ClaRK! Kent

I've been BYOP about 3 times now, and they really seem to be getting better all the time, what with them being so young and learning the trade and all. It's quite nice to watch. Jemina is, yes, a total hottie, and the rest of the band are all really nice people actually. We took them drinking, because they can't buy their own.

Blade Runner. Battle Royale. And anything bastardised from Aasimov (sp?) - ie: iRobot, and Bicentennial Man for the kids. Poor old Planet of the Apes, such a terrible remake. It was on channel 4 the other week, with the trailer claiming it was "from the imagination of Tim Burton." Yes, it was really imaginative how he nicked the concept and fucked it up.

Louis XIV rock the socks. They're fucking brilliant.

I hate people who get hyped up as "the next Bob Dylan" simply for having an acoustic guitar and/or an opinion. HE'S STILL ALIVE! HE'S STILL WRITING SONGS! HE'S STILL A HUNDRED TIMES BETTER THAN WILLY MASON! Grr. Even half of his 80's stuff is better than "Oxygen."

Okay. I have a lot of rage, as a lot of my friends are indie-fashionistas. Nice people as long as you don't talk about clothes/modern music with them, you know. Anyway, on that note... - Arctic Monkeys. Yes, you're from Sheffield. You said that already, on every single song. Move along. - Dirty Pretty Things/Babyshambles. The thing missing from the former is a songwriter like cocaine Doherty, the thing missing from the latter is somebody who can play guitar and lead a band like boring Barat. The outcome? Two thoroughly average bands. - The Zutons. If I want to hear a saxophone, I'll go to a jazz club thankyou very much. Do you have anything else to recommend you? You don't? Well fuck off then. - KT Tunstall. She has the face of somebody who used to be a lot fatter than she is now. Plus she can't play guitar for shit. - Panic! At the Disco. I think everybody's covered this pretty well. - Orson. You're fucking wank, you are. Shut up. - The Feeling. Hatred. Just utterly awful music, no talent whatsoever. - Art Brut. If you can't sing or play instruments, the least you could do would be to shut up. Don't use it as your band's gimmick. You're the reason that my friend's band, who have been professional for several years, can't get an album deal, you scenester fucks. - The Others. Their singer preaches about working class solidarity, but left a £30,000 a year advertising job to form the band. This is for the poor indeed. - Maroon 5. Fisher Price, my first rock'n'roll band. - Fall Out Boy. Oh, just piss off, will you? And don't cover Joy Division songs, you pricks. - Hard-Fi. Yes, we all know that it's hard being working class. I'm working class too, I don't write wanky songs about it. I write good songs about it, and I don't have a fucking record deal, so who's the real victim here? - Ryan Adams. Do fuck off now. Seriously, you're ginger and nobody likes you. GO AWAY. Good boy. No, don't come back. Don't release another album. No, just go. There. Die. I may add more if I think of them.

That's always my excuse.

I meant the Steve Martin version, luddite. Sellers is God, yes, this is a truism that doesn't need repeating.

Final Fantasy X-2. For the Leblanc massage game, if nothing else.

And the fact that it was roundly hyped as "the gay cowboy film" before it even came out. Do these people live in a bubble?! Geez.

They need a damn good homosexual whiplashing, if you ask me.

The movie has "no value to the Bahamian public" apparently. Really?! I'd say it's got a damn sight more value than half the shit that Hollywood turns out. How the fuck is it of less value than, say, The Ringer or The Pink Panther? Unless the Bahamian Film Board has banned them too, in which case I'll stand corrected. Doubt it though. It's sad, really, that a film that deals with homosexuality so tastefully and with artistic integrity, and portrays homosexuals as something other than the typical Hollywood "camp hairdresser/model" stereotype can cause all this controversy. It's not even remotely obscene.

I bet they'd amp up the bathing scenes to pull the punters in. "Are you ready for your... sponge bath, Mr. Leper?" "Are you?" "Oh, come here you loveable hunk of diseased man!" And so on and so forth.

