The latest order from Django:
Free shipping, man, free shipping! I’m spending to save.
Borders Student Discount Day yesterday yielded:
Bright sparks will note a pattern – the sampler fixation is simply due to the fact that I could probably get most of the other albums I want cheaper from Berwick Street or the Internet even with the 20% Borders discount, but samplers aren’t any cheaper in second-hand stores than they are in Borders, probably because they’re dirt cheap anyway. So I got them for dirt cheap, less 20%. Yay.
I came home and somehow found myself at the Django site with about $30 worth of albums in my shopping cart. Then I noticed their “Free shipping worldwide for orders over $50” offer, and couldn’t refuse. For $50, I’m getting:
I should probably feel guilty for this, but you know what? I’ve just spent a month writing an essay which shouldn’t have taken anywhere that long to write, but I haven’t been able to go any faster because it’s been bloody difficult stuff, I have to do a second essay as well by the end of the month, all my other Masters course reading has been completely neglected and will remain so for a good while, my brain is so tired I collapse into bed every night by 2 am (you have to know me to understand how rare this is) but since my dreams seem to constantly feature me getting chased by unknown shadowy menacing figures, or getting stung by swarms of bees, or all my teeth falling out, sleep hasn’t been much fun either, and honestly, the pure simple intense joy I get from coming home with new music to listen to just makes what I spent fucking worth it, okay?
We’re having a girly afternoon in the flat. Chicken in broth is simmering on the stove. I insist on playing Tamara N’Sync’s a capella versions of Last Christmas and This I Promise You that Avril recently downloaded. Tamara loves them as much as I do. We go through a long playlist of sappy R&B. We gush about how much we love All My Life (K-Ci & Jo-Jo). We gush about how talented we think N’Sync are. Halfway through No One Comes Close To you (Joe), Tamara decides she’s starting to feel a bit too loved up and needs a change of mood. Cue Fuck All Night (Jay-Z), followed by No Panties (Trina and Tweet).
From Ink 19’s Top 19 Rock Quotes of 2002. Drummers are always the most quotable, somehow.
“Believe me, even on the shoot no one knew what they were doing. It was like “Get the triplets in the jacuzzi!” or “Get the midgets in wet suits and put them here!” or “Why are we in this make up and why do we have these outfits on? I don’t know!”
– Ray Luzier, DLR Band drummer on the making of the video David Lee Roth’s No Holds Bar-B-Que.
“That was when, I think, anything we’d ever dreamed about was surpassed. You can have dreams, you can be focused and you can do things, but when you go beyond that dream, that’s what happened on the Billion Dollar Babies tour.”
– Neal Smith, Alice Cooper drummer, remembering the glory days of Rock & Roll
“Well, after we’ve been out on tour together, we all get our periods at the same time, absolutely.”
– Gina Schock, Go Go’s drummer on the challenges inherent in being in a band comprised of all women.
When I was fourteen or fifteen I read a trashy romance novel called Perfect by Judith McNaught. It was about a Hollywood superstar (male, ruggedly handsome) framed for the murder of his wife, escaping from jail and taking a hostage (female, beautiful, feisty) in his bid for freedom. They drive across the country to his remote log cabin in snowy mountains, bonding along the way despite their implacably opposed positions in the situation. Yet even as she gradually comes to believe he is an innocent man, and he is falling more and more in love with her despite himself, the fact that she is important only as his shield from police gunfire lurks continually in the background. Things come to a head one night in the cabin. His paranoia explodes into fury. Terrified, she tries to escape. In pursuit, he comes to a frozen river and thinks her car has gone through the ice. He plunges in to try and rescue her, risking his own life. She saves him, and from then on they take on the world, prove his innocence and celebrate their new-found love. He takes her to parties in Hollywood and she dances with Patrick Swayze and Kevin Costner. Happy ever after. The end.
Bel Canto (Ann Patchett) is Perfect, minus the great sex. Terrorists storm posh party in poor Latin-American country hoping to take President hostage, but it turns out the President skipped the party in order to watch his favourite soap opera. Yes, really. Terrorists say “Oh, poo” but decide to keep everyone else hostage anyway. Japanese CEO of behemoth electronics corporation and opera singer fall madly in love despite the small glitch of not being able to speak the same language. Everyone else also falls madly in love with opera singer, by the way, because she’s beautiful and her voice is wonderful, wonderful, Maria Callas and Kiri Te Kanawa eat your hearts out; it makes grown men cry and gives young terrorists hard-ons in ways that jungle warfare never did; no one can think of anything more wonderful than sitting and listening to her sing all day, every day, because of course everyone loves opera. CEO’s translator and young girl terrorist called Carmen (aha, allusion!) also fall madly in love, but oh my God, she’s a terrorist and he’s a hostage, how will it all end?
