Panadola Diction

Joy Zipper, Long Island’s dreamy-melodic-indie-poppy couple (+ drummer) played to a sparse but enthusiastic crowd in Crawdaddy on Wednesday night. Tabitha Tindale and Vincent Cafiso seemed happy to be there, and were good humoured throughout, despite Vincent alluding to the place being a ‘rathole’.

Overall, they sounded pretty good, though Tabitha’s keyboard and vocals were sometimes a little too low in the mix. They played an interesting set, mixing up the old and the new, taking a few requests and playing their version of ‘Wave of Mutilation’, which appeared on Pixies tribute album ’Dig For Fire’ in 2007. An encore of ‘Christmas Song’ went down well, though there was no outing for ‘Baby You Should Know’ - probably their best-known song.

It was all fine and nice and unremarkable, and maybe a little harmless, which is not a word I’d like associated with me if I were a musician. The most remarkable thing, for me, was Ms Tindale. It hadn’t crossed my mind before the gig that I’d never seen Joy Zipper and had no idea what they looked like, so I wasn’t expecting her to be so aesthetically pleasing, with her head and her legs and the rest of her.  

Support was from Gavin Glass and the Holy Shakers, a crowd I’d not seen before, but apparently they’ve been rattling around for years. They were good - they have a few great tunes, and there were even peculiar spoken-word interludes from a verbose preacher. Entertaining stuff, but they weren’t as handsome as Tabitha.

I saw Tapes ‘n Tapes last year in The Village, and they were ok. Pretty good. They played the songs and left. But I liked the songs (I still really like their debut album ‘The Loon’). On Tuesday night in Tripod it was more of the same from the Minneapolitans.

I’m not entirely enamoured with their new album ‘Walk It Off’, it has it moments, but overall I think it is weaker than the first one. As a result, the set seemed somewhat diluted in terms of quality. Nevertheless, they played a decent set, with the highlight being a good rendition of ‘Insistor’, directly followed by latest single ‘Hang Them All’.

There was something missing though. It just didn’t seem big enough for me. The charm of many T’n'T songs for me is their ability to twist mellow verses into loud, epic choruses. This was exemplified by ‘10 Gallon Ascots’ on ‘The Loon’, and seems to be a recurring theme. For me, ‘10 Gallon Ascots’ was the most disappointing song of the night, as the supposed epic choruses sounded thin and lightweight. I don’t know, either a new sound engineer or new distortion pedals are needed.

I guess I’m nit-picking, but it’s always disappointing when a band doesn’t seem to do its recordings justice in a live setting. Other gripes included the lack of an encore (again) and the ridiculous Budweiser monopoly at the bar. The only beverages on draught at all these Bud-sponsored gigs are Bud, Guinness and Cashels - all served in cheap plastic glasses. (Or ‘plastics’, as they will be called when I’m in charge).

As for the support acts - Sons & Daughters were unconvincing. Poor sound again seemed to detract (the vocals were indecipherable (though that may just have been the Glasgow accents)). I saw them in around 2003, supporting Franz Ferdinand in The Ambassador, and I don’t remember exactly how that went, but they seemed like a completely different band on Tuesday - more like a band on a victory lap than a band trying to win my affection. The lead singer was wearing short shorts and a dress/top with her back hanging out. Maybe she was over for a hen night.

Port O’Brien were actually very good. They made lots of (good) noise, and mixed it up with some folkie ballads. They put in a lot of energy, and were quite amusing between songs, in a stoned, Californian kind of way - canvassing opinion on the Lisbon Treaty, and generally thinking out loud. Frontman Van Pierszalowski reminded me of a young Terry Bolea. We also bumped into some of them on Aungier St afterwards, and my exclamation of “Hey! It’s Port O’Brien!” seemed to make their evening.

Ireland, like a toddler, needs to be told what’s good for it, and gently spanked every now and then. If you were to allow toddlers to be democratic and rule the country, we’d soon all be eating Liga and staying up all night playing with stickle bricks, which sounds great, but we’d also have vomit on our shoulders and be sitting nonchalantly in our own faeces. Toddlers need a benevolent dictator. As does Ireland. I suggest me.

