It's Nerdsville, maaaan.

Moving Day!

2010-01-12T20:59:00.005Z

This blog has moved!

Really!

The new address is analanalanimals.blogspot.com.

Pitchfork 500: 9. Patti Smith - Rock N Roll Nggr

2010-01-12T11:41:00.000Z

Probably the most telling reaction I have to this song is the fact that my absolute favourite part is now and always has been, the bit where Lenny Kaye takes over the lead vocals.

Kaye, complier of the classic 'Nuggets,' sings with New York cool, energised in the heat of the moment but still holding some back. But not Patti Smith. Oh no, she holds nothing back and ends up trying way too hard. She oversings like a mother fucker on this track, no subtlety, nothing but pure vamping theatrics.

I imagine for a lot of people that could be the attraction for the song, how she sings it like she'll never get a second chance and if she sounds foolish, then so be it. But an ironic mullet is still a mullet, and she still sings too hard on this track, no subtlety, no holding back. Of course, holding something back makes us want it more. Which I why, fifteen, twenty years after hearing this song for the first time, I still would love to hear Lenny Kaye sing the whole thing.

And of course the subject matter is so over the top as well. Whatever her points about the oppressed, the way she frames the argument is almost eye-rolling. I mean, when John Lennon pulled that same shit with 'Woman is the Nigger of the World', it didn't work then, and it didn't really work, at least for me, with this track. Smith is going out on a limb, pushing things forward, but really, this song is just stupid. Smith was thirty-two years old when this song came out and quite frankly she should have known better. Just because someone is confronting issues, hypocrisy and prejudice, all laudable endeavours, doesn't mean that the way that it is done is any good.

But in Smith and her group's favour, the instrumental track just fucking rocks.

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-12T09:03:00.001Z

Tumbleweeds rolling,

Blowing through empty classroom -

Exam season starts.

Got a cool Hotmail story? Tell us now

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-11T14:19:00.001Z

The delight of snow,

In its white and fresh crispness,

Is getting tired.

Got a cool Hotmail story? Tell us now

Pitchfork 500: 8. Television - Marquee Moon

2010-01-11T11:38:00.000Z

I love that when the British got punk, they took a very select interpretation of it: basically, the Ramones were all they needed and wanted, and culturally that was all it took to slay Emerson, Lake and Palmer et al. And then they sold this version of punk back to the world. But Television, one of the first wave of New York punk bands, listed who played what solo on what song on their album cover; they couldn't have been farther away from British punk if they tried.

I was just critical of theTalking Head's "Psycho Killer" because of David Byrne's vocals and lyrics. But that was a song with no song beyond the vocals. In "Marquee Moon," I have no idea what the lyrics are. None at all. I have loved this song for at least fifteen years, and I have never bothered to actually figure out what it is about, what the "Marquee Moon" actually is. Because is doesn't matter. Tom Verlaine sings it like the only record ever made was the Velvets' Loaded and what he is singing doesn't matter because he sings it right. And then the soloing starts.

Generally, I hate guitar solos. And solos in general. They usually strike me as wankery. And the solos here aren't particularly great and transcendent. But they work with the song, those two intertwined repeating riffs that just keep building and building. Because Television learned more from Loaded than just how to sing, they also learned about repetition, and how repetition can equal greatness. Because the song just keeps going, and going, building and building until the 8:15 mark when all the guitars just start going up their scale and the drums get going and the song literally climaxes and we are left with a sort of blissed out guitar-as-sea-gull floating lull. And then the riffs start again, and the vocals come back. And it all starts over again.

In the original vinyl version of the song, it fades out during the lyrics, but the CD reissues add another forty seconds or so that bring the song to a proper conclusion. But I like the original and the implication that it will never end, just cycle through again and again forever.

Pitchfork 500: 7. Talking Heads - Psycho Killer

2010-01-08T11:40:00.000Z

I've never "got" the Talking Heads. A greatest hits record is mostly filler for me, and "Psycho Killer" is one of the filler tracks for me. I think it is because to me there is no song. Musically, there isn't much here, its pretty skeletal, all support for David Byrne. That's where the song is, in his vocals, in his delivery. And the song is stupid, just a series of non sequesters strung together and held together by that fact that they are next to each other. Or maybe it's the "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" and my longtime aversion to french gets in the way.

David Byrne is just one of "those" artists - if you get them, you love them, but if you don't, well, a lot of people can't get past Dylan's vocals, and I can't get past Byrne. Though having said that, I am a fan of the quirky vocalist, and I have no issue with Byrne's vocals. It's what he's singing that I can't get my head around. The almost collage aspect of the lyric, the french, the shifting perspectives, clever, I suppose, but not effective for me.

There is a brief moment in the outro, when the organ starts rocking, that the song makes an effort to be liked by me, but other than that it is as alienating to me now as it probably was to mainstream listeners back in '78.

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-08T08:52:00.001Z

A hang-dog return,

After beautiful respite -

Glorious Snow Day!

Album sales still down

2010-01-07T12:24:00.002Z

An interesting article at the Beeb proclaiming Downloads up as album sales drop (featuring a picture of Susan Boyle presumably signalling the end of the album or something) notes that for the fifth year in a row, album sales - including whole album downloads - are down, but single song sales, particularly from downloads, are way up. If you think about this date, it is pretty clear that downloads are killing the music industry. But it is the legal ones. The fact that it is now easy to buy the one or two songs you like from an album have made the rest of the album pretty disposable. For years, I've been saying "Want to increase album sales, Big Music? Then stop releasing shitty albums".

I wonder if the sale of independent artists CDs are down as much? These are artists who generally look at an album as a whole work and are selling to a market that respects the album as a whole work. I wonder what the case is there? Ever since the music industry, particularly in America, killed the single to stimulate album sales, people have been bitching about having to buy entire, shitty albums to get one or two good songs. And now they don't have to. So really, the fall in album sales is in fact a normalising of album sales, and after inflating sales through the nineties with catalogue reissues and shitty albums, Big Music is going to have to deal with the fact that they aren't nearly as likely to shift multi-multi-platinum "artists" and should maybe instead look at building sustainable careers out of gold selling artists. Like they used to.

Pitchfork 500: 6. The Ramones – Rockaway Beach

2010-01-07T11:34:00.000Z

Now part of the whole thing behind my Pitchfork 500 series is that it is about listening to these songs and reacting to them, without actually reading the book. That is a book about songs, this is a series of blog entries about listening to them. But I can't figure out why this song is in the book. I will read the book, when I'm finished listening, but this one is curious.

Not that it isn't awesome. The fact that it sounds like a cover of an early sixties song only makes it more awesome. And the theoretical original would have an awesome organ solo, you know it would. But it is a Ramones original. So, like, awesome. Taking that garage rock template and updating it with musical aggression and irony was a winning formula. And of course it is all over in barely more than two minutes.

But what is really shocking was that 'Rockaway Beach' made the book and 'Sheena is a Punk Rocker,' from the same album, didn't.

I suppose when I read the book, things may become clear, but 'Sheena...:? Damn that's good Squishy.

Courtney Love: She used to look like people

2010-01-07T11:20:00.001Z

David Cameron's giant head

2010-01-07T10:52:00.004Z

The new Tory billboard campaign annoys me on several lever. First, it is from the Tories. But if we set that aside, it bothers me because, obviously, the election hasn't been called yet. Now we all know that it is going to be called fairly shortlyish, but still: that's just not cricket.

Another thing that bothers me, in a political sense, is the fact that the billboard is putting the focus on Cameron at the expense of actually mentioning the Conservative party. Is he running for President now? Or leading his party?

But what bothers me more than that, and maybe most of all, is that I find the photo pretty creepy. If David Mitchell from Mitchell and Webb were to do an impression of a self absorbed, pompous politician that thinks he is better than you, the photo would look almost exactly like the one on the billboard. And because billboards are always above you, it puts his head into a perspective that emphasises that gigantic forehead and narrows his (controversially photoshopped) chin, making his smug visage even more like some sort of creepy alien overlord whose dead eyes are staring into your very soul. He has exactly the sort of benign smile that reads as malevolent and patronising: through the power of his stare he will make us all vote Tory! Beware! Beware!

Snow Day Delight!

2010-01-07T10:25:00.002Z

I have a snow day today, and I am very thankful for it. The drive home last night was bad; my Mini, despite how much I love it, is not equipped for driving in ice and snow.

And this morning, there was a welcome delight on the interwebs: Scott Pilgrim using a flaming sword while Gideon looks on! Excitement!

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-07T07:08:00.000Z

True beauty of snow:
glistening, falling pristine,
and closing schools!

Pitchfork 500: 5. Brian Eno – 1/1

2010-01-06T09:57:00.001Z

A really frustrating listen for me; on one hand, slightly - just slightly - too interesting to be ambient music, but at the same time not interesting enough to make me want to actually listen to it. This might be a track that suffers from the whole "active listening" experience I'm trying to create for myself. Basically, I'm trying too hard.

I'm hardly an expert on ambient music, but really the name of the genre gives the game away. As a track from the album 'Music for Airports,' 1/1 would be a nice bit of ambient music piped into an airport to calm the whole place down. I suppose it does succeed on that level, as actual "ambient" music, music designed not to actually be listened to, but felt.

Oddly, as I was listening to it, I kept expecting a narrator to enter at almost every point, with some sort of banal story about Growing Up and Coming to Terms with things. It would start, "It was the summer of my thirteenth year . . . "

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-06T08:33:00.001Z

What is the forecast?

Students silently praying,

Hoping for more snow.

Add other email accounts to Hotmail in 3 easy steps. Find out how.

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-05T13:25:00.001Z

Breath taken sharply,

Quickly, a stab to the lungs –

Gasp of frozen air.

New! Receive and respond to mail from other email accounts from within Hotmail Find out how.

Pitchfork 500: 4. Kraftwerk – Trans-Europe Express

2010-01-05T09:55:00.002Z

A while ago now, a friend of mine made me a tape of the Stooges. He was convinced of their genius, and I hadn't yet explored their discography. So I listened, with some expectation. They were, of course, seminal.

My response was very simple: I heard what they were doing, I heard the effect they clearly had on rock and roll, and I heard that there was no need to ever listen to them again. They were a seismic event that were important in their influence, but all the bands that followed them did what the Stooges were doing, but did it better and more interestingly.

