It’s a ‘twin hats’ kinda afternoon in which the better angels of my nature are struggling to drown out the demons who’d rather dream up potential lineups than concentrate on the difference between liquidity and leverage ratios. We have a date, and a familiar headliner, for Last Year’s Gig the Fourth (one which won’t be [...]
Being ever so slightly of the geeky persuasion the other week I, and an anticipated $1 billion worth of cinemagoers globally, went to see Joss Whedon’s big screen outing for The Avengers (NB: if even the BBC is giving it that title, it’s good enough for me). As I’m sure you’ve read, if not already [...]
The bad news: it’s Monday Tuesday, and I am grumpy with the sort of cold that doesn’t want to break into full-blown misery (a day in bed watching sitcoms!) and instead promises a long week of work with a runny nose and painful cough. The good news: there’s a Starbucks Card in my purse with [...]
Quite recently a list of “30 things every woman should have and should know by the time she’s 30″, that was apparently published a few years ago by Glamour magazine, did a bit of a rerun on various blogs and Facebook feeds. I was torn between whether this was a good thing (a blog prompt! [...]
Crowd funding is very much the in thing for cash-strapped bands low on label backing and rich in fans and artistic independence at the moment, and it’s a great way to get the people who care most about your music excited and involved with every aspect of the process. While sometime Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer [...]
If you really want to get on my nerves on this particular day of the year, just make a hackneyed joke regarding a 35-year-old film franchise. Go on. It seems as though people have only been doing so over the past couple of years, or maybe it’s just that I got to avoid it when [...]
Really upset to hear the news via Twitter this morning that Philadelphia punks The Menzingers, currently touring Europe with Bouncing Souls, were robbed of over $10,000 worth of their belongings in Manchester last night. The Menzingers are particular favourites of my wee pal/gig buddy Rachel. Regular readers and those who know us elsewhere might be [...]
One of these pictures was not taken on or around Mount Teide National Park, Tenerife.
In The Car With: Dan Mangan, through the British Columbia countryside. Dan Mangan is younger than me. I don’t know why this bothers me so much, and there are only a few months in it (he’ll catch up with me on Saturday, according to Wikipedia, for the six weeks before I spin off into that [...]
I have felt as bleak as I’ve felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me. – DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” In retrospect, during the course of my first resort holiday in about ten years was [...]
My own Flickr account has a fair few images that look like they could have been created with Instagram’s retro-flavoured algorithms. They weren’t – they are all film. Stephen Dowling for the BBC, asking whether smartphone ready “retro” filters and photo-sharing applications such as Instagram are making everybody’s photos look the same. Dowling’s isn’t the [...]
If I’m being honest I began to lose my enthusiasm for the annual heady celebration of limited edition exclusives and one-off performances that is Record Store Day round about the time I realised that all the cake they were giving away in Monorail was vegan. The Great Hold Steady Clear Vinyl Debacle of 2010 was [...]
