a little plug for my favourite north london pub.

not least when the bar staff’ll custom your pint of guinness (yes, its a horse).
so when you’re next in Camden, be sure to drop into the lock tavern, eh?

as the daughter of an infant school teacher with a propensity for collecting old educational material this whole ladybird/janet & john aethestic is one i’m digging.

the link was sent from far, far away by our photographer friend in beijing (he’s just hooked us up with some stunning new pics that i might share soon) and its one of those friend of a friend shout outs.

the story’s a good old moral tale, its funded by the arts council and the music’s by howie b.

what’s not to like?

watch and learn.

MIT conducted a cool experiment earlier this year as part of the 2006 Venice Biennale.Called Real Time Rome, the project collected information from the city’s mobile phone users to create visualizations of the city as it worked and played. It shows the rhythms and patterns of city life as different neighbourhoods buzz into life at different times in the day, how massive events like a Madonna concert change and warp the dynamics of urban life. In the pic above the yellow line represent people on busses and trains, the red shows the density of people.

It made me wonder about how amazing it would be if you could take this further; collating loads of information about each user, so you could see how different communities used the city differently, or by having a live emoticon button on the phone so you could see when the city was happy or angry or joyous or expectant.

Maybe we would collectively sense danger and people would learn how to interpret these incredible patterns and be able to read the city as it went about it’s daily life.

I wonder if we would start to see the city (and ourselves within the city) differently, as part of a collective, complex whole rather than as individuals all doing our thing.

jez posted a version of this last week which inspired me to dig this out.
the 4hero mix (who’s new album is sounding dope btw.) of Terry Callier-Love theme from Spartacus

those of you schooled in the uk during the eighties will probably recognise that dog in the playground moment.

there are few things better. you’re about your usual business, in your usual haunt, nothing’s doing, when all of a sudden… an interloper; something totally incongruous which justifies complete abandonment of your usual responsibilities just to watch events unfold and subsequently to dissect the minuatae of watching mr wilson skin his knees while he chased a juvenile jack russell round the school field. its sort of like having a busty streaker during an inconsequential mid-table clash of two midland league one clubs.
luckily those sort of experiences aren’t relegated to my halcyon childhood days (nor do they require me to support Coventry City) as i got to work this morning we had a real live protest on our office roof - this time it wasn’t me whinging about how we’d run out of organic peanut butter.

some unspecified activists (its early doors at in this hotbed of political activity so i don’t know who they’re affiliated with) have chained themselves to the offices downstairs from HL’s daytime HQ and climbed on the roof to put a lovely banner. and that, my friends is enough watercooler fodder for the rest of the week in these parts. aces.

edit: turns out they’re from planestupid and i should probably take this opportunity to mention that not only do we here at horse latitudes have nothing to do with easyjet, we’re all for choosing the train over the plane and sometimes even the car for shorthaul journeys. yezzur, you know how we do.

in the spirit of politics here is my favourite protest song ever. not that its very protesty even. more about solidarity. either way, its a great track (and a second outing on hl for the honeycomb utterings of mr eddie kendricks). enjoy.

eddie kendricks - my people (hold on)

we here at horse latitudes have been hella busy in the outside world recently, for which we’re more than a wee bit sorry.

normal service will be resumed shortly.

in the meantime, enjoy this big fat dumpling of hand-claps in a soggy toilet disco spirituality

norman weeks - hold on (dixon edit)

I sometimes wonder if I actually prefer looking book covers and imagining how great the book is, to actually reading the thing at all.

I guess that makes me a wee bit shallow.

It’s the same with music, I quite often read a description of a track and it will sound so amazing in my head that it is almost not worth buying the damn thing cause I’ll just be disappointed.

I remember spending hours checking out the blue note covers books, imagining how dope the music was before I really got into jazz(and to be honest sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have just stopped there-stopped while it was all just wonderful promise)

I read somewhere that unrequited love is the purest kind of love, cause it never gets tainted with reality and therefore disappointment. It’s not. It’s just a twisted, imaginery thing which is played out in the mind of the unrequited, never becoming real. A shallow, narcassistic imitation of the truth, a bird that never leaves the nest and never gains the strength to fend for it’s self .

So I ended up perservering with jazz, bought loads of awful records and then after a while found some good ones.

Like this,

Max Roach-Effie*
(and the cover, just in case you’re wondering, is pretty average)
*thank you orgyinrhythm

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

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…

We took a trip to the finale of the Thames festival
last night and it was wonderful. A great mix of cultures including a
virulent resurgence of some old school moves from the superhip The London Swing Dance Society.
Loads of theatre and good food etc. The carnival was cool (horrendously
offkey MC aside) but we were really there for the fireworks.

Fireworks are amazing.

They are amazing because you can only experience them in the moment. You don’t have time to analyse anything, you’re too busy trying to absorb all this fantastic candy. The best way to enjoy fireworks is just to turn your brain off and let the spectacle wash over you.
And beneath the visual wonder there is a reminder. A reminder of how rarely we can see past the worries and regrets that seem to monopolise our thoughts and actually live in the moment. A moment that, more often than not, is in itself worthy of celebration.