I finally got round to seeing some films last week after too many evenings organising records and/or being ill in a coughing way, which means trailers!

I, ROBOT – still looks really really dumb. Now starting to edge into the ‘so ridiculous maybe we should go see it for a laugh’ but NO. Also seems to have almost exactly the same plot as Minority Report. With robots.

CATWOMAN – this looks terrible, particularly the ‘hilarious’ cat-related jokes.

KING ARTHUR – was starting to actually look okay (if you can stop thinking about how cool a LOTR style King Arthur fantasy film might be) until the actor playing King Arthur said something. What kind of an awful accent is that? Urgh.

3 (or maybe 4, we were a little late) part trailer for HELLBOY – does anyone really care that much? Failed to move me to any emotion whatsoever, good or bad. Small child in front of us seemed confused also.

Not much to say about the actual films we saw. Spider-man 2 wasn’t really as good as the first one but was still very enjoyable (apart from several shouting at the screen type moments (STOP TAKING YOUR MASK OFF!, why didn’t you notice Spider-man and your best friend had THE SAME VOICE?) and the worry that all goes downhill now that some people know who Spider-man really is and he spoiler spoiler at the end. I really liked the opening credits though, all comic book style and nice flashes of the previous film for dumbasses like me who suddenly realised they’d forgotten everything that happened previously.

And Fahrenheit 9/11 was much better than I expected, what with all the furore and dismissiveness and OH NO LEFTY BIAS etc. Much less stunts and use of 9/11 than expected and very funny with a few utterly shocking moments. In this cynical old world it’s weird to find myself gasping in disbelief of what I have just seen. The weirdest thing for me though was being shown lots of footage of major players in the US government and me not recognising them, thanks to not having watched much TV in the past year! That’s one unexpected downside of getting all your news from the internet.

I haven’t got round to seeing Shrek 2 yet, thanks to my bandmates telling me the “twist” (no doubt obvious to a 4 year old) after someone spoiled it for them. Thanks guys. The gingerbread man is my new hero though so I will sometime. Also, why did no-one ever mention Shrek is Scottish? Sorry, I mean “Scottish” (cue Stu and his his Amazing Terrible Scottish Accent).

Hello!

I’ve been busy (BUY OUR RECORD) but I now hope to be able to stop neglecting diskant and do some much-needed redevelopment and updating, in between spending hours at the post office sending parcels (BUY OUR RECORD). So expect some changes round here. To show you just how serious I am, I’ve just spent all of 10 minutes adding commenting to the blog so that we can carry on in-jokey conversations and you, yes YOU the reader, can tell us how great we are, or how wrong we are, or, er, how great we are. Please do add your comments if you have anything you’d like to add.

I have lots of other things to post but not now. Soon, though.

No, really, BUY OUR RECORD.

I have a record label and I got my test pressings today so very very soon I will have an real record what is available to purchase in a fancy BOX and everything. It features diskant staff bands Uter and Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element and our friends in the USA A Roman Scandal and Denim & Diamonds. There will be some gigs happening soon in the honour of so keep an eye on www.askingfortrouble.org for all the info on that and more. diskant record label madness! (This is why diskant is never updated).

Much more importantly and excitingly, I have just returned from the Netherlands where we discovered a whole new trend which we have brought back in abundance – PARASITE PALS!

“One day Holly was a lonely girl with not the friend. The doctor tells of the infection of many parasites. He give the pills for removal of parasites, but Holly is sad. Why to kill the parasites?”

And thus meet her parasite pals, the most fun being Tickles the Tapeworm who lives in Holly’s unhappy tummy. This is the most insane thing I have seen in a long time. I really never thought I’d see the day when tapeworms were cool.

I’d forgotten the one terrible thing about living next door to the Art School. The annual Degree Show Street Party which takes place right outside our house. Cue booming music all evening interspersed with the sound of car alarms being set off by the vibrations. I’m getting a real education in art school hipster music tonight and it is exactly as you would expect – lots and lots of Franz Ferdinand and The Rapture. Don’t they realise what a cliche they are being? But they’re just playing the full length version of Blue Monday and it sounds amazing. If they want to play this outside my house at high volume every evening that’s fine by me.

I’ve been too lazy to enthuse about the new issue of Loose Lips Sink Ships but lucky for me, Stereo Sanctity have done the work. I’d like to agree with everything they say. I mean, show me another magazine that manages to feature Sonic Youth, Kevin Shields, Weird War, Blonde Redhead and Lightning Bolt all in the same issue. And the photos! And the funny smell the paper has. Mmmmm.

I got mine in Virgin so you should be able to find a copy easy in your local record store/Borders etc. or find out more here.

