It really is bobbins, isn’t it? Ten minutes from first start-up to getting to a Desktop, Internet Explorer doing odd things with downloads, the whole thing shuddering to a halt when I plugged in a USB mouse…
EDIT…and then it through up a UAC dialog to change the name of an icon. Now, I can rationalise why it did that, but my goodness, the UAC implementation is annoying. I will run right back into the arms of my Mac, thank you very much...Sorry, got a little busy this past week. And four weeks from now, I’ll be packing my bags somewhere in Dublin in preparation to get to Prague. Can’t quite get my head around that right now.
My love for The Style Council is deep and embarrassing. Just the thing to kick off the new week, I think…Now we’re exactly like the Major Government, down to the Unionists holding sway. Oh, happy days. New Labour: why don’t you just die?
Benefits of a classical education.
Edible green dust, 600g of white chocolate, peppermint extract, and an iSi whipper:
Meanwhile, this Johnny Foreigner album is pretty good, isn’t it?
So that’s where the costumes from the True Faith video ended up!
There’s something about staring at a sea of white space that is just…terrifying.
A VOICE, OFF-SCREEN: Muahahahaha. Ha.And so, I finally finished Paul Morley’s Joy Division: Piece By Piece. Mind you, I didn’t start it until last week (which makes my frantic hunt for it last November a little laughable). It’s the book he’s been destined to write ever since he crossed the path of Warsaw, and yet at the same time, it’s an evasion of that book, an abdication of his responsibility to fulfil the role Tony Wilson appointed to him, while at the same time fulfilling it. Typical Morley, in other words (the bleak humour of Wilson and him battling back and forth on the question of whether Wilson really did pull him in to see Ian Curtis’s dead body is one of the book’s many highlights).
It repeats itself, and yet every repetition, every article showing something from a slightly different angle, sometimes off by only a few sentences, reveal a bit more of the story. Morley flips between the past and the present, between evasions and truth, evasions and lies, evasions, evasions, and the look back in the mirror, apologising to Alan Eramus over and over. And then everybody dies. Wilson, of course, had the temerity to do it while the book was being written; Morley even initially thinks that he's managed to pull off another wonderful publicity stunt to showoff the release of Control, before the reality sets in. I love how the book repeats itself in miniature at this point; a series of obituaries follows; all written by Morley, all different, and yet all the same. How this fool of a man managed to drag Manchester into the 21st century seemingly by sheer force of his own personality, like he knew it was his destiny all along. You couldn't help but love and hate him equally, it seems. Sadly, I don't think Paul is ever going to write the book I want to read (not that I don't love everything of his I have, but I'm greedy). He talks a little about how he spent the 1980s trying to avoid Joy Division, to escape Manchester in the folds of New Pop and ZTT. I really want to hear this story, as the machinations of ZTT, Frankie and The Art of Noise are still somewhat shrouded (as, obviously, ZTT never had a Paul Morley quite like Factory had Paul Morley). And a collection of the Morley/Penman years? I would swoon. Get to it, somebody!It's like when everybody laughed in 24 Hour Party People when we lost money on every copy sold of Blue Monday because of the expensive sleeve. I thought, you bastards - that's my life, that is, that really happened!Bernard Sumner