BETAMAXNOMATES
'All she can do is dial and yell...'20060730
GET ME AWAY FROM HERE, I'M DYING
Obligatory update time. Don't get too excited though, I'm strictly going through the motions here. Phoning it in. There's an overwhelming sense of 'will this do?' about this one, all right. Which is to say: hello! Apologies for the lack of writing and stuff but I've been blah blah made-up excuse. Just couldn't find the time; not a minute to myself. Actually, that was certainly true of today (not the rest of the week though, that was mostly spent playing GTA and watching Veronica Mars. But I digress...) Today my penance was to make awkward small talk with a bunch of strangers I invited into my house. No, I haven't started rounding up Jehovah's Witnesses and forcing them to act out my tortured existentialist playlets. Not yet anyway. No, I'm afraid I'm looking for a new housemate. The old one got engaged to his girlfriend last month so he's bought a place with her and they've moved in together in a sickening display of smug suburban middle-class heterosexist contentedness. Not that I'm bitter or anything. Anyway, today we had four 'hopefuls' come over to (separately) audition for the once-in-a-lifetime role of 'Idiot Housemate #2'; we decided to assess them according to the criteria set by reality TV - which is, of course, all we know - namely: the degree to which the potential housemate could be said to be 'in [my] face', their 'up-for-it'-ness, their willingness to 'tell it like it is', their professed intolerance for/celebration of 'bitching', 'backstabbing', and 'bullshit', and the extent to which they admitted to being 'a bit mad', 'well zany', or 'just a right ol' nutter really'. Extra points were awarded for sexual deviance, alarming racism, extreme campness, and 'idiosyncratic' uses of the English language. No real contenders so far - a couple of computer geeks, some foreigners (ding ding ding! Racism! One of them asked me if I was Polish) and a ridiculous D4 stereotype - complete with Ugg boots and rugby shirt with upturned collar - who seemed especially reluctant to leave the house - not so much that she liked the place, more that she had never been this far from the Shelbourne. Don't call us, we'll call you.
Not much else to be saying. Superman is mediocre at best: I mean, it has its good points (Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey) and its bad (everything else). Probably not such a good idea to cast - as the all-powerful saviour of mankind - some Gap model-looking guy who you could happily smack around in real life with no serious consequences. And speaking of WTF, the website Playground Law has been made into a TV show, following in the footsteps of other such web-to screen successes as... uh, MySpace... and, I dunno, MILF Hunter. In theory this could (should?) have been really hilarious; in practice it was yet another Friday night laugh drought from the Nuremberg comedy war criminals that brought you Balls Of Steel and 8 Out Of Ten Pitiful Panel-Show Whores. As self-regarding as it sounds, Channel 4, as far as I can ascertain, now exists for the sole purpose of pissing. Me. The Fuck. Off. I mean, with the exception of Peep Show, have they produced anything of any worth in the past ten years? I remember when I was a kid (no really I do! Not all of us were raped, you know) when Friday night on Channel 4 was a LOLlercoaster of Father Ted, Frasier, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Friends (when it was good), and - later - BrassEye. Y'know, 'comedy' programs - with actual 'jokes'. There just are no words for... this. (I lie, there's a few...).
Anyway, before I go I may as well engage in some medium pimpin'. My latest mix is now online - titled, with crashing inevitability, the 'Betamax Bootymix' (#1, as there will be further instalments). You can download it directly here or from the link on the sidebar. I'm also working it setting up a podcast (projected title: the 'homogenizedcheesepodcast' - somebody stop me! No seriously, stop me: I'll end with a job in marketing if I'm not careful). Podcasts seem to be 'all the rage' these days, 'everybody's talking about them', so I'm told, but I'm still not entirely clear how to, y'know, 'do' them. I know it has something to do with RSS or something but I couldn't get the hang of it right away so I gave up. Until I figure it out then, here's the mp3 tracklist:
Not much else to be saying. Superman is mediocre at best: I mean, it has its good points (Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey) and its bad (everything else). Probably not such a good idea to cast - as the all-powerful saviour of mankind - some Gap model-looking guy who you could happily smack around in real life with no serious consequences. And speaking of WTF, the website Playground Law has been made into a TV show, following in the footsteps of other such web-to screen successes as... uh, MySpace... and, I dunno, MILF Hunter. In theory this could (should?) have been really hilarious; in practice it was yet another Friday night laugh drought from the Nuremberg comedy war criminals that brought you Balls Of Steel and 8 Out Of Ten Pitiful Panel-Show Whores. As self-regarding as it sounds, Channel 4, as far as I can ascertain, now exists for the sole purpose of pissing. Me. The Fuck. Off. I mean, with the exception of Peep Show, have they produced anything of any worth in the past ten years? I remember when I was a kid (no really I do! Not all of us were raped, you know) when Friday night on Channel 4 was a LOLlercoaster of Father Ted, Frasier, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Friends (when it was good), and - later - BrassEye. Y'know, 'comedy' programs - with actual 'jokes'. There just are no words for... this. (I lie, there's a few...).