I’m hoping other people will join me in over-opinionating on the new trailers they see. Last night’s was possibly the best selection of trailers ever! Firstly (seemingly) 20 minute long Spiderman 2 trailer which gives away so much plot that I’ll now be able to turn up for the last ten minutes of the film and understand perfectly what is happening. Except it looks great so I’ll be going to see the whole thing. Then the new Harry Potter. I have not seen or read any Harry Potter and spent the entire trailer going “What? Whaat! WHAAAAT?!” It makes no sense. It is mental. I quite want to see it. Then I, Robot. This looks like the worst film ever! Robots with human faces! GONE MAD! Fantastic. Oh, and Shrek 2. That looked okay.

All this was an excellent pre-cursor to the film we were seeing, which was The Day After Tomorrow, oh yes. Anyone having read my previous over-enthusiasms on The Core will know what we were hoping for. We didn’t exactly get it. The Core is great because it is a ridiculously stupid disaster film which the characters take entirely seriously. The Day After Tomorrow tries too hard to make things believable but it is just too very very stupid. There are so many best bits in this film that it took us about an hour afterwards to list them all.

Possibly the highlight was the Glaswegian audience’s reaction to the ‘Northern Scotland’ weather monitoring station in Glasgow (a Glasgow which seemed more like Orkney) and the Scots staff working there who were fans of Manchester United and made their solemn final toast “to England”.

But no, the undoubted best bit involved three young men going outside (despite previously insisting anyone going outside would freeze to death instantly) to board an enormous abandoned Russian ship (which just happened to make its way up their street when New York flooded) in search of Penicillin for The Girl who had contracted blood poisoning (while saving a woman’s passport) and were then attacked by WOLVES who had escaped from the zoo earlier and had obviously made their way to the nearest ship in search of flesh despite all the dying frozen people everywhere and of course the instantly freezing air (which obviously doesn’t affect wolves).

As this scene started, a man in our aisle (with great foresight) stood up, said ‘this is Appalling!” in a loud voice and walked out.

Funniest film I’ve seen in ages.

I’ve been meaning to do this for quite a while but I have the memory of a goldfish. So, despite leaving two copies of Robots and Electronic Brains on my desk I have still not remembered to write anything about them. And that’s a darn shame as Robots is possibly the greatest zine in the world at present. Jim seems to have no concept of release dates and current trends and instead just works his way steadily through what sounds like a small warehouse full of records. Thus Robots is always packed with reviews which muse and ponder over the motives, dreams and personalities behind the tunes. The only bad thing is that almost everything ends up sounding intriguingly great and would bankrupt me if I had the memory to search it all out. The other half of the zine is usually taken up with interviews which are almost always absorbingly interesting even when you don’t have a clue who they are. The two issues I have here (#12 and #13) feature the likes of EU, The Telescopes and promoters Bad Timing but most interesting are the ones with SK (early collaborator of The Streets) and Braer Rabbit (who sounded so fantastic I went and dug out the 7″ that’s been sitting in my review box for a year – it is fantastic). As well as this you also get free CDs featuring stuff from ace labels like Bearos, Antenna and WIAIWYA which make me go ‘ooh!’ and then stick on top of the pile of CDs to be listened to… I can’t recommend this enough so just go buy a couple of issues via the website.Also of note is the news that another diskant zine fave Stereo Sanctity has set up a weblog for random reviews and stuff. I have high hopes so keep an eye on it.

So who lives on the Soup Line.?

“Take a map of the British Isles. Draw a straight line diagonally across the map so that it cuts through Belfast and Nottingham”, says Bill Drummond

If you live on this line then he’ll come visit you and make you a pot of soup! Here is a map, here is an article. Come on diskanteers, invite him round.

At last, at last, E3 is here which means Nintendo DS revealed!. Hurray for Nintendo – this actually looks fantastic, particularly the idea of multiplayer DRAWING madness. New “non-kiddie” Zelda should shut up the moaners as well. And Animal Crossing DS! Woooo!

Firstly Blogger has had a redesign so you may be spotting some changes round here. Already you can view our fancy Blogger Profiles to the left instead of those horrendously out of date pop-up profiles. Also means if you only like one of us you can just read their posts on their profile and pretend the rest of us don’t exist. HAHA.

While looking for ATP photos for our ATP Round-up I stumbled across the website for Everett True’s forthcoming post-CTCL magazine Plan B. By the looks of things it’s fairly similar in terms of contributors and subject and thus very much worthy of your time. Check out the three different reviews of ATP for instance. They’ve got a launch issue out soon but they’re posting reviews and stuff on the site all the time as well as blogs from some of the writers including the lovely Andrew Clare and ET himself.

And finally, WHAT THE HELL? story of the week as Freaky Eyed Hobbit Boy^TM Elijah Wood gets the chance to take over John Peel’s show for a night. Just ‘cos you saved the world from the wrath of Sauron doesn’t mean you can stand in for John Peel. “Elijah is a really big music fan,” a Radio 1 spokesman said. Well, so am I!

actually, finally, WHERE IS EVERYONE ELSE?