Cynicism Has Had Its Day

A General disappointment with Charlie Brooker’s Yearly Roundup For somebody who highly values Charlie Brooker’s contributions to a post-millennial-television-palette in continual-deterioration (and as somebody who tunes into his television programmes with an unexamined ritualism you’d expect in well-trained church goers) I have slowly had to face the truth that his weekly and yearly Screenwipes haveContinue reading “Cynicism Has Had Its Day”

Black Mirror/Utopia/2013

“2013 is unfolding real horror-show-like” said the protagonist Alex, as he sat back in a bubble of styles and tastes, mixed, and mashed together from decades gone, too alcoholically inebriated to care that the here and now is almost unidentifiable  except for a general distinct lack of faith in everything” (Imagining the protagonist from AContinue reading “Black Mirror/Utopia/2013”

If One Noise Could Represent a Century…

(Note: my dark imagination got carried away here; it’s not really a blog that calls for optimism) Whenever I hear two particular sounds they  emotionally grip me so intensely, because they seem much more than sounds that embody a time; they sound as if all elements of an entire era were being smashed together atContinue reading “If One Noise Could Represent a Century…”

Thinking along the Hallam Line (Leeds, Wakefield, Barnsley, Meadowhall and Sheffield)

Leeds Along with the Engineering of Leeds (my 4th town) into a (relative) economic powerhouse, there seems to have followed an almost identi-kit pasting of all the traits usually found in the big financial centres like the City of London, yet in a much smaller area circling the railway station (after which it begins againContinue reading “Thinking along the Hallam Line (Leeds, Wakefield, Barnsley, Meadowhall and Sheffield)”

Long Stares That Never Reach Anywhere.

I am sat staring down a hillside, sat where I often sat when I worked here for 5 years, with my mp3, on shuffle function, playing out sounds from my last 10 years of accumulated music, staring as if looking for something in the manner in which I have so for as long as IContinue reading “Long Stares That Never Reach Anywhere.”

End of Year Haunting

Accompanying sound…. Ceremony – New Order Unite – Burial The Glorious Land – PJ Harvey One of These Days – Pink Floyd Born To End – Manic Street Preachers Dog Shelter – Burial 21st Century Schizoid Man – King Crimson Novelty (1st Transmission Session, Central Sound Studios July 1979)- Joy Division Temptation  – Heaven 17

Touching on the symbolic; visiting a place to try to help put a closure on a stage of my life

My recent move to London was much needed for disparate reasons, but more than any, because the course my life has taken during the past 10-12 years has served its time, and has run out of energy. As I say in the previous post, life is just a series of shimmies away from the pits/totalContinue reading “Touching on the symbolic; visiting a place to try to help put a closure on a stage of my life”

Daft Punk, Discovery: late dreams of a capitalist hyperreal utopia

About half a year ago I wrote about how two different albums by the band Primal Scream ‘are actually the same record, just flip-sides’ (or more like the contents of the first album had been brutally emptied out creating a nightmarish inversion that guided the second album). However, when it was written the first albumContinue reading “Daft Punk, Discovery: late dreams of a capitalist hyperreal utopia”