Anyway, before I go I may as well engage in some medium pimpin'. My latest mix is now online - titled, with crashing inevitability, the 'Betamax Bootymix' (#1, as there will be further instalments). You can download it directly here or from the link on the sidebar. I'm also working it setting up a podcast (projected title: the 'homogenizedcheesepodcast' - somebody stop me! No seriously, stop me: I'll end with a job in marketing if I'm not careful). Podcasts seem to be 'all the rage' these days, 'everybody's talking about them', so I'm told, but I'm still not entirely clear how to, y'know, 'do' them. I know it has something to do with RSS or something but I couldn't get the hang of it right away so I gave up. Until I figure it out then, here's the mp3 tracklist:
'Wicked Party' (from 'Peep Show')
Nightmares On Wax - Les Nuits
Bruce Springsteen - Missing
Cut Copy - Saturdays (Headman Remix)
LCD Soundsystem - Too Much Love
Martinez - Shadowboxing (Trentemoller Remix)
Muse - Supermassive Black Hole
Ursula 1000 - Urgent/Anxious feat. Cristina
50 Cent - Outta Control feat. Mobb Deep (Acapella)
Elastica - Connection
White Rose Movement - Girls In The Back
Andy Freer - Super Galaxo
Hot Chip - (Just Like We) Breakdown (DFA Remix)
Madonna - Get Together
Daft Punk - One More Time
'Most People Are Out Right Now' (from 'Peep Show')
20060724
INDEFINITE LEAVE TO REMAIN
homogenizedcheeseproduct has been put on hiatus for retooling.
Heh heh, 'tool'. Nah, I just can't be bothered updating tonight: I'll write something proper tomorrow. Promise.
20060704
PROBABLY MORE LIKE WHORING AROUND
Yeah, so remember all that stuff I said about posting more, writing about things, you know, 'serious' entries eschewing your typical 'I'm soooo random - MONKEY RAPE! - LoL' shibboleth.... Yeah, well it turns out that was a lie. Sorry about that. But, on the bright side, it did give me an excuse to use the word 'shibboleth'. And what a great word it is - sounds like a gnarled stick a Russian woman might beat a goat with. Anyway, what to talk about? What to give to you - the discerning reader - that you haven't already read on someone else's MySpaz a thousand times already? I know: movie reviews! And then maybe some music recommendations! Perfect.
An unusual, and understandably uncelebrated, aspect of my job involves me going to see very bad movies on a semi-regular basis. In the past month alone I've taken in Curious George (confusing), Over The Hedge ('is it just me or this film very, VERY LOUD?'), RV (unspeakable - honestly, words fail to describe the sheer awfulness of this one), and, just yesterday, The Lake House. Now, I don't know if you've been contemplating seeing this - maybe you're one of the few that've been waiting in breathless anticipation for that old Reeves-Bullock chemistry to ignite the screen once more, I don't know - but I implore you to avoid it like the pox. Realistically, I didn't actually expect The Lake House to be any good - still, that didn't stop me leaving the cinema utterly baffled as to how a film of such towering, colassal suckitude ever made it into production. With a lot of bad movies you can kind of see that, perhaps - on paper - there was a kernel of a good idea there that, over time, got buried in a landslide of shoddy scripting, hamfisted direction, Robin Williams, and sixty gallons of liquid faeces (if you've seen RV, you'll understand... oh, how you'll understand...). But with The Lake House it's hard to see where, or when, at any point this seemed like a good idea: Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves fall in love but - whoops! - turns out they're living two years apart. In what (parallel) universe does that sound like a good movie? Hey, maybe that's the point. Maybe this is a movie posted from another dimension across some temporal roadblock and crammed into our cinematic mailslot by ghostly figures from another time (namely, 1994). If that's the case, mark this one 'return to sender'. Zing! With a dry cool wit like that I could be... urgh, Alex Zane probably.
A slightly better movie out at the moment is 36. Not much to say about this one really. It's French but is, unusually, unencumbered by any lengthy scenes of joyless mechanical sex filmed through venetian blinds. Obviously Gerard Deperdjeeiu is in it (as is that other guy, Daniel Autieouil, who's in everthing) but it's more like an extended episode of The Shield - only with funny accents. Which is cool. And it's got the chick from Hot Shots. Which is also cool. And the obligitary heavy-handed 'symbolic' ending. Which is not so cool, but hey, beggars can't be choosers. (Now, if I really was Alex Zane I'd probably flap my hands about and in my best 'ho-ho ironic' voice make some lazy crack about homeless people or Big Issue sellers there but I'm better than that, goddamnit. Though the fact that I even considered it in the first place doesn't exactly help my case).
