… The Field album.
Thanks for the tip Nick.

I’ll be playing The Field all week in the the south of France. LOL!!!!111

Shame I have no means to listen to it on the train on the way down as it reminds me of that Chemical Bros. track with the Gondry video of a train journey.

You know, this one…

back in 2 weeks

Sometime around late ‘93, just after The Fall released The Infotainment Scan there was a fork in the space time continuum, like in Back To The Future 2, in the world we didn’t end up in Mark E Smith called an end to the Fall project and concentrated on colaborating with electronic musicians (musicians who make electronic music, not robot musicians) occasionally parts of this reality break through, like when we got those Dose colaborations in the late 90s, we don’t hear a steady progression as we do in the yearly Fall releases, just random bursts.

The latest dispatch from this paralel realm is the Von Sudenfeld album which has Mr. Smith slurring and jabbering over squelchy grime breats supplied by Deutschland’s Mouse On Mars. The sharpness of the backing suits Mark E Smith’s voice more than any of the recent incarnations of The Fall, lets face it no matter how consistent in quality recent Fall releases have been we’re only getting further from the crisp poetry of Hex Enduction Hour.

St. Werner and Toma (for it is they!) use Smiths voice as an instrument in their arrangements, twisting and filtering it in much in the same way as The Knife do, not to hold the wierdness down as is the case with a lot of electronic music but to make it sound more alien. It’a shame that these tracks won’t see much dance floor action because a lot of them really are quite danceable, in fact the opening track (video above) sounds like it’s deliberately referencing LCD Soundsystem’s Losing my Edge, which itself is practically a tribute to Mark E Smiths inimitable delivery.

Anyway, hopefully we’ll see more of this kind of thing from Mark E Smith, maybe after the period of consolidation with the last band - which was you know, fine - this signals that Mark E. Smith is getting back into making stuff that sounds new.

Also of note is how brill Domino records are getting these days.

If you want to stop me from AdBlocking your wares you should stop serving them from fomains with names like advertising.com or whatever. Stuff served from e.g. www2.xhhxxc.com, I’m not going to block so hastily as I don’t know that everything coming from that domain is going to be advertising. Though I’d dearly like to, I don’t block akamai because I know they host other stuff for big sites (like Apple and BBC news).

For Dan. As an illustration to yesterdays IM conversation.

[This just kind of came out stuff I can’t really articulate properly, I’m sure someone will at some point though. Possibly doesn’t make a great deal of sense, probably I’m being a bit paranoid]

I noticed the first Big Brother blip-vert over the weekend. Those barely-liminal flashes of the logo they sneak in between commercials for hair products and diet plans.

It’s wierd how the term ‘Big Brother’ has switched from being primarily about fear of being under constant observation (which is pretty much the state we’re in) to being more about constantly observing others, specifically a bunch of idiots in a house, splashed across every media outlet for the whole summer*.

I guess that’s the way it works though, Orwell predicted the ends just not the means, it’s not like anyone is coalating all the CCTV footage and phonecam pics and youtube videos into some big database, there’s too much so we all have to do our little bit of observation. It works like del.icio.us works to catalogue the web, everybody watches everybody else, dutifully tags and catalogues everything for easy searching, facilitated by the all seeing Face Book feeds and the stalkertastic Flickr photostream (my feeling here is that privacy should be the default rather than something you have to switch on, but then you’re not adding the same value to Flickr so they’re not going to do that) and Google reader. For a while now I’ve been thinking it’s getting a bit much the number fo digital cameras held aloft at gigs, people want to record everything, I suppose things like Last.fm are part of it too. Can’t remeber who said it but the following (mis?)quote has been stuck in my head for the last 6 or seven years now:

I always worried about someone holding a big database on every detail of everything I do. I never thought I’d be filling it in myself.

Distributed observation community, so web 2.0.

Goz has some typically astute reflections on the cameras at gigs thing in this ATP post***

So when I think about it I don’t find it particularly surprising that Yahoo et al. are the ones that are propping up cencorship and turning in dissidents in places like China.

*At least Big Brother pretty much guarantees that I disengage with C4 and the tabloid media for the duration of its run, can only be a good thing. Kind of reminds me of the “Why Don’t You?”. Theme tune appropriately “Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead?” . Anyway, series 2 of the INCOMPARABLY AMAZING The Wire should be arriving today so that should see us through to winter**

** Seriously, you need to watch The Wire, I keep meaning to write something about it but it’s too imense for me to deal with in any format other than a drunken pub based eulogy. Basically its about the internal politics of Baltimore PD vs a drug gang (who have a significanlty more functional organisation) and their structural pathologies.

