Dissonance Corp. 2011 Annual Report

in 2011 i:

helped drove a rock band around Germany. went to America. made peace with London, went to Leeds a lot.

signed on way too many times. got A Proper Job. moved out, moved on, moved city.

saw my cousin marry her high school sweetheart. saw my awesome sister graduate uni [hi Fee]. lost a grandma.

reconnected with some amazing old friends, met some excellent new friends both IRL and OTI.
met some rad internet people IRL [hi Jesse, Ruby Kid].

graduated journalism school seemingly just as the industry caves in on itself [hi Newsies].
went to a series of excruciating job interviews [ask me about the one where i ended up talking about Skrewdriver].

continued to learn and unlearn a load of important stuff.
didn't protest awful shit enough.

developed flash crushes on way too many beautiful & awesome women both IRL and OTI [hi... no, not telling you].

started a new radio show. released two fantastic records by three artists [hi Liam, hi Arran [+Dicks]] and reached a year-end Top 50 list in a music magazine i really like [tho Not Here was robbed imho].

read some books, watched films & TV, saw some art. listened to a shitload of fantastic music, didn't actually hear that much bad music at all. saw some amazing live shows, including someone i've been waiting about 13 years to see. embraced poptimism.

didn't play enough [any given musical instrument]. bought a trumpet. started writing a rap album. helped film a music video. formed a band [hi El].

ate some great food, ate prolly way more really shitty food, drank enough coffee to poison a town's water supply.
continued to be pretty unhealthy. discovered i actually really like olives.

engaged in too many Herculean struggles with my own mood swings.

didn't blog enough. tracked the amazing rise of the Horse_ebooks phenom. did my bit to make a washed-up '90s alt-rock singer eat 2 dozen eggs on YouTube. went mildly viral tweeting about a Beefheart/Bono kerfuffle.

ran up the back of a minibus in traffic.

found a stray dog, returned the dog. sat next to a dog in church. saw some great fish and other marine life.

wore various enjoyable hats [favourites: ushanka; Yankees cap; mushroom]

plans for 2012: stop being quite so desperately unhealthy; rejuvenate this blog and get back into writing about music more; release about 5 more records; hopefully meet a load more rad people; generally get my weight up in all ways except literally.

shout out to everyone i love and everyone who loves me.
and if 2012 doesn't bring about that much-vaunted Mayan apocalypse i'ma start the shit myself.

Song of the day: #19 Walt Solek – "Who Stole the Keeshka?"

Kishka (sometimes kishke, kiszka or keeshka) is a Slavic-originating term for various types of sausage or intestine stuffed filled with meat and/or meal, and popular among Eastern Europeans, Ashkenazi Jews and diaspora communities of both.

Its several types include kaszanka, a black pudding-esque concoction involving a pig's intestine filled with pig's blood and barley. Sometimes liver is used as a filling; sometimes buckwheat, ground potatoes (as in Greater Bialystok kiszka) or other grains are subsituted for the barley. Paprika is frequently added for flavour. Ashkenazic Jewish kishke obeys kashrut restrictions by using beef intestines (or sometimes, an edible synthetic substitute) filled with matzo meal, rendered fat (schmaltz) and spices. So-called "false kishka" is actually helzel, chicken neck-skin stuffed with a flour-based mix. Finally, believe it or not, there's such a thing as vegetarian kishka.

Someone has stolen Polish-American lyricist, composer, and Clown Prince of Polka Walt Solek's kishka, and, though he might not look it, he is extremely unhappy about this. Intending to secure the return of his intestine-based feast through song, he penned "Who Stole the Keeshka?" (as it was originally spelt), which has since become a minor polka standard to the extent that it is often credited as "Polish traditional" rather than to Solek (lyrics) and polka promoter and musician Walter Dana. It has been recorded by numerous groups including Grammy-winning polka artist Frankie Yankovic, polka revivalists Brave Combo, and dependably dreadful musical comedian "Weird Al" Yankovic.

The song veers oddly and abruptly between the mournful verses bemoaning the loss of the food, the slightly more optimistic questioning of the chorus, and the frankly balls-out, horn-filled joyous exuberance of the instrumental sections, also featuring some truly wild¹ tambourine-playing. This probably says something profound about the Polish-American experience, but search me if i know what it is.

