Petronia

With downloads, as promised a while back. Plus new stuff. ...Do any of you guys actually read my Tumblr, besides the two or three of you who post there? ^^; Having multiple blogs pretty much just means that they take turns experiencing benign neglect, but I wish I had a better sense of who sees what first.

( Pet Shop Boys )

( Gorillaz )

( The Tears )

( Fever Ray )

( Patrick Wolf )

( k-os )

( Peter Doherty and Dot Allison )

( Saint Etienne )

Grizzly Bear gig tonight! Ed Droste just tweeted saying Le National is one of his favorite venues, bless (it's where I went to see Bebel Gilberto last time round).

1) I read the latest TRC spoilers since I figured I'd never manage to catch up on the manga before the grace period expires anyway, and now I am DYING. CLAMP YOU SPAZZES WHAT ARE YOU DOOOOINGGGG XD XD XD

2) One peculiar side-effect of Libs fandom is that people (RL people, that is, or online people who may as well be RL) feel impelled to keep me in the loop re: happenings in Pete Doherty's life. Like if he's in jail, out of jail, on the front page of Youtube, frolicking through fields of bluebells, that sort of thing. It's... kind of heartwarming? I mean, I know, hence being in the fandom, but the thought, etc. XD

The manager of Babyshambles ought to write a best-practices handbook on Dealing With Batshit Fandom and send a copy to LJ's customer relations management team (that is, assuming LJ actually has a CRM team and not just LIES). It's rather inspiring to watch competence in action.

3) Sororial unit returneth tomorrow in good spirits, having fulfilled her mission of getting glomped** by Carl Barât. Man, I remember when I used to go the extra mile for fandom, now I'm way too lazy.

4) This (linking ladysisyphus's post for context).

5) I hope at least some of you people knew Tada Yumi does My Chemical Romance doujinshi.


** Somehow I managed to get this far before I figured out the right word for it

I will have to take this and this down soonish, so grab them if you haven't yet!

( I realized while paging back that I forgot to post visuals of Taylor Swift, so here's a video )

canis_m asked about fic I'd be writing (or thinking of writing) if I had the leisure to do so. ( It's a good question. )

For instance, we all know I'm never going to write straight-up Pete/Carl fic, because that's not far out enough. XD I'd rather write about Hedi Slimane. Wouldn't Hedi Slimane make a great POV character? XDD Hopefully he's not taking a break for too long. Contemporary art gigs are all very well, but the celebrity manorexics of the world are going to run out of trousers.

(That reminds me: I haven't talked about the NYC museum exhibitions yet. Er, stick it on the list. XD;)

Something else I want to write: an SSBB story based on one of Ezra Pound's Cantos. This is related to the above, for reals, but it'll take another ten paragraphs to lay out why. Well... here. For starters. And the whole Greek mythology thing (thanks for that, I'll never be the same again XD). And:

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years,
And bright ships left you this or that in fee,
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things.

There was another story I would've written for the current issue if I'd had the time, set in the same universe as the first SSBB piece I wrote, the fantasy one... and the cover stories I never completed. As starlighter harangued, more PORN! I think at this point I would really enjoy having a whole year in which to do nothing but write, the tank is filled to overflowing.

Manga, books, job, and shopping will go in another entry. XD

In between writing a music post, or perhaps vice-versa. It's hard to tell. XD;

( Babyshambles )

( Taylor Swift )

( m-flo )

( Teddy Thompson and Linda Thompson )

P.S. there has been a mysterious friending matsuri this past couple of weeks. The flist is now up to 350, which is my cue to ask new people to introduce themselves - you don't have to, that is, I won't be defriending you, but it would be nice. XD Why now, when there are fewer updates than ever, and the mp3 posts are unlocked? Did I make it seem like I'd gone friends-only? XD;;

1) Came back to huge pile of mail. XD Thanks for the CD, Thien - I think it may have been stopped at the border, so glad it arrived in one piece. ^^;; Thanks for the cards, mbp and quixotic_sense and tsutanai!

2) The major revelation of the weekend may prove to be that 90s teenpop is back - back like 80s pop came back. BACK LIKE BACKSTREET. My brain's a flexible object but the sight of a hundred or so MBA students in their late twenties breaking into the Boys' dance from the video spontaneously and in unison has done something irreparable to it. That was the third and unscripted dance-off of the weekend. Unfortunately I was still relatively sober at the time, but that soon changed.

3) I apologize for, um, accidentally doing that to Bing. WILL TRY HARDER NEXT TIME. My strategy is to blame the whole deal on my sister, who has an illustrious history of inflicting me with RPS fandoms (that I usually get away with not mentioning on LJ); the really annoying thing here being that The Libertines are, in a nutshell, the Mirage of Blaze of bandslash. One can only wish that actual Mirage of Blaze had as much fic as this thing turned out to have, but I know exactly how deep (shallow) that pond is. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: there are fewer more distressing sights than that of the NME getting its yenta on.

