i got woken up by my internal jukebox last night.

4am.

with this track looped over and over in my head.

so i’m exorcising the culprit, right here.
simbad feat. steelo -soul fever

when he wrote this song j.tillman said he’d heard that’s about the average distance between seperated lovers in the us. seven states.

but i figure there’s as likely seven metaphorical states between most people, no matter how close they seem.

either way as with all of his songs the lyrics are beautiful.

maybe because i love to bake and tate & lyle’s golden syrup is a key pantry staple (i said pantry… jeeez) but i’m really drawn to the line “there is honey in the lion but i can’t slay it”… its a sampson thing if you want to do more digging on that story.

The idea that defeating a lion, who’s every sinew is strung with potential to destroy you, might not only bring you to more immediate safety but also bear nourishment of the sweetest kind resonates pretty deeply with me.

so check out this slice of dulcet, thursday melancholia taken from long may you run, j.tillman - a nine track collection of self recorded songs put out by the headily ideal keep recordings imprint earlier this year.

the guy’s got a new album, Minor Works out next month too, which will be available through fargo in europe.

Till then get lost, cross-country with this for company…
J. Tillman - Seven States Across

Being of a mildly obsessional nature, it almost goes without saying that horselatitudes *heart* japan. Who could resist a nation that so readily embraces the sort of mild autistism that inspires people to make super authentic retro clothes or take car customization to the next level.

Adding fuel to this unrequited passion are sites like TURBOSONIC which stock a wicked selection of 70s/80s boomboxes and associated t-shirt range.
Heavy!

Thankfully I have good friends (yeah you, jizzy!) heading Nippon-ward anyday now-looks like their ‘what present shall I get for uncle jack ?’ problems are finally at an end.

LL Cool J-My Radio

(via boing boing/xlr8r)

So I have quit cigarettes (again).

Feels good.
Well, it will do in a few days.
Right now I’m in constant growl.

In an effot to ease the pain I have been trying to compensate by indulging in other ways.

Chocolate, booze and music seem to be doing the trick.

Here is something that has been going round my head (insanely) for the last couple of days. It’s by AManCalledHorse and it’s about grace (which is what I need right now, more than anything).

Check it out.

See now, I’ve been living in London for a little more than ten years and always within a 4 mile radius of the mildly maligned SE postcode.

I’d quite fancied moving to the chi-chi east, or closer to the southbank but circumstances conspired to set me right back down in Deptford. Famous for the murder of playwrite Christopher Marlowe in 1593 and more recently for not much else its one of those bits of southeast London thats suffered from not having a tube station and having a kind of off-putting name.

Plus its a little bit ghetto. Yeah, its noisy and kind of smelly sometimes, and you can’t move for double-parked, bashed-up, early nineties mercs; theres mostly horrible architecture, sectarian pubs, high-volume, social housing and pie and mash shops with unfathomable opening hours.
A new house just a few streets away from mine was just up for a big architectural prize and the publicity blurb for the project opens with…”in an area where it must have been tempting to turn one’s back on the outside world”. See, I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit - the notion that someone’s going to spend all that money on a swanky pad, designed by a top notch architect in Deptford while they’re scared of living there is ridiculous.

Sure SE8’s got a bad rep, and yes, theres some horrible gun related gang shit going down at the moment too, but living there, and not making an effort to actually engage with the place you live only serves to further ghettoise all levels of society and will inevitably pull us further and deeper into into some monstrous quagmire. So come on down to the ghetto. It ain’t so bad afterall.

The Superlatives - Come On Down To The Ghetto

Friday is the marvellous ‘Globo Loco’ at Cargo.

We went to the first one a couple of months ago and it was a blast.

Loads of really weird music that despite being directly related to tradition that goes back hundreds of years somehow feels undiscovered and brand new.

This month’s gig features the gypsy punk stylings of mama matrix and the usual helping off-kilter dancefloor smashers from horse latitude pal and world music main man Russ Jones.

A word of warning.

This is not so much a film review as my meanderings but, well, its likely to go on a bit.

I mean, there’ll be an intermission for sure, but when a film renders me speechless for half an hour after I’ve left my seat, there’s payback. For you.

Plus there’s a bit of a spoiler here too. So if you don’t want to know what happens in Children of Men go and hide behind your sofa right now.

PD James’ book Children of Men, is set only 15 years from now at date presumably too close to comfort for modern audiences but Alfonso Cuarón’s movie based on the 1993 novel, and set in an all too tenable 2027, paints a haunting picture of distopic post-2012 London, there are sandbags on Regent Street, armed check-points at Whitechapel, bombings as frequent and expected as radio failures on the Northern Line.
2008 has seen the birth of the last human being on earth - men and women worldwide are rendered infertile. Globally we see, that robbed of the ability to reproduce, humanity has lost faith in itself. In the absence of perpetuity, hopelessness reigns. A world without a chance of new life; without the possibility of a future has nothing to live for, no exception to prove its rule, no tomorrow to look towards and anarchy has set in. Faced ultimately with the extinction of the human race, abject finality and singular introversion have bred fear, prejudice, and hatred.

Read more »

with a new Sparklehorse album so near to dropping i can hear it’s glitchy braying on the wind, not to mention a vaunted sparklehorse/dangermouse album, cut from Static King’s edit suite floor (oh yes peoples it’ll be called Dangerhorse… or Sparklemouse, either way I’d watch that animation) and nina persson never far from my mind when i’m trying to look lovely and winsome - my daily bread is from back in 2001 when nina and mark linkous (who is sparklehorse) hooked up for the eponymous a camp album.

Sure, its a little sugary, a little scandi, a little country and a little melancholy too but i’m super digging it today.

let it wash over you like a good quality bath oil.

A Camp - I Can Buy You

Forget mini-rants about female emcees here is the sorority story of the week.
In an unrelated thread Kleenex reported a massive surge in Columbian sales last week…

You know it’s not really about super flashy new technlogy (well…maybe just a bit).
It’s more about clever new ideas (disruptive ideas even) that get me excited (that and awesome looking comic film adaptations).

Anyway here’s three incredibly simple and yet wonderful exciting geek things that have floated my boat over the last couple of days (and I shall be almost certainly buying all three).

Moo

it uses flickr, it looks cool and I need some business cards (that look better than my housemates*) and it’s british!!!

Neuros OSD
Looks cool, does loads of useful recording tv/transfering to ipod sort of gubbins, is open source so is going to be constantly upgraded by our uber-geek overlords. (how rubbish does iTV look now** ?)

FON
Wireless router $5 with added social wifi love.
It’s like living in the future (only closer).
*just because he doesn’t know it’s a competition doesn’t mean it isn’t. (it just means I have a better chance of winning)
**but I still want one