I'm sure a lot of people would think blasphemy, but I feel much the same listening to 'Trans-Europe Express"; it's just not very good. It goes nowhere. It doesn't build, it doesn't progress, there isn't any actual sense of movement in the track. The synth chords are too resolved, the vocodered vocals, and the synth lead just seem like individual elements that don't work together. They are just separate elements over top of the rhythm, a rhythm that would quite frankly work better without any of Kraftwerk's additions that supposedly make the song.

The Monday Trade: Diary of a Wimpy Kid

2010-01-04T15:31:00.002Z

I became quite intrigued by this book when it kept ending up on the best selling graphic novel lists at Amazon. It's aimed squarely at kids, so I was intrigued as to what sort of book it was, what sort of introduction to comics the kids were getting. The title was very promising, and with it I suspected the book might be able to transcend its kids book origin and work for adults as well; publishing is rife with these sorts of things right now, so it was a pretty reasonable suspicion.

The reality is quite different. When a copy of the book showed up at my school, I gave it a read and was quickly disappointed.

First, it isn't a comic book. It is an illustrated novel, albeit a heavily illustrated one. One of the things that a comic book needs in order to be a comic book is that the graphics carry part of the narrative load, and in <i>Diary of a Wimpy Kid</i> the illustrations far more often than not simply illustrate. Sometimes they feature a bonus joke (and are rather cute and engaging in a barely past stick figure style), but the text is doing all the heavy lifting.

Second, it's pretty bad. Now I know I am not the target audience for this book, but in my place as an "educator," one who does read a lot of children's/teen's/what have you's books, I have some idea what I am talking about. Greg, the protagonist, is an unlikeable punk. He may be "wimpy," but he has few of the qualities associated with the sensitive and bullied. Greg is callous and conceited, and will always miss the moral of a lesson. Now, for a certain sort of kid, he is perfect, but as a likable character for those of us who are capable of being functioning members of society, he's just punchable. And after over two-hundred pages? I couldn't wait for the book to end.

The plot, as it were, is episodic over the course of the school year, as Greg gets into mischief and prankery, alienates his friend and somehow gets him back, which only goes to show his friend is actually pretty stupid. But there you go.

Now I'm going to throw <i>Diary of a Wimpy Kid</i> into my book box, and a certain subset of my reading classes are going to love it, and somehow get themselves tricked into reading a two-hundred and fourteen page book, so score a victory for accidental education. I just wish they were reading something better.

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-04T13:06:00.001Z

A welcome delight,

No more tripping over the seams –

A brand new carpet!

Use Hotmail to send and receive mail from your different email accounts. Find out how.

Pitchfork 500: 3. Lou Reed – Street Hassle

2010-01-04T09:54:00.001Z

This is simply a fantastic song; complex and ambiguous with multiple narrators and shifting perspectives, its three "movements" just build on each other and gain their power not just in and of themselves, but in their juxtaposition next to one another.

I'll admit, the 'My First String Arrangement' riff that the song is built on verges on the shear annoying. There is very little subtlety in the arrangement, built around a riff that sounds great on a guitar (as seen in the second part - and in Spacemen 3's 'Ode to Street Hassle'), but quite frankly beggar's belief in its terribleness as the song opens.

But then Lou starts singing, one of his best lyrics since the Velvet Underground days. The first section recounts the story of a woman and the trick she picks up and the good time they have together. On its own, it is alright, but the song really kicks in in the second section, where the narrative shifts, and Reed takes on the persona of a slurring junkie bummed out by the dead girl in his flat as he implores her fella to get her out. The juxtaposition next to the first section tells us that it is the same couple, but the only thing that tells us that is their proximity next to each other. The ambiguity works for the song, we're pulled in. How soon after part one does it take? The next morning, the next week, month? Are they the same characters? And who is the junkie? (As an aside, I like it when Reed takes on a different singing voice to play a character. He's hilarious in 'Songs for Drella' as Andy Warhol)

And then Bruce Springsteen shows up. He wanders through with a "rap" before Reed pops back in to conclude the song, with another narrator, one who's story shifts in the telling. At first she appears to be the dead girl, imploring her dead lover to slip away as well and join her, but by the end of the verse she seems to be the lover, begging his dead girl to come back. The shifting narrative and narrators, quite simply, works. Rather than being off putting or alienating, they pull the song together. Its a song with depth, with layers, layers that play off each other and reveal more together than apart. The song rewards multiple listenings in the way great novels and poems reveal more with each successive reading. Not a lot of rock music does that, not a lot aspires to that, and even less achieves it.

Pitchfork 500: 2. Iggy Pop – The Passenger

2010-01-03T09:53:00.002Z

Iggy Pop is less an artist than a pop cultural signifier. Recetly, he's been selling insurance in Britain, his leathered mug starring out of billboards all the way down my drive to work. On their most recent album, the Hold Steady kick it off with the awesome couplet "Me and my friends are like/The drums on 'Lust for Life'". They dug him up in the nineties to ironically duet with fellow survivor Joan Jet, crooning 'Let's Do It'. In the eighties, 'Real Wild One' got pimped out for commercials before it even seemed to get released. Or maybe its all me and in my head, but Iggy Pop as a viable musical artist seems, well, he isn't. He isn't real anymore, he's an idea, an icon, a physical representation of Madison Avenue's idea of whatever the "counter culture" stands for this month. Even in the novel 'Trainspotting,' the other characters couldn't understand Renton and Co.'s love for "Ziggy Pop", because even for them he ceased to be an artist and was an icon.

Which leads us to 'The Passenger'. I don't know what to make of it. I can hardly take Iggy seriously as having anything to say other than it is cool to be made of leather and be insured. 'The Passenger' is a decent alterna-pop song that is somehow connected to that leering purple face on my commute. Iggy Pop is a series of signifiers signifying nothing and 'The Passenger' is along for the ride. La la la la la la la.

The Prestigious Darren Album of the Year Award, 1987-2009

2010-01-03T09:32:00.004Z

Updating my list from a few years ago.

1987 U2 - The Joshua Tree / The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
1988 U2 - Rattle and Hum
1989 Prince - Batman / Tom Petty - Full Moon Fever
1990 They Might Be Giants - Flood
1991 Billy Bragg - Don't Try This At Home
1992 Rheostatics - Whale Music
1993 U2 - Zooropa
1994 Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
1995 Oasis - What's the Story (Morning Glory)
1996 Trashcan Sinatras - A Happy Pocket
1997 Yo La Tengo - I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One / The Weakerthans - Fallow
1998 Belle & Sebastian - The Boy With the Arab Strap
1999 b'ehl - Bright Eyes *
2000 The Salteens - Short Term Memories
2001 Stephen Malkmus - Stephen Malkmus **
2002 The Reindeer Section - Son of Evil Reindeer
2003 Belle & Sebastian - Dear Catastrophe Waitress
2004 Delays - Faded Seaside Glamour
2005 Bloc Party - Banquet
2006 The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America ***
2007 Arcade Fire - The Neon Bible
2008 Los Campesinos - Hold on Now, Youngster
2009 The Rural Alberta Advantage - Hometowns ****

* while Bright Eyes is actually a 2000 release, I received my copy in autumn 1999.
** best of a generally bad bunch. Regardless, miles better than the Strokes
*** I did not hear this album until late 2006 if not 2007. I had not awarded an album of the year in 2006 as no one really knocked it out of the park - lots of good albums, no great ones to my ears. Until I heard this one. So, just as Spin Magazine once famously took back its 1991 album of the year award from Teenage Fanclub and gave it to Nirvana well after the fact, I maintain that I can award this album of the year whenever I damn well please.
**** 2008 original release, 2009 wide release

So there you go. A few ties, but that's ok. I must add that these are my Albums of the Year. They aren't the best, they aren't the greatest, but they are the records that ment the most to be in those years, the albums that said the most to me about my life, in whichever way I wanted to hear it. And I love them all.

Doctor Who: What if?

2010-01-03T09:03:00.003Z

I know its unlike me, but I've been thinking about Doctor Who. Particularly, what could have been done with the series over the last year rather than the four specials.

My thinking started this way: total running time, four specials: 255 minutes. Total running time, six normal episodes: 270 minutes. A difference of fifteen minutes. What if instead of those four specials, we had a small, six episode season. But not a regular season, instead something more like Torchwood: Children of Earth, a tight six part serial. Take the themes of the past year and develop them: the Doctor becoming "Time Lord victorious," but instead of comeuppance occurring immediately, the Doctor moves closer and closer to being the Master. And then the Master shows up, or he's been lurking behind the scenes, and the Doctor's regeneration is the price for his hubris.

I obviously haven't plotted the whole thing out, because that would be silly. But just the idea of it, bringing back the themes of responsibility and morality, played out over six weeks, could have been something far more resonant than Davies' first draft bonanza of set piece/unrelated emotional moment/unrelated set piece/unrelated emotional moment. Davies at the top of his game (the best of his Who work, Casanova, T:CoE, all the things I haven't seen) is an amazing writer. He's just such a frustrating one, particularly as Who went on and there seemed to be less and less editorial interference (from the BBC in London or in Wales) and was allowed to get away with ideas that were undeserving of the show. He and JK Rowling should get together to have a good cackle about how awesome it is to not have anyone tell them what not to do.

But I suppose it is better than the Doctor spending two hours camping and hiding from the Master.

Do you hate shirts?

2010-01-02T18:05:00.007Z

Chris Cornell tweeted:

"The 12 year break is over & school is back in session. Knights of the Soundtable ride again!"

So in under 144 characters Cornell mixed his metaphors to include school, Arthurian myths, cowboys and getting his old band back together. Wow. I never liked Soundgarden before, and now I just think Cornell is kind of dumb. I mean, even more so after his last Timberland produced solo album.

Hey Chris, do you hate shirts?

Pitchfork 500: 1. David Bowie – Heroes

2010-01-02T09:51:00.002Z

This is a difficult song to start with because it is hard to have a fresh take on. I've loved this song for years; it is far and away David Bowie's best song, and might very well be in my Top Ten of all time.But despite my love for the song, I've never really been able to get any love for Bowie or get into his albums, I've always been a Bowie greatest hits kid. But when I starting to put this Pitchfork thing together, I realised for the very first time that I had never heard the album version of "Heroes".

