not sport | Wait until next year

January 4, 2013

No resolution

Those of you with a WordPress blog will have no doubt received their funkily designed Annual Report cataloguing your 2012 year in blogging. For those who don’t blog, or at least don’t blog through WordPress, the report collates all the relevant data relating to blog activity and visitors and all that kind of stuff. It is a nice feature as it offers an opportunity to reflect on how you are doing with your blogging, look at what you’ve achieved in terms of how many people you’ve reached in the big, bad world and consider the sheer quantity of stuff you’ve thrown up on the internet. Read the rest of this entry »

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December 10, 2012

A Side/B Side – The Flirtations

I was just going to post one of my favourite Christmas songs today, because I’m too lazy/busy to actually write anything, and if nothing else this place is a handy vessel to inflict my tastes on the five to ten people who flock to the site each day. Then I found out via the wonders of Google that said song, Christmas Time Is Here Again by The Flirtations, was in fact the B side of Nothing But A Heartache, and so Christmas Time Is Here Again is not only one of the great Christmas songs, but is quite possible one half of one of the great singles – Northern soul brilliance and classy Christmas soul, all on one piece of vinyl. Read the rest of this entry »

November 27, 2012

Working Sounds

I’m not sure how I feel about noise in a working environment. This morning, for instance, I have been disrupted and distracted by a colleague playing Michael Bublé’s Christmas hits at high volume, another colleague’s mobile phone squawking out a rather tinny rendition of something by Led Zeppelin, the constant chug of the photocopier, the initial sniffs of someone’s winter cold, plus your usual conversational hubbub/general non-specific office noise. I’m grateful that there haven’t been any especially loud phone calls, nor the bizarre, inexplicable exclamations to nobody in particular that sometimes emanate from certain staff. Read the rest of this entry »

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November 23, 2012

Ours is the cult of the electronic fragment

I’ve been watching various episodes of the classic series The Shock of the New, that thirty years ago covered the development of modern art over eight one-hour episodes. In the video above, from around 25:20 to 28:20 is perhaps my favourite three minutes of TV this year – the message feels just as relevant now as I imagine it did then, perhaps even more so. They don’t make ’em like this anymore.

November 20, 2012

A New Irony

“Take, for example, an ad that calls itself an ad, makes fun of its own format, and attempts to lure its target market to laugh at and with it. It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself. The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism. The same goes for ironic living. Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.”

How to Live Without Irony, Christy Walpole, New York Times

“Isn’t there supposed to be an irony, some grim humor, some sense of the peculiar human insistence on seeing past the larger madness into small and skewed practicalities, into off-shaded moments that help us consider a narrow hope?”

Mao II, Don DeLillo Read the rest of this entry »

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Category: not sport