Even worse than stealing your mail, blog stealing can occur without you ever knowing it! Go here to find out how to prevent this from happening to you. Thankfully today’s splogger was kind enough to leave me his calling card in the form of a link to my plagiarised blog. I probably shouldn’t be linking to it/generating more ad revenue but I felt the need to highlight such blatant robbery. I suppose I could be glad that it actually links to the original post but do I really want my name or blog being associated with that site? Eh no, no I do not. So I’ve spent the day trying to splog-proof my online presence, a task I wasn’t as prepared for as I thought I was. Suffice it to say I came upon several more unsavoury items in the process.
I’m now terrified of the Internet.
In other news, they’ve finally started counting our votes… almost a whole 48 hours later. Well done.
And finally, I feel I must share with you the intriguing combination – of Smashing Pumpkins, Cheap Trick, Fountains of Wayne and Hanson - that is Tinted Windows. Quite frankly, I don’t know what to think.
…I don’t know what they said because either I live in the constituency with the slowest counters in the country or they’ve gone and lost the ballot box. Either way I guess it’s looking good overall, though it’s a pity George-Lee-The-Celebritee has overshadowed proceedings slightly. Him and the rain. I have to admit I was actually quite glad to hear the rain this morning. That feeling wore off quickly. I blame the rain for my lack of blogging subjects. It’s the kind of weather that turns your mind into mush. Yeah, I’m a real wordsmith today.
One thing I will mention is ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix’, the wonderfully titled album from French musos Phoenix, which has provided the soundtrack for my week. Listen to ‘1901′ - you may have heard it already and not known what it was. A serious tune is what it is.
This life of unemployment was really getting to me yesterday so I was thankful for a bit of diversion today in the form of a visit to The Dead Zoo at Large. Not only is the Museum FREE (yay, access all areas for the unemployed!), it also makes a nice change from the usual shopping/eating/going to the cinema experience when town-based. I’ve seen the permanent exhibits in Collins Barracks a few times now so I was glad to see something new and of interest to me. Well I suppose ‘new’ isn’t really the right word when you’re talking about a load of fossils and a 200 year old deer. Anyway, the exhibition is definitely worth a look. Especially if you speak Latin, which I of course do… Joking (and latin name tags) aside, they have a good selection from the old collection in there, all the best bits really. You’ve got your birds, your badgers, your insects, your fish, your panda, your Spoticus and, of course, your dinosaur thrown in for good measure. Great to see my old friend the zebra in there as well, sans bubble wrap and mop these days. I should probably mention that I’m referring to a photograph of said zebra from ‘Dignified Kings Play Chess on Fine Green Silk’ by Karl Grimes but of course you already knew that. Karl photographed the contents of the (closed) Natural History Museum during his artist-in-residence term there and some of these photographs have actually been incorporated into the Collins Barracks exhibition (on the left, opposite the zebra as you enter), which was nice to see. I really enjoyed his exhibitions at the National Museum and the Gallery of Photography last year (or the year before last!? He was a lecturer of mine in DCU at the time so I dread to think of the exact date…). It led me to wondering if those photographs of the Natural History Museum would be the last we’d see of that interior for a very long time. Restoring the Merrion St. Museum is obviously a major project but, this being Ireland and all, I imagine 2011 will have come and gone long before it opens it’s doors again. I hope I’m wrong, especially after visiting it’s New York counterpart recently. It would be great to have a place like that here, for educational purposes if nothing else. I heard a girl in there today asking what a fossil was – kids should know what fossils are!!
Either way, the animals looked quite cosy in Collins Barracks and I can see them being resident there for quite a bit longer than their planned 6 months. Better than living in storage.
…well actually it comes 11 times a year in Ireland but lets not get technical. Not being one to partake in any sort of alcohol-fuelled mayhem, bank holidays tend to pass by without major consequence for me, which is why I’m pleased to report that I just had a fantastic weekend and not so pleased to report that I’m now suffering from the post-holiday blues. Galway was beautiful – the hotel, the beach, the weather, the boats! On top of all that, Final Fantasy was the best he’s been in a long time.
I’d been to the Final Fantasy gig in Whelans on Friday night and while he seemed as delighted as ever to be playing here, I found the show somewhat lacking. The venue felt overpacked, the set kept within the hour and the Dublin crowd their usual loud and talkative selves. The latter was particularly evident during Castlemusic, the (unexpected) second support act, which was a shame because, as it turns out, she has some very interesting (and quiet!) songs. I discovered this the following night in the hushed silence of the Roisin Dubh, where Jennifer Castle was given a better opportunity to showcase her songs. Someone else who took advantage of this silence was surprise special guest Richie Egan, a.k.a. Jape, with an acoustic set – a nice departure from the heavy electronic stuff of late – and a lovely story about his knee popping out… By the time he’d finished, the night had already shaped up to be much better than the previous one and I’d probably have accepted any old set from Owen! I certainly wasn’t expecting an hour and a half of solid gold, not one but two encores and a rare performance of (he swore he’d never play it again!) Mariah Carey’s Fantasy. This alone would have been worth the trip to Galway so the fact that it was preceded by Bloc Party’s ‘This Modern Love’ and followed by ‘This is the Dream of Win and Regine’ made this the best Final Fantasy gig since those early days when everything he did seemed amazing! I’m now really looking forward to the new album, ‘Heartland’, and I imagine I’ll be waffling about it here when it’s (eventually) released. It was also great to see Steph and her overhead projector back, though her paper creations just didn’t seem as impressive as they were in those aforementioned early days. Maybe I’ve just gotten old…
…and then write one big post of all the things you’ve been meaning to blog about.
