Today I have been 'festive'. This has been achieved by finding a jovial felt santa 'hat' with a hole in it buried deep in the chasms of my laundry bags, which I put on my head whilst doing the dishes to Joan Baez at about 4.30 and it is still there. I also, after repeatedly putting it off because I hate the annual realisation that I don't anywhere near the number of interests and hobbies that a 20/21/22/23/24 year old should have, and ultimately I am a man of such simple and illicit pleasures that I either already have them (books, cds, dvds) or am just not pathetic enough to ask for as christmas presents (cigarettes, alcohol). Or the rest are unobtainable (a nice girlfriend who likes Bruce Springsteen more than 'a bit' and Hakan Hellstrom, who isn't a complete idiot, and has some sort of mental deficiancy which means she'll be unable to leave me for any particular reason) or pure fantasy (Dog the Bounty Hunter to come round my house and make me a sandwich) which aren't worth the time of day. So here it is, John Widdops annual collection of materiastic goods to cause my parents to tear their hair out over.
***
Jens Lekman - Night Falls On Kortedala
When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog
Oh, You're So Silent Jens
Shout Out Louds - Our Ill Wills
- Howl Howl Gaff Gaff
The Knife - Silent Shout
The Tough Alliance - A New Chance
Loney, Dear - Sologne
Peter Bjorn and John - Writer's Block
Marissa Nadler - Songs III (Bird on the Water)
Red House Painters - Red House Painters
Sun Kil Moon - Ghosts of the Great Highway
Mark Kozelek - What's Next to the Moon
Fucked Up - Hidden World
Band of Horses - Cease to Begin
mewithoutYou - Brothers, Sisters
Woven Hand - Mosaic
Malcolm Middleton - A Brighter Beat
The Drams - Jubilee Drive
Lucero - Rebels, Rogues and Sworn Brothers
Motion City Soundtrack - Even if it Kills Me
DVDs
The complete Cadfael collection
Seinfeld Season 8
Flights of the Conchords series 1
Curb your Enthusiasm season 5
Insomnia (original Swedish one, not the remake with Al Pacino)
Back to the Future trilogy
Inland Empire
Books
Robert Graysmith - Zodiac (1845765311)
Henning Mankell- Faceless Killers (0099445220)
Simon Barnes - The Meaning of Sport (1904977855)
Paul Auster - New York Trilogy (0571200583)
Might be as good a time as any to start reading PG Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster books as well.
A Digital Camera.
******
Obviously I'm not expecting to receive all of the above, my parents aren't made of money and I don't have lucicrous ideas above my station. I just tend to add shit loads extra onto the list to either give my parents choice, second options, plan D's, and to save them the embarassment of having to go into a shop and asking for albums by 'Fucked Up', especially when the album in question hasn't even been released in the UK. The Cds are basically a list of albums I've illegally downloaded during the year and feel I owe the artist in question for the enjoyment that I've had from listening to their music for free, but haven't dipped into my own miserly wallet at any point to actually buy the thing myself. Largely because I still hate buying CDs on the internet and since Spillers Records has decided to not stock anything AT ALL that I want to buy anymore, espcially not crappy t shirts for record labels I don't care about one jot, I've run out of places to buy things. The DVDs are the usual collection of titles I again can't be bothered to buy myself because I've only decided I want most of these things three weeks before Christmas and CAN wait. Seinfeld is on there because series 8 and 9 of Seinfeld aren't really that good, apart from 'The Frogger' and I've seen that episode anyway, but I still want them anyway. I'm still not sure why I want to watch 15 hours of Cadfael. Books are always a problem because I can bookloan almost anything from work anyway, these are just titles I would have bookloaned anyway, or alternatively, books I'd never get round to reading within a two week time bracket. I want the digital camera of course, to take photographs of myself in the mirror after I've spent six months tarting myself up, so that I can use it as my profile photo so I can have an artificially created work of personal digital art to go with my artificially enhanced version of myself in my facebook profile. Either that or I'll take it out to take some photos of ducks and geese in the park.
So for the last six hours I've been feeling festive. Tomorrow is December 1st, which means Christmas music will be on the stereo at work for the next 24 days. If I hadn't wasted the last 90 minutes of my life watching 'Patriot Games', then I'd be excited by all of this.