When I’m in charge, all train drivers will be made redundant and replaced by second-hand games consoles. My research suggests that a 16-bit processing unit would be more than capable of handling a train’s basic controls - i.e. Go and Stop. As a fail-safe mechanism, nerdy pre-junior cert students will be excused from P.E. classes to monitor the consoles (preferably Sega Mega Drives), and be on hand to take manual control in case of an unlikely emergency. These ‘Junior Auxiliary Inspectors’ will be issued train-driver’s hats and blue uniforms. All trains will run exactly on time, with 100% efficiency. Redundant ex-train drivers will be re-trained to do something else, possibly to manufacture hats.

On their breaks, the Jauxis will be encouraged to play the classic Amiga game, Sensible Train-Spotting.

As Emperor Joseph II said, “Everything for the people, nothing by the people.”

A lot of miserable bastards have been complaining about Indiana Jones - joyless deadweight scribblers from the freesheets and various shit-sprongers who had made their minds up before the film was even released.

No lead-in tales of the cinema today - straight to the verdict. I thought this film was great. Yes, it is silly, geographically inaccurate, unrealistic and cheesy……….. but hang on, so were the original three! The visuals have been updated to accommodate a cold war era palette, giving the film the look of a spruced up 50’s classic, and this is complemented by a John Williams score punctuated by Elvis and Bill Haley.  

The film hits the ground running with a great opening sequence, where Indy has a run-in with the delightfully bad Irina Spalko’s (Cate Blanchett) Commies in Area-51, before pausing for breath with the customary university scene. We are then introduced to young biker Mutt Williams (Shia LaBoeuf) before setting off on a chase sequence that more-or-less lasts until the end of the movie.

The action is great. There are some CGI scenes, but there is still enough fist-fighting and gap-jumping to make it classic Indiana. Ford makes the transition to aging Dr. Jones effortlessly, and this is probably his most watchable performance of the last fifteen years. He is, and probably always will be, the (thinking man’s) action-hero against whom all other (thinking man’s) action heroes will be measured.

Of course it’s not perfect. (My least favourite scene involved Mutt and some Tarzanesque action, but I didn’t spit out my popcorn and march out of the cinema.) It could have been better. It doesn’t have Sean Connery in it, it doesn’t have a paper-mache boulder rolling down a ramp, it doesn’t have a Hitler cameo. But it has other things (John Hurt, huge ants, quicksand). It’s not Saving Private Ryan, or Schindler’s List, or ET. But it’s not supposed to be. It’s just another Indiana Jones film.

I’ve read paperfulls of nit-picking reviews about IJatKotCS, giving it two and three stars out of five, but to me this film is blatantly entertaining, slickly put together and does exactly what you might expect from a sequel set 20 years after the originals. If you love the original three, I don’t see how you couldn’t enjoy this.

2 thumbs up out of 2.

The Muxtape has been changed. Here’s the new playlist:

1. Broken Social Scene - Lover’s Spit
2. Tapes ‘N Tapes - Hang Them All
3. Joy Zipper - Baby You Should Know
4. Pavement - In The Mouth A Desert
5. Siouxie and the Banshees - Israel
6. The Strokes - The Modern Age (Peel session)
7. The Young Knives - Stand And Deliver (XFM Session)
8. Radiohead - Bangers + Mash
9. Weezer - Pork And Beans
10. The Duke Spirit - The Step And The Walk
11. Operator Please - Leave It Alone

The title was inspired by a snippet of conversation last week on the way home from Broken Social Scene, where it was agreed that “He was milled by a car transporter” would be the coolest epitaph ever.

I’ve also realised that I didn’t list the songs from my first Muxtape, Jimasphixit, and now it’s gone for ever. So, for posterity, as far as I can remember it was something like:

• The Cure - Grinding Halt
• Black Lips - Katrina
• The Breeders - German Studies
• Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks - Cold Son
• Elbow - Grounds For Divorce
• Lykke Li - I’m Good I’m Gone
• Santogold - Lights Out
• My Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow
• Roisin Murphy - Dear Miami
• Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds- More News From Nowhere

About two years ago, I went to the bar in Dicey Riley’s Garden and asked for two pints of Smithwicks. I paid with a red note and waited for my change. “40 cent please,” said the bartender. “Ahahaha,” said I, and I vowed never to go there again.

In the interim period I have heard two stories about the place - one involved Colin Farrell, and the other involved a bare-chested man trying to pay a waiter for a round of drinks with cocaine in the toilets, as he’d run out of cash. I think they were unrelated incidents.

