Oi, Women...

...stop thinking yer unattractive without make-up. Seriously. It's stoopid.

This Is Fucking Awesome.

They are Foot Village and they rule.

You've Bored Me So Long.

In between my lesson which made me feel like a stupid dunce and my tutorial which made me feel like an inferior child, I had 3 hours to kill and so went to the Phoenix to see 'I've Loved You So Long'.

'I've Loved You So Long' is a French film that stars Kristin Scott Thomas and some actors I don't recognise, directed by Phillipe Claudel. I also hadn't heard of him, but a trip to IMDB tells me that this is his first film.

This film has had rave reviews, and with such a convenient time to be showing just down the road from where I was with 3 hours to kill, why the fuck not, eh? The film centers around Juliette(KST), a woman who's returned to France to live with her sister after being released from prison in the U.K. (I can't remember now if this is actually said or merely implied.) It's about her path to regaining her life, and the impact this has on her & the family she is staying with.

I can see why this film has had good reviews. Kristin Scott Thomas is excellent in the lead role, and the rest of the cast are very good too. It deals with the issues of social stigma and rehabilitation in quite a frank and honest manner. And it all looks very nice (and for most of the film Kristin Scott Thomas looks pretty hot).

But there's just something about the film that makes it pretty boring. The whole "Ooooh, I wonder what she's done?" aspect feels like it's drawn out too long considering it's pretty obvious quite early on what she was imprisoned for. The whole "But why did she do it?" angle feels like it's been written in purely because this film for the most part doesn't ever seem to be going anywhere, certainly not towards anything like a natural conclusion, and they needed some sort of payoff. It's as if the film writer/makers really wanted to study the main themes of the film, but had no idea how to actually do it. What this has resulted in is a film that for the most part either says the same thing over & over again in slightly different ways, or seems to say nothing at all.

But hey, it's French right? That means that the critics will cream themselves over the overlong scenes, the downbeat tone, the amusing asides and the whole damn Frenchness of it regardless of it's actual content, or lack of.

For me this film was a big let down. There is a REALLY good idea here, but for my money (£4.50! Being a member of the Phoenix rules! When was the last time you paid under a fiver to go to the cinema?!) it's handled pretty badly.

Sun 5th October 2008. Friendly Fires at the Zodiac.

Going to a trendy gig at this time of year gives you a unique opportunity to check out what the freshers are like this year. So how are they? Young. They look like children who've sneaked out of boarding school. And they don't seem to know how to dance. While Friendly Fires were playing, they seemed content to merely sway along out of time for the most part. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The support was a duo called Jape. These 2 guys play guitars and occasional synth over a backing track of drums and synth. If that sounds interesting, for the most part it wasn't. It was pretty pedestrian. It actually sounded a bit like someone was playing the Friendly Fires album too slowly. And the guy can't write lyrics for shit. I swear at one point the guy sang a lyric about "a brick made of mist" and how while it wasn't physically possible, it was still something you could imagine, in your mind... Yeah, well done mate. I can imagine juggling 5 dragons while whipping up a cake with my bare feet in my mind... Doesn't mean jack shit tho, you poncey little tosser. I mean, I'm all for quirky lyrics, don't get me wrong, but there is a big difference between a genuinely imaginative turn of phrase, and some lame 'wacky' non-observation. All the songs sounded the same, all the songs were played at the same pace of a bit slow and all the songs had the same sound of a bit 'baggy'. All apart from one. As the third from last song they played segued into their penultimate song, they put down their guitars and hunched over their synths. Then they suddenly out of nowhere started playing this full on, out and out electro house track, which was TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME!! WHERE THE FUCK DID THAT COME FROM?! ALL IS FORGIVEN!! Then after this 4 or 5 minutes of fleeting genius, they made the stupid mistake of picking up their guitars again. NO!!! YOU BLOODY BASTARDS!! How DARE you go back to peddling that pedestrian indie crap on us when you have shown your true power! Stop trying to pick up chicks with your pussy rock and BRING BACK THE DANCE!! Seriously, if Jape hung up their guitars for good, and pursued the house route, they could be so fucking good. Please Jape, we need another dance act to get passionate about. Orbital split, Underworld are a bit too happy living on the outside of everything and the Chemical Brothers went shit YEARS ago. We NEED another great dance band! Please Jape, please be that band. Pleeeeeease?

In the break between bands, I made the mistake of going to the bar. Yes, the barstaff at this place are just as shit as they always have been. You'ld have thought that what with it being over a year now since Carling redid this place they would have managed to get some people who actually know how to work behind a bar by now, but no. A year on and they still hire brain dead staff. Little dimwits, pottering around like Teletubbies who became disenchanted with the world without ever actually growing up. I mean, I'm pretty certain the old Zodiac was never like this. Maybe I wouldn't be so dismissive of them if a) my JD & Coke hadn't cost £3.50, and b) the escaped post-op lobotomy patient who was working the bar this particular night hadn't served, and I'm not exaggerating this, 6 people who came to the bar after me. It's not like I was in an awkward position or anything, I was directly infront of where she was doing most of her 'work'. She saw me several times. She is clearly just a total imbecile.

