Sonically they have a buzzy, fuzzy guitar sound with a lot of resonance; there’s minimal gain and distortion here but simultaneously it’s a full sound and far from sparse. Melodic, soothing vocals and some great double-time chord progressions underpinned by a warm, vibrant bass sound and rounded percussion complete the effect. There are quite a few instrumental parts which work really nicely, emphasising when the vocals kick in. Lyrically their singer focuses on personal stories and anecdotes, using them to paint a broader, more universal picture.

A definitely highlight is ‘Raw Bar’, which exhibits some of the aforementioned killer chords, and opener ‘Tiny Planet’ with its extended instrumental intro before cutting right back for the lazily drawled vocal refrain “Oh, I’ve got bigger fish to fry”. There’s a subtle and gentle wit at work throughout as evidenced by the catchy and sly final vocals of closing number ‘Obama House, Fukui Prefecture’: “Warm and comfortable / Purely functional”.

Everyone Everywhere are well worth your time and I heartily recommend you check them out. I’m writing this review at about 11pm after spending 12 hours at work, coming home and working on some freelance copywriting for another few hours, and I’ve found this record’s faintly nostalgic tone, varied songwriting, highly competent yet suitably understated musicianship and easygoing, accessible yet far from banal subject matter to be a great comfort. That’s not to pin the band as a one-trick or one-mood outfit; more that this melodic emo/indie-rock derived music is comfortable and pleasant and will probably resonate with a lot of people, wherever they find themselves whilst listening.

Myspace | Facebook | Tumblr | Tiny Engines Records

• Fabula and Syuzhet – The terms fabula and syuzhet came from Russian formalism – an influential school of literary criticism from the 1910s to 1930s. Russian formalism is distinctive for its emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and its original conception of literary history.
  Tags: literarycriticism history formalism
• Facts about civil and public services – PCS – While sections of the media and some politicians continue to try to blame the public sector for the country’s economic problems, the truth is that civil and public servants are as much the victims of the recession as other workers.To help challenge some of the common myths and misconceptions, we provide some facts and figures about public sector pay, pensions and jobs.
  Tags: recession coalition publicspending
• Does social security do nothing in reducing poverty? – One of the claims in Iain Duncan Smith’s Twenty-first Century Welfare really annoyed me when I first read it, and it has been niggling away at me ever since:
  The welfare system has failed to tackle intergenerational disadvantage and poverty.
  I suppose the reason I find this statement so annoying is that you come across it so often – after a century of social security, we still have poverty and inequality. So obviously social security/the welfare state is a failure.
  This is a claim that fails to take into account what would happen if we didn’t have the welfare state.
  Tags: welfare poverty classwar statistics analysis britain
• Fist City on MySpace Music – Canadian garage-punk band.
  Tags: band music
• SKURVI on MySpace Music – Not very interesting punk rock from Brighton. Could be fun live though.
  Tags: band music
• 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly) – “Let’s pretend for a moment that zombies are real (as if half of you weren’t already daydreaming about that very thing). Have you noticed how most zombie movies take place only after the apocalypse is in full-swing? By the time we join our survivors, the military and government are already wiped out, and none of the streets are safe.

  There’s a reason the movie starts there, and not earlier. It’s because the early part, where we go from one zombie to millions, doesn’t make any sense. If you let the creeping buzzkill of logic into the zombie party, you realize the zombies would all be re-dead long before you even got a chance to fire up that chainsaw motorcycle you’ve been working on. Why?” Zombies: kinda crap.
  Tags: zombies horror funny

• Ask a real musician: 5 classic male metal singers – If you’re a singer, you should be following Claudia Friedlander’s blog. The classically-trained, New York-based voice teacher provides sage advice not only for singers for all types, but also for musicians and people in general.

  Although at least one of her students sings metal, Friedlander knows virtually nothing about it. I wondered what she would think of some of metal’s most classic male singers – the foundation of the artform. It’s rare to find someone who isn’t familiar with any of these singers. Her perspective would be a fresh one, free of cultural baggage. I sent her five completely unidentified songs. Her comments are below. I have also included initial reactions she sent me immediately upon hearing the singers.
  Tags: singing vocals music metal interesting

The number of various anti-racist, anti-fascist and queer activists, Brighton folk, socialists and trade unionists was a bit more impressive with something like 2-300 people joining the main march, plenty of other people showing support as we passed, and I think a few dozen anarchists running about and trying to block / tussle with the ENA.