The single version runs a perfect 3:37, but the album version runs a whole two and a half minutes longer, a completely unnecessary two and a half minutes. The length of the album version really emphasises how tight the single is, how dramatic it is. The build and tug of the song, the momentum of Eno's juddering keyboards and Robert Fripp's guitar riff work terrifically well in the short version, it is triumphantly punchy (to use a phrase I hate), but the album just keeps going. The drama of the single is deflated. It's not even a case of a "get to the working overtime part" because the song isn't a great hook and the bits waiting for it, "Heroes" is a whole package, a beginning to end of triumph and tragedy, and part of the perfection of the single version is the tightness, a dangerous spring coiled tight ever waiting to go off.

Single version:

Album version:

Geronimo!

2010-01-01T21:08:00.001Z

He's stealing my sunglasses.

'Cos he knows how cool I am.

Listening to The Pitchfork 500

2010-01-01T20:50:00.001Z

A couple of years ago, music website Pitchfork released The Pitchfork 500, a book about what they feel are the 500 greatest/best/most important/etc songs released between 1977 and 2006. The book isn't a best-of countdown thing, it's chronological list starting from the October 1977 release of David Bowie's "Heroes" and leading up to the December 2006 release of Panda Bear's "Bro's". Last year I reckoned I should give these tracks a listen, and see what I thought. Pitchfork is a music site I generally quite respect. Pitchfork, as a website, is a very polarising one, easy to hate on with cries of "hipster douchebags! Trustafarians! Brooklynites!", but like it or not, it is very much the loudest voice in the underground, and while its writers may talk shit, they know the shit they are talking about. It can often disappear up its own ass (more so in the past than today) but the quality of the writing and music journalism on the site are top notch. Its sensibilities are independent; not just indie (as we call it in Britain) but other genres and mircogenres from across the musical spectrum. It generally doesn't go in for major label stuff unless the artist has risen out of the underground, artistically part of the underground, or is a hip-hop artist. Its heart is in indie rock (in the American sense, rather than the British way of saying "the new stadium rock", and while I honestly don't understand its love affair with Animal Collective, most of the time what it has to say is well worth reading and investigating. They might be wrong in the end, but things they like are usually worth at least a listen. And judging by the list, so is the Pitchfork 500, their attempt at establishing an indie canon. So I'm going to listen.

I started typing this up last spring, but I lost momentum, as I thought I wasn't doing justice to the songs, but then on my last trip back to North America, I actually saw the book for the first time: it was wee. What I was writing was sometimes more than was actually in the book. Re-emboldened, I decided that Listening to the Pitchfork 500 was back on. And New Year's Day seems as good a day as any to start posting; this weekend aside I'm only going to post on weekdays, so this very well could last two years.

And no, I haven't read the book. I want to do this clean. My responses, uncoloured by what the book had to say.

Doctor Who: the End of Sense Part 2

2010-01-01T20:33:00.004Z

And so, after months of hand wringing, we see how the Tenth Doctor ends his adventures: with a lot of bangs, and then a lot of wimpering.

First, this episode was a game of two halves, the first resolving last week's episode, the second, the Doctor's final, dying voyage. The first half was a triumphant improvement over the mess of last week's car crash. Tight and emotional, it really made much of Part 1 pretty irrelevant, which is probably a good thing. The return of the Time Lords, led by Rassilon (!), was exciting if not needing a few more, "What's going on, Doctor?"s. The ongoing confrontations with the Master and then with Rassilon were mile ahead of last week. But then the Doctor had to jump out of a space ship some distance above the earth and fall through a skylight and survive. That was, easily, the dumbest thing in forty-seven years of Doctor Who. Since we are playing the Regeneration Game tonight, a much shorter fall from a radio telescope killed the Forth Doctor. And that was the Master's fault as well.

But the Master didn't get the Doctor this time. Instead, it was the Doctor's greatest nemesis, the thing that already killed Doctors One and Three: radiation. And here the Doctor died a slow death, wimpering and bemoaning his fate all the while. No heroic death or sacrifice, just the realisation that he has to die for Wilf. This didn't come across as particularly emotional, it was just kind of sad. Not emotionally sad, just sad like a kid who always gets picked last. Kind of.

And then the Doctor makes his final voyage, to see his "rewards": he goes and sees his old companions. Mickey and Martha are now Smith and Jones, married adventures. Donna gets married at last. Jack, apparently in Mos Eisley, meets Alonso and sexiness ensues. But the most emotional visits were to see the Granddaughter of Joan from "Human Nature" to find out if Joan had a good life. And then he sees Rose.

I know Rose is played out. I know bringing her back for the end of series four was a bit much and damaged her story. But seeing her and Jackie again, back on the Powell Estate, before she even met the Doctor, taking the series back five years, back to the beginning, and seeing Rose before it all happens for her, in the Doctor's death, Rose's beginning, and his beginning too. That was the most powerful moment for me, seeing an innocent Rose on the verge of "the trip of a lifetime".

I was disappointed Tennant didn't get to end with a big heroic moment rather than being crushed between the weights of prophecy and predestination. It was a rather "off" end for the Doctor, a moment of powerlessness that sits poorly next to the Tenth Doctor's adventures. This was a Doctor that made things happen around him, but here he doesn't cause things to happen so much as they just happen to him. It's implied that that has been Wilf's role in the universe all along, to cause this to happen, but that just seems so wrong.

But then comes the regeneration and the Eleventh Doctor's adventures begin with a damaged TARDIS and an impending crash landing. And a catch phrase: "Geronimo!" Oh dear.

So, to sum up: I really enjoyed tonight's episode, even as I was disappointed by it. Good-bye, Tenth Doctor. I'll miss you.

2009 - The Year in Review

2010-01-01T12:48:00.008Z

Album of the Year: The Rural Alberta Advantage - Hometowns

There really wasn't too much I particularly loved this year; nothing set the world on fire for me, and a lot of what I listened to was a 2008 release. In fact, my album of the year was initially released independently in 2008 but got a proper release in 2009 - though it hans't made it to Europe yet. The Rural Alberta Advantage are a Toronto based band led by an Alberta ex-pat. The songs are generally built around overdriven acoustic guitar, drums and keyboards, though some tracks have the full cello accompaniment. A lot of the songs are about being away from where you thought you belonged. It is an album of things you have (or thought you had) lost. And I like that a lot.

TV Show of the Year - The Wire

I don't care that it actually ended in 2008, it finally got a terrestrial broadcast in Britain on the BBC just this year. And it was my show of the year; I became obsessed with it. An increasingly complex story of crime in Baltimore, over sixty episodes The Wire was everything television should be: rich, engrossing, intelligent. Every season has a lot to recommend in it, but the very first season might just be perfect television.

I am barely capable of watching an entire one hour programme from beginning to end, but I could just "go to Baltimore" for hours at a time. I've never had a show that was so compelling that I couldn't stop watching it (I can also watch 30 Rock for hours at a time, but I can walk away from it at any time). Five seasons, sixty episodes, fantastic.

Film of the Year: Moon

I don't see nearly as many films as I used to. I barely make it to the cinema once a month anymore - maybe even once every two months. I think I made it to about nine this year. Last year, I went to the theatre more often than the cinema (I saw seven plays or musicals that year. That was pretty awesome). But the amount I am seeing doesn't change the fact that Moon was a great piece of cinema. I am sceptical about how much rewatching it will hold up, it might be a one view masterpiece, but less rewarding once you know all the twists. I actually chose not to buy a blu-ray of it yesterday as part of a two for £25 dealie. I was getting Inglourious Basterds and needed a second. I went with Gladiator because I hadn't seen it since it was in the cinema and I really liked it. But I still chose Moon over Tarantino's film because with Basterds is going to be highly rewatchable in most any mood, Moon is a much smarter, more fully realised character study. It might not hold up to scrutiny over and over again, but for those two hours in the cinema, it was mesmerising, and that is what film is supposed to do.

Video Game of the Year: Rock Band, and Beatles Rock Band in particular

We got Rock Band and the full drum and guitars kit for Christmas last year, and it far and away has been the game in the house. Social games are a relatively new phenomena, but the Rock Band series have just been fantastic for having like minded mates around to listen to great songs and sing and press buttons together. The career building aspect, and the customisable avatars are surprisingly engaging as well.

And as for Beatles Rock Band, with the new downloadable content, the game has changed dramatically. While playing through the Beatles career as an evenings endeavour is fun (as is setting up mic stands and having three vocalists - the two playing instruments are just singing background and if you know all the songs - like we do - you don't need to look up from your instrument), sitting down and taking forty minutes to play an entire album from beginning to end is also a blast. Right now, Abbey Road, Sgt Pepper and Rubber Soul are available and all are great fun. Even Abbey Road. That is my least favourite Beatles album, but having to play through the whole thing has made me more cognisant of the intricacies of the music and has made me hear the album in a whole new way and actually like quite a bit better.

Gig of the Year: Blur - Southend-On-Sea

This was a hard one to choose, as J. Tillman, Bon Iver, and the first time I saw the Pains of Being Pure at Heart were all very special gigs. This might be the year with the highest level of gig quality of any in recent memory. But seeing Blur in a relatively small venue, standing right at the front - wow. I was young again.

Sherlock Holmes

2009-12-30T21:19:00.003Z

When I teach the Sherlock Holmes stories to my kids, one of the first questions they have to ask is "are Holmes and Watson gay?" And it is a fair question, one that this new film makes little effort to put to bed, so to speak. Overall, the film is kind of OK, nothing that particularly insulted my intelligence but nothing that particularly engaged me. The thing that did fascinate me, however, is how close Holmes, Watson and the Holmes formula itself stayed true to the source material.

Now I am sure there is a small army of Sherlockians (or whatever) pooh-poohing the movie, possibly in the manner of Star Trek fans who were insulted that last summer's film didn't feature more people sitting around tables. But as a layfan of Holmes, I was quite impressed as to how Guy Ritchie managed to take one hundred and fifteen year old source material and make it into a contemporary adventure film.

While the film overall was not as engaging as I would like, there were still elements within the film that were particularly strong. Holmes's inner monologues as he thinks and assesses possibilities as the world moves in slow motion around him, as well as the dinner scene (if you have seen it) where the camera and sound design allow us to observe that Holmes is seeing and hearing everything around him; he can't shut himself down, he can't get his mind to slow.

Overall, Sherlock Holmes was an alright film with some very good touches that I appreciated more on an academic level than a visceral one. But Robert Downey Jr is always fun, Jude Law actually plays someone with a sense of humour, and Guy Ritchie has remembered how to direct films now that he is Madonna free.

