26 February 2004
The Tofu Hut: Formally at least this is the best MP3 blog I’ve seen – conversational tone, good readable design, lots of info and links on each track. Currently up are some very tasty-looking African tunes, soul rarities and a bit of bluegrass. Like all MP3 blogs they get removed after a limited period.
There’s quite the little network of these things springing up now, and I seem to have caught the wave just as it’s swelling – PopNose is linked by a fair few of them and has become (in 3 weeks or so) the second most popular page on the site, even without a front-page link. Not surprising really, I’m giving away free stuff after all. (Not that it’s mine to give away, you might say, but I don’t feel too bad about that – at 64 kbps mono the MP3s are unburnable on some programs and are of a low enough quality to really actually be for the fabled ‘evaluation purposes’.)
Plus it’s very refreshing and entertaining doing it – like making a mix CD but without the pressure to make it flow, you can just shove any old thing up and as long as you give fair warning nobody’s worse off. And it takes the (self-imposed) pressure to theorise/think/write off too, which is just what I need at the moment.
My only concern is the potential audience numbers – Fluxblog (the daddy!) is getting some ridiculous level of traffic, which might be bandwidth-crushing if replicated on the Nose. And as more new MP3 blogs start up, more people discover them, use their links lists and the virtuous circle continues to expand. Like any ‘web phenomenon’ it’s likely to be written about, too, but this time the thinkpiece in the Guardian / Voice / Whatever is to be feared, since what will happen is that Matt Perpetua will get a slap on the wrist and a nice A & R job offer and the rest of us will vanish overnight! Enjoy it while it lasts, is I suppose what I’m saying.
(Oh and one more thing – PopNose has VOTING now on tracks, an idea we flagrantly stole from the GABBA boyz, who were (what did I tell you?) mentioned in an aside in this month’s Observer Music Monthly!)
Tom in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
25 February 2004
Hunting on the web for information about St Trinians – in particular when exactly Ronald Searle originally began drawing his cartoons (because some of them appear behind the credits in a proto-Trinians movie, 1950′s The Happiest Days of Your Lives, w.Alistair Sim, Margaret Rutherford, Joyce Grenfell, Richard Wattis, which I’m just now watching) – I found this excellently named website. It has more on Searle, more on the films, and just more…
Best line from the film (or in fact any film): “The Infant Animal needs space, to breathe and blow!”
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in Do You See • 1 Comment
Snax part 3917: Curried Bean Toast
This is easier to make than the “curry in a hurry” recipe I posted yonks ago. You mix a can of baked beans in tomato sauce with a spoon raisins and a teaspoon of green curry. While you heat the beans, you toast two slices of bread spread with (olive) butter. Then you slap the bean mix between the slices and, PRESTO, you have dinnah!
Stevie Nixed in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
Two important facts about peanut brittle: 1.) It is easy to make great peanut brittle. 2) It is easy to make terrible peanut brittle.
To make the great stuff, boil together three cups of sugar, one cup of light corn syrup, and one-half cup water. USE A CANDY THERMOMETER. While it’s heating up, butter a one-half sheet pan. At 230 degrees F (soft ball), add three cups of raw peanuts and a generous pinch of salt, and stir the mixture constantly as it cooks. At 300F (hard crack), add three tablespoons of room-temperature butter and turn off the heat. Quickly stir in a generous tablespoon of vanilla extract, then three teaspoons of baking soda. When the soda is mixed in and the whole thing is a big foamy mass, quickly turn it out onto the buttered sheet pan and tilt the pan so the corners fill in. Let it cool, and all that’s left is the breaking up and the eating.
To make terrible peanut brittle, follow the above directions exactly during humid weather. The sugar crystals will seize all available water vapor right out of the air, and you’ll be left with a nasty product that is sticky to the touch, not entirely brittle, and guaranteed to get in your teeth and never go away. Make this during clear, cloudless days and you’ll have a great candy that will melt in your mouth after the first crunch with caramelly, roasty-peanutty, buttery goodness. The perfect sweet for chocolate-haters.
William in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
Exotic indelicacies #1: Super Piratos
The horse sausage was indeed fried and eaten, and very good it was too, though the meal’s success relied on the addition of a small amount of super-zingy red chilli relish. As part of the transaction which saw me cooking horse sausage in a flat in Victoria, I was given a packet of SUPER PIRATOS: little black discs of ‘lakrids’, which I assume means liquorice. If only my translating skills had lingered long enough for me to ponder the meaning of another word featuring prominently on the packet: saltlikrids…
Now I like trying unfamiliar foods from strange lands. Don’t we all? And we all love pirates, right? Right. So how could a packet of Danish Haribo products which look like Pontefract cakes be wrong? They’re called SUPER PIRATOS! They have a picture of a pirate on the front! And the pirate’s parrot is saying ‘EN GO’ ST’RK LAKRIDS TIL ALLE LAKRIDS-ELSKERE’, which I don’t understand, of course. It had never occurred to me that parrots could speak any language other than English.
It is my solemn duty to tell you: SUPER PIRATOS are the worst thing I have ever tasted. Sharper readers may have guessed that something labelled ‘saltlikrids’ may involve liquorice and salt, and they would be spot on. These little black doubloons are extraordinarily strong, acrid lumps of badness, all salty and sour. Imagine Mighty Imps pickled in brine and served up in 50p-sized lumps and you may be getting somewhere near. My eyes watered, the taste wouldn’t leave my poor mouth. I’m shuddering now just thinking about them.