The police forced us to move on from the station (I think, I joined the march just as it got going) and we headed along Queen’s Road, then down North Road to Victoria Gardens where we found ourselves penned in. Great. This was pretty shit but spirits were pretty high and most folks were having a laugh, enjoying the sun, listening to a few short speeches and generally not being reprehensibly awful human beings. The reprehensibly awful human beings took about an hour to show up, possibly due to interference from the anarchist bloc, police management or just through being too stupid to walk about 15 minutes to their destination.

When they eventually arrived they spent about 20 minutes listening to some speeches – thanks to getting ourselves penned we had no idea what was going on so consoled ourselves with chanting at them. Hmm. After that was up they were escorted back to the station, surrounded by a cloud of onlookers, hopefully a few of whom were sharing their opinions of the ENA and the EDL. Eventually we were let out of our pen but not before a few spirited attempts to break through the fence were made. A few people were arrested, mostly for being mouthy as far as I could see, and hopefully have been / will be released without charge (I didn’t know any of them).

After that I headed homewards and found the remnants of the ENA arrayed outside the station with a bunch of the remaining counter-protesters chanting at them. I left at this point but apparently the fun continued for a while longer when the ENA got themselves an escort to a nearby pub (would that the police offered this service to regular folk) which was again surrounded. Well, I imagine they got the idea that they’re not welcome here and easily outnumbered, even with an almost total lack of promotion for the counter-demo.

A bunch of photos and a very short video follow. I am not a good photographer I’m afraid, so suck it up.

The front of the column

Setting off from the station

Behold my ability to frame a shot free of extraneous clutter

The view from the front of the column (horsies!)

I'm not convinced the cost of putting a chopper in the air was really justified

Somewhere behind all the cops and gawkers there are about 30 racists, fascists, idiots and (one hopes) deeply misguided people

After we'd been stuck in a pen for a few hours and were done shouting and chanting, people began to get a bit bored 'n rowdy...

...so long, security fence, we barely knew ya.

Not that what's already in that fountain is much worse.

After a few fences were tugged out we got a solid wall of vans across the park and three mounted officers came into the pen. Briefly toyed with fishing the fences out of the fountain and setting up a rodeo; felt it wouldn't go down so well.

Afterwards the ENA were escorted back to the station which was quickly surrounded by more people shouting and chanting. Look at that Israel flag there. What a bunch of idiots.

My camera isn’t very good at doing videos.

Okay yes yes I am working on some REAL posts and reviews and things. Work is hard at the moment! Which means I gotta get my relax on, rather than slaving over a hot keyboard for y’all. xx

Critical reaction has been mixed. I like to think that all the people with different opinions to mine are narrow-minded or less clever than I am, because that way I get to feel intellectually superior even though I position myself as an everyman “reviewer” rather than some hoighty-toighty ivory tower “critic”.

This review is not the kind of nonsense I feared it would be when I first started writing it. I was afraid it would be another review where I’m dreaming I’m writing it and then I wake up but I’m really still dream-writing and only dreamed I woke up, but then I really wake up, but no, really I’m still dream-writing, ad infinitem (sic). This is a little bit like the movie, but most of the story challenges the audience to follow a very complex plot, rather than trying to trick the audience into falling for special-effects razzle-dazzle. There are dreams within dreams, but most of the time the audience knows when that is happening, even though this review may not really back that statement up.

So, does Inception make sense? I’m not sure. It makes more sense than most action films. It is not stupid. But it is complicated, and I’ll have to see it a couple more times before I decide if it plays fair. This sort of analytical laziness is fine because I’m a reviewer and not a critic.

On the other hand, any screenwriter who knows enough physics to understand that inside an elevator you can’t tell gravity from acceleration has my respect, because I like things that correspond with what I already know even when they’re mostly insignificant when discussing works in this medium.

This is not Leonardo DiCaprio’s best work but there are excellent actors in smaller parts, especially Michael Caine and Cillian Murphy. I’m going to assume you know the roles they play and not discuss them any further.

And Inception is popular, proving wrong the conventional wisdom that nobody wants to see films that make you think like the famously unsuccessful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Vertigo, Seven Samurai, Fight Club, City of God, or Nolan’s own Memento. Inception is already #3 on the IMDB all time greats — a little too soon but a good sign for the future of smart science fiction films, or at least an indicator of how fickle people can be when it comes to recent blockbusters.

Imagine Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy directed by Christopher Nolan. Then keep imagining it, and pretend you’re dreaming, because I’m not going to explain this bizarre conclusion to my “review”.

[Disclaimer: I've not seen Inception. I'll probably check it out on DVD as it sounds interesting. I also have nothing against Rick Norwood. He's probably a really nice guy doing cool stuff, but this is not a good review by any stretch of the imagination.]