Hear, hear. PHIL COLLINS FOR READING HEADLINER! Ahem. Aside from all of the Reading/Download bickering, let's just address the real festival issue this year - no Glastonbury = a wank year for festivals. Of course, that might be just because I live about 50 minutes from the place, so it's officially closer to my house than a lot of bog-standard gigs that I go and see. Indie-kids always buy up the first batch of tix quickly, I was on MSN last night and my friend Laura, who's still at school, was counting down to 7pm when they went on sale. I asked her how she was gonna afford the £100+, as I've developed a new appreciation of money since I'm over £500 overdrawn these days. She said "oh, I've got my dad's credit card." No doubt she'll be paying it back to him, probably in monthly installments until the festival, but that still blows. When I was living at home, if I'd asked my dad if I could use his credit card to jizz £150 up the wall on a festival pass, he'd have given me a thick ear and a lecture about the value of money. The hardest thing isn't being an indie-kid, it's liking the music indie-kids like but not coming from the super upper-middle class family that they all seem to come from. I couldn't even afford black nail polish and those weird suit-but-not-a-suit things they all wear! I was such an outcast at White Stripes gigs, I tell you. Mind you, if you really want to go the festival, last year I found out that you can buy tickets at the gate for a slashed price, no risk. They apparently keep a few hundred, maybe few thousand, back for that sort of thing, so if you can't afford it now, do that. You've thus got months to save and/or weigh up if the line-up is worth it.

Aside from the obvious NME-influenced line-up (what can we expect, really? It's primarily a festival for indie-kids, and NME is the indie-kid Bible) there are a few positive things on there. Belle & Sebastian should be great, Franz Ferdinand are always good at festivals if nothing else, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' new material sounds excellent and they're always good live, The Kooks and The Subways are both excellent young bands, and it's pretty much impossible for Muse to have a bad gig. That said, Arctic Monkeys, however much you like their music or not, will be instantly the worst act at that festival. Blah blah blah, they only have to sing 2 lines before the crowd takes over, blah blah whatever. Anytime when I have to stand in a room with even a few dozen music newspaper-fed morons convulsing over the thoroughly average band on stage is a bad time, doing it at Reading with thousands of the little teenage "indie Barbies" is gonna be the drizzling shits. I'm going this year, as all of my friends from home and most of my friends at Uni are. Most of my home-friends will be watching and orgasming over the Monkeys, I'd guess, so I suspect I'll be spending most of Sunday hiding in the Carling tent to escape from the hype.

I liked the ending to Angel, agreed. Life on Mars had a really good final episode, there was just the right balance of closure on the season/possibility for more hijinx later on. I liked the Firefly end, as an episode, not sure if it made a good 'finalé' though, 'cos obviously it got cancelled. My favourite "last episode ever" would have to be the end of Seinfeld though, agreed. Either that or Frasier.

Hmm... the other week I fell asleep with my iPod on shuffle, I awoke to the beginning bit of "Silverfuck" by Smashing Pumpkins, which isn't the best thing to be hearing at 5am after some heavy stoned dreams. It was quite freaky. Most of Patrick Wolf's second album can be quite scary if you just come across it, shuffled for instance, without expecting it. Except "Landsend", that couldn't scare a kitten. "Tales of Brave Ulysses" by Cream. Anything of off the Morrissey album Kill Uncle. Not that it's frightening, it's just scarily bad. Silly Moz.

I'd have to say "Shelter from the Storm" by Bob Dylan as the kind of girl-related one. It's not anything that really connects to a moment, but it does kinda relate to how I feel about my current girlfriend, so yeah. The song that was playing during my first kiss was "Fairytale of New York" by the Pogues, because it was in December and I was in Ireland, so it's sort of the law for it to be playing. Also going to have to say "Subterranean Homesick Blues" by Bob Dylan, as this is the song that got me into him at the age of about 8, and I've been one of those manic-obsessive fans ever since. So yeah, that also.

Agreed. Rules of Engagement and Meet the Parents are probably the worst movies in their particular genres for a long time. They deserve to be quickly forgotten, not put into some big quotes list.