Rather novel this, but Friendly Fires might just be the only headline act who I've ever seen actually come on stage to start at the time they're listed as starting. Right on the button of 9.30, they stroll on stage, and treat us to a fucking superb set. Their set basically consisted of the album, in a different order, and their ace cover of the classic Frankie Knuckles track "Your Love", which they played 2nd and made me smile because I thought maybe they didn't play that anymore.
Now, I'm used to seeing Friendly Fires at The Cellar. At an ARF? night. Crammed, cramped and hot & sweaty with people dancing themselves to near exhaustion as FF play their brand of incessant dance rock. This was different. Upstairs at The Zodiac, tall room, air conditioned, stage at least twice the size, playing to an audience who mostly seem to be made up of newly Oxford located freshers, who don't seem very sure of themselves and are trying too hard to impress everyone around them. Which is silly. They should've just let that shit go and fucking danced, coz Friendly Fires were on form. Although having said that, I can't think of a time I've seen them when they haven't been excellent. I was well excited when I found out they had a album coming out. And it didn't disappoint. A short sharp burst of attitude and energy, they got all the critics doing a little bit of dribble. 'Where the hell did these guys come from? They weren't on any of our watchlists!' (apart from NME, who at the beginning of the year held them out as 'Ones to watch', but don't let that put you off.) That's pretty much what you get seeing them live too. The energy they put into their set really comes through. The guitarist almost constantly looks like he's on the verge of totally spazzing out, the singer cannot stand still for one moment, the drummer's too busy playing frantic loops to have anything like a short breather and the bassist/extra percussionist is switching, chopping and changing partly laying the foundations, partly trying to keep up with everything. It's frantic and it's bloody exciting. 'Jump In The Pool' in particular gets the collective pulse racing, and causes a near riot of applause when it finishes. 'Paris' winds everything down with that Field sampling bliss of an outro that seems to bring the set to a natural wound down close, before they announce there's one more. 'Ex Lover', complete with Friendly Fires equivalent of a wig-out at the end. That being an all percussion stage party, but with nothing so cheesy as an audience invasion. All of which brings things to a perfect close, which can only mean one thing. It's time for the tedious 'get the crowd riled up and roaring for an encore'. Sure enough the crowd get a bit rowdy and chanty, wanting more, but then the house lights come up! Music from the stereo plays! There's no encore! YES!
I FUCKING LOVE YOU FRIENDLY FIRES!!!

(and I bet you get loads more groupies than Jape. Y'hear that Jape? Give up the guitars. Embrace the dance side! You know it makes sense.)

The Clash.

Someone stuck The Clash on during my last week of full time work. Cool, I thought. I haven't listened to The Clash in ages. In fact, I bought 'London Calling' years ago and never got round to listening to it. It was dirt cheap and I figured it was one of those albums I'm just supposed to own, so I bought it. I've somehow only ever really heard the odd song here and there. The Clash just seemed to be one of those bands that just passed me by, so this was probably the first time I had ever properly heard them.

Good God, they're dull.

I've heard that they have some sort of cultural importance or something, something to do with being seminal because they're a punk band who used reggae tones and structures creating a cross cultural style of music. Important to their time they may have been, I don't know enough about them to say one way or another. What I do know is that listening to them today, they just sound dull. As tired as the myriad of 'Punk' bands that regularly infuse their music with ska and reggae. Personally, I think The Specials are the only band who have ever managed to pull this off. Maybe it's because they were a genuinely cross cultural band, so that sound came sort of naturally to them as a group.

Dammit! I wrote that lot earlier this afternoon and now I've completely forgotten what the rest of it was meant to be. Altogether now, Ooooooooooooold maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan Aaaaaaaaaaaaxxxxxlllllllllllllllllllllllllll....................

Musings Of An Aging Man.

Notice I said aging, as in 'I am getting older', not as in 'I am old'. None of this "Oh Axl, yer not old blah de blah" bull crap.