(500) Days of Summer

2009-12-30T11:23:00.003Z

On the plane back from Egypt the other day, I watched Up and it made me cry. It was a very good film. But I also watched (500) Days of Summer, and despite it being clearly inferior to Up, it has really stuck with me.

The thing about is I honestly can't figure out why it works. It was a really engaging, enjoyable movie that has so many flaws as to be almost comic. But the movie still transcends the sum of its parts to be emotionally resonant.

In a nutshell, the movie depicts the 500 days between a greeting card writer (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meeting a girl named Summer (Zoey Deschanel), falling in love with her, being dumped by her, and getting over her. The "hook", as it were, is that the movie is non-linear - we jump back in forth in their relationship as moments resonate back and forth over time. That is quite clever and very effective.

I think the greatest flaw of the film is the non-personality of the characters. The film is built around the relationship between these two, but we learn so little about them and who they are as to almost be a joke. They are hastily sketched by pop culture references and favourite bands. The first time they talk, it is about the Smiths. Basically, she is quirky and he is enchanted, and you have seen them in all sorts of other films in the last decade and that is all you need, the film makers decide. And, you know what, that is all you need.

The film isn's so much about them as it is about their relationship. And relationships are different beasts than people. We don't need to know why he is in love with her; what matters is that he is in love with Summer. As the movie progressed, it became clear that Summer was a McGuffin, the point wasn't her, but Tom's (I had to look up the character's name) feelings for her. There have been a lot of films about "relationships," but usually they are about people having relationships. This movie really was about a relationship, and as ambiguous and non-specific as that sounds, it somehow worked. That overall, nebulous idea overcame the dramatic shifts in tone and level of realism, the unknowable characters, the twee shorthand and the scene stealing kid sister. The heart of the film worked fantastic and allowed everything else to work with it. The emotional honesty and love and pain in the film pulled the whole thing together to make a charming, engaging and at times painful film to watch.

So, rent it or watch it on a plane or a movie channel. I just needed to type my way through my thoughts. Summer is a McGuffin. There you go.

MK - Further to our discussion earlier today ...

2009-12-29T23:04:00.002Z

Doctor Who: the End of Sense Part 1

2009-12-28T21:28:00.005Z

Russell T Davies has written a lot of great episodes of Doctor Who. Like, really great - "Midnight", "Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways", "Gridlock", "The Sound of Drums". He also wrote, what is to me, the worst episode of New Who, he wrote 'New Earth,' the series two opener, an overstuffed, campy run around that barely made sense, even when squinting. And now, with 'The End of Time Part One'. Finally, after years of trying, Davies has managed to top himself with something even more terrible.

At his worst, Davies's scripts have a first draft quality where odd things seem to happen in odd places and audacious, ridiculous ideas exist for the sake of being audacious and ridiculous. The results aren't always good, but they are usually at least entertaining. Most of of Doctor Who's specials fall into this category. Only 'The Christmas Invasion' and last month's 'The Water's of Mars' are what I would call particularly good. But while rarely approaching Who at its best (or Davies at his best), the specials have at least been overblown spectacles that have their own certain charms. But finally, with part one of his swan song, Davies has managed to make Doctor Who charmless.

Right from the word go, with Timothy Dalton's rather inelegant narration about "bad dreams," "The End of Time Part One" came across as simply dire. I literally could not believe what I was watching it was so bad. Actually, that is not entirely true - Wilf in the church was actually a good scene, and then the cafe scene was fantastic - but almost every other scene was terrible. It verged on non-linear, the scene to scene movement. Wilf and the oldies - including that woman who wants to sell insurance to other oldies (now that pulled me out of the show) - seemed to be in a completely different show than the strange quasi-mystical resurrection of the Master, and then all the scenes in the industrial wasteland where the Master can now fly and has laser hands, and then the guy who plays Friar Tuck in Robin Hood shows up on auto-pilot, and the werewolf's girlfriend from 'Being Human' is a cactus alien, and none of it made sense together. And holy fuck, John Simm must have just been desperate for some mustard, because his performance was nothing but ham and cheese. Simm is a really good actor, but his Master, so sinister back in Series 3, was trying to out camp old Who's Master. I mean, the episode literally ended with a solid minute of Master laughter! I timed it! A full minute of laughing while all sorts of ridiculous Simm in a dress or a too large suit sight gags played.

And then Timothy Dalton announced that the Time Lords were coming back, which is a terrible idea, because the show is far better off without them, but whatever. By that point I was so shell shocked at what I was watching it almost didn't matter. I know this was a "Part One," but I still can't figure out what the actual plot of the episode was, other than maybe some people look for the Doctor, some people (including the Doctor) look for the Master, and then out of nowhere the Master makes the world into an Aphex Twin video, but without anyone saying, "Roll on".

This hasn't been a particularly coherent review, but it wasn't a particularly coherent episode. I really, really, really hope Part Two is better, but really, it can't get much worse.

Anal Anal Animals in the Court of King Moonracer

2009-12-21T16:42:00.003Z

OK, weather permitting - and it is not very permitting right now - I am off to Egypt to enjoy Christmas somewhere warm. But in the meantime, please, attempt to enjoy my Christmas gift to you, the Anal Anal Animals Christmas EP, In the Court of King Moonracer. King Moonracer, if you have forgotten, is the King of the Island of Misfit Toys.

You can find the EP at: http://www.sendspace.com/file/e35vug.

It is six original songs plus a reissue of the classic Kissing Time Christmas release, You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch added as a bonus track.

Haiku of the Day

2009-12-18T13:20:00.001Z

I have had enough!

I'm not going to go to work

For the next two weeks.

Add other email accounts to Hotmail in 3 easy steps. Find out how.

Haiku of the Day

2009-12-17T08:18:00.001Z

It's a basic fact:

Diagonal cut toast

Is simply the best.

New! Receive and respond to mail from other email accounts from within Hotmail Find out how.

Haiku of the Day

2009-12-16T13:28:00.000Z

Scrape frosty windows,
Blowing hands to keep them warm;
A proper winter.

New! Receive and respond to mail from other email accounts from within Hotmail Find out how.

Haiku of the Day

2009-12-14T09:30:00.001Z

Dark winter morning,

Breath appears and turns to ice -

Hanging in the air.

Have more than one Hotmail account? Link them together to easily access both.

Sunday Afternoon at Some Wholesaler

2009-12-13T20:16:00.003Z

This afternoon Mademoiselle Kitty, R-Kid and myself went on a trip to North America.

It was fantastic - giant shopping carts, giant sized packages, giant deals - this afternoon, we went to the London Costco.

North Americans, you know what I am talking about, but to the British reading this: Costco is a members only wholesale warehouse. Everything is available in bulk sized packages and containers - toilet paper comes in packages of forty-eight rolls, for example. We found a package of PG Tips that contained 1620 tea bags. Yes, sixteen hundred tea bags.

We worried that the London Costco would be a British version Costco - a cheap, tacky, decidedly inferior attempt at something similar to a Costco but missing the mark. Britain is fantastic for this sort of cultural failing. It does British things very well, but in its love affair with North America, very often when it tries to recreate North American things it misses the mark completely, bungling so many of the details. But Costco was right. It was proper.

So it was decidedly nostalgic to visit it and shop, browse around at all the dumb crap that you don't need until you see it for the first time. Like a home breathalyser kit; it would totally be fun for parties. Or a chair that you had never thought of until you see it in the aisles.

Oh, and Costco sells everything. Food. High end electronics. Toys. Clothes. Furniture. Full size backyard football nets (yes really). All available at wholesale prices, and the savings are passed on to you.

Realistically, it offers online prices in a shop. The great thing is the groceries, which are real savings, but only if you have large families, a giant freezer, or you are buying for functions or non perishable stuff. MK getting a Costco membership (she's an independent businesswoman!) is not going to really impact my life, but maybe save me some money on TP, the savings of which I will then spend on a big box of animal crackers or something, but it was an awesome afternoon and provides another oasis to battle homesickness besides TGI Fridays.

And MK did enjoy making fun of R-Kid and myself for unironically pointing out that virtually everything was "a good deal". But we are from Winnipeg.

Three Camera Sit-Coms

2009-12-13T08:15:00.004Z

I was reading Dave Baddiel's column over at The Times Online on the subject of canned laughter in sit-coms. It's a defence of it, as he rightly points out that the laugh track in by far the majority of sit-coms is via a studio audience, either watching the performances live or at a screening of the episode. I've sat in the audience for both types.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the three camera sit-com recorded in front of a live audience, and how weird it was that culturally we accept non-diegetic laughter as being part of a TV show. Yes, I know, blah blah blah single camera blah blah blah The Office and Arrested Development. But the three camera sit-com is still here, and the thing that is interesting me is that it is possibly the last to the origins of the medium and the notion of recording live performance (If we don't count Saturday Night Live in America, which actually is broadcast live). A three camera sitcom is literally a short theatrical play, complete with audience, recorded and broadcast.

TV drama long ago left these roots behind, it added the fourth wall as soon as it could, which in America was pretty quick. Live dramas, like Playhouse 90 and the like were long gone from the schedule when I was born. In Britain, it is a whole different matter, as the "live theatre" aspect of the BBC's corporate culture lingered on for decades. Its love of videotape (immediate) over film (shapable) still exists today, though with the arrival of HD, things are certainly going to change.

Interestingly, thinking about it, at least in US terms, the three camera sit-com was vanishing in the 1960's. If you think back to a lot of the memorable American sit-coms of the sixties, shows like Bewitched, Gilligan's Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, even Hogan's Heroes, these were all generally recorded on film, and while the streamlined simplicity of weekly TV production often required the vestigial lack of a fourth wall, these shows were more filmic in nature, not necessarily bound to the two sets in the studio.

I guess what really changed that was the arrival of All in the Family, which very specifically went back to the live production of the early years of television in order to create a rawer, more "honest" production. It quickly became apparent that if you wanted to appear "modern" as a sit-com, you followed this route - which on the whole is incredibly ironic, but such was the tenor of the times. Perhaps tied to this, shortly after All in the Family's debut and immediate cultural importance, CBS cancelled all of its "rural" sit-coms (and it had a lot). It replaced them with urban comedies, contemporary comedies. Compare The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres to this new generation: The Bob Newhart Show, MASH or The Mary Tyler Moore Show. While MASH was a film based series (though still containing the laugh track that this post started with), having a finger on the pulse of America meant three cameras and a live studio audience. And pretty soon, relevant or not, that was the norm. Plus, it was slightly cheaper.