The other day I read somewhere that Facebook and Twitter were “killing blogging” (would this be the same way blogging supposedly killed newspapers or real life conversation or whatever else it’s meant to have killed?) and while this seems a little ridiculous, it does raise an interesting issue. With Twitter in particular – ‘micro-blogging’ I believe it’s called – people just fire off snapshots of their life like it’s their own personal Sky News – bringing you breaking news (or not news, as the case may be) as it happens!! Once you’ve given everyone a 160 word gig review while you’re still at the gig, a play by play of your trip to the shops (the highlight of your day) or a twitpic of your mangled leg after you’ve been run over by a bus, there can’t really be much left to blog about at the end of the day. Thankfully, then, I’m too busy paying attention to what’s going on around me to stop and tweet about it. That or the screen on my Nokia 5310 is just too damn small to figure out Twitter on the go. And since I don’t do out-and-about-tweeting, my Twitter profile consists mainly of inane comments and pointless exclamations from someone who’s been sitting in front of a computer screen for too long, all posted from the way too accessible little box in the bottom right corner of my browser. I doubt too many of my friends – sorry, followers - are very interested in a link to photos of the recently constructed fountain in Tuscany soon to be the setting for “OMG, the most important scene in New Moon”, and yet it’s up there, in all it’s tweetish glory. My point is, what with my apparent misuse of Twitter and all, that it appears I still have something left to talk about. And so, rather than a savage killing, today marks the birth of my blog!
And now down to business. Since the furthest I’ve been today is the shops, it may not come as a surprise to you that the thing that upset me most in the last 24 hours is learning (on the Internet, of course) that Florence and the Machine’s highly anticipated album may not be as worthy of that anticipation as one might have hoped. Having been completely drawn in by the sound of her voice (her being Florence, obviously) in the latest O2 Blue Room Ad, I took to playing on repeat the only existing live recording of ‘Cosmic Love’ on YouTube:
I was shocked to see that her debut album, ‘Lungs’, wasn’t due out until July because, given the obvious interest in the song from the ad, surely they’re missing out on what would otherwise remain an untapped fanbase. And while some great tracks like ‘Between two lungs’ and ‘Kiss with a Fist’ were available on her Myspace, ‘Cosmic Love’ wasn’t.
Then some new clips from the album appeared on MySpace and, much to my disappointment, it seems that Andrzej Lukowski of Drowned in Sound’s First Listen review was spot on. Never have I heard anything so heartbreakingly overproduced as the album version of ‘Cosmic Love’! It’s such a disappointment, whatever they were thinking!! I’m sure I’ll still get the album when it finally surfaces in July. At least the wait won’t seem as unbearable anymore.
One album that was worth the wait is Grizzly Bear’s ‘Veckatimest’. I’ll be honest, while I was a fan of ‘Yellow House’, I wasn’t exactly bursting with excitement about their next release. That is until I was blown away by their February show at the Howard Gilman Opera House with the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra. Mr. Caoil and I had come to see Final Fantasy, thinking Grizzly Bear was merely a pleasant aside. Upon seeing Mr.Pallett without his signature strings though, I knew it wasn’t going to be his finest hour and surely enough, he left it up to the home side to steal the show. With the fantastic new single ‘Two Weeks’, along with ‘Colorado’ - my favourite track off ‘Yellow House’ - and their haunting cover of ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)’, their set was a pleasure to witness from beginning to end and I’m delighted that this week’s release of Veckatimest gives me the excuse to talk (read brag) about it all over again!
I was planning on talking about the new Sigur Rós LP but as it turns out, I’m all about the Grizzly Bear today so before I go, while I’m on the subject, it’s Grizzly Bear week over at Drowned in Sound. This involves lots of input from the band, from their favourite Grizzly Bear covers to a recipe for Grizzly Bear Gumbo (!) but my favourite has to be Grizzly Mum: Wendy Rossen’s Indie Corner. Guitarist Daniel Rossen shares some of his mam’s “indie blog notes”, in which she takes motherly newspaper cutting to the next level!!
“She has branched out to general indie community research – browsing around Pitchfork and Gorilla Vs. Bear, staying up to watch our contemporaries on late night TV and reporting back with e-mails filled only with lists of sundry indie-community news and thoughts on various artists that may or may not have anything to do with GB.”
The woman makes some great observations, I really think she’d make it big in the music blog business! I’d certainly be an avid reader.
