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Is anybody else interested in seeing the Tom Stoppard play Rock'n'Roll before it closes near February's end, and if so, when? Via GILT, some stalls tickets are only £30 - which does still seem a bit dear, but the only cheaper option would be up in the gods.
Listening to Amy Winehouse's gorgeous 'You Know I'm No Good', you can hear why it seemed like a good idea to add a rap, a male reply. Alas, what we actually get on the single is an utterly superfluous and unusually half-arsed little effort by Ghostface Killah. I can only assume that he turned up at the studio looking to get outside of some bottles and some clothes with the lovely Miss Winehouse, and rather forgot about the actual rapping bit until the last minute - and though I can hardly blame him for that, I still don't want to listen to the result when I've already got the original version on the album.
I've only had BBC4 for a year, but now I don't know what I'd do without it. Their California Dreaming series is going particularly well so far; last night's Hollywood Confidential accomplished the singular feat of making me feel relatively benign about modern tabloids and celeb rags, because at least their stories about the famous being too fat/too thin/love rats aren't in service to quite such terrifyingly repressive political agendas. Even better was Hotel California: LA from The Byrds to The Eagles. It covered a scene whose music, bar the odd song or two, doesn't do much for me - but it made me care nonetheless. Perhaps it helped that I knew so little about the material; I know who Neil Young is, and I was vaguely aware that Crosby had been in the Byrds, but that Nash had been in the Hollies*? Complete news to me (I'm still not too clear who Stills was, but I suspect he might simply have been the Other One. Most bands have them**). It's the old story - a scene is founded on revolutionary idealism, distracted by money and absorbed by the Spectacle - but the participants are lucid, the editing informative, and one comes out of it feeling ever so slightly wiser.
Publishers are like record labels; most of the time they're just a mechanism which gets the art to the public, and sometimes they even get in the way, but every now and again one comes along which is something more. Labels like Rough Trade, 4AD and Warp have (or at least have at times had) an identity of their own, such that if you like enough of their past acts, you'd give something new a try just because it was coming out via them. And in recent years, the publisher which has come closest to that status for me is Serpent's Tail. Like those great labels, it's not that their output is homogenous, just that it has a certain coherent sensibility. They describe themselves as "Committed to publishing extravagant, outlaw voices neglected by the mainstream", which is as good a summary as one can manage for their list of translations, skewed thrillers, erotic memoirs, cult fiction, reprints and general weird sh1t. And I don't think being bought by Profile will necessarily harm them, because Profile itself publishes a lot of very good books, and has promised Pete Ayrton continued editorial autonomy at Serpent's Tail. I'm just sad that, according to the Bookseller, this will mean Serpent's Tail leaving Finsbury Park, that I'll no longer get that quiet moment of regional pride passing their office as I go down Blackstock Road.
A rare instance of Tony Blair saying something with which I agree: he's defended air travel in principle, pointing out that the we-must-never-move-further-than-pedal-distance-from-the-village-again new parochialism of the neo-puritans risks "putting people off the green agenda by saying you must not have a good time any more and can't consume". Which is not the whole of the answer, of course, but it's something of which the more sanctimonious green elements lost sight too long ago. In other happy political news, the new gay rights legislation has been upheld by a three-to-one majority in the Lords, mainstream religious groups are furiously dissociating themselves from the associated protests, and the one dissenting voice of whom anyone's heard is the increasingly hilarious Norman Tebbit: ""Black is about being. Sexual orientation is about being. And we would not wish to discriminate against people for being black nor on grounds of their sexual orientation. The concerns which are being expressed this evening are primarily about sodomy rather than about sexual orientation - that is doing, not being." Brilliant.
*Coincidentally, I've just found the Hollies; 'The Air That I Breathe' on a compilation I've had around for a while. Is it just me or is that song absolutely terrifying?
**Except that, judging by The New Order Story which I've also been watching, their eponymous Other Two are in fact quite sparky characters. It's a brilliant combination of documentary, video compilation and those ill-advised band films I so love, enlivened by the collision of Paul Morley's typical Morleyisms with the dry wit of New Order themselves. "Who's the laziest member of the band?" "Ian Curtis."