I remember the first batch of single camera comedies that started showing up in the nineties, and how alien they looked and felt. They were usually short lived things on FOX where the humour was too weird even for me.

But now we're seeing another divide - three camera sit-coms are old fashioned and out of touch, and single camera ones the only source of "real" humour that doesn't appeal to your mother in Indiana. It is rather odd, perhaps, to see hipsters (myself included) trying to explain why they enjoy The Big Bang Theory despite its traditional format, it is like the Cool Kids aren't allowed to like it because it uses three cameras. That is an amusing cultural bugaboo, that a television programme can not be funny because of the staging of it. Of course staging has an impact, but to say that it simply can't be funny - well, that's just silly. But to a certain extent I think that. And so do you.

I reckon pretty soon someone is going to take the sit-com back to being live, being a short play, and all us Cool Kids will be all over that like flies on shit. "How cool, cutting edge and arty!" we'll squeal. "How honest and full of truth!" we'll proclaim.

But back to the laugh track: I guess dramas have music, sit-coms have laugh tracks. Both are there to emotionally lead the view to the place the director wants them to be. Both make little sense if you think about them. I wonder when film scores began? Certainly the theatre doesn't use music to score a play, and all the music in a musical is pretty much there to support the singing and dancing. Opera might have some actual music that isn't completely related to the song, but who was the first guy to think about sticking music non-diegtically into a filmed narrative? I guess it just seemed natural after silent films. For decades the music - played live - had been a part of the cinematic experience and part of how the stories were told - or supposed to be told. I imagine some directors were annoyed about the lack of control they had over what was being played and how well it was being played. Actually last night at dinner a friend was telling me about how he recently watched Buster Keaton's The General and the soundtrack was simply a loop of Scott Joplin's greatest hits, with no regard for matching image to music. We decided the DVD should have had an extra audio track that was just the sound of a projector running.

And so, almost one thousand words later, after saying a whole lot without ever feeling like I got to the point, I have decided it is time to eat waffles.

Haiku of the Day

2009-12-11T08:30:00.001Z

In misty morning

Shapes fade in and appear

As if from nothing.

Use Hotmail to send and receive mail from your different email accounts. Find out how.

I could star as man with back pain today

2009-12-10T13:13:00.002Z

I heart Great Britain

2009-12-07T17:26:00.002Z

Despite what you think, this is a real sentence, and not the result of some crazy random headline making web page:

A jury has cleared Prince Charles's former royal harpist of burglary while she was hooked on heroin but has found her guilty of handling stolen goods.

Read about it here.

I really love the idea that Prince Charles has a harpist on the payroll, presumably ready to play whenever he claps.

I heart the interweb

2009-12-06T14:25:00.004Z

I just got this email from a Meredith Bowman:

Hello, Steve, I’ve heard that your wife is about to give birth to your firstling and you’re going to be present at the childbirth. You know, two years ago I became a father too, but after I had seen my young wife in labor I couldn’t bring myself to make love to her for several months. So there are a few tips on how to avoid my sad experience.

Someday I dream of having a firstling, and I am going to be saving this email in case I can't make love to my lovely young wife because I saw her in labour. And we won't be having sex, not because my lovely young wife will not want to have sex because she has had a firstling forced through her vagina, a baby that is now keeping us up all hours of the night and now totally taking away all of her time and forcing a complete change to her and our priorities, but, I'm sure, because l just be the sight of having that firstling bloodily crowning that stops the sex. But I suppose, now that Meredith is a father, she should know, so it'll be best if I just hold onto this link.

Thank you internet!

...and right afterwards he flew over a shark

2009-12-03T16:44:00.000Z

Haiku of the Day

2009-12-02T09:13:00.000Z

Heaters turned to full

Trying to fight winter chill -

A losing battle.

New! Receive and respond to mail from other email accounts from within Hotmail Find out how.

Who Dat Ninja?

2009-11-29T17:40:00.003Z

I just accidentally watched some of Who's That Girl? because I thought it was Desperately Seeking Susan. I was a little surprised about how little of it I remembered until I realised it was a completely different movie. And possibly the worst movie of all time.

Awesome Linkage

2009-11-29T09:37:00.003Z

Finding discographies on teh interweb is pretty easy; some are bare bones, the product of young fans who just need to list those albums as an act of fandom, while others go into catalogue numbers of international releases. But I've never seen anything like this unique bit of Lemonheadography. It is pure awesome.

(And if you roll your mouse over the images, you can see the backs!)

Graham Coxon Power Acoustic Ensemble at the Barbican

2009-11-28T23:01:00.004Z

This was a fantastic show.

The premise was simple: Graham Coxon gets twelve of his closest friends to join him on stage to perfrom his latest album, The Spinning Top. Among those twelve are Robyn Hitchcock and Martin Carthy. I thought there would be some sort of trade off thing, an evening of everyone playing each others songs, but no, it was just The Spinning Top from beginning to end in order, with an intermission while we flipped sides. The album is one that I am not sure I have ever listened to all the way through without falling asleep, but performed live, before my very eyes, it was a revelation.

There is something extremely powerful about seeing an ensemble of very talented musicians making music in front of you. Not simply playing it, but making it, layering it, building it up until the song is far more than the sum of its parts. That is what the Graham Coxon Power Acoustic Ensemble brought to the lovely Barbican. To actually see them making and playing these songs, together, it really threw the album into sharp relief and revealed the details in the songs. And the rich, full sound of such a large band is truly a fantastic listen.

The album is still too long, though.

My Stylophone Beatbox has been posted!

2009-11-28T13:42:00.002Z

Oooh! My Stylophone Beatbox has been posted, and now I can spend the next few days asking the postman for my ~~spy camera~~ Stylophone Beatbox. Imagine: a beatbox made to sound like the shittiest synthesiser of the seventies! Could it get any better? My breath is baited!

On an unrelated note, in an act of uncommon socialness, I went out to "I Heart the 90's" at the Islington Academy last night. The ads and flyers for it prominently feature El Jarvo, Damon Aldebaran and Noeli G, but it was a very different version of the 90's inside, one with a lot more Deep Blue Something and Skee-Lo than I had experienced. It was a bit of a dissappointment. But I imagine they wouldn't get a lot of punters with the slogan, "All the shit from the 90's you have happily forgotten!". Weber and I were hoping for some serious Brit Pop action, but little luck beyond a bit of Charlatans and Happy Mondays. Oh, and the DJ played "Coffee and TV" by the Blurs, but he sped it up and turned up the bass so much the song disappeared and that isn't a great song to dance to anyways, particularly when Graham starts skronking up his solos in the outro. But it was still a good night. I just won't be going back.

And on a related note, I am seeing Ol' Graham tonight at the Barbican. Remember kids: be a Barbican, not a Barbican't.

That is all.

God Help the Girl at the 100 Club

2009-11-27T13:36:00.002Z

I should have posted this last Sunday, but things are things. Regardless, last Saturday night I went and saw Stuart Murdoch's God Help the Girl project/band/thing at the 100 Club down on Oxford Street. And it was great.

The 100 Club is both a wonderful and shitty venue. A smallish basement club with a stage along the long axis, right behind a large column. It's a bit silly, but there you go. In a lot of ways, it's like an old veteran's hall from North America. All it needs is a plastic Schlitz clock above the bar and it would be set. But it has charm, and a great, clear sound system, which is particularly useful when the club is a small concrete box.

Supporters The Pocketbooks started things off with decent but incredibly stereotypical indie pop. If there is a Platonic ideal of what a British indie pop band looks and sounds like, it must be them. But no one got hurt, and no one had a bad time, so it's all good.

So then came God Help the Girl. On stage, they were three members of Belle and Sebastian (Stuart, Stevie and Bob), plus Finlay from Teenage Fanclub on drums, a couple more Scottish indie ringers, and the three main female vocalists from the album. Things didn't look good to start with when it was plain the stage was littered with music stands featuring song lyrics and chord changes. Having seen Belle and Sebastian back in the Old Days, I was aware of the mess they could bring to the stage at times, but the crack, pro band of the post-Isobel years is what came to the fore here.

God Help the Girl is basically the vocal soundtrack to an unmade film as played by Belle and Sebastian doing their version of Girl Group music. The album itself is not as direct and immediate as the best of Girl Group stuff (hmmm…maybe they are more Cilla Black/Dusty Springfield sort of thing), and the lyrics are overly full at times, but the album is really good. Live, it sounds even better. Despite the absence of the strings that are all over the album, the show was an exciting, rocking show. The three ladies are all very appealing front women and work very well as the focus and centre of a performance. This certainly wasn't Stuart Murdoch featuring some ladies, it was the other way around; they really commanded the stage.

Sadly, this was God Help the Girl's second of only three shows, full stop. They played fifty minutes, playing highlights from the album and the 'Stills' ep, plus, very surprisingly, one new song that sounded great. With the limited touring and "projectness" of the whole thing, the new song was a real surprise, as I would love to hear more from the group in the future, because by the end of the show, they really did seem like their own group, and not just Belle and Sebastian with different singers.

Regardless, it was a great night, a great show in a great venue.

Haiku of the Day

2009-11-27T09:13:00.001Z

Holes in the classroom,

Smiling faces, left for prayer -

Celebrating Eid.

Use Hotmail to send and receive mail from your different email accounts. Find out how.

Haikus of the Last Two Days (but not today)

2009-11-26T08:48:00.001Z

24 Nov 09

Tear drops stain the page

Ink swirls in salty wetness

Words are lost like love

25 Nov 09

In the years to come

Look back with joy and warmth

Remember this day

(for Sheran on her 17^th)

New! Receive and respond to mail from other email accounts from within Hotmail Find out how.

Haiku of the Day

2009-11-23T11:52:00.001Z

Fwip fwip fwip fwip fwip -

Smeared across wet windshield,

Glow of red brake lights.

Have more than one Hotmail account? Link them together to easily access both.

Phone Call ... From the Future!

2009-11-20T07:03:00.003Z

So MK is off in Atlanta right now, getting annoyed in a university library, doing research for her doctorate. And she brought her laptop with her, so last night, we Skyped for the first time.

