Monthly Archive for June, 2009

a to z: it’ll be the best year ever;

Published on June 30, 2009 in music and photography. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .
This entry is part 15 of 25 in the series A to Z

175. It'll Be The Best Year Ever

Since content has been a little thin on the ground recently, and I’m quite proud of what I’ve come up with so far on this little series of pictures, I’m going to attempt a little bit of mp3 blogging/self-portrait crossover based around a current music-related sub-project within a project.

Inspired by the infinitely more talented Concrete Cowboy, who said it was okay if I followed suit, I am embarking on a mini-project as part of my 365: an A-Z of song-related photos. The reason that I felt like starting this was, as Paul was posting last night, I was listening to an “A” song that moved me to tears. It always did, a little (to me, it’s a song about feeling unsatisfied but kidding yourself that time isn’t marching on), but something about not being able to bellow along to my favourite line and mean it last night was pretty heartbreaking.

Astute blog readers will of course recognise this as the title track to one of last year’s mixes, but this incredible song is definitely worthy of a repost. Can’t wait to see the lady herself in Edinburgh in August.

DOWNLOAD: Amanda Palmer: “Another Year (A Short History of Nearly Everything)” [YSI]
BUY: Who Killed Amanda Palmer [Amazon.co.uk]
ON TOUR: Amanda Palmer plays the HMV Picture House, Edinburgh, on 22nd August as part of the Edge Festival

let’s siphon off some gas, let’s get this show on the road;

Published on June 29, 2009 in a little more personal, film, music and travellin'. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I cannot believe I missed watching Bruce Springsteen’s Glastonbury headline set in favour of one of the most dreadful movies I’ve ever seen. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, whose film reviews I always rush to look up after sitting through something particularly loathesome, describes Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen as “at once loud and boring, like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan… [for] two and a half hours.” The only thing I can think to add was that it felt like twice as many.

So we only caught the last five minutes, but at least the BBC’s online coverage is pretty comprehensive and I’ve got plenty of catching up to do. Shame the Boss won’t be covering Joe Strummer or playing with the Gaslight Anthem in Dublin or Glasgow, but that taster has gotten me pretty excited.

And at least those shows will be free of the execrable Jo Whiley, who the BBC still wheel out to spout inanities during their live music coverage…

It’s been a really good weekend, in no small part due to my favourite Kiwi’s first visit to Scottish shores. Finally getting to meet people in the flesh after months or years of chatting online is always brilliant, but when it’s one of your oldest and dearest friends it’s even more special. This weekend I got to buy Ness her first Irn Bru, and show her some of my favourite bits of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Also, inadvertantly, quite a few dodgy back alleys. And we did a lot of walking.

It rained on Edinburgh yesterday, but there were plenty of shops to pop in and out of. We weren’t keen on the castle – thirteen quid for a visit, when you can take a photo from the street? No thanks – but sheltered from the rain in a seventeenth century tenement. Later we got our photo taken with a teddy bear that is currently travelling from Lands End to John O’Groats (and his friends, two policemen cycling for a cancer charity) in the oldest pub in Edinburgh, and I found a fantastic red cordoroy bomber jacket in Armstrongs. It looks like a Michael Jackson tribute and smells like patchouli oil and charity shops. I love it – not bad for a fiver.

Good times, people, good times. But it’s Monday again and I feel as if I’ve been hit in the face by a train. Back to work.

don’t let this fading summer pass you by;

Published on June 25, 2009 in music. 3 Comments Tags: .

[T]his bollocks is written by an idiot who has polished his image as an existentialist, atheist hard-man and anti-mope, forever sneering at the tribes who wallow in self-pity — the gothers, the emo kids, the Smiths fans — the whole 900-block-wide marching band composed entirely of the white male urban middle classes who are convinced that (as the most affluent and pampered human beings who have ever walked the planet) theirs is a story worth hearing. Blissfully unaware that they are but a few generations away from regular visits to the doctor who would wind parasitic worms from their beer bloated assholes using sticks.

RIP, Steven Wells. I’m genuinely gutted about this, not least because I didn’t know that he was suffering from lymphatic cancer, which is ridiculous because he’d written about it often enough for Philadelphia Weekly. But I suspect that it’s better that I was continuing to enjoy his columns in the Guardian and for The Quietus, rather than wallowing in his imminent demise.

Swells was the best thing about the NMEh before I stopped reading it. We rarely agreed on anything (well, apart from Smiths fans), but dear God, I loved the way he said it.

He will be missed.

Friend and former colleague Everett True has collected some tributes here, as well as posting his own.

The Guardian also has a retrospective of some of his sports columns.

twenty-seven and i’m fucked: last month’s (birthday) mix, june 2009;

Published on June 24, 2009 in a little more personal and music. 7 Comments Tags: , , , , , .
This entry is part 4 of 28 in the series monthly mix club

Ten years feels like no time at all.

I effectively started university a decade ago this month, summer holidays spent in the Union and going to entry-level classes as part of an introductory programme aimed at certain schools. I discovered Fopp on Byres Road, and spent the wages from my first job building up the basics of an album collection from the £5 classic CDs shelf.

