Posts

Showing posts from March, 2016

Note on Made of Stone - Reni's drums

Image
First off, let me just put it out there: this tune is truly phenomenal, on every possible level. You'd be hard pressed to find another pop song which achieves so much, on so many different fronts, in under four and a half minutes. The drumming is unreal. It begins to run, the boiling beat of landslide rocks upon the road at midnight;  Mani's bass rumbles low, and edges towards the day's first dim smoke of sunlight as verse climaxes into chorus. The chorus departs and the drums shift a gear, a cold long line of solitary notes, repeatedly punctuated by the crash of 3 strikes: the landslide ablaze in fire, the night air pulsing with fear. 

A note on Easy Rider

Image
A great film which develops a problem similar to that posed by The Graduate: does society allow us to be free? The film presses and presents the key, intertwining and conflicting elements of American society: young and old, citizen and criminal, free and enslaved, subversive and submissive. And the final shot, of Wyatt's bike blowing up in smoke, the Stars and Stripes ruptured and shot to smithereens poses the essence the American Dream: a locked barrel of anicent words, unable to wrestle free from the iron chains of tyranny and repression. 

PR drowned, neoliberal stooge

Image

antithesis to the PR-drowned, neoliberal stooge

Image

asian boy white friends

"yeah, let's call the team the taliban. fuck it" cue huge laughter, it was really funny "yeah its alright call me afghan, and that there is my mate bin...short for bin laden" i spent a lot of my youth spitting out lines like that and grinning as the chuckles started to sprout. it feels good when you've got people who you think are laughing with you, no matter what you're laughing at there's all sorts of variations. one evening i told my mates at uni that i was going out on an asian night out, and might have even referred to it as a paki night. and i went on the paki night and had a good time and then came back the morning after and got asked: how was your paki night? and then one day in my house my mate started shouting up the stairs for something or other, something generic like calling me to come play football down the road and he called "paki?! paki?! paki?!?" my uncle told me how people u

BOOSH

Image

office notes 2

it occurs to me that thinking changes in the office. when youre outside and free youre very much spinning thinking all over the place, like jackson pollock paint, or spaff in a dark alley. but in the office, thinking grinds to a slow chug chug chug - the wings of fluid, whimsical thought trails are rained in and the mind resorts to slowly squeezing out small blocks of thought like shit out of an anus. bit grim. 

office notes

i'm sitting here and it's all very funny. there's a guy sat next to me who is a little bit overweight. and eats a packet of mini eggs every day which helps him stay a little bit overweight. and doesn't exercise much. but he's getting laid with one of the hottest in the office so it's all good. diagonal-desk there's the girl who looks like a ginger-dipped goldilocks: these loping curves of hair just dropping down from the head, she doesn't give a fuck: proudly sits there without the heavy make-up or petrolled perfume of the rest, and fits in like a young boy at girl scouts. then opposite there's the one who's just joined but is about to leave. the one who clocked on to how much of a farce the company is just before everyone else clocked onto her clocking and began firing whispers at her while she had her head turned. all good fun. 

united, mourinho, fan ownership

Image
Seems to be a furious rush to get Mourinho in the hotseat among many United fans I speak to at the minute. Unsure it's the best thing for the club. One man explained: 'football is a commercial entity, we have shareholders, you need success to please them - Mourinho is the best person right now to deliver this". Mourinho's track record does indeed point to success, but not over the long-term. Surely the club needs to be laying down plans which account for more than just the next 3 years. Is there any suggestion at all that this happening? The latest rumblings and rumours whirling round the club is that a once renowned youth system has become an utter shadow of its former self. The club's approach to buying and selling players is absolutely all over the place, engulfed by a cloud of rumour and gossip which deprives fans of transparency and accountability. The people in charge of the club appear more intent on clinching lucrative sponsorship deals and rolling o

more important than Picasso

Image
I've been thinking about the Roses a lot lately, and why they continue to hold such a huge appeal even 20 years after they last put out a tune. Damien Hirst claimed a few years back that the Roses were 'more important than Picasso'. Don't get me wrong, I think Hirst is prick but I feel there is something to value in that kind of statement. The music of the Roses' debut album was subversive, beautiful and striking to the point of life-changing. If that ain't the key strings to any great piece of art then my word, I don't know what is, and that's why the Roses should be considered and analysed alongside the likes of Picasso and even Shakespeare. Any art which is able to captivate an audience so profoundly, across such a large period of time deserves to be held in this company, and I'd wager that it's the connotations between the Roses' music and crowds of northern, working class people (as opposed to the public school, aristocratic-types

Premier League ticket prices

Great and unprecedented news on the Premier League capping away prices for the next 3 seasons at £30. But still a lot of work to be done before top-flight football becomes truly affordable in England.  

El stone roses

Rumours of new tunes. And thank fuck it wasn't to be. Because this is all starting to seem more PR agency marketing bullshit than the subversive spectacle of four unemployed lads dicking about the city. When TopShop begin tweeting about you, as per on Friday in regards to the Roses rumours, then you know the game is up. With regards to actual tunes, I'm not going to lie, I'd love nothing more than to hear some, as per Reni, 'new stuffs'. Hearing the Roses debut for the first time was unlike anything else I have ever experienced, a feeling of pure, unbridled liberation at a time in my life when I really needed it, and was one of those precious moments of indefinable musical glory: where you come out of a tune reborn, a different person to the one who went in. Anything that offers even a slither of hope that this feeling can be replicated, or even bettered, is something which I obviously find very hard to dismiss. Which is why I was just another dude on twitter o

The Graduate (part 2)

"I'm doing it to learn", I told her. "I want to study, to learn about the world, to learn to think about the world. It's not about anything else". The conversation had gone on for a while, and I knew where it was heading if I didn't round it off. "I know I need to get a job, I know how important it is. I'm not gonna sit around. But I love learning, that's what I enjoy and that's why I went in the first place." "Good. That's all fine. Just make sure you remember that at the end of the day, you're there to help you get a job. Above anything else". *** "It's about time you started paying your way and living out in the real world!" My third night moderating focus groups in row, was t'nite. I finished work at 11pm and returned to my flat by midnight. I eat, try to wind down. 5 hours sleep at least man, come on, I've learned this the hard way. I try to sleep but my mind finds itself racin
as i wandered out of the window 5 floors high in the south east the river was a black track kissed by lonely lamps and the whistles of a car alarm spiralled and whirled in the air which all cried despair in falsetto and echoed in my typed scribbles of the plans i made tonight to draw my smile, tomorrow in trying to find the time to save me from this sorrow 

Spike Island film

Image
One of the worst things about this has to be the Adidas fetishism which peeps out the screen at every opportunity. In the early days, the Roses never bothered with any of that crap: their look was decidedly original and free from any kind of corporate colonisation. One of the biggest tragedies of Manchester is that Adidas has managed to scratch its dirty mark onto just about everything that was ever radical about the city.