It was kind of weird - after the technical hitches that were of course there, there she was, sound and vision, some sort of picture phone, exactly like 2001 told us the future would be like. She showed me the t-shirt she bout me, and the crap she bought in the Urban Outfitters, I held up the cats for her to see, it was all very odd.

There was also more down time in the call. You didn't have to be talking the whole time cos you could look as well. That was kind of odd. That might have just been the wonder of it all. I was reading a David Lodge book about writing and he had a chapter on early telephone conversations in novels, and how, pardon the pun, novel they were. It is easy to forget that at one point the telephone was new, and it was the very first time you could have a conversation with someone who wasn't right there with you. We take that for granted, existence without presence, but this must have been mind blowing to the Victorians. I don't mean to imply that this was an idea that was foreign, they weren't babies, but it wasn't something that had ever been experience on planet earth before. Now everyone has multiple phones, and we spend most of our free time watching other people who aren't in the room with us do stuff on the television.

And last night I got to look at and talk to my wife, a continent and five time zones away in an Atlanta hotel room, with a picture of a sea anemone on the wall, and it was cool. Next week it will be old hat. Roll on, The Future!

Haiku of the Day

2009-11-19T09:13:00.001Z

A violent shift

In the winds of November

Stripping the trees bare

New! Receive and respond to mail from other email accounts from within Hotmail Find out how.

Haiku of the Dau

2009-11-18T09:14:00.001Z

A warm wakefulness

Duvet like a great big hug

Great start to the day

New! Receive and respond to mail from other email accounts from within Hotmail Find out how.

Haiku of the Day

2009-11-17T12:02:00.000Z

Lingering darkness -

Not leaving, sticking around

Longer each morning.

Use Hotmail to send and receive mail from your different email accounts. Find out how.

Ask and ye shalt receive...

2009-11-16T11:48:00.000Z

Working for a school, I have learned to put up with things not being perfect. Resources are never as plentiful as one would like, old stuff isn't always quickly replaced, but today I learned that sometimes asking to solve the problem can work wonders.

My classroom carpet is a total mess - covered in gum stains, held down by duct tape, just a right mess. And it needs taping down again. So I e-mailed the caretakers about it, but as a joke, I first asked for a new carpet, and if they couldn't get me one, could I get the thing taped down. So the assistent head approved a new carpet for me. Hooray!

That is all.

Use Hotmail to send and receive mail from your different email accounts. Find out how.

The Waters of Mars

2009-11-15T21:44:00.003Z

OK, I have to iron some trousers and go to bed. But first, after too long a wait, the latest Doctor Who special was fucking fantastic. It was one of those episodes that when you are watching, you know, really quickly, that you are watching something special. But then it just kept getting better.

Even the cure robot couldn't pull the story down. I was expecting a bit of a tense, scary "base under siege" story, but it was so much more, a real emotional gut punch. The characters were so finely drawn, their inevitable fate since moment one just was so much for powerful for it. And then the episode went sideways, into something far different from where it started from, and it got even more powerful.

Just a pity the whole thing is contradicted by "Father's Day" in series 1. But if you ignore that, wow. Just ... wow. Fantastic.

FACT.

2009-11-14T21:03:00.002Z

Looking cool for the ladies

2009-11-14T07:36:00.005Z

My uncle just sent me some photos of my cousin's ~~American~~ Canadian football team. My cousin is 14 and huge, a monstrous man-child, and in his armour is even biggger.

Now I know making fun of teenagers is like shooting fish in a barrel, but sometimes those fish need to be shot. In his team photo was this guy (who is not my cousin):

I imagine he was trying to look cheeky and cool, winking at the camera, but man, between thought and expression lies Special Education.

Classic Haiku of the Day

2009-11-13T08:06:00.002Z

Old fashioned beliefs

Of bad luck and ill-omen

Reappear like ghosts

(Friday, 13 Oct 2006)

Haiku of the Day

2009-11-12T09:12:00.000Z

I want my car back,

I am so sick of the train.

Gah! Stupid repairs.

View your other email accounts from your Hotmail inbox. Add them now.

Haiku of the Day

2009-11-11T08:52:00.001Z

Legs and feet aching -

Walking is not the problem,

But poor choice of shoes.

Add other email accounts to Hotmail in 3 easy steps. Find out how.

Haiku of the Day

2009-11-10T08:49:00.000Z

Getting back to work

After too many days off sick -

And Year Ten's exam.

Add other email accounts to Hotmail in 3 easy steps. Find out how.

Mad Men killed Kennedy

2009-11-08T08:47:00.006Z

SO after last week's Kennedy killing episode of Mad Men, MK and I started talking about the Kennedy assassination and all that, and she wondered, rightly so, why Mythbusters hadn't tackled the assassination as they had the moon landing (and I hate moon landing conspiracy theorists - that one is just simply ridiculous to begin with, and pretty much all of their accusations can be taken apart with Science). It turns out that while Mythbusters hadn't done it yet, other folks at the Discovery Channel had.

Like most people, I had been working on the assumption that there was some sort of conspiracy that day in Dallas and assassin Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone (and did he really go by three names? Or was he just Lee?). Everyone knows that, right? At least 70% of people do. The real bone of contention is that three shots were fired, one missed, one hit Kennedy and continued going into fellow passenger, Texas Gov Connally,and another hit Kennedy in the head, killing him. Conspiracy theorists point out the the middle bullet, the "magic bullet" that they claim couldn't have hit both Kennedy and Connally at the angles it did, did the damage it did, and still be recovered intact. Except the Discovery Channel special "Unsolved History: JFK — Beyond the Magic Bullet" showed that it could.

I'm not going to rehash it all, go over to wikipedia to do that and it read it in the nicely balanced articles over there, but it seems that if you accept the "magic bullet" as just being ballistics at work, everything falls apart for the conspiracy theorists. All of the impartial science, as best can be reckoned as CSI wasn't there that day, pretty clearly puts one shooter in the Book Depository. Most everything else is based on testimony, and one thing thirty-seven years on this earth has taught me is that a lot of people have very different interpretations of the world and what is going on. If we just look at the witnesses to the shooting, some did hear four shots. One guy heard eight. A number heard one. But most heard three. But still a fair percentage heard a different number. Because that is just how people are, and our minds are fantastic things. Extrapolate that, and all sorts of things can happen.

Additionally, I was kind of surprised that with the Kennedy Conspiracy, there was no one "leading candidate" to be behind it. The "commies". The Mob. Big Business. The Klan. Castro. The CIA. Lyndon Johnson. Pretty much the entire political spectrum right to left was covered, and every other bogey man threatening America's stability at the time. Pick any terror that kept people awake at night in the early 60's and you can connect them to the assassination. Had it occurred six months later, I'm pretty sure someone would have written a book blaming the Beatles somehow. Fucking Ringo. That's not even his real name.

From the looks of things, for me at least, Occam's razor seems to be saying that Lee Oswald killed Kennedy and he acted alone while doing so. Science seems to support this. Everything else seems to be just imagined from three puffs of smoke from a nation trying to make sense out of something horrible happening during horrible times. It's in our nature to try to see patterns, and sometimes they just aren't there. The police and FBI investigation was not particularly thorough, mainly because it was so straightforward, and in all the gaps in the reports have been filled by the imagination.

And that is what I did with my Sunday morning. Now I am going to build an IKEA bookcase.

Just a note...

2009-11-07T12:26:00.002Z

I have avery large ipod - a 160gb monstrosity that was taken off the market for being too much ipod for the common man. Suffice to say, there is a lot on that sucker that I haven't fully gotten a chance to listen to yet. So when on a quick scan through of Jackson 5 songs, I noticed they did a version of 'Doctor My Eyes,' I got so excited I almost exploded. Sadly, it was just their neighbour Jackson Browne's original, but for a brief moment, I was rather embarrassingly excited.

That is all.

TEH ALBUMS OF THE DECADE!!!

2009-11-07T08:37:00.004Z

Right now it seems the blogosphere is winding down for Christmas by beginning the ______________ of the decade lists.

I too, will be providing this.

Next year, WHEN THE FIRST DECADE OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY IS OVER.

I thought having the year end in "10" would give this one away. I sat by when everyone got the end of the millennium wrong, because that was all about the numbers changing, same with the eighties and nineties and stuff, but here, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, this should be the one that we obviously get right. I mean, one to ten, ten years, pretty straight forward. If we aren't going to do that, why not have your _____________ of the decade be from 1994-2003? That's ten years.

IF YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE IT A "DECADE", THEN FUCKING DO IT RIGHT.

You can either choose to be ignorant, or be right and annoying. And I can not choose ignorance.

Lists to follow next year.

Haiku of the Day

2009-11-05T12:32:00.000Z

Wanting it over,

Coughing and sneezing all day -

Sick of being sick.

New Windows 7: Simplify what you do everyday. Find the right PC for you.

Haiku of the Day

2009-11-04T08:32:00.000Z

Colds of November

Taking their horrible toll:

Runny nose and coughs.

New Windows 7: Find the right PC for you. Learn more.

Haiku of the Day

2009-11-02T08:44:00.001Z

Ah! First day back -
Only thirty-five school days
Until Christmas break.

New Windows 7: Simplify what you do everyday. Find the right PC for you.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-30T21:15:00.000Z

Stunned by the beauty,
The most gorgeous in Europe -
The lovely Stockholm.

Download Messenger onto your mobile for free. Learn more.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-29T20:31:00.000Z

Another box tick'd -
Swedish meatballs in Sweden;
Best I ever had.

New Windows 7: Find the right PC for you. Learn more.

Doctor Who is on Sarah Jane tomorrow!

2009-10-28T16:49:00.003Z

And I will be in Sweden for it. Thank you Sky+!

But it is photos like these:

I can not wait for the Matt Smith era to begin. Those gurns. Ugh. But then I watch Tennant move and speak, and man, I just wish he could go on forever.

Tanka of the Day

2009-10-28T16:46:00.002Z

Autumn leaves falling,
Tumbling like a golden rain
Under a warm sun.

In a certain dusky glow
Warm faces and long shadows.

(If you can't figure out what a tanka is, you can read about them here)

Ebay

2009-10-27T11:46:00.002Z

So the time has come when MK and I try to get rid of some of the crap in our flat, and Ebay seemed the way to go. However, they have revised their rules, so that you can no longer charge for postage on books, DVDs and CDs because all the on line retailers have free postage. The difference is that I don't want to just sell my crap like I am a bleeding store, I want to Ebay my stuff, which means have an auction and let the market decide what all of these books are worth: ie, not much.

