Via Do You Feel Loved.com, Tori Amos to do a full album of covers highlighting the difference between songs sung about women sung by women or men. There’s a notable list of people she’s covering, from The Beatles and the Velvet Underground, through to Eminem and Depeche Mode. I haven’t been interested in Amos for nearly ten years now, but this seems intriguing.
Davo gives his perspective on the whole Mardi Gras debacle: “To the grassy knoll between the Trade tent and Popstarz stage to meet Tom, Nick and John and catch the remnants of EMF’s set (more nostaglic flashbacks … I still knew all the words, ten years on), then for a quick musak boogie on the way out, a mad dash for cigarettes and alcohol (without the need for ridiculous drinks tickets), then to Soho…”
In weird flash back circumstances, I’m currently enjoying an album that I first listened to in 1988 and which became an absolute staple of my life back then. Listening to it again, I still like it, and I don’t care what anyone says – I think it’s a fucking good album. I present for your delectation: Bangles: Everything. I’m particularly obsessed by two songs at the moment – the sublime Glitter Years and the transformatively self-destructive Crash and Burn. Sing along with me kids: “Going nowhere, And I don’t care, Can’t wait til I get there, Sometimes I wish I could crash and burn. Fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, Gotta be a place where they can’t find me, Watching all those bridges burn behind me. On my Philco, I hear an echo, there was a wrecko, yesterday. And by tomorrow, they’ll clean the char-o, and wash the tar and the trouble away.” You only have to listen to the latest Hole album to see the influence they had on chick-based guitar bands.
An interesting webzine-style site that I have recently discovered: Scissorfish. I figure it’s the suburban equivalent of razorfish. Entertaining though.
I’m reeling a little at the moment having glanced at Friends Reunited, a site that is designed to get you in touch with other people who went to school with you. I’m particularly reeling because there actually was someone on it who I wouldn’t mind getting in touch with. Stunningly weird and improbable. Unfortunately I have no intention of paying the £5 necessary to actually go through with it and contacting them.
Barbelith.com needs your help. The heavy schedule of new articles that I’ve been trying to maintain has taken its toll – and more to the point, we’ve run out of articles to run. Do you have something that you’ve always wanted to put out on the web – something insightful and brilliant. Or is there something you’ve always wanted to write. If so, then join in the discussion on The Underground and then submit your piece to barbelith.com submissions.
Possibly the least effective attempt at sleep I’ve ever undertaken in my life. I couldn’t have moved more if I was running a marathon. I feel more exhausted this morning than I did last night. I’m useless with really muggy sticky weather. My body isn’t designed for it.
I’m slightly drunk and confused after a quarter bottle of vodka and Priscilla on TV. The film always seems very honest to me in a strange way, considering it’s made by hundreds of people with video cameras and technical equipment and focused on actors pretending to be people, so that we can relate to them and experience our feelings through it…
Dot Com Blues
I’d decided that I wasn’t happy in my job for a variety of reasons and handed in two months notice from timeout.com – so that they could find someone to replace me and so that I could find another job that I would enjoy. Unfortunately I did it at just the wrong time – pretty much exactly the wrong time, actually.
Between January and March I had a variety of interviews for well-paid and interesting jobs around the UK new media scene – among other positions I went for a role at AOL.co.uk as a broadband producer that I was really excited about and was talking to Sapient about going to work with them as a Content Strategist. Then almost overnight everything stopped dead. With one company I had a full day of interviews, and several subsequent meetings and was about to go in to discuss salary and benefits packages when they suddenly rang up out of the blue and said that they’d been forced to stop recruiting that morning. A couple of other companies that I was talking to suddenly started doing the same thing. Interviews were cancelled and the market just died overnight.
Since leaving Time Out in the beginning of March I’ve had pretty variable luck – I’ve managed to do more freelance writing, which I’ve always wanted to do (including writing film reviews for bbc.co.uk), and have paid the bills with work at at a couple of web design companies and start-ups doing HTML and design work. It’s been really interesting, and I’ve had a couple of interesting challenges – designing HTML templates for e-mail clients like Outlook and web-mail was a completely new experience for me, even after seven years of knocking HTML together. But finding the right ways to create, organise and present content online is still where my heart lies and anything else still feels a bit like killing time. And that’s when the work is coming in – which it doesn’t always do.
The UK hasn’t been hit as hard as the US, by any means, so there’s still, thank god, only a limited will-code-for-food ethos around. But it’s hard on everyone – particularly those of us who mistimed our next career step.
Guess who’s coming to London: Travelling Carnival of Fine Hypertext Products.