The moon on a stick

My thesis is now almost in the lap of the Gods. I have two nights off 'for perspective' while my supervisor proofreads the thing. At 240 pages it's a bit lumpen and scary (like my soul), so I feel sorry for her. After that, there is one more weekend of torture - prettying it up, formatting tables, pausing only to shit or fill my face with Aldi chocolate. D Day is Thursday next week.I wonder how I'll feel? It will be a line drawn under four tough years.


Well maybe not exactly a line, because I will still have to defend the thing in front of a couple of world renowned academics in the Spring. Hopefully, by then I'll have rediscovered some respect for my own work because at the moment I'd probably manage a more enthusiastic defense of the Meath/Louth phone directory.


I know what I am going to do as soon as I finish, though. I am going to read. A LOT. Anything that is not psychology thank you. At the moment, I'm halfway through a million books. All the narratives are frozen in time. In 'the portrait of a lady', Isabelle's spirit is being slowly bled from her by Gilbert, in 'blood meridian' there are a lot of raggedy heads on sticks, and in 'heartburn and reflux for dummies' I'm half-finished my 'design your own heartburn chart'. Next up, I think I'm going to read 'infinite jest' on the grounds of Karl's recommendation.


Christmas this year is going to be a time of chilled out reading. I can't wait. As for this blog, I'm thinking of upgrading to Wordpress, and also considering posting some of my recipes on it. What do yis reckon? The other option I was thinking of was to have an alternative food blog? I can't work out a name for it though. All I can manage are ultra-lame food angles on asleep on the compost heap...("compost treats?" like fuck I'll have one....."lets eat on a compost heap?" ...whatever you're into yourself).


Here is some of the music I've been listening to at the desk over the past couple of weeks...(the photos are all by my talented friend Ailbhe Kelly Miller who is currently in Iceland and spying on things through a triangle).

MP3: A sunny day in Glasgow-ashes grammar/ ashes maths

This band have made a very interesting and possibly great album. But being the judgmental freak I am, I was reluctant to listen to them because of their ultra contrived name - "they come from America and they call themselves 'a sunny day in Glasgow'? C86 aping cunts." How wrong I was. The 'ashes grammar' album is beautiful and elusive; it squirms all around the place like mercury and keeps drawing me back in. 

To call it nu-gaze would be to do it a terrible disservice as there is so much more going on. But there is a HEAVY whack of Slowdive off it; not that there is anything wrong with that - I'm just saying. I've read a few reviews which came down relatively hard on the album. They nearly all focus on the fact that there are a lot of ambient interludes. I don't think that criticism is fair. In fact I'd say such reviews were rushed due to circumstance and didn't give the album time to breathe. Ambient music typically needs time to develop. Sure it was only after four or five listens that I switched from admiring this record to being enamored with it.

Well, now. How about this for a change of tone from the last piece of music. Shackleton is a producer who makes STRANGE music. Rattling alien signals from a place marked on the furthest dusty corner of an ancient map which only he has read, a secret cave linking dubstep island to techno peninsula. His new album '3 EPs' came out on Perlon and it is the weirdest, darkest, most exhilarating, and most perfectly conceived thing I've heard this year. That riddle-wrapped-inside-a-mystery-inside-an-enigma Ricardo Vilallobos once pestered Shackleton to let him remix a track, and ended up with one of his best ever pieces of work - the desolate and epic wormhole below, which nods to 9/11, ancient history and entropy.

I can see where Villalobos was coming from. Shackleton is something else.

More Indie MP3: Girls-Hellhole Ratrace

Finally, another band who people have been mixed about. These guys are called Girls. There is something about the PR circus surrounding Girls which bothers me; they come with a gnarly cut and paste cult 'n drugs indie X-Factor style back-story. Every single piece of criticism about them obligingly mentions said story, to the point that a 200 word review of the band in the guardian wasted about 150 words describing it instead of the music. All this shit stinks of PR, and undermines their music. Which is a shame, because it's likely the band will soon tire of being pigeonholed by such baloney.

Their music sounds completely wide-eyed, raw, and real. It's gorgeous. In fact, the above song is an absolute anthem in waiting. It's communal and celebratory in a a genuine way that puts it straight into the same hallowed space as Blur's tender and Spiritualized's ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space. Don't believe me? Listen to the zonked sing song and see-sawing feedback that crash in at 3.46 and try to keep the hairs on your neck under control. Magic.