Gorillaz - Glitter Freeze - Squealing, pounding and insistent to the very end. Open mouthed assault.
LCD Soundsystem - Drunk Girls - Poppy and perky as well as surprisingly annoying - still love it.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Soft Shock - Waves of sound crashing on to you when listen to it.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Gold Lion - Like a protest song with raised fists and an interrogative tone.
Blaqk Audio - Stiff Kittens - Lethargic and slightly nightmarish new wave disco pop. Dystopic overtone.
Arcade Fire - Keep the Car Running - Strumming urgency and counterbalanced lyrics leave you wonderfully disorientated.
Micachu and the Shapes - Golden Phone - Inventive and fun and more than a bit catchy.
In The Aeroplane over the Sea - Holland, 1945 - Wonderful song writing to a gentle lullaby tune.
MGMT - The Handshake - Contemplative and then stompy like a stroppy philosopher.
Lush - Last Night - A true British soundtrack to personal apocalypse. Biting and lost in meandering sound.
Mary Onettes - Under the Guillotine - 80's Power Pop revival from 2006, pulsing and harmonious at its best in the chorus.
LCD Soundsystem - Get Innocuous! - Surprisingly Gregorian chanty and like something off Daft Punk's better albums.
Dan Arborise - Under Your Spell - Meditative and compelling, like the regret of finishing a book for the first time.
One new artist who I am giving a lot of time to is Yoav who seems to have a wonderfully intuitive understanding of what gives a pop hook that little hopeful, heroic twist. His music seems to have a pendulous and heightened sense of reality to it - his percussion is like listening to a handclapping chorus in a butcher's shop; all chops and slaps of sound that drifts to make the music dense and textured. Needless to say I am a huge fan. UK tour please???
Monday, 31 May 2010
Sunday, 16 May 2010
A social calendar can be a confusing thing - packing in friends, family, obligations and relaxation will never be easy. Writing to them. Texting them. Meeting up for a drink. It would be fantastic to have all the time and money in the world to be with people but its not a realistic hope for those without a serious acre of funds behind them. One of the biggest things that always stands in the way of meeting up with peeps has become the weekend/weekday divide. Students and workers will never be best buddies with this standing in their way. You say a tuesday night out for cheap drinks? I say I have to be up at 7 on wednesday. This was never going to be easy but why is it that a creeping sense of being boring, a slight greying up of your personality, begins to bother you?
Being nagged by a sense of my lack of cool is not exactly a cutting edge phenomena for me. Having lost contact with some people totally and most meaningful contact with others I begin to consider that most revolutionary of pruning techniques - the facebook friend purge. Cut for not talking to me in 5 years. Cut for being an old university acquaintance. Did I work with you on a student film once? Cut! Does culling make me cool? Is a statement of needing (or NOT in this case) symptomatic of a loser or a creepy collection aspect? I don't subscribe to that so much - if cool is relaxed then presumably axing people is such an actively dismissive decision it becomes uncool. Or is being friends indiscriminately just as bad? Being cool online is certainly very catch 22 in its logic. At once yes you can have pretensions to awesome behaviour online but...you're still sitting inside typing it up. That's anti-life equation right there. Maybe cool can't exist in a world with the internet and all attempts to prop it up with tweets and teenage sincerity are utterly fruitless.
Needless to say if you can dispense with someone online then why would you need to talk to them in real life? Frivolities are actively encouraged on the web but once you get beyond cats and memes what can we talk about? It certainly isn't what I did yesterday (online) or how funny something (online) was/is. What about football? Male niche for the most part. Sparkling conversation? I read a guide for that on ehow.com once. It is hard to escape from the net (haha!) but the more I see of the world the more I see that as a chronicling tool the internet is a fantastic option - it is a wonderful repository of information. What it can't replicate is friends in the same room spending time with each other. It is the fine balance between recording our lives and making them worth recording that we could improve.
