Sweet Nothings

Years really do come and go thick and fast as you get older. It's also increasingly difficult to pick out milestones each time, though maybe this is no bad thing. The early part of my 2009 was dominated by fires - two near work and one a bit too near my old flat. Luckily my smoke alarm did its job, luckily these things only come in threes, and luckily I found a new, better flat. Funny how even though Palmers Green is a far less fancy area, and even though I've had problems (broken washing machine, broken boiler) here already, it feels much more like home. I've even put pictures up and everything! It's also helping me do my bit for the environment - and my wallet - by being warm enough, relatively speaking, for me to not have turned the heating on once. Bonus! So then I turned 30, started running, got some glasses, committed to a crazy month-long trip to South Africa next summer, and that's about it. Can't really complain, all in all. And as last days go, today h...

The main problem with being an avid fan of Mark Kermode and the Kermode/Mayo "Wittertainment" brand is trying to avoid basing my opinions exclusively upon his. I try not to always agree with him, but such is the strength of his character that I find myself absorbing his views by an odd kind of osmosis. Take Inglourious Basterds , for instance. Even though I really enjoyed the movie and it had those two incredible sequences (the opening one in the house and the one in the bar), I share every criticism the good Doctor made of that film and its creator - overlong, undisciplined, self-indulgent in the extreme, etc. It's just that I love Tarantino's style so much that I can forgive him an awful lot (I've not seen Death Proof , to be fair). Basterds wasn't my film of the year though. Film studios and critics everywhere will be devastated to know that I haven't really decided on one. All the big Oscar-fodder came along in January in what has become the annual ...

One of the more pernicious music industry inventions has to be the annual BBC Sound of... survey of music critics and industry figures, which presents us with a helpful list of all the acts with the biggest marketing budgets for the coming year and whose records we are therefore expected to buy. Let’s see who was in the 2009 top ten (in ranking order): Little Boots (disappointing considering the amount of time and money that must have been invested) White Lies (hilariously death-obsessed, yet more Joy Division-reduced-to-mainstream-glum fodder although the one guitar band to break through this year) Florence and the Machine (critical and commercial success - hurrah) Empire of the Sun (good tunes but too wilfully weird to cross over) La Roux (see below) Lady GaGa (see below) VV Brown (seems like you can have too many electro girls. Brown got literally nowhere) Kid Cudi (quite big in hip-hop circles by all accounts) Passion Pit (haven’t really broken through) Dan Black (I saw him do a fe...

Oh blimey. Myself and plenty of other Wolves fans were perhaps guilty of jumping the gun a couple of weeks back with talk of handing Mick McCarthy his P45. A couple of vital wins since then have put us right back into a competitive position, so all was looking rosy. And then he goes and plays the reserves against Man U last night... Mick's logic is easy enough to follow. We gain three entirely unexpected points against Spurs on Saturday, so we are already 3 points ahead of our expected total for this week's matches. We also have a crucial game against Burnley at Molineux on Sunday, which we have a good chance of winning. Mick reads an article about how players can't perform to their best three days after a match, knows we'd struggle to get a result at Old Trafford at the best of times, and therefore gives the entire first team a rest. At 7:30 last night I was shocked, but not exactly angry as I didn't expect anything from the game, and ultimately Mick is the manager...

The murder of Meredith Kercher ticked all the right boxes: young British female victim, in a foreign country with a somewhat different legal system (which for some immediately translates into "inferior legal system"), and a young couple heading the list of suspects, one of whom just so happened to be an attractive woman. Anybody who believes that feminism is now obsolete because women are basically men's equals now and in some cases have more rights (and there are plenty of blokes who complain about TV adverts portraying men as spineless gimps, etc) need only take a look at the media coverage of Amanda Knox to discover how wrong they are. Her then-boyfriend and a small-time drug dealer have also been found guilty of the murder, but they are both (a) male and (b) non-English speaking foreigners, and have been given comparatively few column inches. On the other hand, American hottie Amanda, aka Foxy Knoxy, has been fair game from the start. An awful lot has been written and...

I've blogged nothing for ages, which is not necessarily a bad thing for anybody involved. Especially me, as it shows what a busy November I've had both at work (busy is on balance better than not busy) and on the exciting going out type front. Sadly, everything seems to have gone tits up in the last couple of days, especially on the football front. It's not just Wolves who are depressing me - that would be bad enough on its own. A deeper malaise seems to have descended around football in general, and it's bloody annoying. Thing is, this season was meant to be a great one for the neutrals. Man U sold two world class attacking players in the close season, and it felt like Chelsea had missed their best chance for glory when Hiddink went back to Russia, leaving an ageing team with yet another new manager. Meanwhile, Liverpool appeared to have hit on a formula for success, Arsenal surely couldn't fail to improve, Man City were spending stupid money and looked like genuin...

