Sweet Nothings

Unbelievable scenes this evening as both Manchester teams failed miserably to qualify from the group stages of the Champions League - a tournament, lest we forget, whose chief function these days is as a cash cow for the bigger teams, and whose deck is massively stacked in their favour. City's exit was no surprise, the damage having been done by their failure to beat Napoli. You could argue that Mancini's men were unlucky to land themselves such a tough group - obviously as debutants they had to start in pot 3, but they probably would have been happy be paired with anyone from pot 4 bar the Italians, with the possible exception of Dortmund. Cynics will point out that the Azzuri  were making their first group stage appearance too, but the vast sums spunked by City in the last couple of years created a unique kind of pressure which the team patently struggled to deal with. Napoli's position is more akin to that of Spurs last season - not expected to qualify, and thus able...

Let's have a round-up of the gigs I went to in the last week or so, because hey it passes the time and that. The Complete Stone Roses - Islington Academy Having reconciled myself long ago to the fact that I would never get to see the most seminal band from my Uni years play together (one particular Ian Brown quote, responding to how much it would take to reform the Roses - "You could give me Mars and Jupiter and it still wouldn't be enough" - sticks in my mind, not to mention John Squire's "I have no wish to desecrate the memory of the Stone Roses" sculpture-thing), I booked tickets earlier this year for this highly-regarded tribute act instead. And, y'know, they were alright .   The singer has a decent stab at Brown's ape-dancing as well as the bouts of atonal skronking, and the guitarist looked vaguely Squire-like even though the other two looked bog-all like Mani and Reni (not sure the drummer was even black), and there was only one Secon...

Which is up against some pretty stiff competition. Eat your heart out, Carol Ann Duffy: Remember, Remember, the 4th of November, when a part of the M5 was alight. The UK became cold, when the news was told, ... 34 vehicles were burning bright. Sympathy to them all, who were in the fireball, to those relatives who were on that route. May everyone reflect, so we can pay our respects. Let's spread the poem to show our tributes There are genuinely no words.

I was interested to read  this article  the other day, as I'm currently halfway through Haruki Murakami's epic   1Q84  (the first book of it anyway). The bit that particularly struck me was that some reviewers apparently have a beef with him for only being interested in playing to his own fans rather than trying to win new converts to the great intellectual cause: "Murakami, now 62, has ceased being a novelist and has entered the dangerous world of literary phenomenon, a cult figure himself." On the surface, this would appear to make Murakami the literary equivalent of Radiohead, who now make esoteric electronica designed to appeal to a set few who - by implication - have outgrown hoary old concepts like choruses and hooks. Or perhaps Stewart Lee, who instead of telling jokes prefers to endlessly deconstruct them for his audience of delighted fellow pseuds. But the world of novels operates in reverse. Murakami is a great writer who can combine high quality wi...

To complete my LFF tripleheader - yet another film featuring death as a central plot point. I swear I'm not doing this on purpose... The Descendants comes a whole seven years after Alexander Payne's last film Sideways , so to call it long-awaited would be an understatement. Saying that, Payne’s films exist in such a completely different world to most Hollywood fare that discussing them in such terms seems almost vulgar. This one centres around George Clooney as Matt King, a father-of-two struggling to cope after his wife falls into a coma from a near-fatal jetski accident. He's also responsible for the imminent sale of an important piece of land on behalf of his family, land passed down from generation to generation from their ancestors (the Descendants of the title). Typically for a Payne movie, even the balmy Hawaiian climate doesn't shield the characters from any of fortune's outrageous slings and arrows. Both Matt's daughters have their issues, the youn...

WARNING! ***CONTAINS KOOKINESS*** Gus Van Sant's latest, Restless ,   shares a major theme with 50/50  whilst taking a very different approach. Far from being some kind of weird mortality obsession on my part (though this film certainly has one), instead my interest was piqued by the presence of Van Sant (because whatever else he's done, Good Will Hunting remains a wonderful film) and of Mia Wasikowsa, with whom I've become slightly obsessed after her astonishing performances in shrink drama  In Treatment (season one: Sky Arts; season two: Sky Atlantic, where I can't watch it. Fuckers.) Restless begins with our hero Enoch laying within his own chalk outline; we then follow him on his way to a funeral at which, it becomes quickly apparent, he has no business being. Here he meets Wasikowska's Annabel for the first time, who then saves Enoch's bacon when it he's about to be busted at another funeral he's gatecrashing. We quickly learn that Enoch has a...