Solek's anguished vocals really convey the pain of the lost blood sausage: it's actually quite surprising that someone can imbue the words "it was hanging on a rack" with so much emotion. After a while he moves from anger to the bargaining stage, offering up pretty much any of his other Polish delicacies in exchange for the kishka's return:

You can take my szynka
Take my fine kielbasa
You can take my [stewed]? czernina²
But gimme back that kishka

Happily, everything turns out ok for Walt: at the end of the song it turns out that it was in fact Yashil who stole the kishka, the big bastard. To his credit, he returns it to the rack, and Solek thanks him, just in time for another tambourine-soaked hoedown frenzy. He's lucky Walt's such a nice guy. i'd have considered giving him a fine kielbasa round the face, to be honest with you.

Walt Solek's records seem insanely hard to find nowadays. There's a couple on eBay, two records on Spotify for British/Scando readers, and that really is about it. For ages i've been trying to find a tune of his called "Old Whiskey Shoes Polka", which was used to great effect by Les Blank in his 1980 documentary short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, so if anyone knows where i can get hold of a copy of that, hit me up and i will reward you with some Polish sausage or something. Word.

mp3: Walt Solek – "Who Stole the Keeshka?"

¹ And endearingly over-high in the mix, for that matter.
² Couldn't work out for sure what this says, though some research into Polish cuisine throws up czernina – duck blood soup – as probably the closest-sounding dish. Like the kiszka, it's also full of blood.

Some good fucking dishes in this thing

 www.whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com

Spodify advert reviews pt. 2

i can't really praise Strictly Kev's truly impressive six-volume Kraftwerk cover-version compendium highly enough, so i won't; instead, i will just direct you to this website and to gorge your ears on over six hours and 200 tracks' worth of interpretations sacred (Bălănescu Quartet, Big Black) and profane (Señor Coconut, P.M. Dawn). Tell 'em tomasz sent you. And then ignore them as they narrow their eyes suspiciously, muttering "who?"

In the meantime, by popular demand (waddup Dennis, Leon) here are some more reviews of adverts from the popular UK-and-some-of-Europe based streaming music service Spodify.¹

---

Bryn Terfel - Bad Boys (album)
i don't think it's a controversial statement to say that, if you're an operatic bass-baritone, you've probably got quite a strong voice. So why would you need accompaniment from weedy, clicky little rim-shot drums? A wholly regrettable artefact of the need to pop-ify all music for sales, they're as crass and unnecessary as those sporadic attempts at rewriting the works of famous authors in dubious patois to appeal to some groaning and nebulous caricature of "da youf", as uncomprehending scallies metaphorically gawk blankly and throw chips at them.

Share My Playlist
A shower of awful, guffawing stage schoolers congratulate themselves on their incredible taste in music while sharing playlists both curiously short and suspiciously redolent of focus grouping. Of particular awful note is the guy who listens to disco while driving to Newcastle and goes on about how he's soooo embarrassed to listen to it. Yeh? Not embarrassed enough not to tell everyone who listens to Spodify about it, clearly.

Spodify Day Pass
BACK OFF the BLOODY MIC, man. Good lord, there are crappy little bands in garages all over this land that can fashion a satisfactory pop shield from a coathanger and a pair of tights, yet the ad from The New Online Saviour of Music Distribution™ still sounds like someone's trying to push the microphone down the voiceover guy's throat at knifepoint. Just move back a few inches, that's all it'd take. Not as badly executed as that first Suitopia ad (nor as charming), but not far behind.

Dance4life
"I went to Africa and got kicked by a giraffe!" What? i'm not going there then! No, apart from the strange angle they decided to approach this from, and the slightly quaint early 90s house in the background, this is one of the only Spodify ads that isn't mindlessly, self-trepanningly infuriating. Fair play to you, charitable camelopard assaultee.

Roberta from Spotify. i don't believe i need any particular excuse to post this.

Zizzi Italian restuarants
Apparently "the A to Z of great Italian food begins with authenticity and ends with Zizzi!" Oh yeh? So what if i wanna order abbacchio? What about the antipasti i was going to have for my aperitivo? And my friend here: he's on a special seafood alimentazione, and quite fancied his pizza laden with alice. i guess we're also screwed if we want any kind of zuppa or anything with zucchini or zucchero in it. Sod this, we're going somewhere that doesn't structure its menu by arcane alphabetical cut-off points.

(Their web advertising's faintly hilarious too: "Our restaurants are run the Italian way... Each one's a bit different in character, architecture, age and feel; think Robert De Niro with a regional accent." Great, now i'm imagining a Scouse Robert de Niro. "You talkin' to me, lid?")