• TRAP THEM’S RYAN MCKENNEY RESPONDS TO SACHA DUNABLE’S METALSUCKS COLUMN – Last week, as part of his recurring MetalSucks column, Blogronaut, Intronaut’s Sacha Dunable asked the question: “Are corporate-sponsored metal shows killing the live concert market?” The blog garnered a large and impassioned response, not just from our readers who left comments, but from industry insiders who e-mailed us their thoughts directly. One of those people was Trap Them vocalist Ryan McKenney, who, with no prompting whatsoever from us, wrote the below. And since we like to think of MetalSucks as a place where all kinds of points of view can be weighed and considered, we’re running it! We hope you enjoy…
  Tags: metal touring economics band music ethics
• Resisting the cuts: building a campaign – I’m old enough to remember the Thatcher years. What I mostly recall is just how ineffective most campaigning we did was. For sure you could sometimes mobilise many people, but not always to much effect. So how should we approach the challenge we face today in campaigning against the cuts? There are two types of opposition already getting going. Many are already defending “their” bit of the public sector saying “don’t cut us, what we do is too important”. Others oppose cuts on economic grounds fearful they will push the UK into recession, though they may well want cuts further down the line. But unions and others combine these positions, and there is already an interesting debate – mainly online – about how best to maximise opposition to the cuts in general and thus shift government policy.
  Tags: cuts coalition activism strategy
• Bad translation makes fundamentalists of us all – “I was recently watching the Spanish documentary To Shoot an Elephant, about the Israeli attacks on Gaza in January 2009. The documentary is good, but the subtitles in English struck me as strange: “For the sake of Allah”, “May Allah protect [your sons] for you”, “May Allah reward you” and other references to God are recurrent throughout the film. I couldn’t help thinking that, when translated literally into English, these expressions make Arabs sound very religious – or even like fundamentalists – in the eyes of those who have a tendency to jump to quick conclusions. And no need to say there are many of these in the current context of Islamophobia as it has been shown before on Cif.”
  Tags: language arabs phrases colloquialisms
• Fawwaz Traboulsi Interviewed by Paul Jay, “A Defining Moment of the 2006 Israeli War on Lebanon” – I think the main existential threat against Israel is Israelis themselves, who believe — unfortunately, in more and more numbers — that there is no more hope for peace and who sabotage peace.  So, to start with, there’s no Israeli partner for peace, let alone everything else.  The other is this stubborn idea of trying to control 300 million Arabs by force and refusing to be part of the region.  And as much as Israel is this military state, I think it’s bringing its own downfall, especially in that for the first time in its anti-guerrilla warfare it’s failing — I mean, both in southern Lebanon and in Gaza.  It’s becoming more and more an army that kills civilians, including women and children.  And it’s obvious that any prospect for any just peace has been simply obliterated by the advent of Mr. Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing allies.  So this is the real danger for peace, for security of all the peoples of the region.
  Tags: israel lebanon palestine hezbollah iran war peace middleeast interview
• Lessons We Should Have Learned From the Iraqi Sanctions – “Very few people have been aware of exactly how the U.S. worked to maintain these sanctions over more than a decade. The Iraq sanctions regime was managed by a committee of the Security Council known as the “661 Committee.” Created by Resolution 661, it mirrored the Security Council itself, containing representatives from each state on the Council. The committee met behind closed doors. For years, the minutes were not even available to the committee’s own members. But in the course of my research, I obtained access to thousands of pages of the committee’s documents, including their minutes and internal reports. Consequently, it was possible to document what went on, in a setting where none of the participants thought there would ever be a public record of what they said and did”
  Tags: politics history usa iraq sanctions war
• gnimmel: This are serious thread – The greatest lolcat comic ever, at last I found it again.
  Tags: lolcats comic funny
• Mel Gibson’s tirades are the distilled violence, cruelty, and bigotry of right-wing Catholic ideology – This is extraordinary. We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church.
  Tags: celebrities racism fascism sexism religion catholicism
• My Fault, I’m Female – Do you sometimes feel that you’re female, and it’s all your fault? MFIF (My fault, I’m female) is a blog that shares stories of women who’ve been made to feel it’s their fault that they are female at work, at home, or wherever. Basically it’s FML, but with sexist bosses, stone age attitudes, pay gap stories, and plenty of ranting.
  Tags: sexism rant blog
• Stuff You Will Hate: Scene Hair: Z0MG UR Doing It Wrong – “Origins” of “Scene” hair. Haha. <3
  Tags: scene hairstyles dumb kindacool subculture
• Black Power’s Gonna Get You Sucka: Right-Wing Paranoia and the Rhetoric of Modern Racism – “Prominent white conservatives are angry about racism. Forget all that talk about a post-racial society. They know better than to believe in such a thing, and they’re hopping mad. What is it that woke them up finally, after all these years of denial, during which they insisted that racism was a thing of the past?” Seriously AMAZING post.
  Tags: usa racism rightwingbullshit
• Revealed: brutal guide to punishing jailed youths | Society | The Observer – Published by the HM Prison Service in 2005 and classified as a restricted government document, the manual guides staff on what restraint and self-defence techniques are authorised for use on children as young as 12 in secure training centres. The centres are purpose-built facilities for young offenders up to the age of 17 and run by private firms under government contracts.
  Instructions to staff warn that the techniques risk giving children a “fracture to the skull” and “temporary or permanent blindness caused by rupture to eyeball or detached retina”.
  Tags: prison privatisation youthdetentioncentres youth children britain
