I go off to the south of France for my well earned holidays and when I return diskant is broke, my email is broke and no-one has posted on the weblog. No surprises there then. If you haven’t heard, we’re in the middle of a big re-organisation at diskant with me wielding the big scissors. So it’s goodbye to the events, the go see sites, the forums, the guestbook and so many other little things. End of an era really. Ah well, think of all the free time I’ll have.

So, France was fun. My parents spent the time forcefeeding us yoghurt, bread and wine and taking us on wild goose chase drives across the Dordogne in search of aquariums. Sadly all fish seem to hibernate in France and they were all closed. Nonetheless we saw some big crocodiles and scary snakes in REPTILAND, some eagles and scary vultures at Rocamadour and all manner of wonderful scenery. Hurray.

The other day, Fate sent me to see the BEST FILM EVER. Originally intending to go see The Rules of Attraction, tickets sold out at the precise second we got to the ticket desk. Snap decision and we instead went to see THE CORE. Anyone who has seen the trailer will no doubt have been similarly amazed and hysterical as we were at the film concept. In a nutshell – the core of the earth has stopped spinning, END OF WORLD! DOOM! etc. but it’s okay ‘cos we can send some brave young people into the centre of the earth to fix it with NUCLEAR WEAPONS – undoubtably best plot ever. It’s hard now for me to fully explain the marvellousness of this film in that it is even better than the trailer would have you believe. The plotline is stupendously idiotic and unscientific but that doesn’t daunt any of them for a second. Before the film even gets going properly it has a space shuttle landing in central Los Angeles, something that in any other film would have been the major event. But not for The Core, oh no. It then introduces a complete set of disaster movie cliche heroes and villians [plucky young girl, careworn old mentor, supercilious evil scientist, rugged hero, foreign expert with wife and kids, ‘crazy’ inventor] and sends them into the centre of the earth in a specially developed rollercoaster made of concrete to save the world. Hurray. They then go through a series of disaster movie cliches, people start dying in fantastic ways, everything goes horribly wrong, they come up wth a Plan B, defy the People In Charge with the help of a GEEK HACKER and some whales and save the day. Double hurray! There are too many best bits to even think about mentioning and without giving away every single minute of the film. Definite highlight is that they do manage to do the ‘ship broken, must go outside and fix it’ cliche despite being in the centre of the earth and they stand about wearing ‘pressure suits’ that look like they’re made of rubber and plastic. In the centre of the earth! The only way they could have bettered this scene would have been to have a giant lava monster jump out and eat someone. Seriously, GO SEE THE CORE.

Buy em now from their website. [And that’ll be their new, fancy website so that link immediately stopped working and now they seem to have sold out of the tshirts as well. Gah]

See also Wee Stuart having it out with John Battsek, the producer of that Britpop documentary Live Forever in The Scotsman.

Stuart: “If by influential you mean Hirst has opened the door for a plethora of like-minded chancers to exploit the swamp of postmodern Britain by churning out similarly banal, contemptuous artefacts and that Albarn is a multi-talented multi-faceted composer/musician in the sense that he has spread his soulless drivel over a variety of musical genres then you are correct.”

The other guy gets the best put-down though: “Maybe you were too busy printing T-shirts and missed it.”. HO ho. Oh dear.

Back from the wilderness with bright new shiny broadband and creaky falling apart new house. I’m not going to talk about the war because I’m finding it all very strange and I can’t quite organise my thoughts. That is, the bit that goes STOP THE WAR is quite clear but after that I’m finding there’s lots of debate and thinking. Which is great, obviously. The other major thing is having a TV again and being quite awestruck by the wrongness of televised war. Maybe more sometime later.

In the meantime, I have been Getting Out Of The House, quite a new experience for me really. First stop the newly reformed Throwing Muses back playing live again. I never saw them before and I was quite excited by the idea as well as new album with Tanya and everything. The support band I was confused by, not being able to figure out who the hell they were but not particularly caring since they were a bit dull. I was thus surprised and dismayed to discover they were Sons and Daughters. Surprised because I know Scott and Adele to some small extent and didn’t recognise either of them; dismayed because I really liked Scott’s solo thing March of Dimes and Adele’s voice on various things (Arab Strap, the otherwise rubbish Zephyrs). I can only conclude that something was wrong and I shall endeavour to see them properly and have another go.

