it's halloween, and everyone looks awful. some people, though, are genuinely just out to scare people. theres someone on the ground floor sporadically leaning out of her window and screaming at passers by, and two guys just, essentially, attacked me (in a playful way though, like they do with rape at public schools). i've never been interested in the tacky dressing up (and then just going out dancing as usual) side of halloween, but this is the kind of halloween activity that i appove of. i really like the idea of a festival that celebrates fear. not terrible, life-destroying fear, but playing on the small, irrational fears that people have-the dark, loud noises, surprises. it's something worth doing at least once a year.

to add a bit onto what i was saying about solipsists not long ago, two solipsists i know have been bonding quite strongly recently, over how they both must be correct

this will have to do as my joke about solipsism. it is pretty funny to be fair

HELLO I'M YOUR NEW NEIGHBOUR

the altered/forgotten lyrics are what clinches it

"the hills are groaning with excess"

albums which i'm listening to with mental hunger right now:

minutemen-double nickels on the dime
joanna newsom-Ys
the knife-silent shout
cap'n jazz-analphabetapolothology


Ys is playing a MASSIVE part in my life again, i don't know why. its so amazing, it's gotta be remembered as a highpoint of early 21st century music in jimmy carr nostalgia shows yet to come. there are so many fantastic moments in it, like the parts in sawdust and diamonds where it swells up and get panicked and just, beautiful. and theres a moment when youre really listening to it that 'only skin' just hits you with its brilliance, its usually about 12 or so minutes in, where its been going, seemingly endless and constantly original, for SO long and you just suddenly realise where its taken you with its flurry and lyrical imagery and the soft, bird-like warble throwing your thoughts around as you try to keep up, and think 'god, this is really something special'. cos it is.

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"your girlfriend tries to act shy around me"

"millenium kids we're too cold, no pity"

wiley

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if talking heads were a book they'd be the tractatus. so clean, so acute, so completely lacking in self-interest or indulgence.

"my heart writhes in its own blood", was a lyric i heard and read tonight. i thought it was one of the best things i've heard since i came here and i've heard a lot of things since i came here.

its from some bach piece, about jesus.

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talking about classical music about jesus, richard dawkins writes in somethingorother about how good it would have been if scientists had commissioned the classical composers, not the church, so you would get mozarts 'symphony of a supernova' and such like instead of just focusing on nativity plays. an interesting idea.

imagine if the zutons really were always right behind you

vanity and presumption, DAPPER


hey hey hey hey

"I am becoming everything I used to hate but I, I can't go back now"

this isnt relevant to my life or feelings at the moment, so please dont think that it is. i just think its an amazing lyric

the way ozzy goes, "i love you!", in sweet leaf must be the best recorded version of that phrase ever. better than any other time anyone's said it in any film, music, television, anything. its just so panicked, a desperate but fully assured and confident yelp. john darnielle said about black sabbath in his excellent book about them, 'they sound like the guys who stand at the back of the party and never dance'. that is EXACTLY what black sabbath sound like.

i love a lot of the production on master of reality, it was when sabbath became incredibly negative and awful, and the riffs got really slow and doomsome (doomsome almost certainly isnt a word but it sums it up well). its like that middle section of sweet leaf, about 1:20 in where the mid-range single note riff is layered over the crunchy chords, and it sounds like the most dismal, dream-crushing thing ever. in a good way, not in a snow patrol way.

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while i'm on sabbath might as well also say that 'supernaut' is one of the best uses of the guitar ever. that call and response bass-to-guitar riff, beautiful.

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someone asked me what music i liked the other day and i said 'well when i was a teenager i was really into early punk music' and she laughed and said 'when you were a teenager?' and i realised that i'd talked about it like it was years ago, and felt a little disturbed.

recently ive been getting back into punk though. it began when i was sent a fanzine in the post that i subscribed to all those years ago when i was a teenager, and it came in the post and took me totally by subscribed. i was charmed by its beautiful, diy simplicity and thought 'this makes sense all over again'. so ive been getting back into it all. bought an album by nation of ulysses which i'm slowly getting into, but the main area of interest right now for me is, once again, cap'n jazz.

i remember the first time i heard cap'n jazz's cover of 'take on me', and i immediately just wanted to do something. it felt inappropriate to sit around after hearing it. tim kinsellas voice is just so beautiful in such a brozen way.

i'm also massively into 'snake rap' by a band called 'snakes' too, who seem to scarcely exist at all.

also the frumpies

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heard the BEST BUSKER EVER the other day. most buskers assume that what people want to hear is oasis songs and 'imagine', but it really isn't true. then i saw someone on saturday that changed all this.

i was out walking the streets of the silver city and i heard this crunchy, arrhythmic guitar solo coming from around the corner. i went to check it out and saw this guy in a trench coat and baseball cap with a stratocaster sat on a practice amp, slumped over his guitar, playing the main riff to 'sweet home alabama' and 'sweet child of mine' over and over and over again, in a tense, squeaky, scratchy way, all totally solo and unaccompanied-no loop pedal or drumtrack-occasionally pausing to play a trail of horrible bends which constituted a solo. in other words he played guitar EXACTLY like i used to play at gigs. the reason i got into the whole bend-heavy style from johnny thunders is cos it sounds so sarcastic and is so easy to turn into a mess, but this guy had mastered it.

i'm not being ironic or facetious at all, i genuinely loved this guy and wanted to tell him. i gave him £2.

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the jonas brother can fuck off

from last.fm:

Right now, all over the world…

1,155 people are listening to Coldplay – Violet Hill

104,810 people love Newton Faulkner

really makes you think