You the jury

Last deadline for a submission, people. Email me if you have something. I have only the weekend to do it before the last workshop on Thursday. I'm waking up in the night thinking about fonts, it's not good, so keen to finish it now...





A rough version of the cover. Which one would you prefer?

PS: Is it easy to convert Word documents into PDF files? (this is something I have to do, apparently.)

How can I shrink A4 pages into A3 without making the text too small to read? Oy, it was easier in the days when it was quite literally a cut & paste job, and not on a computer...

Laundromat

Laundromat, originally uploaded by Slaminsky.

I are in the Hackney Museum. But you can view this right here, you lucky people.

Great lost musical geniuses of our time... no. 1

Ultra Vivid Scene
were in fact just Kurt Ralske, making music all by himself in his bedroom. Dreamy, camp, a bit twisted, a bit SM, highly personal, (he sings like he's whispering to himself) sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes surprisingly dark, often with a sting in the tail... (ex. The Whore of God 'You said your last john was peculiar, he moved in a mysterious way...') Not afraid to take on big themes like Sex, Death, Religion, Redemption in a 3 minute pop tune. He also did a song called the Mercy Seat, which I prefer to Nick Cave's. Best and most heartbreaking of all is Bloodline, where he conjures perfectly that period of being so stunned after a breakup that it doesn't seem to have hit him yet and you feel his loss more than he does. He was on 4AD and I believe that the cover of his first album was a dayglo toothbrush, created by the great Vaughan Oliver. Bought it, lost it when our flat was burgled (really, the most stupid burglars in the world - what value a bag full of home-taped C90s on the black market?) found it again in a junk shop, lost again when moving house... But surely it will be available somwhere on the internets again... I implore you to seek it out... (you can sample a little bit here)

Loss: An Evening of Exquisite Misery

This sounds like the club night I've been waiting for my whole life.

Had you heard of the Last Tuesday Club? And if you had, why didn't you tell me about it before?

Shameless

I wanted to do Betty and Geoff's Guilty Pleasures meme, I really did, but then what shameful secrets do I have left to share with you? I have already plumbed the depths of musical degradation many a time and there's no sin left to reveal - but wait, what's this - I'd forgotten this little treasure which I'd downloaded in a nostalgic mood recently. Remembering a time when I wore white ankle socks to school and was an avid reader of Smash Hits. I do genuinely like this song, and the way he sings it (Okay, bang goes my street credibility. I also like Iggy and the Stooges, had I mentioned that?) It has a certain instrument on it - could it possibly be called the slap bass, or am I making it up? - which is like Proust's madeleine in musical form, totally redolent of the 80s. (There's also some kind of percussion sound like someone smoking a bong, or maybe that's just my speakers.)

Hadn't realised there was a video too - please please watch it, nothing else has brought me such pleasure in a long time...

(I'd be grateful if you can also please explain the semiotics of it, I was totally baffled. Why does she kiss the blond chick? Why does he push the bald bloke down the stairs...?)

OUCH

Look what was in my mixed leaf salad from Londis...

Yes, that's right.

A STINGING NETTLE!

It is a deeply felt but newly discovered belief of mine that Your Food Should Not Hurt You.

Now quite literally have bee-stung lips.

The potential for mischief is endless

"With GrandCentral, a free service from Google, you can receive phone calls and post voicemails right on your blog. Though GrandCentral is currently in a private beta test, bloggers can skip the wait and get a free account immediately. Sign up now"

Magic G

Why is it no surprise that this study was carried out at 'the University of L'Aquila in Italy'?
(seen on Girl With A One Track Mind's blog.)

It tickled me that 'the findings make it possible for women to have a rapid test to confirm whether or not they have [one]'. That's a fun job for someone.

Freud said one type of orgasm was 'infantile' whilst the other was for real women, accepting of their subordinate role in life. In your face, Sigmund!

Back

Did you miss me?

Click through to flickr to see the photo of the Curve's beautiful breakfast in close-up.

(We also saw the Raveonettes at the Apolo, but I didn't get a photo of gorgeous Sharin Foo because we had found such a nice little spot right by the bar where we could see and could lean our hot selves against the cool zinc counter, in convenient proximity to alcohol.)

Fanzine names we came up with over the weekend:*

• Golden Eyes (after this fabulous funny and kinky exhibition we saw)
• Naked Tongue (thanks, Em, aka Mrs Malaprop. I think she was thinking of ‘Native Tongue’ but it came out wrong.)
• Dirty Blonde (going for LCD pick-me-up factor)
• Sleep With Me (ditto)
• Heartbreak Soup (this my favourite, but a direct steal which is a bit cheeky)
• Anzine – (again, thanks Em and the Curve. I don’t think anyone will get this joke though.)

