Jibba-Jabba

Mr T Vs Everything is a repository of links to fictional fights between Mr T and, you guessed it, anything and everything. The complete shittiness of the Photoshopping involved in finding and altering pictures to storyboard the fight is part of the charm, as is the repetitive use of key elements such as youth centres, his helluva fast van, milk, and how far he can throw someone. There are too many fights to browse through, and most are really mediocre, but I think Mr T Vs Hitler, Mr T Vs Shakespeare, and intriguingly, Mr T Vs His Own Abstract Thoughts were a little above the morass.

Graham Greene: The Power And The Glory

Again I am brought to my knees by Graham Greene. Again I find myself fumbling for words that deserve to be used in a review. Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is an incredibly audacious book; perhaps one day I’ll write an equally bold one about Graham Greene – because in my life so far (narrow-horizoned as it admittedly has been), I have not read a writer who can equal his understanding of what it is to be human.
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This Is KNN

My Civil Procedure paper was wild. Two fiendishly long questions and 40 short questions in 3 hours, each one of which involved frenetic flipping and re-flipping through voluminous notes and statutes, with an exhausted mind that had gone completely blank. I don’t know why anyone even bothers with extreme sports when they could be getting their adrenaline rushes from doing death-defying examinations in Civil Procedure.

So anyway, after an indulgent dinner at Michelangelo (Me: This panna cotta is so wonderful, it’s solid cream! Everyone else: Michelle, that just sounds really gross), I was reading IS on the bus home and found finally, finally, a DJ at Zouk who I’d bother leaving the house for! Meat Katie! He was there last Saturday. Kan ni na.¹

I have to echo Laces’ plea for Zouk to bring in some interesting DJs and stop being so goddamn pedestrian. I want Diplo and Michael Mayer too. Also DJ/Rupture. Also Akufen. Amon Tobin. The Scratch Perverts. And world peace.

As I do every now and then, I was surfing around to find out how London is, and found out that DJ/Rupture was at 93 Feet East with Supersoul on Sunday, Ty is at Cargo tomorrow, and Eclectic Method are doing weekly video mashups at Herbal.

Again I am reminded of my grim theory that if the amount I saw and did over four years in London is anything to go by, the amount I’ll have missed this past year and over the next six is just…depressing. Then why, you shriek in aggravation, do you keep CHECKING UP ON WHAT YOU’RE MISSING, MASOCHIST? The answer is: because one of my biggest fears is ignorance. I would rather know what’s going on where things actually happen, even as it makes me chafe at my limited options here, than escape back to London years from now and be completely out of touch with everything that used to excite me so much.

In the meantime, I’m sitting at my computer listening to Amon’s Solid Steel Presents and shouting KAN NI NA to a funky beat.

¹ Definition here

Big It Up For The Small Towns

I was listening to Lamacq Live (show of November 15th, available here but not for much longer I reckon), where Lady Sovereign was presenting a special report about MCs from the countryside. As they put it, “Can you be street if you live in a lane?” Let me just say that if you’re one of those hataz who can’t take UK hip-hop seriously because of the funny accents, you ain’t heard nuffin (well, nothing quite as funny) until you’ve heard a Scottish MC freestyling to grime.

It was a sweet little program, but a little depressing. There were a lot of exchanges like this:
Lady Sovereign: So wot do you rap about?
Random Cornish/Welsh/Scottish MC: About life and stuff.
Lady Sovereign: Yeah, so, like wot?
Random Cornish/Welsh/Scottish MC: Dunno, really. Not much happens round here.

At least I’ve finally found a watertight argument against Alec ever moving me to the countryside. My future career as a top MC would clearly be jeopardized.

You Realize You’re Getting Old When…

…Gangsta’s Paradise is on the radio, you start rapping along with it in glee (you are studying and very bored), you get to the line “I’m twenny-three now, but will I live to see twenny-fo’?” and you realize that THE LAST TIME YOU RAPPED THAT LINE YOU WERE FIFTEEN AND NOW YOU ARE TWENNY-FO’.

You Make Me Like Charity

A guy and a girl trade verses and half-meanings, some proclaimed, some whispered, all against a background of stripped-down synths and minimalist percussion. That is all. It lasts only 3 minutes 5 seconds. And I am completely addicted.