• ‘Hollywood Accounting’ Losing In The Courts – If you follow the entertainment business at all, you’re probably well aware of “Hollywood accounting,” whereby very, very, very few entertainment products are technically “profitable,” even as they earn studios millions of dollars. A couple months ago, the Planet Money folks did a great episode explaining how this works in very simple terms. The really, really, really simplified version is that Hollywood sets up a separate corporation for each movie with the intent that this corporation will take on losses. The studio then charges the “film corporation” a huge fee (which creates a large part of the “expense” that leads to the loss). The end result is that the studio still rakes in the cash, but for accounting purposes the film is a money “loser” — which matters quite a bit for anyone who is supposed to get a cut of any profits.
  Tags: accounting economics profit hollywood filmmaking
• RIAA Accounting: Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales – “We recently had a fun post about Hollywood accounting, about how the movie industry makes sure even big hit movies “lose money” on paper. So how about the recording industry? Well, they’re pretty famous for doing something quite similar. Reader Jay pointed out in the comments an article from The Root that goes through who gets paid what for music sales, and the basic answer is not the musician. That report suggests that for every $1,000 sold, the average musician gets $23.40.” Good article, rounds up and quotes some other famous ones too.
  Tags: musicindustry riaa economics marketing music accounting
• 18th-Century Ship Found at Trade Center Site – On Tuesday morning, workers excavating the site of the underground vehicle security center for the future World Trade Center hit a row of sturdy, upright wood timbers, regularly spaced, sticking out of a briny gray muck flecked with oyster shells.
  Obviously, these were more than just remnants of the wooden cribbing used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to extend the shoreline of Manhattan Island ever farther into the Hudson River. (Lower Manhattan real estate was a precious commodity even then.)
  Tags: archaeology history usa new york
• Tory shock therapy for the NHS is an attack on democracy – “Coming alongside cuts, these [neoliberal] reforms mean that the NHS as a service free at the point of delivery, providing quality all-round care for all, is under serious attack. This is being promulgated alongside Michael Gove’s attempt to roll back a public, comprehensive, democratically accountable education system. This isn’t happening because of the deficit, it isn’t happening because people want it, least of all is it happening because of the result of the 2010 general election – please let us be spared that insult. It’s an attack on the welfare state, it’s an attack on the working class, and it’s an attack on democracy.”
  Tags: NHS healthcare britain coalition tories classwar neoliberalism
• Bill Hicks – a romantic out of time – “Kurt Cobain once called grunge the last wave of rock. Around the same time Bill Hicks became the first rock and roll comedian.”
  Tags: comedy standup iconoclasts culture politics
• All Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online – Thanks to the Film Annex, you can now watch the complete collection of Tarkovsky films online – for free. Each film is listed in our Free Movie collection, but here you can access each major film in the order in which they were made.
  Tags: film andreitarkovsky free video stream
• Britain Rolls Out Own Unmanned Killer Jet – “Tired of not having their own manless killer plane, Britain just rolled out the $216 million Taranis, a flying deathbot drone named after the Celtic god of thunder. Or misspelled dinosaur (Taranisaurus Rex).” Oh good, we need unmanned drones more than 2.5 million jobs.
  Tags: war unmanneddrones weapons britain
• My Flixel talk: demo, source code and a couple of other bits – Kerry’s resources for using Flixel.
  Tags: flixel games coding design
• ‘Populism’ and the mob – Literal expressions of contempt for the masses tend to stick in the public throat. People don’t like it. It works better as caricature and satire. In American pop culture, this is usually expressed in cartoon form. In The Simpsons, a constant mainstay is the hysterical, shrieking, irrational crowd, inflamed with murderous rage, galvanised by some moral panic or other. Pitchforks and flaming torches appear out of nowhere, looting begins spontaneously, anarchy in its basest form prevails. In South Park, they literally mutter “rabble, rabble, rabble” as they lead their charge, addressing hysterical demands to some political or corporate authority (who, however venal, comes across as a paragon of Enlightenment against the hateful mob).
  Tags: populism democracy elitism popularculture usa capitalism
• Boris Johnson and his innovative trial methodology – We expend a vast amount of money and effort on assessing children, without much evidence that this does them any good at all; but we make no attempt to cheaply and systematically assess the teaching profession’s various education methods, despite knowing for an absolute fact that this would bring incalculable benefits for every generation to follow. Instead we have Boris and some think tank wittering on about a “competition”: and everyone takes them seriously.
  Tags: science stupid education britain
• Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 – These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.
  Tags: photography history usa
• Critical responses to my last relationship – “From the runner-up of our Short Story Award, comes the offbeat tale of a music critic and the band that made him change his tune.” Great short story.
  Tags: fiction story music relationships
• Dark Roasted Blend: Ekranoplans Showcase – They hover and skim above the water surface at speeds of up to 250 miles an hour, they carry heavier loads of cargo and troops than any airplane – the Ekranoplans, or “Wing-in-Ground” (WIG) vehicles are possibly the most exciting and strange looking technology ever designed by men. Developed mostly by Soviets during Cold Wars years (by Rostislav Alexeev’s design firm) some of them were over 500 feet in length and had an estimated weight of over 500 tons! And yet they skimmed over the waves with grace, at high speeds, able to negotiate stormy conditions, unseen by radar – all thanks to an aerodynamic principle known as the “ground effect”.
  Tags: technology prototypes design military ussr transportation war aviation

