Observations
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Innocent grapes died for you
Just wanted to sing the praises of our local Oddbins (Clapham High St), who’ve thrown themselves wholeheartedly into creating engaging, booze-themed signage. The staff are friendly and helpful, and they’re trying to set up a wine-tasting club at the moment, so if you live in the area, pop in and join the fun. Our first…
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No need to shout
So it’s true that estate agents aren’t known for their retiring, wallflowery nature. But London chain James Pendleton really could show you a thing or two about self-confidence. If you haven’t come across their WE WIN AGAIN tag line, you can get a rough idea of its effect by imagining how you might celebrate a defeat…
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Victor Ward’s Mondo Exotica
Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama it-boy Victor instructs his staff on his club’s opening night music. As he points out, it essentially amounts to putting on an Ultra-Lounge CD. (The first of which, Mondo Exotica, was released in 1996, a couple of years before the book was published.) An interesting comment on the ease of adopting…
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Monet and Clams Casino
After a visit to the Saatchi gallery last weekend put me in drawing-art-and-music-parallels mode, I got thinking about the fact that much of what’s popular and “cool” in today’s UK/US music scene is unabashedly impressionistic. Form and theme are present but blurred, lyrics often part-way indecipherable, samples topped, tailed and laden with effects. Our music…
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And then there was silence
A trained violinist and teacher, Elizabeth Elliott’s life is full of music. Her husband and eldest daughter are professional cellists, and their home in the Welsh countryside overflows with much loved and well-worn sheet music. Thirty years ago, at the age of twenty-five, Elizabeth lost her hearing. She tells of how having a cochlear implant…
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Top 10 blog spam comments
Apologies for the deviation, but this is nearing Tina Fey territory, really. God love WordPress’ Akismet plugin for panning this gold.. never fails to make me laugh. Plus, as an aspiring writer, #10 does so fill me with hope. 1. “Wow!, this was a top quality post. In theory I’d like to write like this…
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The Nice jukebox
In the narrow streets of Nice last week, I came across these little music box ‘kits’ The appeal of these as gifts somewhat eludes; Michael Jackson and Provencial landscapes have never really sat side by side in my mind. That said, with their display the shop had created a rather neat kind of manual jukebox,…
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Draw what you hear
This year, a friend and I organised a charity concert for Save the Children. We asked primary schoolers to listen to some of the music that would be in the programme and draw how the music made them feel. Here are some of the results for Oblivion by Astor Piazzolla, below. Drawings by the talented pupils of Ysgol…
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Ads in the age of the EPIC
Over the past few years, there’s been a growing trend in advertisers going all-out feature film on us. Average Joes raised to godlike stature seems to be the pitch a la mode. Those geniuses have cottoned on to our secret past-times of imagining our lives as films: meeting a loved one accompanied by soaring strings, strutting from…
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The Words That Maketh Murder
This post is purely in admiration of PJ Harvey’s move from verse to chorus in The Words That Maketh Murder. (If you’re short on time skip to 1’25″.) She first sings the title line whilst still within the confines of the verse, then pulls the rug out from under your feet by surreptitiously shifting down a…
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Scoring the period drama
It recently occurred to me: isn’t it strange how the majority of TV period dramas are scored with a soundtrack appropriate for – or at least alluding to – the music of the era? It’s a little like saying that UK films set in the ’90s should always be accompanied by Brit-pop. A standard example of what you’d…