I went down the front for Throwing Muses because this was the QMU, a venue where small people cannot see anything unless they are right at the front. Even in the second row, I often couldn’t see a thing, thanks to Tall People in front of me. I hate harping on about the rubbishness of being a wee person at gigs but it so totally sucks. Throwing Muses were great as well – a bunch of songs I knew and a whole lot I didn’t and sounding all sparky and loud with Kristin’s voice as lovely as ever. Only after a few songs the sound started to become uncomfortably loud like the soundman had turned the volume knob all the way up to ‘Mogwai’. So what could have been a wonderful gig ended up with me struggling to see and struggling to make out the tunes through the blaring distortion. Eventually it got so loud I started to feel ill and had to go sit down. So I’ve had it up to here with the stupid QMU. I really resent paying twelve pounds to not see a band and not hear them either. Until they open up the balcony as a special small person’s area and turn the volume down a notch I’m avoiding the place. Gah.

Quite the opposite situation the next night at Stereo where I was treated to a cheap night of fantastic electronic music. Steven and John bis got themselves dressed up in white coats for one of their first gigs as Dirty Hospital, as which they romped through a set of electro rave. Fit to join the ‘electronic music can be fun’ ranks alongside the likes of Cex and Kid606, they were a joy. Loud, fun, stupid electronic music with shouting about hospitals. I like. EU was much more understated but still very very good. And he carted his entire computer all the way from Russia or wherever it is he’s from. No ‘get a laptop’ hecklers to be heard though. I enjoyed his set immensely apart from kicking myself for not bringing any money to buy more of his records. I was also astonished to discover I knew pretty much no-one in the place. When I next see all my Glaswegian friends and acquaintances I shall be shouting FOOL at them for missing this.

This is going on a bit now so I’ll just end with THINGS I WANT.

– a shiny new platinum Gameboy Advance with SNES Zelda!

– new shoes

– to hear the new Mogwai album

– it to be December. How can it still be NINE MONTHS until the next Lord of the Rings film…

Yes, I am moving house again, which means diskant is moving too since we don’t really all work in a big castle. The broadband is being a bit tricksy so there may be some delays in getting things updated. It’s also highly possible that this might cause delays in me replying to emails but even if it doesn’t I’ll be using that excuse for at least two months. And, hey, if you’re ever in Glasgow come visit us [unless you are a psycho].

I did wade through the boxes and leave the house over the weekend though, thanks to the major ego boost of being asked to be part of the panel at one of the workshops at Frock On. I had a really great time and met lots of nice people. I’ve always been a little wary of GURLfests, despite being initially radicalised via Riot Girl. Never been too keen on all the vegan, anarchist, new age stuff that goes along with the music and the feminism. But I had a jolly nice free lunch and a couple of hours discussion about self-publishing and zine making with a cool crowd of girls. As I say, I was on the panel along with Lucy from Chica, Marie from No, I’m A Veronica and Pat from Vesuvius and they were all lovely and much more interesting than me. Good discussion from panel and ‘audience’ and lots of networking of the nice kind. Sadly, my head was still full of boxes so I never made it to the evening gigs but I’m sure it was all good. Big thanks to Heather for asking me along.

Right, I better get back to my boxes. Maybe fit in a THINGS I LIKE though:

YAY:

– Mojave Three and Ligament. Covering all bases at present

– New house!

BOO:

– Soil gnats! They may not be damaging my plants but they are damn irritating.

– all the crap, boring, tiring parts of moving house

Finally, I am selling some indie/Britpop stuff on eBay so have a look if you might possibly be interested. It’s all ending in the next day or so though.

So, as I was saying before Blogger went mental and ate my post [we hates it, we hates it! etc], it was the Anti War protests on Saturday and I hope you were all present and correct. We took lots of small children with us so spent a fun Friday night making our own placards out of cardboard boxes, brightly coloured paint, plaited wool and shoogly eyes. They were rather fantastic and the press kept taking photos of us. Sadly the interview Indymedia Scotland did with two of the kids isn’t on the website [interviewer: “why are you here?” kids: “umm” interviewer: “are you against the war?” kids: “YES!”] but there are lots of photos. The Glasgow demo was brilliant I thought, filling Glasgow Green at the beginning and the SECC car park at the end. Walking up St Vincent Street with people ahead and behind as far as we could see was exciting enough. Going off for chips halfway through and returning to just as many people was amazing. Also great to see so many ‘normal ordinary’ people instead of recognising 80% of the demonstrators. Tony Blair nipped in early to do his speech at the Labour Party conference and then wussed off home to hide so there was little to do once we arrived at the SECC except be continually amazed at how many people were there, try and find a space where you could be one of the twelve people able to hear the speeches and consider occupying the Tall Ship. Then the police closed the nearest bridge over the motorway so I had to walk some more miles to get home. Best anecdote of the day: when we were watching the march going past and looking for a handy gap to slide into, one of the kids with us asked, “is that the war?”. Aww.

