i was in a french restaurant today and of course they played accordian music because that is the only music ever created and listened to by french people in their entire history. in french restaurants its ALWAYS accordian music, in spanish the obligatory flamenca backround music, in indian restaurants bollywood. this made me wonder what they play in english restaurants abroad. status quo?

oh its the last time oh its the last time oh its the last time oh its the last time always the last time

werner herzog describes auctioneering as 'the poetry of capitalism'

i heard that estelle song american boy today and a weird feeling came over me, that sort of 'blast from the past' feeling. i think that american boy was so incredibly overplayed when it came out that now it sounds like a distant memory even though its only been around for a few months. weird.

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hate the bit in that scroobius pip song where he goes '...just a band' over and over again. what the fuck is it you want from us?????

like a flower in the overgrowth falling, falling to pieces

someone threw themselves in front a train i was on yesterday and everyone around me got on their phones and angrily complained about how it would make them late, so i found the event distressing on more than one level. after it happened i tried hard to grasp onto the thoughts flashing through me about it. i began to realise that when the guy heard our train coming around the corner, he must have started to prepare himself for death, take in his life breath, think his last ever thought. the sound of our approach was the signal for the end of a mans life, so i was part of something that was going to kill someone. i found it hard not to be affected by that.

but a lot of people around me weren't affected at all, so maybe i'm just overthinking the whole thing. a woman near me complained that he 'could at least have tried it at night'. this got me thinking that maybe he did deliberately do it in rush hour to make people like this woman think and take notice, or perhaps just to annoy people like this and disrupt their lives as much as possible, and i agree with both these decisions.

he didnt die, though. he was arrested and taken away. i got this image in my head of this man at his lowest point being taken away in a police car as we, the instrument of his intended death, glide passively on. we werent doing anything wrong but somehow i viewed the train as the villain in this story, perhaps because no other one was apparent. i think the whole thing that upset me about what happened was that the world just kept moving onwards after it had swerved to avoid this man, which needed to happen and i'm wrong to want anything else, but my instincts told me that we should somehow pause for longer than was needed to drag him away from the tracks, which is illogical.


"to mourn the dead is to mourn those who were never born"

school's question time tonight which i didnt bother to apply for, but wish i did when i saw that the young panel member was a very right wing ukip member who at one point said, "i dont know anything about iran, but the whole thing needs to sort itself out" and subsequently made it painfully clear throughout that he hadnt read a newspaper and didnt know anything at all about politics. is this really an appropriate ambassador for my age group? also iain duncan smith got all the claps from the audience, further compounding my worry about how right wing everyone my age seems to be these days. for example, the reaction to david cameron's zero tolerance on knife possession was really positive from the audience, when i thought kids would be more understanding of people who'd been drawn into carrying knives, but i guess everyone's been sort of sucked into the whole 'yob' rubbish, even people who come into contact with them on a daily basis and know them personally...

i dunno, i think the whole 'united youth' thing died with nirvana (or perhaps rave) and there's never really been a general attitude of young people since then-we prefer these days to divide into intensely different groups that bitterly hate each other. but if there is a general consensus of my 'peers' (shudder) right now, it's certainly conservative which as i've said before doesnt make any sense to me.

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i've always found marvin gaye's 'sexual healing' an intensely creepy track-imagine someone seriously saying those words to you-but now i've heard hot chips version and it's suddenly made brilliant, as is the case with anything.

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i sometimes like to pair songs together than i think are connected in some way and listen to them next to each other. at present i've done this with 'this year' by the mountain goats and the classic 'destination unknown' by alex gaudino. i know it sounds weird but i think they're both very similar songs. both are about breaking away from the ordinary, which in the case of the mountain goats is a staple subject, and for gaudino it's all about not individual freedom, but instead moving away from present monotony in huge groups, an army even, even if they're not sure what they want, they're still gonna flee towards their utopian haven (the dancefloor)

first line of 'destination unknown': "i left my job my boss my car and my home"

first line of 'this year': "i broke free on a saturday morning, i put the pedal to the floor"

i generally like to listen to 'this year' first, as it sort of makes a story-a guy starts off by just driving away from his life but is gradually joined by thousands of others as the marching rhythm of destination unknown kicks in.

will young is just the smartprice rufus wainwright

Saw a guy today wearing a t-shirt that read, "you can read this while i suck on your tits."

I suppose it was one of those classic witticisms that works on a lot of different levels but I must say I failed to get even one.