Peaches "The Teaches of Peaches"

While the lovely Ms Peaches is perhaps best known this album's opener, 'Fuck The Pain Away', there is much great music here. I particularly like 'Lovertits', on which Peaches seems to have found another irresistible dancefloor groove.

I don't think I know anyone who likes Peaches – other than my beloved, of course.

More incisive commentary coming soon.

Turbonegro "Ass Cobra"

Another old record. The more I think about it, the more I realise that Turbonegro are the band Zodiac Mindwarp could have been (er, could have fronted), if only he had had more than one song and liked singing songs about handsome sailors. I also like the song 'I Got Erection', with its increasingly outlandish list of things that give the singer a hard-on. I heard somewhere that the video for this song featured the band parading down some Norwegian street with giant inflatable erect penises – small wonder it received such heavy MTV rotation.

Maggot Brain

Air Moon Safari
Air 10,000 Hz Legend

Given that these albums are both genius and very different from each other, it is a wonder that I have not sought out more music by the French sensations.

The Unknown Soldier

Those of you who read my posts about comics will recall me mentioning The Unknown Soldier by Joshua Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli. On the occasion of its first book format collection of this title appearing, the BBC have run a piece on this Ugandan-set title. It reminds me of my ambivalence about this title. Anyway, have a look, there are plenty of nice pictures from it: In pictures: Ugandan comic hero

Important Animal News

A bear became trapped in a Colorado skateboarding park.

Rescuers lowered down a ladder, and the bear climbed out.

more on this important story

The Beatles "Abbey Road"

A longer walk to work has made listening to albums on the iPod more appealing than random shuffled tracks. So it was that I found myself listening to this record again.

It has only just hit me what a disturbing song 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' is… behind the jaunty musical arrangements lie lyrics about a young sociopath who murders people for causing him the slightest problems. Maybe it is meant to be thought of more as some kind of adolescent power fantasy, though I am not sure why that would make it a good thing.

"To my ear, all these songs are universally awful"

Over on the Quietus, they have had a most excellent idea: play a load of space themed songs to famous astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, see what he thinks of them, and ask him about their astronomic accuracy.

And here it is: Space Rock The Final Frontier: Sir Patrick Moore On Pop

"I remember this one! I think it's dreadful," he says of Muse's 'Supermassive Black Hole'.

And Make Them Large Ones

A local documentary festival was showing that documentary about the All Tomorrow's Parties festival, this being the one they have had on in Camber Sands and Minehead over the last ten years or so. The film was made up of footage supplied by the festival's attendees, overlaid with music of bands playing at it (occasionally intercut with footage of British holiday camps in the 1950s and 1960s) In an age where people can't go for a piss without recording it on their mobile, the film's producers obviously had a lot of footage to work with – it's striking how they are able to cut between different shaky camera angles when showing performances by popular bands (thought they also had proper footage taken by professionals).

Most of the film washes over the viewer, as a kind of audiovisual stream of consciousness, but it is all very evocative of the festival in both locations. I think my favourite bits of concert footage were probably Battles performing 'Atlas', or The Gossip performing a song other than 'Standing in the Way of Control'. Other notable performances included Daniel Johnston, skating on the thin line between idiot savant and worrying mentalist, while the Yeah Yeah Yeahs continue to radiate star quality.

I also liked the bits where festival organiser Barry Hogan was giving out about the people who live near the Pontins in Camber Sands. They are a bunch of cunts, apparently. The bit where the guys in a trolley are being pushed around was also a*w*e*s*o*m*e.

I do not know what people who have never been to any of the ATPs would make of it, but I care not for them. For my own part, this motivated me to run out and buy a ticket for the Nightmare Before Christmas in early December, so I could spend the next six* months getting excited about it.

*indicating how long ago I wrote this.

World's Greatest Blog Found

OK so it is not updated that often, but still.

It is actually the blog of good dog Bilbo, the Newfoundland lifesaver who would patrol the beach at Sennen if he wasn't prevented from doing so by the RNLI.

Fearful Symmetry

The last SF book club book was Alfred Bester's 1956 novel "The Stars My Destination" (originally published in the UK as "Tiger, Tiger"). It concerns this fellow Gully Foyle, who goes on a rampage of vengeance against those who left him for dead in the depths of space. This is in the future, when people are able to teleport (or "jaunt") across the surface of the Earth but not through space. And in an unlikely sequence of events, Foyle also finds himself with Maori-like facial tattoos, symbolising his predatory nature; he is a total bad-ass, willing to do any number of unsavoury acts in order to attain the vengeance he desires.

It's a crazy book. A lot of the way the future society works is thought through in a credible and evocative manner, but a lot of the plot twists are rather outlandish (Foyle is several times saved from certain death by enemies of whatever planet he is on deciding to launch a surprise nuclear attack). Yet the book still works, almost as though by piling on ever more improbable events Bester manages to cancel out the unlikelihood of any one of them. The whole thing romps along at a pace that never lets you stop to question anything. It also has some wonderful SF touches – like how in a world where people can teleport across the planet, status is shown by moving as slowly as possible, so to impress people Foyle shows up to a party by train, with flunkies walking ahead of him to lay the tracks. Or a throwaway reference to how on Mars, where plants are vital producers of oxygen, the punishment for picking a flower is summary execution.

One thing people say about this book is that it is proto-cyberpunk, featuring people with technological implants, all-powerful yet strangely feudal corporations, odd future culture, and so on. And yeah, the gang's all here, all it's really lacking is people plugging into some crazy virtual reality computer system, but even with that the book feels like something very contemporary, not at all like something written in the 1950s.

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