I recently got 'found' on Facebook by my younger half-brother Ben. I just had a look on his profile and virtually every comment on his wall ends with "Lol". Hey, he's 15 so it's allowed okay? It does however add to the list of things that make me feel criminally old.
It's the induction week for my course at Ruskin this week. Ruskin is a college that specialises in teaching people who haven't been in education for a while. Basically this means that for the last 2 days I have been sitting in rooms full of people who are for the most part older than me. You would think this would make me feel young, right? On the contrary, being in an older environment is making me feel old. I'm not young, nubile & sexy enough to hang out with the young people at other colleges/universities, oh no. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say anything bad about these people. They seem nice enough, and for a learning environment a bunch of mature adults are gonna be a hell of a lot easier to get along with than a load of kids who are just out of school, wet behind the ears, arrogant little wankpots. But it still makes me feel old.
I made the mistake of looking at Bebo earlier too. Somehow Bebo came up in conversation with someone the other day, and I realised I didn't really know what it was. I knew it was a social networking site, but that was it. I went on it just now, and fucking hell. It's like Facebook & MySpace made love, and had a baby, but it was a baby made of vomit. Seriously, looking at a Bebo profile is like looking at every MySpace and Facebook profile you've ever seen all at the same time. It's so cluttered that it hurts yer eyes to look at it. It's the kind of madness that only kids could make head or tail of. Everyone on Bebo seems to be 17, 18 or 19. Everyone's wall or whatever Bebo call walls are covered in smileys and hearts. Everyones photos are the most posed photos you've ever seen in yer life (My favourite of the ones I saw from the 4 profiles I looked at before my eyes started to boil was someone called Craig, or "Mashhead", who found it necessary for his profile photo to be him topless and flexing his muscles.). It has surveys called "Are you straight lez bi or loner?", "What kind of gang member are you?" and "Are you sexy, slutty or ugly?" It has something called "Sofia's Diary" which has the tagline "You think your life sucks? Watch mine...", so I did. Episode 130 to be precise (For someone who seems to hate their life, it seems odd that they have no problem broadcasting 130 episodes of it to the whole world.). What did I see? Sofia, a slightly attractive girl in her late teens mopes around her bedroom for a bit before going to meet her friends, before walking along the South Bank (yes, it's set in London) where she meets a boy she really fancies and goes all snogging on him. Wow. Your life is like soooooo hard. A brief look at Episode 127 reveals to me that she works for a magazine called "Wicked". Go away now Bebo please. Go away, re-brand yerself "ChavSpace" and have done with it.
I can't remember what else makes me feel old now. My memory seems to be getting worse as I get older. Hey, that's another thing that makes me feel old!

End Of An Era.

So, on Monday I am to become a student. I am being inducted into Ruskin adult college on their "Creative Writing & Critical Practice" course. Now I'll obviously have to don some sort of golfing gear, tie myself to a slag and go round pubs SHOUTING REALLY LOUDLY ABOUT HOW I WANT A HALF PINT OF LAGER AND IN 5 MINUTES WE'RE OFF TO THE NEXT PUB, ALRIGHT GUYS?!

This also means that after almost 7 years, I am no longer a full time employee of HMV. Which is fucking awesome. My last full time day was yesterday. I'm still gonna be doing weekends, y'know for the money and that.

What surprises me is how much I'm really not going to miss it at all. Working in a shop for the last 7 years has been like watching the slow deterioration of the human race happen before my very eyes. People actually are getting more stupid and more lazy. And more rude. A HELL of a lot more rude.

Hmmm... this may have to be finished at a later date, as I don't really seem to have a lot to say about the whole thing right now.

In summary then: I only work weekends now and from Monday I will be a student. Go me.

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas.

15th September 2008. Mr Axl & Lady 'Caela have decided to go to the cinema, but they can't decide what to see. Nothing at the Odeon really takes their fancy right at this moment in time. Lady 'Caela checks what's on at the Phoenix.


LC: "Do you fancy seeing 'The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas'?
MA: "What's that?"
LC: "It's a film about the Holocaust."
MA: Slightly dubious as he's not really sure he's in the mood for that. "Hmmm.... dunno."


They look at the Odeon board. The only thing Mr Axl wants to see is 'Man On Wire', but Lady 'Caela isn't in the mood for a documentary. Everything else they could see now kind of looks a bit lame.


LC: Deciding to try her luck. "What film magazine do you most trust?"
MA: "Empire. Why?"
LC: "We'll see what they give it."
MA: "Okay." Thinks to himself that if it's anything lower than 4 stars, we're in for a tricky few minutes.


Lady 'Caela looks up the review on her phone internet. There on the screen comes up the Empire header. Below it, 'The Boy With The Striped Pyjamas' has been awarded 4 stars.


MA: "Alright then, let's go."


I've always been a bit of a sucker for Empire. I don't know what it is, but they just seem to be really good. There is no music mag that is as good as Empire is a film mag. Not by a long shot. Which is a real fucking shame.


The last time I can remember seeing a film that I knew virtually nothing about beforehand (not counting random films on tele) was The Matrix. All I knew about that was that Keanu Reeves was in it, and there was fighting. All I knew about this was that it's about the holocaust.