So, Jonathan McCalmont has been writing alternative ballots for the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form category of the Hugo Awards (an award perhaps best known for the controversy it causes by being utterly uncontroversial). Triangle is one of the films he included on the list and one of those which I checked out for myself.

The basic concept of Triangle is simple: a small yacht is capsized in an unusual storm and the few survivors are picked up by a cruise liner, the Aeolus, which appears to be uncrewed – until a masked figure begins picking them off with a shotgun. It’s not long before even weirder shit starts happening. Okay, from this point onwards there are going to be spoilers so if you want to check out the film free of preconceptions, stop reading now.

What makes Triangle unusual is its use of mechanics familiar to anyone who’s seen Groundhog Day or Primer – the sequences of events aboard the Aeolus, culminating in the murder of almost all of the survivors, continually repeat. Single mother Jess is the only survivor who appears to be an actor in these events rather than a recurrent victim, and as such she sets about trying to change events – to save the survivors, or to prevent them from boarding the ship in the first place.

Readers familiar with Greek philosophy will likely have already picked up on the name of the cruise liner and its significance. The film, sadly, is not quite so subtle, and one of its most clunking sequences is a scene where most of the survivors gather round and discuss the name of the ship and what it means. Of course, this is never mentioned again – it’s presumably only included to make things obvious for us thickies in the audience.

Anyway, overstated as it is the allusion itself is nice because:

1.) Aeolus was one of a triumvirate of god-figures.
2.) All three were the god of winds, and one was the son of Poseidon.
3.) Aeolus was the father of Sisyphus, who was condemned to spend his days pushing a boulder up a hill and by night seeing it roll back down again.
4.) Jess’s plight is Sisyphean in its inescapable futility and (what seems to be) endless repetition.
5.) Sisyphus has been seen by some scholars as personifying not only the rising and setting of the sun but also waves.
6.) Sisyphus was condemned to his plight by Zeus for his infractions of arrogance and hubris, specifically relating to a child.

Despite these points of confluence, however, the situation in which Jess finds herself is not directly analogous, rather it’s a variant on the concept, and I think that’s interesting. At first she appears blameless and somewhat damaged, struggling through life with her autistic son, but the film later undermines this initial perception of her as victim. In one of many uncanny moments in the film this Sisyphean figure, upon recognising her own crimes, murders and attempts to take her child away from herself – displacing the patriarchal aspects of the original myth of Sisyphus and reframing them as something else. Later she finds that she hasn’t broken the pattern at all, and instead she has made herself into a monster. There’s more to dig into here but I’m mostly mentioning this to highlight the fact that the film’s allusions had me thinking and making these connections at the same time as the plot itself keeping me glued to my seat.

What’s also interesting – and this is where the Primer comparison enters – is that what’s presented in the film is not a closed cycle. The bulk of what we see fits within the patterns we follow, but there are events that stand outside it – looping around the core events in a weird sort of elliptical orbit, if you will. It’s a conceit which cleverly indicates more than is shown, and in so doing highlights the doomed and fatalistic nature of the film.

