"In high school sex seemed to me to be another club. It was in many ways similar to games for me; the boys that were good at one were generally also good at the other."

-Alan Bennett

as predicted, heartbroken is now MASSIVE. yay for justice!

also as predicted a few months ago, everyone is now sick of the nu-rave fad and no one listens to the horrors anymore.

am considering becoming a trend predictor.

"look at it...who can say it's not beautiful?"

hearing the original version of 'unchained melody' today reminds me of some dialogue from 'true stories' in which the lead character lewis 'the bear', who spends the whole film trying to find someone to fall in love with, is asked to leave a date after singing his songs to the woman and being told they are too sad..

"i never really thought about it, maybe i am kinda sad. i like sad songs...they make me wanna lie on the floor....'lewis the bear'...on the floor....

....'lewis the bear'...out the door...."



sad stuff, worth digging out if you can.

anyway, to lighten the mood, last night i saw gordon ramsay grab a fat, crying chef by the tits and say "c'mon now big boy"

and today in neighbours a young boy told his newly discovered father who'd forgotten his birthday that it was ok to make mistakes at first, and used the example of his dog shitting indoors at first but eventually learning this was unacceptable to console his father.

jo brand's smarmy, self-satisfied face follows me everywhere i go.

"If you can't take a racist joke then your racist yourself!!!"

yep. this comes from a 'boris johnson for pm' facebook group which came to my attention this morning. inspired by this, i type 'prime minister' into the groups search to find other nominees of the electorate, which include jeremy clarkson, david cameron, stephen fry and for some reason hugh grant. one was called 'if a singh was prime minister...'.

also loving this at the moment cuz its basically about how brilliant the british empire is http://hs.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2211249603&ref=mf

the future is safe with our children.

"our miserable king can't protect us from ourselves"

edinburgh was as fair and bountiful a city as you could ever ask for. weirdest thing about it is how its got everything in walking space. but i mean, literally everything. like as you step out of the scottish parliament, which is the centre of edinburgh, if you cross the street youre on the side of a mountain, with countryside stretching for miles ahead of you. it's crazy, i never knew.

anyway it was a weekend of museums for me. the last one i visited was the national gallery of scotland for a joan eardley exhibition. the work was in general good, especially the seascapes, and i left feeling refreshed and upbeat. as i was leaving, my eyes were caught by another exhibition, this time of contempory art.

sigh.

right, i love art me. but, as with music, i'm not one of those people who is afraid to say 'this is shit' for fear of being a phillistine who doesn't get it. one of the pieces in the contempory exhibition was three planks of wood propped up against the wall. in the lengthy text it said that they were in their 'rested state'. i mean for fucks sake.

stuff like this is pretention of the highest order. it is awful, it is boring, it is a crap, empty idea given a facade of genius to make people pretend they like it. it is the lowest of the low. if it was entered into a gcse art exam, it would barely scrape a pass. loads of people will say 'thats not the point!' but it actually is. this is shit art. the approach to art like this is 'lets be simplistic' and as such, i'm going to view it simplistically as well and say 'this is shit art'.

the best thing was, someone tried to take a photo of it and the security guy said 'no photos'. brilliant. i think the idea of photographing it is a much better post-modern statement than the actual piece itself. how can you ever beat taking a picture of some wood because it's "art" as a statement against the complexity of art? genius!

anyway the only thing that broke through this shit was stuff by jessica harrison, who mentally i've just found out went to frodsham and john deanes. she basically warps classical art standards with mild surrealism and i liked it a lot. here's something by her which wasnt the best but is the only example of her drawing i cant find on the net:



caught a very small amount of 'i'm a celebrity' on saturday night before i switched over and one of them said 'this is probably one of the most stressful and emotionally strenuous jobs i've ever had.' not sure whether calling it a 'job' was a momentary slip-up or just profound honesty.

i still miss your streets at dawn

i'm popping up to edinburgh for the weekend and am taking the following glacial, wintery sounding music to accompany the whistles of the icey north wind into my ears:

bjork-debut
joy division-substance
wiley-treddin' on thin ice
the fall-peel sessions disc 2
ivor cutler-dandruff
a ram records compilation featuring some really cold drum n bass
the slits-cut
johnny thunders live in sweden (because sweden is cold)
jay-z-the blueprint

and i leave you with that. enjoy the cold!

x

reading a book about queen anne today, it listed her favourite hobby as 'admiring fine gardens'. why don't people say things like this anymore?

good pop bad pop

today in oxfam the radio was unexpectedly on radio 1. as i settled down at the til at the start of edith bowman's set a pigeon detectives song and 'hey there delilah' sandwiched 'heartbroken' by jodie aysha. this song is weird to me. it's just infiltrating my life. i first heard it at sankeys, because it belongs to the whole 'bassline' scene which is a northern thing and sankeys is big on that. then i started hearing it through open windows and coming out of cars, as if the song was following me around. then it appeared in a mix that someone sent me. then it was finally brought fully into my life as a proper, important song when my friend rosie said to me 'have you heard that song that goes 'heartbroken, without your love'?' and i got excited that it wasnt some kind of ghost and it DID exist so we found it, put it on and had a dance. it was a weird feeling, like this thing that i'd been courting for weeks had finally entered my life and it was so good to have it in my heart where it belongs (the song, not rosie).

