so i find hounds of love in the landlady's record collection, which i am excited about, and put it. a few familiar singles in, and i'm loving it - just mad enough, just 80s enough, hanging together lovely. as the album goes on, i find it gets madder and madder, goes all folksy and then starts repeating songs. it goes on too long and i get bored of it.
because it's the cd. there's at least three sides worth of vinyl here - the original album, plus bonus tracks. it's bad enough having those two sides of vinyl on the same cd - but having bonus tracks on the same disc just made the music keep going until i was sick of it.
Pink Floyd (what's left of them) just won an injunction against EMI to stop them selling tracks from their albums individually; they wanted each work to be available as a whole, not as fragments to pick and choose.
please, record companies: include a bonus disc for remixes and b-sides. leave the album as it was meant to be. it's precious.
i was just looking up fopp on wikipedia, wondering if they still had their store in edinburgh (for some reason) after they went into administration.
i was reminded that their troubles began when they over-extended and bought music zone, which was another local start-up that had gone national. i didn't realise they bought music zone because mz had gone into administration themselves.
what really surprised me is that music zone had gone into admin after over-extending and buying MVC (remember them?), who had been created by ex-our price staff who left when woolworths bought them. our price was of course a virgin media company. our price got rebranded as v-shops, selling all kinds of virgin media, with an insane way of ordering cds over instore-internet terminals. why would you leave the house to buy cds online?
our price was sold to an autralian company and rebranded (for 8 million) as 'sanity'. they sank without a trace.
The virgin megastores then became zavvi in an incredibly poorly-timed management buyout, that left the zavvis all over the country re-opening as bargain sportswear outlets.
HMV tidied up by not 'selling out', accusing their prospective buyer of undervaluing them, then cherry-picking prime fopp and zavvi branches that didn't compete with their own stores. they're also expanding into live music venues.
I mean, i just wanna buy some borking cds. what was that thing about extreme environments leading to low biodiversity? what was that thing about the world being a massive buffet?
warning: the wire nerdery in this post. this occurred to me while doing the washing up today, and the more i thought about it the more true it became.
a few people on the internets have noticed this (e.g. 1, 2) but to summarise the key points:
* he always has an young, pretty (effeminate?) side-kick, who he is protective of. ok, he's gay, but so's batman.
* he's a vigilante - a criminal who goes after other criminals - tolerated by the police. when arrested for a murder that he didn't do, the fact that he has killed many deters certain police from running to his aide, while others want him back on the streets because he only got the right ones.
* he pulls 'some spider-man shit' towards the end of the series, albeit not entirely successful (if only he'd had that base-jumping gear the real batman does).
* he's a good detective - patiently observing, above and beyond the police.
calculated assuming constant rate of respect for every individual death - ie, if you kill 1 person out of 10, 9 people will respect you 1 point. if you kill 2, 8 people will respect you 2 points = 16 points in total. optimum is 50% population slain.
tracklisting: PART ! Anne Briggs - Fine Horseman (early morning hush [compilation]) Kyle Gabler - Red Carpet Extend-o-Matic (world of goo soundtrack) Genghis Tron - Recursion (board up the house) Dildano - Windows and Carpets (a disappointing evening with the christ punchers) Dildano - Neck (the buzzard maze) Astra - Where You Rest (where you rest) Necro Deathmort - I Fought The Law and The Law Won Because Fighting is Against The Law MJ Hibbett and the Validators - It Only Works Because You're Here (regardez, ecoutez, et repetez) Jim Steinman - Bad For Good (bad for good) Chaos UK - Kill Your Baby (grind your mind [compilation]) Intense Degree - Future Shock (peel session 28/02/88) (grind madness at the bbc [compilation]) Electro Hippies - Life (grind your mind [compilation]) Dead Kennedies - Looking Forward To Death (fresh fruit for rotting vegetables)
PART " Napalm Death - The Kill (peel session 13/08/87) (grind madness at the bbc [compilation]) Napalm Death - Prison Without Walls (peel session 13/08/87) (grind madness at the bbc [compilation]) Napalm Death - Dead (peel session 13/08/87) (grind madness at the bbc [compilation]) Napalm Death - Deceiver (peel session 13/08/87) (grind madness at the bbc [compilation]) Napalm Death - Lucid Fairytale(peel session 13/08/87) (grind madness at the bbc [compilation]) Napalm Death - In Extremis (peel session 13/08/87) (grind madness at the bbc [compilation]) Napalm Death - Blind To The Truth (peel session 13/08/87) (grind madness at the bbc [compilation]) Napalm Death - Negative Approach (peel session 13/08/87) (grind madness at the bbc [compilation]) Napalm Death - Common Enemy(peel session 13/08/87) (grind madness at the bbc [compilation]) Scorn - Days Passed (evanescence) Euros Childs - My Baby Joy (son of euro child) The Author - Lord Fear (downloaded from knightmare.com) Theme from Keyboard Cat (teh interwebz)
backstory: so a few years ago - when i was living with ian, around when i started going out with rachel - i found a co-op vegan cafe in hackney called pogo. i was unemployed/temping at the time so i signed up to do some volunteer shifts, which i enjoyed, but then i got work, i moved away, yada yada yada... but i've never signed off the weekly update emails, as i like knowing what's going on there.
news: i was going to blog all the emails that have been going around for posterity, but there's too many now and i don't think it will stop any time soon. so to summarise: this week, there's been a lot of drama in the cafe, secret and emergency meetings, and finally, an annoucement that members of co-op are leaving, amid accusations that they are an 'impenetreble clique'. it seems that a pile of skip-divided meat was rescued from the local supermarket and kept in the pogo freezers, and then forgotten about. it was finally discovered and created a massive vegan shitstorm, that resulted in the dissolution of the co-op as it stood.
opinion: the ethics of freegan meat are debatable; i wouldn't eat it, because i wouldn't enjoy it. but that's not what this is about.
communication is the glue that holds a co-op together, and it seems this was the mistake that was made, in the form of storing the meat (depite labelled 'not for cafe use') and not moving it in time. but rather than try to work out how to avoid this mistake in future, some volunteers kicked up a stink. lots of the emails that have gone round have focused on how outraged people are at the vegan side of the matter, to the point where they have utterly demolished any form of co-operation. it's hard not to see this whole thing a a petty issue-settling coup; a mistake was made, and a game of 'now i've got you, you son of a bitch' was entered. the accused have removed themselves from the situation, and their leaving email was well measured and reasoned; they've admitted they made mistakes, and provided examples where they believed they had been maligned, but then felt unable to continue in the co-op given the atmosphere that had been created. the newly-established 'open collective' then emailed, in a similarly measured way, but not really addressing my problem: that surely this shit could have been worked through if people had wanted to do that.
needless to say the whole thing leaves a bad taste in the mouth and i won't be returning to the cafe (not that they've missed me, i've not been there for about two years). the whole thing is disappointing socially, but fascinating sociologically.
i do, of course, wish them the best and hope the open collective approach is more succesful.
so i heard once that organic produce is so resource-intensive that the earth could not make enough to feed everyone in the world. and i thought, well that's a pretty sound argument for not buying organics - it's elitest.
of course, that only holds true with the current population. what it actually implies is that there's too many people in the world - and we all know that's true anyway. so by buying organic, you're actually helping create a downward pressure on the population that might reduce it to sustainable levels, in a way that's more environmentally friendly*.
why did it take me so long to figure out that organic produce was in keeping with my views, not against them?
*not necessarily true. e.g. organic milk always goes off faster in our fridge than normal stuff, which is wasteful. but i think this is compensated by the animal welfare benefits.