Being nagged by a sense of my lack of cool is not exactly a cutting edge phenomena for me. Having lost contact with some people totally and most meaningful contact with others I begin to consider that most revolutionary of pruning techniques - the facebook friend purge. Cut for not talking to me in 5 years. Cut for being an old university acquaintance. Did I work with you on a student film once? Cut! Does culling make me cool? Is a statement of needing (or NOT in this case) symptomatic of a loser or a creepy collection aspect? I don't subscribe to that so much - if cool is relaxed then presumably axing people is such an actively dismissive decision it becomes uncool. Or is being friends indiscriminately just as bad? Being cool online is certainly very catch 22 in its logic. At once yes you can have pretensions to awesome behaviour online but...you're still sitting inside typing it up. That's anti-life equation right there. Maybe cool can't exist in a world with the internet and all attempts to prop it up with tweets and teenage sincerity are utterly fruitless.
Needless to say if you can dispense with someone online then why would you need to talk to them in real life? Frivolities are actively encouraged on the web but once you get beyond cats and memes what can we talk about? It certainly isn't what I did yesterday (online) or how funny something (online) was/is. What about football? Male niche for the most part. Sparkling conversation? I read a guide for that on ehow.com once. It is hard to escape from the net (haha!) but the more I see of the world the more I see that as a chronicling tool the internet is a fantastic option - it is a wonderful repository of information. What it can't replicate is friends in the same room spending time with each other. It is the fine balance between recording our lives and making them worth recording that we could improve.
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Coalitions.
Everywhere you look nowadays there seem to be cracks emerging in every institution. This is called in this country of increasingly small means a 'crisis', when other European countries have sensibly enshrined these contingencies into solid political structure. Horse trading we brand it and with its overly flexible reliance on the moral compass of politicians horse trading it is. However the civil service will still run, hospitals will remain open and policemen will not be set on fire.
One question that has disappeared in all this kerfuffle is the question of culture. More to the point it is the question of whether the English/British have a culture worth speaking of. This seems to have been proven to be absolute nonsense by the totally assumptive way most people have got to grips with the election debates. Culture isn't necessarily what you create, rather for 99% of the people it is how they live; how they live has been the most important talking point of this election. Tax cuts, single mums, the Big Society etc have all appeared in normal, prosaic and decidedly unartificed conversations. For most of the 00's we despaired with our post-imperial hangover that stretched for far too long, whilst other countries began to ease themselves out of that self-indulgence. We decided that the French must be superior culturally, their vast reserves of class and style wafting over the channel in a government supported push to show off that huge cultural reserve. Yet, the French culture of looking at themselves is nothing about being reflective; it may appear to be inwards looking yet it looks away and disengages - helping to ignore the untidy elements of culture that accompany its vast problems with racism and inequality. Perhaps the notion of looking at such 'complete' cultures is a total fallacy and we should be less prepared to believe that what we have is somehow not culture.
This is where the Imperial part kicks in. We assume that it isn't culture because we have it, as if its some sort of base level 'normal', whereas any other is not 'normal'. Isn't this the very definition of culture? A definable difference in lifestyle, society or politics that is assumed to be acceptable. We have a culture but perhaps for all its flaws it is a culture that increasingly looks inwards and finds some appalling things. It is the mark of a strong culture that they can be addressed and humanely dealt with. Our culture is not there yet but navel gazing may be a strong first step.
One question that has disappeared in all this kerfuffle is the question of culture. More to the point it is the question of whether the English/British have a culture worth speaking of. This seems to have been proven to be absolute nonsense by the totally assumptive way most people have got to grips with the election debates. Culture isn't necessarily what you create, rather for 99% of the people it is how they live; how they live has been the most important talking point of this election. Tax cuts, single mums, the Big Society etc have all appeared in normal, prosaic and decidedly unartificed conversations. For most of the 00's we despaired with our post-imperial hangover that stretched for far too long, whilst other countries began to ease themselves out of that self-indulgence. We decided that the French must be superior culturally, their vast reserves of class and style wafting over the channel in a government supported push to show off that huge cultural reserve. Yet, the French culture of looking at themselves is nothing about being reflective; it may appear to be inwards looking yet it looks away and disengages - helping to ignore the untidy elements of culture that accompany its vast problems with racism and inequality. Perhaps the notion of looking at such 'complete' cultures is a total fallacy and we should be less prepared to believe that what we have is somehow not culture.