I met both my best friends ten years ago: a chance meeting in a family law lecture and a decade spent in Pizza Hut; a pair of eyes and a laugh over staff training videos starring Annika Rice.

I’ve been blogging for ten years come September, if not here then in various little pockets of the ‘net under this name or another. It’s ten years since I spent my lunchtimes in the library, chatting on Kittyradio rather than photocopying my seminar notes. The likelihood of that Hole reunion remains to be seen, but you can’t help but laugh at the timing.

Ten years from teenage, and that’s a freakin’ lot.

Is it any wonder I feel a little nostalgic?

Ten Years From Teenage: last month’s (birthday) mix, June 2009
1. The Pictish Trail: “I Don’t Know Where To Begin”
2. Herman Dune: “Not On Top”
3. Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit: “Good”
4. Sgt. Dunbar and the Hobo Banned: “A March Through Charles Mingus’ Garbage Pile”
5. Drive-By Truckers: “Lisa’s Birthday”
6. Let’s Wrestle: “I Wish I Was In Husker Du”
7. Jay Reatard: “It Ain’t Gonna Save Me”
8. Manchester Orchestra: “The Only One”
9. Lord Cut-Glass: “Look After Your Wife”
10. Hole: “Boys on the Radio”
11. Emiliana Torrini: “Summerbreeze”
12. William Elliott Whitmore: “Hell Or High Water”
13. Dan Auerbach: “The Prowl”
14. The Vaselines: “Son of a Gun”
15. Bob Dylan: “My Back Pages”

ZIPPED MP3S, LEFT CLICK AND SAVE]

Monthly Most Played after the jump.

Continue reading ‘twenty-seven and i’m fucked: last month’s (birthday) mix, june 2009;’

they say in the end you’ll get bitter just like them;

Published on June 18, 2009 in music. 12 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Although I always claimed REM were my first favourite band, it was Courtney Love’s Hole who ruled my life over a similar timeframe. I scratched their lyrics into my diaries and lecture notes, traded bootlegs and spent a fortune chasing down singles on eBay. I spent hours on message boards, and slept at night with Courtney’s wide, black mouth looking down on me from a Pretty on the Inside-era poster on my bedroom wall.

I grew out of it, as one does most obsessions. As I was growing up and looking for more sensible role models Courtney seemed to be aging in reverse, falling out of bars and brain-dumping on the internet and declaring war on Ryan Adams. And America’s Sweetheart, her 2004 solo album, was pretty dreadful.

But you never forget your first loves, and I was tentatively holding out hope for the follow-up. Nobody’s Daughter must be at least three years overdue by now, making it something akin to the Chinese Democracy of should-have-known-better pop. Only… it seems that in its latest incarnation, it isn’t going to be a Courtney Love album after all…

I just… god! I don’t know how I feel about this at all. I’ve got this old, giddy, teenaged excitement in my belly that I’m trying to talk myself out of because that way madness lies. After all, can it really be Hole with some wee tedious indie shiter in the Eric Erlandson role? And am I still the same girl enough to appreciate it?

I think I’m going to have to go to bed with Live Through This and mull this one over.

cards on the table;

Published on June 16, 2009 in legalese. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

I hadn’t been following the case of Christine Laird, who was being pursued for damages by her former employer Cheltenham Borough Council, but when the news that the local authority had lost their claim hit the legal feeds yesterday morning I couldn’t help but pay attention.

The issue at stake was whether the former managing director had “fraudulently or negligently withheld” details of her past history of depressive illness from the local authority when she had applied for the position, and centred on a pre-employment medical questionnaire. When asked if she enjoyed good health, Mrs Laird answered in the affirmative – and when asked whether she had any ongoing medical conditions which would affect any offer of employment, she answered “no”.

Mrs Laird had suffered three episodes of “depression with associated anxiety” between 1997 and 2001, but claimed to be in good health at the time of her 2002 appointment. She left her position in August 2005 on an ill-health pension, after taking sick leave on full pay from June 2004.

For obvious reasons, it is difficult to write about this case objectively. Had you asked me six months ago, I would have said that from my perspective the position was cut-and-dried: why should one be expected to disclose a past, treated health condition on a form which asks about ongoing conditions? Particularly one which, despite awareness-raising by mental health charities such as Mind and popular estimates that one in four of us will experience conditions such as depression at some point in our lives, still carries such stigma. A survey by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development last year found that 60 percent of employers would not consider taking on someone with a mental health problem – that’s a pretty big risk to take for disclosing something which is past having any impact on a person’s ability to do a particular job. The Disability Discrimination Act of course contains protection on paper, insisting that employers take “such steps as [are] reasonable” to accommodate conditions which include depression, but in this case the authority were willing to argue that due to the nature of the role they could not insulate Mrs Laird or any other applicant from stress.

Of course, that was before I found myself being treated for an unexpected relapse in my own depressive condition, so my delight at the verdict may be construed as mere soapboxing. Mr Justice Hamblen opined that if anybody was to blame, it was whoever wrote the “poorly drafted” questionnaire that Mrs Laird filled in – her answers were not false or misleading “given the terms of the questions”, and she did not have an impairment under either the Mental Health Act or the Disability Discrimination Act.