it is a beautiful song and i think it's gonna be one of those crazy dance tunes that for some reason goes huge. like you can totally see the logic in why stuff like sandstorm, zombie nation etc are huge, but every now and again a dance tune that doesnt seem that mainstream goes totally off the wall and surprises everyone. and it's truly weird but truly good, its actually quite a disjointed song, randomly skewing off into new arrangements and with mental wobbly melodies. but it's something new and it's gonna get big. i wish it had a better video because videos are where dance music gets big; radio 1 is all about giving indie kids what they want and so its only on stuff like the hits that dance kids get what they want and so a dance song needs both a good hook and video to get massive (like put your hands up for detroit's video appealed to a pretty direct audience and worked a charm). or maybe this song will ride all the way to the top on the simple fact that it is good. which can still happen, you know.

whilst i'm here and i've mentioned it i'd just like to say that 'hey there delilah' is an awfully lazily written song and it's time we put a stop to stuff like this. i'm an open-minded person about music, and always give a song one listen-through without dismissing it before i judge it but this began to try my patience as soon as he rhymed 'new york city' with 'you look so pretty'. i just find music like this sickeningly patronising, like plain white t's are afraid (or more likely unable) to challenge us with a genuinely thought-provoking track that could change our day and so release this muesli. meanwhile beside them 'heartbroken', without even trying, both musically challenges us and also surpasses it as a love song at the same time. true justice!

"gritting her teeth like a sandpaper lawnmower"

want this to last

The first time I heard Cascada's 'Everytime we touch' i thought 'this is one of the best pop songs i've ever heard. Then eventually i began to wonder and lose my faith as many people who i respect said it was pure shit. But now, as i listen to a 15 year old boys murky remix of it, i realise that as usual everyone else is wrong and it is amazing. It's often the case with dance music (or perhaps i'm talking about pop music right now) that the most synthetic, attaining-to-be-commercial sounds are the best, and it lands them in a similar vein with the mindless, pure-joy delights of ramones or early beatles records.

I just really love this song for firstly the reason that it's brilliant, and secondly cos its what indie kids dismiss as 'chav music' (cos it is) and i love how they'll never understand or experience the pure joy of these records, just as they'll never experience the pure joy of an editors album (cos there is none to be found).

Their cover of 'kids in america' is even better btw.

today in oxfam;

i started my 3 hour a week job in oxfam today. the manager, in a possible effort to impress the new kid (me), muttered 'cantankerous bitch' as an old woman left the store. also, on the pad behind the counter where you are supposed to note down important accounting things, i found a series of simplistic sketches of dolphins done by the elderly woman who was on the till before me.

Entrances uncovered, street signs you never saw.

My girlfriend's flat overlooks a motorway overpass. This is a fact. She doesn't really like this, which i suppose is understandable, but I really like it, like i like a lot of things these days.

I used to hate these monstrosities too until I got really into talking heads and their odes to modern architecture. As i began to listen, i began to understand the understated beauty of these structures. One of my favourite films is made by david byrne, it's called true stories and is a simplistic, smiling portrait of small quirks in a small town, and there are a lot of lines which you can quote endlessly (which always makes for a great film-spinal tap, pulp fiction, and the godfather to mention better known examples) and one of them is during a passage on highways where david byrne says, "they're the cathedrals of our time".

So true. There's something to be said for these vast, white concrete crescents. I often wake up pretty early or can't sleep, particularly when i'm sharing a bed, and on sunday morning i got up and sat at her desk and looked out at the view trying to get sleepy again, watching white vans and lorries zipping along the motorway, the cat's eyes, the orange pools of light. I just think that whilst motorways are the ultimate in functional architecture-no one cares what they look like-if you stop and try to find them beautiful, you can. Which is true for anything. There is just as much to see with a room of motorway with lamp-posts and there is with a room of a river with trees. In fact, aren't there remarkable similarities? Both are endless and unchanging, giving a non-stop flow of unrecognisable, unimportant matter. Like watching fire, or a waterfall, there is somethign beautiful in just observing the continuity of it.

Fine, she said, but the noise is still annoying. Again, i frustratingly disagreed (but privately this time so as to avoid a 'why are you always so contrary' remark). I once read someones blog where he said he'd been sampling cars going past his window a lot, and since then i cant listen to the short, gasping pockets of sound you can get when cars drive past you without thinking 'there is music in them'.

Music can help you find beauty in anything, i guess.

Or, everything has the potential to be amazing.


james x