Anyway, crashing on, you may have noticed that I've embedded one of those new-fangled music guage/counter thingys on the sidebar (that's presuming it is on the side: I coded this site by hand and haven't tested it in any other browsers yet so there's a good chance it may be upside-down and somewhere towards the left. Either way, it's stupid and annoying and painfully slow to refresh itself (I mean it keeps telling me that my 'most listened to' artist is The Diableros but they're, like, sooo last week, I hardly listen to them at all now). What I have been listening to rather a lot is Ride - a bunch of shoegaze also-ran's whose lead singer now plays guitar for Oasis: go figure - and their album Nowhere, a hazy slice of British psychedelia perfectly encapsulating that heady summer of 1991. Of course I was too young to be listening to Ride at the time - back then, the extent of my musical knowledge was that all cows ate grass, Prince had two of his ribs removed so he could suck his own willy, and that multi-ethnic techno-popsters 2 Unlimited died in a plane crash last week - at least according to my best friend's neighbour's girlfriend's mentally subnormal cousin Brian.
Further, I suggest you 'celebrate' the 'entire catalogue' (TM Office Space) of Soft Cell (so much more than 'Tainted Love'), the new Hot Chip album, and the mighty Gil Scott-Heron. And I quite like the new Christina Aguilera song though I've seen the making-the-video special so many times I feel like I fucking directed the thing. It's possible I did, in between my time being Alex Zane. And speaking of him, why not gorge yourself on a selection of vintage Popworld clips on YouTube (this being my personal favourite) before Cap'n Zane(y) and the dead-eyed, learned-English-from-phonetics Female Presenter came along and cocked it all up.
An unusual, and understandably uncelebrated, aspect of my job involves me going to see very bad movies on a semi-regular basis. In the past month alone I've taken in Curious George (confusing), Over The Hedge ('is it just me or this film very, VERY LOUD?'), RV (unspeakable - honestly, words fail to describe the sheer awfulness of this one), and, just yesterday, The Lake House. Now, I don't know if you've been contemplating seeing this - maybe you're one of the few that've been waiting in breathless anticipation for that old Reeves-Bullock chemistry to ignite the screen once more, I don't know - but I implore you to avoid it like the pox. Realistically, I didn't actually expect The Lake House to be any good - still, that didn't stop me leaving the cinema utterly baffled as to how a film of such towering, colassal suckitude ever made it into production. With a lot of bad movies you can kind of see that, perhaps - on paper - there was a kernel of a good idea there that, over time, got buried in a landslide of shoddy scripting, hamfisted direction, Robin Williams, and sixty gallons of liquid faeces (if you've seen RV, you'll understand... oh, how you'll understand...). But with The Lake House it's hard to see where, or when, at any point this seemed like a good idea: Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves fall in love but - whoops! - turns out they're living two years apart. In what (parallel) universe does that sound like a good movie? Hey, maybe that's the point. Maybe this is a movie posted from another dimension across some temporal roadblock and crammed into our cinematic mailslot by ghostly figures from another time (namely, 1994). If that's the case, mark this one 'return to sender'. Zing! With a dry cool wit like that I could be... urgh, Alex Zane probably.
A slightly better movie out at the moment is 36. Not much to say about this one really. It's French but is, unusually, unencumbered by any lengthy scenes of joyless mechanical sex filmed through venetian blinds. Obviously Gerard Deperdjeeiu is in it (as is that other guy, Daniel Autieouil, who's in everthing) but it's more like an extended episode of The Shield - only with funny accents. Which is cool. And it's got the chick from Hot Shots. Which is also cool. And the obligitary heavy-handed 'symbolic' ending. Which is not so cool, but hey, beggars can't be choosers. (Now, if I really was Alex Zane I'd probably flap my hands about and in my best 'ho-ho ironic' voice make some lazy crack about homeless people or Big Issue sellers there but I'm better than that, goddamnit. Though the fact that I even considered it in the first place doesn't exactly help my case).
Anyway, crashing on, you may have noticed that I've embedded one of those new-fangled music guage/counter thingys on the sidebar (that's presuming it is on the side: I coded this site by hand and haven't tested it in any other browsers yet so there's a good chance it may be upside-down and somewhere towards the left. Either way, it's stupid and annoying and painfully slow to refresh itself (I mean it keeps telling me that my 'most listened to' artist is The Diableros but they're, like, sooo last week, I hardly listen to them at all now). What I have been listening to rather a lot is Ride - a bunch of shoegaze also-ran's whose lead singer now plays guitar for Oasis: go figure - and their album Nowhere, a hazy slice of British psychedelia perfectly encapsulating that heady summer of 1991. Of course I was too young to be listening to Ride at the time - back then, the extent of my musical knowledge was that all cows ate grass, Prince had two of his ribs removed so he could suck his own willy, and that multi-ethnic techno-popsters 2 Unlimited died in a plane crash last week - at least according to my best friend's neighbour's girlfriend's mentally subnormal cousin Brian.
Further, I suggest you 'celebrate' the 'entire catalogue' (TM Office Space) of Soft Cell (so much more than 'Tainted Love'), the new Hot Chip album, and the mighty Gil Scott-Heron. And I quite like the new Christina Aguilera song though I've seen the making-the-video special so many times I feel like I fucking directed the thing. It's possible I did, in between my time being Alex Zane. And speaking of him, why not gorge yourself on a selection of vintage Popworld clips on YouTube (this being my personal favourite) before Cap'n Zane(y) and the dead-eyed, learned-English-from-phonetics Female Presenter came along and cocked it all up.
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