Either that or they’ve been doing really boring things like going to see Fugazi and to the cinema and stuff. cough cough etc.

I’ve been doing some exciting stuff but it was ages ago now and I can’t remember much about it. Fugazi tomorrow though and the mighty Eska supporting. I just wanted to mention a couple of things. Firstly, the nice people at Instal [hopefully they’ll update that website soon…] are offering YOU a 2 for 1 ticket deal for this year’s event. It takes place at the Arches in Glasgow on December 1st and features all manner of exciting and innovative ‘brave new music’ including perfomances by Ryoji Ikeda, Stephan Mathieu, Koji Asano & the Paragon Ensemble and Phill Niblock. We’ll be previewing Instal 02 in next month’s ZINE but there’s details on the event, the line-up and the ticket deal here. I suggest you get yourself along.

In other news, um, there’s a really interesting interview with ME in the latest issue of Tasty zine. You can also email Sam for your own free copy! Okay, I’ll shut up now.

Hurray, I’ve finally been doing something I can blog about. We grabbed some handily placed kids today and went to see The Powerpuff Girls Movie! It was really great as well. And don’t say it’s not topical since it has a theme tune by bis [which they nicely punked up for the film]. It was basically just a long episode of the cartoon but considering how rare it is for cartoons not to get messed up in the movie version, that was pretty ace. They used the time to explain the origins of the Powerpuff Girls in proper detail and also how Mojo Jojo came to be an evil monkey genius. It was hyper brightly coloured, almost excessively loud and packed full of monkey smacking action and actually funny jokes. It also had the best newspaper headline ever: FREAKY BUG-EYED WEIRDO GIRLS BREAK TOWN. We also added our own brand of hilarity to the showing by bringing along Rhiannon’s talking Pikachu who has master timing for shouting ‘pika-pika!’ during quiet moments. I’ve yet to find a situation where this isn’t funny. So, yeah, go see go see!

When I was young I used to love to stay home, but now I just get bored and irritable. It has given me the chance to listen to some music for the first time in ages though…

HELLA Falam Dynasty 7″ (5RC)
I’m yet to hear a bad word said against this band. Dave Stockwell very kindly got me their LP which for me will rank highly in the upcoming diskant 2002 review thingy. Word has it that these guys are 20 and 21, which makes me feel very lame indeed. Some of the most intricate and keenly executed sounds I think I’ve ever heard. Can’t recommend this, and their LP enough. Seriously, get on it.

THREE MILE PILOT s/t 12″ (Gravity)
Been meaning to get this for some time, and now I have, I’m a little dissapointed. I went off 3MP for quite a while, but recently Another Desert Another Sea has been reminding me how great they are. This, on the other hand, is really just lacking that edge that makes a lot of their other stuff so amazing. If nothing else though, it did remind me that I need to get the new Black Heart Procession album.

GET HUSTLE Earth Odyssey CD (5RC)
Took me a while to get into them, but the general sexiness of this band has won me over big time. They somehow manage to sound laid back and full on at the same time, with lots of piano and the odd wailing vocal. Get Hustle also feature on…

DYNAMITE WITH A LASER BEAM comp (31G)
Lots of weirdo bands playing Queen songs. Sounds like it should be shit, in fact I was apprehensive for a while, but thankfully it rocks. My favourites are probably rather amazingly The Oath (punk, oh no!) doing We Are The Champions and The Locust doing FLASH!! (aaaargh). The Locust will always be a rather silly novelty band in my eyes, but the crappy sci-fi element of band and song works here very well.

I still think us staff should have wishlists because we’re very important and deserve to be given stuff, so here’s mine:

Melt Banana’s new 6″ on Level Plane
The Hudsucker Proxy region 1 DVD
Train tickets to Nottingham so me and Kim can get to see Fugazi and Wolves of Greece on the 23rd
Hell, I’m not picky. If something’s free I’ll take it. Go nuts.

The christmas lights have been up in George Square since at least Wednesday. No wonder I’ve been cold in the mornings.

Better put a link here too. How about an Escher picture using Lego? Or settle arguments using Googlefight.

