"The boundaries between what's cool and what's not cool have kind of blurred, haven't they?"

- Simon Ratcliffe of Basement Jaxx, from a feature on JC Chasez in the latest Entertainment Weekly.

PLUG IT IN, PLUG IT IN BABY.

One last thing today: David at what is now Cakes & Money has made me slap my head in one of those "of course!" moments. So that's what the rush of "na na na na" backing vocals on 'Good Luck' by Basement Jaxx remind me of. The Farscape theme. No wonder I dig that moment so.

Speaking of Scissor Sisters, check out their website for a sneak peek of the forthcoming debut album's cover, in all its proggy, Roxy Music, disco fabulous glory. In fact great sleeve art seems to be a theme with Scissor Sisters' releases - you knew it would be, right? Check out some of the single artwork to date:

'Electrobix'

'Laura'

'Comfortably Numb'

Even by his standards, Sasha Frere-Jones has been on a bit of a roll lately - much to agree with or even to disagree with in a "hmmm, smart point but..." way. Highlights have included a response to this New Yorker piece of end-of-year 'Best Of...' lists (a piece which starts off a little stuffy and overblown but with some understandable points, yet ends with a statement that encapsulates almost everything I disagree with in pop criticism to the extent that it can be considered an anti-touchstone: "Pluralism and democracy are fine things, but they have no place in the evaluation and consumption of pop culture, especially today, when, all around us, the sea is rising."). SFJ also deserves thanks for drawing out attention here and here (subject matter includes nasty attitudes to hip hop, and nasty attitudes in hip hop - two phenomena equally necessary to find an accurate and workable approach to criticising).

But in a slightly childish manner, I think I am most gratified by SFJ's confirmation that Cold Mountain is shit, because I'm not going to go and see that film, and yet I reserve the right to speak often of its badness. I have sat through the trailer around three times now at the cinema, in addition to enduring radio, TV and print ads, and that's been ordeal enough. From Kidman's narration, interminable even for five minutes, what with the astonishingly poor accent and mawkish delivery, to the endless, endless shots of Jude Law walking over some hills (and people said LOTR was landscape porn), I'm amazed by the extent to which the trailer for Cold Mountain views like a parody of Oscar-begging, "serious" costume drama slop. Pile on the strings and the sobbing, cake your actors' faces in mud, make much of the "historical" setting, and hope nobody notices the lack of substance (it's not like I don't mind lack of substance, as long as it doesn't come complete with a giant hand-carved Ye Olde label that screams LOOK! LOOK AT THE SUBSTANCE!). Wild horses couldn't drag me. Oh, and it's got Jack White in it - see why I hate him?

Moreover, I thought everyone had figured out by now that Jude Law as slightly smug but mildly charismatic rich pretty boy who has some kind of homoerotic bond with the film's protagonist and then bad things happen to him (Gattaca, The Talented Mr Ripley) = great; Jude Law as anything else = shit, and highly punchable...

Out last night at a pub in Shoreditch - the kind of pub where the DJ has just discovered the Scissor Sisters but mostly plays old skiffle records - this isn't entirely a bad thing, I'm just trying to let you know the kind of hipster den we're talking about - fun, but crammed and loud, which makes it a struggle for the temperate - and maybe I'm getting old, but I found myself feeling deeply irritated with the latest trend for guys. Hipster boys: wash your hair. Whether it's a badly-cut fauxhawk or straggly locks, that greasy "hey man I don't have time to use shampoo I've been partying all week" look is not going to impress anyone worth their salt. Look at the hipster girls and the strange complex geometries and colour schemes of their hair, and then feel suitably ashamed by your lack of both effort and hygiene. You're playing yourselves. Thank you.

LIFT UP YOUR RECEIVER
I'LL MAKE YOU A BELIEVER

going back to England to play cards again

A copy of Gallowsbird's Bark by The Fiery Furnaces arrived in the post today (Sav, if you ever read this, you are a scholar and a gentleman). Early thoughts based on the tracks I listened to on the bus to work: nice, very nice. I can hear the reasons they've been compared to Royal Trux - it's the more playful, surprising side of Royal Trux, the one that was more about mucking around with odd instrumental arrangements than digging around in the muck of rock'n'roll history (not that I mind that side of Trux at all). I also hear the hint of Patti Smith in Eleanor Friedberger's voice - although, unlike certain of her contemporaries, it doesn't sound like a deliberate imitation, which is refreshing. Yeah, and I hear a little bit of late Beatles, maybe, although I always wonder whether that reference point is just the most obvious of many one could invoke on hearing a certain kind of pop. Anyway, I like hearing all this.

Stand-outs so far:

'Leaky Tunnel' - oh gosh, it's production WOW time. The sounds on this track impress me much in the same way as the RZA's 'Cherry Range', so much so that I'm slightly disappointed when the most interesting stuff drops out around the two minute mark. It's still great, though, and so far it's the song on which the Furnaces' thing for singing about London tourist spots and the like is most charming.

It also transitions nicely into 'Up In The North'. Now if I was still drinking, and if I could organise it, I would love to persuade a whole bunch of my favourite people to listen to 'Up In The North', fall in love with it and learn all the words, and then at the end of a long evening of carousing we would sit in someone's front room and have a good old sing-along.

'Don't Dance Her Down' - is also very good. Sorry, here my ability say something interesting about a song after one listen has failed me (unless "it sounds a bit electro at the start" counts), and I just have to register my approval and the likelihood that I will soon be humming this one regularly too.

