive posturing ['Dude, are you being ironic?' 'I don't even know any more,' Simpsons quote of the day for Macca...] that I did the online equivalent of hurling the magazine across the room with a robust 'Gah!', which is to hit the 'x' button with more than the requisite amount of forefinger force. 'That showed them,' I hissed.

Time is a great healer of annoyances, and I recently meandered back into their ambit for some reason. I was enjoying this article on transmedia stories, and then I got to the following sentence:

'"Battlestar Galactica", a show about killer robots, makes thoughtful critiques of the war on terror, and tricks us into sympathizing with the Iraqi insurgents. '

I don't dispute the 'war on terror' reading, but 'tricks us into sympathizing with the Iraqi insurgents'??? I underline my query with repetitious question marks in a manner comparable to Jupiter Jones at his most precocious. It's this sort of glib speculative criticism/ideological indoctrination thinly masked by ironised distantiation that again caused left mouse button damage as I departed Pitchfork's pages with alacrity.

AND their RSS feed keeps sending me the dismal news that Alice Coltrane has left this dimension. I'd make some clever Egyptological allusion, would it not consign me to the folder marked 'arch twat' - go and drift through 'Journey in Satchidananda' by way of tribute instead.

That top twelve in full

I mentioned Amy Winehouse in passing in the last post... I like that song a lot, and it occurred to me that I should do something very conventionally zine-ish [coming this year! slalom-speaking in hard copy...] and bung up a top ten of my favourite tunes from last year. There was going to be a brief digressive grumble about Nick Hornby and 'pop chartism' [because now downloads are included they 'mean something' again, it says here], and then I thought, actually, no, let's not give the slap-headed, boring shite novel peddling, list fabricating Arsenal fan fanny the satisfaction. There's only one thing in the world worse than being blogged about, Nicholas!

SO!

Twelve lovely tunes from 2006:

Amy Winehouse - Rehab
'Trying to make me go to rehab, I said no, no, no.'

Admirable sentiments, Ms Winebar. And what an ambitious sound too. Now eat a pie, for god's sake, you're making me feel peckish.

Stereolab - Interlock
'Hey all the small ones now "explain" '

Off their album 'Fab Four Suture' from March, which collects singles and b-sides from the last few years... this is superStereolab plus brass, big band-ish drum and loop-sounding synths [this observation from the 'zero insight department']. Also has classic Laetitia Sadier lyric snippet 'consumorphic morality', which might be about defence mechanisms for those becoming that which they buy... I love the way Stereolab are vitally political without really sounding like it.

Otterley - In Camera
'Keep paying attention...'

Ooh this is great. Otterley are from Dundee, Scot-land, and they made this tune which you can download from their website and you should. Full of African-sounding guitars, lots of spangly swooshes and echoey vocals you can half make out. 'In camera' means in secret, literally 'in chamber' [latin], and it's an apt title for a number of reasons - it sounds like a forlorn tennis song of emotion [forlorn tennis: where it's never 'love/love'], describing hidden feelings, and it's from one of the millions of rooms off the corridors of myspace...

Prince - Black Sweat
'I don't wanna take my clothes off... but I do.'

Well, this was just great too. Filth made by a master filthster. Tune: Proper Rogers Nelson, deceptively simple. Urgent funk-o-rama groove and whistley synths... he wants to 'show you what's really good,' and by 'you' he means, doubtless, Justin T. The video even looks a bit like the video for Kiss, just to reinforce the 'classic bit of Prince', dirrrty sex fiend vibe. A reminder, should one have been necessary, that he kind of thought all this stripped down r&b with talky shit up.

Hot Chip - Over & Over
'Like a monkey with a miniature cymbal...'

Or 'like a monkey with inflatable pigeons' as I was singing at that early stage when you've just heard a song that you know is going to be unavoidable within weeks but you can't quite place the words. For my website: accompanies a great lost Flash animation, perhaps, an endless loop of an animated monkey whipping what looks like a balloon from a bag by its side, a few quick exhalations and an inflated pigeon is added to the growing pile by the huffing simian. And more filth! 'Joy of repetition' alluding to one o' Prince's longest, dirrrtiest songs, the music sounding like the Beta Band locked in a disco instead of the studio after 'The Three EPs' came out... what was not to like? [I include this over the other NME 'hit' I also dug, The Gossip's 'Standing in the way of control', for the sake of numerical precision and also because The Gossip track sounded like Dolly Parton guesting on the Wild Bunch's 'Danger! High Voltage', which is absolutely a good thing but life's full of tough choices, eh? NB I don't really consider any aspect of this kind of indulgent exercise 'a tough choice' in any meaningful consideration of the phrase.]

Booka Shade - In white rooms
'Dnn-dnn-dnn, dnn-dnn-dnn, dnn-dnn-dnn, dnn-dnn-dnn...'

Mmmmm! The bit about two and half minutes in where the pulsing bass picks up a melody has the relaxational/uplift properties of standing in a white room the size of the universe. Soaring, serotonic, crowd-pleasuring dance music that has not failed to lift my spirits and the hairs on the back of my neck each time I've listened to it since we first met, and that's a great number of times, by the way, should my enthusing be insufficiently explanatory.

Ladytron - International Dateline
'Let's end it here...'

Dramatic! I didn't hear this until well after it came out [end of 2005], but that virtually makes it from last year, so anyway... Helen Marnie's voice is so very distinctive/plaintive, the sound is much heavier than the 'Boys & girls' synths of stuff like 17, and it communicates perfectly the melancholy of transit between places, selves, and the heart-choking Rubicon pause [not the brief hiatus before swallowing a soft drink, although it could be that too I guess...]... this notion of invisible thresholds drawn arbitrarily around the planet, in the sand, in airports. Moments of momentous decisions that make or break everything, and every moment being like that.

Pissed Jeans - Ashamed of my cum
'Never satisifed even after I'm done...'

I have to include this, not just for the wilful obscurantism quotient, but also because their name, sound and song inspirations are brilliant. It makes me think of Guided by Voices with less whimsy... the Stooges with no fun at all... brutal, yet hilarious. Plus the chorus is amazing.

Claude Von Stroke - Seven Deadly Strokes [Patrick Chardronnet remix]
'Bloop-bloop bloop bloop-bloop, bloop boop bloop boop-boop...'

Proper personal stereo tune this. Pop it on when embarking on a bus or rail journey by night, or crank it up in the car and enjoy about eight minutes of your time amplified to timeless emotion of every time you've ever undertaken such an expedition. Reverbed sounds like trucks honking in the inside lane, electronic noises blink like indicators, planes on approach, lights on the all-weather pitches giving the trees a weird look.

Arctic Monkeys - Mardy bum
'It was all up, up and away, but it's right hard to remember that on a day like today, when you're all argumentative... and you've got the face on.'

We lived every word.

Gotan Project - Tango Cancion

Unfortunately I'm at a loss as to how to represent the accordion and string plucked elegance of this number. Makes me yearn for the ability to throw someone with scraped back hair and a big flouncy black & red dress on about in the dance hall, a long stemmed red rose clamped between the teeth.

And to conclude this retrofest,

Dirty Pretty Things - You fucking love it
'Yeah yeah yeah!'

Well, you can't argue with that.

Pop music! Saviour of the universe time & again. Do please share your own favourite tunes, if tunes you have and want to share.

If anyone wants a CD burning, just ask...