Thursday, September 30, 2010
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Monday, September 27, 2010
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Goodbye, 'Star Wars', hello, Florence
From Alex James of Blur…this is his weekly column, second time featured on the blog...love his writing style.....I like this one, so many parts I kinda relate to…minus the 7 kids….but I did have trouble finding a spot in the fridge for my tall cans of Ukrainian beer with just one kid.
There has been just one CD in the car CD player for the past two and a half years. I've got about a million songs in my phone but I like listening to music in the car, and in the car there is a choice of just 14 songs. That seems to be enough.
I suppose they are like friends, songs, and you can't have more than a certain number of them at any one time. The compilation is a crazy selection because they are all songs that were chosen by a three-year-old for his fourth birthday party. There's the Star Wars music and the Doctor Who theme. Then there's "Since You've Been Gone" by Rainbow and a taste of Clarence "Frogman" Henry's swinging blues. I particularly like Susan Fassbender's marching song "Twilight Café".
It is proof positive that there are only three kinds of music: good music, indifferent music and bad music, and they exist in all genres. My favourite moment of the week is starting the engine on a Saturday and watching all the kids go bonkers in the back as "Falling Trees", a Bad Lieutenant B-side, kicks in. That's always the first thing we listen to.
Well, I needed to go somewhere yesterday and I reached for the music and someone had changed it. There was a Florence and the Machine CD in there instead. Three tracks I'd written and recorded here with her, looking at the date on the CD, three years ago this week.
I've watched Florence's rise to fame since then with delight. She was obviously a star but I'd forgotten how good at singing she was. That was one of those sessions where you just stand back and watch. I was banging away on a Gibson 335. I knew it was brilliant at the time but one song in particular was never finished, there wasn't even any bass on it. It's like listening to Aretha Franklin. My God, it's utterly brilliant. Maybe it's the time of year. Is it just me or does music sound better in autumn?
With five children, it's like Christmas every mealtime
I have five children under six. One is still really small but it's starting to sink in that we need seven of everything. Seven. Seven people sitting down to breakfast lunch and dinner. It's like doing Christmas every day. All washing-up and no presents.
On Fridays the fridge is so full I have to excavate my kippers from somewhere behind the bacon and the lemons and then fit it all back together in there. It's like a cross between Jenga and a jigsaw. By the end of Saturday the fridge is always empty and we need to go shopping again.
It's actually quite satisfying the way everything gets slurped up. Not much gets thrown away but we're way off the kitchen scales. We need the bathroom ones. For this reason, one of my delights is shopping for industrial catering and cleaning equipment on eBay. Really, this is nothing new.
In days gone by, country-dwelling pioneering types all had 12 children and were able to mail-order a mind-boggling amount of stuff from catalogues. Although eBay does mean I'm more likely to take a punt on slightly ridiculous second-hand stuff that I would never buy new.
I got the nine-bird rotisserie oven for 300 quid. I haven't been so excited about anything since I was seven. I bought a one-chicken rotisserie on eBay a while back and I can't cook a chicken any other way now.
The trouble is, one chicken just doesn't touch the sides around here. If you're going to cook chicken here, it's best to cook about three, just to be safe. I phoned the seller to arrange collection and she asked me if I wanted a walk-in fridge for £600. Couldn't believe it. Just what I was after.
Fairy-tale enchantment in a humble English hedge
As I picked the last of the peaches yesterday, always the event that marks the end of the summer, it occurred to me that there has never been a prettier August. I caught sight of the combine bringing the wheat in from the top field and shot up there on the quad. I wanted to ask the contractor if I could keep a few tons for feeding chickens, pheasants, children and so on. The dog followed me until he saw a deer, then he disappeared.
I jumped off the quad bike to watch the combine, chewing an ear of corn and staring, eventually, at nothing, as yokel types and horses are wont to. It's quite tasty, wheat – nutty, milky and sweet. Then I realised I'd become completely absorbed in a hedge. I must have been staring at it for ages. In a garden in a town, a hedge is one thing but this was another thing, something from a fairy tale.
