Firstly, A FANZINE REVIEW!

This has been sitting on my desk for weeks and weeks now, for which I can only apologise. By shouting STUPID BROKEN INTERNET.

Anyway. THE BLOODING #2. I remember very much liking issue #1 which was one of a group of zines that seemed to spring up from nowhere and prove that zines weren’t dying after all. Issue #2 is also very good. It’s got interviews with 90 Day Men, This Ain’t Vegas, Don Caballero, OXES, Karate, State River Widening and Twofold plus profiles of local label Freakscene, online distro Glaive and some other bits and pieces. It’s one of those zines that’s perfect for a bus ride or boring waiting room; I happily read it cover to cover in one sitting and was interested, amused and intrigued in turn. Definitely one of the better zines around with their coverage of both the latest Southern heroes and the stuff going on around their doorstep and some good layouts and use of space. I advise you to get yourself a copy asap. Email the_blooding@hotmail.com for more information or just send £1.50 to The Blooding, 40 Silsoe House, 50 Park Village East, Camden Town, London, NW1 7QH.

While I’m here, I’d also like to mention our new venture here at diskant – the diskant bookswap! If you read lots of books and would like to discuss your recent reading and trade your read books for some unread books then why not join up and do just that. Join up via Yahoo Groups or just send a blank email to diskantbookswap-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

I’ve just been astonished for the second time in two weeks in relation to the work of Robert Tressell, author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. You’ve probably never heard of this book but it’s possibly my favourite ever book and it even made it to #72 in The Big Read (where the BBC had great trouble finding anything to say about it, not surprising since they also managed to destroy the original tape of the dramatisation of the book after broadcasting it a mere two times). Anyway, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is one of the few books about working class life written by the working class, being the (semi-autobiographical) story of a group of house painters in Hastings at the turn of the century and the attempts of Owen to explain to them the principles of Socialism as a way of ending their poverty and powerlessness. It’s a great book, you should read it.

But to get back to the astonishment. Last week, I wandered randomly into a charity shop and discovered up on a high shelf a range of trade union and communist books, no doubt the past possessions of a recently departed relative. Among them was a copy of One Of The Damned, the biography of Robert Tressell which has been long out of print and which I have been trying to find a copy of for literally years, since reading the copy hidden in the vaults of Aberdeen Library. And here it was for the stupidly tiny sum of £2.75! Having now re-read the book, I’ve been filled with a sense of pained sadness and frustration as Fred Ball unravels the sad tale of Tressell’s life – his death in the workhouse, the butchering of the manuscript to cut it down to a shadow of the original, the loss of much of his murals and signwork and the general lack of recognition for his writing and artwork.

So then to discover this evening the TUC History Online website where they have scanned in every page of the original manuscript of this remarkable book, in Tressell’s handwriting with all the orginal amendments and self-censorship and all the later cutting and pasting (quite literally) and restoring, has quite knocked me over. Even just to see the original front page has practically made me want to cry.

It’s always been one of my main hopes for the internet, that you’d be able to find out anything at all in the greatest of detail and be able to see and read all the things currently hidden away in the archives of museums and universities. My heartfelt thanks go out to the TUC and all involved for making one person very very happy.

[I hope everyone enjoys the juxtaposition of today’s postings]

While trying to think of something to play yesterday I had a sudden realisation that I had almost missed the window of opportunity to most suitably listen to Low‘s Christmas album. So out it came and I’ve been listening to it on and off today at work (and with only six of us the office I can actually hear it as well). If they piped this through shops during December I might not go mental so quickly. Go dig it out if you’ve forgotten it yourself.

I see the 2003 Best Ofs are getting off the ground too. Ours are in the pipeline but, judging by the first batch of votes, it’s going to be as wideranging and random as last year with hardly any two people voting for the same record. We seem to be more in agreement (more commercial?) when it comes to films.

Having been particularly skint this year it’s not altogether surprising how few of Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2003 I’ve heard, let alone own. A mere 5 to be exact. Number owned = 0. More worrying is the fact that I have heard of less than 50% of the artists. I fear I may be becoming Out Of Touch. Oh well.

An article on John Peel’s Home Truths website entitled Middle-Aged Groupie has a link to diskant at the end. WHY? It also links to the Obsessive Fan Sites website which trawls the web for horrendous fansites and pokes fun at their use of frames, java and enormous photos and is quite funny if you’re bored. Which I’m not, obviously.

