Month: January 2011

Junior Choice


My daughter doesn’t want to help me pick records for the blog anymore so I’ve tried to rope my son into doing it. But being a baby he needs a fair amount of coaxing and is easily distracted. He was about to pull out The Associates’ Fourth Drawer Down album, when…


…oh look, a toy car!

I’m sure he’ll get better with practice.

Download: Q Quarters – The Associates (mp3)

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Where Youth and Laughter Go


I’m absolutely stunned to find out that Trish Keenan of Broadcast has died. It’s bad enough when old rock and soul troopers pass away but when it happens to someone so young in such a modern and vital band it really gobsmacks you.

Broadcast made a lot of my favourite records of the last 10 years and I’m going to miss her voice terribly. Awful, awful news.

Download: Before We Begin – Broadcast (mp3)

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Something for the weekend



Pardon the pun, but… swoon.

Who knows what I might have done had I not sustained that injury at Twickenham?”I ended up sitting with the head of special teams, who works with kickers and other specialists, and watching tape of elite place kickers for a couple of hours, while he talked me through their technique. As any woman in her 20s and 30s who has tried her hat at online dating knows, a blind date even if you’ve cheap oakleys seen a person’s photo, or in the case of “The Bachelor,” watched them on reality TV is a crapshoot. The very idea that 25 pre selected women would automatically be able to fall in love with any one man is laughable especially if said man only uses two words to describe his dates (“amazing” or “beautiful”), slut shames his suitors and is Wholesale China Jerseys an all around boring human. Yet “The Bachelor” operates on the premise that the star has the power to choose or not choose any of his suitors. (It’s bit more common to see a male contestant bowing out early, but even then it is often portrayed as a massive betrayal or agonizing heartbreak.)But you also have to remember that he was incredibly underappreciated. Before he got there, nobody was talking about the Philadelphia Eagles. As much as Andy Reid, Donovan McNabb is chiefly responsible for reviving that franchise into being the perennial playoff contender it is now. He was a very, very good quarterback, maybe a Hall of Fame quarterback. But he certainly acquitted himself very, very well over his career. He’s a great player.Why such conviction? Well, NFC teams had again dominated the jordans for cheap regular season, and once in the play offs it was the Cowboys who raised their game. With Emmitt Smith leading the league in rushing, Michael Irvin one of the very best receivers and the quarterback Troy Aikman in imperious form, the offense was dauntingly versatile. And yet the defense, short of headline names but full of heart and application, was even higher in the rankings.Finally, in 1911, an American company managed to drain the entire lake, because if there’s one thing America is good at, it is the total destruction of a natural resource. Sadly, the mud on the bottom of the lake proceeded to immediately harden, trapping any gold that might be left under its thick, impenetrable crust.Later this month, he’ll help us officially kick off the celebration of Disneyland’s 50th anniversary, the park that started it all and we plan cheap oakleys to mark this historic milestone in Wholesale China Jerseys true Disney style, including a fantastic new parade, a new World of Color show and a new Firework Spectacular, among other features.

Fondarella


Late Friday nights on British television back in the 1970s was essential viewing for a hormonal teenage boy and budding cinephile (especially once his mother had gone to bed) for it was then that they would show cult, arthouse, and horror films which, besides being an introduction to the stranger and more risqué end of cinema, usually had some naked ladies in them too. My personal Hall of Fame from those nights on our couch includes Walkabout, Girl On A Motorbike, Baby Love, The Shuttered Room and To The Devil A Daughter which aren’t all particularly great movies (most of them aren’t in fact) but they burned themselves into my adolescent brain for one reason or other — well, OK, mostly one reason — so much so that I can still remember my first, slightly freaked-out encounter with them 35 years later.

Being a typical teenage boy I was also into comics and science fiction so a movie which combined those things with naughty bits would have to be pretty much the greatest thing since spam fritters, so when I first saw Barbarella — robots, spaceships, monsters and Jane Fonda bonking her way across the galaxy — I thought I’d died and gone to boy heaven.



A kitsch riot of sex, space travel and shag-pile carpets, it was like watching a very groovy episode of Dr. Who directed by Hugh Hefner and featuring Louise Jameson having it off with the Cybermen. Even though it was based on a comic book it was far weirder than anything Stan Lee ever dreamed up and wasn’t set in any world I recognized from reading Spiderman, (though I wouldn’t have minded seeing Gwen Stacy in one of those sexy outfits). I wasn’t really aware of this at the time but there was such a thing as “adult” — and French — comics which, in this case, meant sex, sex and more sex, plus really twisted, creepy things like the evil little dolls with razor sharp teeth which made my skin crawl at the time (and still do actually). The people who made Barbarella were clearly degenerate weirdos who did lots of drugs and it was bloody marvelous as a result. It probably did my head in more than any of the films mentioned above because it was so damn freaky (and silly and saucy) and even though it’s often camper than a row of tents it’s also visually stunning with some amazing set and costume designs.

And, of course, Jane Fonda looks absolutely ravishing in it. She’s had so many other lives since she made Barbarella — anti-war activist, serious actress, work-out video queen, billionaire’s trophy wife — that it’s easy to forget she was once a sex symbol (with a verrrry sexy voice to boot) and she’d probably rather forget she ever did something as fluffy and kitschy as that, not least because she apparently turned down the lead role in Bonnie and Clyde to do it. But my teenage self, for one, would like to thank her very much indeed.

You probably know that Duran Duran got their name from a character in the movie and played their first gigs at a Birmingham club called Barbarella’s, which makes my choice of record easy.

Download: Girls On Film (Night Version) – Duran Duran (mp3)