*** My favourite bit

before Mogwai went on stage to headline Friday’s lineup, their sound engineer pointed at a couple of girls and black guy standing near the front and said: ‘Would you, you and you mind moving back a bit please. The first ten rows are reserved for white boys staring at guitar pedals.’

Thanks to James A’s recomendation I’ve been steadily inhaling episodes of the ‘re-imagined’ Battlestar Galactica over the last couple of weeks. I’m up to number 7 or 8 in series two. It’s compelling stuff (as my ridiculous viewing schedule, of 20 odd episodes and a 3 hour mini series in two weeks will testify) but not without some serious problems.

First a quick synopsis: Humans created Cylons (anthropomorphic robots with evil glowing eyes) as slaves. The Cylons rebel and there’s a war. After much carnage a truce is negotiated and the Cylons bugger off to live on their own planet. 50ish* years later the Human space fleet is mothballed and everybody seems quite happy then the Cylons attack and pretty much wipe out the population of all 12 planets inhabited by humans only 50,000 people are left alive and they all get together and run away with the only surviving battlestar (read battle ship) the antiquated Galactica which having engaged the Cylons in the original war doesn’t have any computer networks on board which are vunerable to the Cylons h4ck1ng skillz0r. A couple more things. Some of the Cylons look human now, so no one know’s who’s a Cylon and who isn’t. One of the central characters bears a good deal of responibility for the genocide. Some of the Cylons are HOTT WOMEN. OMG!

The situation is used as a jumping off point for stories about martial law, politics and religion paranoia etc. which are much more interesting than anything managed by stuff like Babylon 5, probably the series with which Galactic shares the greatest proportion of it’s sci-fi DNA. But you will remember from when I said so above, there are problems.

These problems largely fall into two catagories.
A> Bad design (visaul and ‘world design’): The universe that the characters inhabit is a bit flaky; at heart its a basic gunmetal sci-fi setting, i.e. a battle ship in space, which is fine. The details of the society don’t hang together though; it might just be my pro-enlightenment outlook but it’s hard to see how a civilization capable of incredible feats in the arena of interstellar travel could be so deeply superstitious at all levels. The feeling of artifice is amplified by a series of aesthetic details which just don’t make any sense, why would all pieces of paper (and i mean all of them from the weightiest religious tome to the most casual post it note) be octagonal? This seems particularly odd aboard the Galactica where the rest of the design is brutally functional. The coherence of the world is undermined further by the writers poor understanding of technology esp. computer networks on which large bits of the plot rely. If you’re making sci-fi a large section of your audience is likely to be highly computer literate so it seems odd that they didn’t make the effort to get this stuff right. Don’t even get me started on the arrow of apollo possibly the clumsiest MacGuffin ever devised. Also, you need a nuclear bomb to make a Cylon detector? Why? This kind of over the top stuff is never explained satisfactorily. **

B> Stupid characters: A lot of the crew of Galactica’s problems could be resolved by fairly straightforward reasoning: In what order should you test whether people are Cylons or not? Surelty the logical course of action is to do it in heirachial order as a Cylon agent would be in a position to do more damage from a position of power and reasuring people that their leaders are not cylons would seem to be a good move in terms of morale. Mind you they don’t know whether the detector actually works or not because the tests aren’t observed by anyone expect the delusional scheming Doctor (who incidentally is a rather excellend character) and any Cylon they get their hands on tends to get blown out the airlock so I guess the point is kind of irrelevant.
Further, there’s not a great deal of discussion about the state of Cylons with regard to sentience. No one really questions or examines the Cylons claims to conciousness even though it seems pretty much key to understanding their actions and motivations. Maybe this debate is being saved for later but to me it seems like there should be someone speaking up for Cylons as concious agents rather than just ‘toasters’ right from the start. Everybody is labouring under the zombic hunch which I guess plays to the societies deep rooted mystisicm but is still a bit of a shame.

Anyway, in spite of it’s flaws it’s good stuff. Even though some of the hard questions the series raises seem to be just out of reach of the writers the fact that it can raise these questions at all is testament to the quality of the show.

Also I’m a total sucker for sci-fi, if they set Last Of The Summer Wine in space I’d probably have all the box sets.