The film is also tense throughout and solidly-paced, with some wonderful moments: small incidents which were earlier foreshadowed, or scenes which bring to the fore with crushing brutality just how many times events have looped, and how despite her best efforts to break the cycle Jess really is just doing exactly what she’s done before.

The film was shot on a relatively low budget and as a result a lot of sets are re-used – which for me added to the film’s claustrophobic air – plus visually it’s nothing to write home about, with the exception of some of its clever setpieces. The characters, on the whole, aren’t particularly memorable – Jess is played perfectly by Melissa George but the rest of the cast don’t stick in the mind, with the slight exception of Heather (Emma Lung) who is killed off very early in the film (a lucky stroke, to be honest, as in suffering this fate she avoids a worse one).

There are also holes to be poked in the film’s central conceit, such as the question of why at the film’s outset does Jess appear to be suffering from amnesia (she has experienced a traumatic accident but her decision to return to the pattern of events indicates that she remembers what has come before, at least partially), but it’s easy to self-justify these moments. Perhaps the most obvious criticism of this as a horror film is that it’s not ’scary’ – but it’s certainly horrifying thanks to the inherent dread of being unable to escape a truly awful fate.

All in all I thought Triangle was an excellent film – very tense with a sympathetic anti-heroine lead and cleverly written with plenty of (what should have been subtle) interesting mythic allusions.

