2 January 2012
“What were the skies like when you were young?”
I think everyone hears a record in their youth which suddenly reveals a whole new world of possibilities. It could be a three minute punk song, where simplicity and lyrical fervour suddenly make the business of writing your own songs seem possible. Maybe hearing the Aphex Twin opened a world of atonal computer music, bedroom techno that saw no instuments at all. Or think of the kid coming home from yet another tedious trumpet lesson hearing the joyous release of Two Tone and looking in a whole new way at his instrument. more »
Pete Baran in FT • 3 Comments
28 December 2011
Unlike the rest of the internet, here at FT Towers we like to make our end-of-year list at the Actual End Of The Year! And we need YOUR help to do it!
Send your top 20 tracks of 2011 to poptimistspoll2010@gmail.com* by 1am GMT on 30th December and we will post the results during the first week of January.
- ‘Tracks of 2011′ can mean something released as a single or on an album this year, or a track that emerged this year on the internet or a young person’s trendy mixtape, or singles taken from a 2010 album released this year. To be honest I will be pretty lenient about the whole business so put whatever you like.
- The order of your top 20 is important! Your #1 will be allocated more points than #20.
- If you can’t think of 20 songs then 10 or 14 or 2 is just fine.
- As per last year we are running this poll in conjunction with the Poptimists LJ community, so if you’ve already sent me your 2011 list over there, there’s no need to do so again.
That’s it! Get voting!
*Yes yes I know it’s last year’s email address. A big ‘whatevs’ to you too :)
katstevens in FT • 7 Comments
Charlemagne Palestine – Four Manifestations on Six Elements
1.
Charlemagne Palestine approaches a piano like a climber approaches a mountain. He does not play the instrument so much as he lets it test him: he starts each performance like an ascent, knowing that somewhere ahead there are the limits of the piano, and also the limits of him. It is entirely possible that he will reach neither, or both – when I saw him play in 1998 he finished the piece exhausted and the piano finished the piece with two of its strings at the lower end broken from the relentless pounding waves of music Palestine had forced from it.
We heard the strings go, a sudden cracking sound after maybe fifty minutes of the music building. more »
Tom • FT •
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Introduction, by Alex Thomson
In many ways Adorno exemplifies the image problem faced by critical theory today. Adorno is not a sexy figure. He comes over in his writing as severe, curmudgeonly and patrician. His prose is deliberately and unrepentantly dense and complex. His philosophical and cultural reference points are out of tune with contemporary fashions.
Nowhere has Adorno’s reputation taken such a beating as in the field of popular culture. In the 1970s a generation of tight-trousered academic pioneers in the uncharted waters of cultural studies took their turns to ridicule Adorno for his supposed pessimism and elitism. Later, Adorno played the fall-guy in the postmodernism wars of the 1980s and 1990s. more »
byebyepride • FT •
9 Comments
“[John Thelwall] also had the misfortune to be a mediocre poet — a crime which, although it is committed around us every day — historians and critics cannot forgive.” —E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class*
It was called The Battle of Waterloo, and it was one of the plays offered by J. K. Green’s Juvenile Drama: in other words as sheets of figures to cut out, colour and deploy, on little slides, in a miniature proscenium theatre you’d built yourself, from paper or card on a wooden frame.
A miniature proscenium theatre like this features as a prop in the classic 70s version of The Railway Children — one of them is bedridden, the others put on a show for her, and the show is Waterloo.** It also features in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous 1884 essay ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’ more »
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør • FT/The Brown Wedge •
15 Comments
Tarkus vs The Strokes
Al_Ewing • FT •
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I don’t think much of the idea of ‘guilty pleasures’ but there’s guilt and there’s guilt, isn’t there? There’s guilt for something you might be doing wrong – breaking some invisible law of taste, maybe – and that guilt you can and should kick aside. But then there’s guilt for the things you have done, and that’s what I felt when I listened to Carter USM.
The USM stands for Unstoppable Sex Machine, and like everything else about them it seemed like a good idea at the time. Which was 1989 to sometime in the mid-90s – they lost their major label deal and faded from sight; they’d faded from fashion long before. But for a while they were kings – a No.1 album and Top 10 singles when ‘indie bands’ didn’t routinely achieve such things, in the music press all the time, et cetera. In their pomp they were as big as The Smiths ever were, I’d guess. They had a high profile for so long that their profile now they’re uncool is absolutely flat – they don’t even get referenced by mags who want to wink knowingly at their readers and say, hey, even we get it wrong sometimes, because with Carter the NME and other zines got it ‘wrong’ continually, for years. more »
Tom • FT •
61 Comments
24 December 2011
An online shop only describable as ‘prepared for a nuclear winter’ has left us with a severe surplus of meat products. Rather fuzzy headed this morning, it seemed to me an excellent time for a bacon sandwich. Other Half didn’t get downstairs in time to intervene in my more experimental cooking tendencies, however, leading to me deciding that just yr regular meat and bread wasn’t sufficient for this level of fine dining.