Now if I put my stuff up for auction and start it at 99p or less, the only charge is what Ebay takes off the winning bid, which is fair. Now I don't imagine many of our books selling for any more than 99p, but if I have to eat the postage, then I am losing money on each transaction, and if I start the auction at more than 99p, to ensure postage is covered, I have to pay 15p wether the item sells or not. All of this seems like a nice bit of cash grab on the part of Mr. Ebay.

Of course at the root of this is the fact that Ebay has changed from an online auction site to a "buy it now" second hand junk store, it's just another online retailer where prices are set and there is no fun left and few deals to be had. And it means that we have a whole pile of books that are going to go to a charity shop rather than making any money back on them, which is disappointing but ultimately far easier, I suppose.

The Monday Trade - Legion of Three Worlds (plus bonus haiku!)

2009-10-26T14:32:00.005Z

What more could I want?
Enjoying a nerdgasm -
Three Brainiac Fives!

Actually, the correct title for this guy is Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds but since it a) ended months after Final Crisis; and b) does not have a single thing to do with Final Crisis in any way measurable, I'll just keep the the title up top the way it is. Now, fortunately, I was reading this because of the Legion of Super-Heroes, not because of Final Crisis, but I really have to wonder how many fans felt ripped off by buying a tie in comic that didn't tie into the comic is was supposed to tie into. Actually, I'm sure they just sighed and thought, "Par for the course," so there you go.

Even though I am a trade waiter, I was eagerly downloading each seemingly quarterly issue of this comic when it came out, and I enjoyed it immensely, but put it all together between two covers and Legion of Three Worlds is just a tremendously fun read. After about thirty pages of warm up, the following one hundred and fifty pages or so are pretty much just various members of the Legion of Super-Heroes punching/being punched by the Legion of Super-Villains. Actually that does the comic a tremendous disservice, it makes it sound like there is no plot - there is plot, and lots of it - but the plot goes on while all the punching is happening. I am not actually a fan of comics mainly made up of punching, but here writer Geoff Johns and penciller George Perez pull it off.

The plot, at its most basic level, is that evil Superboy-Prime has been thrown through time and breaks the entire Legion of Super-Villains out of prison to destroy the legacy of Superman. The Legion of Super-Heroes, depleted in numbers after the events of the Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes collection, summons help from two parallel world Legions. Punching ensues. If you have to ask any questions about what any of that plot means, or who these characters are, this is probably not for you. It is exactly the sort of continuity heavy super-hero comic that is dominating Marvel and DC right now, and while it works for fans of the genre and the companies, it is the sort of thing that is helping to increasingly marginalise super-hero comics from potential fans.

Johns actually does a good job of explaining the key points of character and premise, and does so in a relatively sensible manner - while the opening in the Superman Museum of 3009 is a little on the cute side, it is effective, though most of the other bits of narrative sense-making are integrated flawlessly into the text. In fact, this would very much be the sort of story that one could point to when showing how continuity need not be a bugbear to new readers, if it wasn't for the fact that despite helpful writing to get across everything you need to know about what you are reading, the emotional heart of the story is pretty much entirely based around the readers emotional reactions to characters that are appearing in the story for the first time, so all of the careful world building falls apart when much of the story is based around the shock, emotional reveals regarding characters that the reader has no idea how they are supposed to care about. It is a weird conundrum. The book is written to be new reader friendly, but the actual story (rather than the narrative style) is rather exclusionary. I think this really highlights that the problem with mainstream super-hero comics isn't with excessive continuity, it is relying on past stories for an emotional centre to these new stories, rather than building something new out of these old parts.

Which, quite honestly, is something that is a bit academic in this review, because I know who all the characters are and got to have nice emotional reactions to the shock revelations and returns. And as such, I loved this comic.

Since the last, flawed attempt at reviving the Legion of Super-Heroes, Geoff Johns has spurred DC editorial to just go back and revive the original Legion, and over the course of two previous collections, JLA/JSA: The Lightning Saga and Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes, Johns has done a great job of reintroducing them to the present day DC Universe and establishing their place at the core of the Universe. As a reader, these three "Event" stories were far more entertaining and more engrossing than the regular Legion title that limped to a close just prior to the beginning of The Legion of Three Worlds. Additionally, the inclusion of Superman, Flash and Green Lantern mythology into the recent volume has really made the series seem "important" as a comic.

All of which is me tap dancing around the fact that as a long-time Legion fan, I really enjoyed the comic. Without the endless delays and the at times eye rolling last page reveals, the collected comic as a whole hangs together remarkably well, and only once really falls into the "previously, in this book you are reading right now" syndrome that often effects trade collections. As super-hero comics go, it was a lot of fun; as "event" comics go, a lot of "important" things happened in it, even if none of them related to the series it was supposedly tying into. The story is a lot of fun, the art is great, seeing old, lost to continuity Legions were great, seeing the original Legion back in action was great, and seeing three Brainiac 5s interacting and arguing was fantastic.

So, to sum up: a meandering review of a very enjoyable comic. More please!

The Wisdom of Admiral Ackbar

2009-10-25T06:37:00.003Z

So I'm having this dream last night, and it is pretty awesome because it is a Star Wars dream. I won't go into details, because it was a dream and it is all fading, but suffice to say it involved the Rebels luring the Empire to the Rebel's Death Star - which was remarkably like a toy GI Joe base, but making the Empire think the Rebels were taking time out to have some sort of Space Olympics. Of course it was a trap, which prompted Admiral Ackbar, who knows traps, to proclaim:

"When you expect corn and rice, what you see is corn and rice."

Pardon me, but WTF?

Later on, when the Empire had been successfully lured into this trap, Luke and his team are on the Empire Death Star, trying to plant the explosives to blow it up, when he and Vader come face to face! However, their lightsabers aren't working; they soon realise that the Force doesn't want them to fight - yet. So then they make polite small talk and chit chat, which ends when Luke proclaims:

"Well, I gotta get going. I have to blow up your Death Star".

I love my dreams.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-23T15:00:00.001+01:00

This year's reunion,
Be it sidewalk or concrete;
I have my tickets.

Chat to your friends for free on selected mobiles. Learn more.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-22T09:14:00.001+01:00

A big enough stink -

I don't know if you had heard:

It's Bonnie's birthday.

Download Messenger onto your mobile for free. Learn more.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-21T09:06:00.001+01:00

Wait for tomorrow

A long twenty-four hours

And Bonnie's birthday.

Stay in touch with your friends through Messenger on your mobile. Learn more.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-20T07:59:00.001+01:00

Nine short years ago,

In a castle in Scotland -

A beautiful day.

Did you know you can get Messenger on your mobile? Learn more.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-19T08:23:00.001+01:00

While the desks are clean,

The price is that smell - oh no!

A terrible stink!

Chat to your friends for free on selected mobiles. Learn more.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-15T13:34:00.001+01:00

Thirty minute lie in

Adds twenty more to my drive

Not really worth it

Stay in touch with your friends through Messenger on your mobile. Learn more.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-14T07:58:00.001+01:00

Morning comes early;

Bolt rattling in the door frame,

Cats want to get in.

Chat to your friends for free on selected mobiles. Learn more.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-13T09:07:00.002+01:00

Bonnie asked for help -

Color Purple confusion,

Who is Sophia?

Dear the ghost of Michael Jackson

2009-10-12T17:50:00.002+01:00

Dear Michael Jackson. I have heard your new song. It is pretty good. However I think it could be greatly improved if you came back from the dead and added a chorus.

Yours sincerely,

Darren K

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-12T10:34:00.002+01:00

Cold air hits the lungs,

Awakens and refreshes -

Makes you feel alive.

Mountain Goats and Hitchcon

2009-10-11T18:48:00.003+01:00

It was a busy weekend - Saturday night saw a trip to Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank to see the Mountain Goats, and Sunday afternoon saw a return trip to the Hall's larger neighbour, Royal Festival Hall for a live reading of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy scripts by the surviving original cast.

I had been more than excited about the Mountain Goats gig - it was to be a solo show by main Goat John Darnielle, just him and his guitar (and piano), just like the old Mountain Goat days, when he recorded everything on a ghetto blaster, before he decided to make it real and get a band and real label. His new album, The Life Of The World To Come, is great, despite it being his eighteenth (more or less, depending on how you reckon it) full length (plus an extra billion side projects, singles and eps). His formula stays the same - idiosyncratic lyrics, often with no chorus, sung in a voice that is either awesome or annoying, accompanied by strummed acoustic guitar - or maybe a bit of piano - and a light, tasteful application of bass and drums (played by Superchunk's Jon Wurster). Suffice to say, he has a large catalogue, and while I am a fan, there is a vastness to it that I have not yet been able to get my head around.

Darnielle is a very personable host, an easygoing performer with a strong rapport with his audience. It was my first time seeing him and I really enjoyed the show. He played a lot of the new album and a lot of older songs, including concluding with my third favourite song of all time, 'The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,' a sadly powerful song about crushed dreams.

John Darnielle's rather oblique approach to songwriting, often full of odd signifiers that only make sense to Darniele himself, often work best on an emotional level, rather than a literal one, and often repeated listenings are required to really make the song resonate. Playing in the large, impersonal vastness like the QEH, and playing a lot of new or unfamiliar songs, didn't help the show. It was good, and I did very much enjoy it, but I look forward to seeing the Mountain Goats again in a place better suited to one man and his guitar, and promoting a record slightly older than less than a week.

And then Sunday saw Hichcon '09, a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of Douglas Adams's seminal The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Eoin Colfer's new sixth Hitchhiker book was getting the big push over the weekend, but I avoided that as best I could. The original five book trilogy was already two if not three books too long, and a sixth, without even being written by the deceased Adams, is pretty much surplus to requirements. But this being the twenty-first century, it was going to get published regardless of what I felt, so there you go. Colfer seems like a nice man, I hope it is good.

