to visit the, er, boys in blue. i had multiple reasons, and i am in fact obliged to go down the nick by last thursday. but it was closed. surely that is highly irregular. do the criminals know? is the eerie lack of sirens in the air encouraging rampant litter-dropping and burglary as we speak? if any criminal types are reading this, you’d better forget what i’ve just said, or i’ll be done for aiding and abetting before the day is out. i think i’ll leave the country.
this time justified by financial transactions, but i’m still damn lucky. doesn’t everyone look lovely at dawn on the beach?
no-one said that posing was the point. the point, i seem to recall, was dancing. a good many people present understood this, especially the dj who played ’sabotage’ on sunday night. the boredoms understood that once you have arrived on stage, dropping jaws all over the room with your hitherto-unheard-of ability to conduct tidal waves of noise with a small stick of light, you let your three drummers loose and don’t let em stop.
eleanor freidberger and the rest of the fiery furnaces understood that just cos your recorded output consists mainly of sparking synth-littered electric pop, you can and should play a 45minute show of garage-metal versions without stopping once. well maybe once. but only once.
they even explain themselves on their site:
Given that both Rehearsing My Choir and Bitter Tea were tack-player-piano records, Matt thought it best to play only guitar on tour, at least through August. He feels this quite simple change is needed to give the songs the necessary different cast. We don’t like bands that attempt to replicate– or accidentally replicate– their records at their live shows. And we feel well justified in this aversion to that sort of un-natural, un-necessary, mutant-izing or cloning. Eleanor will be playing her relatively new Stratocaster on this trip, not Matt’s old, green, Japanese Univox. That guitar gets to rest at (someone’s) home.
dinosaur jr certainly got it too. i always quite liked them on record, but live they were incredible. by which i mean incredible and incredibly loud. an elderly punk sitting next to me atop a speaker stack just fell the hell off. he wandered off at an astonishing speed before i could convince him to seek medical attention. i hope he’s ok. lightning bolt almost got it, but despite them playing three sets over the weekend, technical hitches in the equipment and the cognitive functions of the security guards prevented me see them play for more than five minutes. man is that a shame. but only in the same way that it’s a shame electrelane, sleater-kinny and destroyer played plodding, lacklustre sets when i know they are capable of so much more. i.e., a bit of a shame, but a shame overshadowed by a hell of a lot of dancing. i am particularly grateful to herman dune, whose fantastic songs about naked violin-players coming of age and other joyful sundries kicked off the weekend in style. mt. eerie was unspeakably wonderful.
the real shame is i’m writing this on the same day desmond dekker passed away. they are all dying in the wrong order.*
*copyright oneravingant
i did the thing and tuned my kalimba. a small victory, but a pleasing one. i always seem to be acquiring things which become obselete overnight as the mysterious passage of time unites with my limited capacity for understanding what i am pottering around with. so now kalimba music will happen because tine-wiggling is now longer a mystery. thanks to mark for instructions.
i am also pleased to note that again this week my itunes has been pumping out dudley perkins at the expense of inferior noise.
i am not a funk man. i will move to the music, but i won’t be crawling through the bargain basement for that rare chink of clinton’s mothership. i also don’t listen to much music on my computer. now it is comprehensively qualified in a borderline neurotic manner, i will let my weekly chart speak for itself on the matter of how much i am feelin’ dudley perkins
this is not enough to convince? you need to see him? you do need to see him.
and, afterwards, appeared some photos. none, of course, of the magnificent shows played by the liars, devendra banhart and vashti bunyan. it would far too embarrassing to hold up my phone and take a crappy picture, it’s expensive-looking and the unavoidable envy would sour the atmosphere of unrestricted beard-growing and melodic meandering that represents hippiedom these days. i don’t even remember taking many pictures, but i think somebody discovered the mosaic setting. it’s hardly lucy’s fancy camera, but it sure is gimmicky! looking at these bizarre constructions, its almost like it was yesterday again.
im going back very soon. i have my reasons
“They’re worried about a loss of dexterity”
Apparently conjurors are worthy of concern.
Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has warned Labour MPs not to “get into a war”
What room is there for satire when the turncoat toad drops one like that on us? The only way the man could get more ridiculous is if he’d been reshuffled to Health Secretary.
US State Department legal adviser John Bellinger on why Guantanamo Bay is now just a nice holiday resort for naughty foreign kids. A bit like bratcamp, really:
“We now have more rigorous laws, more rigorous procedures, more rigorous training and more rigorous monitoring mechanisms.”
Does he mean the waterboarding is now carried out by more experienced professionals? They have started watching 24/7 for any deviation from the dress code? That it is possible to be “more rigorous”, any more than it is possible to be “more American” or “more dead”? Well I ain’t buyin’ dat, no sir, not till i become more braindead.
i, me:
took lucy:
to paris for her birthday:
she has a new camera that does this:
and this:
there is not a reason. but it is interesting.
the famous-pretty-boy-footballer-kicking-something-around genre* of adverts has spread out into crisps. this on the same day that george monbiot suggests that the government should ban fast food ads if it wishes reduce crime. He refers to a British Journal of Psychiatry paper from 2002, noting it found that…
among young adult prisoners given supplements of the vitamins, minerals and fatty acids in which they were deficient, disciplinary offences fell by 26% in the experimental group, and not at all in the control group.
there is only one conclusion to be made. monbiot is in cahoots with pringles to use our most daring sports stars to create the next generation of criminals, thus increasing left-wing outrage and sell more copies of his filthy rag
*my limited vocabulary forces me to abuse this term
