Recent content by OldRottenhat

  1. O

    Pointless But It Does My Head In

    Oh, I grasp the point of it, and I have no trouble at all with messages that begin e.g. "this is BorderPolice". I strongly endorse straightforwardly identifying yourself on your answering message, rather than, say, playing a brief passage of badly-recorded music, interspersed with whooshing...
  2. O

    Bicycles without gears/breaks

    How can you not love the look of a track bike (forget the person riding it)? The way the lines of the frame are so clean, uninterrupted by levers, cables, braze-ons...it's the bicycle expressed solely as its fundamental components. The experience of riding fixed is different, the connection...
  3. O

    Pointless But It Does My Head In

    Answering machine messages which say "You have reached...." Obviously I haven't reached them or I wouldn't be hearing this bloody message.
  4. O

    Cookbooks that changed your life.

    The Essentials Of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan is the book I've used more than any other for ten years or more (the recipe for ragu bolognese alone...) although Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery would be a close second.
  5. O

    good books on FOLK

    I liked Colin Harper's book about Bert Jansch, Dazzling Stranger, although it's not really what you're looking for - it's more for the history of the early '60s folk boom in the UK and so forth. And the last third follows the predictable arc of collapse of talent under tidal waves of booze...
  6. O

    Cycling

    Gutting, isn't it? And how much more so for whoever wins? Knowing that you've spent three weeks flogging yourself to the point of unconsciousness every day and that the respect you get will always be diminished because of the absence of the favourites?
  7. O

    Sleater Kinney break up : about time!

    So far as I'm aware, it's simply that most of them have had children within the last few years and don't have the time to commit to recording and touring. Since Ian McKaye now has the Evens to fill his time, I wouldn't expect to hear from Fugazi much more often than, say, Scott Walker. And I...
  8. O

    loop

    Only if you don't already believe that Space Ritual is the best live album ever released bar none. It amazes me that you can still meet people who profess to love krautrock (especially the heavier end thereof) but will dismiss Hawkwind out of hand. Then again, there are people who think Acid...
  9. O

    sonic youth are old and boring

    Saw them last Thursday with Mark Ibold (Pavement, Free Kitten etc) depping on bass, while Kim switched between vocals, guitar and bass, which made for a big low end on some of the new songs. About halfway through Thurston registered the shouts of "louder" coming from the audience and gave the...
  10. O

    loop

    One of the first live bands I ever saw, when I didn't know how good I was getting it (come on - MBV twice, Sonic Youth by Nirvana, Fugazi ca. Repeater, Shamen supporting Happy Mondays, Dinosaur Jr., Young Gods etc etc) and I barely remember it, but someone else who was there tells me they...
  11. O

    SunnO)))

    Boris - Feedbacker: At Last is also excellent, on the same tip as Flood judging by Throughsilver's description, a single track that develops through sections reminiscent of Pink Floyd or maybe even Codeine into an oceanic guitar drone meltdown that is just crushingly lovely. Sun Baked Snow Cave...
  12. O

    SunnO)))

    I think the slowness of Sunn O))) live is a key part of the experience - the space between chords is so far beyond what you're conditioned to expect by other music that you lose sense of time and structure, and can focus only on the wash of slowly decaying distortion. You feel drugged, the...
  13. O

    Continental/Analytic Philosophy

    Well, not necessarily. Questions have implied premises and if those premises are contradictory then the question isn't meaningful - it's common practice to examine the terms of any proposition in order to see what assumptions are being smuggled in and whether they are valid. If I ask you "what...
  14. O

    things you have recently deleted/sold

    Half my vinyl, last week, because I'm also moving and I haven't listened to any of it in three years - the other half is going as soon as I get back to Dublin - and I'm feeling pretty damn good about it. I don't think the lady of the house feels the same way about me any more though.
  15. O

    Books you've read recently and would unreservedly recommend

    Picking up on a bunch of disparate points: 1: Mother London is probably the best novel I've read in several years. I completely reevaluated Moorcock after this one. I had been a huge Moorcock fan back then - Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, Dancers At the End Of Time, Oswald Bastable, the lot...
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