The Null Device
2005/8/3
Following on from the indie cover MP3 compilation, there is now a collection of songs covered by Belle & Sebastian in their live shows, as a set of bootleg MP3s of varying quality. They've got everything from The Byrds and The Beatles to a cowbell-intensive version of original umlaut abusers Blue Öyster Cult's Don't Fear The Reaper and covers of The Pixies, The Smiths and Dinosaur Jr. guaranteed to please the coolsie indie chats. Also, it seems like they have a habit of pulling fans in from the audience to do guest vocals.
(Btw, the C86 page previously mentioned here seems to now have links to all the MP3s, in a bunch of enormous ZIP files.)
(via sweepingthenation) ¶ 0
Street fashion in Helsinki, which seems to be a sort of Scandinavian Harajuku. The kids there seem to be quite creative about how they dress. There are a few recognisable archetypes (hair-metallers, punk rockers, the odd goth, a handful of dudes with 'fros and various sorts of coolsies who wouldn't look out of place at Dangerfield on Brunswick St., or, indeed, at an Architecture In Helsinki gig), and then you've got the people who have their own unique thing happening, for better or worse.
(via bOING bOING) ¶ 0
A Times piece on the effects of Labour's shift to the centre-right, and the Tories' subsequent identity crisis:
The view has long been widespread among commentators that Tony Blair is unusual: not exactly a Tory, but somewhere much closer to a continental Christian Democrat than a typical Labour Party product. James Callaghan reportedly said of him: "I don't know what that young man is, but, whatever he is, it isn't Labour."
Of course, while truth in advertising is laudable, renaming the party to the "Christian Democrats" would alienate voters of other faiths. Perhaps "Abrahamic Democrats" would be more appropriate, or (to include Hindus and such) "Theist Democrats"? That leaves the atheists out in the cold, of course, but everybody knows that they're amoral nihilists and shouldn't be encouraged.
In the cause of trying to contrive meaningful differences with Mr Blair, the Tories have opposed policies which, intellectually, they should support, while adopting inconsistent tactical postures. The frustrated search for territory beyond the Blairite shadow took the Tory election campaign to the wasteland of HIV testing for immigrants, strict quotas for asylum-seekers and a crackdown on gypsies, while saying little about the economy, hospitals or schools.And while Labour's transformation into Tories-with-good-PR has alienated a lot of leftists (many traditional Labour supporters didn't bother voting in the last election), it has been popular with elsewhere: 70% of current Labour voters regard themselves as "supporters of new Labour not old Labour".
According to Technorati, one blog is created every second. The report doesn't say how many of those are search-engine spammers' link farms.