Bibio

Been loving these new tracks from low-fi ambient guitar picker Stephen Wilkinson along with the pretty if slightly stylized accompanying videos. Signed to Boards Of Canada's Mush imprint he shares their fascination with the fragments of memory left over from childhood, equally concerned with the textural elements of joy and sadness as opposed to the emotional ones. When listening to this I'm counting electricity pylons on an imaginary car journey, running my hands through virgin snow or greedily inhaling summer on my new bike. It also makes me wanna cry like an infant.

Go buy his stuff HERE

Animal Collective My Girls

This just gets better and better, like The Beach Boys performing in a wind tunnel with Tangerine Dream.

Red Riding - a good hiding?

Watching the bleak and somewhat brutal Red Riding (C4, 9pm) tonight made me think about the police force and how their dubious 'Hit first, ask questions later' approach might not be such a bad thing after all. Watching these simian-like plods slap Andrew Garfield around with glee was at once disturbing and sobering. I actually started to feel 'afraid' of the law for the first time in ages which was a refreshing experience. If your life is as sad and hopeless as mine then you may have caught Nightwatch with Steve Scott (ITV1, 12:30am) at some point and watched with despair at police trying to deal with drunken behaviour using logic, reasoning, empathy and respect. Witnessing this awful human miscommunication is as uncomfortable as meeting a distant relative at a wake and having to listen politely to their bigoted views about race and society because you don't want to cause a scene. Sometimes I want the police of old to pull up in a clapped out Ford Granada - like time cop messiahs - twatting pissheads and manhandling nonces whilst eating cream horns and drinking bitter from pint glasses with the handles still on them.
Even 'da kids' aren't scared of the police anymore, such is the state of their law-enforcing impotence.

I realise that all of the above makes me sound like Richard Littlejohn or something and that in actuality this mind spillage is mainly an attempt at loving the idea that 'baddies' get pummeled to within an inch of their life but under the proviso that I or any other innocent party would never be wrongfully fingered out as a 'baddie' and thus be subjected to the resultant pummeling.

Jimmy training with Jesus disco - Disco Dancer (1982)

Super sweet disco tuneage. This guy is coated in sweat from his disco activities. Absolutely coated.

Burj Dubai

Christ, this building is a pretty amazing structure. Burj Dubai is the world's tallest building standing at 2,620ft/801m and is in fact so tall that workers on the top tier can almost see the earth 'turning' which is somewhat astonishing. They'll be building a ladder to the moon next.

The Old Guys = impotence

Watching The Old Guys (BBC Sat 9.45pm) written by the talented writers of Peep Show (Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong) makes you feel like an old man trying desperately to arouse his diminished, wrinkled pecker in front of an old time-ravaged whore that once was beautiful. You hope to get excited by the intoxicating memories of how good she could be but she's lost her luster and is a mere shadow of her former self. So you end up merely talking about your depressing life clinging to her gin-soaked platitudes that spew out effortlessly between each smoke filled exhale. Consequently you end up back at home, sullen and slightly cheapened by the whole experience. At least that's I how felt.
You see the broad comedy requisite of the BBC has sucked the life out of the duo's writing and even though Katherine Parkinson gives a nice performance as Roger Lloyd Pack's long suffering daughter it's a bit like eating a turd and commenting that the bit of sweetcorn was quite pleasant.

Edward Woodward futureshock

Been watching The Equalizer recently and finding the memories to be somewhat bittersweet. The gritty urban tint to the show's cinematography (well for the 80's anyway, it's not Cassavetes or anything) still comes through but the ridiculousness of an aging British expat cornering drug pushers and dispatching street punks with an arthritic karate chop is hard to swallow with eyes soaked in the violence juice of the last two decades.

Still, the one thing that's still great is the title sequence which to my mind is one of the finest intros to a TV show ever made. It's laced with some wonderful urban images of trains raped by graffiti, darkened alleyways, late night subways, metaphorical scales of justice - often shot from strange angles - accompanied by Stewart Copeland's pounding drums and synths creating a beautiful sense of malevolence before a shadowy character standing in a car's headlights emerges as the 'answer' to all this.

I'd like to place this in a time capsule as a high point of TV art, all 0.59 seconds of it. There would be no note with it, just a VHS of this. But then maybe I need help.