Fortunately it turned out to be an excellent breakfast, so if you’re feeling the worse for the season tomorrow and the mere idea of what follows doesn’t make you boak perhaps it is a thing you would like to put in your mouth.
more »
Hazel in FT • 7 Comments
(Soz for the late posting, yr correspondent has completed a GRUELLING 25-HOUR JOURNEY across many time zones including correspondent’s British spouse being detained by US Homeland Security for 2.5 hours of fun! But all HOME SAFE now albeit in an awkward timezone for posting.)
Again the mother of the household is frying latkes in the first scene (we’re 3 for 4 here), again there is an interfaith family (4 for 4), again there is a stilted explanatory “What is the story of Hanukkah?” scene (3 for 4) and holy crap is that Ray Charles? Holy fuck what is Ray Charles doing in this! Oh man! This is already the best Hanukkah ever!
more »
Kerry in FT • 1 Comment
22 December 2011
Hey, it’s tiny Shia LaBeouf! It’s the day before Hanukkah, and he is searching the house for hidden presents, a materialistic narrative all children, Jewish or goyish, can relate to.
Downstairs, Mama LaBeouf is frying too-perfect latkes while the rest of the family hovers hungrily (but not actually helpfully). “You know what Mom, you haven’t told us the Hanukkah story since we were little kids,” a brunette teenager prompts.
“Well,” she begins. “Your ancestors – from my side of the family,” and it’s INTERFAITHSPOSITION AWAY as we find this is yet another Hanukkah being celebrated by a mixed family. I have nothing against interfaith familes – indeed, I’m part of one – but SERIOUSLY do no Jews marry Jews in TV land? more »
Kerry in FT • No Comments
21 December 2011
Is it though? IS IT?!
NB I have never seen an episode of The OC before and watched this while (a) drunk and (b) packing. So I may have missed some subtleties, but actually looking back I don’t think so.
more »
Kerry in FT • No Comments
I am not in the business of wishing Christmas away already, but there is one festive highlight which is still not done to death by the BBC, namely the annual festive pub crawl. Between Christmas and New Year the thoughts go to drinking, and what is now the Eleventh Annual Between Christmas and New Year Pub Crawl. And after last years frankly tiny journey around the City, we thought we would have a bit more of a challenge. So the longest physical walk of any of our pub crawls Stretching from Angel to Shoreditch, up and down the City Road, and yes, in and out of the Eagle. And this is what it looks like (click through for a bigger version).
You can see the shape up there and it almost completely mirrors the movements of the FTSE share index this year.
more »
Pete Baran in Pumpkin Publog • 10 Comments
20 December 2011
Chag sameach! And so long to advent calendars and welcome to EIGHT FT NIGHTS of Hanukkah TV specials. Although your correspondent doubted eight Hanukkah-related TV episodes or specials existed in the whole of pop culture, having dredged the depths of 1980s cartoons and 1990s sitcoms it turns out there are at least TEN! But we’re not going to do ten.
Nickelodeon classic cartoon Rugrats features an interfaith Jewish-Christian family and more holiday specials than you can shake a baby at. The episode titled “Chanukah” features adventure, drama, triumph, grown-up Hebrew jokes and two bad puns around “Maccabee”:
The other one, for the record, is “To be or Maccabee”.
more »
Kerry in FT • 6 Comments
19 December 2011
‘Dr De Bie, senior lecturer in artificial intelligence, said: “Musical tastes evolve, which means our ‘hit potential equation’ needs to evolve as well. Indeed, we have found the hit potential of a song depends on the era. This may be due to the varying dominant music style, culture and environment.”‘
(Note link also includes MATHEMATICAL FORMULA FOR POP SUCCESS, and other reliable christmas cracker filling material…)
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT • No Comments
11 December 2011
As is tradition, at least two of the FT advent calendar doors must be opened late – this just means double the chocolate for everyone! And the excuse to dress up in POSH FROCKS:
more »
katstevens in FT • 3 Comments
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