Not for the first time, it occurs to me that writing about music *as* music - as opposed to what I'd perhaps call music as ideas - is frequently a struggle for the musically untrained writer. This is a subject covered accurately by Eppy at clap clap blog, here - it's very much worth reading, and I suspect will strike a chord with a fair few regular readers of this blog. Here's an extract:

We do have very few descriptive terms for smell in our language, and only a very few more for sound. That's why we need to invent them. That's why professions develop a jargon: so members of that profession can make themselves very specifically understood.

Still... it's precisely this lack of a jargon, and this focus on cultural rather than musical analysis, that makes music criticism, along with movie crit, somewhat widely read.

It's a Catch-22, no doubt about it - the number of times I wrestle with whether I can justify repeating myself by describing yet another vocal performance as "yearning", or saying that a beat makes it impossible not to dance - and then reason that the most important thing in writing about music might be to communicate what you think about it in as clear a way as possible to potential readers/listeners... God knows how I'm doing so far.

(I may or may not be fishing for feedback, there.)

It seems like about a month since I last saw sunlight. The British winter is bad enough, but when you spend the daylight hours in an office during the week, and in bed at the weekend, it all starts to take a toll. I keep hearing that funereal, spooky piece of music from the cinema scene and end credits of Donnie Darko in my head.

Here's something to get excited about, though: Hayao Miyazaki, the genius behind Spirited Away (the best film to get a cinematic release in the UK last year), is busy adapting Diana Wynne Jones' novel Howl's Moving Castle. Details here. The combination of DWJ and Miyazaki is going to make some people's heads explode in gleeful expectation alone, I suspect...

I'm so slow: the crunch was talking about the mean-looking one from 'Change Clothes' over a week ago and I totally missed it.

Update: so I'm pretty sure the model in question is Omahyra Mota Garcia. This should explain everything:



And that's enough of that obsession for now - will get back to writing about music or films or telly or something tomorrow...

philippians 4:8

Moving on to better things... First "who is THAT?" crush of 2004: the surprisingly androgynous model in the 'Change Clothes' video. You know, the one who looks super-surly, like kinda pissed off to even be there. That's so necessary.

Meanwhile in related news the award for "Single of 2003 that I somehow managed to miss throughout that year" goes to Snoop & Pharrell's 'Beautiful'. Fortunately the music channels are rectifying this for me by putting it on heavy rotation right now... Makes me long for the summer, still so far away.

evil is real

So at the beginning of the new year I'm finding more reasons than ever to get angry. An obvious starting point would be the question of why stupid, obnoxious people with ill thought-out, poorly expressed opinions can't stay the hell away from the places I spend time online, but that's a recurring problem that can only really be dealt with by HOLDING FAST - knuckling down and putting the work in, concentrating on upping the quality of what I write and not getting too distracted by the more tempting but ultimately less constructive and rewarding pastime of kicking fools to the kerb.

There are some crimes, however, which cannot be ignored.

Many thanks to for bringing to my attention a whole new level of smug offensive patronising Barefoot Doctor idiocy, which either tips the scales in favour of the "it's a wind-up" argument, or proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man should be publicly blinded and then beaten to death with his own severed limbs.

I find myself being driven along on the well-sprung rear seat of a smart Mercedes to an early morning TV studio, there to talk about the antidote to the January blues. As we stop at the lights, my eye is caught by a man in his mid-30s rummaging through an Oxford Street rubbish bin with well-practiced hands.

...

He reminds me, that guy, as he wipes something from the inside of his lips with fingers fresh out of an Oxford Street bin, to have the humility and grace to appreciate my current position and condition.

...

Just then, the traffic lights change, the Mercedes moves off and he looks up. Our eyes briefly meet - both of us slightly, subtly shocked at the contact. 'Thank you,' I mouth, smiling. He looks confused for a second, then smiles back and winks.

Over on Barbelith, someone asked whether this was any worse than the standard reaction of effacing any encounter that takes place between people who live on the street and the more privileged ('us'). That's a hell of a question - although if this is an accurate representation of a real encounter, I'm Mutya from the Sugababes - but I think I'd have to conclude that what the Barefoor Doctor is doing *is* worse, because apart from anything else, the political ramifications of this column are actually actively conservative if you scratch the surface. Fate has dealt the Barefoot Doctor one lot in life and the nameless object of his condescension another, and that's just the way it is. Several times during the column the Barefoot Doctor makes a statement which you would expect to be followed by the suggestion that the status quo is unfair and that action should be taken to rectify this in some small way (if this had been written by anyone with a shred, a fucking SHRED of humanity), only to swerve to avoid even the slightest implication that anything should actually be done to change things. Example:

This scene and revelation could be occurring at any time of year, but the thought of all those billions just spent on presents, decorations, food and drink, and being spent even now in the sales, lends it a particular poignancy that drives the message home and inspires me to suggest...

To suggest - go on, let's guess what he's going to suggest. Making donations to Shelter? Doing volunteer work? Sparing 10p? Oh no. Oh no no no no no.

...inspires me to suggest a moment of recalibrating your own set of expectations of how external reality should be treating you against a more humble attitude.

So what this column does is claim to present a realisation of privilege and inequality whilst simultaneously setting up a reaction of inaction and complacency (in the form of the borderline meaningless hippy jargon claptrap above) as if it were a morally laudable, 'enlightened' and even radical form of action. The man in the Mercedes writes a list of his privileges and other benefits in his life, writes "I am deeply thankful for this" at the bottom, and the debt is squared. He can sleep with a sound conscience. This is evil filth. I mean, FUCK. Someone explain to me how it would be in any way morally objectionable to hunt this gross little shit of a man down and put him out of his misery?