Listening to Amy Winehouse's gorgeous 'You Know I'm No Good', you can hear why it seemed like a good idea to add a rap, a male reply. Alas, what we actually get on the single is an utterly superfluous and unusually half-arsed little effort by Ghostface Killah. I can only assume that he turned up at the studio looking to get outside of some bottles and some clothes with the lovely Miss Winehouse, and rather forgot about the actual rapping bit until the last minute - and though I can hardly blame him for that, I still don't want to listen to the result when I've already got the original version on the album.
I've only had BBC4 for a year, but now I don't know what I'd do without it. Their California Dreaming series is going particularly well so far; last night's Hollywood Confidential accomplished the singular feat of making me feel relatively benign about modern tabloids and celeb rags, because at least their stories about the famous being too fat/too thin/love rats aren't in service to quite such terrifyingly repressive political agendas. Even better was Hotel California: LA from The Byrds to The Eagles. It covered a scene whose music, bar the odd song or two, doesn't do much for me - but it made me care nonetheless. Perhaps it helped that I knew so little about the material; I know who Neil Young is, and I was vaguely aware that Crosby had been in the Byrds, but that Nash had been in the Hollies*? Complete news to me (I'm still not too clear who Stills was, but I suspect he might simply have been the Other One. Most bands have them**). It's the old story - a scene is founded on revolutionary idealism, distracted by money and absorbed by the Spectacle - but the participants are lucid, the editing informative, and one comes out of it feeling ever so slightly wiser.
Publishers are like record labels; most of the time they're just a mechanism which gets the art to the public, and sometimes they even get in the way, but every now and again one comes along which is something more. Labels like Rough Trade, 4AD and Warp have (or at least have at times had) an identity of their own, such that if you like enough of their past acts, you'd give something new a try just because it was coming out via them. And in recent years, the publisher which has come closest to that status for me is Serpent's Tail. Like those great labels, it's not that their output is homogenous, just that it has a certain coherent sensibility. They describe themselves as "Committed to publishing extravagant, outlaw voices neglected by the mainstream", which is as good a summary as one can manage for their list of translations, skewed thrillers, erotic memoirs, cult fiction, reprints and general weird sh1t. And I don't think being bought by Profile will necessarily harm them, because Profile itself publishes a lot of very good books, and has promised Pete Ayrton continued editorial autonomy at Serpent's Tail. I'm just sad that, according to the Bookseller, this will mean Serpent's Tail leaving Finsbury Park, that I'll no longer get that quiet moment of regional pride passing their office as I go down Blackstock Road.
A rare instance of Tony Blair saying something with which I agree: he's defended air travel in principle, pointing out that the we-must-never-move-further-than-pedal-distance-from-the-village-again new parochialism of the neo-puritans risks "putting people off the green agenda by saying you must not have a good time any more and can't consume". Which is not the whole of the answer, of course, but it's something of which the more sanctimonious green elements lost sight too long ago. In other happy political news, the new gay rights legislation has been upheld by a three-to-one majority in the Lords, mainstream religious groups are furiously dissociating themselves from the associated protests, and the one dissenting voice of whom anyone's heard is the increasingly hilarious Norman Tebbit: ""Black is about being. Sexual orientation is about being. And we would not wish to discriminate against people for being black nor on grounds of their sexual orientation. The concerns which are being expressed this evening are primarily about sodomy rather than about sexual orientation - that is doing, not being." Brilliant.
*Coincidentally, I've just found the Hollies; 'The Air That I Breathe' on a compilation I've had around for a while. Is it just me or is that song absolutely terrifying?
**Except that, judging by The New Order Story which I've also been watching, their eponymous Other Two are in fact quite sparky characters. It's a brilliant combination of documentary, video compilation and those ill-advised band films I so love, enlivened by the collision of Paul Morley's typical Morleyisms with the dry wit of New Order themselves. "Who's the laziest member of the band?" "Ian Curtis."
