Sound bytes

Finisterre
I know this is a hundred years old (released 2002) but the film, originally conceived from individual short pieces to accompany the Saint Etienne album of the same name, just came through the post on DVD and it is quite the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in ages. A montage of 24 hours in London filmed in nooks, crannies and jaw-dropping vistas all across the city soundtracked by the Finisterre album and punctuated with spoken interludes by various unseen Londoners on why they love/hate/idolise their great city. Magic. Get it.

Witnessed on Oxford Road:
Man wearing a camouflage army jacket with dark grey suit trousers, slip-on Vans in neon-pink and black checks, carrying a bag covered with a garish floral print like a roller blind from the 1970s. Huh?

Chris Jordan
Jaw-dropping photographs. The Abu-Ghraib montage and Hurricane Katrina images might be unsurpassable in terms of defining twenty-first century America. Any one of his images will amaze and frighten though.

From Manchester Lifestyle Hospital website:
“Cosmetic surgery procedures available: Breast augmentation, Breast reduction, Breast uplift … For further information visit www.baaps.co.uk”

Chalet Lines
Heart-breaking cover of my second-favourite Belle & Sebastian song. For some reason the very British references in this upsetting tale of sexual assault on a holiday camp are all the more moving in his sweet French voice.

Witnessed on Oxford Road:
Four scallies drinking in the street. Not surprising? It was Baileys. Huh?

MGMT remix
Unrecognisably filthy noise-mix of MGMT signature tune.

Pinned to my wall to encourage writing:

“Jack sweated so profusely while writing On The Road that he went through several T shirts a day … He started his book in early April 1951. By April 9 he had written thirty-four thousand words. By April 20, eighty-six thousand. On April 27, the book was finished, a roll of paper typed as a single-spaced paragraph 120 feet long.”
– Introduction to On The Road

“Once work gets a grip, depending on the work you do, it becomes the meaning of life for a while, as much an imperative as eating or sleeping. A career won’t be denied; it chomps away at your allotted twenty four hours and its hunger is satisfied only temporarily before the next urge, as sure as waves roll in from the sea … It has a life of its own.”
– Julian Clary, A Young Man’s Passage

“He had sold one painting during his lifetime. Three times was his work noticed in the press. But these are just details. The real Vincent Van Gogh is the man who has just done “five size 30 canvasses, olive trees”. To me, in context, one of the most moving and realistic descriptions of how a real artist thinks.”
– Alice Walker

Soundtrack:
Stereolab 'French Disko'. Never ever get tired of this, possible tune for October ... The Divine Comedy's cover of Ride's 'Vapour Trail'. I was expecting a pared-down chamber version of this track but they've kept the wall of swooshing guitars and brought the words forward and it's worked. Also a hundred years old I realise but, hey, I work. Am about to embark on a psychedelic trip around Britain in the 1960s, so John's Children, Floyd, Hendrix etc, I'm so bored of right now, right now.