Some (late) reflections after the Flaming Lips' gig on Wednesday night. Firstly, the venue: the Troxy is in a cruddy part of East London, has a stupid name and is basically a bloody bingo hall - complete with dodgy carpet and weird side-on tables on the upper level. There was no bitter on sale, the wine was awful and the over-zealous security bods operate a one-in-one-out policy at the very front, which isn't ideal if you need to go for a piss or to the bar and get back to your mates in a hurry. And the Lips themselves? Well, this gig showed them to be a solid band overly fond of formless jams, capable of crafting the odd great tune when the mood takes them and canny enough to furnish their shows with enough gimmickry (dancers in animal suits, balloons, rolling around in a huge hamster ball, etc) to compensate for their musical eccentricities. Wayne Coyne is a wonderful showman, although it has been noted elsewhere that some of his onstage pronouncements ("aw shucks, you g...

Bloody disappointing Giving up on a TV series, especially one which has been praised to the skies and you feel you ought to like, is a strange business. True Blood has pulled in HBO's highest viewing figures since The Sopranos in the States, and being an Alan Ball creation it has an impressive pedigree. True, I never thought Six Feet Under to be quite the masterpiece that some reckoned (the stunning final sequence aside), and although American Beauty is a tremendous film, there was a story in Word magazine a while back that director Sam Mendes actually rewrote the ending because Ball's original script climaxed far less satisfactorily. But still, a Ball-produced, postmodern, Southern Gothic vampire melodrama - how could I possibly not like it? Quite easily, as it turned out. Firstly, I don't find vampires inherently interesting. Although True Blood 's central conceit - vampires co-existing with humans in modern-day America and living on artificial blood - is a good o...

So I was thinking about writing what looks like being an annual piece about the last 12 months in music - blah blah female electro LadyLaRouxMachine yadda yadda - when the thought struck me that we’re near the end of the decade and I’ve not seen any definitive musical recaps of the noughties yet (which will be the last time I use that word, you’ll be pleased to know). So, written mostly from hazy memories and with very little in the way of research (which let’s be honest is no different to what the majority of these pieces will be like when they hit the newsstands), here are my brief reflections on popular music over the last decade. The 2000s seem like a slippery bugger to pin down. Now we’re at a safe distance from the 90s, a convenient middle-class rock journo shorthand has been developed - they started with NIRVANA! (with SUEDE! holding the flag for Brit guitars) then came OASIS!/BLUR!/RADIOHEAD!, then the latter two went weird, Oasis went down the drug dealer’s, The Verve died, Pu...

I was chatting with a fellow Wolves fan last night, my friend's housemate's boyfriend as it happens. (I know, look at me chatting with unfamiliar people!) He was utterly convinced that we would survive this season in the Premier League, and that we'll even end up pushing for European qualification within a few years. From our brief conversation he seemed like an incredibly charismatic and positive bloke. He was also quite scarily tall, so perhaps these attributes are connected. If there was ever a moment that summed up my life in a microcosm then this was it. This guy was clearly one of life's optimists and as a result he was charming and popular, chatting away to everyone as well as sharing some romantic moments with his attractive girlfriend. Meanwhile, I'm one of those types who's forever stuck in a corner at parties, too self-conscious to work the room and make small talk and yet perversely, being more of a realist than a full-blown pessimist, not cynical en...

I saw The Cribs at the Forum in Kentish Town last night. The last gig I'd been to was Noah and The Whale a couple of weeks previously, where from our position at the back we actually couldn't hear some of the quieter moments because so many people were bloody well talking. Why pay to see a gig if you're going to natter with your mates the whole time? And even if it's on a freebie, don't bloody go if you're not that into the band. Anyway, as you might expect last night was the polar opposite. The Cribs are a band you really have to jump around to, and despite my advancing years I assumed a position near the front and braved the headbanging hordes. Is headbanging the right term? I was going to use the term "mosh pit", but it somehow sounds a bit old-fashioned. Surely da kidz must have invented a new phrase by now... Speaking of kids, and taking nothing away from the Jarmans/Marr performance, by far the best moment of the night was the sight of an achingl...