I managed to book for three films at this years London Film Festival , a 50% improvement on last year. At this rate I should be able to catch the entire festival output by around 2063. Here goes with the first one (spoilers ahoy): 50/50 Judd Apatow has a lot to answer for. Whilst both Knocked Up and Superbad  were terrific fun, they were the harbingers of a grim new era for Hollywood comedy wherein smut and vulgarity rule at the expense of character development and charm (with Apatow himself directly or indirectly involved in much of it). One of the many recent nadirs was The Change-Up , the direct result of a terrible power lunch pitch along the lines of "wouldn't it be great if we rehashed the old Freaky Friday bodyswap plot, but with 90% of the jokes about poo and porn?" This drive to break all possible taboos now brings us 50/50 , which could easily be marketed as a CancerCom. You would be forgiven for not holding out high hopes for a comedy movie centred aroun...

Celebrity deaths, and more specifically the reactions thereto, are a curious business. The print and broadcast media will necessarily adopt a measured and neutral tone, mostly painting each newly-extinguished life in a positive light in all but the most heinous cases. Meanwhile in the worlds of the internetz and social media, which require no such filters of tact or taste, there are explosions of activity. On my Facebook feed, there will be several "RIP actor X/pop star Y" status updates, to which more obscure names often prompt amusing "whos that then hun?"-style responses. Yesterday I noticed one or two more elaborate ones, "Thanks to Steve Jobs for changing the world" for example, as well a couple of links to inspirational Youtube clips. There is nothing wrong with positivity of course, although I can't help feeling that when some people (and it's always the same people) put up an RIP for every single semi-famous person it's more of a refl...

I've always loved TV quiz- and gameshows. I was reminded of the subject this week thanks to Dave Gorman's Absolute Radio podcast . Dave spent some time lamenting the state of gameshows today, which arguably reached its nadir with Simon Cowell's overblown and utterly vacuous  Red or Black . The decline of TV gameshows is one of my pet subjects and I could quite easily have made this blog entry a lengthy exploration of why exactly they have all but ceased to be a viable prime time proposition. But then I thought I should record my own experience, if only for posterity's sake. And besides, Game Show Death can basically be boiled down to (a) the rise of reality TV and the subsequent proliferation of micro-celebs into every nook and cranny of the schedules, and (b) the success of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?  since everybody else tried to copy it, and failed miserably. Yes, for a few brief minutes back in 2000 I was a TV star. The show was the sadly-defunct Channel 4 tea...

Arty boat tour shot Top of the Must-See List for Chicago was an architectural boat tour . Although this doesn't sound terribly promising on paper, it lives up to its billing by being an informative 90 minute-lecture on the history of Chicago's most significant buildings - delivered by a genuine expert from the Chicago Architecture Foundation - which doubles up as a pleasant introductory riverbound meander around the downtown area. The tour was certainly a more pleasant journey than the long El ride into the city, which we had to take every day because for reasons of (can you guess?) extreme parsimony we were ensconced in a hotel way out in the northern suburbs. The El (short for el evated railway) is one of those iconic things which turns out to be something of a disappointment. What looks fun and quirky on ER and in the movies is pretty drab up close. The circular section around The Loop - the heart of the City, at least in the financial sense - is quite cool and find...

En route to Chicago we stopped off at Cedar Point  theme park in Sanduskie, Ohio. It has lots of rollercoasters, including the 400ft+ Top Thrill Dragster : I'm pleased to report that I completed this ride without soiling myself. After queuing for a good hour, the ride itself being about 17 seconds long doesn't represent great value for money as it were, but goodness me it's intense. An espresso shot of adreneline, compared to the more traditional coasters such as Millennium Force - itself over 300ft and offering an arguably more satisfying overall ride experience. In our limited time here we also squeezed in a ride on the Windseeker (above)   - just like chair-o-planes except that you again happen to be over 300ft in the air. We tried 4 rides in 4 hours, and barely scratched the surface of what the park had to offer. America - where they do things just that little bit bigger.

Toronto was never that high on my city wishlist, but due to various complex friend-related reasons (which can be boiled down to "I don't have many, so am reliant on the ones I do have") it's where I spent the first few days of my recent north American jaunt. I certainly had no designs on staying at the Holiday Inn Express in North York a good 10 miles outside the city centre either, but again due to various complex friend-related reasons... etc. Still, a night in the drab suburbs did gave me a taste of what life must be like for your average Torontonian - a far cry from the idyllic, summer-cottage-by-the-lake existence enjoyed by their more fortunate brethren. Once properly ensconced downtown at the much nicer Strathcona (although no free breakfast - complex friend-related reasons etc), I was much happier. The CN Tower is by far the main tourist attraction, although despite its great height it's not all that impressive when viewed from close-up - a grey concr...

