Welcome back (to me?)

I started this blog earlier in the year with the intention to regularly update and post writing cravings / words of (supposed) inspiration and the like up, and, you know, gain a following or whatever one does with blogs.

However, life interrupted such plans and I have been flat-tack on a number of other projects.

Until now. As it somewhat does and is never the plan, life has once again provided me the opportunity to update, upload and basically fill more already very filled-up internet space with already meandered-upon meanderings. But hey, that's what the internet as a space for rhetoric is for right?

Relatively useless apart from its two-minute entertainment factor? And I'm sure this can't be the worst on that note.

So here we go. Again. Sounds like a song. Probably is. Can't remember which one.

Look forward to sharing this space with you once again and look forward to hearing your thoughts about why opinion does or does not (probably the latter) matter.

TNPS

I've pretty much already done all the blogging / playing on radio / hyping and general banter about this band I can, but now that I've started this blog I have to get these guys in here somewhere.

These New Puritans released Beat Pyramid a couple of years back and it was totally representative of the scene from which they were born - that Shoreditch rave fest that included the like of Klaxons a few years back. They pinnacled with 'Elvis', an industrially dark disco track that makes you wanna rave in a cave with black hoods and perform some sort of ritual or something.

Anyway, Hidden totally continues this caped crusader lineage with drums so large one would think they've attached steel chains to them or employed a brass band bass drummer. 'We Want War' and 'Attack Music' are apocalyptic tracks for what (if you pay any attention to the lyrical subject matter) they believe to be post-apocalyptic times.

AND, the video for 'We Want War', below, is a continuation of their darkly spiritual quest:

THE AMERICAN CONDITION

Yes, I'm going to America and yes I'm super excited (two weeks! LA, WTF!) But of late, maybe subconsciously, but more because they'd presented themselves as good deals at op shops and car-boot sales in the Wairarapa  I've been reading, almost entirely, since 2010 began (maybe even before - I think one was perhaps a Christmas gift even) novels relating to the condition of people, the economy and, um, animals in the good(?) old U.S of A. And so here are the guys that I've read, and I guess semi-reviews - completely biased and stuff though - on them.

1)  Junky William S Burroughs

While I'm yet to fully 'get' the beat writers - except for Bukowski because I get the feeling that he just totally lived the life that everyone else from that generation professes to have tried out but sort of didn't (I guess he was the most real deal)  - Junky was probs my fave to date - yes, I liked it more than On the Road. Honest, street level and quick and mean like those '50's poets were meant to be, it's got none of the self-obsession and fraught intellectual undertones that dominate his poetry - although that, don't get me wrong, has it's own merits. Boom, wanna know what the taking and peddling of narcotics was like for young dudes who'd been stricken from all Doctors and therefore couldn't get pharmaceutical scripts filled was? Read this book!

2) Eating Animals Jonathan Safron Foer

Bought this book for three reasons: had been emailed a 40% voucher for Borders, the cover is bright green with amazing typography and, well, it was by Jonathan Safron Foer. Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close are two of my favourite books of all time - which I guess makes Saffron-Foer my favourite novelist, yes? - and I kind of purchased this with that lineage in mind. Do not buy it for these reasons. Buy Eating Animals because it's a journalistic account of the factory farming industry in the States and weights all the opinions, options and truths out into a, um, digestable context that contains all the quirky anecdotes (like a double page spread bequeathed to a box describing the amount of room a factory farmed chicken has for its short life) Safron Foer is notorious for. I'm a meat eater, he's not. But this book doesn't argue for or against vegetarianism. It argues that the ethical, environmental and even economic consequences of devouring the amount of meat in the way Americans (and to a lesser extent the rest of the world I imagine) do is not sustainable, and we should sort our shit (literally, eww) out. 

3)  The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald

I guess Fitzgerald is heralded as the dude that first diarized the contemporary American condition in an economic-social sense yes? Well this book rules for doing just that. So subtle and voueristic in the way it delves, from the perspective of an outsider, into the goings-on of wealthy people's lives and how, really, boredom and money corrupt absolutely. Has anything changed since 1925?

4) The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe

A) Should have read this directly after The Great Gatsby as it eloquently follows the lineage that Fitzgerald created and is pretty much same motto, different day. 

B) Did not realise that Tom Wolfe was so significant for pioneering a new genre of journalism that he is likened to Hunter S Thompson and deservedly so. His books are excessively researched, elegantly and engagingly written pieces of historical insight and so it would seem, The Bonfire of the Vanities is my first step down a road of amazing American discovery. Pumped! I'm totally gonna read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in airports across the United States in a few weeks time!

MONDAY DRIVE FEBRUARY 15TH 2010

Still getting over how amazing seeing Echo and the Bunnymen live was. Talking about it a lot on air. Playing some other tracks too.

4PM
Songs - Clouds
Pavement - Embassy row
Batrider - Let me in to down below
Grinderman - No Pussy Blues
Surfer Blood - Floating vibes
The Dead C - Scary nest
Mount St Helens Vietnam Band - Albatross Albatross Albatross
Bikini Kill - Rebel girl
Maps - Die Happy / Die Smiling
Final Fantasy - Oh Heartland, up yours!
Dead Mans Bones - Pa Pa Power
Beach House - Walk in the park
Devendra Banhart - I feel just like a child
Caribou - Melody Day
LCD Soundsystem - 45.33 (Padded Cell remix)

5PM
Yacht - It's boring / you can live anywhere you want
Yeasayer - Ambling Alp
Signer - We should touch teeth
Thom Yorke The Eraser Album - *Activity Guide*
Health - Before tigers
Health - *IV*
These New Puritans - We Want War
Popstrangers - 1000
Vivian Girls - Can't get over you
Blonde Redhead - Scuira Sciura

6PM
Four Tet - Sing
Yeasayer - O.N.E
Lawrence Arabia - Apple Pie Bed
Wolfparade - I'll believe in anything
Echo and the Bunnymen - Seven seas
Thought Creature - Ice scream ice queen
Them Crooked Vultures - Reptiles
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Dig! Lazarus! Dig!
Bad Energy - Seed
Ponytail - 7souls

Video Clip from Later with Jools Holland, track 'The Cutter':