As you can see, I’m a rank amateur at this. I need a good one, or NOBODY WILL PICK IT UP and worse yet, I will be shamed before the legions of cool, cute, hip young twenty-something indie boys at the next workshop.

Oh, if only I knew lots of people who enjoyed playing around with words – oh.

* Lord, is she still banging on about this? Yes she is. Will she ever shut up about it? Only if she gets what she wants from the shy, modest, reluctant, retiring and bashful bloggers...

Raaaaaaah!

Was bitterly disappointed yesterday, (because when I walked into work, I thought it was Friday, and was smiling and happy til a colleague gently pointed out it was still Thursday.) But today is Friday! And tomorrow I'm off on my hols! Huzzah!

Gone here. Laters...

Moonwalk

Happy Valentine's Day, you sexy beast.

Moonwalk, originally uploaded by Slaminsky.

(Forget red roses, have some George Clinton featuring Public Enemy - seriously, this is shit-kicking music and possibly my favourite tune of all time. Available for 7 days only, get it while it's hot.)

Me, I'm going to have a beer, so I can cry into it.

Bearlesque

Auf wiedersehn, mein Bear, originally uploaded by Slaminsky.

Bearlesque - Grrrrrrrr!

(more here)

F**zine

Okay, I know none but the faithful few are really interested in this, but the first workshop was so much fun, so inspiring & exciting & generally out of my comfort zone, and you know, my blog yada yada yada...

So now I know that you can widen the remit and it doesn't have to be just about music, it's whatever you fancy, and here are some of the words I scribbled down when they asked us to write down what it was about: music, line drawings, Hackney, photography, graphics, typography, my favourite writers, graffitti/street art around Brick Lane, comic strip? cartoons Penguin covers laundrettes. Don't like the sound of that? Write in & influence it...

• And here is the deal: Rough Trade will a) print up gratis and b) distribute it in the shop.

• So feel free to inundate me. You all are my favourite writers, I've got 2 weeks to do it and have to turn up at the next one with it pretty much finished, ready to print.

• I can put it together, you don't have to pay to get it done AND can advertise your blogs in it, it's a win-win situation!
  

• Or not. No pressure, like. You could just read it, if you prefer - we've already got some magnificent writing from Billy, RoMo and DJ Del - the latter exclusives not to be found on their blogs, oh no.

• Oh, how I wish I could draw like Lucy, though, now more than ever.

• And that I had a name for it. How am I going to tie all that together and be cool and make people want to pick it up, and yet not make people cringe? Naming is the hardest part. *

*Which reminds me of a friend at college, who called his band Pit, just so their first record could be called 'Pitiful'.

Where to drink in the arse end of nowhere

We're in the pub after work. It's called the two pound pub (because every drink costs £2.00, or thereabouts) which is all that the glorious area we work in offers in terms of entertainment, despite being bang next door to the PROPERTY BOOM OLYMPIC VILLAGE INVESTMENT BUY NOW!!! apartments, sprouting up like mushrooms, if large square boring featureless glass mushrooms, every time you look.

Where is the infrastructure for all these rich people supposedly snapping up these Olympic flats & moving in? They may have floor to ceiling windows, but all they look out onto is a motorway flyover and a far distant view of the O2, and there is fuck all (I say this with some bitterness in my heart) else around there.

A drive-in Macdonalds is the only sign of civilization, and that's as good as it gets. No cafes, no restaurants, no shops, no parks, no nada. Grim, rotting council high-rises, as far as the eye can see. Major traffic. Major pollution. No green space whatsoever. I can't conceive of moving into a flat, no matter how plush, in such a phenomenally deprived and dismal area, no matter how near the Games it was.

Anyway, the pub. There are toothless old geezer locals who try to accost you on the way to the loo, darts board with locals' names chalked up on the blackboard, red plush barstools, mahogany effect chipboard walls. It's muy reminiscent of the scary locals' pub in Withnail and I. If anyone needs to film in an authentic, unreconstructed pre-gentrification grim old boozer, drop me a line.

Adios, muchacho

Now you’re just toying with our emotions… Oh well, I for one won’t miss you AT ALL, you sarcastic curmudgeonly misanthropic old git.

*sniff*

Net disaster

Run! Run! Run for your life!

Psst, wanna be in my fanzine?

Rough Trade (my favourite new shop, though I can't actually purchase much in there apart from a coffee at the moment because am currently without CD or record player, I just go in occasionally and stroke the CD covers wistfully and wander out again) are holding a fanzine workshop with Everett True of Plan B - didn't our Tim write for Plan B or something?

And it made me think - though of course we love the New Media and all - it would be fun to put together a little fanzine. And everyone could contribute, writing, artwork, photography, whatever they felt like. Novel writing - even joint-novel-writing - is clearly beyond me, but this is maybe more achievable. What do you think?

1.) What could it be about?
2.) What to call it?