Also on the Scottish front, some good news and some bad. The good news is that there is finally an official website for the Yummy Fur [only about five years late eh?] which has a long and very good interview with singer John McKeown and lots of other info. The bad news is that bis have confirmed that they’ve split up. But there will be a few farewell live dates and a final record before they go and they’re all involved in new projects. Crossover news of the day as John and Steven bis’ new band Dirty Hospital will be playing Stereo in Glasgow on the 24th of March [supporting the ace EU] followed by John McKeown’s new band The Mars Hotel the day after [and my birthday, yay!]. We just need a gig by Amanda’s band The Kitchen and we’ll have the full set.

There’s a new issue of Scotland’s answer to Careless Talk out now. Issue three of Is This Music? has interviews with Teenage Fanclub, Nick Cave, Swimmer One, Idlewild, Calamateur, The Beauty Shop, Cayto and Olympic Lifts plus live and record reviews and the usual actually-good free cd featuring Swimmer One, Won Mississippi, Tacoma Radar, The Aphrodisiacs, The Electroluvs, The Beauty Shop, Cayto, Real Shocks and Calamateur. £3 from independent record shops in Scotland (nationwide soon) and online from www.isthismusic.com.

Man, are we cool or what? Totally solves all those ticket buying problems though. You’re there early enough that no-one else has bought tickets yet but not so early that you might change your mind and go do something else instead. Then you go drink alcohol and wonder what bubble-coated prawns are until showtime. The non-revolutionary part of me that likes supermarkets and tall buildings thinks it would be cool to hang out in the UGC bar even when not planning to see films. I know this to be wrong though. The ticket lady gave us a free UGC magazine to read and it was great. Reviews of upcoming movies with a handy ‘You’ll like this movie if you liked…” thing, like Amazon recommendations in reverse. Totally perceptive stuff like If you liked Muppet Treasure Island you’ll like this new Disney movie also based on Treasure Island! If you liked Memento you’ll like Irreversible ‘cos, er, it’s filmed backwards… If you like Eminem you’ll like 8 Mile! Actually the 8 Mile review just had some presuasive quotes like ‘Eminem Rocks!”. So I’m deffo going to that now.

Did we see a film? Oh, right, yeah. We went to see The Two Towers. I’d already seen it but it was all part of my convoluted Lord of the Rings viewing strategy. I watch the film for the more vivid experience of watching the story develop, then I read the book to fill in the gaps and explain anything I didn’t get and then I see the film again with my new-found understanding. I’m really enjoying this way of doing things, apart from having to stop myself from reading the last book before December. I got much more out of this second viewing although some of the more ridiculous bits seemed ridiculous beyond belief [that bit where Sam and Frodo hide under a cloak outside Mordor made me want to scream with annoyance] and some bits in the middle were really dragging but overall it rocks and even more so than the first film. I imagine most of that’s down to Gollum though who manages to be both hilarious and pitiable and steals the entire film, with Frodo’s scary eyes coming a close second. If you’ve not seen it yet then get on it before you miss your chance. I can’t wait for the next one.

diskant finally notices that Pitchfork have a new design and a new weblog thing called Repeat. Don’t think much of the redesign [the vertical menu is just…wrong!] but the weblog, where they’re writing short bits about single songs, is looking pretty cool. I’ll go add it to our links then.

I don’t like anything at the moment but I can tell you I hate sitting doing nothing, sitting reading books, trying to remember to take bright orange pills three times a day and dealing with the damned housing benefit fools. I don’t even know what day it is.

– a very good sum up of Ride‘s career reviewing OX4 and joining the general consensus that Nowhere actually contains almost all of Ride’s ‘greatest hits’.

– excellent handwritten personal account of Pavement‘s “cocky, atrocious and clever” Slanted and Enchanted.

Nice work.