[Spoilers follow]
It ends, my friends, in tragedy. The terrorists have been making ridiculous demands – freeing of prisoners, aid programmes, a Playstation 2 for every member of the organization etc., and the government won’t budge. Special forces decide after a couple of months of sitting around scratching their balls that yeah, they should probably storm the compound. In a cruel twist of fate, Japanese CEO is killed trying to protect Carmen the girl terrorist (I forgot to mention that all the hostages and the terrorists really get along by now. It’s quite a love-in. They play football and all, although I think the Latin-American Terrorists vs Japanese Electronics Corporation People fixture would have been a bit of a foregone conclusion). Translator and opera singer are heartbroken. How will they recover from this loving and losing? They will marry each other, that’s how, even if they displayed not a jot of romantic interest in each other all the time they were imprisoned (well, the translator did proposition the opera singer for sex, but that was on behalf of the CEO). They marry in Puccini’s birthplace, and will live in Italy, where opera singers should live. Happy ever after. The end.
I’m thinking the people who gave this book the Orange Prize and Pen/Faulkner Award must have seen something in it that I’m not seeing. I’m thinking I wasted a few days’ worth of reading time on this. I’m thinking Judith McNaught should be sitting in a room somewhere really pissed off.
I am generally self-satisfied to the point of arrogance with my prowess in various little endeavours, but with regard to blog entries my proverbial feathers have just been well and truly proverbially ruffled. When I am queen everyone funnier than me will be first against the wall, and this guy’ll be among them. Mark my words. I just have to go find a wall long enough for a shitload of people. And become queen.
Note to self: when one has managed to bruise one’s tailbone through falling on one’s arse while ice-skating on Friday, it is not particularly smart to commemorate this injury by going to a drum’n’bass club that very night, and it is even more stupid to throw caution to the wind and indulge in more booty-shaking at The Roots gig on Monday.
Notes to self, eh? Why don’t I ever listen to them?
Owwwww.
The Roots. At the Jazz Cafe. Last night. Seamless. Seminal. Wow.
That’s the condensed version. Let the gibbering version begin by saying I’m a little worried: I might just have seen the best gig of my year already, although I’m hoping Sigur Ros and Massive Attack will prove me wrong. And there’s always the hope of a Pavement reunion tour (ha bloody ha)…
We begin with the venue. If you were more than 20 metres from the stage you’d have been really unlucky. I’m so glad I jumped at the chance to see them at the Jazz Cafe instead of in the vastness of Brixton Academy on March 29.
I suppose the quickest way to describe the performance is that The Roots live are every bit as amazing as you’ve heard they are. Half the time they’re a band that rocks harder than any of the NME’s latest “The ______s” darlings. The rest of the time they’re pretending not to be a band any more but a collection of classic records in the dextrous hands of a turntablist, except that they’re live musicians rather than recorded sounds, and Rahzel’s not using his hands. He’s “scratching” MC Black Thought’s rapping. He’s sampling. He’s cross-fading. I run out of DJing knowledge to describe most of what he’s doing, but the important thing I need to stress here to the uninitiated is that he’s using his mouth. The only other time I’ve seen live beatboxing was Killa Kela doing a solo gig at Cargo, which didn’t prepare me at all for the way The Roots fit it all together. Other highlights included their alternate ragga, ska and heavy metal versions of You Got Me, their ‘tribute’ to Jam Master Jay where they pretended to be Run DMC posing for a photo session, and the call-and-response bonus track from Phrenology for the encore.
Okay. I now redescend to essay-writing hell, but God bless The Roots for that brief foray into hip-hop heaven.
From Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk):
‘My tiny life. My little shit job. My Swedish furniture. I never, no, never told anyone this, but before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name it “Entourage.”
This is how bad your life can get.’
I suppose it says something about me that I think the dog’s name is brilliant.
There were all sorts of snowmen in Tavistock Square yesterday. One ambitious effort towered over me, wreathed with maple leaves. Another only came up to my knee, but with his glinting 5p eyes and mouth wide open in a silent wail he was as scary as knee-high snowmen can be. I got there late, when most of the activity had died down and the light was beginning to go. In the expanse of white and grey, Gandhi remained quietly hunched over the parched flowers in his lap, snow on his bald head and bare skin.
I moved on to Gordon Square, where I met Avril, and we built our own snowman. He looked comfortable on the park bench, although the legs we made to dangle off it were rather too spindly for his portly frame. When a group of guys initiated a snowball fight, I realized that I do, unfortunately, throw like a girl.
At UCL, one of the naked male statues on the facade was sharing his pedestal with a snowman. Another truly impressive (and unmistakably male) specimen lolled back on his bench and watched the goings-on with a broad, sculpted (no twigs involved!) smile.
By this time the light was dying fast. I took my last photograph, moulded my last snowball, and went slip-sliding all the way home.