Last night, against my better judgement, I went there to meet some friends, to celebrate multiple birthdays. I arrived at 9:30 and was asked to fork out a fiver to enter. Sigh. As I walked in the door, Ireland equalised against Serbia. Woo. I bought a pint of Smithwicks - €5.50. Argh. I met my friends and they told me I was sunburnt, I told them no, it was merely a hat-mark.

Then began two hours of constant harassment from ‘Praetorian Security’ - laughable suited assholes with hi-vis vests telling everyone that they couldn’t stand wherever they were standing. You weren’t allowed stand anywhere in the beer garden - only constant movement was acceptable, apparently. And then there were the heaters, which were on full-blast despite it being a warm evening. And the overcrowding. And the half-hour bar queues. And the music (bad). And the clientèle (vapid). And the €6 lager ( I felt like a peasant drinking my cheap ale).

If I were the son of a property developer and had a bland stripy white shirt with a little designer logo on it, sunglasses on my head and a slack jaw, I would no doubt go to Dicey’s Coke-yard every week and be very successful at pulling sparkly hellpigs.

I can just about understand why someone who worked nearby might go there for a couple of ciders on a sunny Monday evening, but as a venue for a weekend night out, Dicey’s makes no sense to me at all.

I made excuses, left early, headed for the other end of the scale - Carnival (a half-empty, dingy, perfect gloom-hole, with good music and a poorly-stocked bar), and thought about calling in the air strike.

I’m a bit slow with the review I know, but I’ve been busy managing at the frontline. I bought tickets to BSS a yonk ago, and as I had not seen them before I was looking forward to it, despite the other blogs which suggested that Sunset Rubdown or No Age might have been a better allocation of Tuesday night funds. Meh.

And it was great. The publicised no-support-act, three hour set did not materialise. BSS member, Charles Spearin opened the show with the first public performance of his ‘Happiness Project’ - an interesting piece of linguisto-musical experimentation, whereby he recorded conversations with his neighbours and subsequently chopped them up to find interesting melodies in their speech, to later be played over live. It worked quite well, was short and amusing, and seemed to lighten the mood in the slowly filling Vicar St.

I think there were eight BSS members present in total last Tuesday, including Brendan Canning, Amy Millan, Justin Peroff, Evan Cranley, a couple more whose names I didn’t catch, and of course Kevin Drew. They played a great set with plenty of crowd-pleasers and lots of amusing anecdotes in between, including details of what they had for dinner, and musings on Men At Work. A more detailed review and the setlist can be found here on this nice blog I’ve not read before.

For the last hour of the gig I had the dubious pleasure of standing behind a flailing crazy lady. She seemed determined to injure, and her repeated combo attacks of elbow-arse-stamp left me leaning backwards holding my arm in front of my face for safety. She then called me a bastard and complained that my friends were mocking her (they were merely laughing at my predicament). I told her to fuck off in a light-hearted manner, she seemed harmless enough. A few minutes later, after a wrist-elbow combo to the face, she turned around and hugged and kissed me like I was a long-lost puppy. All very confusing. Her male friend/bag-holder tried to distance himself throughout, and looked relieved when she suddenly announced that she was going home.

Anyway, yes, good gig, impressed, disgustingly talented musicians, good crowd, free tickets in exchange for fake email addresses (a choice of Tapes ‘n Tapes, Joy Zipper, Stephen Malkmus, De La Soul, etc. (already had T’n'T and Malkmus, De La Soul disappeared pretty quickly, so took Joy Zipper), not a bad Tuesday night at all.

I stumbled across a documentary about Edwyn Collins last night, and ended up watching the whole hour. I’d previously only known him as the one-hit-wonder bloke behind 1994 hit “A Girl Like You,” and I wondered why he might be the subject of an hour long documentary.

What I didn’t know was that Collins suffered a stroke as the result of a double brain hemorrage in 2005. This left him unable to speak, walk, read or write, and without the use of much of the right side of his body.

The documentary charted his progress in the years since the stroke, as he struggled to re-learn all the things he had lost, with the help of his wife and son (who now looks after his myspace). Collins has only vague memories of his life before the incident - his life as a wildlife illustrator, a member of critically acclaimed post-punk band Orange Juice in the early ’80’s, and subsequently as a successful solo artist.

