Michel Gondry’s Rubiks Cube Feats are all well and good but surely nothing is as awesome as planning out the video for Star Guitar on squared paper and then roughing it out in the street using utensils, fruit, shoes and nails…
The original video itself remains funadamentally awesome and should be in all modern art galleries. Sez Me.
Tags: moving pictures, music
It’s a hard habit to break. Even tonight I came home, turned the telly on at 7PM and hopped to ITV 4. Alas, the tour is over now, but despite all the controversy I still enjoyed it. Cycling Weekly got it badly wrong when they called for the tour to stop early. Whilst it is clearly wrong that top line cyclists like Alexandr Vinokourov, Michael Rasmusen and Iban Mayo doped to improve their form it is far more important that this is the first year I’ve known in which favourites were caught and dealt with promptly.
David Millar and his fellow majority of clean riders in the Peloton are rightly getting very angry at many of his fellow sportsmen who clearly are taking a long time to wake up. How far back the culture of doping goes is hard to guess. Tom Simpson certainly died whilst doping and tales of doping from that period on are all over the place. Sadly there’s little interest in the veterans in tarnishing their reputation and coming clean, especially when like Bjarne Riis they were running a team. However, slowly the truth is emerging and perhaps we’re looking at the end of a scandal that has lasted several generations. That’s not to say all successful riders doped , there’s clearly been a number of outstanding riders such as Lance Armstrong and Miguel Indurain who by skill and genetics were able to operate on a different level. That said we do know almost certainly that Bjarne Riis and Marco Pantani doped their way to a yellow jersey.
It will be very interesting to see what shape of tour ASO (the TDF’s organisers) pick to run with when they announce in October. There’s talk of national teams, Millar’s moved to a new American team who appear to have a much stronger anti-doping regime than anyone else and also there’s a strong possibility of another stage to reach London in the coming years. However there are many issues to be resolved in cycling which essentially boil down to arguments between the organisers of the tour and the organisers of elite cycling over who has real power. If they can agree on entering national teams then a UK team is certainly on the cards in ‘09 if not ‘08. In the longer term a cleaner tour will only mean good things for the sport of cycling in the UK, as it will become only easier to enter our clean athletes and hope for success on a fair basis.
Roll on Tour ‘08
Tags: cycling
Yes, Bill Bailey is going to try and take part in Eurovision 2008 as the UK entry.
Meanwhile, the first Eurovision Dance Contest is coming up and all thanks to the UK. I fear it won’t be featuring morris dancing.
No, not the classic They Might Be Giants album.
It appears to be a bit wet out there, though I think The Evening Standard is being more alarmist than usual.
Right now many people are working around the clock to try and avoid losing a major national grid switching station to the waters and plunging several hundred thousands into darkness. Unfortunately it would appear that those who were involved in refurbishing it only last year were only too aware that it was built on a flood plain.
‘We will have eight out of 16 circuits transferred by October this year, which puts us bang on target to have the new switching station fully commissioned for the end of 2006. Transferring circuits calls for planned outages. This is timed to ensure that there is no supply disruption to Central Networks customers during the peak winter period. Also the position of the site on the river flood plain presents some challenges for working during winter. The switching station is on raised ground, and the building itself is on stilts, and in one period of heavy rain it became an island surrounded by flood water.’
Perhaps they’ll be raising those stilts before the winter.
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga by Spoon (nifty streaming thing for the whole album linked)
I’ve been tracking Spoon since I came accross them on both the Stranger Than Fiction and Veronica Mars soundtracks simultaneously. Aggressively nerdy rockers that they may be they are now past (and ever more present) masters of indie rock experimentation and geek rock. I’d strongly recommend you click through, especially for the my two absolute favourite songs You Got Yr Cherry Bomb and The Underdog which both have some lovely horn action. Somehow they’ve successfully melded their own funky indie on to a much more sixties production like ethic and in so doing they’ve made for me the ultimate successor album for all those of us who got addicted to Camera Obscura’s Let’s Get Out Of This Country. And if you don’t like then I can only quote some lyrics at you and scoff.
You got no fear of the underdog.
That’s why you will not survive.
It’s like a Scotland team anthem! It’s certainly my summer one thanks to the light and breezy production.
Also worth singling out for a mention, if rather haunting, is the track The Ghost Of You Lingers which has a very nifty unofficial video which is almost as good as the official one for The Underdog.
[other folk explaining this better at metacritic]
Tags: new music
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