Pictures from the awesome Dylan Meconis

*i’m guessing, i can’t remmebr but it’s something like this

** Other questions

• Why don’t the humans have any kind of night vision goggles
• Why don’t Cylons have heat vision for finding people in forests deserted cities etc. ?
• Surely some kind of EMP weapon would be effective against Cylon centurions?
• Why do they need such a large press corps for a population of less than 50,000?
• How does the economy work? Everyone seems comitted to keeping a kind of capitalist status quo in place but for what? If everything is rationed and distributed centrally what value does capital have?

What with all this running I’ve been doing, I’ve not been cycling in to work recently. My knees won’t sustain two different forms of excetrcise for more than a week or so, hence I’m a full time commuter again. Things I have noticed:

• Braces (the type that hold your trousers up, not the teeth type). Mainly on girls, a bit emo perhaps but combined with tiny waistcoats as promoted by Kate Moss I fear we may be seeing a mainstream braces wearing resurgence. Perhaps it’s a subconcious response to the film This is England in which people wear braces.
• Increasing variety and complexity of Converse trainers and their various generic sub types. London is now split in to two roughly equal factions, those who wear Converse-type trainers (really they’re more of a pump/espadril than a trainer I’ve always thought) and those who don’t. You’re either with us or against us (i’m against but only by default as people with big feet look like clowns in Converse all stars). These days they’re often worn without laces, potentially dangerous on the escalators but these fashionable types don’t care for their safety and also don’t run up escalators as their ludicrously tight jeans wouldn’t allow it even if they were in a rush and it wasn’t considered the height of uncoolness to be in a rush or urgent or indeed to care about anything much at all except for small pieces of consumer electronics and Russel Brand. The embelishments on these shoes are increasing, sometimes they’re made of leather.
• As aluded to above, tight jeans continue their dominance, still worn low as if they were baggy though which is the thing I really don’t get, I mean there’s a reason for wearing baggy jeans low i.e. gravity and lack of a belt. When you’re wearing a belt (possibly white, probably fabric) and your jeans are tight enough to cut off circulation there really is no excuse. Seriosuly this tight jeans + converse look works for almost nobody (What do I know? I wear a yellow anorak, I like to think it’s maybe slightly ‘old rave’ but actually it’s proabably 100% Tinkers Rucksack, practical though), at best you look a bit ill, at worst (i.e. your a slightly overweight 30 year old man) you look ridiculous, ‘the aubergines’ I call them in my head.
• Reading fashion/ general etiquette: Harry Potter and Dan Brown seem to have died off leaving the tube reading niche open, whilst a variety of novels and non fiction books have moved in on this territory they’ve largely been crowded out by the Cambrian explosion of free ‘news’papers. There was one dedicated entirely to sport today, I have no idea if it’s any good, I can’t really judge the quality of sports writing because I can never get past the first sentence before my mind wanders off, also I didn’t pick it up. Hung over, all I could do was watch the crowds, no improvement in general manners, some very poor hand rail etiquette was observed this morning, really even the most dodering pensioner needs only a single hand hold (as an experienced traveler I need none, feet a foot and a half appart, 45 to direction of travel, sorted. Except sometimes when I end up stumbling around like a drunk), to sling your arms across the entire rush hour crowded carriage is practically a capital offence, certainly worthy of a steely glare, at least until the perpetrator looks up, at which point look away quick. No eye contact allowed.
• Good taste is the enemy of creativity
• Also of note, I have identified a sub class of fashion victim who seem to have no clue about what the fashion of the day (as dictated by magazines and the kids) actually is, they wear expensive sunglasses all the time, even underground, and T Shirts that look like their from top shop but actually might have cost quite a lot of money.The smell overpoweringly of aftershave (could be worse) and I suspect read Nuts and Esquire magazines on their summer holiday
• Myself? I wore the wrong clothes. Need to go home to get chnged before going out tonight which is a real pain. This T Shirt isn’t the colour I thought it was and I don’t like it. The yellow one which I thought I might like less I think now I actually like more.

Hi, as you probably know I’m going to try to run 10km on the 1st of July.

If you’d like to sponsor me that would be really cool and you can do so on this site here. All the money’s going to the totally amazing National Council For One Parent Families.

If you’d like to meet up afterward the race finishes by St. James’ Park and I think we’re going to go to the pub to celebrate Canada day and the smoking ban.

Once again, you can sponsor me here.

Just upgraded to the new Wordpress, having a few teethign problems which caused me to lose a whole post about going to the zoo on Sunday and animals in captivity and stuff, including a harrowing anecdote about a circus I went to when I was about 6 or 7 in Wales. Anyway the gist was (without wanting to be totally Veruca Salt) OMG! Otters! I want some in our garden!