“One left, one right. that’s how I organize ‘em” Brill!

“Ten is for you so who gonna get the next dozen?” Ace!

A natural born popstar, if her album doesn’t do really well my little remaining faith in the British pop buying public will be shattered. Quite a short set though, I’d have like to here this but I think that was always unlikely.

I had only one of these tapes, it was 90 minutes rather than the 60 minute version shown above. On one side it had Totale’s Turn, on the other The Infotainment Scan, both copied from CDs rented from Wilmslow library who ever was in charge of selecting the fairly limited range of CDs they got into that library between 1994 and 1996 is one of the major influences on my music taste. Other CDs I rented from Wilmslow library include :

• Julian Cope’s classic Jehovahkill (lying on my bed in the sun listening to this and reading Good Omens whilst pretending to revise for GCSEs is a powerful memory)
• Captain Beefheart’s somewhat less than classic but still quit enjoyable in places Shiny Beast/Batchain Puller which I later bought from them for 60p when they were clearing out stock.
• Sugar’s Beaster, haven’t heard this for years, I used to have a 6ft x 4ft poster of the cover on the wall.
• Mercury Rev, Yerself Is Steam which is probably their best album by virtue of having decent songs, being awesomely psychedelic and not at all saccharine, 3 features which they’d never get together on the same record again. Also ended up buying this off them for 60p.
• Sonic Youth, Screaming Fields of Sonic Love compilation, I already had the promo version of this picked up from Vinyl Exchange in Manchester as well as pretty much every album from which the songs on it were drawn but this had a slightly different (and in my opinion worse) track listing so I got it out anyway because i was a total Sonic Youth completist in those days. I think I bought it for 60p and then gave it to Neil in our third year at uni. Wait a minute… Neil’s a librarian, and this CD came from a library. Spooky!
• Inspiral Carpets Greatest Hits. Because it had a track on it which featured Mark E Smith, the rest of the CD confirmed that I didn’t much care for Madchester/etc. I seem to remember there were about 18 track on the record and they all sounded pretty much identical.
• Stone Roses, the first one. Everyone kept going on about how great they were at school. I thought they were rubbish. Do people still maintain these guys are good? I predict a revival of interest in 2008 followed by a reunion tour in 2009.
• Throwing Muses, Red Heaven. Since first renting it I’ve bought this album no fewer than 4 times in 3 different formats.
• Breeders, Last Splash. Since renting it I never bought this record even though The Breeders were for a time my favourite band.
• Some others

I used to have this image on a T-Shirt when I was a younger.
Apparently so did this guy who’s reviewing each ‘prog’ of 2000 AD in order.

I’ve deleted my flickr account, I never used it and it seems wasteful to have accounts that you don’t use. Plus and email from their support team which included the line
“multiple queries regarding the same issue make the Magic Donkey cry.”
and was signed off
“The Flickreenos”
had some influence on my decision.

On the plus side, the very same email inspired me to dig out the Alan Moore Abelard Snazz story that has a Californian society being destroyed (The Multi-Storey Mind Mellows Out!) and includes the immortal exclamation “jog for your life!”. It was just as funny as I remember it being.

…It was really brilliant, full of sharp insight and shimmering wit and no spelling mistakes at all. I’ll never be able to recreate it so to summarise:

1. Woke up at 4 this morning, after tossing and turning and generally fidgeting for a couple of hours I got up and was in the office by 7:30. Much closer to my natural rhythm I think, I like to be in bed by 10. Naturally uncool. Why is it cool to stay up late?
2. Episode 2 and The Trap’s not going very well; still no mention of iterated PD + misrepresentation of selfish gene.
3. Never get involved in debates online with people you don’t know, I’ve been tempted to over the last few days but seeing how they’ve played out the same way they always seem to (unproductive point scoring/ bullying) I’m glad I stayed away. People who talk about the internet as a global conversation seem to miss the fact that conversation only ever seems to happen on a small scale. Large scale ‘discussion’ sites like The Guardian’s Comment is Free, BBC news’ Have Your Say and the granddaddy of them all Slashdot all seem to be pretty good proof of this theory. The opposite situation, a kind of echo chamber circle jerk, is just as infuriating and unproductive.
4. I really Enjoyed the Dawn of The Dead remake but I’m don’t like Frank Miller’s retarded macho shtick and apparently 300 is a racist gore fest which is worrying though it the fact that the same reviewers who are saying that kind of thing seem to feel the need to make derogatory references to computer games (1. it’s you mean video games. 2. Alongside the DVD box set, they’re the defining art form of our age, get over it granddad) and adolescent males (as if they don’t get demonised enough already) both of which kind of undermine credibility in my eyes. Also there’s all sorts of confused commentary about the films sexual politics along the lines of: “Man those Spartans are gay, in their speedos and so on” and then later on, “OMG! I can’t believe they made the Persians all gay! This film is totally homophobic”. the subtext of a lot of this stuff seems to be that cinema audiences are too stupid to work out that they’re being manipulated by the film into supporting an invasion of Iran and voting in the BNP at the next election and need to be protected from themselves by Guardian columnists and tiresome critical theory bloggers.