• How to Prepare for Studio Recording with a Click-Track – Expect the click-track to annoy you. Expect to have difficulties executing certain fills, song sections, or transitions that you previously assumed were “in time.” Allow yourself time to adjust to the sound and feel of playing with a metronome, and if necessary to rewrite the parts you are playing. Whether your studio date is coming up in one week or in several months, you will benefit from designating a practice schedule and sticking to it. No matter what schedule you agree to, however, you need to allow time to set tempos, practice at the documented tempos, and slowly adjust the tempos upward until you reach the final “pocket.”
  Tags: music recording practice precision technique songwriting
• “Not Rape Epidemic”: The Modeling Industry Is Anything But Immune – “I was struck, reading the piece — which is both moving and important — by a strange feeling of recognition. Peterson defines a new term, “not rape” — the kind of sex and sexual attention young women get from men which is, if not outright unconsenting, some measure of coerced. Not rape is every kind of uncomfortable experience you’re made to feel complicit in: for choosing to go to the party, for wanting the kisses but not knowing how to say ‘No’ to what came next, for ending up alone with someone you thought you could trust — or, in Peterson’s case, for opening the screen door a few inches to a friend-of-a-friend one summer afternoon while her parents were out. The essay made me think of all the times I’ve not been raped. And all the other women in my industry who’ve not been raped.”
  Tags: rape sexualassault gender modelling fashionindustry
• Laurie Penny, “Youth Politics and Revolution” – Not every generation gets the politics it deserves.  When baby boomer journalists and politicians talk about engaging with youth politics, what they generally mean is engaging with a caucus of energetic, compliant under-25s who are willing to give their time for free to causes led by grown ups.
  Tags: youth rebellion activism politics uk britain unemployment generationaldisparity
• Rebel Frequencies: There is Power In a Boycott – “It’s not infrequent in our highly depoliticized society for an outspoken artist to be attacked for daring to take a stand. As long as profit comes before integrity, then “shut up and sing” will be the rule of the day in the music industry; musicians will be in the position of defending their views and actions. There’s a difference, however, when the denunciation comes from an ally.” Alexander Billet on criticisms of the Arizona Sound Strike boycott.
  Tags: boycott politics activism usa arizona music
• Trailer for Beijing Punk released – The first official trailer has been posted for Beijing Punk, a new documentary by filmmaker Shaun Jefford. Jefford toured China and met a number of fiercely (and legally) underground Chinese punk and hardcore acts including Misandao, Demerit, Hedgehog, The Gar, PK14, Candy Monster and Joyside.. As the trailer notes, the entire movement is forbidden by the communist government which has banned rock from television and most live performances since the 1990s.
  Tags: trailer video documentary punk china
• few points about, translations & interpretations of, & arguments with a standard exemplar of the stenchful & emetic. – Mieville poking holes in some common rhetoric employed to undercut radical writers and activists; here, a Guardian review of Chomsky.
  Tags: writing criticism reviews radicalism noamchomsky chinamieville
• Study: U.S. Pets’ Healthcare Better Than Rwandan Humans’ | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source – PHILADELPHIA–A University of Pennsylvania study released Monday found that U.S. pets enjoy superior healthcare to that of Rwandan humans.
  Tags: satire healthcare wealth medicine usa rwanda
• The 6 Most Gigantic Everything in the History of War – In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “War makes people act like dicks.” We don’t want to glorify war or otherwise portray it as something other than terrible. Yet, war makes people think big, and sometimes you have to sit back and be amazed by what humans can accomplish when they really, really want to kill each other.
  Tags: war history interesting
• Twilight Makes for the Best Fanwank Ever – Apparently even “R-Patz” can’t stand the awful phenomenon that is Twilight.
  Tags: funny fanwank criticism
• Twilight | Cracked.com – Some poor bastards read the series so we don’t have to.
  Tags: funny fanwank
• LRB · Jenny Turner · Who Are They? – “I’ve been watching these people off and on for years now, since I was a student in the 1980s and they called themselves the Revolutionary Communist Party. I find them fascinating, peculiar, entertaining, a real-life soap: who are these people, what on earth do they think they’re up to?” Lengthy article about the Revolutionary Communist Party, Spiked online, the “Living Marxist network”, and the annual Battle of Ideas conference.
  Tags: politics activism lobbyists britain history marxism libertarianism socialism critique
• Picnik – Another free online image editor.
  Tags: online free software web2.0 photoshop editing design graphics
• Photo editor online pixlr free edit image direct in your browser – Free online Photoshop-style image editor.
  Tags: online free software web2.0 photoshop editing design graphics
• Abused, humiliated and abandoned. What really happens when the UK deports failed asylum-seekers – “[F]lights are being used by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) with increasing frequency to return failed asylum-seekers. They are shrouded in secrecy, but an investigation by The Independent has put together details of the process, including the companies and airlines involved, the conditions on board, the techniques permitted, and the contracts of those paid to escort deportees. Though the records of activists, charities, befrienders, and the testimony of deportees themselves, it is possible to build up a picture of chartered and scheduled removal from Britain.”
  Tags: immigration asylumseekers britain deportation humanrights abuse
• Bastards Of Young – A stream of their debut album… at last!
  Tags: band music
• Le pré où je suis mort (download EP for free!) on MySpace Music – Wicked French emo/screamo band. Recently toured the UK with La Dispute.
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• ‘Hollywood Accounting’ Losing In The Courts – If you follow the entertainment business at all, you’re probably well aware of “Hollywood accounting,” whereby very, very, very few entertainment products are technically “profitable,” even as they earn studios millions of dollars. A couple months ago, the Planet Money folks did a great episode explaining how this works in very simple terms. The really, really, really simplified version is that Hollywood sets up a separate corporation for each movie with the intent that this corporation will take on losses. The studio then charges the “film corporation” a huge fee (which creates a large part of the “expense” that leads to the loss). The end result is that the studio still rakes in the cash, but for accounting purposes the film is a money “loser” — which matters quite a bit for anyone who is supposed to get a cut of any profits.
  Tags: accounting economics profit hollywood filmmaking
• RIAA Accounting: Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales – “We recently had a fun post about Hollywood accounting, about how the movie industry makes sure even big hit movies “lose money” on paper. So how about the recording industry? Well, they’re pretty famous for doing something quite similar. Reader Jay pointed out in the comments an article from The Root that goes through who gets paid what for music sales, and the basic answer is not the musician. That report suggests that for every $1,000 sold, the average musician gets $23.40.” Good article, rounds up and quotes some other famous ones too.
  Tags: musicindustry riaa economics marketing music accounting
• 18th-Century Ship Found at Trade Center Site – On Tuesday morning, workers excavating the site of the underground vehicle security center for the future World Trade Center hit a row of sturdy, upright wood timbers, regularly spaced, sticking out of a briny gray muck flecked with oyster shells.
  Obviously, these were more than just remnants of the wooden cribbing used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to extend the shoreline of Manhattan Island ever farther into the Hudson River. (Lower Manhattan real estate was a precious commodity even then.)
  Tags: archaeology history usa new york
• Tory shock therapy for the NHS is an attack on democracy – “Coming alongside cuts, these [neoliberal] reforms mean that the NHS as a service free at the point of delivery, providing quality all-round care for all, is under serious attack. This is being promulgated alongside Michael Gove’s attempt to roll back a public, comprehensive, democratically accountable education system. This isn’t happening because of the deficit, it isn’t happening because people want it, least of all is it happening because of the result of the 2010 general election – please let us be spared that insult. It’s an attack on the welfare state, it’s an attack on the working class, and it’s an attack on democracy.”
  Tags: NHS healthcare britain coalition tories classwar neoliberalism
• Bill Hicks – a romantic out of time – “Kurt Cobain once called grunge the last wave of rock. Around the same time Bill Hicks became the first rock and roll comedian.”
  Tags: comedy standup iconoclasts culture politics
• All Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online – Thanks to the Film Annex, you can now watch the complete collection of Tarkovsky films online – for free. Each film is listed in our Free Movie collection, but here you can access each major film in the order in which they were made.
  Tags: film andreitarkovsky free video stream
• Britain Rolls Out Own Unmanned Killer Jet – “Tired of not having their own manless killer plane, Britain just rolled out the $216 million Taranis, a flying deathbot drone named after the Celtic god of thunder. Or misspelled dinosaur (Taranisaurus Rex).” Oh good, we need unmanned drones more than 2.5 million jobs.
  Tags: war unmanneddrones weapons britain