So yeah... that last post moaning about a handful of minor disturbances on my road was started at the beginning of last week, but by the time I'd finished it and published it last night London was being beset by rioting. Talk about great timing... I guess it's good to keep things in perspective - and pat myself on the back for choosing not to live above a shop again. And not to live in Tottenham, obviously. Yikes...

So it's come to this - a blog in which I complain about my noisy neighbours. I've lived in my current flat for two and a bit years now, and I can't remember another period in my life (even living in student halls and villages) during which I've been woken up during the night and generally been perturbed by noise as much as these last few months. I'm not under any illusions that my little street in Palmers Green is particularly classy. It's also the summer, and the place is like a greenhouse, so the wide-open windows do inevitably increase external noise levels. But nevertheless, it seems that amongst the newer crop of residents in these blocks there are an awful lot of selfish, shouty bastards. The standard disturbances are people coming home from a late night out. Sometimes this involves cars waiting around with the engine on, sometimes it's just the too-loud sound of intoxicated speech. (I should add that I'm on an off-street cul-de-sac, which ca...

Last Sunday, as we made our way from the car park on the third day of Latitude to see The Waterboys , my friend and I realised we were playing a high-stakes game. The festival had been enjoyable enough so far, and although there’d been lots of rain on Friday night and most of Saturday the site hadn’t turned into a total mudbath. (The thing about a quagmire like the 2007 Glastonbury is once you’ve been through it and come out the other side, any festival conditions seem pretty tame in comparison. Our generation never had a Great War or a 'Nam. This will have to do.) Naturally it helps when you get to stay in a big house just outside Ipswich rather than on a soggy campsite. Overnighting elsewhere is a double-edged sword though, and not just because of the hair-raising mudslide that was the drive to the day car park. Festivals aren’t just about watching some bands/comedy/etc on the main stages - they’re about the vibes, maaan. Nothing quite beats the thrill of catching something un...

Well, haven't the last couple of days been interesting? All sorts of things that could be said about News International's nefarious dealings, but this pretty much sums it up: "Hitler was nice to dogs". Brilliant. I'll probably buy the News of the World tomorrow, just to see what they fill it with. Chances are it'll only be an improvement...

An inordinate amount of my last few days has been spent in Hyde Park. Wednesday night's appetizer was a 10K race, rescheduled from April thanks to Kate'n'Wills. Just over 54:00 - not too shabby if I do say so myself, and helped by the perfect conditions and nice scenery (only partially spoiled by the sight of a man tumbling into a dirty puddle thanks to an errant cyclist. I swear they do these things on purpose.) There was of course a dirty great artificial barrier blocking off the northern section of the park - erected because we were in the middle of the annual two-week span during which the park temporarily turns into central London's biggest gig venue. The first festival, Hyde Park Calling, had been and gone, but Arcade Fire 's gig was a standalone affair and therefore not quite as corporate. I arrived in time to see The Vaccines , who one has to feel somewhat sorry for. Had they arrived a few years back they could have made a relatively gentle, low-key entry ...

I put this on my Facebook but figured it deserved the widest possible audience  to be put on here too. Just imagine if these allegations turned out to be true. You heard it here first.

I couldn't let this one go without passing comment, as it is truly the most baffling managerial appointment that I can remember. It was all going so well for Aston Villa - finally rid of Deadly Doug (but not before his parting gift of a fantastic manager), and guided by what seemed that rarest of creatures, a sensible foreign owner. Then it all began to unravel: the departure of O'Neill (who has a fondness for litigation, so let's not speculate about any of that), followed by the appointment of an ageing Frenchman possessing the archetypal "dickey ticker". Houllier's enforced exit should have been a blessing in disguise though - now the club could appoint a decent (and more importantly, healthy) manager who'd have the whole summer to build a team and bed them in. I can't imagine even the most masochistic Villa fan ever dreamed it would come to this. First of all Mark Hughes looked like the obvious choice, but apparently the abrupt manner of his ...

Block-age My relationship with Adam and Joe has been a bit rocky so far. Several different people whose opinions I respect had recommended their 6 Music show to me, but for whatever reason I never jumped in. Then when I finally popped my podcast cherry in South Africa, my expectations had built up to such extreme levels that they were always going to disappoint. Worse, the postmodernism, silly voices and absence of any sort of heart made me furious. I  hated  this self-indulgent crap! Oh well, to cut a long story short I've been listening to the new batch of podcasts from the start and I like them now. Sorry about that. The one quality that helped them to crowbar their way into my affections was how media-literate they are, and it's this that makes Attack the Block  a qualified success. The general consensus seems to be that this is a 7 out of 10 film and I'd have to agree. It's a great concept, and as Cornish has pointed out comparisons to Shaun of the Dead ...