This is a very self-indulgent post about stuff in today's Guardian . Best you don't read it, really. Marina Hyde is reassuringly sanctimonious as ever about the Anton Du Beke racism row (her final paragraph is very good, mind), but oh no, not Lucy Mangan too! I love Lucy, it's fair to say. She is very probably my ideal woman and future life partner, she just doesn't know it yet. Sadly, today has seen our first fight. I don't think Anton should have been sacked. Leaving aside the rabid attempts in some quarters (Charlie Brooker today calls them "repugnant vested-interest newspaper scumbags") to denigrate and slur the Beeb, this all boils down to whether you should condemn a person utterly, and thereby cost them their job, on the basis of one single mistake. Ok, two mistakes - he also mentioned something about Leila possibly being a "terrorist" at one point. But he did apologise. If you believe the scurrilous rumours then Marina Hyde once shagged...

I've just made a terrible mistake. Tonight I bought the latest WWE wrestling pay-per-view event on Sky Box Office, entitled Hell in a Cell, which promised much steel cage-related action. (This wasn't the terrible mistake, although the PPV was rather disappointing.) I always have to watch these things live, or before I go to work on the Monday, due to not being able to resist the temptation to read the results online. Now, PPVs start at 1am and go on till 4. The last few times, I've stayed up all night to watch them and only got a few hours sleep before work. Therefore I'd got into the habit of buying cans of [popular goth-targeted energy drink] to keep me awake for the duration, supplemented by a cup of tea towards the end. This time, I'd woken up quite early on Sunday morning and decided to go to bed at 10pm, get three hours sleep beforehand, watch the PPV and then get the rest of my full night's sleep quota - simple huh? Unfortunately, I continued with my habi...

Saturday began with a leisurely breakfast followed by a visit to MOMA . If you think that website is cool, the museum itself more than lives up to it. The modern painting and sculpture galleries contained works by the likes of Van Gogh, Rothko, Giacometti and Warhol that even a relative artistic philistine such as myself could recognise and appreciate, and the lovely little sculpture garden seemed a fine place to relax. I, though, was off to Greenwich Village to meet up with cousin Steve and his wife Nancy. My great-grandfather and Steve's grandpa were brothers, so that must make us first or second cousins once removed, or maybe twice. Who knows, or cares? Because Steve and Nancy were fabulous, a bohemian older couple who lived in a wonderfully cluttered flat above a Cuban resturant in the heart of the village, and who seemed to know everyone . Yes, Greenwich Village (and West Village, which appeared to be two sides of the same coin) genuinely has a village atmosphere, where people...

It didn't start off so well. Upon arrival at JFK airport I eschewed the chance of taking a bus or the subway to Manhattan and headed straight for the cab rank. I was expecting the cabbie to be a garrulous Irish or Italian type who'd welcome me to their wonderful city by giving me all the proper patter. Instead, my driver was a taciturn black guy who barely uttered two words to me the whole way. The Pod Hotel was all funky and bohemian and my little pod-room seemed very cosy. I had a vague expectation that the lobby would be filled with young, attractive travellers who'd invite me on a four-day hedonistic party around the city, but oddly enough they didn't materialise and so it was that I headed off on my own for an initial Big Apple recce. I walked by the United Nations building and then down 42nd Street towards Times Square, and gawped around like an idiot trying to take everything in. The sheer size and quantity of skyscrapers is what you notice most, a very differe...

Well, the adreneline was certainly flowing this morning. Two women got involved in an argument on the tube, and like the good citizen I am (shush! it’s true) I duly admonished them for getting on everyone’s collective tits. I’m not 100% sure how it started, but I know we’d stopped and more people were squeezing onto the carriage. A blonde lady (let’s call her Lady One) was holding onto a rail and started complaining to a black lady (Lady Two) who’d just got on and appeared to have pushed her hand away, or something equally trivial. Of course, in such a claustrophobic, stressed-out environment what should be a minor irritation can serve to bring one to the edge of their sanity, and if I couldn’t hear exactly how the dispute started I very quickly heard the rest as it escalated into a proper slanging match. It must be said that, as the accused party, Lady Two was doing most of the (very loud) talking. She was well-spoken and clearly not some ignorant pikey sort, although she did drop the...

I've had a couple of experiences over the last week or so which served to demonstrate the importance companies attach to customer service these days. Firstly I ordered a gig ticket for something to do whilst I'm in New York later this month (New York? Why yes! I might even blog about it...). The package was duly Fed-Ex'd across the Atlantic and delivered to my home address, where of course it didn't get delivered because I was at work. After phoning up and being offered the chance to collect the package from their depot on some bleak industrial estate in darkest Enfield (no thanks), they agreed to deliver it to me at work. Which to be fair to them, they eventually did. Albeit at least three days after the originally specified day. Which was a Friday, with a window of 8:30am-5pm, for which I attempted to get into work early, but the bus was late, and I got in late, and stayed in the office until 5 even though everyone else left early for a colleague's leaving drinks,...