1.) My band is recording a second demo tomorrow. TOMORROW! So I’ve been busy practising our newer songs, installing new tubes in my amp (turns out that balancing the power tubes in a DSL100 is pretty easy, even when you’re drunk) and restringing my guitars (ugh, replacing strings is for when you break them, at least in my book). EXCITING.

2.) I’ve had a promotion at work at the same time as a friend / colleague has left so I’ve been pretty preoccupied with plugging gaps in dayjob-world.

3.) I’ve been kind of inclined to spend my free time chilling out with films, videogames and friends rather than writing in a darkened room. Not that I have a problem with the latter, but it’s more like work than blowing off steam.

4.) IT’S THE SUMMER <3 <3 <3

I’ll post up the occasional review as and when the mood takes me & will be back with three more levels of experience and a +1 Something of Whatever in the near future. I may also have other cool stuff to share, e.g. a friend and I are going to collaborate on an indie game… I’ll provide writing and “ideas” and she’ll do the hard work. Awesome!!!

If you want to follow something I’m doing in the meantime, check my twitter or tumblr thingies.

(The Penthouse above the ‘butt will be still be running, though, so do keep heading there. It’s a scrappy little bar that I’m still really fond of, and it has some cool esoteric DJ nights.)

This rapidly follows confirmation that The Providence is being sold by the Barracuda chain, quite likely to Tesco. Make of that what you will; it’s been pointed out that several other Tesco branches are about 5 minutes walk away, and there are already 11 Tesco shops in Brighton (plus there’s the one they’re considering building in Lewes Road too). I wasn’t hugely fond of the Providence as a pub but the sound was decent enough and some long-standing promoters put on a lot of shows there.

In the last month we’ve also heard news that The Engine Room has been closed. No official statements have been released as far as I’m aware, although the word on the street is that there just wasn’t enough money for some payment or another. Anyone reading this got the facts? [UPDATE: minutes after I posted this, an article popped up on the local paper's website explaining that the venue is up for sale. Balls!]

And of course earlier this year came the end of the Hobgoblin, a genuine Brighton punk rock and metal institution, which despite eking a few more months of life after its initial closure late in 2009 has been bought by another chain. They’re currently in the process of entirely revamping it; initial rumour was that it was being turned into a gastro pub (ah yes, no shortage of those in Brighton) although its new exterior paintjob does still tout “live music” as a feature. It seems unlikely that they’ll want to play host to the same D.I.Y. promoters and touring bands as in the past, though.

Several years back the Pressure Point was sold to a developer following a lack of interest from purchasers who wanted to keep it running as a venue. It’s since been converted into a hostel with a bar. The Brighton Gloucester / Barfly remains closed and unused following Barfly / MAMA’s abortive attempt to break into the local music scene around the same time. I assume they still own it and may intend to reopen it in brighter economic times.

The saddest thing is that most of the venues that have bitten the dust were the ones doing the most to support relatively unknown outfits, small touring bands, local groups and musicians and so on.

SIGNS OF LIFE

On the positive side of things the Hydrant (was the Hare & Hounds) is making a huge and laudable push into supporting local music with both a large upstairs function room for shows and regular gigs in the downstairs pub as well. Then there’s Hector’s House which seems to have picked up a lot of the punk and metal shows the Hob would once have hosted – and good on them, speaking personally it’s greatly preferable to the student drum ‘n bass crowd I remember from 5 years ago! Finally one of my current favourite venues, the Prince Albert, is also keeping on rocking – and their P.A. is one of the best I’ve heard in a small venue.

And of course there are other venues like Jam, the Greenhouse Effect, Audio and larger venues like the Concorde 2. So live music in Brighton has taken some major blows, but there are still plenty of places to go and play.

If you’re involved with a local venue, whether as an owner or a promoter, please get in touch via email or the comments below. I’d like to do a round-up of venues in a separate post in the near future, and counteract some of this bad news with a reminder of how Brighton still has a lot to offer!