Red Bull Academy
Did that woman really just abbreviate the "www" of a web address to "dub dub dub"? Eurgghh. Kill me. No wait, her.

That new dating gameshow on ITV
This advert features a typical "getting to know you" dating conversation between a man and a woman, where the guy fumbles it after a bit of complimentary small-talk by remarking that "it'll be nice to talk to someone other than my mum!" Except the part of the woman is played by about half a dozen women all speaking at once, so either that's literally what happens on the gameshow and the hapless man has to attempt to seduce all six at the same time, or the guy is enough of a blundering moron to have fallen at the exact same hurdle six different times. Whichever it is, surely Spodify listeners don't watch ITV anyway?

Christmas holiday drinking & driving
"You will now have to wait twelve seconds to get to your music again," intones a blokey, no-nonsense voice. "Imagine having to wait twelve months to get to your car again. That's what'll happen if you drink and drive this Christmas". Wow, pretty good logic! i was gonna drink and drive loads, y'know, just for fun. But i'm certainly not going to now i know there's such a clever numerological basis for avoiding it.

Sorority Row (film)
Hey, you know what'd be a great thing to run in a 20-second, audio-only slot? A film trailer! Hopefully the film is better than its marketing campaign. Doesn't sound like it, though.

¹ i only originally started calling it "Spodify" as an ineffectual form of mockery ("more like Stan Darsh!") of the software's hideous name, based on the British slang term "spod", to denote a bit of a geeky loser (and not an acronym for "spastic or disabled" as one of the more ribald UD entries tries to claim). However, i now get a good handful of people arriving after actively searching for "Spodify".

Christ knows why, but i think the most likely explanation is that the the /t/ phoneme doesn't exist in that horrible trendy Nathan Barley London hipster accent all Spodify's developers seem to have, but instead gets glossed to a /d/, which might be reasonable if you were talking to an American about "butter", etc., but just sounds utterly jarring and foolish when surrounded by what sounds like Jamie Oliver trying his hand at speed seduction, and that as a result there are people out there who honestly believe it to be spelled with a "d". Oh what a world, etc. One day i'll probably have to write a detailed blog explaining why i both love and detest Spodify at the same time.

Hey Ryan Reynolds, stfu. Love, LJB

It's galling to me that serious people actually give enough of a shit about what slick Hollywood sleazoids like Ryan Reynolds think to commission Written Articles About Stuff from them, especially when it's ostensibly reputable blogs like Huffington Post doing the commissioning.

Take this bleating piece, for instance, in which Ryan takes the moral high-ground re: the decadent wastefulness of competitive eating contests, mainly by invoking a variety of third-world children he has made up. "Young Mustafat, who maintains a strict diet of inner turmoil and bleached hope, looks forward to watching the ESPN-televised event to better understand what gigantically wasteful, fucking super-retards we all are", he wails, rending the air around him with concern.

Without, of course, pausing at any point to consider that: (a) competitive eating contests are at least 5 times more entertaining than any film Ryan Reynolds has ever starred in, and his self-congratulatory writing and poor stabs at Socratic irony too, for that matter; and (b) the combined staging and costs of every competitive eating contest in the United States wouldn't exceed the budget of a wack summer tossbuster such as, ooh i dunno, X-Men Origins: Wolverine.¹ (Ryan's condemnation of the excess promotional budgets of 7-11 convenience stores, Papa John's pizza,² the California Milk Processor Board and Schick razors is also strangely absent.)

Moral? i guess it's partly this: if you once starred as Van Wilder: Party Liaison, your right to diss anything on the grounds of taste is pretty fuckin' limited. And so, unless your salary for the next brainless superhero mindsore is all being donated to, e.g., MSF, it might be best not to single out one business's pefectly legitimate promotional tactic as if it were the major cause of the West's entire ethical downward spiral.

So, in summary, then: shut-up, pretty-boy. Now somebody pass the frankfurters.

Eine kleine wurstmusik:
mp3: Men's Recovery Project — "New Talking Sausage" (YSI)
mp3: Sam White — "Polish Sausage"

¹ FYI: The only reference i can find to a budget for the Nathan's annual Hot Dog Eating Contest is a 1995 NYT piece which postulates that Nathan's, as a "smaller" chain "with only 30 company-owned restaurants and fewer than 170 franchisees", can probably afford an annual advertising budget of "less than $1 million". Now i know that's old, and deals specifically with TV spots; but factor in the cost of staging the contest and then adjust for 14 years' inflation, and i still don't think you're near the same ballpark as X-Men Origins: Wolverine's $150 million budget. i'd speculate that maybe the X-Men catering budget might be nearer the mark. Assuming that's even vaguely close: so for the cost of promoting 30 restaurants and 170 franchises for a full calendar year, you could also achieve a small fraction of 107 minutes of celluloid! Positively bargainous, no? Well... no.
² Why the fuck would you want to eat at somewhere called "Papa John's"? It just reminds me of Papa Doc Duvalier. Preusmably if you displease the staff, you don't get your food gobbed in, you just get fully fucking hexed and then "disappeared".

