Friday 29th June - My Glastonbury

With my various allergies (stupidly overpriced tickets, huge crowds, hippies, mud, camping, traveling for hours on public transport, being wet and dirty for 5 days street with no hope of a nice warm bubble bath, and Kaiser Chiefs) I did not attend Glastonbury this year. In fact, I have never have done, and I probably never will. It just all seems so irrelevant now. There are many over festivals around the country without nearly the same amount of fuck wit Nathan Barley sorts, and girls aspiring to be Kate Moss in aviator shades and out of place mini-skirts, yet being able to boast a just as impressive line up. Latitude and Connect for two. I myself shall be attending Indian Summer in Glasgow in a couple of weeks where the likes of The Teenagers, Wilco, Flaming Lips and Emma Pollock shall be entertaining me over what I hope shall be a lovely weekend, full of sun, reasonably priced food and gin. Enough of my hopeless romanticism though, here’s how I spent my Glastonbury weekend.

Wednesday 27th June 2007.

Apologies for my lack of article yesterday. God doesn’t like me and so flooded my house.

Friday 22nd June

No entry today folks as I’ve spent all of today either fixing the garden, going to the doctors or watching Glastonbury (including the fucking amazing Arctic Monkeys!!). A Certain Romance has just come on now. Full feature on my Glastonbury experience next week. In the mean time, it would be a great help if you could listen to Johnny Remember Me by John Leyton as it is one of the 60s greatest songs and not enough people know about it. Ditto for Jack the Ripper by Screaming Lord Sutch.

Tuesday 19th June 2007.

Apologies for the lack of me around these parts recently. End of year University essays have taken precedent and left me with precious little time in which to look for Celebrity and Televisual news. But, for the few of you that might have inexplicably missed my ramblings, I am back. Aren’t you overjoyed?

Friday 15th June - Luke Pritchard Confirms His Irrelevance

I imagine that this will not come as a shock to most who read this, but as a white, middle class, fairly liberal minded arts student, my newspaper of choice is The Guardian. Free from the horrid sensationalism of the News of the World et al, the insipid human/local interest obsession of the Record, Mirror etc and the dodgy, hypocritical politics of the Mail and the Express, it has come to be somewhat of a bastion of objective, fair reporting that deals with matters that actually matter and news that is actually new. Of course, this is impossible and this idea of The Guardian being somehow superior to all other newspapers of its ilk is just an illusion, with its history of Zionistic bias and altogether smug approach certainly letting it down on numerous occasions. However, I still read it, as it does tend to employ reporters who can write and throws up the odd feature that finds itself to be spirited and imaginative enough as to warrant a thorough reading.

In other music news…

…I was wrong about ‘Boxer’. You may recall a few weeks back I gave a review proclaiming The National’s latest LP to be disappointing. I apologise to all who read that. I should have seen it coming. It was the same with Alligator. It’s taken months but I have learned to love it. It is a most wonderful album that shall definitely feature come the end of year top 10. It was a 6.8 (by no means a shoddy score), but that can easily be raised by 2 points. For it is indeed sublime. Forgive me for ever doubting you Matt Berninger. Forgive me.

Friday 8th June - For those who know nothing of music…

WARNING. POST CONTAINS HEAVY DOSES OF OPINION. OPINION DISGUISED AS FACT.

Minor notings of interesting things

Continuing my love of all things Ezra Klein (it’s purely platonic, I assure you), this post by a colleague of his noting that not only are the neoconservatives perfectly happy starting shit with the entire Muslim world, they wanted to fuck with an actual nuclear power, as well. My God, is there anything stupid that the current American government will not do?

Also good is this takedown of the myth of social mobility in America. The American Dream has long been a dream, since it is actually social democratic principles and policy which result in actual social mobility (as you can see, the Nordic countries have exceptionally high social mobility), rather than libertarian, neoliberal, or lassez faire policies, a theme I will return to later, and probably repeatedly. We should also look at what the conservative revolution has done for us Brits; our social mobility is just as low.

Kos says smart things about the failed plot by Islamic militants to bomb JFK airport, noting that the right-wing talking points about the War on Terror (”it’s useless just using law enforcement methods to fight terrorism”, “we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to over here”, “infringement of civil liberties are needed to fight modern terrorism”) are straight-out bullshit.

Sonic Youth…

…play Glasgow ABC on 21st and 22nd August. I can’t go as I fly to America on the afternoon of the 21st, but I thought I might bring this to the attention of Patch fans. Seriously, if you can make it, GO!!!!!! Not only is it the third greatest American band ever playing, but they are also performing one of the defining records of rock in its entirety. Daydream Nation is as influential, tremendous and triumphant record as you can get. A masterpiece of the 20th century that ranks alongside anything The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Smiths, Mozart, Bach and Beethoven have ever done. Striking the perfect balance between punk and poetry, this is a record that defied all previous rock and roll ground and constructed an entirely new way of thinking about popular music. So buy tickets now. NOW!!!!! If I know you and have spoken to you before and you are able to go but don’t, then don’t ever speak to me again.

Teenage Riot is the second greatest song ever.

Info!!

Saturday 2nd June- My Guilty Pleasure

When you think of an English student what do you expect? For some reason I’d always imagined an artistic type who sat around in dusty, wooden-floored coffee shops discussing Keats, Shelley and, more importantly, the lesser known, ‘misunderstood’ poets. Occasionally there’d even be poetry recitals in slow drawls, those around looking on in awe and admiration, berets firmly on heads and pipes (which may or may not contain illegal substances) dangling from the males’ mouths.It’s a good thing I didn’t want to become such a person by embarking on an English degree. I’m actually not quite sure where I got such a ‘vision’ from; the people I described are more like pseudo-intellectual hippies than any undergraduate I know. The only poetry I’ve ever heard someone recite out of lectures are dirty limericks (most likely copped from Bridget Jones’s Diary anyway), and the smoking illegal substances is something which is common for many students, it certainly doesn’t make them sound more thoughtful or intelligent afterwards.