“it’s the nameless non-slop that matters”
Wonderful post by John Higgs which ranges from the Trump assassination attempt, the Olympics opening ceremony to “knobbing about”. Higgs makes the best analysis of the Olympic opening ceremony I’ve seen, dscribing it as “slop”, which he defines as The ceremony was a lot like modern digital culture. We are...
Love in Constant Spectacle, Jane Weaver
Have been listening to Jane Weaver’s Love in Constant Spectacle for a couple of weeks now. Such a carefully constructed, intimate and gentle album which builds a fragile melancholic voice over dreamy motorik beats. Weaver’s gentle psychedelic pastoralism (which is the best way I think I can describe it) is...
OCLP and Ubuntu
Shock! Horror! Yesterday, I realised that – and I’ll blame this squarely on work – I’d slipped back into using OSX in that unconscious, it’s-what-I’m-used-to way. So I tried booting into Ubuntu on my macbook to find that it just refused to boot up. The boot choice led to a...
Shakespeare and His World
Found this copy in an Oxfam bookshop today. I used to have a copy years ago but lost it in a move between schools. Originally publishing in the mid-1950s, it’s essentially a standard version of Shakespeare’s life though I imagine that some of the historical detail might be dated (ha!)...
Bob Mould, Hüsker Dü, Sugar
It must be the general mood I’m in at the moment but among the albums I’ve been sorting through in my never-ending organisation of my music library have been (last week) Hüsker Dü and (today) Bob Mould and Sugar. I originally got into Hüsker Dü back in in my teens...
Rock Bottom, Robert Wyatt
My attention in music recently has shifted again towards the early 1970s to the post-psychedelic stuff produced by musicians loosely grouped as the Canterbury Scene. My tastes in pyschedelia have always been in the slightly-folksy English pastoral strain which has brought me via Soft Machine and Matching Mole to Robert...