Severe Jam Damage

Dustin is representing Ireland in the Eurovision this year. I laughed my ass off through the performance last night. RTE went back to the old way of picking a song and this is what the public voted in - given the other choices, Dustin was really the only way to go. Dana was disgusted, Louis made a crack about the fact that Dustin is RTE and it was an RTE show, and Maria (the girl who won for Serbia last year) almost fell off her chair with laughter and kept calling him a ‘duck’.
Priceless…

Warren Ellis has posted up episode number 9 of ‘The 4am’. This week its all about ‘Poptometry‘.
Give it a whirl. If you like the tracks right click to download ‘em (filesize - 20mb)

So far the third track ‘Cavalier’ is my favourite. From Warren’s post on the 4am:

Brandon Whitesell of Onlooker says: “I imagine that this song is about chemical dependence, destroyed eco-systems and biological chaos… and an army of stuffed bears wearing gas-masks and marching through the rainy streets of downtown…” And he’s not wrong. If possibly a bit mad.

Picked this up on Saturday, but I’m not going to bore you with a review of it as Jim Carroll did a much better job over on The Ticket.

I almost lived with Jim once, years ago. I was looking for a new place to live and so was he. A mutual friend put us in touch. We had a few discussions about getting a place big enough that would be able to house both of our music collections and libraries but Jim found a place soon after and I met Mrs H and moved into Smithfield.

Anyway go read it, in addition to upping the band, he has a good (or bad) take on the state of the Irish music scene that is worth reading.

Lisa Gerrard and Patrick Cassidy

I’ve been listening to this on and off over the weekend. Lisa Gerrard - the female half of Dead Can Dance and composer of the soundtracks to Gladiator (with Hans Zimmer) and ‘The Insider’ (with Pieter Bourke) – has teamed up this time with Irish composer Patrick Cassidy to bring us ‘Immortal Memory’. Similar in theme to her previous work, this has the added bonus of hearing Gerrard actually singing words. Granted those words are sung in Old Irish and Aramaic but still, they are (almost) recognisable words. Then again if you are buying a Lisa Gerrard album you aren’t really there for the lyrics rather, the Voice. Which still manages to astound and surprise. At times you could be mistaken for thinking that no human could make that sound, it must be an oboe or a cello. For instance I had to listen to the second track ‘Maranatha’ (Aramaic for ‘Come Lord’) three times before I realised that she is actually chanting deep underneath and has overlaid this with another lament – the second melody sung in her signature ‘melismatic’ style. ‘Amergin’s Invocation’ builds on ‘Maranatha’ and listening to it one can easily imagine the Milesians marching to war with the Tuatha De Danann.

This is quite a specialised album and it’s not going to be up everyone’s street. Me, I’d buy an album of Lisa Gerrard singing the phone book. Given the lack of recognisable lyrics on her previous albums I quite possibly already have. But this is good listening for those nights when it is 4 in the morning and you can’t sleep. Put it on the stereo on low, close your eyes and get lost in the heart of it.

Well obviously I was busy with other things but here is a quick list of the books, music and other stuff that absorbed me on holiday.

Books:
War Reporting for Cowards - Chris Ayres: I picked this one up at the airport and pretty much finished it by the time I landed in Toronto. It’s pretty standard travel writing stuff. Chris Ayres was an embed in Afghanistan in 2003 and writes about his ‘Nine Day War.’ Witty in parts he doesn’t dwell on the reasons for the war, but rather how he got there and how soon he can get out.

Sideways - Rex Pickett: One muggy evening when we were too exhausted to even speak to each other we sat on the porch drinking cold beer. Mrs H was reading ‘The Quiet American’ and I picked up Sideways. I haven’t seen the movie but I knew the general gist, the basic American Road Trip story. To me the book seemed oddly uneven. The first part seemed manic, almost ‘Fear and Loathing’ with Cab Sauv. Driving, swigging wine and lots of shouting. I didn’t like either of the characters, Miles was an alcoholic and in denial about it and Jack was - not to put to fine a point on it - a prick. I couldn’t understand why either of these men were friends and it was not explained in the book. All they did was fight about wine, women and everything in between. There didn’t seem to be any reason for either of these men to hang out together and that quite frankly grated on me.

Someone comes to town, someone Leaves Town - Cory Doctorow: Yep, that bloke from Boingboing. Okay I also bought it cos the cover art is by Dave McKean. (Holy crapola I’ve definitely become a geek. I’m buying books for the cover artist now!) I read this one on the way home and it read like a Nano novel. The plots were thrown around like dirty clothes on the spin cycle. All it was missing was a few Ninja Pirates (Nanowrimo joke.) But it did have monsters, angels and murders. The one driving (and pointless) plotline was about getting Wifi into Toronto’s Kensington Market, and pretty much the whole book hung around that. Considering that Doctorow is an uber-geek and the King of Boingboing the technical shit was pretty poor, and rather outdated. (Think Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon - okay you can stop now before your head explodes.) It really should have been tighter. The ending tied up absolutely nothing, or at least there were still a few strands left hanging.