   Anyway, I was thinking of seeing it at the I-Max on Friday or Saturday if anyone fancies it.

In the original version all these things were deftly interwoven and there was an overarching point but as I said I lost that version so you’ll just have to make it up.

I submit for your consideration: Helios by T.B.Huxley at BBC Television center…

c.f. Smoke

I was going to wait ’till the whole series was finished before mentioning the new Adam Curtis Documentary, The Trap, that’s showing on BBC 2 (and presumably being repeated on BBC 4) at the moment, for reasons which will become clear later on. But I’ve decided to because I got so enraged by this article in The Guardian, the bit that specifically annoyed me was this…

Human beings were driven by genes, programmed for survival, Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene argued. As Dawkins put it, “our DNA is an encoded description of the worlds in which our ancestors lived”.

…which tells me that Madeleine Bunting hasn’t read Dawkins’ book or if she has she’s not understood it. As Dawkins points out at length within the pages of the book, and many other times since, it’s the genes that are selfish not the organism (people). It’s a real shame that people don’t read this book because if it shows anything about Dawkins’ views on human nature it’s that he is an optimist and regards cooperation as a key feature. People who haven’t read Dawkins tend to use the selfishness is good argument from Dawkins purely based on the title of the book and then use this as a stick to beat science in general. The idea that Darwinism is somehow all about violent selfish competition is just nonsense infact the metaphor of selfishness as Dawkins uses it doesn’t even preclude co-operation on a genetic level let alone on an organism or species level.

Anyway, the reason I wasn’t going to say anything about this series is because it’s not over yet and if it follows the pattern of Curtis’s previous documentaries commenting on the content of the first part is a bit like commenting on a book that you’ve not finished. i.e. liekly to make you look a bit silly.

Having said that, things that stood out:

1. Use of the Assault on Precinct 13 theme on the sound track.
2. A rather strange example of the prisoners dilemma was used to explain it, crucially (I’m guessing) a formulation which doesn’t allow iteration (because one of the actors is dead for certain results) crucially unlike Dawkins use of the dilemma in The Selfish Gene (guess my theory*)
3. Curtis repeatedly saying such and such was “proved by science”. As all good Popperians know; you don’t prove stuff correct in science, you only prove stuff incorrect.

… anyway, I expect I’ll say more in a couple of weeks, suffice it to say that whether or not you agree with the premise or conclusions drawn The Trap is polemic documentary film making at its best, intelligent and expertly crafted.

*In addition to the theory that you have to guess as I think it’s going to be a spoiler if I write it down here, I also have another theory about how the iterated prisoners dilemma might apply to US presidential politics, ask me about it in the pub maybe…

i.e. pretty much all three or four of you.

You should watch or video Dave Chappelle’s block party tonight at 11:30(ish). It’s really good.

Chances are you’ll be reading this Monday morning or sometime in the week and will have already missed the showing in which case you should probably get it out from the video shop or your favorite bit torrent tracker.

Californai Uber Alles
As applicable today to the current Web 2.0 Ochlocracy as it was to the liberal elite in the early 80s. Many great lines, my favourites being “You will jog for the master race” and, of course, “Mellow out or you will pay”. There’s a bit in Wired this month where they have a map of the world showing places which are about to be destroyed by global warming, either through encroaching desertification, rising sea levels or catastrophic reduction in biodiversity. Their accompanying recommendation, that we jump on a jet plane and visit them all before it’s too late, would be brilliant satire if it weren’t delivered with that total sincerity in the face of overwhelming irony that only Californians seem to be capable of.

My Heart And The Real World
My latest favourite Minutemen track, a chirpy little number perfect for a sunny Friday afternoon like today. As discussed previously they’re amazing.

TV Party

What differentiates the Californian variety of punk from the earlier British and New Yorkian strains is the overt politicking and eschewing drink/ drug induced bad behaviour and art schools in favour of hard work and the the working man, which mutated into the transcontinental straight edge glories of Minor Threat and eventually Fugazi. It’s not hard to argue (as Michael Azerrad does in the frankly only alright book Our Band Could Be Your Life) that Henry Rollins’ activism, DIY ethic and tireless hard work with Black Flag laid the foundations for all this and much of the rest of ‘underground’ derived American rock music in the 80s, 90s and onward.