4) I played the stuffing out of Up The Bracket over the past week, which really only has peripherally to do with item 3 and more to do with being in the passenger seat of cars more than usual, including the 12-hour round trip with a driver who will only listen to rock. Also, having to wake up at 6 in the morning. This interspersed with The Pipettes, like lime after tequila. All of which got piled on top of the mental essay on Beirut, hauntology, etc. until the structure began to totter on the brink of tl;dr collapse. The sort of thing that would happen to Suze all the time, then she would post, like, a gnomic one-line conclusion followed by "DISCUSS". EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Tommy february6 still wins the Derrida sweepstakes. DISCUSS.

5) Since no one showed any signs of scanning it for my benefit, I went ahead and bought the January issue of Jump SQ so I could read the new Kishibe Rohan side story. The first ten pages are possibly the most godly ten pages of manga I've ever translated - that is, I haven't yet, but I will. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Rohan is an awesome rock star, but the worst real estate investor of all time.

There's this hilarious bit at the beginning where they film the audience going in, and there's Sir Ian McKellen, Neil Tennant... had someone bombed the venue British homosexuality would've been set back half a century.

( Cards and presents. )

Was complained at this year for not having Christmas music, but truth is I haven't heard anything good/new I liked recently and I'm fairly sick of my Christmas playlist from preceding years. XD So here's, uh, requested stuff from yesterday.

Tsuji Ayano - Neko ni naritai
Tsuji Ayano - Cherry

Tsuji Ayano Spitz covers for usomitai. *g* The first is from a Spitz tribute album, the second is from Tsuji Ayano's own covers album that also includes versions of "Ougon no tsuki" and "Swallowtail Butterfly", among others. (Ukelele folk, for those just joining us in this corner.)

Final Fantasy - Peach, Plum, Pear (live Phoenix 2006): the aforementioned Youtube rip. Actually, what is even better than this one--

Final Fantasy - Fantasy (live): the Mariah Carey hit, bogglingly reconfigured for dude + solo violin + sampler. You can actually hear the audience XDing to this. Novelty factor high enough to warrant office email cc-ing - then again, "Peach, Plum, Pear" and "Fantasy" document the same emotion, only in different terms.

Patrick Wolf - Tristan: for jereeza. The story behind this one is that PWolf was living in a shack in Cornwall - being where the romance of Tristan and Iseult took place - went for a walk along the beach and got caught in a thunderstorm, then dragged himself home and wrote the song in 5min. As T remarked that is pretty much what it sounds like (or alternately, not a little like Depeche Mode).

Wolfman feat. Pete Doherty - Darksome Sea (Rough Version): just the Youtube rip again, talking and all, but not mine (it's an annoying and time-consuming process :P). Those of you out there anthopomorphizing The Birth of Tragedy to the tune of 21st-century emo, it could always be worse: you could've decided in the waning days of 2007 to be a Libertines fan. This is actually all Jonathan Ross's fault, because sororial unit kept watching his show on Youtube and happened on Pete Doherty and liked him. So the moral of the story is, never trust a man who snogged Neil Gaiman in public. I sort of made fun of her a lot, then sat down and pondered the possibility that there was a Real World Out There beyond ILM and LJ fic comms where this was not, in fact, all that embarrassing. Like, in the Real World there are people who make the unironic claim that Pete Doherty is the best English songwriter since Liam Gallagher. Sorry, Oasis fans on flist, but. You know. YOU KNOW.

Given that I didn't particularly enjoy The Libertines' music back in 2004, the fact that I know anything about this band (or Babyshambles, etc.) has to be a form of fandom osmosis, like my knowledge of the plot of Naruto. Was trying to explain the whole insane canonical WNGWJLEO melodrama to Aki last night (sorry Aki - connection died as always =_=), and she was like, SO HOW IS THE FIC THEN, and I was like, UM. ACTUALLY I HAVE NEVER READ THE FIC. Which isn't true, I'm sure I have, I just can't remember anything. In the meantime some of the famous-er songs gradually filtered in, and "For Lovers" ended up on the mythical Nana FST Part II, which I may finish sometime before Chinese Democracy. Once my sister pushed her Babyshambles mp3s on me I realized there were like two dozen more where that came from, so, heck.

Babyshambles - There She Goes (A Little Heartache): like this one, which really doesn't sound like anything I'd've expected. I was reading Scott Pilgrim so it reminds me of Envy Adams, basically. XD;

Babyshambles - Albion: and this, which is ridiculously pretty. (It also starts with thirty seconds of feedback noise, so don't worry about the sound card.) Okay I haven't forgotten that I promised visual reference when I start yammering on about bands, so ( here's a video of the song. )

Burial - Archangel: been posting about Burial too, so here's the track everyone says is an insta-classic à la "Teardrop". Not so sure myself but it may just be that the rest of the album is like this as well, so it's not a standout in the same way. At any rate I've been listening to it a lot. No visual reference though, since no one knows what the dude looks like. XD;;

If you're on carnet, btw, here's the full text of the interview I quoted. It's worth a read. OMG hauntology, etc. XD (And here's the short story for those as missed it. I wish someone had written something like this for the SSBB horror issue. XDD)