This is where the Imperial part kicks in. We assume that it isn't culture because we have it, as if its some sort of base level 'normal', whereas any other is not 'normal'. Isn't this the very definition of culture? A definable difference in lifestyle, society or politics that is assumed to be acceptable. We have a culture but perhaps for all its flaws it is a culture that increasingly looks inwards and finds some appalling things. It is the mark of a strong culture that they can be addressed and humanely dealt with. Our culture is not there yet but navel gazing may be a strong first step.
Paid!
Paid my dues with the final payment to CTR, with my wallet significantly lighter and my heart similarly buoyant. So what now? Well I think its time that the economic crisis really came home to Bloomfield town and I began to thrift the heck out of my paycheck. A second job and holding on to my mentoring at Sussex Coast College would be really useful! I'm hoping that my old chums at the De La Warr Pavilion can come up trumps with their various events - more importantly do they need stewards for said events?!
The nostalgia feast continues even as I look at more contemporary fare. What has been a pretty interesting musical period for me has been a little frustrated by the demise of the ever buggy itunes, a truly lamentable program that I cannot even uninstall, such is its tenacious grip. Talking of tenacious grips I can't get this one out of my head. Accusations of salacious beginnings seems a bit foolish; surely they just add lustre to the myth?
Having had a pretty eventful year considering I just stayed at home, I think the best thing that could happen to cap it all off would be to finish abroad, working hard on something that could take me in a wildly different direction than the way I thought I would go. I've worked 3 jobs at the same time, spent months volunteering with a fledgling charity and worked with difficult children and helped some of them succeed. That makes it sound very neat and cohesive when it really was all rather arbitrary, but what the heck, when I revise my lifes event's I can make it all part of a master plan. I've been to see friends, artists, concerts and wrestling. Debated election candidates with 14 year olds, been peed on by my nephew, been accepted into an internship and had 4 job interviews. It's been pretty hectic and maybe I need to start following the calendar year more slavishly but.....heck... a line has been drawn from summer to summer and as a post-bachelor pretender I can only hope to set all my timeframe's like this.
My goals before I go away?
- To be able to run for a substantial distance.
- To get more to grips with Photoshop and Graphic Design in publication.
- To have a bit more in my German language armoury before I head out.
- To somehow scrape some money for a laptop together.
I've started all 4 - but the proof is in the pudding and buying the ingredients does not a cake make.
Baking does.
The nostalgia feast continues even as I look at more contemporary fare. What has been a pretty interesting musical period for me has been a little frustrated by the demise of the ever buggy itunes, a truly lamentable program that I cannot even uninstall, such is its tenacious grip. Talking of tenacious grips I can't get this one out of my head. Accusations of salacious beginnings seems a bit foolish; surely they just add lustre to the myth?
Having had a pretty eventful year considering I just stayed at home, I think the best thing that could happen to cap it all off would be to finish abroad, working hard on something that could take me in a wildly different direction than the way I thought I would go. I've worked 3 jobs at the same time, spent months volunteering with a fledgling charity and worked with difficult children and helped some of them succeed. That makes it sound very neat and cohesive when it really was all rather arbitrary, but what the heck, when I revise my lifes event's I can make it all part of a master plan. I've been to see friends, artists, concerts and wrestling. Debated election candidates with 14 year olds, been peed on by my nephew, been accepted into an internship and had 4 job interviews. It's been pretty hectic and maybe I need to start following the calendar year more slavishly but.....heck... a line has been drawn from summer to summer and as a post-bachelor pretender I can only hope to set all my timeframe's like this.
My goals before I go away?
- To be able to run for a substantial distance.
- To get more to grips with Photoshop and Graphic Design in publication.
- To have a bit more in my German language armoury before I head out.
- To somehow scrape some money for a laptop together.
I've started all 4 - but the proof is in the pudding and buying the ingredients does not a cake make.
Baking does.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)