Sweet Sixteen. I went to see it last night and it’s excellent. Ken Loach is a supreme manipulator of emotion. If he wasn’t allergic to happy endings he’d be bigger than Spielberg. Him and his damned inconvenient integrity. The film is great and, according to the BBFC, it is as dangerous to children as the film I nearly went to see last night, Baise-Moi. The French film with the (allegedly) gleeful amounts of rape and murder. They both get 18 certificates but if you watch Sweet Sixteen you would be hard pressed to see why. There’s no nudity, the drug use is all off-screen and the small amount of violence is sensitively and inexplicitly handled. But it is as dangerous as Baise-Moi because it contains some words, one in particular, that the censors don’t like. Can you guess what it is? Yes, it’s the one for everyone’s favourite piece of anatomy. I have to say that as the film is set in Greenock, not far from diskant tower and as Ken Loach has used local actors, I know just how well he’s done at capturing his characters’ voices. And yes they are saying “cunt” a lot. Big Deal. The kids throwing fireworks outside my window are too. Why is it that films about growing up are always kept away from the age group they are about? I won’t get onto how I think this shows the BBFC to be suffering from geography- and class-based bias, just this: Why not use a combination of the new 12A rating and the consumer advice now on every poster (i.e. “contains strong language”) to let folk decide for themselves, rather than class a well-made and touching (hate that word) film alongside Zombie Flesh Eaters?

If nothing else, it devalues the 18 certificate as a guide to those seeking out morally reprehensible filth.

Get Your War On. The Guardian should syndicate it instead of that Doonesbury column I can never spot the punchline of. Haven’t laughed more at work for too long.

Well, I’m home and sulking cos I ain’t got no money to go and see Erase Errata. Damn Sleazy’s for not ever doing tickets. If they’d sold tickets I would have bought one weeks ago and I wouldn’t be in this jam.

So, anyway, I’ve been wading through the visitor referrals and have found some new reading for you.

– The Rub looks jolly nice and reads rather well too. Plus every week it offers some darn good MP3s to download.

– Stumpshaker doesn’t seem to get updated too often [but who are we to talk…] but there’s some interesting stuff in the archives though, lots of it film related which makes a nice change from all the music blogs.

– Jill who I met at Audioscope has an ace Oxford-based website Nunuworld with local music stuff, a blog and a rather fantastic gigblog of every single gig she’s been to this year!

– The always great Skippy’s Cage has a Cat on Form Tour Diary by Dan of their recent UK jaunt which makes for amusing reading of bodily damage and giant watermelons. Good luck to Skippy as well who is off to live in the US of A shortly. How will London manage without him?

– I’m not entirely sure what Transmission Disorder is but it looks like quite a good thing. Obviously keen on the new wave of garage rock bands, there’s news and reviews, interviews, quizzing rock stars on how ROCK they actually are and lots of little bits and pieces.

– Eroding Empire is a website full of information on DIY action and events in London and they can have a link purely for calling diskant “for the indie kids”. Cheers.

If that’s not enough for you then there’s plenty in the diskant links pages to keep you occupied. Check the New Links page for our latest finds or the Go See Sites for our current favourites.

just read ross mcgivern’s column on iraq. very informative, and very important. i’d love to say that i was off down to the demo next saturday, and spend my time doing something i really believe in, rather than being my usual indifferent self. but i really don’t think i could bring myself to actually take part in something like that, and i blame it solely on where i live.

cambridge can be a great place to live, but, like many other things, political demonstrations have very little meaning to me any more. and it’s all the student’s fault. in years gone by i felt i could relate to the “alternative” crowd, the section of society (often students) with the messy hair and the torn clothes and “radical” ideas, but things have changed. maybe i’ve just seen one too many dreadlocked rich kids blowing whistles heckling police, thinking they’re the baddest thing since bob dylan (yeah, i blame the hippies too), but i cannot even begin to take any kind of demonstration seriously any more. this is a truly bad thing, because it’s just to easy for myself, and no doubt many others to assume that real beliefs and views are the last things on these people’s minds. maybe it’s a phase a lot of people go through when they reach a certain age. they suddenly realise that they can go around making a racket and disturbing the straights, therefore they must.