I found out the next day that it's an adaptation of a children's book, which makes sense as it's basically a child's view of a part of the Second World War. Which has a double effect of a) adding an innocent naivety & humour to things, and b) heightening all emotional responses. When something is felt, you feel it that much more. This would be such an easy thing to overdo, but the film is extremely good at simply presenting itself, not trying to make you think one thing or another, and just letting you go along with the events and feelings of the film, leaving you to have a perfectly natural emotional response to what you are seeing. Nothing is forced out of you. Nazi's are not presented as pantomime villains, they are presented as real people, which makes their moments of 'evil' all the more effective.


The basic plot of the film is that a Nazi officer is promoted to oversee a Concentration Camp. His family moves out of Berlin for him to be closer to his work. While out playing, the officer's son finds the Camp which he has seen from his bedroom window. There on the other side of the border fence is another boy. The two become friends. The film centres around not only the two's friendship, but also the effect on the family of the move and the changes in their lives that come from his new job.


This film is incredibly moving. The contrast between how the situation is seen by the children and what we the audience already know in retrospect really affects how you feel towards this film. It's something that I'm sure the film-makers know and have done deliberately, but I'm not sure how. Like I said earlier, they never try to drill anything into you, you just feel what you feel naturally.

I'm not sure if I've made this clear or not, but I think this is a really good film. If it weren't for a certain 'Dark Knight' this would almost certainly be my film of the year so far. I urge you all to go and see it. Make sure you take some tissues tho.

If I were to do a 'Fudge' style rating, it would get 4.5 fudge sundaes out of 5

If You Only Ever Ate Soup...

...would you always have diarrhoea?

Winkstock '08

13th September saw Port Mahon & The Cellar hosting this year's Winkstock. I can't actually remember if I went to last years. I think I was going to, but missed it. Anyway, this year I went, albeit missing the first 4 acts.
The first band I saw were the superbly titles You're Smiling But We'll All Turn Into Demons, who sound exactly like The Heads. I love The Heads, and ...Demons are a band who do this sound really well too. "This sound" being scuzzy sounding garage psychedelia with a nod to the late 60's and early 70's space rock jams. It would be better if they hadn't broken their bass drum halfway thru their set, which is a shame because although they're still really good, it always sounds like there's a layer missing from then on.
Chops are next, and the headliners of the Port Mahon leg of Winkstock '08. Chops consist of 2 guy's who go a bit mental on synths, vocals, a guitar, a saxophone and strange boxes, backed by a ridiculously talented drummer. You get the impression that the drummer is the glue who holds these guys together, and that if he weren't there, the other 2 would just devolve into a primal mess of pure sound, trying to outdo each other in a noise fight for the position of alpha male and possession of the most attractive female in the vicinity. As it is, this is a joyously structured mess. I'm just not sure how much of the headache it was worth.
On to The Cellar then for the second leg. First up, Elapse-O. I hadn't seen Elaspe-O for a while and was really looking forward to this. Shame they were so shit. YEAH RIGHT! They were fuckin' awesome! The last 2 songs of their set especially were amazing. If these guys don't get singed up to an indie in the next year then there is something seriously wrong. Come on, there's no point pretending anymore that people don't listen to this stuff. A niche market noise music may be, but that still means there's a market for it, and Elapse-O are probably one of the most exciting and original UK acts in this crazy old sub-genre.
Next up, Gentle Friendly, a keyboard & drums duo. I don't know what it was, but I just didn't like them. The whole thing just left me a bit cold and "whatever". And I can't shake the feeling that the drummer seems a lot better than he actually is because he's playing at about 400 beats per minute. The guy who plays bagpipes on Cornmarket Street in Oxford plays really quickly to try and cover up the fact that he's actually not very good and mistakes are less noticeable when they're at breakneck speed. It's probably unfair to level this accusation at the drummer from Gentle Friendly, because I couldn't actually hear any mistakes or slips being made, but then I did stop actively listening after the first couple of songs and went to join 'Caela and some mates off in an alcove for a chat and just let GF become background noise. I've focused on the drummer, because I can't really remember the keyboard player. I'm pretty sure his keyboard was white, and although I wasn't impressed with the sound that was coming from it, I couldn't actually tell you anything about that sound.
And so onto headliners Manatees. Manatees amps were stacked up to the ceiling. Manatees play slow, sludgy, loud metal in the vein of Isis. Manatees are really good. REALLY good. The pace never really picks up, so you get lulled into this hypnotic state, hanging on every decibel of the methodical chugging of atmospheric low-end intensity. These are no doom imitators we're dealing with, these guys have clearly meticulously studied doom, and worked out their place in it. Hence, they sound like Isis, but in no way sound like they're ripping off Isis. Or anyone else.

Why do I always seem to have more things to say about what I don't like than what I do?