weltschmerz

Timo Maas - Help Me (featuring Kelis)

from Loud (2002)

German DJ/producer Timo Maas serves up a dancefloor monster, with a little help from the diva Kelis, whose sultry vocals slide and glide around samples from the 1951 sci-fi thriller The Day The Earth Stood Still. The track opens 2001's Loud and comes with a special Homie seal of approval, as does Shifter (featuring MC Chickaboo) from the same album.

Party on, thanks to Mark Wrafter.

Finished J.G. Ballard's High-Rise this evening. It's a pretty tedious and tepid read — imagine Lord Of The Flies and American Psycho rolled into one, but less compelling than the former and lacking the graphic horror of the latter.

In other, most excellent news, my Discworld books (The Light Fantastic and Guards! Guards!) have arrived. I expect to devour them rather quickly.

Turn away now if you don't want to read about politics. I promise not to do political posts very often, but the UK elections are happening on 5th May, and I feel that I ought to write a little about them. Guess which party I'll be voting for?

I was recommended this rather intriguing site tonight: Who Should You Vote For?. After answering a short list of questions, you're told how well the five main parties' policies represent your views. They don't pretend to cover all the issues (the list is noticeably light on the environment, for instance), but it's a useful tool.

Green 8 Liberal Democrat -1 Labour -6 UK Independence Party -6 Conservative -11 The Green Party, which is of course strong on environmental issues, takes a strong position on welfare issues, but was firmly against the war in Iraq. Other key concerns are cannabis, where the party takes a liberal line, and foxhunting, which unsurprisingly the Greens are firmly against.

The Greens won't win, I know. I don't even agree with all their policies (oh dear, scrapping university tuition fees?). It'd be nice to have a Green MP in Parliament though. And incidentally, I settled on the Greens before tonight.

If you're not up to scratch with the issues, it's worth perusing this as you go along, otherwise you might end up with dubious and embarrassing results like:

UK Independence Party 9 Liberal Democrat 8 Green 7 Labour -10 Conservative -18 UKIP's primary focus is on Europe, where the party is strongly against joining both the EU constitution and the Euro. UKIP is also firmly in favour of limiting immigration. The party does not take a clear line on some other policy issues, but supports scrapping university tuition fees; it is strongly against income tax rises and favour reducing fuel duty.

If you're into these political quizzes, I can highly recommend The Political Compass, which is very enlightening in general and also has a UK Election 2005 section.

My internship at NEF ended on Friday. Michael gave me a bottle of wine, which was sweet of him. I'm not sure I'll ever work there again (though the door has been left open for me), because of the job offer I've accepted and the damned course, but I'll definitely stay in touch and I wish them the best of luck. They ought to make it into the papers with increasing frequency.

I saw a book today, entitled The Selected Prophecies of Nostradamus. Haha!

Any Discworld fans hanging around? I've read The Colour of Magic a number of times and loved it exactly the same number of times, but I've never taken the brave step of trying the other 20+ in the series. Jez recommended that I try out the City Watch books, the first of which is Guards! Guards!. Let me know your recommendation(s).

The Delgados have broken up.

I learned the news while browsing randomly on Tiny Mix Tapes. There's an announcement on their official website, informing us that bassist Stewart Henderson doesn't want to record another album and that the band is therefore disbanding amicably.

It's rather disappointing, as I was just getting into The Delgados. The joyous single Everybody Come Down, from their final LP, Universal Audio, was one of the catchiest things I heard in 2004. The Glasgow quartet never quite got the acclaim they deserved, even though their indie-pop was on a par with that of fellow Scots Belle & Sebastian. You can sense Henderson's frustration in his parting diary entry.

Scant consolation, I know, but head over to Epitonic for a download of American Trilogy.

It's the long-awaited début of SotM on this new blog, and it's a 2-for-1 offer on modern British rock.


Elastica - I Want You

from The Radio One Sessions (2001)

Elastica were widely and rightly regarded as one of the finest Britpop bands of the mid-90s. Their self-titled début stormed into the public consciousness in 1995, beating the sales record set by Oasis and Definitely Maybe, thanks to dynamic, catchy riffs (copied, Elastica's detractors complained) in songs like Connection and Waking Up. Frontwoman Justine Frischmann's well-publicised break-up (and relationship) with Damon Albarn of Blur didn't do the band any harm.

One can only wonder how I Want You never appeared on a proper Elastica album. Frischmann's vocals simmer with detached sexuality and angular hooks abound. The current generation of angular-rock merchants (yes, Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, I'm looking at you) owes a debt of gratitude to bands such as Elastica. Have a listen, thanks to Fluxblog.


Kaiser Chiefs - I Predict A Riot

from Employment (2005)

Speaking of the current generation, I Predict A Riot is the signature single of the Kaiser Chiefs. It's fair to say that they've graduated from "Next Big Thing" to "Big Thing" in the last few months. Named after a South African football team and hailing from Leeds, the five-piece have even tasted success in the US with this propulsively catchy track. Cheers to Salon Audiofile, via *sixeyes.

I've come down with a bout of gastroenteritis, but I shan't elaborate, lest my 'readership' declines even further.

Edit (15/4/05): I'm much better now. Thanks, madwoman and homie.

Anyone interested in going to these gigs? Visit the artists' websites for samples.

I Am Kloot
21/4 @ Camden Electric Ballroom

The Go! Team
12/5 @ Camden Electric Ballroom

Rachael Yamagata
28/6 @ ICA

There have been well-publicised cases of bloggers getting fired for blogging about work, so one ought to do so anonymously. However, I am negating the issue by writing only positive things. Cunning, eh?

I'm doing an internship at New Energy Finance, a startup firm providing specialist financial information on the renewable energy sector. These are exciting times for NEF: on Thursday, the FT ran an article based on an NEF press release. The gist of it is that, according to NEF's index of renewable energy companies, the Kyoto Protocol appears to have boosted firms in participating countries (e.g. Japan, Canada, EU member states) and hurt firms in non-participating countries (e.g. the US, Australia).

Do a quick search, and you'll see that the story has now been picked up all over the place. For instance,

GreenBiz

EarthVision

sustainablog

Modern Power Systems

.

And I've made it onto the NEF team page, hurrah!

Finished reading The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time by Mark Haddon yesterday. It's a breath-taking piece of work, and I'd recommend it unreservedly to anyone who hasn't already read it. No spoilers, but to sum up, it's a first-person account of a boy (Christopher) with Asperger's syndrome/autism, who attempts to find the killer of his neighbour's dog and ends up in deeper waters than he expected.

There's an interview with Haddon which I found enlightening. It's significant that he never mentions a specific disability to describe Christopher's condition. Haddon says:

"We were sitting around in their offices talking, and someone mentioned autism and Asperger's, and this woman said, 'Oh, I didn't realize there was actually anything wrong with Christopher.' I've always treasured that reaction.

"It's kind of naïve but perfect. There is a very true sense in which there is something more wrong with the people around Christopher than with him. By the end of the book, although he hasn't profoundly changed — in a way, he hasn't changed at all — he has managed to restore order to his life. From his perspective, that's been a victory. But if you look at the people around him, they're still struggling with these huge problems. Their story is going to go on. They're the people who in some sense have something wrong with them."

I couldn't agree more. It doesn't make Christopher's 'hyper-rationality' any more tolerable though; some of the things he does really aren't nice. And that's the great thing about Haddon's work: he gives us insight into the workings of a mind that seems alien but is internally consistent throughout. (Insert digression into the philosophy of mind and how we can know about other minds.)

Not sure yet about re-readability. If it crosses that hurdle, it could make my favourite books list.