You can hear You Make Me Like Charity, the song that’s currently ruling my life, here (it’s track 11), as well as the rest of this rather lovable album by The Knife.

Edit: Shit. Looks like they’re no longer streaming the album. Sorry about that. I’ll just have to listen to it a couple of extra times for all of you.

Stealth Fighting

The RIAA Radar is an easy way of checking if any of the music you own, share or download is RIAA-released or not. And why do you want to know this? To quote the RIAA Radar site:

“That’s possibly a fairly long answer, but just the highlights of the RIAA’s practices involve price-fixing, blaming its poor financial state on unfounded digital piracy claims (and in turn, blaming and suing its own consumers), lobbying for changes that hinder technological innovation and change copyright laws, underpaying the artists it represents, invading personal privacy to enforce copyrights, and dismantling entire computer networks just because of their ability (of their users) to share copyrighted files.

In order to successfully and efficiently support who you like (or not support who you don’t like), you need to have information immediately available to know who is who. The RIAA Radar works in two ways: if you’re looking to stop buying RIAA releases, it will help tell you what albums to avoid (or purchase secondhand); if you are looking for new music or new alternatives, it works to promote non-RIAA releases by providing similar RIAA-free albums to almost any RIAA release, and RIAA-free popularity charts for several genres in order to showcase viable alternatives.”

Out of curiosity (okay, and extreme boredom), I checked some of the stuff on my iPod against the radar and was quite pleasantly surprised with the results.

Non-RIAA:
A Silver Mount Zion
Adem
Aereogramme
Amon Tobin
Animal Collective
Bedhead
Black Heart Procession
Boards Of Canada
Bonnie Prince Billy
Brother Ali
Calla
cLOUDDEAD
Coldcut
Decemberists
Devendra Banhart
Diplo
Dirty Three
Diverse
Dizzee Rascal
DJ Rupture
DM + Jemini
Edan
Elliot Smith
Explosions In The Sky
Fog
Four Tet
Fugazi
Interpol
Iron And Wine
Jacques Lu Cont
Jean Grae
Knifehandchop
Lambchop
Low (most albums OK except Long Division)
Magnetic Fields (most albums OK except i)
Manitoba
Meanwhile Back In Communist Russia
Michael Mayer
McLusky
Ming + FS
Mogwai
Múm
Neutral Milk Hotel
Pavement
Pedro The Lion
Prefuse 73
Polvo
RJD2
Silver Jews
Songs: Ohia
Soundmurderer
Summer Hymns
Telefon Tel Aviv
The Arcade Fire
The Books
The Czars
The Shins
The Unicorns
Third Eye Foundation
TV On The Radio
Ulrich Schnauss
Unwound
Wiley
Yo La Tengo

RIAA:
Brian Eno
David Holmes
Disco Inferno
DJ Spooky
Durutti Column
Hidden Cameras
Meat Puppets
My Bloody Valentine
Photek
Pixies
Sonic Youth
Talk Talk

Of course, it should be noted that there is a whole lot of RIAA music that would be on my iPod if I could be arsed to rip more of my CDs eg. Radiohead, Velvet Underground, Kanye West, Bob Dylan, Joy Division, Orbital etc. But in general, I think the main point that has become obvious from this exercise is that there is a lot of bloody excellent music around which won’t get you in trouble with the RIAA.

Having said this, I personally believe that if you like what you hear, you should buy the music. This is why I am continually broke.

Water With Stuff Floating In It

This is the photograph I have been trying to take for years. To all my long-suffering friends who have had to stand around patiently while I interrupt whatever we’re doing, stare intently at water with stuff floating in it, and start snapping away, this is what I was actually trying to achieve.

And now that I’ve seen the promised land, I’m afraid I’ll just have to continue asking for your indulgence. If, one day, I take a photo like that one, it will all have been worth it, won’t it?

Dancing To Autechre

I sometimes bob around my room a bit while listening to Autechre, but I never thought of them as a techno act anyone would really dance to until I saw this mindbending video of some Korean-American guy dancing to (what sounds like) their song Eutow.