Hah, that Wolves! (of Greece)/Gringo news not being online is all my fault. I forgot to upload the updates Matt sent me. Duh. Go see here now: www.gringorecords.com. Lots of Gringo in the new, final Careless Talk Costs Lives which I’ve only browsed through quickly so far. Looking good though. I will surely miss it (if you can miss something when you could never find it in the first place..) but ET and Steve’s new projects sound Exciting so it’s not so sad.

I’m also putting a record out on my new Asking For Trouble label which is involving way too many forms and jargon. I’m normally great with forms (I could win a fastest DSS form filling competition for certain) but this is like suddenly losing all your brains. I had to go tackle some MySql databases to make myself feel clever again.

I watched the new Ghibli film, The Cat Returns, the other night after being told it wasn’t being shown at the GFT after all. I’d forgotten how difficult it is to keep up with subtitles while eating your dinner but the subtitles were pretty random so it didn’t matter too much. Once the story reached its climax the subtitlers obviously got bored and stopped subtitling for ages, leaving me highly confused. I ended up having to check the synopsis at Nausicaa to find out what the hell had happened. Anyway, translation traumas aside, it’s a fun little film though nowhere near Miyazaki standards. It’s all about a girl Haru who saves a cat’s life. Only he turns out to be the Prince of Cats and lots of cats from the Kingdom of Cats offer their thanks in many bizarre ways, eventually kidnapping her and turning her into a cat so she can marry the Prince of Cats. Oh no! etc. Luckily more cats in the shape of the Duke and his fat friend (who drowns temporarily in a vat of jelly in a truly Homer-esqe scene (Mmmm, jelly)) come and save the day. Cue elaborate escape scenes. Actually it’s got a similar feel as The Castle of Cagliostro, if everyone was cats.

I want to watch Totoro again now, particularly after reading an interview with Nintendo Hero Shigeru Miyamoto at Zelda.com (Flash required but it is lovely) where he mentions that he based much of the look of Zelda WindWaker with the Amazing Eyes on Totoro. Best film ever inspires best looking game ever. Speaking of, I completed Zelda Link to the Past the other night and now I need a new game. Suggestions please.

I’m very excited to hear the news that there is another INSTAL festival in Glasgow this year. Their website’s disappeared so find out more via The Arches (scroll down a bit on the right). With this line-up and the fantasticness of the previous 2 events, I shall definitely be there.

AMM: [Keith Rowe, Eddie Prevost, John Tilbury]
Vooredoms: The Boredoms
Merzbow
Ryoji Ikeda
Cosmos
Vibracathedral Orchestra
Paragon Ensemble
Whitehouse

Sun 23 November
4pm-12am £14/£10

Instal, the Arches’ annual new music blow out, is your chance to experience ground breaking and genre defining live experimental music in the unique surroundings of the Arches. In its third year, Instal features one-off performances from some of the most striking artists in contemporary music today.

You’ll also have noted that we now have Chris Summerlin blogging for us. If you don’t know Chris already, I’ll be very surprised but go read his profile by clicking his name on the left there or just go read his always-great columns. We hope to have some other new people blogging soon but they’re all ignoring me just now.

Aw, everyone’s been doing much more exciting things than me. My weekend was mostly spent putting together exciting new content for diskant (lots on the way, keep an eye out), playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time (yes, I know it’s taking me actual years to complete) and managing quite well not to spend money even when faced with records and hamtaro things.

We did also go and see Pirates of the Caribbean in random Saturday night ‘want to go to the cinema, what’s on?’ thing. It was the only film on at the right time that we both kind of wanted to see and it was surprisingly fun. I only realised after it finished that I hadn’t found any spare time during it for my mind to wander on to other things. The plot’s very Disney (a happy-go-lucky mix of pirates, treasure and CURSES) and at times made no sense at all but it was all highly enjoyable and a bit stupid. Johnny Depp mightily fun as Bad Pirate Who Is Also Kind Of Good (a complex character for Disney there) and Orlando Bloom does ‘Orlando Bloom pretends to be a pirate’. Jeez, the guy can’t act. He just does ‘Orlando Bloom pretends to be an Elf’ and changes it slightly. I kept expecting him to peer through the rigging and shout, “They are taking the Hobbits to Isengard!”. He is very likeable though in a sort of dumb puppy falling down the stairs way. The last twenty minutes had enough plot ‘twists’ to keep anyone entertained but the actual ending was unbelievably lame like they realised the film was actually getting too fun and exciting and they better quickly simplify it into ‘boy gets girl, THE END, GO HOME NOW’.

