You know you know you know I went to see that 'vicky christina barcelona' tonight. Wow! what rubbish. I mean, really. It's just a mills and boon novel in every way; it has a narrator who tells us the already starkly obvious emotional outlook of every character and also the things that at the very same time we are actually seeing with our own eyes ('vicky went to the cathedral'), it has the standard mills and boon starting block of pasty white touristettes falling for a dark-eyed continental stubble-covered rogue, and it takes the clichéd tourist activities and puts them centrally into the lives of these characters. Urk, so bad.
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Fuck the knife are SO good arent they. One of those bands that you love when you first hear, then they become such a massive part of your life that you forget just how special they are, but occasionally, in the right moments, they astound you all over again. Like the Ramones. Or the beastie boys. But anyway, what voices! The woman from the knife sounds like someone's nan, and she may well be, and the man sounds like a melted whale.
I listened to silent shout on the way home tonight and those icy sounds fit perfectly, washing the glaring, stifling fake-tan of vicky christina off my mind. I listened to we share our mothers health several times, imagining vikings, and letting the windy voices blow me home through jagged granite streets.
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Continuing the theme of scandinavian beauty, el perro del mar.
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It's hard to express how wonderful wave pictures are using one song as the impatience of you fuckers dictates i MUST do, but if i had to i guess i'd choose 'i love you like a madman'. Such beautiful lyrics, sort of like the mountain goats, but with the warbling confidence of a bad-tempered teenager.
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Mark Kermode and his stupid slab of cancerous gammon face.
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My philosophy tutor has a slot on aberdeen student radio on tuesdays which i thought might be good but which turned out to be amazing. You can check it all out on his blog here.
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Some stuff that's been washing round me a lot recently:
-Hot Chip-Laws of Salvation
-Hot Chip with Robert Wyatt and Geese (who are just hot chip anyway)-EP.
-Ital Tek-Cyclical
-Jay-Z remixed w/fela- Nigerian Gangster
-The instrumental version of nigerian gangster, which is just an afrobeat trip hop album, and isnt anywhere near as bad as that sounds.
-The Wave Pictures
-Vampire Weekend-I Stand Corrected
-Alexis Taylor solo-I Love my Home, Collector's Item
-X-The songs from their first album that the girl sung on.
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This is something quite special, apparently '90%' (probably not that exactly calculated) was made using stuff from the film alice in wonderland, of which this video is my only experience. Anyway, beautiful, breathlike stuff.
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Incidentally if anyone wants to know about the connections between wittgenstein's philosophy and alice in wonderland you have only to ask.
A taster of what you'll get if you do: When alice talks about how she can't recall what a candle flame looks like after it's been put out, that is PROPERLY wittgensteinian of her.
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I'm now on twitter but will probably hardly ever update as I have four followers. But so did jesus when he started out.
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Can people who have blogs please write on them please!
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My friend gavin asks,
"Which music genre would you pick if you could never listen to another?
I like this. It's a less loaded, more modern (ie spoiled) Desert Island Discs construction.
You could of course assail the very idea of genre as a self-fulfilling restriction that truly innovative artists pay no heed to, and thus claim the gaps in the Map as yours.
But I know you've a proper answer nonetheless. (:"
I answer:
"60s r&b, eg martha reeves and the vandellas. At the end of the day, it is the most perfect of all musics. Functional and efficient in every sense-emotionally, rhytmically, aesthetically, it has it all. It's just pop music of course, but pop music crystallised to its central mesasge-love, not being alone, the beauty of desire. It expresses every emotion at once. It can be a social music-good for dancing-or music you listen to on your own when you're at your lowest ebb. Perfect, wonderous, infinite loveliness. Anyone who says they don't like it doesn't like truth.
Disco is a close second as it has all the features mentioned above, except it's not as yearning and melacholy as soul, which you need at night."
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And that's as good a point as any to end on. I hope you enjoyed it, i feel like this blog is only just starting to get good now to be honest, and getting close to the giddy heights of joy and quality of my old myspace blog. I dont know why this is.
Stay so fresh and so clean x
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4 comments:
alice, ebony and i went to see that film we agreed with everything you said.
and the knife.
x
"Can people who have blogs please write on them please!"
This is your first real update since the end of january.
Inspire us, James.
Great post, I've had that Alice in wonderland track on my laptop for ages its a great chillout tune.
Lauren is the only person who ever pushes back on here. Not that it's a massive sample of commenters.
Think this was the beginning of my round robins. True to your curse, I wasn't sure you liked me at all at this stage (and to be fair there was a great deal to dislike). What awful phrasing, for instance.
The Knife bit here is an instance of MAX PUSHING writing. I didn't get them at first at all, for instance.
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