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alexsarllFrancophones! Is it true that in France, film screenings are called 'seances'?
Will shortly be popping out to buy That Book, before going into seclusion with it. Am sufficiently paranoid about spoilers that I think I shall leave off checking today's friendslist updates, just in case. Obviously I'm glad in many ways that Rowling has got this big because her behaviour with her creations and riches have been exemplary in their honour. But it is making the reading experience bloody awkward to have to rush it like this. Last book's death got spoilered on a bloody *bridge* - what's it going to be this time, skywriting?
In other books news, I was delighted to see that 17 out of 18 publishers failed to recognise submissions plagiarised from Jane Austen, and rejected them. Unless they've been reading Austen-derived chicklit, they can hardly have been making a worse use of their time than they would have been by reading her - and they all have the sense to reject passionless drivel by the Regency Liz Jones.
I don't often listen to albums over and over, not when there are always so many more to check out, old ones to revisit, other places to go. The last exceptions I recall are the Long Blondes and Amy Winehouse, both of which (inconveniently) I bought together. And similarly, this past couple of weeks a whole heap of exceptions arrived at once. So when I've not been listening to the new Bonzo Dog (Doo-Dah) Band reissues, hearing the 'hits' separated out and contextualised on component albums for the first times, learning the full map of Bonzoland instead of just the main roads, I've had the new Gogol Bordello on. It's the sort of thing singers always say of their new release, but when Eugene Hutz said this was like Gypsy Punks only more so, he wasn't lying. I've become particularly keen on 'American Wedding', a culture-clash comedy compressed into one bouncy complaint. "Have you ever been to an American wedding? Where's the vodka, where's the pickled herring? Where are the supplies to last three days?"
And when it hasn't been Viv or Eugene, it's been Howard. Even with Magazine increasingly reassessed, welcomed back to the place they always deserved in the histories, Howard Devoto's solo stuff seems to have disappeared from the record, just like that eighties album Kevin Rowland did has never been dragged back into the light by all the Dexys love. I've never heard Luxuria, and until this week I'd never heard Jerky Versions of the Dream. I wasn't expecting much - maybe an over-polished, watered-down affair like the last Magazine album. But this...if it's not Secondhand Daylight, it can certainly hold its head high in the same company. It has the same detached, post-human spite I always loved in Magazine, the same noble condescension. It knows what humanity's like, and it's not going to spare anyone's feelings on the matter. The title of the album's centrepiece, for instance - 'Some Will Pay For What Others Pay To Avoid'. You can't put it much fairer than that, can you?
There's a guy dressed as Hal Jordan in the new Mixmag's photos of cool clubbers. Not as in a Green Lantern t-shirt, as worn by Bill Bailey in Spaced or Ed at last night's Soul Mole* - as in, the full bodystocking. Even I don't think that's a good look.
*Ace, obviously, if a little lacking in the usual everyone-I-know-in-the-whole-world-is-here! factor.
Will shortly be popping out to buy That Book, before going into seclusion with it. Am sufficiently paranoid about spoilers that I think I shall leave off checking today's friendslist updates, just in case. Obviously I'm glad in many ways that Rowling has got this big because her behaviour with her creations and riches have been exemplary in their honour. But it is making the reading experience bloody awkward to have to rush it like this. Last book's death got spoilered on a bloody *bridge* - what's it going to be this time, skywriting?
In other books news, I was delighted to see that 17 out of 18 publishers failed to recognise submissions plagiarised from Jane Austen, and rejected them. Unless they've been reading Austen-derived chicklit, they can hardly have been making a worse use of their time than they would have been by reading her - and they all have the sense to reject passionless drivel by the Regency Liz Jones.
I don't often listen to albums over and over, not when there are always so many more to check out, old ones to revisit, other places to go. The last exceptions I recall are the Long Blondes and Amy Winehouse, both of which (inconveniently) I bought together. And similarly, this past couple of weeks a whole heap of exceptions arrived at once. So when I've not been listening to the new Bonzo Dog (Doo-Dah) Band reissues, hearing the 'hits' separated out and contextualised on component albums for the first times, learning the full map of Bonzoland instead of just the main roads, I've had the new Gogol Bordello on. It's the sort of thing singers always say of their new release, but when Eugene Hutz said this was like Gypsy Punks only more so, he wasn't lying. I've become particularly keen on 'American Wedding', a culture-clash comedy compressed into one bouncy complaint. "Have you ever been to an American wedding? Where's the vodka, where's the pickled herring? Where are the supplies to last three days?"
And when it hasn't been Viv or Eugene, it's been Howard. Even with Magazine increasingly reassessed, welcomed back to the place they always deserved in the histories, Howard Devoto's solo stuff seems to have disappeared from the record, just like that eighties album Kevin Rowland did has never been dragged back into the light by all the Dexys love. I've never heard Luxuria, and until this week I'd never heard Jerky Versions of the Dream. I wasn't expecting much - maybe an over-polished, watered-down affair like the last Magazine album. But this...if it's not Secondhand Daylight, it can certainly hold its head high in the same company. It has the same detached, post-human spite I always loved in Magazine, the same noble condescension. It knows what humanity's like, and it's not going to spare anyone's feelings on the matter. The title of the album's centrepiece, for instance - 'Some Will Pay For What Others Pay To Avoid'. You can't put it much fairer than that, can you?
There's a guy dressed as Hal Jordan in the new Mixmag's photos of cool clubbers. Not as in a Green Lantern t-shirt, as worn by Bill Bailey in Spaced or Ed at last night's Soul Mole* - as in, the full bodystocking. Even I don't think that's a good look.
*Ace, obviously, if a little lacking in the usual everyone-I-know-in-the-whole-world-is-here! factor.
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