Coming on the same day as a friend of mine was subjected to a stressful employment review relating to absence around her own mental health problems, I cannot help but sympathise. A supportive working environment means I’ve had it pretty lucky, but the fact remains that as the country slides deeper into recession redundancies, financial worries and increased pressure to perform on reduced or minimal resources could be leading to a mental health timebomb. A verdict against Mrs Laird would have sent out a strong signal to those perhaps already struggling with, or trying to hide, anxiety or depression from colleagues, preventing them from asking for the help they need for their own sakes – as well as that of their employer.

noone would know him if jeff buckley had lived;

Published on June 15, 2009 in a little more personal and photography. 7 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

164. Factory Girl
dead rock bobby
dead rock boys
sultans of bling
dead rock posse

Note to self: a digital SLR is wasted on the drunk. The photographs from Saturday’s Dead Rock Star-themed birthday party weren’t spectacular, but I thought I’d share a couple of them anyway.

It was an absolutely top night, but I suppose I now have to confirm Birthday Season 2009 officially over!

this is one fucked-up seduction;

Published on June 11, 2009 in art & culture and travellin'. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

chucked
Converse shop, Carnaby Street, Sunday afternoon

Last weekend, as is seemingly traditional for the one before my birthday, I headed down to London for my birthday present from my best friend – tickets to see Gillian Anderson lead an all-star cast in a new production of A Doll’s House at the Donmar Warehouse.

Zinnie Harris’ new version of the Ibsen classic reinvents the basic story as a political scandal, set in London at the turn of the last century, and it is one that takes on an extra layer of relevance in the current climate – particularly in the wake of the expenses scandal. Anderson excels in her role as Nora, the “little mouse” whose secret actions result in blackmail and, ultimately, a kind of awakening. It was called the first “feminist” play and attracted controversy on its debut for its obvious criticism of 19th century traditional marriage norms – to the point of being banned, initially, here in the UK.

The intimate Donmar Warehouse was the perfect setting to appreciate the performances, particularly Anderson’s. The role of Nora calls for an actress with an incredible emotional range, who must appear to convincingly play-act to her husband as she schemes to protect his reputation behind the scenes. It plays to Anderson’s strength perfectly – for all of our fangirling, she is an accomplished stage actress capable of delivering a show-stopping performance with a single glance or eyebrow twitch. From our seats at the side of the stage, we had a perfect vantage point from which to appreciate her.

Of course, my favourite leading lady wasn’t the only familiar name in the cast. Tara Fitzgerald and “my” Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, played solid supporting roles and Toby Stephens, who I was previously unfamiliar with, played what was ultimately an unsympathetic role to modern eyes with humanity and warmth. The simple set was effective, and the costumes absolutely luscious.

With many more classic shows and intriguing casting decisions in the coming months (Dominic West performing Calderon, and Rachel Weiss as Blanche duBois catching my attention in the programme), I hope to take advantage of the Donmar again soon.

how i learned to stop worrying and love the stringer;

Published on June 2, 2009 in a little more personal and wedding of awesome. 13 Comments Tags: , , .

“This isn’t going to be one of those bride things, with the magazines,” I was warned about thirty seconds after the first gleeful phonecall to my best friend. And I don’t intend for this to become one of those wedding blogs either, although I’m sure odd bits I find particularly interesting will slip through the cracks in the same way anything that catches my attention does. Like this collection of YouTube-immortalised inappropriate wedding songs.

I think that, no matter how much you try to pretend that you’re not interested and that you’re not going to plan, there’s this ingrained bit of the female psyche that goes into overdrive whenever marriage is mentioned. Tell another woman that you’re planning a wedding, and you will instantly be bombarded with questions and opinions. And the more questions you get, the more you realise that there’s something else you hadn’t thought of and it’s probably going to cost money.

Plus, when you get right down to it, talking about this stuff with my friends (two of whom are getting married this year, and one of whom is of course heavily involved in the design and creative aspects of the “industry”) is fun! Your average wedding, after all, incorporates many of my favourite things: pretty dresses, photography, music, cake, makeup and, in my own case, Jay. And I’m fast learning when to shut up… pretty much when talking to anybody who responds to one of my ideas with “oh, you can’t do that“…

There aren’t really many plans to report at this stage, although that isn’t stopping the overexcited email chains. I feel quite giddy, as if I was a little kid planning one of those play weddings you used to put on in the playground on lunchbreak. Although I was never one of those kids, instead laughing at the silliness of wanting to pretend to be a grown-up and trying to derail whatever the popular kids were doing. Indeed, up until relatively recently (gawd, there’s another project I never got around to finishing) I told myself I wasn’t the marrying kind, admittedly with a little less vehemence than I managed in my younger days.

So what’s changed? Why now? It’s a change of perspective I suppose, as we all get a little older and so many of my friends start to think about settling down, but more than anything it’s just finding the right person. Stringer and I are going to be your cool married friends, who’ll hit each other with their walking sticks when they’re old and grey together. And it’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun getting there.

The best thing? We get to do it all our way.