The program was in equal parts heartbreaking and uplifting. Collins is not the same man, he can no longer play the guitar, except when his wife provides the strumming right hand, and he needs help with many basic daily tasks. However, the spirit and general optimism of the man, and his wife, Grace, is quite inspiring. He seems happy to just be alive and making progress.

As Collins’ speech improved in the months and years after the stroke, he began to write songs and sing again, re-learned his old songs, and eventually got to a level where he could practice with his old band again. The film culminated with an emotional comeback gig in Camden, where he and his band played a mixture of old and new material to a packed house - a remarkable achievment for a man who couldn’t even speak only two years previously. 

In late 2007 Collins completed and released the album he had been working on prior to the stroke - Home Again, a review of which can be found here. I’m not sure I’ll be rushing out to buy it, but this was, nevertheless, an excellent piece of television about a remarkable man.

According to this website, there are 66667 anagrams of ‘Panadola Diction’. At least 40,000 of them amuse me.

So, instead of the misleading tagline under the blog title up there, I’m just going to put an anagram up instead, preferably one which inspires a nice mental image.  

The first one I’ve chosen is Lido Panda Action. This is great for a number of reasons. Here are the reasons:

• There’s a chipper on Pearse St called Lido, which recently reopened after rennovations. They do a good battered sausage.
• When I was a young chap, there was a program called Lido on Eurosport, which involved scantily clad flowery French women parading around a stage. I don’t know what the point of it was. I remember a parent wandering into a room when Lido was being flicked past, and her being slighty outraged. “But it’s Eurosport!” didn’t seem to reassure her of its suitability.
• A lido is actually a fashionable beach resort, or an open-air swimming pool.
• Pandas are the Robert Smiths of the bearlike-mammal world.
• Every phrase sounds more exciting with the word ‘action’ in it.

If you can’t combine all that into a pleasing mental image then your imagination is broken.

Spare a thought for the last door you opened. Did you have to think about how to open it as you approached it? If you did, it is a failed design. There’s so much bad design everywhere. Most of it falls into one of two categories - functionality sacrificed for ’style’, or just plain stupidity.

Any door with a ‘Push’ or ‘Pull’ sign is a failed door. You should just know without having to read instructions. Should I push the left or the right door? It should be obvious.

Do you have a Mac? Does it have one of those built-in DVD drives under the monitor? (I’m not sure what model this is) How do you open the DVD drive? There’s no button - fucked if I know. They had them in DIT Aungier St when I was there, and a colleague had to point out that you need to press a button on the keyboard to open it. “Where’s the sense in that?” I said. “Oh, but it looks prettier without a button”. This is why I hate Apple products. Too much pretty and not enough common sense.

And one-buttoned mice - “Why?” said I. “Oh they look prettier without two buttons, and Mac’s don’t include right-click functionality by default, we Ctrl-click instead,” said she. “But that means I need to use two hands - how is that better?” said I. “Ummmmm,” said she, “but look, it’s all pretty and translucent.” Fucking mac shite. What if I want to drink coffee whilst copying and pasting something? I can’t on a Mac. I need to put down the coffee! What if my friend walks past and I want to wave at him/her? I have to stop work! What if I want to scratch my ear? Production must cease. “But wait,” said she, “look at the brand-new Mac mouse - it’s got a revolutionary little ball that you can use to scroll up and down!” Oooh. “You mean a scroll-wheel? Like on a normal mouse?” “Ummmm…. but it’s so pretty!”

“And why is the ‘Power’ button way off back at the back of the monitor, where I have to stretch to reach it to turn the thing on?” said I. “Apple would prefer you to leave the computer on in standby mode, I guess,” said she. “I don’t give a shit what Apple would like,” said I. “But they are so stable,” said she. “Oh come on - you’re not controlling a hospital’s life-support machines, you’re animating a red blob, which turns into a blue blob. Oh look, it’s red again. Blue! Red! Only with the power and stability of a Mac is this possible,” said I. “You’re mean,” said she.

Argh, I love arguing with Mactards. And don’t get me started on M4A format and iTunes.

Right, there’s a nice unfocused rant to start the weekend. It doesn’t even fit into any of my categories. Hmmmmm, maybe I’ll make a new category.

Anyone interested in backing up their design-related rants with some theory should read The Design Of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman. Interesting stuff.