Cake review: Pip's birthday cake

It occurs to me that i have never written a cake review before. Partly it's because the need for such a thing has never really occurred to me. Mostly though, i'd say, it's because i'm not much of a cake person. i find most cakes incredibly rich, even cheap supermarket ones, probably because that much sweetness in one entity just makes me to start to feel like a post-chocolate-chute Augustus Gloop after about two mouthfuls, but possibly because real cake never lived up to the reality of the ur-cake of cartoons, that perfect condensation of the essence of sweet flavour.

Take Battenberg, for instance, the belladonna of the cake world. It looks incredible, the ultimate cartoon food manna, its day-glo squares laden with the flavour-Nirvana of double-barrelled pink-and-yellowness. Then you bite into it, and your dreams are all ruined by the horrifying emetic almondpaste that is marzipan.

Nevertheless, i agreed to eat this cake because it was Pip's birthday cake, and because she said i should write this review of it. So instead of just cake, i now had cake and effort. Not sure what kind of bizarre reverse psychology is involved in that, but it fooled me anyway — kudos, Pip.

Anyway, the cake was in the form of popular undersea cartoon favourite Spongebob Squarepants, and of all the Spongebob cake pictures i've found on the 'net, it looked most akin to this one, only somehow sort of better. For one thing it was more lifelike (to the extent that this means anything when we're talking about cartoon baked goods), probably thanks to the fact that Spongebob was posed in this kind of one-legged action stance, as if about to hurl a baseball or administer a savage beating to a cakey opponent.

(Bonus round: StonedBob; PancakeBob; PointillistBob; AmputeeBob; ShowtunesBob; DementedBob; WarholBob; FuckingCreepyBob; WherethefuckismynoseBob; EforEffortBob.¹)

i ate it while enjoying the start of Anthony Gormley's latest artwork, One & Other, wherein 2400 people spend a total of 100 days on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, noting the sense of mild irony in solitude atop a public monument being about the furthest atmosphere from that of a typical birthday party; including this one, its time divided between garden and densely-packed garage, its occupants' conversational streams weaving and buzzing in and out of each other in all directions. The cake was pretty good, actually, for a non-cake person. It was perhaps a little squashed, but for that i've no-one to blame but myself, and it didn't hurt the cake too much. Inside it was composed of a time-honoured jam and cream combination between two sponge sections (a Victoria Spongebob, if you will)². My portion came from the section surrounding, and partly including, Bob's grinning mouth, so i also gained a good chunk of icing for variety. Overall, this was an excellent piece of birthday cake, amply filling its twin roles of pudding and celebration, and even for one without the infamous "sweet tooth", it is nonetheless always heartening to mark the passing of another year of a friend's company with such delicious and comical foodstuff.

Now for some cake-related music.
mp3: Fire Party – "Cake" (YSI)
mp3: Young Marble Giants – "Cakewalking" (YSI)
mp3: Melt-Banana – "Creeps in a White Cake" (YSI)

¹ Photo credits to original uploaders.
² Sorry.

"Beans on toast... original Sunday roast!"

Photos by: su-lin, paulhammond, kirsty @ Flickr; William @ Safe to Eat; Maarten Hillebrandt

When it appeared on the Wordlab comp back in 2000, Blak Twang's "Masterchef Sandwich" was dismissed as a "terminally parochial" example of "why Brit-rap has remained underground for so long" by some clueless turdburger at the New Musical Express.

Needless to say, it's nothing of the sort; rather, the man Tony Rotton hooks up an ace bouncy Oompa-Loompas-on-steroids beat and drops punchlines both braggadocious and food-centred while also finding time to have a stern word with those in the UK scene that never seem to support the good stuff:

When hunger strikes and I'm on the mic I turn rappers to brunch
I'm like Gremlins after 12 in all-you-can-eat restaurants
Call me Gizmo. Comin' like piranhas in a fishbowl
Terrorisin' fishy wishy-washy rappers with kid flows

[...]