Anyway, the thing I went down for was a live reading of Hitchhiker radio scripts by the surviving original cast, Andrew Sachs, and Harry Bloody Shearer. And it was fantastic. If any of you had the misfortune to see Old John Cleese and Old Michael Palin perform the Dead Parrot sketch on SNL in the 90's, I can assure you this was nothing at all like that tragedy. The performances were lively and spirited, and the sound effects were performed live on stage. For a bunch of old men standing around in front of microphones, it was a terrifically enjoyable performance. A lot of the original series was performed before heading into the scripts adapted from the later books after Adam's death. It didn't always make a huge amount of sense, but by the end, it actually tied itself together nicely and in its own way explained the differences between the original radio series, the lp rerecording, the book, the TV version, the video game, the comic book and the movie. It was actually a rather sweet ending that may or may not have been buried in one of the later books that I can barely remember, but I won't go spoiling it as the evening was recorded for future broadcast/release.

Simon Jones was resplendent in Arthur Dent's dressing gown, and Mark Wing-Davey's Zaphod Beeblebrox was accompanied by another performer standing behind him all night with Zaphod's extra head on a stick and an arm to add for the Big Zee's third arm. Stephen Moore's Marvin was perhaps the star of the night, as Moore shuffled about the stage in character, often late to his mark, seemingly on purpose as he had total control of the rest of the performance, one can only assume the physical aspect was purposeful.

And then Harry Shearer showed up as Slartibartbast. In some of the voice over parts, I though I recognised his voice, but doubted it was him, but then this Harry Shearer looking guy shows up on stage, and Wow. Harry Shearer. One of Spinal Tap, one of the Simpsons. Wow. Sure, Arthur Dent was standing in front of me, but he was talking to Mr. Burns!

But it was a lot of fun. And they cocked up, regularly, which is always fun. And one of the mice told the audience to "Fuck off," so there you go!

Cilla Black on Thank Your Lucky Stars

2009-10-10T09:25:00.003+01:00

So last night I was watching a DVD of old Beatles TV appearances, like you do, and I was watching a special Merseyside edition of Thank Your Lucky Stars as hosted by Brian Matthews, who looks nothing like I imagined him too. This was a full broadcast, not just with the Beatles, so it has all sorts of other acts on the programme, which is great, but Cilla Black was on it too. All I could do was laugh at her lurching performance. Her elbows seem to be bonded to her body and her waist only pivots forward, there is no side to side. Cilla is dancing like a poorly articulated Barbie doll in a fright wig. It was such a sight to behold, I have to share:

Stargate Universe

2009-10-10T06:06:00.005+01:00

OK, because the batteries in the TV remote were dead, I couldn't change the picture size to match old skool American aspect ratio, so I didn't watch the TV I planned to watch on our Sky+ box last night (Daily Show, crapload of series 5 of The Wire), so I wandered into the Anytime TV section of the box to see if anything there struck my fancy. And I ended up watching Stargate Universe. And it didn't suck!

Actually, it was quite good. Well, it started quite good and ended pretty good, but the key word in there is "good", which is not something I expected from a Stargate show. I am a big fan of the movie (though not nearly as much as MK), but I tried watching the show but could not as it was terrible. It was exactly the sort of cheap looking uniform based quasi military American Sci Fi blight that I couldn't stand (but oddly, my mom loves). It was so American. I mean, look at Primeval: not a particularly good show, but if it was American, I can guarantee you that everyone would have a uniform and there would only be one eccentric scientist instead of a bunch and the lone military guy would be far more important and there would be more of him. Fortunatly British SF always goes for the eccentric over the military. But that sort of cultural distinction is not really here or there, when this is a quick blog post supposedly about actually enjoying a Stargate show.

I had heard that this Stargate was going to be "grittier" (aka, more like Battlestar Galactica), which is really not a thing I particularly go for, but it had to be better than the bad camp of the eleventy other Stargate shows. It started well, with lots of shaky cam, a sure sign of serious television, and then military people and people in real clothes shouting at each other. And then the flash backs started!

It was very clear that Lost played a big role in the aesthetic and structure of the show. The flashbacks grew far less important as the opening two-parter went along, but it was pretty clear that the programme makers were hanging out their shingle: this was going to be a modern, twenty-first century adventure show, not the dated hangover from nineties television that wast the rest of the Stargate shows. The set up for the plot is a bit convoluted when you write it all out, but the bottom line is that for a series of complicated reasons, a bunch of people are stuck on a spaceship in another galaxy and trying to figure out a way home. The cast is a mix of boring uniforms, eccentric scientists - including Robert Carlyle, the should have been Doctor Who - and people in suits. In a lot of ways, it kind of seems like the idea was to put the idea of the cast of Lost into Star Trek Voyager and hope it turns out more like the former than the later.

So far, after the two part episode I watched, the show already is showing its shitty, telegraphed Star Gate plots, but is doing a good job with the mix of characters and personalities. In the second half of the pilot, an obvious character makes an obvious sacrifice, and it was so telegraphed as to very on the eye rolling. But they are getting the mix of characters right, and they are reasonably interesting. Carlyle is spikey, but he carries such an on screen charisma with him that he dominates the show. There is a military lieutenant that is in over his depth and trying to keep it together, and a brilliant slacker nerd that left his mom's basement just two days earlier. They were the three main characters in the opener, but the "support" characters clearly have enough oomph to them - or at least their opening set up (the soldier with a past, the senator's daughter, the medic who wasn't supposed to be there - no prizes for originality, but still very watchable) - that the show just might be worth watching. I'm going to keep with it, but we'll see. I'm hopeful on this one.

The biggest worry I have about the show is that for the majority of the opener, the military commander was injured and out of the picture, but by the end he was ok again and back in charge, and the drama got a lot less dramatic because "dad" arrived and started making people get their shit together. It was a worrying sign that the show might slip into the military sci fi zone that I hate. I was enjoying the conflicts, and kind of took that out of the equation some what. So we'll see.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-10T05:58:00.003+01:00

No weekend haikus
It is a school week thing
So I get time off

I've been writing a haiku more or less every school day for a few years now - I have a file on my school computer with nearly three hundred of them. I like haikus because they are easy to write, but still have a nice set of rules to guide you. They are fun to teach and students really like writing them too; even the least able are able to write a serviceable haiku. I know they are supposed to be about nature, but they are also supposed to be written in Japanese, so there you go.

Now that Blogger has introduced (and I have noticed) e-mail posting, I reckoned I might as well start sharing my haiku's because it is pretty simple to make happen. So there we go. This isn't some new thing I'm doing, it's just new to sharing.

Oh, and I should note, that many of the haiku's I write are school based or directly related to events at school. If anyone has an opinion, I would like to know if you are interested in haikus about exam timetables, or should I just keep those on my white board?

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-09T18:59:00.001+01:00

I'm out of practise.
Only one glass of red wine -
Ass getting kicked.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-08T08:23:00.001+01:00

Morning crashing in

Like a cruel, jack-booted thug

Kicking in your door

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-07T13:56:00.003+01:00

In morning darkness,
A remarkable trip in -
Catching all the green.

New Doctor Who logo

2009-10-06T13:28:00.005+01:00

I'm really keen on the new Doctor Who logo(s) announced this morning. There is a cool retroness to it, while still seeming pretty contemporary. Plus it is blue, my favourite colour, rather than orange, my least favourite. FACT.

I've really disliked the taxicab logo that the show has sported since its revival, but one thing it did do was really take advantage of the aspect ration of the show. The sqaure blockiness of the new one works as a work of graphic design, but I am curious as to how they will make it work on screen.

Additionally, photos are now all over the internet of the current filming of Matt Smith's regeneration story, which is being recorded out of order. I'm remote posting from school via e-mail, and I'm not sure how to stick in a picture yet, but I'll sort it out. They are easy to find. Anyway, they feature Matt Smith in the tattered remains of David Tennant's suit - which looks quite good on him - and Karen Gillan's Amy Pond who is apparently a copper with fantastic legs. Fantastic. Legs.

Hysan, I think you should go here.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-06T08:53:00.002+01:00

Drizzly morning -
Autumn rain chills to the bone,
Never getting warm.

Haiku of the Day

2009-10-05T07:59:00.001+01:00

December's cloak
Wrapping tighter each morning -
In the headlamp glow.

The first twenty seconds of this clip absolutely freak me out.

2009-09-28T19:25:00.001+01:00

Freaked completely out.

It's Nerdsville, maaaan.

Moving Day!

Pitchfork 500: 9. Patti Smith - Rock N Roll N*gg*r

Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Day

Pitchfork 500: 8. Television - Marquee Moon

Pitchfork 500: 7. Talking Heads - Psycho Killer

Haiku of the Day

Album sales still down

Pitchfork 500: 6. The Ramones – Rockaway Beach

Courtney Love: She used to look like people

David Cameron's giant head

Snow Day Delight!

Haiku of the Day

Pitchfork 500: 5. Brian Eno – 1/1

Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Day

Pitchfork 500: 4. Kraftwerk – Trans-Europe Express

The Monday Trade: Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Haiku of the Day

Pitchfork 500: 3. Lou Reed – Street Hassle

Pitchfork 500: 2. Iggy Pop – The Passenger

The Prestigious Darren Album of the Year Award, 1987-2009

Doctor Who: What if?

Do you hate shirts?

Pitchfork 500: 1. David Bowie – Heroes

Geronimo!

Listening to The Pitchfork 500

Doctor Who: the End of Sense Part 2

2009 - The Year in Review

Sherlock Holmes

(500) Days of Summer

MK - Further to our discussion earlier today ...

Doctor Who: the End of Sense Part 1

Anal Anal Animals in the Court of King Moonracer

Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Day

Sunday Afternoon at Some Wholesaler

Three Camera Sit-Coms

Haiku of the Day

I could star as man with back pain today

I heart Great Britain

I heart the interweb

...and right afterwards he flew over a shark

Haiku of the Day

Who Dat Ninja?

Awesome Linkage

Graham Coxon Power Acoustic Ensemble at the Barbican

My Stylophone Beatbox has been posted!

God Help the Girl at the 100 Club

Haiku of the Day

Haikus of the Last Two Days (but not today)

Haiku of the Day

Phone Call ... From the Future!

Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Dau

Haiku of the Day

Ask and ye shalt receive...

The Waters of Mars

FACT.

Looking cool for the ladies

Classic Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Day

Mad Men killed Kennedy

Just a note...

TEH ALBUMS OF THE DECADE!!!

Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Day

Doctor Who is on Sarah Jane tomorrow!

Tanka of the Day

Ebay

The Monday Trade - Legion of Three Worlds (plus bonus haiku!)

The Wisdom of Admiral Ackbar

Pitchfork 500: 9. Patti Smith - Rock N Roll Nggr