please don’t assume i’m saying that anyone who chooses to go out and voice their political beliefs are simply charlatans. i agree that there’s a great number of things in the world that must change. but there are too many people who just cannot grasp the responsibility they are undertaking by sitting in the road yelling about animal testing. i don’t like the idea of animals being hurt and killed any more than you, but if it was going to save my life, or the life of someone i care about, i wouldn’t give a second thought to what had happened to make this treatment available, and neither would you. these days too many people protest simply because they can, and all it does is undermines the work of those who really are devoted to their cause. there are people in the world dying every day for what they believe in, and you’re worried because you saw some pictures of little bunny rabbits, or because roads are the scurge of the earth. people go to protests as a social event in cambridge. who cares what it’s about, you can go and smoke a spliff and the police won’t care! not only do these people undermine those who really are protesting about the lives of the millions of opressed people in the world, they even undermine the people who fight for student grants to be reinstated. why should the government pay for you to develop a bloated sense of moral decency for four years? answer me that, you fuck.

christ, sorry. went a bit off track there. but to sum up, i deeply dislike people who manage to damage the hard work of others, so that they can feel like they have political beliefs.

any feedback is welcomed :)

I’d like to apologise for being away on holiday and not posting here going ‘woo, I’m in the south of France!’, cos now obviously you won’t believe I was really there. And I can’t even say I was so much in the middle of nowhere that there wasn’t an internet cafe as there were two in the wee town I was in. So I’m afraid it was entirely that I was enjoying myself too much to give you all a second thought. I did find the time for some record shopping though during a day trip to Bordeaux and thanks to Hugues for giving me directions to a rather ace record shop called Total Heaven which was filled with lots of UK, US and European vinyl. Not to mention a nice big box of local band releases and a big display of fanzines [all in french, sadly for me]. They’re on the Rue de Candale so go there if you’re ever in the vicinity. Shopping in Bordeaux was probably the most exciting thing I did in France but wandering about the alleyways of Sarlat, driving through some staggeringly beautiful places, visiting castles, caves and water gardens and seeing my mother for the first time in months wasn’t exactly un-exciting.

Nor indeed was my return to the UK where I hopped on a bus to Oxford and spent a hugely fun weekend there for Audioscope. Despite being robbed of all but a few hours’ sleep by Fighting Red Adair and their talking all night antics, I had a great time tending the Appliance merch stall and stumbling over to photograph the bands. You should be hearing more about Audioscope in the next issue of the diskant ZINE but suffice to say it was a fantastic day, both in terms of the bands and the amount of money they raised. Top bands for me were Cat On Form, Appliance, Souvaris and Dustball. Hello to everyone I met at Audioscope by the way, especially Jill and Jamie for making me feel like all this time and energy we put into diskant is actually appreciated by real people.

been watching lots of films lately, most notably vanilla sky and brotherhood of the wolf…

vanilla sky was semi-surprising, as there were enough unexpected elements to keep you guessing (cameron diaz’s freaky slut routine was entertaining). the major downfall though, apart from the weak final scene, was the fact that tom cruise’s character was such a prick, that you really didn’t care if he sorted things out or not. for some reason, i can’t help but compare it to fight club in my mind, but it loses out each time to edward norton’s rich guy turned crazy loser. the total recall thing was kinda cool though.

next, brotherhood of the wolf, a horror/kung fu/period drama/swashbuckler. quite a mix, i’m sure you’ll agree, but a very good one. vincent cassel is possibly one of my favourite actors, mainly because he only ever seems to be in great films (dobermann, la haine) and he steals the show here as the crazed gothic….oops, i almost gave the whole thing away there. in fact i probably have already, but go see it, it stands out to me as being one of the most original films i have seen in some time.

As I haven’t been doing a lot of stuff, here are some useful links to help those who might be feeling a bit disconnected at the moment.

* CND are looking for 50 more people to agree to break the law by signing this pledge.

* “If a car is stolen, it can be fitted with a computer to enable it to be tracked – so why not apply the same principle to finding missing children?”

* I like this site about bikes, not least because it pointed me to this barcode generator.

* Sarah Hepola sent us a postcard on her travels that she writes about.

* I love Radio 3, especially since I got their downloads to work properly. There’s Wauvenfold and Lonesome Organist live sets, plus a Bjork interview for starters. [She got burgled, you know, but the stories aren’t interesting]

* RTMark, which I found in our links database has more great ideas than you could ever do justice to.

* And if all that’s not enough, this link takes you to any recently updated weblog. See? Try again. Look! it’s different.