Sometimes I think we should just live the motto: "All good things come from Manchester". But that's just me.

of rebels long gone,

morning of listening to The Milkshakes. specially "Everywhere I Look". the heat. summer is a hideous thing, it should be banned. depressing, the impossibility of finding clothes my size. we got tickets for Inception tonight. i predict a fluke.

i like to read the lines of your face, your history in depth.

There are few things in this world as poignant at Chris Eccleston's face.

Music My Father Would Like #1

There's something terrifically nostalgic in going through the stacks of records at the Notting Hill Record Exchange (its sister shop dedicated to second-hand books is the closest to a home I feel I have in this city). Nostalgic in the way characters in animes say "nostalgic" (these days we're rewatching Toradora!,  masterpiece) - that is, in reference to missing a kind of feeling that was never there in the first place. Feeling nostalgic for something that never happened in the first place. I become a well-intentioned poser in these second-hand record stores. I pretend to know more than I really do. I want to impress the people who work there; those long-bearded middle-aged men who mock the Rough Trade mania and seem impossibly cool to me in their disdain.

I wanted to buy a record for my father's birthday. I had a note with names of bands I thought my father would enjoy (but hopefully didn't already have in his collection). The note read: 

The Fleshtones. 

Cockney Rejects.

The Lambrettas.

*The Chords.

The Crack. ("In search of")

Mose Allison.

Purple Hearts.

Hersham Boys.

*The Dentists.

I forgot the note at home.

In the end I bought a rare cool-looking compilation that features three songs by Purple Hearts. The man behind the till didn't seem impressed by my good taste. I was going to buy a really nice double LP by Hersham Boys but it was too expensive and I love my father but I am poor.

And I don't even know if he likes Hersham Boys.

lately i've been listening for sunshine.

favourite tracks of 2009

10 - Rose Elinor Dougall - Fallen Over

9- Slow Club - Apples and Pairs



8- The Pains of Being Pure At Heart - Young Adult Friction

7- Eugene and the Lizards - Grogshop

6- The Editors - Papillon

5- The Dirty Projectors - "No Intention"

4- Girls - Lust for Life

3- Grizzly Bear - Fine for Now

2- Mumford & Sons - White Blank Page

1- Memory Tapes - Run Out

it's God you were looking for.

Things that are brilliant this week:

- Early Sunday Morning re-watch of Bresson's Lancelot Du Lac. I only meant to watch a scene but it's so mesmerizing that I ended up going along for the whole ride once more.

- Louis Ferdinand Celine:

Long live Peter the Great! Long life to Louis XIV! Up with Fouquet! Genghis Khan, ten thousand years! Up with Bonnot-and all his gang! And anybody else for that matter! But weep ye no tears for Landru! Because every bourgeois has got some Landru in him. It's sad, isn't it? And there's nothing to be done about it either! The revolution of '93, in my opinion, was the work of the lackies! Lackies who took everything word for word, lackies who vociferated, lackies of the pen, who, one fine night, took over the castle, all of them crazed by jealousy, raving, riddled by envy, they pillage, slaughter, and then settled in to count up the sugar, the sheets, the cutlery... they inventory everything... they were never able to stop. The guillotine was an accounting office... on they go counting up the sugar lumps till they die... mesmerized by the lumps! You wouldn't even have to hunt them down to kill them-you'll always find them in the same place-down there in the kitchen, counting. They're still there. What can they lose by it! You can't take this pack of windy, intellectual, impressionist, confusionist, leftist, unreconstructed, conservative hair-splitting arguers-all of them up to the gills in ulterior motives-seriously! One look is enough. They'll go where you tell them to go. After the smell of lucre! Onto the soap-box!

- John Hopkins at the ICA, "Insides". Sometimes I wish I could write like music, liquid and lost.

- Gigantic Magazine is out and I've finally caught up. Loving the design so much. I also love this little piece of art intensely.

- Dogzplot call for submissions for their next issue is on the theme of MAGIC. For some reason it made me think of Jonathan Safran Foer's short story for A Convergence of Birds and how I read it as a re-telling of Death in Venice but I never really knew what it was about. Maybe I should write something about magic.

- This poem by Evie Shockley at the Winter Issue of Le Petite Zine.

- Any poem by Bernadette Mayer.

- J.A. Tyler's review of Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas:

Scorch Atlas is a world of mold, a world of festering wounds, a world of hurt. Scorch Atlas is a carefully and meticulously distraught world of language, a trembled and shaken line of thought, a vibrant dead trance of phrasing, the measure of words put together all and in the right ways.

youtube alerts sometimes conspire against you

Chris Killen reads from "Paul Simon Gives Chevy Chase The Finger" at Rough Trade East.

I spent most of my weekends at Rough Trade East and yet I was not here. I did not know Chris Killen was going to be there. I have missed my chance to stalk him.

You still can submit something to the Guardian Short Story competition. I am going to. It's a story about nazis and Sotheby's auctions.

I went to a classical music thing about Robert Burns today. It was in a very small church in the City. All the musicians were irreverently young and odd-looking. It felt like I was witnessing some sort of Nodame Cantabile cosplay.

How would I ever become a serious literaty author if I keep referring to Haydn in terms of japanese manga for girls? Maybe then I do not want to become a serious author. Does Ian McEwan casually quote Hana Yori Dango at parties? I wouldn't want to be Ian McEwan in any case.

The BBC documentary about Rufus Wainwright was rad.