Tim in Pumpkin Publog • 11 Comments
more updating
The rabbit has been cooked now – he/she got fried and then casseroled in cider, along with lots of carrots and some fennel, onion and red pepper – num num. Fiddly to eat though, the main meat of a rabbit seems to be a barrel of meat right under the rib cage, a chicken like texture but a meatier taste. The juices though – oh my they were great, so savoury.
I understand the horse sausage was like a mild pepperoni, ie it had less of a kick…arf!
chris in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
Some people might say that I deserved exactly what I got when I decided to go and see an Argentinian Lesbian Road Movie. And for the first forty five minutes of Suddenly, I would have to agree with them. Despite the pleasingly grainy black and white footage, it consisted of two millitant lesbians (so millitant they denied being lesbians) propositioning and then kidnapping a lingerie store saleswoman at knifepoint. Casual pointless voilence, and meaningless eliptical converations were the order of the day as our Mao and Lenin (oh yes) hit the road in a stolen taxi. ie – it was pretty shit.
And then, we get to Lenin’s aunties house. Aunties don’t really fit in violent, radical feminist chic lesbian road movies, and it showed here. The film started to be come sweet. Relationships sprung up, floundred and some semblance of real social interactions flared up. It became interesting. And then it ended. Suddenly. The end is the point of the films name I suppose, but also robbed the film of its warmth, reminding you of the nonsensical opening yet again, where the revolution amounted to smoking in Burger King. I deserved what I got.
Pete Baran in Do You See • 1 Comment
Club Freaky Trigger is back on the 24th March. We haven’t got a flyer yet, it will be posted here in due course. The venue is the Chapel Bar in Islington, free entry, 4 hours of fine pop, etc etc. There are two especially good things about this Club FT though.
- it has a THEME! (Or a GIMMICK! you might say) The 24th March 2004 is also the 20th anniversary of the kids in The Breakfast Club doing detention. So the theme of Club FT is 80s vs 00s. DJs will be interpreting this however they want – in my case this is going to mean a track from the 80s next to its ‘equivalent’ from now. (Suggestions welcome of course.) It is also possible that some people will be wearing funny clothes.
- it’s the start of FT’s 5th Birthday celebrations, which will be bookended with 2 club nights (details of the second TBA) and will involve all sorts of online excitement. It’s also the day after my 31st birthday for what that’s worth.
See you there (I hope).
Tom in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
SEE ME FEEL ME BEACH BLANKET BINGO
Hey! Comic archives by Howard Cruse and Mark Martin! Ace!
Vic Fluro in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
24 February 2004
WHAT’S SO ESSENTIAL ABOUT… ESSENTIAL HOWARD THE DUCK?
Halfway through the book, when he misses an issue and submits a long freeform essay in its place, Gerber freely admits that the next-issue box is as great a mystery for him as it is for the rest of humanity. So far, so every other comic – but there’s something in ESSENTIAL HOWARD that screams it from day one, as the Duck bounces like a pinball from one ‘wacky’ foe to the next, all with something to half-say about the state of the Earth and American Society circa 19seventywhenever. Starting off as just another half-humourous oddity in Man-Thing, a comic crawling with them, something about the personality of the protagonist – i.e, the first recorded Marvel Hero to actually think and talk like a normal human being, if not act like one – obviously captured ‘the fans’ enough to give him a series, and then to prolong it.
Indeed, the best bits of this odd number are the bits where Howard doesn’t have to jump about fighting the villain-of-the-month or guest-starring with the hero-of-the-moment, but is free to wander around being himself. He gets about a page and a half per issue for this and spends it displaying an intelligence that is sorely missing in every other character in the book – and, I suspect, in the entirity of late-70′s comics up to Daredevil or so. He hogs personality like bad webcomic characters hog blankets – his Dr Who-like companions are left with little to go on save an ‘artistic’ temperament, an unfunny speech defect or, in long-running foil Bev’s case, a vaguely confused 1970′s attitude to what makes a ‘healthy’ sexuality. Essentially, her thing is she’s fucking a waterfowl – for the rest, you might as well flip to any page in a Luke Reinhart novel. (On a side note, surely the most overrated and egomaniacal author ever to walk the planet.)
At this time, though, this would have been completely revolutionary – an attempt to bring the vaguely anarchic spirit of the undergrounds, packaged and Marvelised and then made as unsafe again as possible by the buzzing, questing Gerber, to be brought to newsstands frequented by college students struggling to justify their taste for the illiterate. Despite the somewhat dated elements, it’s schizophrenic, electrifying stuff which makes a lot of today’s comics look sick.
Best scene would be when, in the course of some adventure or other, Howard becomes a human being, and, for a blessed half-issue or so, we get a glimpse of something truly magnificent – the saga of a badly-dressed man who looks a lot like Chico Marx slouching about misanthropically, having adventures no more ‘super’ or less interesting than a real city could provide.
Too good to last, by the end of the issue he’s randomly become a duck again… and somehow, after that, the pages turn a little faster. The peak has been reached. So much for the seventies.
Vic Fluro in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
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