Overgrown to 12ft tall and all the better for it: the more I looked, the more I saw. There were rosehips, blackberries, sloes and crab apples, which are actually tastier than garden apples but a bit too chewy – a feast for the eyes rather than the tastebuds. Prettier than Christmas Day, it was. A humble overgrown hedge. Not one of the things people come to the Cotswolds and pay money and stand in queues and fight for parking spaces over but if I had to choose the most spectacular thing I've seen all year, it would be that hedge: the backbone of the English countryside. Where are the crowds? September is always the best month.
I suppose they are like friends, songs, and you can't have more than a certain number of them at any one time. The compilation is a crazy selection because they are all songs that were chosen by a three-year-old for his fourth birthday party. There's the Star Wars music and the Doctor Who theme. Then there's "Since You've Been Gone" by Rainbow and a taste of Clarence "Frogman" Henry's swinging blues. I particularly like Susan Fassbender's marching song "Twilight Café".
It is proof positive that there are only three kinds of music: good music, indifferent music and bad music, and they exist in all genres. My favourite moment of the week is starting the engine on a Saturday and watching all the kids go bonkers in the back as "Falling Trees", a Bad Lieutenant B-side, kicks in. That's always the first thing we listen to.
Well, I needed to go somewhere yesterday and I reached for the music and someone had changed it. There was a Florence and the Machine CD in there instead. Three tracks I'd written and recorded here with her, looking at the date on the CD, three years ago this week.
I've watched Florence's rise to fame since then with delight. She was obviously a star but I'd forgotten how good at singing she was. That was one of those sessions where you just stand back and watch. I was banging away on a Gibson 335. I knew it was brilliant at the time but one song in particular was never finished, there wasn't even any bass on it. It's like listening to Aretha Franklin. My God, it's utterly brilliant. Maybe it's the time of year. Is it just me or does music sound better in autumn?
With five children, it's like Christmas every mealtime
I have five children under six. One is still really small but it's starting to sink in that we need seven of everything. Seven. Seven people sitting down to breakfast lunch and dinner. It's like doing Christmas every day. All washing-up and no presents.
On Fridays the fridge is so full I have to excavate my kippers from somewhere behind the bacon and the lemons and then fit it all back together in there. It's like a cross between Jenga and a jigsaw. By the end of Saturday the fridge is always empty and we need to go shopping again.
It's actually quite satisfying the way everything gets slurped up. Not much gets thrown away but we're way off the kitchen scales. We need the bathroom ones. For this reason, one of my delights is shopping for industrial catering and cleaning equipment on eBay. Really, this is nothing new.
In days gone by, country-dwelling pioneering types all had 12 children and were able to mail-order a mind-boggling amount of stuff from catalogues. Although eBay does mean I'm more likely to take a punt on slightly ridiculous second-hand stuff that I would never buy new.
I got the nine-bird rotisserie oven for 300 quid. I haven't been so excited about anything since I was seven. I bought a one-chicken rotisserie on eBay a while back and I can't cook a chicken any other way now.
The trouble is, one chicken just doesn't touch the sides around here. If you're going to cook chicken here, it's best to cook about three, just to be safe. I phoned the seller to arrange collection and she asked me if I wanted a walk-in fridge for £600. Couldn't believe it. Just what I was after.
Fairy-tale enchantment in a humble English hedge
As I picked the last of the peaches yesterday, always the event that marks the end of the summer, it occurred to me that there has never been a prettier August. I caught sight of the combine bringing the wheat in from the top field and shot up there on the quad. I wanted to ask the contractor if I could keep a few tons for feeding chickens, pheasants, children and so on. The dog followed me until he saw a deer, then he disappeared.