While Ollie was having his ears assaulted (see below) I was having mine caressed by the gentle sounds of the James Orr Complex AKA Chris Mack of Eska with an acoustic guitar and that wonderful voice of his. A launch night for his debut album, which seems to have taken the best part of two years to finally see the light of day, in the tiny confines of Monorail I was not likely to be missing this. Always a friendly and natural performer, we got a lovely selection of some of the highlights of the new album which we were then encouraged to buy a whole three days before release. Hurray!

Which led to conversation later, namely ‘Monorail, a record shop in a pub – best/worst idea ever?’. If you’re anything like us, it’s hard enough to avoid spending all your money on records as it is. Add booze, a relaxing, friendly atmosphere, a stomach full of comforting vegan food and the company of your drunken friends and all hell may break loose on your pocket. And don’t think your usual saving grace applies here; Monorail has every record you’ve been meaning to buy EVER, on cd and vinyl and with a nice selection of second hand stuff, magazines, zines and gig tickets to boot. Plus there’s a reasonable likelihood of you getting to place your money into the hand of Stephen Pastel himself. If Mono was my local I’d be penniless by now.

The James Orr Complex album is excellent though so go buy it for these quickly-approaching winter evenings.

We went to The Lighthouse on Sunday, Glasgow’s design and architecture museum. I love The Lighthouse, the way it’s hidden away in the back streets of the city centre, the way the staff always want to know where you’re going, the millions of escalators, the shop filled with expensive wonders and designer geek stuff and the restaurant right at the top where you get lovely crumbly shortbread free with your coffee.

Anyway, we took our dad (yes, I realise my dad visits a lot – there’s one reason for this and you spell it I-K-E-A) since he’s an architect and we wanted to see the Contemporary Japanese Posters. The posters were pretty cool but, really, once you’ve seen the one for Ueno Zoo, the rest don’t look so great:

We didn’t brave the hundreds of stairs to the top of the Mackintosh tower this visit (exhausting but worth it for the best view of Glasgow outside our bathroom) but we saw some newspaper photographs of the year and sat in the mobile cinema (which was pretty dull, sadly) and then spotted a fantastic little exhibition of self-assessment forms called Everything in Moderation. The idea is you take one home and keep track for a week of your eating, drinking, excercising and leisure habits and then tally it all up at the end to see what you learn and then take it back in to display with the others. I’ve got mine stuck up at home to fill in each evening but I doubt I’ll remember to bring it back in. Which is a shame as I enjoyed looking at the ones there. I’m also ashamed at quite how amusing I found the one that someone had filled in as Darth Vader but it was done with such detailed care and seriousness that I couldn’t help it.

Also good (good meaning fantastically tremendous) was Spirited Away which I have been looking forward to for EVER but I’m glad I waited to see it in the cinema with an audience who were totally into it. Sadly the dubbed Disney version but actually really well done unlike the crappy Princess Mononoke one. Anyway, it’s a total Alice in Wonderland tale of Chihiro who wanders into an abandoned amusement park (what were you thinking?!) and inevitably ends up trapped in the spirit world with her parents turned into pigs and has to get a job in a bath house to free them and get back home. Not the most exciting of plotlines but it’s all really a context to bring in the wonderful characters. The spirits range from creepy to ugly to cute to hilarious with my favourites being the sad-masked No Face and the return of the soot sprites from Totoro as coal carrying slave spiders but really there’s not a single character that didn’t have me enthralled, one way or the other. I can’t wait to see it again. GO SEE.

I’m not sure what I think about this article about ATP on Freaky Trigger. I like the way it’s written, the way the half thoughts instantly remind me of my own ATP experiences and yet seem entirely personal. I think where it goes wrong is in a certain smugness and superiority over the music. There seems to be a whole layer of Belle and Sebastian fans who feel emotionally attached to ATP purely because of the pre-cursor Bowlie and spend a weekend each year trying vainly to recreate it at what is technically and actually a completely different festival, both in terms of organisation, music and audience. Although very few people would say they go to ATP purely for the music, I would hope most people go because they’re interested or intrigued by the line-up and want to hear some new and exciting music. In the FT article, there’s a patronising air that the bands were unimportant, unmelodic and a mere distraction from the real attractions of beach, pub, singalongs and television. If the music is such a minor part of the experience and the audience considered further and further from the twee ideal, maybe they should pack up their ‘We were here first’ indie cred and invade the Kerrang Weekender instead where they can really feel like outsiders. Or just go for a weekend in Skegness.