There were similarities, but there were also differences.

Just noticed this Cap'n Jazz song is a haiku:

Boys kissing boys,
It's about time for me to take what's mine,
Virginia.

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There's a very nice bit in the Alan Bennett diaries where he's sitting in the park and a man comes up to him and asks if he has the time. Alan says that he does not, the man stands about for a moment with a pitying smile, and then eventually moves away. Alan sits, the realisations dawns, and calls after him "but thank you very much for asking."

I've always found this sweet and very touching, but especially today as basically the exact same thing happened to me just now.

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And today was a truly lovely day to be in the park. First properly sunny day for ages, and I pretended it was summer. Sky blue canvas shoes et al, swish ting y'know. What am I gonna do with this weather, I thought. I'll make an effort with the new Vampire Weekend album, I decided.

I wasn't that keen on Contra and didn't put much of an effort into it ever since I heard the first track 'Horchata' which just isn't a very good song. It's quite smug, too preppy, like Cliff Richard. I think Vampire Weekend are everything that I love and hate at once. I think the hipster thing is unfair and due their fans rather than the band themselves, which is a shame. But they do seem to base their image around Bennetton a bit too much. On the other hand I like that pop music has gotten back to focusing on the small details, and they remind me of the sea. If I had to choose one word to sum Vampire Weekend up it would be 'Pastel'; everything soft, delicate and beautiful.

Vampire Weekend are only really great when listened to on the beach. They sound like that classic ideal of the seaside: blocks of colour and brightness. I can only listen to Vampire Weekend when my surroundings are equally beautiful; the sea, the park, the botanical gardens, Old Aberdeen. If you listen to it in an industrial part of town or a train station its beauty seems both amplified and diminished; crushed by the ugliness but also mocking it with its own beauty.

As for the album itself, it's hard, I have no concrete feelings about it. I think that perhaps all that can be said about the album is that it's beautiful; and you don't really need anything more. Like Brideshead Revisited, perhaps it's merely ridiculous, preppy fantasy. Waugh himself hated Brideshead for its insane, frankly unbelievable beauty-as do I, in a way-he wrote it when incapacitated during the war and longing for the past and all its flavours, memory distorting reality. Actually I suppose that's another example of beauty (in this case of the past) mocking the ugliness of the present.

Sorry, that wasn't very good was it.
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I also listened to 'Kind of Blue' whilst I did the crossword and, with a juggler practising on the lawn on a dog walker on a bench throwing a ball, felt like I was in Seurat's world.

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