Friday 30 November 2007
Wednesday 21 November 2007
Someone Always Gets There First
I am using Wordpad. Why anybody in this day and age uses Notepad is completely baffling. Why use a program which doesn't allow word-wrap when you have the same resources to use one that does is ridiculous. It's like using a typewriter in the early nineties when word processors are available? Actually, why am I bothering to write this? Charlier Brooker has probably already written about this is a column. I'm starting to get annoyed with Charlie Brooker now, because almost every exciting though about popular culture in the last three years that I'd had, I've discovered Charlie Brooker also has and expressed in far more interesting terms in a national column, in the Guardian, and in far more explicit and definitive terms than I have. For instance, reading his last anthology, which I tend to do for lack of desire to read The Guardian every week, I've noticed he has written an article about Chat magazine, which, about three years ago when I was going out with Anna, we used to read on a regular basis as a result of it's utter preposturousness. Read it once, and you'll know everything about it. But I never went on about it enough. But Charlie Brooker can mention it in the Guardian Guide and now I'm fucked, because I can never discuss it because I'll sound like a bad Brooker rip-off. I used to hate Nick Hornby because he wrote '31 Songs" because I thought it would be amazing to write a book about how amazing 31 particular songs would be. But after reading it, I realised he never stole my idea because it was never my intention to write a derivative, shitty smattering of sub-par memoirs about how much Teenage Fanclub changed my crappy life for the better" so now I don't feel better. But Charlier Brooker; I might as well not exist anymore. He has done articles about every Tv program I've ever felt was worth ridiculing, but did it so long before me, he has rendered all of my opinions more useless than a bullet proof vest in a Hugh Grant movie.
Monday 19 November 2007
You're No Rock and Roll Fun
Two things I've learned in the last week or so:
'Atlantis to Interzone' by Klaxons is completely brilliant. Much as I hate to admit it, but having only previously experienced the song on frosty February mornings trying not avoid getting out of bed and having either Phil Jupitus or Sean Keavney (neither both of whom I resent even entering my earspace and thus have no intention of letting them have any persuasive effect on my musical taste) tell me they're so hip they could make Ironside walk again, the general barminess of Atlantis to Interzone was utterly lost on me. It's like having a Murikami book read to you by your parents. A waste of time and effort, and with a bonus headache. However, four consecutive nights of drinks mixed so badly you could paint fields of roses with my vomit, and an involuntary hand actions which prior to last Wednesday, I'd never raised above pint-height apart from volunteering to leave whatever piss-soaked hellhole I'd ended up in. So a new life, a new ability to point out directions to fellow dancers to the nearest loser whilst DJs pump up the nonsense, and Bobs Your Uncle, I'm ressurected as a modern man who likes the Klaxons and makes eyes at people sixteen thousand times my own quality. I'm not entirely sure if this is a good thing. Actually it's not. Plus, as my research which led to downloading one song and declaring the search over, The Routron 5000 remix of 'Adieu' by Enter Shikari is how a preposutrous combination of bad rock music and bad trance music can unite to make the ultimate 2-wrongs-making-a-right slab of total genius.
There are people out there who still think that I know everything about music and are too scared to talk to me for this precise reason. There aren't enough gigabites in the entire universe of cyberspace for me to go into great depth about how utterly wrong a misrepresentation this is, but for the record, the last sentence of the above paragraph proves my point. Tim Westwood knows a fuck of a lot more than 99% of the population about music, but that doesn't mean you should be scared of him - he wears ridiculous striped jumpers on 'Pimp My Ride' for one thing. For another, despite these qualities, he's a total bell end.
'Atlantis to Interzone' by Klaxons is completely brilliant. Much as I hate to admit it, but having only previously experienced the song on frosty February mornings trying not avoid getting out of bed and having either Phil Jupitus or Sean Keavney (neither both of whom I resent even entering my earspace and thus have no intention of letting them have any persuasive effect on my musical taste) tell me they're so hip they could make Ironside walk again, the general barminess of Atlantis to Interzone was utterly lost on me. It's like having a Murikami book read to you by your parents. A waste of time and effort, and with a bonus headache. However, four consecutive nights of drinks mixed so badly you could paint fields of roses with my vomit, and an involuntary hand actions which prior to last Wednesday, I'd never raised above pint-height apart from volunteering to leave whatever piss-soaked hellhole I'd ended up in. So a new life, a new ability to point out directions to fellow dancers to the nearest loser whilst DJs pump up the nonsense, and Bobs Your Uncle, I'm ressurected as a modern man who likes the Klaxons and makes eyes at people sixteen thousand times my own quality. I'm not entirely sure if this is a good thing. Actually it's not. Plus, as my research which led to downloading one song and declaring the search over, The Routron 5000 remix of 'Adieu' by Enter Shikari is how a preposutrous combination of bad rock music and bad trance music can unite to make the ultimate 2-wrongs-making-a-right slab of total genius.
There are people out there who still think that I know everything about music and are too scared to talk to me for this precise reason. There aren't enough gigabites in the entire universe of cyberspace for me to go into great depth about how utterly wrong a misrepresentation this is, but for the record, the last sentence of the above paragraph proves my point. Tim Westwood knows a fuck of a lot more than 99% of the population about music, but that doesn't mean you should be scared of him - he wears ridiculous striped jumpers on 'Pimp My Ride' for one thing. For another, despite these qualities, he's a total bell end.
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