Music:
The Sadies: Saw these guys in the afternoon at the Winnipeg Folk Festival and they were really cool. On stage one brother looks like Nick Cave and the other has a sort of scruffy Bob Dylan thing going on. You can listen to some of their stuff here

Food:
A&W: Okay, forget McPuke’s and Bluergher King. If you are gonna go fast food A&W is the only way to go. I had a couple of TeenBurgers (or three) while I was there. SO MUCH BETTER than the rest. Question: They have a Teen, Momma, Poppa and Grandpa burger but what happened to Grandma eh?

Mrs H’s Grilled Salmon: She bought a half a wild salmon for under a tenner. (We’re on an island famous for salmon and it’s not that cheap!) Stuffed with dill, lemon and garlic butter then grilled on the barbecue for an hour. Absolutely delicious. Also, her homemade guacomole kicks ass.

Bison Burgers: Tastes like beef. Apparently they are now farming Bison for meat. The burgers were DAMN good.

some of you may have already heard this elsewhere…

Paris Hilton - Stars are Blind
Popbitch likens it to UB40’s ‘Kingston Town’.

Luv,
Eli (trawling the net for crap so you don’t have to)

Sometimes YouTube is very, very bad… And other times it is very good.

Here’s a bit of a blast from the past:

Book of Love - unfortunately no ‘Modigliani’ or ‘I Touch Roses’ so you’ll have to make do with ‘Pretty boys, Pretty girls’.
Cabaret Voltaire - I’d forgotten how long ‘Sensoria’ is.
Camouflage - I fuckin’ LOVED this song. Everybody raise your fist now ‘The Great Commandment.’ Also doesn’t Marcus Meyn look like Matt Damon in that video? I lost my copy of ‘Methods of Silence’ years ago. bah!
Front 242 - Lock the target, spread the net, catch the man.
Killing Joke - cos it just needs to be here.
Lene Lovich - Doin’ it old style.
808 State - A bit of early trance, cos it may have been getting a bit industrial in the list.
Pop Will Eat Itself - She loves me, she loves me not.
Nitzer Ebb - Whether you be glad, sad or bad…
XTC - Christ Andy Partridge looks so young, but let’s end on a prayer shall we?

Oh god.

I’m so embarrassed. So embarrassed in fact that the best thing to do is just admit it.
I went to see Take That on Friday night.
Nigel had a spare ticket y’see. I met her for something to eat earlier and she was still looking for someone to whom she could offload the extra ticket.
‘Sure if you can’t find anyone, I’ll go with you’ I said.
I blame the wine and lack of food. I was supposed to be meeting friends in a pub and to be fair I went down, had a pint and said hello and then we had to feck off back down to the other side of town.

The Point was full of women. Women in pink glittery cowboy hats, women in pink glittery boas, women in glittery bunny ears, women in tiny strappy tops and high heels. Just inside the doors Louis Walsh was getting his photo taken with some drunken English girls. Note, this is the second time in three years I have been within punching distance of Louis Walsh and done nothing about it. Of course we happened to be standing behind one of those three men for about half an hour of the concert. Nigel isn’t much taller than I am so the two of us grumbled for a bit. Eventually the Jolly Gay Giant trundled off to some other part of the arena and our view was a little better.

Now, I missed out on the whole Take That phenomenon during the ’90’s. I arrived back in Ireland midway through their popchart domination so was unaware of who they were or what they did. Even if I had known I wouldn’t have been interested in buying their albums. I have seen Robbie Williams in concert since (it was at Slane ok?) and thought he was a great showman, he knows how to manipulate a crowd alright. But I never had any inclination to buy, see or listen to any sort of boy pop band. The show on Friday was like being at the biggest hen night in the world. Myself and Nige fell out of the place deaf and stunned. 9000 women (and three men) have amazing lung capacity.

The show itself was, dare I say it, quite impressive. A huge stage which extended out to the back of the Point allowed the band to come out into the audience. And some impressive special effects including a rain storm on stage during ‘Back for Good’ and a hologram of Robbie Williams during the finale ‘Never Forget’. Also on stage were fire eaters, flamenco dancers and a man wearing a corset and spangly thong. Perhaps the less said about that the better though.

At one stage the band performed a Beatlemania medley which went down a storm. I doubt they could have pulled it off 10 years ago. There were a couple of plugs for the new album and a number entitled ‘How to create a boy band’ which was a pure dig at the music industry and appealed to my cynical attitude. Overall it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. A bit of a laugh for a Friday night and although I wasn’t au fait with all of the songs (unlike the screeching banshee beside me, and I don’t mean Nige) it was a good evening.

We even managed to get into Mulligans for last orders.

Music to blast out the window. For the day that’s in it …

Cloudbusting, covered by Cora Bissett. Open the windows, let the sun shine in and blast this one at your neighbours.

More from dogbox records.

Milk and cookies goodness…

Titanic: Two the Surface

(needs quicktime)