in a big box sent all the way from america.

it’s about twelve inches by twelve inches in size, with a delightful repeated motif of the X from House Gothic 23 Extended Bold all over it in a fetching brown and white design. WHAT A RESULT!

cushions are the new rock and roll, for this week

I played at that gig mentioned below (on 020202) so I’ll continue the self-obsessed and nepotistic theme by mentioning it here. For us (that is, Sunnyvale Noise Sub-Element (or Sunnyville…, Sunnyvale Noise Experiment, etc)) part of the fun of the night, nay the whole weekend, was travelling up for 10 hours in our little van, and picking the Starries up along the way, thinking we were on some kind of rock voyage, like if Summer Holiday was set in 2002 and featured a bunch of Shellac and Ninja Tune fans.

Anyway, setting aside the wonderful diskant hospitality and the general feeling of warmth and happiness to be experienced in Glasgow (my new choice of place to live – as these feelings quickly wore off as we returned to the miserable south), the gig was a success. And not just ‘cos we thought we played well – we thought we played quite well, incidentally – but because the place was pretty packed, the people were good, the pie was tasty and the Irn Bru was flowing. The Starries played more confidently and raucously than I remember them playing before, and with a top Husker Du / melodic hardcore blah blah edge, and were good and LOUD. Fighting Red Adair were an incredibly pleasant surprise, the description of them on the flyers as some kind of Shellac / Oxes fight hybrid being spot on, as they cranked it up and let rip with their sharply-honed vicious barrage of structured noise.

There will be more of these diskant gigs, i hear. And that news is A GOOD THING.

just sat through the whole of jo whiley’s sycophantic dribble in order to catch channel 4’s ‘pioneers’ programme about the mighty SONIC YOUTH. a disappointment? oh yes! i wondered how they’d manage to cram the whole of a 20+ year career into such a compact time (fifteen minutes – fifteen WHOLE minutes!) and – clever trick – they didn’t bother! effectively cutting the career in half, NOTHING pre-‘Goo’ was played, only hinted at in the vaguest of ways, and the band interview was giving secondary prececedence behind rambling obvious blather from a collection of low-rent 90s indie kids (debbie goodge excepted – a Snowpony member fair enough, but hmm… I seem to remember some other band called My Bloody something or other which seemed to have dropped off her caption…) Any reason why sonic youth have such a massive influence over so many bands from oooh… 1985 onwards (at least) wasn’t even partly explained: the closest we got is ‘because they got Nirvana signed to Geffen’. Yeah! DIY spirit!

fuck!!

Finally got to see ‘Battle Royale’, although I had to be in London to do so, ‘cos the exciting! big! multi-screen! Warner cinema in Reading still shows only the most mainstream movies. BUT, consider my surprise, upon realising that I didn’t actually like the film all that much – it was entertaining, sure enough, but ultimately I found it cheesy, confusing in parts, a very very good idea messed up. The idea behind the film (if you don’t know it) is that due to kids being little fuckers these days, why not drop batches of them on a deserted island and let them kill eachother? (it’s not quite as simple as that, but that’s the gist)…. my friend said afterwards that she always considers whether she’d enjoy foreign language films (Battle Royale is Japanese) the same if they were in English. And in this case, no way, as the dialogue is at times super-childish and unrealistic. a shame… and a real let down.

i’m feeling weak and fragile after possibly my worst day at work since i started there four years ago. so, i’ve got the vincent gallo album on warp records to listen to and i gotta say it’s the most exquisite, beautiful, touching, personal and artistic record i’ve heard in a long time. from the elaborate book-style packaging onwards it seems clear that vincent, or mr gallo to me, should be friends with all of us.

and if you haven’t seen buffalo ’66 yet, either, then that’s this week’s movie go see tip!