Bolshy Spice

I'd like to tell you about the Daves I know...

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:11:16 GMT

If you're one of the Daves I know, this one's for you:

What the world needs now is another top 100 list...

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:06:57 GMT

Nicked from henry_the_cow :

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.

3) Underline the books you LOVE.

4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.

5) Reprint this list in your own LJ"

Hmmm, surprisingly there aren't any I would completely rule out reading, not even the dread Da Vinci code...

Type your cut contents here.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Lack of Doctor Who

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:28:43 GMT

Everyone's talking about Doctor Who and I haven't seen the last two episodes yet because the Virgin Catch up TV thing hasn't been working in Edinburgh for the last week.

[hands over ears] LA LA LA CANT HEAR YOU LA LA LA!

There's always the beeb website I suppose. I prefer watching telly on a telly though. Yeah yeah, call me old fashioned.

Where I hang

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:45:37 GMT

I'm spending more time these days writing up the films I watch in blog form.

http://isthisvalid.blogspot.com

I'm finding it a good way to remember what exactly I've watched. It'll be fun when people start commenting about how wrong I am about everything.

Beware: Royal Mail are c*nts, part 399,384,947,823

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 13:38:41 GMT

The US dollar/Pound Sterling exchange rate is incredibly sweet right now, so I took advantage and bought a nice new handbag for $60, plus $17.20 shipping, which works out at less than £40.

It arrived today, but I had to pay £13.26 to Royal Mail to get them to hand it over.

Now - I expected to have to pay VAT, which I figured out would be just over a fiver. Fine. But I've also been charged the very mysterious Royal Mail International Clearance Fee of £8.

I called Royal Mail, and the girl in the call centre read something from her screen to the effect that from 3rd April 2007 this charge went up to £8 (PER ITEM!!!) and a bit of spin about how it covers administration costs and "speeds up delivery".

This has put me off ever buying goods from outside the EU ever again. Well, unless it's something really expensive, which would make it worthwhile, probably.

So much for globalisation and free trade.

Humph.

Angry Old Man

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 22:41:25 GMT

Why are old people so much better at doing anger these days than young people?

In Goya's greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
"suffering humanity"
They write upon the page in a
veritable rage
of adversity
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies
in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
bent statues bats wings and beaks
slippery gibbets cadavers and carnivorous cocks
and all the final hollering monsters
of the
"imagination of disaster"
they are so bloody real
it is as if they really still existed
And they do only the landscape is changed
They are still ranged along the roads
plagued by legionaries
false windmills and demented roosters
They are the same people
only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards
illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness

The scene shows fewer tumbrils
but more maimed citizens
in painted cars
and they have strange license plates
and engines
that devour America

a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Who's EIGHTY-EIGHT years old.

Triptych 2007

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 09:27:52 GMT

I've come out of my slumber briefly because of Triptych Festival issues. Issues I-VI follow:

I

If I can only see one band in the whole of the Triptych festival it will be the mighty Einsturzende Neubauten. I have waited my whole life to see them. Give me a shout if you too are going. They're playing Glasgow on Wednesday 25th of April.

II

Aside from that, I'm rather dissappointed by this year's line-up, mainly because nearly all the gigs I want to go to are in Glasgow. They seem to have majorly cut back on bands playing all three cities, which I thought was the whole point?! Prob not cost effective, especially as a lot of Edinburgh people travel to Glasgow for gigs, but personally I hate that fewer and fewer interesting gigs are happening in Edinburgh generally. Thumbs down to Triptych's organisers for exacerbating things.

III

I highly recommend checking out Les Georges Leningrad, who are a totally mental noisy Francophone Canadian band that defy any detailed discription. Let's just say I saw them at Dour a few years ago and I greatly enjoyed their music and stage antics. They're playing Glasgow on Thursday 26th. I won't actually be going though, as I've seen them before, and I can't countenance two trips to Glasgow in a row during the working week so I'm TAKING A STAND against the increasing leeching of all COOL away from Edinburgh to Glasgow.

IV

The mighty, mighty Electrelane are playing the Bongo Club on Sunday 29th. Hooray for coolness in Edinburgh. Electrelane are one of the best live bands I've seen in the last few years. However, minus points to Triptych for making them a support act to The Pastels. Rage.

V

The band I will take a chance on are Field Music. I've heard two of their songs, and they're rather too poppy for the tastes of some people, but I like them because they sound kind of like the Beatles, but the singer has a pompous shopping centre tannoy voice, which coupled with some quirky riffage and chord changes make them sound very proggy. Prog Beatle-esque. Hooray for prog. They're at the Bongo Club on Friday 27th.

VI

If I lived in Glasgow, I would go to see Terry Riley, and also that Free Noise gig that includes Evan Parker, Yellow Swans, etc. and get to see all those people I read about in Wire magazine. But I don't, so I won't. I'm taking a stand, right?

New Year's Resolutions

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 20:28:10 GMT

1. Listen to more music, especially new-ish obscure underground music.

1.5. Listen to less 6Music (a couple of good shows but way too much major label fake indy-schmindy dreck on it).

2. Make more music.

3. Write that filmscript that I had the idea for on October 28th 2006.

4. Go abroad at least once.

5. Get more freelance work.

6. Spend less time on the internet.

NB: #6 means I won't be spending much time on this LJ thing anymore, although I haven't the heart to delete it (yet). It's nothing personal, oh LJ friends. Basically I just spent 2 weeks in Dublin with only about 10 mins per day online to check email, with the result that I felt much more in tune with real life, and much happier.

So if I'm speaking to you, please don't assume I've been following your blog/LJ, because I probably won't have.

All hail meeting people face to face, talking on the telephone, the print medium, and fresh air!

Over and out.