I never thought I'd hear myself say this
But certain DJs are responsible for all the fuckeries and the fakeness
Putting basic timewasters on the A-list of the playlist
But if it was down to me they'd be on some "no-luck-today" list
They've yammed so many calls they're constipated
That's why they find it hard to swallow when the proper shit gets defecated
I've never catered. What they know about spice-ness?
Their definition of Spice is a tart in a tight dress...

And anyway, who among us can really resist a song that proclaims "Sod Ainsley Harriott (sod him). Sod his recipes"?

mp3: Blak Twang — "Masterchef Sandwich"

A man ate this

Jamie Oliver is currently weeping into his watery health-chicken.

After losing the title of "world's biggest burger" to the Clinton Station Diner in Clinton, New Jersey, which introduced a 12.5-pound hamburger called "Zeus" in early 2005, Denny's reclaimed the crown a few months later by unveiling the "Beer Barrel Belly Bruiser", a monstrous 15-pound burger featuring 10.5 pounds of ground beef, 25 slices of cheese, a head of lettuce, three tomatoes, two onions, a cup-and-a-half each of mayonnaise, relish, ketchup, mustard and banana peppers. On a bun.

In October 2008, Brad Sciullo of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, became the first Denny's Beer Barrel Pub customer ever to polish off one of their "Beer Barrel Belly Bruisers" in one sitting, consuming the 15-pound burger (20.2 pounds with bun and toppings) in 4 hours and 39 minutes.

On a similar tip, cheers to Miles for putting me up on the Heart Attack Grill of Arizona, taking the whole thing just that bit further by offering you side-orders of "soft drink of elite hackers" Jolt Cola and unfiltered Lucky Strikes. Awww yeh! The nonchalant combativeness of their press coverage/skirmishes page fills me with great joy, as do their non-medically trained nurses.

Finally, who knew an ostrich burger looked like this?


MP3: Judi Chicago — "Burger Joy"

100 dumplings & 1,000,000 peas: the further adventures of Mr. Greedy

I used to have a tape of kids' songs themed around Roger Hargreaves' deathlessly wonderful Mr. Men characters. There were about five or six songs on each side of the tape, i seem to recall, up to a total of about twelve.

They were mostly third-person narrative tales about the adventures of the better known Mr. Men or some of their character traits: Mr. Happy's track, for instance, was a (rather soppy, i recall) paean to positivity, while Mr. Bump's chronicled his accident-prone nature. The odd few were told from a first-person perspective, a highlight being Mr. Nosey's painful account of the consequences of constantly sticking his ample nose in everybody's business.

(Thanks to this ace site for the cover scan.)

The best song, however, which ended side one, concerned (and was entitled) "Mr Greedy's Little Light Lunch".

One hundred dumplings and a million peas
Twenty marmalade puddings and a cheddar cheese
Bread and butter and a roll or two
Bread and butter and a roll or two, three, four

Then boiled beef and carrots in a casserole stew
And a bucket of custard, vanilla cake too
Bread and butter and a roll or two
Mr. Greedy is having a little light lunch

And then a treat for him to eat
It's roly poly pudding...

Apparently, Greedy also ate "ice cream in tons", "a gallon of soup", "bunches of bananas", and, somewhat underwhelmingly after all that lot, "plum duffs". Dunno about you, but to me that sounds like a hearty meal.

An unhealthy appetite was also the downfall of Mr. Greedy's namesake this week. The suitably rotund-looking Clive Greedy (right) was suspended from his job as a paramedic on the Isle of Wight after eating a stick of celery while attempting to revive a patient suffering from a heart attack.

According to the Beeb:

Darren Claydon, an emergency care practitioner... told a hearing in London on Monday: "My attention was called to Clive Greedy, by him saying, 'Nice celery'"...

This story just gets more and more improbable. Not just because at the time of the celery consumption, Greedy's partner paramedic John Jones was also "jesting with a prawn" and speculating as to whether said seafood would be cooked if the patient was defibrillated while it was on his chin; but also because, who, i ask you, has ever used the phrase "nice celery" before?

Obviously i wanted to give away "Mr. Greedy's Little Light Lunch" with this post, but my Mr. Men tape got lost about fifteen years ago (there's good money in it if you can get me a rip. More for a hard copy) so that went out the window. So here's some good general songs to go towards your five-a-day instead.

MP3: Minor Threat — "Salad Days"
MP3: Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention — "Call Any Vegetable"
MP3: The Vegetable Orchestra — "Greenhouse"