They're definitely getting edgier. I didn't think Brian looked into it, Skumfrog. At the Colston Hall SMiLE show last year, which I saw live, he was way more into it, grinning and thanking everybody for having him and suchlike, he seemed very happy there. At Glasto he looked a bit... drained. Until Good Vibrations, like I said.

Music > Everything else in life, infidel. Seriously, imagine life without music. Now imagine life without a place like Glastonbury, one of the biggest love-ins ever. It's beautiful. The BBC coverage was all that kept me sane over the last few days of not being able to attend. Besides, it's popular enough to warrant that much coverage, it'll have destroyed Wimbledon in the ratings now that Tiger Tim and Vanilla Murray are out. Just saw the Garbage set - Shirley = Sex. As for the Brian Wilson Band - they have to be somewhat energetic, or it draws attention to the fact that Brian himself is pretty motionless and/or uninterested. As great as he is, he looked bored stiff until Good Vibrations. Poor man.

Coldplay were, as I suspected, totally dull. One of my friends in the year below (who doesn't have exams and has thus been able to attend) rang me last night and said that she left halfway through their set because she, and I quote "felt about ready for bed after Clocks." How I laughed. Saw Brian Wilson on TV this afternoon - the number one artist I would've been to see, and the main reason for my uncontrolled rage on seeing my exam timetable this year - he was fantastic as usual. White Stripes, Kaiser Chiefs, Killers, and Bloc Party have all looked good. The Bravery looked terrible as usual. Are Garbage at Glasto this year? That'd complete my rage, missing them and Brian Wilson in one weekend. "The spirit of us Brits" is admirable, people coming together and sharing tents with people who lost theirs and all, but those same people came in their thousands to revel in the snooze-fest that was the Chris Martin Experience last night, so meh. A pox on the lot of them.

The Pixies had the occasional bit of Black Francis chanting in Spanish, didn't they? Melissa Auf der Maur has a French language version of her song "Taste You" which is quite good. MC Solaar, which is French rap, grew on me a lot during the French exchange I went on last year. I introduced the girl I was staying with to Nirvana in return, and we've both since invested in albums from each other's artist. Solaar is really good, actually, it's less about gangsta-rapping and stuff and more about the sound. It's quite jazzy in places.

Only here could Roddy Piper get into somebody's "favourite movie quotes" list. Sad lack of decent British films, and as Hamster said, the problem with the AFI is that they have far too much love for old movies, irrespective of whether or not they were actually good or not. Nice to see two quotes from A Streetcar Named Desire in there, if only because I have an exam on it on Wednesday afternoon. Brando is also very, very quotable. Some ones I was sad, but not necessarily surprised, were omitted... "We were a few miles outside of Vegas when the drugs started to set in. 'No point in mentioning these bats,' I thought, 'the poor bastard will see them soon enough.'" - From FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS "Yes, that's a point, what has happened to my agent? Bastard must've died! - From WITHNAIL AND I "In America, first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women." - From (obviously) SCARFACE "You people need people like me! So you can point your fingers and say 'hey, that's the bad guy.' Say goodnight to the bad guy!" - From SCARFACE "They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the world is at an end and, as Presuming Ed has so rightly said... we have failed to paint it black." - From WITHNAIL AND I "Get my wallet... it's the one that says 'Bad Mother Fucker' on it." - From PULP FICTION "Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?" - From TRAINSPOTTING "When you're sad, you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound." - From GIRL, INTERRUPTED "Not steal. Commandeer. We're going to commandeer a ship. Nautical term." - From PRIATES OF THE CARRIBEAN Etc.

So you've been dead since fall 2003 then?

Agreed. I'd never be more happy to be proven wrong about something (I hate being proven wrong) but unless Corgan has mellowed out in the last few years, or Iha has gotten over their problems, or D'Arcy yearns for the drug-fuelled days that got her into a mess in the first place, or MAdM is willing to give up her solo opportunities... it's unlikely that I will be. Alas. Still, it'd be the most significant reformation since the Pixies (and probably a Hell of a lot less disappointing) and the most anticipated reformation anywhere in rock music at the moment. Unless they can find a way of digging up Kurt and using hydraulics to pump "Smells Like Teen Spirit" through his mouth.