I jumped off the quad bike to watch the combine, chewing an ear of corn and staring, eventually, at nothing, as yokel types and horses are wont to. It's quite tasty, wheat – nutty, milky and sweet. Then I realised I'd become completely absorbed in a hedge. I must have been staring at it for ages. In a garden in a town, a hedge is one thing but this was another thing, something from a fairy tale.
Overgrown to 12ft tall and all the better for it: the more I looked, the more I saw. There were rosehips, blackberries, sloes and crab apples, which are actually tastier than garden apples but a bit too chewy – a feast for the eyes rather than the tastebuds. Prettier than Christmas Day, it was. A humble overgrown hedge. Not one of the things people come to the Cotswolds and pay money and stand in queues and fight for parking spaces over but if I had to choose the most spectacular thing I've seen all year, it would be that hedge: the backbone of the English countryside. Where are the crowds? September is always the best month.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Only country artists can write lyrics like this...
Rain makes corn,
corn makes whiskey,
Whiskey makes my baby,
feel a little frisky
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Francoise Hardy & Anna Karina
Always thought these could have been a great Smiths album or singles cover
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Prada - Lagoss
Johnny Kotze ( Johnny Neon ) & Yannick Ilunga ( Popskarr ) have joined forces to create a "Dark Pop Dreamwave" group called "PRADA".The music is very electro pop with Johnny's distinctive vocals being complimented by Yannick.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Friday, September 10, 2010
Thursday, September 9, 2010
King Cole Bar
How could we resist visiting one of the most famous bar and lounges in the world...picked up a book of matches for our son....Cole , they have the famous mural on the boxes of matches. What a great website they have, fascinating to read the historical timeline.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Have you tried this?
Arcade Fire's "We Used to Wait" is a different type of music-video experience. It's one that you can only watch on a computer (and a high-functioning computer at that), but more importantly, one that brings the viewer's own childhood associations into the work. "We Used to Wait", which you can watch here, uses Google Street View images of your first house, turning old memories inside-out and drawing them into a series of images that won't leave your head anytime soon. Simply from a technological standpoint, it's pretty staggering, and it suggests lots of future possibilities for the medium. But it's also a fiercely affecting piece of art, the sort of thing that can send your brain down all kinds of rabbit holes.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Peter Saville creates England football shirt
Peter Saville, the designer of sleeves for Factory Records bands including Joy Division and New Order, has designed the new England football team shirt. Saville also worked with Suede, Buzzcocks, Roxy Music and Duran Duran.Click below to watch a video made by manufacturers Umbro about the design of the shirt.
Monday, September 6, 2010
THE MUSEUM
Air Canada kindly treated me to the following documentary on the creation of the crystalline structure on Bloor Street.
Fascinating look at rebuilding and refreshing the ROM, egos, public outcry, debates on contemporary public architecture and one man's vision and passion (William Thorsell, CEO, Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum) - something this city needs more of...even if you don't always agree.
Kenny's Castaways - Greenwich Village
Strolled along Bleecker Street in New York in Greenwich Village and snap this pic of the so called heart of Rock and Roll. There since 1967. Gigs by The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Aerosmith, Rod Stewart and the Ramones are all part of Kenny's history. The location is the site of a 19th century bar called The Slide, the New York Press (a 19th Century news rag) called it "the wickedest place in New York." Click here to read a great article on the history.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
Atticus collaboration with Placebo
New Placebo track "Trigger Happy Hands". The release will go hand in hand with a limited edition T-shirt, designed by Placebo and Atticus' Paul Jackson. Atticus is a clothing label which recently also launched a record label, Atticus Black Music. Not only will this be a first for Atticus, Placebo also will be re-issuing the "Battle for the Sun" album, for the first time ever seen, with a 10 track bonus disc featuring brand new tracks, including "Trigger Happy Hands", reworked classic tracks and the Atticus collaboration T-shirt.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Who You Gonna Call?
These guys brought the movie Ghostbusters to life in the reading room of The New York Public Library at 42 Street.
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